Chapter 3 #2
He asked how she was. He listened to the answer. He asked a second question that showed he had listened, which almost no one had managed in three weeks.
Then he got to it, the way he always got to things, sideways and in plain sight.
“The campaign’s in a bad way,” he said. “We’ve a hundred and ten days and about half of what we need, and the gala’s the engine, and you are the person who has made that gala work for six years.”
“Roger.”
“I’m not asking you for anything. I want to be clear about that. I’m telling you where things stand because you’ve earned knowing.” A pause. “And because I’d rather you heard the state of it from me than read it somewhere.”
“Is that a warning?”
“It’s a courtesy,” Roger said. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and when a family goes quiet, people start writing the story themselves. That’s all.”
She looked out at the gray yard and the gray hill behind it.
“How’s Bethany doing with it?” she said.
It was out of her mouth before she had decided to say it, in a voice so pleasant and so ordinary that it frightened her.
“She’s very capable,” Roger said.
And there it was, right there, the whole of it: the half-beat before he answered, and the fact that a man who had been handling people for forty years had reached for the one word that means nothing at all.
“She is,” Mila said. “Thank you for calling, Roger.”
* * *
By the end of the second week her days had a shape.
Up at six, because pain gets you up. Twenty minutes to be a person. The walker to the bathroom and back and then sitting on the edge of the bed sweating like she had run somewhere.
Then the exercises, which were humiliating and boring and which she did to the letter, three times a day, the whole two hundred boring days of it starting now. Ankles. Quads. The bridge thing. The one where you lie on your side and lift and everything in your hip screams.
Then the yard, when there was any light.
She did the yard in stages, gate to post, post to trough, trough to the block by the barn door.
She sat on the block and got her breath and looked at the mountains, and the girls came past with wheelbarrows and said hey, Mila, and did not slow down, which she loved them for.
She asked Nikki for work.
“Work,” Nikki said.
“Something I can do sitting down. I’m not going to sit in that cottage being a tragedy for four months, Nik, I’ll lose my mind.”
So she got the entries and the billing and the vet schedule, on the old computer in the barn office with the eucalyptus dying beside it.
It was not work. It was about nine hours a week of small sums and phone calls.
It was the first thing in six weeks she had been asked to be responsible for, and she was so grateful for it that she had to go and be alone in the tack room for a while.
* * *
On the Friday of the second week she called the house.
She did it in the afternoon, when she knew he would be at the harbor. Cecelia picked up, who had kept that house for nineteen years, and made a small sound when she heard Mila’s voice.
“Mrs. Shepard.”
“Hi, Cece.”
“Are you all right? Nobody tells me anything.”
“I’m all right.” She closed her eyes. “Can you do something for me. In the blue room closet there’s a hard case, black, about so big. Like a small suitcase but square. There’ll be a bag with it and a stand.”
“The recording things.”
“The recording things.”
“I know exactly where they are,” Cecelia said. “I dust them.”
It arrived in an hour and ten minutes. Not by courier. Cecelia drove it out herself in her own car and would not come in, and she hugged Mila in the yard so hard that Mila had to put a hand on the gate.
“He didn’t touch it,” Cecelia said. “He asked what it was for and I said it was yours.”
* * *
She opened the case that night on the floor by the stove, because the floor was where she could get to.
Everything was where she had left it. The cables coiled her way, over and under, the way you coil a cable if you want it to still be a cable in six years.
The windscreen had gone flat on one side from sitting.
The recorder took batteries and she had none, and she laughed out loud in the empty cottage, a real laugh, the first one since October.
Nikki found four AAs in the truck.
Mila put them in. The little screen came up amber, the way it always had, and the meters twitched, and the room came into her headphones in that particular way that is not like hearing at all — closer than hearing, more honest, everything the room is doing when nobody is asking it to perform.
The stove ticking. The wind. Her own breath, too loud, the way beginners breathe.
She reached out to set the levels.
Her right hand came up off her knee and hung there in the air and shook, a fine hard tremor she could not stop, and the little gain knob was about the size of a shirt button, and she could not touch it.
She tried for a while. She braced her wrist with her left hand and tried again. She got the knob and turned it too far and the meters slammed and the headphones roared and she yanked them off.
Then she sat on the floor of a borrowed cottage with the best ears in three counties and a pair of hands that would not do what she told them, and she put her face in the horse blanket, and finally, seven weeks late, she cried.
It did not last long. She was not built for it.
When she was done she wiped her face and put the headphones back on and pressed record with the flat of her thumb, because a thumb she had, and she let it run for nine minutes on the empty room.
Later she would say that was the night she started. At the time it did not feel like starting anything. It felt like the only thing left in the house that still belonged to her, and she held onto it on the floor with both hands.