Chapter 13 #2
“In the hospital, at about two in the morning, in the corridor. She’d heard.
She called to ask if I was all right.” His voice was perfectly level and his face had gone gray.
“And I stood in that corridor with your blood still on me and I talked to her for twenty minutes, because she asked, and nobody else was asking.
“So no, I’ve never told you about the field. Because the two of them are the same day. They’re hours apart. And every time I’ve got anywhere near saying I got to you first, I’ve remembered what I did at two in the morning, and I have not been able to get my mouth open.”
* * *
Mila drove out to the hill field that evening on Tansy, alone, in the long light.
She sat at the top with the reins in one hand and thought about a man going over a fence into fog, and the same man, hours later, taking a phone call in a corridor.
Both true. Both the same day. Neither one canceling the other, which was the thing that had taken her five months and which she suspected she had only understood that afternoon.
She had wanted, since November, for it to be one thing.
It was going to be two things for the rest of her life.
* * *
She did not tell him she had been in the kitchen on the night of the first.
She thought about it the whole of that week — in the truck, in the aisle, lying awake — and she came within about a sentence of it twice, and both times she stopped.
She knew what she was doing and she made herself say it out loud to the empty cottage, because she had promised herself she would not be a woman who lied to herself in the dark.
“You’re keeping it,” she said, “because while you’ve got it, you’re still the one who knows something.”
And that was true, and it was not the whole truth either, and the rest of the truth was worse and simpler: that a man had stood in a dark room at midnight and said the truest thing he had ever said about her, and that the minute she told him she had heard it, it stopped being his.
She was not ready to give that back.
* * *
April was the month the work got hard, which is the month in any project when you find out whether you have one.
She had sixteen hours of tape and a shape and no spine.
Jody came out twice a week and they built a cut of the first part, and it was good and it was not right, and Mila knew why and spent three weeks refusing to say so.
It had everybody’s room in it but one. It had the porter and the charge nurse and Noelle Vinson and a man in Dundalk whose wife had been under for nine days in 1998, and it circled and circled and never once landed.
Nate drove out on the twentieth and listened to forty minutes of it in the cottage with his eyes shut.
“It’s the best thing anybody’s given me in two years,” he said.
“But.”
“But you’re standing outside it with a clipboard.” He took the headphones off. “Mila. Everyone in this is telling you what it was like in that room. And the one person who actually knows is running the desk.”
“We’ve had this conversation.”
“We’ve had it three times and you’ve won all three, and I’m going to lose this one too.
” He got up and put his cup in her sink, which he did every time.
“Delivery’s the twenty-third of May. I’m not moving it, the slot’s the slot, and it goes out the Friday after.
” At the door he stopped. “And the money clears thirty days after delivery, which I know you’d rather I didn’t mention, and which I am mentioning anyway because there’s a card pinned over your desk in that office with a number on it and you think I haven’t seen it. ”
He left. Mila stood in the cottage for a while.
Then she went up to the barn office and looked at the index card, which said a number and a month, and the month was now two away.
* * *
She told Vern about Larry on one of those April afternoons at the clinic.
He was still coming on the same afternoons she did. He had gotten thinner over the winter and he had six words now, which his daughter reported every week with an enthusiasm that Mila had stopped finding difficult and started finding tremendous.
Mila sat down beside him in the waiting area with the same bad radio playing the same six songs.
“I want to tell you something,” she said, “and it’s not a cheerful story, so if you want me to talk about the weather instead, blink at me twice and I’ll do the weather.”
Vern looked at her.
“Right,” said Mila. “My father-in-law had a stroke in January. He’s seventy-one.
He can hear everything and he can’t say anything at all, and he’s got a couple of words, and one of them is no.
” She kept her voice ordinary. “And the first time I walked into that room I did the thing you and I do not do, which is I nearly talked to him like he wasn’t in it.
I got about three feet in and caught myself, and I’ve thought about that ever since. ”
Vern’s hand moved on the arm of the chair.
“I told him what day it was,” she said. “I told him what happened to him and what they thought it meant and that nobody knew the timing. Which is what you told me, in about four months, without a single complete sentence.”
The radio got to the one about the truck.
“Anyway,” Mila said. “He rings a bicycle bell now when he’s frightened at four in the morning. I put it on the rail with baling twine. I got the idea from watching you not be able to reach a cup on a tray.”
Vern shut his eyes.
Then he worked at it for a long moment, with his jaw and his throat and the whole of the left side of his face, and produced, entirely clearly:
“Good.”
“That’s what he says,” said Mila. “Word for word. You’d get on.”
She sat with him until his daughter came, and on the way out to the truck she found she had to stop in the parking lot for a minute, which she had not expected at all and did not particularly mind.
* * *
Roger called on the last Friday in April, from a gravel pull-off somewhere, sounding sixty-eight.
“I’m going to say something and you’re going to take it badly.”
“Then don’t say it.”
“The board wants to know whether there’s going to be a Shepard at the head of that foundation in the fall,” he said, “and there is one obvious answer to that question, and every person in the room has thought of it, and I have been holding them off for three weeks.”
Mila closed her eyes.
“No,” she said.
“My dear girl—”