21. Stand Down Tonight #2
"She took my hand off the back of her neck today," he says.
"Set it down like it didn't belong to her anymore.
Ten years and she's never once. And she lied to me, clean, about needing the house.
" He turns his cup a quarter. "I told you.
You can't hold that girl still. I couldn't at sixteen with the van right there in the drive. You can't now."
"You also told me to be the truck that comes." I drink the coffee. It's ash. "How do I be the truck if I don't know which road and she's made damn sure I can't follow her onto it."
"You don't, yet." Walt's voice is the steadiest broken thing I've ever heard.
"You stay close as she'll let you, which right now is not at all, and you keep the phone face-up on the nightstand the way I've kept mine every night for ten years, and you wait for the ring.
That's the whole of it, son. That's the job she left us.
Two men who love her, sitting by phones, waiting to find out what she decided.
" He looks at me. "It's the worst job in the world. I've had it ten years. Welcome to it."
I take the truck.
Not to leave. I tell myself that, sitting in Ed's dark lot with the chain still in its box on the shelf — I'm not leaving, I'm just sitting in the one thing that's mine.
But the no she put in me is doing its work, and so is the doubt, and somewhere past midnight I find I've called Ed at home and told him to put the chain in first thing in the morning.
He's quiet on the line the way he gets. Then: "You sure, Cole?"
"No."
"I'll have her running by noon anyway."
Because Ed reads a man the way this whole town reads a man.
She told me to go bury my brother. Maybe the one true thing in everything she said is that I've been a coward about the mountain.
Maybe the cleanest thing left to do is the thing she ordered and the thing he asked — drive to Lander, walk three days up, set Holt down where he wanted to be, and quit hiding behind a woman who just told me to my face I was never anything but a warm wall in a bad month.
I go back to Eleanor's. I sit on the floor by the window with Holt and I don't talk to him tonight.
I just put my hand on the cool metal that never warms and I lie down on the throw with my back to the wall, the way I have every night I've been in this town, and the bed of it is the right kind of hard, and I don't sleep, and then I do.
And she's there.
The first night. Her room, the street-light through the blind, her hand finding mine at the mouth of the hall.
There he is, she says, the way she said it the first night at the bar and again with me inside her, and in the dream I get to keep it, I get the warm and the weight of her and the dream locked out — and then the bed's cold and my arms are empty and I'm reaching for a woman who stood in a door and made me look down, and I wake on a stranger's floor with my hand out flat on nothing and Holt cold beside me and the gray coming up over a ridge I'm supposed to drive toward at noon.
The empty bed. That's the thing nobody warns you about either. You can lose a man off a team and learn to sleep alone again because you never slept with him. You can't unlearn three weeks of a woman's back against your chest in three hours on a floor.
I lie there in the gray and I do the math one more time, the cold math, the operator's math that doesn't care what my chest is doing.
She cleared the board. She got the detail to stand down and Bo sent home and her father sitting by a phone and me on a floor across town with a truck getting fixed to carry me three days in the wrong direction.
There is not one set of eyes left on that house tonight but a federal car she probably talked down to a single man at the curb.
She has engineered, with surgical care, the exact gap she needs to step through.
And I helped. I walked out her door to keep my hands clean and I took the last wall off her in the doing of it.
The walls are all back up. Hers, brick by brick, faster than she ever took them down, the last one my own body on the outside of it.
And mine — mine went up the second I said okay, the old fourteen-month nothing closing back over the man I'd let myself become, because a man with nothing to lose can't be hurt and I just handed back the everything that made me one.
Two people who learned to love each other because they were both fluent in walls, and the fluency was always going to be the thing that killed it.
I should drive to the mountain. She told me to. The dead man would tell me to.
I can't make myself turn the key.
And somewhere across town, in a house with no eyes on it but one tired fed at the curb, the woman I just left clean is sitting in the dark she engineered — and the cold part of me that doesn't switch off, the part that's never once been wrong about a perimeter, is screaming that the gap she opened for herself to slip out of is the same gap they've been waiting three weeks for somebody to open for them.