Chapter 16 Three names #2
The cold came up to meet her at the door — the whole of the March night, the stars out hard and close as they only were after the plows had been through and the air had nothing left to carry.
The shuttle sat in the bay with its engine off.
Danny was not in it. He was sitting on the bay steps in his beanie and his jacket, in the cold, when there was a warm box with a heater not ten feet away, because Danny could not sit in a small warm space tonight, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and he patted the step beside him anyway.
She sat. For a while neither of them said anything, and the quiet did the thing quiet did with Danny in it, filling up like a pan left on the heat.
“You’re going to think I rehearsed this,” he said at last, “and I did. The whole way down. I had it word-perfect, I had a bit in the middle about the road, it was good, you’d have enjoyed it.
” He turned his glove over and over in his hands.
“And now I’m going to say it badly anyway, so — just let me get through it, all right?
Let me get all the way through it before you do anything. ”
“All right,” she said.
“Take it.” He said it to the snowbank across the bay.
“File the three names. Yours and Halvor’s and mine.
You saw the figures — I can see them on your face, you checked them and they check, because they would, she’s not a liar, that’s the whole trouble with her.
” He stopped. His breath made a cloud and the cloud went and there was another one.
“Three years of that file, and now places poorly going on the end of it. I’ve watched you with it since Monday.
This takes it off. Placed. This unit, this valley, done, and nobody can ever type it about you again. ”
“Danny—”
“Let me get through it.” His voice went rough on it and he hauled it back level with both hands, the way he hauled the shuttle round the switchbacks.
“It leaves Kwabena off. I know. Say it, Danny, it’s your idea — it leaves Kwabena off.
” He made himself say the name to the snowbank, and it cost him, she could hear it cost him the whole way through the two syllables.
“I’ve read the same form you have. My whole family works off that form — my mom, my uncle, the road — I’ve been able to do its sums since before I could drive.
He did the arithmetic on Thursday morning and he did it alone, and you were right about that, you were right — so here’s me doing mine out loud, sitting next to you, where you can smell whether I mean a word of it. ”
He turned and looked at her then, finally, the open sunburnt face gone blotchy with cold and with the effort of staying open.
“Because here’s the other road, Robyn. You don’t file, the report goes in bad at nine, and maybe you’ve got something — you’re you, you’ve read everything, maybe there’s some rule, some appeal, some thing in a blue book I’ve never heard of — and it’s a gamble, and do you know what the stake is?
It’s not me. It’s you. Five years closed, the clinic job, the housing.
The valley. If it goes wrong you’re gone, you’re four miles down the road and then forty and then somebody I send Christmas cards to.
And he—” the voice cracked again, and he let it, “he’d tell you the same.
That’s what the withdrawal was. He’d rather be a man who visits than the reason you’re not here.
And I’d rather live in that room a man short for the rest of my life than not have you in the valley at all. ”
He ran out of words there, and sat breathing, both gloves knotted together in his lap.
“I want him in it,” he said, quieter, to his own hands.
“You know I do. I can’t even want it quietly, not in this valley, not with this nose, nothing’s quiet here — so you can smell that that’s true as well.
Both of them. They’re both true at once and I can’t help it and I’m not asking you to pick which one of them I meant. ”
She could. That was the engine of the whole world, that she could: the want and the sums lying next to each other in the air off him, neither one cancelling the other, the grief and the sincerity the same warm Danny-smell turned over like soil.
He was not betraying anyone. He knew precisely what he was asking her to do, and he had done it out loud and in the cold, where she could check the figures on him too, and it had cost him the whole way through every sentence.
He had the most to lose of any of them, and he had just spent it telling her to take the deal.
She did not make him take it back. She thought about it — about saying you didn’t mean that, giving him the hand back out of it, the way you’d steady somebody who’d stumbled — and knew it for the small cruelty it would be, dressed as kindness.
He had done the sum in front of her because she had told the valley, all week, in everything she’d moved and everything she’d said, that doing it alone was the unforgivable part.
“I’m not going to make you take that back,” she said.
“I know.” A ghost of the grin, the chipped tooth, gone as fast as it came. “That’s the worst part. I’d have let me.”
She put her head against his shoulder, there on the steps in the cold, and he put his chin down on her hair, and they sat like that while the shuttle ticked as it cooled and the stars did nothing at all overhead.
The heat was past its crest and going down on the schedule her body had declined, and she could feel the ebb of it under everything, a tide going out, and underneath the tide the cold clear floor of her own mind, where the decisions waited for Friday and for after the biology had finished with her.
She had not decided. That was hers, and it was not eight o’clock yet, and the worksheet lay folded against her chest with three names’ worth of arithmetic on it and the white space where a fourth name had been.
“He should be here,” Danny said suddenly, echoing without knowing it the sentence Halvor had said into the lamplight hours before, and then he heard himself and huffed once, not quite a laugh. “Yeah. Heard it as soon as it was out.”
“Come on,” she said, and got up, and pulled him up by his knotted gloves. “Drive me back up the hill, Danny Osgood. It’s warm, and it’s ours till Sunday, and you’ve got a road to open in the morning.”
He drove her back up the hill, talking the whole way, soft and aimless and warm, the patter running again like a tap left on for the pipes.
In the unit the lamp was still lit and Halvor was awake in the chair by the window, and he read her face and the folded paper in her hand and did not ask, because the asking had rules in this house and eight o’clock was one of them now.
She put the worksheet on the kitchen counter, on the exact square of laminate where Okonjo’s tablet used to sit charging, face-down, and it lay there being exactly what it was: the small clear figures, the one underlining and the two, the shape of the offer, the shape of the gap in it.
Then she went to the bed she had built wrong, and Danny’s shirt was still stuffed down the draughty side of the mattress, and three of them slept, and the cold sat on the sill, and the night did not ask her for anything more.