Chapter Seventeen – Cole.111 #2
It went slowly, the way it always went in January, the amber light building first, thickening, everything it touched turning a color that had no name in the ordinary vocabulary of daylight.
The near ridge caught it first, the rock face going warm and gold, and then the light moved up the range from the lower peaks to the higher ones, climbing the granite in its own unhurried order, and for a few minutes the whole outline of the mountains glowed with the particular intensity of a thing at the edge of its own ending.
Then the rose came in. It moved through the amber the way warmth moved through cold water, gradually and without urgency, and the peaks held it for longer than the lower slopes did, the high rock turning a deep, mineral pink that had no summer equivalent, that only existed at this hour in this cold.
I watched it and drank my milkshake and did not say anything yet.
Beside me, Lila was watching too. Her cup was at her lips and her eyes were on the mountains and the line of her face in the rose light had the particular quiet of a person who had spent a large amount of themselves in the last hour and had arrived somewhere that did not require anything further, at least for now.
The cold was in her cheeks, color there that was not the heat of the last several days but the clean, outdoor kind.
Her breath misted lightly in front of her.
I looked at the mountains.
“He sounds like somebody,” I said.
My voice came out low, shaped for the tailgate and not the open air, and I let the words sit for a moment before I continued.
“The way you described him. The auction, the yearling he was wrong about. The way he laughed.” I turned the cup once in my hands.
“A man who names his daughter before she’s a fact yet.
Who makes a pencil mark on a wall and trusts the room to get finished.
” I looked at the near ridge, which was going darker now, the rose fading from it.
“That’s somebody. That’s a whole particular person. ”
She did not say anything.
I had not needed her to. I was not building toward something that required her response, I was just saying it, the way you said things out loud sometimes because they asked to be in the air rather than only in your chest. I had stood at that grave and heard her pour everything she had into the frozen ground and the pale grey stone, had felt each thing she named land in me with the specific weight of something true, and driving back with the heater running and the mountains on one side and the silence between us I had turned it over and arrived at one conclusion that felt like the right one.
“The way you talked to him,” I said. “At the grave. You weren’t asking him to forgive you for anything.
” I kept my eyes on the mountains. “You were telling him who you are. All of it, the guilt, the sleeping, the laughing. You were giving him the honest version of you, not the managed one.” My thumb moved along the side of the cup.
“That’s what somebody does when they loved somebody right.
When the love was real enough that it doesn’t need to be performed. ”
The last of the rose went out of the upper peaks.
What replaced it was something cooler, not grey yet, not the flat dead grey of full dark, but a deep, transitional blue that sat in the rock of the mountains the way cold sat in old stone: permanently, constitutively, as though the color had always been in there and the light had just been covering it.
The sky above the ridge went the particular blue of a January dusk that intended to become a hard clear night, the kind of night that would put a new skin of frost on everything by morning.
Lila shifted beside me.
Her shoulder came against my arm. She did not move away from it and I did not shift to give her room.
She pressed both hands tighter around her cup and let the weight of her shoulder sit against my arm, and I kept still and let her have it, and the cold came up through the tailgate into the backs of my thighs, and none of it asked me to be anywhere else.
I thought of the kitchen at four in the morning and the bread in the oven and the grey at the edge of the window beginning to have intentions.
I thought of what I had turned over in that kitchen and left where it was without examining too closely, the way you left something in the warmth to prove that warmth was real.
It still felt real. It felt, with Lila’s shoulder against my arm and the mountains going dark in front of us and Hope present and particular under the fabric of Lila’s coat, like the realest thing I had stood next to in a long time.
I did not say any of that.
I drank the last of my milkshake and held the empty cup and looked at the outline the mountains made against the deepening sky, the specific, jagged signature of the Sawtooth range, every peak and dip of it familiar now in the way the things you looked at every morning became familiar, without your deciding, without your asking.
Beside me Lila was quiet in the complete, unhurried way of a person who had finished crying and had no immediate plans to begin again.
The cold deepened around both of us, patient and entire, and neither of us moved to go inside.
The last color went out of the sky above the peaks.
The mountains became their own silhouette against the dark, enormous and exact, and we sat on the lowered tailgate in the January evening with our empty cups and our boots hanging over the frozen ground and the outline of everything we had both been given and lost and were still, improbably, here for.