Chapter 17 Doubling Down — Ii
But I’d done it. I’d taught him. Under the cover of a game I could not stop myself from teaching that child where the safe distance is, and how to see a van that’s stayed a day too long, and to notice which windows have people behind them, and to walk toward the well-lit side, and to tell me, always, if anything on our block was different from yesterday even a little, even if it seemed dumb, especially if it seemed dumb.
I told myself it was ordinary caution. I told myself lots of things.
Countersurveillance is a word I did not use and taught a sixth grader anyway because I loved him and could not bear the idea of him in a scene I couldn’t read.
The Theo problem got worse before it got a coffee poured on it.
Ren picked up a double Friday, which meant I had him overnight, and we made grilled cheese and watched forty minutes of a documentary about a dam failure that Theo narrated with the calm relish of a boy who has memorized every stage of it and finds the grownups’ surprise touching.
He paused it to tell me the engineers had ignored a “seepage indicator” for eleven days.
“They saw it and they didn’t say anything,” he said, disgusted. “For eleven days. If you see the thing you’re supposed to say the thing.”
“That’s very true,” I said, my mouth dry.
“You’d say the thing.” He looked at me with total confidence, the kind only a twelve-year-old hands you, unearned and enormous. “If you saw a seepage indicator. You’d say it.”
I did not tell him that I had been seeing seepage indicators on our own block for a month and saying nothing to anyone, capping them in the dark and coming home and lying awake.
I said, “Eat your crusts,” which is what you say when a child has accidentally read your entire soul over grilled cheese, and he ate his crusts.
Wes was in the hardware store again Saturday.
He didn’t pretend to shop this time. He came to the counter where I was pricing drawer pulls and he set down a coffee, two coffees, one for me, the kind from Fran’s with the lid that says HALFORD DINER in letters worn half off, and he said, “You looked like a two-sugar,” and it was correct, and I hated that it was correct.
“I couldn’t possibly,” I said, taking it, drinking it, two sugars.
“How’s the block?” he asked. Plainly. Like the weather. And the cold clean part of me went still and listened, because that was not a question about the block, that was a lure with a nice smell on it, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it, and there we stood.
“Oh, you know,” I said, doing the little laugh, the fluttery one, patting the counter. “I don’t really — I keep to myself, I don’t notice things, I’m hopeless, I locked myself out twice this week —”
“You backed a crowd to a hundred and fifty feet at Larch and Delaney,” Wes said. Not unkind. Not a gotcha. Just set it down between us like the coffee, a true thing, the way he does. “That’s a good instinct. Where’d you get it?”
And here is what happened, and I have not forgiven it: for a quarter of a second, one single quarter of a heartbeat, I wanted to tell him.
Not the facts. The relief. I wanted to put down the drawer pulls and the fluttering and the two-sugar coffee and say to this dry steady man with the worn diner lid: I have been so tired for so long, and I could read every one of these scenes with my eyes shut, and no one knows, and it is killing me a little, being this careful and this useless at the same time.
He looked at me and I had the sensation, brand-new and awful, of being seen in both directions at once, the scared woman and the one underneath her, and it was the most frightened I had been in three years, standing perfectly safe in my own store with a warm coffee in my hand.
“From a documentary,” I said. “Theo watches them. Very informative. Did you know most people run the wrong way in a fire? Toward the exit they came in, statistically, even if it’s the fire. Isn’t that awful? I think about it constantly.”
Wes looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable.
“Statistically,” he agreed, and picked up his own coffee, and left, and did not believe a single word, and I stood at the counter with my heart going like a bird against a window and thought, with the flat clean voice, the one I keep in the box: he is going to figure it out, and I am going to have to decide what I do when he does, and I have absolutely no idea what that is.
Then I dropped the drawer pulls, on purpose this time, and yelped, for the benefit of Marcy, who said bless your heart, which meant it worked, which meant nothing at all.