Chapter 4 #2
"Ruin, you did that yesterday. About the subsidence. You walked off in the middle of a sentence and came back forty minutes later with the right question."
"...Huh."
"You're welcome. That'll be my whole fee."
"Your turn," I said.
"For what?"
"Why you do this. And don't give me the professional answer, I've heard four versions of it already and they all sound like a grant application."
She was quiet long enough that I thought I'd overplayed it.
"I watched a city drown," she said. "That had been warned."
"Where?"
"Doesn't matter where. There are eleven of them, pick one.
" She turned the jar in her hands. "I was twenty-six.
I was second author on the report. It was a good report, Ruin, it was clear and it was early and it had a map with a red line on it, and it went to the right desk, and the man at the desk said the word alarmist, and eight months later I was standing on a highway overpass handing bottled water to a woman who lived inside the red line. "
"Did she know?"
"That's the thing I've never been able to stop." She looked at me. "She didn't know there'd been a report. Nobody had told her. The argument happened in a room she wasn't allowed in, and she lost it, and she didn't even get to find out she'd been in it."
The rain had stopped completely. You could hear the water against the wall, that patient nothing sound.
"So I stopped writing reports," she said. "Now I just drive to the place and stand in the yard and say the number out loud where everyone can hear it. It's an appalling methodology. My colleagues think I've lost my mind."
"You told nine children in a vault."
"Yes."
"That's not a methodology. That's a nerve."
"They're the same organ," she said.
"What was her name?"
"Whose?"
"The woman on the overpass."
She turned her head and looked at me for a long moment, and I watched a thing happen behind her face that I didn't have a name for yet.
"Nobody's ever asked me that."
"Nobody?"
"I've told that story maybe forty times.
Conferences, hearings, bars. Everybody asks what happened to the report.
" She wrapped both hands around the jar.
"Her name was Ifeoma. She was fifty-two, she had a cooler with her, and the cooler had somebody else's insulin in it because she'd grabbed the wrong one on the way out and she was trying to find who it belonged to.
On an overpass. In the third day of a flood. "
"Did she find them?"
"I don't know," Del said. "That's the whole thing.
I have never known. I've had eleven years of an excellent professional career and I have never found out whether that woman found the person with the insulin, and I want you to understand that when I say eighteen months in your yard, that is the sentence underneath it. "
The rail was cold. Somewhere below, a dog that shouldn't exist barked twice at nothing.
"Bastion doesn't drown," I said.
"I know. Onyx told me you say that."
"I said it over a hole in the ground with my father in it."
"I know that too."
"It's not a plan," I said. "That's the part I've never said out loud. It's not a plan, Doctor, it's a noise I make."
I don't know which of us moved.
I've reconstructed it a hundred times and I genuinely don't know.
There was a version where I turned to say something and there wasn't any distance left to say it across, and her hand was flat on the grating between us with her little finger against my thigh, and she'd stopped talking, and the whole Gulf was down there being quiet, and I could see the salt dried white along her jaw from a night of somebody else's water.
"Ruin," she said, very low.
"Yeah."
"I have a rule about this."
"What's the rule?"
"I can't remember it."
And then Cash, from ninety feet below, at a volume that could have been used for navigation:
"RUIN! THE NUMBER TWO GENERATOR'S DOING THE THING AGAIN!"
She put her forehead against my shoulder and laughed until she had to hold the rail.
"IS THAT THE DOCTOR? IS SHE UP THERE?"
"GO AWAY, CASH."
"I NEED THE PIPE WRENCH!"
"GO AWAY, CASH."
"THE THING'S GETTING WORSE, RUIN, IT SOUNDS LIKE A COW—"
We climbed down.
She stopped at the bottom with her hand on the ladder rail.
"I'm going to say one sentence about that and then we're never going to discuss it, because I've got two days of instrument time left and I cannot afford to be a person this week."
"Go ahead."
"I've been doing this eleven years," she said, "and you're the first man who's ever asked me her name."
Then she let go of the rail and walked off.
Neither of us said anything about it. She went left to her container and I went right to the generator, and Cash took one look at my face in the lamplight and had the sense — the only time in his life — not to say a single word.
He waited a full four minutes.
"So," he said. "The generator."
"Cash."
"It's fine, actually. I fixed it."
I stopped walking.
"You fixed it."
"About twenty minutes ago." He examined his fingernails. "But then I thought, you know what, better safe than sorry."
I have never hit him. I want credit for that. I want it carved somewhere.
He caught up with me at the shop door anyway, because he always does, and he'd dropped the grin.
"Ruin."
"What."
"East pump house." He leaned on the frame. "She called it Tuesday. In front of Marisol and me and two other people. Word for word — the drain's undersized and it'll back up from the land side."
"I know."
"So what do we do with that?"
"I don't know yet."
"Because there's two options," Cash said, "and I want to say them out loud before somebody else says them worse. Option one, she got lucky on a drain. Option two, everything else in that folder is the same quality as the drain."
I stood in the doorway of my own machine shop at one in the morning with my hands shaking from eleven hours of sandbags.
"It's option two," I said.
"Yeah."
"Don't say it to anybody."
"Ruin—"
"Three days, Cash. Give me the three days I gave her."
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he did the thing that makes him worth every miserable joke he's ever made at my expense.
"Okay," he said, and went to bed, and didn't say a word to anyone for three days.