Chapter 9 #2
In the cistern I couldn't stop narrating.
In the culvert I couldn't stop looking at him, which is worse.
He had the lamp behind him so I only got half a face at a time, and he kept stopping — actually stopping, with his forehead against mine — like a man checking a gauge, and the third time he did it I said, "What are you doing," and he said, "Making sure," and I said, "Of what," and he said, "That it's you.
It keeps not being — I keep expecting to look up and be wrong. "
And I said, "It's me," and he said, "Yeah," in a voice that came apart in the middle, and after that neither of us said anything sensible for a long time.
At some point, much later, he said: "You wrote three things in that note."
"I did."
"You numbered them."
"I number things, Emmett, it's not a character flaw—"
"Number three was that you've never had a reason to hurry that wasn't professional." His hand was flat between my shoulder blades. "That's the one I read about forty times at the eighty-mile marker while I was working out whether to be angry."
"And?"
"And I decided that a woman who numbers her reasons and puts that one last," he said, "is a woman who's put it last on purpose."
"That's alarmingly perceptive for a man who calls every tool 'the small one'."
"I have depths."
"You have one depth," I said, "and I've found it, and it's about ninety miles long."
The rain went on being a freight train. The lamp burned. Somewhere out past the mouth of the pipe the whole drowned world kept getting slowly, patiently lower.
Slow, is what I'll say about it. Unhurried in a way that ought to be impossible when you're that far past sense. He took the entire storm about it.
And at the end, with his hand in my hair and my ear over the noise his heart was making, he said it.
"Delphine."
"Mm."
"Not Doctor."
"I noticed."
"I've been saving it," he said. "I've had it in my mouth for a week and a half. I wanted somewhere nobody could hear."
"There's nobody within forty miles."
"That's why I rode ninety," he said.
I lay there and listened to the freight train that never arrives.
"Emmett."
"Mm."
"I want to say something and I'd like to say it badly, because I've noticed that everything I say well turns out to be a defense."
"Go on."
"I don't know how to do the next part." My voice came out smaller than I'd planned. "I know how to arrive. I'm extremely good at arriving. I've arrived in nine countries. I have never once in my adult life been in a place at a point where the interesting part was over."
"The interesting part's not going to be over for about four years."
"That's not reassurance, that's a schedule."
"It's the only kind I've got," he said, and put his hand flat on my back, and left it there, and I fell asleep like something being switched off.
I woke at first grey with a numb arm and one boot still on, which will be on my headstone.
He was already awake, on his back, looking up at eighty years of concrete.
"You've been thinking," I said.
"I've been awake. It's adjacent."
"Emmett."
"Faulk's been buying land for four years," he said. "That's what she told me. Every viable site north with pipeline access."
"Yes."
"She said viable. She didn't say all."
I sat up.
"Say that again."
"She's a woman who chooses words. She stood in my yard and picked every single one of them, and she said every viable site north of here with pipeline access." He turned his head. "So either she's got them all and she's telling the truth, or there's one she doesn't think is viable."
"There is one she doesn't think is viable," I said slowly, "because it's dead.
There's a spur off the old Hartwell trunk that got abandoned in the twenties when the pressure went.
It's on the shelf. It's on my list in the folder marked don't use, and it's marked don't use because I couldn't confirm the line had any integrity left and I don't put things in front of people that I can't confirm. "
He was already sitting up.
"So Cortland has your list."
"Cortland has my list with my own note on it saying not to use this one." I got to my feet too fast and hit my head on a culvert. "Ow. Emmett. They read my handwriting and they believed me. They skipped it because I told them to."
"How far?"
"Forty miles. Maybe forty-two."
He was pulling his boots on.
"Doctor," he said. "Do you know what your problem is?"
"I'm about to."
"You keep marking things don't use," he said, "and then somebody uses them."
We packed in eleven minutes, which is a personal record for both of us and involved neither of us looking at the other.
"Del."
"Mm."
"If the line's dead."
"Then it's a shelf with no pipeline, and Bastion becomes a farming town with a refinery it can't feed, and Cortland buys the plant in eighteen months at whatever they feel like.
" I strapped the case down. "That's the actual stake.
It's not the ground. The ground's fine, I could tell you that from a photograph.
It's whether there's a way to get crude to the ground. "
"And if there isn't?"
"Then we go and find out anyway," I said, "and we come back and say so, out loud, in the yard, where six hundred people can hear it. That's the methodology. It's the only one I've got and it's cost me a man in Recife and a job in Corpus and it is not up for revision."
He got on the bike.
"You know what Faulk said to me?" he said. "She said she drove out here so that when I told them no, they'd know that I did."
"That's the same methodology."
"Yeah," he said. "That's what's been keeping me up."
We rode north at dawn on one bike and one solar buggy, in convoy, at the excruciating pace of the buggy, which he complained about for the first eleven miles and then stopped complaining about entirely.
I asked him about that later.
He said: "I worked out I was going to be behind you the whole way regardless, so I might as well enjoy the view."
I told him that was the second most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me.
He asked what the first was.
"Geology," I said.