Chapter 4
EVANGELINE
Iwake up because someone is breathing in the room.
It's the second thing I notice. The first is that I am warm.
Not the warm of a burning house, not that thin hot air that presses at the mouth of a wet towel.
A clean warm, wool against my collarbone, cotton under my cheek, a weight of quilt across my hips.
I am under a quilt. I am in a bed I do not know.
The quilt smells like cedar and like woodsmoke and like a soap I don't recognize, and somewhere near me there is a slow steady breath that is not mine.
I keep my eyes closed.
In eleven years of rooms full of Daniel's friends, I learned to listen before I look.
Breath is the cleanest information you can get in a strange room.
The breath I'm hearing is to my right, low, seated.
Not asleep. Awake breath, waiting breath, the kind of breath somebody makes when they are holding themselves still on purpose.
I count through five of them. I learn the room by sound.
A fire somewhere, not close, crackling behind a door of iron by the tone of it.
A clock ticking. Wind in trees. Not the wind a city makes against a house. The wind of forest.
I open my eyes.
The ceiling above me is plank pine, knotted, the kind of pine that has been cut close to the tree it came from. No plaster. No molding. A single light fixture, off. Dawn comes through a window I cannot see yet and turns the pine a warm orange. I turn my head on the pillow an inch at a time.
A man is sitting in a chair across the room. No, not a man, a woman. Masculine enough to mistake for male from a distance. Or if you weren’t paying attention.
She's in a clean dark henley and dark jeans and boots without laces yet.
Her hair is short, dark, pushed off her forehead like she ran a hand through it wet.
Her muscular forearms are across her thighs.
Her strong hands hang empty between her knees.
There is a raised ridge of scar along the outside of the left forearm that runs from the wrist most of the way to the elbow, and in the light from the window the scar is a pale track against her skin.
She is watching me. She has been watching me.
I can see in the way her eyes are on my face that she has been watching me for some time.
I do not startle.
I was expecting to die in my husband's house. Waking up anywhere at all is a gift I wasn’t sure I wanted, but I can afford to be slow with.
"Hi," she says.
Her voice is low. Not unkind. The kind of voice that has been trained on a lot of people who were not calm.
I try to answer and my throat gives me nothing.
I cough instead. The cough rakes up through my chest and I know at once that I have been breathing smoke for an hour and my lungs remember it.
I turn my head and cough into the pillow.
The woman in the chair doesn't move to help me.
She waits. When I am done she leans forward and picks up a glass of water from the nightstand and holds it out.
"Small sips."
I sit up on one elbow. My left hand goes to take the glass and the pain in my palm stops me.
I look down. A strip of white gauze is taped across the outside of my left hand from thumb to wrist. There is a small brown stain at the center of it.
I remember the window. I remember hitting the window. I remember the shape at the treeline.
I take the glass with my right hand.
The water is cold. It hurts going down. I take two sips and hand it back.
"More in a minute," she says.
She puts the glass back on the nightstand. She sits back in the chair. She has the stillness of somebody who has spent a lot of her life in rooms where moving is the wrong thing to do. I recognize the stillness because I have my own version of it.
"Where am I?”
My voice comes out nearly whole. It sounds like somebody else's voice. A woman who has been smoking for twenty years.
“A cabin," she says. "Forty miles northwest of the city. In the hills."
"Whose cabin?”
"Mine." She pauses. "I'm Max Hale. I'm a firefighter. I'm off duty tonight. I saw the fire on my way home."
I look at her.
I have spent eleven years reading men at dinner tables.
Eleven years of watching for the beat between the question and the answer.
The beat where the lie lives. I watch her and there is no beat.
She says she saw the fire and she looks at me and she does not look away.
I cannot find the lie in her face. That is either because there is no lie or because she is very good, and I am not going to know which it is this morning.
"My husband," I say.
She shakes her head. Once. Not theatrical. A clean no.
"I got you out," she says. "I couldn't get to the east wing."
The east wing. Where Daniel was. Where Daniel has been sleeping since Tuesday, in the suite with the brass door and the decanter on the sideboard and the reading lamp he never turned off.
The east wing that I saw glowing through the transom of the front door, orange all the way down the hallway.
The fire went through the east wing first.
I wait for the grief.
I wait for it the way you wait for a contraction, with the understanding that it is going to come and that it is going to be large.
I have been married to Daniel for eleven years.
I have lived in his rooms and sat at his table and worn the pearls he put around my neck on the first anniversary and the diamonds he put on my wrist on the fifth.
I have been the woman in his photographs at charity events.
I have been the woman at the head of his Thursday dinners.
The grief is supposed to be a big animal coming up out of the dark.
It doesn't come.
There is a small flat gray space where the grief is supposed to be.
In the flat gray space I can feel my own pulse and the pillow under my cheek and the wool of the quilt and the water cold at the back of my throat.
I can feel that my husband is dead and I can feel that I have slept better in the last two hours than I have slept in three years, and both of those facts are in the gray space at the same time, and the gray space does not get any bigger.
"I'm sorry," Max says.
"Thank you."
The word is automatic. It comes out the way thank-you comes out at the end of a benefit dinner, and I hear it leave my mouth and I know that it is not the right word for this room, and I don't have a right word yet, and Max does not push me to find one.
"You can sleep more," she says. "You breathed a lot of smoke."
"Did I have anything on me? When you brought me in."
"A nightgown. A wool throw." She tilts her head toward the foot of the bed. "The throw's on the chair. The nightgown's in the bathroom. I rinsed it. There's blood on the hem. I didn't know if you'd want me to throw it out."
"Keep it, please."
She nods.
"Your palm was split. I cleaned it. It's shallow. It'll scar if you don't keep it dry for a few days."
"Okay."
"There's clothes in the top drawer of that dresser. Mostly mens. Mine. They'll be too big. There's a robe on the door."
"Okay."
She doesn't move to stand. She doesn't come nearer.
She sits with her hands between her knees and waits for whatever I am going to do next and does not pressure me to do it.
It is the least pushed I have felt in a room with another person in more than a decade, and it makes me want to cry, and I don't.
I push the quilt back.
The nightgown is not on me. I am in a henley, gray, soft from washing, that falls to mid-thigh.
The wool throw from my mother is on the chair at the foot of the bed, folded once, the way you fold a thing that matters.
Max looks at the wall while I sit up. She keeps her eyes on the wall until I have my feet on the floor and the quilt pulled around my legs.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
I look at my left hand.
On the ring finger is the eternity band Daniel put there eleven years ago.
Platinum, a full circle of small diamonds, the kind of ring a man puts on you when he wants the sentence to be complete.
I have worn it every day for eleven years.
I look at it in the dawn light coming through the window and I feel a thing I can put a word to for the first time all morning, and the word is tired.
I am tired of this ring. I have been tired of it for years and I have not been allowed to know that I was tired of it until this second.
I pull it off.
It comes off easier than I thought it would. The skin under it is a pale band, almost the color of Max's scar. I close my hand around the ring. I sit there holding it.
"There's a dish," Max says, without turning her head, "on the dresser. If you want to put it somewhere."
There is a small ceramic dish on the dresser.
White. Empty. I cross the room in bare feet and the floor is warm wood and I put the ring in the dish, and the ring sits there looking smaller than it has ever looked, a small bright circle on white.
I stand there with my right hand flat on the dresser and I look at the ring for what would have been a long time in another life, and then I turn away from it.
"Thank you," I say, and I mean it this time.
---
She feeds me oatmeal from a saucepan on the stove.
The stove is a black iron thing with a kettle and one pot and a cloth over the handle.
There is coffee in a french press on the counter.
There is a radio on a shelf tuned low to a weather band, a man's voice reading wind speeds in a county I have never heard of.
Max moves around the kitchen the way a person moves around a kitchen she has cooked in alone for a long time.
She does not ask me what I like. She puts a bowl in front of me, oatmeal with butter and brown sugar and cream, and a mug of coffee, and she sits down on the other side of the table and does not eat.