CHAPTER 7
◆
The orchard starts thirty feet from the kitchen door, and I've been looking at it through glass since they sent me home.
This morning the door opens under my hand and my legs hold me, so I put a coat on over yesterday's jumper and go out without telling anybody. There's nobody to tell. Julian's car went down the drive before seven and won't be back till dark.
The grass is soaked and cold enough to sting through my boots. By two it'll be near eighty out here. That's this month all over — frost at dawn, shirtsleeves by lunch, and the trees can't make up their minds either.
The windfalls have gone over. They lie split in the wet grass under every tree, browning at the breaks, and the smell coming off them is sweet and boozy and lovely for about thirty seconds before it turns into something you'd rather not have in your nose.
Wasps work them slowly, and none of them has the least interest in me.
I put my palm flat on the first trunk. The bark's rough as old mortar, and it's warmer than the air is.
Then I count.
I count out loud, because I've counted out loud since I was twenty-two, when a foreman on my first site told me that a number you haven't said is a number you haven't checked.
Forty-one trees. I walk the rows again from the far end, touching every trunk so I can't cheat myself, and I get forty-one a second time.
Two counts, same answer. I stand at the end of the last row with wet ankles, grinning at a number like a woman who's won something.
Three weeks ago I couldn't have managed the second lap. Three weeks ago I came down to breakfast with both hands on the banister, and Nora made a great show of not watching me do it.
Then the drive.
It leaves the turning circle in front of the house, bends twice around the slope, and ends at the gatehouse. I've been up and down it in cars for six years, and nobody has ever once told me how long it is.
So I measure it.
Here's how you do that with nothing in your pockets.
You count your strides, and then you find out what a stride is worth.
I walk from the turning circle down to the gatehouse steps counting aloud into empty gravel, and the gravel's loose on top and packed underneath, so every step makes two sounds — a scatter, then a knock.
“Six hundred and forty. Six hundred and forty-one,” I tell the gatehouse, and stop.
Then the calibration. I lay out ten strides on the flat by the gate and mark each end with a fist-sized stone.
Then I go back along that ten-stride run heel-to-toe, my own boots end to end, the way you measure a room when your tape's in the truck.
Thirty-nine boots. My boot is ten inches, and I've known that since I was buying steel toes at twenty-three and the man in the shop told me I had a long foot for a woman.
Thirty-nine boots across ten strides. Three feet three inches a stride.
I do the multiplication standing up, and then I do it again, because I don't trust my own head yet and I'd rather be slow than wrong. Six hundred and forty-one strides. Two thousand and eighty-three feet.
Four tenths of a mile.
There's a plat of this property framed in the hall outside Julian's study, and the drive on it is marked 0.40 mi. I've stood in front of that frame a hundred times and never once thought about the number.
I'm inside thirty feet.
I sit down on the gatehouse steps with my coat under me and I let myself have it for a minute. My head gave me a right answer. Ninety days of being handed water I didn't ask for and being told what I meant to say, and this afternoon my own body measured four tenths of a mile and got it right.
I put the two stones back in the verge where they came from, and I tell them sorry for the trouble.
The gate is a sliding cantilever, aluminium, running on a track set into the concrete apron.
The keypad sits on a post at car-window height, which puts it at my chest. Its rubber buttons have gone chalky in the sun, and they're tacky now, so each one holds my fingertip half a beat longer than it should before it lets go.
I put in the six digits I used all summer. The little light stays red. I do it again, slower, because fingers lie.
The gate doesn't move. Nothing about it moves.
Under the keypad there's a call button with a worn ring around it from other people's thumbs, and I press that.
“Good afternoon, Evelyn.” AURA comes out of the post warm and unhurried, the way she says everything, even the weather. “The gate's on a rolling code this week, and I'm afraid I can't open it for a pedestrian.”
“Then open it for me anyway. I'd like to stand on the road for five minutes and walk straight back up.”
“It's a safety interlock, and it's there to keep the apron clear for vehicles turning in off Fernhollow Road. Would you like me to ask Julian to come down and let you out?”
“No. Don't ask him anything.”
“Of course. I'll leave it alone, then. Is there anything else I can do for you this afternoon?”
Pedestrian.
I stand with my thumb still on the ring and turn that word over.
She didn't say she can't open it for me.
She didn't say it's shut for security, or till Julian gets home, or because of the insurance.
She said pedestrian, which means a person on foot, which means anybody.
This gate has rolled open twice this week for Cole Brennan's truck — I heard the track from the kitchen both times — and it has never once opened for a woman walking.
“You can tell me who decides what counts as a safety interlock,” I say, “though I don't suppose that's a thing you're allowed to answer.”
“I'm sorry, Evelyn. I don't have an answer to that one.”
Her voice is kind. That's the whole trouble with the arrangement, and I say it out loud to the empty apron because I want to hear how it sounds in air.
“It's easier to fight a man than to fight a courtesy.”
I don't press the button again. I want that on the record. I press it once, and once only, and then I take my thumb off it and walk away like somebody with an errand.
The fence runs east from the gatehouse along the road, post and rail with wire behind it, and I walk three hundred yards of it the way I'd walk a weld.
Slowly, close in, hands on it, hunting for the spot where somebody got tired.
That's always where a thing fails. Never in the middle of a run. Always where the work got boring.
I test every post for rot at the ground line. I lean my weight on the rails. I follow the wire with my fingers until my fingers are black.
There's no gap in it anywhere. There isn't even a gate for a mower.
So I come back up the drive at a stroll, coat open, looking at the trees like a woman with an afternoon to spend, because there are four cameras between the gatehouse and the house and I've decided what they're going to see.
The phone in the hall rings before my coat's off.
“There she is.” Julian's delighted. There's traffic behind him, then a door, then no traffic. “AURA tells me you walked the whole drive today, all the way down and back again, and I've been sitting in meetings since lunch thinking about it. That's marvellous, darling. Genuinely marvellous.”
“It took me the better part of an hour, which is humbling, but I did the whole thing without sitting down once.”
“An hour is nothing at all. Three weeks ago you couldn't get down the stairs without both hands on the rail and me carrying your coffee behind you, so I'd rather you didn't stand there in my hall calling it humbling.”
“I counted the orchard while I was out. There are forty-one trees, in case it ever comes up at one of your dinners.”
He laughs, and it's a good laugh, easy and pleased, the laugh he had when we were new.
“Forty-one. Six years in that house and you've never given me a number for anything out there, and now I get one on a Tuesday, over a terrible line, from a woman who's meant to be resting.”
Then, in exactly the same voice, with no seam in it anywhere:
“Do one thing for me, though. Don't do the fence line again.
The ground along the road is all rabbit holes and old drainage and it's never been levelled properly, and if you went over on that arm down there, I'd be an hour away with a phone in my hand and nothing useful to do about it. Walk the drive as much as you like. Walk it twice, if you want.”
There's a pale square on the wallpaper where a picture used to hang.
“I'll be careful.”
“That's all I'm asking of you. I'll be late — there's dinner, and then a car, so please don't wait up. Shut your window tonight as well, the nights have turned.”
I put the phone down and stand there with my hand still on it.
He praised me and he leashed me in one breath, and both halves came out at the same temperature, from a man who is honestly pleased with me. That's the part I can't get a wrench on. If he'd gone cold about the fence, I'd know exactly what I was looking at.
And he knew about the fence because a woman's voice told him, seven miles away, while I was still down there with my hands on the wire.
Nobody has mentioned the dinner party since the night it happened, not Julian, not Nora, not once.
So the cameras get a stroll from here on. Everything else happens where the cameras aren't.
Upstairs, I lift the mattress and get out the red site notebook and the flat carpenter's pencil with brENNAN SYSTEMS stamped down one side. Five entries in it so far. I add three more in block capitals, one line each, the way I'd letter a drawing.
Forty-one trees, counted twice.
Drive: six hundred and forty-one strides at three feet three inches. Four tenths of a mile. The plat agrees.
The gate opens for vehicles. It does not open for people.
I read that last line back twice, and my hands go cold on the pencil.
The bathroom holds heat badly, so I run the tap hot and let it fog the window while I get undressed.
The jumper comes over my head and I stop with it caught on one arm.
There's a stain in the skin of my left forearm.
It sits above the surgical scar, on the inside, where the arm's palest. Brown and yellow, flat, sunk into the skin rather than sitting on top of it.
Nothing swollen. Nothing sore. There's no red left in it at all, and no purple, because whatever this was, it happened a long time ago and it never finished clearing.
I've been pulling sleeves over this arm for weeks.
I turn it under the light above the basin, and the shape is still perfectly readable. Four soft ovals in a row along the inside of the forearm, close together, evenly spaced. And one more on its own, lower down, on the other side of the arm.
The car, then. Think about the car.
A three-point belt makes a diagonal. It comes over one shoulder and down across the body, and it leaves a line, and a line is a line the whole way along.
“That's not a seatbelt,” I say to the tap.
I say it a second time, because the first one didn't come out in my voice.
There's no camera in this house that belongs to me.
Mine went in the crash, and the one I have now was set up for me while I was still on a ward, and anything I put on it exists somewhere else within the hour.
So I won't photograph this. Later I'll get the notebook out again and draw it in pencil, actual size, and the sleeves stay down until I know what I'm holding.
I put my right hand on my left forearm.
I don't want to. I do it anyway, because I have never in my life been able to leave a measurement untaken.
Thumb underneath. Four fingers over the top.
Then I shut my eyes and check the fit a second time, because I'd rather not be looking while I find out.
Four ovals above the scar, and one below it on the other side.
I put my thumb on the one. I put my four fingers on the four. And they fit — not nearly, not roughly. They fit the way a part fits the part it was made for.