CHAPTER 13
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The window glass pulls the heat out of my palm in about four seconds, and the light coming through it has no yellow left in it at all.
Past the terrace there are apple trees. Eleven in the first row, nine in the second, seven in the third where the ground drops toward the wall. I can't see a single one of them from this side of the house. I count them anyway, because counting is what my hands do when there's nothing to hold.
The scar on my left forearm has started aching the way it does now that the mornings have turned. Cold pulls it tight, like a strap done up one hole too far.
Upstairs, a vacuum has been running for eleven minutes.
Wednesday is the east wing. It's been the east wing on a Wednesday for the eleven years Nora has kept this house, and I've known that the whole time, and I left a red notebook under a mattress anyway.
The glass under my hand has fogged where my palm was. I wipe it clear with my sleeve, which is the sort of thing a person does when she needs both hands busy.
“Good morning, Evelyn,” AURA says. “Nora's cleaning the east wing today, so I'll keep the corridor lights up until she's finished with it. The overnight low was thirty-eight. Would you like the floors warmed in there before you walk it?”
“Leave them cold, thank you. I'd rather know what the house is actually doing than have it made comfortable before I get to it.”
“Of course. I'll keep the corridor lit for her either way, since she's carrying things.”
The vacuum cuts out mid-stroke. In the quiet after it, the coffee machine clears its throat and the terrace door seal ticks as the sun works along it.
Then Nora on the stairs, and the particular soft weight of an armful of bedding coming down.
She crosses toward the laundry passage with the sheets held high against her chest. She doesn't look at me and she doesn't slow down.
“I put fresh linen on,” she says. “The mattress wanted turning.”
“It's had six years to want that.” I lay my palm flat on the counter. “What made this morning the morning?”
“There's damp working through under that window and I've told him about it twice. Twice he's told me the house would let him know if there were damp.” Her hands lift the bundle an inch. “So I turn what I'm able to turn and I leave the glass to the glaziers.”
“Did anything else come out from under there that wanted turning?”
“I take the linen down and I bring the linen up, and that is the whole of what I do in this house.” She's at the passage door now, shoulder against it.
“The wash runs an hour and ten. Anything of yours goes in the basket in the next few minutes or it waits till the end of the week, and I'm not making a second trip for a cardigan.”
She goes through. The door swings once and settles.
I don't run.
I pick up the glass I've been holding and rinse it and set it in the rack tines-down, and then I walk the east corridor at the pace of a woman with nowhere particular to be. Sixty-one steps. It's always sixty-one.
The bed is made. The cover's pulled square, the pillows squared to the cover, the whole surface flat enough that you could set a level on it and read zero.
I slide my hand under the mattress at the near corner, where a red graph-ruled notebook has lived since the second week of September, and there's nothing under there but ticking and the cold of my own fingers.
I stay in the room long enough for the floor pipe to click twice, because a woman who stands in a doorway is a woman who has just been shown something, and I'd rather he had to guess.
So I write nothing. All day.
Twenty-two entries. I hold them the way I used to hold a load table before a pour — top of the column to the bottom, no skipping, out loud inside my head while my hands do something harmless. The doors. The doses. The forty-one minutes that don't come back.
By evening the ridge has gone the color of wet nickel and the terrace lights have come up on their own.
Julian is at the counter when I come down, in shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned twice, a glass of water at his elbow that he'll never drink. His notebook is open beside it. And squared to the counter edge, exactly parallel, is my ledger.
“You've been out,” he says, and he says it kindly, the way you'd mention someone's new coat. “Nora saw the gate log. I'm glad. I've been telling you for weeks that you're allowed to want a day that isn't this house.”
“I went into town and sat in The Wren for an hour. I had coffee and a slice of pie I didn't finish, and I watched a man argue with the pie case.”
“That's the most ordinary sentence you've said to me since June, and I want you to know I'm not going to spoil it.” He turns the ledger a few degrees toward himself with one finger. “Sit down, Evelyn. I want you to hear these the way I heard them.”
I don't sit. I stand at the end of the counter where I can see both his hands.
He finds the page without hunting for it, which means he's been through the whole book more than once.
“Here's the ninth,” he reads, and his voice goes gentle, unhurried, careful with it.
“'4:40 a.m. East corridor door opens. Nobody comes through.
House log shows no event.'” He turns two leaves.
“And here's the tenth. '2:12 to 2:53. Forty-one minutes missing off the drive camera.
Same gap as page four. Same gap as page eleven. '”
He sets the book down and lines it up with the counter edge again.
“I want to tell you something I've been carrying since the hospital, and I'd like to get all the way through it before you answer me.” He turns the glass a quarter turn without lifting it.
“I've been frightened. I don't hand you that word often, because I know what it costs you to hear it, and because I promised myself in that waiting room that I'd carry my half of it where you couldn't see it.
But you should have it from me instead of finding it later in somebody's letter.
When Aldred sits across a desk from me and uses those careful phrases of his, I don't hear a diagnosis, Evelyn.
I hear my wife writing the same forty-one minutes into three separate pages across three weeks because some part of her can't set it down and go to sleep.”
He straightens the notebook beside the glass so that the two of them are square to each other, and he does it slowly, the way a man does a small thing to keep his hands from doing a large one.
“I've watched you check the terrace door and then walk back across the room and check it again.
I've heard you tell me a door opened at twenty to five in the morning when the house says nothing opened at all, and do you know what I did every single time?
I agreed with you. I smiled and I agreed, because agreeing with you was easier for me than standing here watching your face while I didn't. That's my failure and I'm not going to pretend it's yours.
I've been feeding it to you for ninety days.
I'm finished doing it tonight, and I'd rather you hated me for a week than kept building this.” He rests two fingers flat on the ledger.
“You've written the same forty-one minutes on three different pages. Do you see how that reads to someone who loves you?”
The refrigerator compressor comes on under the counter. Somewhere in the west wing a door releases and re-seats.
“It reads like a number that doesn't change,” I say.
He looks at me for a moment with something in his face that I'd call sorrow on anybody else.
Then he picks up the ledger, walks it four steps to the sink, and drops it in the basin.
The lighter comes out of his trouser pocket. Flint, once — that bright small scrape, sharp and then gone — in a kitchen that has never smelled of anything but food.
The cover catches at the corner and curls, and the red goes black and then a paler ash-white, and the graph rule comes up out of each page as it burns, brown line by brown line, a grid drawn back onto the paper by the heat that's taking it.
My handwriting stands up dark for a second on the top sheet before the sheet stops being paper.
I watch all of it. I don't look at the window and I don't look at his hands, because looking away is the thing he's standing there waiting for.
“Would you like the extractor fan, Julian?” AURA says. “There's smoke.”
“Please. And bring the lights up two steps, would you, it's gone dim in here.”
The fan takes hold with a soft pull of air. Twenty-two entries, and the stainless under them stays warm, and the smell is nothing like a fireplace — it's flat and chemical and it gets into the back of the throat and stays there.
He runs the tap. Water hits the ash and the ash doesn't drink it; it beads up on top in gray pearls, sitting there, refusing, until he moves it around with two fingers and it turns to a slurry that slides toward the strainer basket in the drain.
He's watching the water. So I put my hand into the basin on the far side of the stream, take hold of the basket rim, lift it half an inch, and take what's under my thumb.
One corner. Maybe two square inches of it, scorched to a brown lace at the edges, three lines still legible on the unburned part. It goes into my cardigan pocket, and my hand comes back out, and I dry both hands on the towel that hangs on the oven rail.
He turns around with his wrists wet.
“You keep that in your pocket,” he says, and he reaches across and lifts the pencil out of my cardigan, two fingers, the way you'd take a splinter of glass out of a child's fist. He holds it up in the light.
Flat, red, brENNAN SYSTEMS running the length of it in white.
“It's a beautiful little object, honestly. Somebody thought hard about how it sits in a hand.”
“It's a pencil. It came free with a job.”
“You don't need to keep records in your own house.”
He puts his thumbs against the flat of it and pushes, and the pencil goes with a dry crack, and the two halves land on the counter with the lead splintered out of both of them. One piece has the B on it. The other has the RENNAN.
I reach past him and pick up both halves and close my hand around them, and the broken ends press into my palm where the wood went through in long splinters. He watches me do it. He could take them. He lets me have them, and the letting is the loudest thing that's happened in this room.
“What do you want for dinner?” he says. He shuts off the tap. “I can have something brought out. There's that place with the flatbreads you liked in the spring, or I'll make you eggs, which is the only thing I do properly and you know it.”
“Whatever's easiest.”
“Nothing about you is easiest, and I'd be insulted on your behalf if you'd let me be.” He dries his hands, folds the towel in half, and hangs it back on the rail with the fold facing out. “Eggs, then. Give me fifteen minutes and don't come in here and tell me how to do the pan.”
He goes through to the pantry.
I walk out of the kitchen with my fist closed.
The utility corridor runs the length of the east end, service doors down one side, the storage room at the far end with its old brass lock.
No windows. The lights along here come up when you enter and drop behind you as you pass, so you always move inside a small moving room of light with dark at both ends of it.
The pantry door shuts behind me. A pan goes onto the range and the extractor takes a second breath in the room I've left.
Twelve steps in, the light ahead of me doesn't come up.
I stop. My hand is sweating around the pencil halves and the splinters have found the base of my thumb and I can feel the two flat sides of it, one narrower than the other, and I count them anyway. Two. There are two.
Behind me, the light I've just walked out of goes out as well.
Somewhere above and to the left, a magnetic lock takes hold — the deep soft clunk of a plate finding its keeper, the sound this house makes at ten, never at nine.
AURA says, warm as a hand on a shoulder, “Evelyn, your bedroom door is secured for the night. It's twenty past nine.”
The mag takes the frame with a sound like a small door closing inside a larger one, and I am on the wrong side of it, in the corridor, in the dark, with half a pencil in each hand.