CHAPTER 33
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The ankle is stiffer today than it was yesterday, which is the bargain you make on day three. The swelling goes down and the joint sets like grout.
I strap it anyway. Two turns under the arch, three around, tape across the top. It'll carry me standing. It won't turn.
I find that out at the top of the stairs at nine, shifting my weight to face the gallery, and everything from my left knee down says no in a voice I've learned to respect.
So I won't turn. I've designed plenty of things that hold without moving.
Running went two days ago, when I came off the mezzanine stair and the left ankle rolled under me, and I've finished being sad about it. A structure that can't relocate has to solve its problem where it stands. That's the entire discipline, really. Everything else is arithmetic.
I kneel on the mezzanine with the bad foot stuck out sideways like a dropped tool. It hurts, and I say so out loud, because there's nobody in this house to be brave in front of anymore.
Nine posts carry the gallery rail. Four feet apart, each one bolted to a steel plate, each plate lagged down through the oak floor and into the end grain of the joist underneath. Four lag screws per plate. Three inches of thread into wood that never wanted them.
End grain doesn't hold a screw. It splits along its own length and lets go all at once, and whoever installed this rail either didn't know that or was paid not to mention it.
I work the three posts nearest the stair head. That's where anything happens up here, because the bag has to go down those stairs and so does anyone carrying it.
Flat screwdriver, the long one from the drawer under the stairs. Back each screw out slowly, counting turns, until about one thread is still biting and the head sits flush in its countersink like nothing has been done to it at all.
Twelve screws. Forty minutes. My wrist quits at nine, and the last four are worse than the first eight together, and twice I stop and put my forehead against the cold of the newel post until my hand comes back to me.
The foot doesn't get better while I kneel on it. It gets hot, and then it gets loud, and by the eleventh screw I'm talking myself through the turns out loud like a woman counting laps.
“Eleven down and one to go, and then I'll leave you alone.”
I mark the oak at the third post with the flat of the pencil, a line about as long as my thumb, because in four hours I won't be able to look for it.
Then I stand on the good foot and lean my hip into the rail, and it takes me. It stands. It looks exactly like a rail.
The screws go into my coat pocket, and they click against each other all afternoon whenever I move, like coins, like a clock I'm carrying around.
Before I go down I put my palm flat on the top rail.
“You were never meant to hold anything. I'm sorry. You're about to.”
The canvas bag comes out of the boot room at ten, and after that the house is nothing but stairs.
Into it goes the ninety-one-page packet with two men's names in raised type across the top. Twenty-two envelopes, opened once and resealed badly, still in their rubber band. The organizer, lid hinging on the left, fifteen doses inside it that never went anywhere near me.
The second ledger, red-covered, graph-ruled, written in a carpenter's pencil I've sharpened four times. Delphine's recorder and her cassettes. The inspection sheet that puts Julian in Lisbon on a day his own clinical record swears he spent here, watching me lose the thread of a sentence.
Five trips up and five down, and each one costs more than the one before it. He had the car towed at 7 a.m. and paid the bill himself. Aldred has been at the courthouse since 8:30 and isn't coming back today.
AURA finds me on the fourth trip.
“You've been up and down those stairs a great deal today. Shall I ask Dr. Aldred to come back early?”
“No thank you, but it's kind of you to keep track.”
“Your husband asked me to remind you about eating something at midday.”
“Tell him I heard the reminder and thought about it.”
I stand there in the hall with a dead woman's voice coming out of the ceiling, being polite to it, and then I pick the bag up and keep going.
She comes back at two, while I'm folding the last of it down.
“The house is holding sixty-eight degrees. Would you like the great room warmer before this evening?”
“Leave everything exactly the way it is.”
“Of course. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“There's nothing else, and I don't believe there ever really was.”
A car comes up the drive at twenty to four.
In six years he has never come home before half past five on a Monday. The front door. His coat going onto the hook, two sounds, the second one softer than the first.
Then a long quiet while he stands at the island, and I know what's waiting for him on the granite, because I put one of the two things there myself. A folded invoice. And, seven days ago, my ring.
“Evelyn, are you upstairs? I'd rather not shout up a stairwell.”
“I'm on the gallery, and I heard the car come in.”
He comes up the stairs holding the invoice. He doesn't know he does that. When a piece of paper has beaten him he carries it in his hand, and he has carried paper at me for four months without once noticing.
“Two hundred and eighty dollars to move a car that doesn't run four hundred yards. I paid it. I'd like to know what you thought was going to happen next.”
“I thought you'd read it at the gate and turn straight around, and you did, so we're both standing precisely where we expected to be standing.”
He looks at me for a while. He's very pale in this light, and immaculate, and the collar of his shirt is still perfectly flat at four in the afternoon.
“The hearing is tomorrow morning, Evelyn. Tomorrow morning, and then none of this is yours to carry. You could have had one quiet night.”
“You keep offering me quiet like it's a room I could go and sit in. I've been sitting in it for six years, and it turns out it was never quiet. It was only soundproofed.”
He sets the invoice down on the gallery table, squares it to the edge, and turns back to me with his hands open, and he's warm about it, he always is.
“You've decided I'm the weather, and I understand why, and I'm not going to argue you out of it standing here.
What I'd ask is that you look at the actual sequence.
You came out of that hospital unable to hold a list of three items. I have a doctor's history, an insurer, a court date and a signature, and none of that is cruelty, it's simply the order things have to go in when a person can't sign for herself.”
“Say the whole word out loud once and I'll listen.”
“It's a temporary order, Evelyn, and you know that perfectly well.”
“There's a difference between a woman who can't hold three items and a woman who is given fifteen doses of something she never asked for, and you're a careful enough man to know which paperwork you'd need to hide the second one inside the first.”
That's when he sees the bag against my leg.
“I'd like you to hand me that, and then I'd like you to sit down and let me put something hot in front of you, because you've been on that foot since nine and I can see exactly what it's costing you.”
“No, and you already know what's in it, so let's leave out the part where you ask me twice.”
“Then hand it over and we'll go through the whole thing together.”
I go for the stairs, because the bag has to go down them. He steps across the head of them without hurrying, the way a man moves to hold a door.
“There's a recorder in here with your first wife on it, Julian. Four cassettes. On one of them she talks about you in the present tense, and she isn't fond of you.”
“She lay on that floor for eleven minutes with a telephone in her hand and never once dialed it, so whatever you believe is on those tapes, it isn't a woman asking anybody for help.”
The record says the fall wasn't witnessed. The record says she was found in the morning by a housekeeper who let herself in at seven.
Eleven minutes is a number you only get by standing somewhere with a clock.
I don't say that. I've got twelve loose screws in my coat pocket and a courtroom in Calder Ridge in the morning, and arithmetic like that can wait for somebody with a badge.
“Give it to me, please, before this turns into something neither of us can explain to anyone tomorrow.”
Then he takes hold of my upper arm.
He's never done this. Six years, and he has put his hands on me exactly once, at the gala, on the right wrist, four marks he apologized for afterwards in writing.
He isn't good at it. His elbows are in the wrong place and his face has gone strange, almost embarrassed, like a man asked to lift something at a party.
He walks me backwards along the gallery.
I can't turn on this foot. So I won't turn.
I give ground. The rail comes up against my back at the first post, and I keep giving, and the second post goes past my shoulder, and my heel finds the seam in the oak I marked with a pencil at half past nine this morning.
Third post. Here.
He gets the bag half out of my hands. Both of his are on it now, and his weight is coming forward through his shoulders, and his shins are against my shins.
I drop.
Straight down, deliberately, out from under all of it, onto my right hip and both forearms, and the floor is harder than I planned for and I don't care.
His chest goes into the top rail at the height it was built for.
Three plates. Twelve screws. One thread each.
The first plate tears out of the end grain with a sound like a branch coming off a tree, and then the second, and then the third, in order, away from the stair head, because that's the order I loosened them in. The section swings out over the great room and folds away like a gate.
He goes with it.
Eleven feet onto polished concrete. The rail comes down after him and rings, once, enormously, and then goes on ringing for far longer than anything that size has any right to.
I don't go down the stairs. I can't.
I get myself onto the top tread with the bag in my lap and my legs out in front of me, and I count his breathing, because counting is what I do, and it's fast and it's there.
Alive. Alive and swearing in a way I have not heard out of him in six years of marriage.
His left shoulder has come forward and down. His left collarbone is broken — there's a ridge standing up under his shirt where the bone used to run straight, and he's holding that arm against his ribs with the other hand, and he's looking all over the floor for the thing that did this to him.
The air off fourteen feet of glass comes up the stairwell at me, iron-cold, carrying the last of the ringing with it.
“Nine posts. Lag screws, three inches, into end grain. They'll hold a lean. They were never going to hold a man.”
He stops moving and looks up at me. It's the only time in six years I've watched him not know something.
Blue light comes across the great room through fourteen feet of glass, sliding up the wall and over the ceiling and back again. Two vehicles on the drive, and a woman getting out of the first one with a folder held against her coat, and she is early.
Then somebody puts a hand through the sidelight rather than wait for a door to open.
Glass goes across the floor, the bolt turns, and Cole comes in with his right knuckles split open and blood running down the frame behind him, and something in my back lets go at the sound of his boots.
He isn't allowed within sight of this door. He knows that better than I do, because he's the one who stood in a room and had the condition read to him, and he came through the glass with his right hand anyway.
“Don't get up. Ev — look at me. I'm here. Don't get up.”
Roz Pike comes in behind him with her hand raised and her voice flat as a level.
“Nobody touches him. Everybody stays exactly where they are.”
“Deputy Pike, Calder County. Ma'am, is there anyone else in this house?”
“Nobody else is here, and it's all in this bag.”
I put my hand out from the top tread. Cole comes up four stairs and takes it with the wrong hand, the split one, and it's warm and wet and it gets on my sleeve.
“You're barred from this house by a court order, and I had him down before you ever touched that glass. You didn't need to come through it for me.”
“I know what you did. I could hear it from the drive and I knew it was yours. I came anyway, and I'd have come through the wall.”
Below us, Julian shifts on the concrete and makes a sound that has nothing charming in it.
“Evelyn.” He says it from the floor and it comes out wrong, because a broken collarbone changes the way a man says anything at all. “Tell them I was helping you.”
Roz Pike is in the doorway with her hand up and Cole is behind her bleeding onto the frame, and I hold the bag against my chest and I don't get up, because I can't.
“Tell them yourself,” I say. “Tomorrow morning.”