CHAPTER 21 #2
She had won the thing that was worth winning before the car ever reached the bottom of that hill.
The man on the track turned around because a woman read the clear shore ice against two hundred and thirty pounds and put herself where he could not follow.
What was left out there was eight degrees and a wind at thirty, and those do not care who was right.
“No,” she said. “I am telling you no and you can hear me. Do not put your hands on me.”
He stood there three seconds. I counted them from the slip.
“I am going to pick you up and carry you off this ice, sparrow, and you will be angry about it for the rest of my life.”
He wrote that rule himself, six years ago, so there would be one thing left in the world he could not do. He did it anyway, forty yards from where I stood, with the wind bringing me every word she had said about it.
That is the break. I am not going to hand it a kinder name than that, and he never asked me for one.
He came back on the straight line. He left the gray shore ridge and cut across the snow-covered seam because he could not carry her the longer way in that wind. Ten yards short of the slip the note came up beneath him again and this time it did not finish.
The ice let go and took the two of them down together.
He had her up on the shelf before he did one thing about himself. The edge caught her face as she went over it and opened her right cheekbone. Then he got his left arm across the ice and hauled, and something in that shoulder let go with a sound I was near enough to get, and he kept hauling on it.
I got a hand in his collar and the other in his belt. The water came out of his sleeve and over my wrist and took the feeling out of it in about four seconds, and that is the number I would give a board if a board ever asked me for one.
He came up onto the gravel with her against his chest and made three steps on it, away from the water.
“Bellwether,” she said.
He had her on her feet before the end of the word.
“Bellwether. Down you go. I broke my own rule out there and it was not small.”
He put his hands into his coat pockets and left them there, and he did not touch her again for the rest of the night.
“May I put my coat on you?” I said.
“Do it fast, because my hands are gone.”
I put it on her and did the buttons from the bottom up, since she could not. Her eyes came up to mine and sat behind where they should have been, amber and slow, and I have read that in a book and never had it standing in front of me.
“May I look at your face?”
“My face is going to get looked at either way.”
She was shaking hard by then and the words came out of her in pieces, and she got every one of them out anyway.
“I am asking you.”
“Be quick about it, because I would like to sit down somewhere with a door on it.”
I folded a handkerchief and put my thumb under the split and held the linen against it. She let me. The cut had gone down to the bone and stopped there and it would want stitches inside the hour. Rook stood a yard off with his left arm hanging and he came no closer than that.
“I am going up for the car,” I said. “I want the heat running before she is anywhere near it.”
The car was where I left it with the lights on and the wipers going.
I got in and put the heat to the top and sat with my hands on the wheel.
There was blood on the wheel from the right one and I left it there and did not wipe it off.
Ninety seconds is a long time in a car with the doors shut and nobody in the other seat.
I said it out loud. I said that I loved her, in those words, in an empty car, at thirty-six years of age, having said it to no living person before that.
Then the doors opened and I did the opposite of it.
“There is a blanket behind your seat,” I said. “It goes over your legs first and your shoulders can wait a minute.”
She got it over her legs. In the mirror her hands were pushed up under her arms and her jaw was going and she could not stop it doing that.
“He put me down when I said the word,” she said. “It should go in a file somewhere. It is the only part of today that worked.”
Rook got in and shut his door with his right hand, because the left one was not going to do it for him.
“Do not tell me there was nothing else to do out there.”
“I was not going to tell you that.”
“That is the correct answer.” He put his head back against the rest. “I do not know whether she had four more minutes in her. I am never going to know it either, and that is mine now, and I will carry it a long while.”
Looking at a man while I say a hard thing to him is a courtesy and it is also a method, and I have never been certain which of the two I am using.
“Look at me.” He did it. “In the morning you will tell her every part of it, in her own room, with the door standing open, and you will not ask her for one thing at the end of it.”
“I know how it goes. I wrote the rule.”
“They took your chair tonight,” he said, when the wipers had gone through a dozen strokes with neither of us using them for anything.
“Seven to five, and two of the seven were mine.”
“I know whose they were and so do you. There was a board and you would not stand up at it and say her name out loud, so you took the censure, and the censure took the two.” He turned his head on the rest. “Thorne walks her into that room and reads a clause at her, and you will sit there and be reasonable at him in a voice no man present has to lean away from.”
“That is how I work.”
“That is not how you work. That is what was put in you at fourteen and never taken out again.” He shifted the bad arm and it cost him something to do it. “Then get loud about it, for once in your life.”
“I have not raised my voice in eleven years.”
“I know that. So does every man at that table. That is the entire reason it would land.”
He shut his eyes. In the mirror she had her forehead against the glass and she was looking back down at the lake, and the snow had already put a lid over the place where the ice let go.
I turned the car and put it up the track in first gear. My right hand would not close on the wheel, so I steered with the left, and I counted the bends, and there are nine of them between the boathouse and the yard.
There was one thing I had not done in eleven years, and I was going to do it.