Chapter 3 #2
By the second day of the blackout we'd worked out a rhythm, the two of us, the kind of thing you can't perform your way into.
She rose early to work while it was cool, hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table with the notebook open beside it, frowning at columns of numbers.
I made coffee on the gas ring because the espresso machine wouldn't run off the generator, and she drank it without comment, which from her was a compliment.
We didn't talk much before noon. She didn't like to. I learned that and gave it to her.
In the punishing middle of the day, when the heat made the town go to ground, we went to ground too.
The thick stone walls kept the guesthouse bearable.
She read on the worn couch. I fixed things, because there's always something to fix and I think better with my hands.
Once she watched me re-seat a hinge for ten minutes without speaking, and when I finished she said, "You don't sit still. "
"No."
"Why."
"Sitting still's when the head talks." I set the screwdriver down. "I'd rather it didn't."
She wrote that down. I'd stopped minding when she wrote me down. Somewhere in there I'd started wanting to be in the notebook.
I learned things about her in those slow hours that no harbor wall would ever have given up.
That she read with a pen in her hand and argued with the books in the margins.
That she'd taught herself to be still on the outside while everything inside her ran flat out — I'd catch her gone somewhere behind her eyes, jaw tight, and then she'd surface and the cold would come back up like a shade pulled down.
That she ate almost nothing during the day and then, around midnight, would stand at the open fridge eating cold pasta straight from the bowl with her fingers like a kid, and the first time I caught her at it she dared me with a look to say one word, and I didn't, and something between us eased a notch that night that never quite tightened back.
She learned things about me too. That the charm went quiet when my hands were busy.
That I knew the name of every man on the fleet and the name of every man's father.
That I'd stop mid-sentence to listen to the generator, the way you listen to a person breathing in the next room, and could tell from the pitch of it whether it was about to give us trouble.
You love this building, she said once, watching me run a thumb along a windowsill I'd planed by hand a decade back.
I didn't answer. She didn't need me to. She wrote it down.
In the evenings, when the heat finally broke its own back and the air turned almost soft, we sat in the dark common room with the single string of low lights and a bottle of wine gone warm because the fridge had better things to keep cold, and we argued.
God, we argued.
About the harbor, at first. She'd lay out the arithmetic and I'd lay out the men and neither of us gave a centimeter.
But it bled outward the way talk does in the dark, into everything — the towns we came from, the people we'd left, what a life was for.
She fought like she was being graded on it.
Every soft thing I said, she met with a hard one, like she'd made a vow against being moved and meant to keep it to the grave.
But I'd started to see the shape of the vow. And the shape of it was a man.
"Your father," I said, on the second night, when the wine and the dark had loosened both of us past where we'd have gone in daylight. "You said you watched a man stay in a town like this until it killed him. That was him."
She went very still on the couch across from me.
"You don't get to use that," she said. "Whatever you read in the file —"
"I didn't read it in a file. There's no file, Mila.
I made the file up the first morning to get under your skin and it worked too well and I've felt like garbage about it ever since.
" I leaned forward. "I know about your father because you keep telling me about him.
Every argument we have, he's in it. He's the reason every harbor in the world is a trap to you.
You didn't come here to assess Cala Sirena.
You came here to be right about your father one more time. "
In the low light I watched something cross her face that I'd never seen on it — not the cold, not the cleverness, not the wall. Something young and raw and furious.
"He sat on a crate," she said. Her voice had gone flat and careful, the voice of someone walking out onto thin ice on purpose.
"On the dock. Mending a net he was never going to use again, because the boat was already too old to take out, because the bank already owned it, because the town had already taken everything it was ever going to give him.
And his heart stopped. And he tipped over into a coil of rope and nobody found him for two hours because that's how invisible a man gets when his usefulness runs out in a place like this.
" She was shaking, very slightly. "I asked him a thousand times why he stayed.
And there was no answer, Rafael. Don't tell me he stayed for the men or for the theirs of it or for the romance your Battista feeds the tourists.
He stayed because leaving terrified him more than dying did.
That's not love of a place. That's a cage with the door open and a bird too scared to fly. "
The room was dead quiet. The generator hummed somewhere out back.
I didn't reach for charm. There was nothing in the charm for this.
"You're probably right," I said.
She blinked. She'd braced for a fight.
"About your father," I said. "I didn't know him.
Maybe it was a cage. Maybe he was scared.
You'd know, I wouldn't." I held her eyes in the low light.
"But here's what I think you've got wrong, and I'll only say it once.
You decided his answer was the answer. You took one man, one frightened man in one town, and you made him the verdict on every harbor and everyone who stays in one.
So now Battista's a liar and Carla's a romantic and every man on that fleet is just your father waiting to tip into the rope.
You see the cage everywhere because you can't afford to see anything else.
Because if even one of these men stayed for a real reason —"
"Stop."
"— then maybe your father had one too," I said, gently, "and you never found it, and that's worse than him being a coward. That's the thing you can't carry. So you decided. Coward. Cage. Case closed. And you've been closing it on every town since."
She stood up so fast the wine glass tipped and rolled and didn't break.
For a second I thought she'd hit me. I'd have let her.
Instead she stood there in the dark with her chest heaving, twelve feet away, and the heat in the room had nothing on what was coming off the two of us, and neither of us said the thing, and neither of us moved toward it, and it would have been so easy — three steps across a dark room and we both knew it.
"I'm going to bed," she said.
"Mila —"
"Don't." Her hand was already on the hall doorway. She stopped. She didn't turn around. "You don't get to be right about him," she said, very low. "You especially. Do you understand? Anyone else. Not you."
"Why especially me?"
She was quiet for a long moment in the dark.
"Because you're the only person in fifteen years who's made me want to put the report down," she said. "And I can't put it down. It's all I am."
Then she was gone down the hall, and the door closed, and the lock turned, and I sat in the dark with the spilled wine and the humming generator and understood, with the clarity that only comes at a bad hour, that the assignment was over.
It had been over for days. Maybe since the first espresso.
I wasn't trying to steer her report anymore. I wasn't trying to make her love the town for the club's sake. I'd told her the truth about her own father in the dark, the cruelest true thing I'd ever said to anyone, and I'd done it not to win the harbor.
I'd done it because I couldn't stand watching her carry the lie, and that is not a thing a man does for an assignment.
That's a thing a man does for a woman.
The lights came back on the next afternoon, for about an hour, and then they died again for two more days. I remember thinking the grid was like the two of us — flickering toward something, then losing its nerve.
I went down to the harbor in that one bright hour while the town cheered the return of its refrigerators, and I stood by the bikes and tried to remember the man I'd been ten days ago, the one who'd taken this job because Reaper asked and a debt is a debt.
That man had been certain of a simple thing: that charm was a tool and a tool has no feelings about the work it does.
I couldn't find him. I'd misplaced him somewhere in a dark common room between a spilled glass of wine and a woman saying you're the only person in fifteen years who's made me want to put the report down.
When the power died again that evening I was almost glad.
The dark felt more honest than the light had.
I just didn't know yet which one of us would lose our nerve first.
I hoped it wouldn't be me. I'm built so it almost never is.
But I'd never met anyone like her, and the heat was relentless, and there were two locked doors and a dark hallway between us, and every night the hallway got shorter.