Chapter 6 #2
That landed on Nadia harder than the shotgun had.
"Since Tulsa," she said.
"Since about the second week."
"You never said."
"You never asked," said Pepper Vance. "That's the whole thing, Nadia. That's been the whole thing the entire time."
"That's not forgiveness. That's a door." She stepped aside. "You take a door when it opens, Nadia. That was always your best quality."
The chase, I'll compress, because it was mostly other people's insurance.
Two vehicles came into the lot as we came out of the row. The van did seventy through a gate arm. Nadia drove because I was, and I quote her here exactly, "having a small event."
Ozzy was on speaker the whole way from North Dakota.
"Okay so I've got the map up—"
"Ozzy, you're eight hundred miles away."
"I've got the map up," Ozzy said, wounded. "Take the next left."
"There's no left."
"There's a left in like two miles."
"There's a dirt lot in two miles."
"That's the left," said Ozzy. "Also, Deke says he's proud of you both and to remember there's a rail in the back, so if you're doing evasive stuff, the rail—"
"Ozzy, I swear to God—"
"I'm just saying the rail's sharp."
"Ozzy, who are they?"
"Uh — two vehicles, one's a Tahoe, I can't — Deke, can you—"
"They're not Ash," Deke said, distant, from somewhere near a stove. "Ash doesn't own a Tahoe. Ash owns four Buicks and a boat."
"Why does Ash own a boat?"
"Nobody knows why Ash owns a boat," Deke said. "It's been eleven years."
"Ozzy, the left—"
"It's coming! It's — okay it's in like four hundred feet and I want to say up front that on the satellite it's from 2019—"
"OZZY."
She took the dirt lot. She took it at fifty-five with a wall of dust behind us and the two vehicles went past on the highway and kept going, and we sat in a hearse in a field for eleven minutes with the engine off, listening.
Nadia had both hands on the wheel and was breathing like a runner.
"You okay?" I said.
"Ask me in a minute."
"Okay."
"...Are you okay?"
And here's the thing I hadn't put words to yet, sitting in the passenger seat of a converted hearse in a dirt lot outside Cheyenne with my hands shaking.
I wasn't scared of losing it.
I'd been scared of losing it for three weeks and it turns out that fear had a floor in it, because the floor was: and then I'll be a normal man. Fine. Bad, but fine.
What I hadn't planned for was watching somebody else do the thing better than I'd ever done it, with no gift, with nothing but the truth, and stand a woman down who had every right on earth to pull that trigger.
"You didn't con her," I said.
"No."
"You just — told her."
"That's all there was left."
"I've been doing this fifteen years," I said, "and I've never once had that in the bag."
Nadia turned her head. There was dust on her face and her hair had come out of everything, and she looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, which by then was standard, and which by then was the thing I liked best about her.
"You have," she said. "You've just never taken it out."
"Would it have worked?"
"No," she said. "Not in there. Not from you. She'd already decided about you at the door."
"That's grim."
"It's Tuesday," said my wife.
"It's Thursday."
"It's conceptually Tuesday."
We sat there a while longer. A truck went by out on the highway and neither of us breathed until it was gone.
"Can I say the ugly one?" I said.
"Always."
"I'm relieved."
She turned her head.
"Not about her," I said. "About it failing.
About hearing it go." I flexed my hands, watching them shake, feeling weirdly clinical about it.
"Fifteen years I've walked into rooms knowing how they end.
Every single one. Do you know what that does?
You stop arriving. You're never in a room, you're just watching a thing you already wrote. "
"And now?"
"Now I have no idea what happens next and it's the worst I've ever felt and I don't want it to go back."
Nadia looked at me for a long, long moment. Long enough that I started to get self-conscious about it, which was itself novel.
"Say that again in three weeks," she said, "and I'll believe you."
"You won't be able to."
"No," she said. "That's why I'm asking for three weeks."
I looked out the window at a lot of Wyoming and thought about a string going slack in the middle of a note.
"Nadia."
"Mm."
"When we get back, I want to tell Wolf. About the gift. All of it."
She didn't answer for a second.
"Not yet," she said.
"Why not yet?"
"Because once he knows it's a club problem, and once it's a club problem there's a vote, and I've read enough of your minute-books this month to know what happens to men who turn into votes." She reached for the key. "Give me a week."
"You've got a week."
"Nadia."
"Mm."
"On the dock," I said. "The morning at the lake. Was there really a fisherman?"
Two seconds.
"Yes," she said.
And I believed her, immediately, completely, with my whole chest.
"Okay," I said.
And she looked out the windshield and put both hands back on the wheel, and I didn't understand for another eleven hours why her knuckles had gone white.