Chapter 7
Nadia
"That's the alternator," Trick said.
"You don't know that."
"I know it's the alternator."
"You don't know anything about cars, you told me you know one thing about cars—"
"I know one thing about cars," he agreed, "and it's the alternator."
The dash went dark. The heater went with it. Outside, the plains were doing that thing where there is genuinely nothing out there, no light, no fence, no sound but a wind that had come a hundred miles without hitting anything and was very pleased with itself.
I checked my phone. Four percent, no bars.
"How's yours?"
He held it up. It was off. It had been off since Cheyenne because he'd left it on the seat with a bag of ice on it, for reasons.
"Silas."
"There was a reason."
"What was the reason?"
"Deke sent a Gatorade in a — the ice was for the Gatorade, and the phone was under—"
"I want you to hear yourself."
"I'm hearing myself," he said. "I don't love it."
"Okay," he said. "Options."
"One. We freeze."
"That's not an option, that's an outcome."
"One," I said. "We freeze. Two, we walk in a direction we can't name and freeze at a slightly different address. Three, we get in the back with a blanket and thirty-one candles and wait for the trucks."
"Four," he said. "We burn the hearse for warmth and get a ride from whoever comes to look at the fire."
I stared at him.
"That's not a bad plan," I said.
"It's a terrible plan, I said it as a joke—"
"No, walk it back. There's something in it."
"Nadia, there are eighty years of Wolf's grandfather's paperwork in the back of that vehicle."
"We'd take the paperwork out first, Silas, I'm not a lunatic."
"You are audibly considering arson."
"I'm considering visibility," I said. "There's a difference and it's mostly about how you write it up afterward."
"That is the most frightening sentence anybody's ever said to me at four in the morning."
"I've got better ones."
"I know you do," he said. "That's the problem."
So: two people, one dead hearse, ninety miles from a town, in the last hour before dawn in April in Wyoming, which is a season the tourism board does not discuss.
Inventory, conducted by flashlight, item by item, because I am a professional:
One moving blanket. Grey. Enormous. Smelled like a garage in a good way.
One box of stolen candles from a lake house in Colorado, thirty-one of them, taken by me on the grounds that a man in Portugal does not grieve for candles.
Two lighters.
A tote of documents from 1948 that we were absolutely not going to burn no matter how the night went.
Eleven ketchup packets.
"Six hours," Trick said, looking at the road. "Minimum. Nobody's coming through here till the trucks start."
"Six hours."
"We could walk."
"To where, Silas."
"North."
"North is a direction, it's not a—" I stopped. "Get in the back."
The back of a converted hearse, for those who've never had the pleasure, is a long carpeted box with a rail down one side and no seats, and if you put a moving blanket down in it and light nine candles in a line along the rail, it becomes — and I want to be measured — the single least dignified romantic setting in North America.
"Question," he said, watching me light the fourth one. "Why do you have thirty-one candles."
"I took them from the lake house."
"You took thirty-one candles."
"They were in a drawer. Nobody grieves for candles."
"That's the third time you've said that. I want you to know I've been letting it go."
"It's a sound principle."
"It's a principle you invented in a kitchen in Colorado to justify a felony involving hamburger."
"And look where we are," I said, gesturing at nine points of light in a funeral van in Wyoming. "Vindicated."
He conceded it. He did it with his eyebrows, which is how he concedes things.
"It's like a very cheap chapel," he said.
"It's like a rehab chapel."
"It's like the inside of a shoe."
"It's warm," I said, "and I would like it on the record that I did this, so you know."
We sat against the wheel wells with the blanket over our knees and the candles going and the sky out the back windows starting, very faintly, to consider it.
And I told him.
I'd been carrying it four days by then. Four days of him handing me coffee and believing me about fishermen.
"There wasn't a fisherman," I said.
He didn't say anything.
"On the dock. At the lake. It was him."
"The suit."
"Yes."
"Okay," he said, quiet, and pulled his knees up. "Tell me all of it and don't take care of me while you do it."
So I gave him all of it, straight through, no shaping — the two hundred and nine jobs, the hand being moved, Weber's stack, sixty percent, the acceptance by consent, the four yeses with their dates.
And then the last part.
"If I take it, I get it. All of it. And you become an ordinary man in a state full of people who spent fifteen years agreeing to things they didn't choose."
"How long would I have," he said.
"He said you'd survive the week."
"That's generous of him."
"He said you wouldn't survive the month."
Trick nodded slowly, looking at the candles.
"Say the rest," he said.
"There isn't a rest."
"Nadia. There's a rest. You've been carrying something for four days and it isn't the arithmetic, because you'd have led with the arithmetic, you like arithmetic."
I pulled the blanket up.
"Cheyenne," I said.
"What about it."
"You asked me if there was really a fisherman. In the field. After."
"Yeah."
"And I said yes." My voice came out flat. "That's the part. Not the dock. I've been lied to my whole life and I've got a system and it works, and four days ago I looked at you in a dirt lot after you'd just watched your whole life fall over, and I lied to your face, and I watched you take it."
"Okay."
"It's not okay. That's the thing he's actually buying. It's not the gift. It's that every day I get a little better at doing that to you and you get a little worse at noticing, and there's a version of this where in six months I'm not even choosing it anymore. It's just how I talk to my husband."
Trick was quiet for a second.
"So don't," he said.
"That's not a plan, Silas—"
"It's the only one there is." He shrugged. "That's what everybody else has been doing this whole time. Every married person in the history of the world. There's no mechanism. There's just don't."
"That's horrifying."
"That's Tuesday," he said, "as somebody once told me."
"And if you don't take it," he said.
"It stalls. Sixty-forty. Nobody's got a working one and we're two civilians standing in the middle of a road with a tote of paper that eleven organizations want."
"And we both go down."
"Inside a year."
He was quiet for maybe four seconds.
"Take it," he said.
"Silas—"
"Take it." He turned his head. "Right now, tonight, whatever the mechanism is, however he wants it said — take it."
"You didn't think about it."
"I thought about it in Cheyenne," he said. "I didn't know what I was thinking about, but I did it in a storage row, so it's done."
And this is the thing. This is the whole thing.
I have been lied to by professionals. I have been lied to by my own mother and by two federal agents and by a man in Marseille who was very good at it, and I have a working system, and the system is nobody gets a free pass.
I looked at him in nine candles' worth of light in the back of a hearse, and I could not read him, and I never would again.
Which meant the only way to know if he meant it was to know him.
And I did.
"You mean it," I said.
"Yeah."
"That's the worst part."
"I know."
"I could handle it if you were running something." My voice went. "I've got a whole plan for if you're running something, I built it in Cheyenne, it's good —"
"Nadia."
"— and instead you're just sitting there being sincere at me at four in the morning in a funeral van, which is frankly a filthy thing to do to a woman with my history—"
He kissed me.
Which, tactically, was the correct call, and I want him to know I noticed.
I'd like to tell you it was smooth. It was not.
The blanket went sideways immediately. He put an elbow into the rail and said a word I'd never heard him say, and I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on his shoulder for a minute, and he laughed, and one of the candles went out and we both said "leave it" at the same time.
That's what it was, mostly. Half-laughing.
The lake house had been firelight and rain and two people finding out that believing somebody is a thing you do, not a thing you conclude.
This was different. This was the back of a dead vehicle on the shoulder of an interstate, freezing, with a moving blanket and thirty-one stolen candles and a rail I hit my hip on twice, and it was the most honest hour of my entire life.
"Say true things," I told him. "That's the rule tonight."
"That's a hard rule for me."
"I know. Do it anyway."
"I'm cold."
"Not that kind."
"That one was true," he said, "and I'd like credit."
"Credit granted. Another."
"I've never once in my life been sure anybody wanted me," he said. "Not one time. Not since I was nineteen. Every yes I've ever gotten came out of a room I was standing in and I could never tell what was me."
I put my hands on either side of his face.
"I want you," I said. "And you can't do a thing about it, and you'll never know why, and you're going to have to just live with that."
He made a sound like it hurt.
"That's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me," he said.
"You have terrible friends."
"I have excellent friends, Deke made us a cake—"
"Silas."
"Yeah."
"Stop talking."
It was slow, because there was nowhere to be and no power in the vehicle and six hours of nothing coming, and because slow was the only thing either of us had never done.
The blanket was scratchy. The floor was ribbed.
He kept his hand at the back of my head every time I forgot about the rail, which he'd learned in about four minutes and which undid me more than anything else in the whole night, and I told him so, and he said "that's my one car fact and my one person fact, I'm out," and I laughed against his mouth.