Chapter 15 #3
I sit there for another hour. I do the hair.
I number nineteen folders. I finish half the sandwich.
I don’t ask Mabel another question, partly because she has clearly decided she is finished answering them and partly because underneath everything else I am doing arithmetic at a speed that would embarrass a calculator.
Eighteen ninety-two. Nineteen-oh-four. Nineteen thirty-eight.
Volkov. Thorne. Volkov again. And a man who stood in my kitchen last night putting cans of tomatoes on the wrong shelf until I moved them, then kissed me against my refrigerator when I explained the system for the third time.
That is a hundred and thirty-four years in one town of two thousand people, in a state where someone can still tell you what your grandmother paid for a car in 1979.
I’ve had four hundred years in my head since Monday night and done almost nothing with it except be tender about it. Four hundred years is a number. It’s seventeenth-century Eastern Europe and a birth date nobody wrote down properly. It’s abstract, and abstract is comfortable.
This isn’t abstract. This is here. He didn’t outlive the world somewhere far away and then arrive in Black Harbor. He stayed.
He stayed on that hill while generations of people were born and married and fought about church suppers and planted lilac bushes and died.
Every few decades, one man disappeared and another arrived.
A Volkov became a Thorne. A Thorne became someone else.
A new owner came up the road to Blackthorn House carrying a different name and the same face.
Maybe there were funerals. Maybe there were letters from overseas announcing a death, followed years later by a nephew arriving to inherit. Maybe he simply went away long enough for memory to soften around the edges.
I don’t know. That’s the point. I know only what I asked.
But whatever the mechanics were, the result is sitting in three photographs. Julian has spent more than two centuries making a home he has to keep pretending he just walked into. And the whole time, he kept paying for the roof.
That’s the part I have to put my pencil down for.
Eighteen ninety-two, a reading room. Nineteen thirty-eight, a customs house bought for the town so it wouldn’t come down for something newer and uglier.
A road graded every spring whether there’s a soul in Blackthorn House or not.
My grandmother’s town has been held up all that time by a man who keeps removing his own name from it.
I sit in a cold room with a pencil behind my ear and grieve for him, quietly, over a shoebox. And then, because grief is apparently not the only thing I’m capable of today, I get irritated. Not at Julian. Mostly. I understand why he does it. That’s the problem.
Monday night, that man sat across from me and told me the truth for hours.
He answered every question I asked. He showed me his fangs.
He told me what he drinks and where it comes from and why he doesn’t feed from people.
He told me about Marguerite and the pans and the rooms he stopped entering.
Then he took me upstairs and, in the interests of historical accuracy, thoroughly demonstrated several other things I hadn’t thought to ask.
And I came away thinking I knew him.
I didn’t. I had exactly what I ordered. Because that’s what Julian does.
He never lies. He never even quite hides.
He simply waits for the question and gives me the answer, exactly as much as I asked for and not one syllable more.
He has been serving me my own questions back on a small plate, beautifully arranged, and letting me leave satisfied.
I understand why. It isn’t strategy. It isn’t manipulation. It’s a man who has been rationing himself for so long that a small, careful portion is the only way he knows how to be known without frightening the person doing the knowing.
And I love that man a little for it. That’s an alarming sentence, so I put it away for later. But understanding him doesn’t mean I’m willing to keep doing this forever. I am done eating off that plate.
I walk down Water Street at half past two with a pencil still behind my ear and three photographs on my phone.
I’m not frightened, and I’ve stopped expecting to be.
I want to see Julian so badly that it is a physical ache.
I get as far as the bait shed and have to stand there being interested in a boat until my face cools down, which is not a dignified thing to do in front of Ray.
By the time I reach the Salt & Sage, I have a prep list for eighty people in my head, my keys in one hand, and absolutely no intention of waiting until tomorrow.
I take my phone out.
Are you at home tonight?
His answer comes back before I have the loading door all the way up, which means he was holding the telephone, which means something.
I am always at home. Yes.
I stand in my doorway looking at six words and think about a man who has spent centuries answering exactly what he is asked.
Tonight he’s going to sit across a table from me.
And for once, I’m not going to let him decide the portion.