Chapter 23
The stool at the end of my prep counter is empty on the seventh of January.
It’s empty on the eighth as well, and on the ninth he comes down but not until nine at night, when the front of the shop is dark. He parks on Mill Lane and comes in through the loading door. I don’t say anything about that either, and I hate every second of not saying anything about it.
The Veil has been in town for a week. In case you were imagining vans and production crews and crowds, it’s not like that at all.
Instead it looks like three people having lunch at The Rusty Kettle.
It looks like Ben Carter filming the harbor from the town dock at seven in the morning with his hood up.
It looks like Rowan Pierce at the far end of the bar at the Widow’s Lantern on Tuesday and Friday, buying his own drinks and losing at cribbage to Doris Alden, who is merciless, and who hasn’t noticed that he isn’t trying very hard.
It is the least sinister thing I have ever seen, and it’s destroying me.
On the sixth, Rowan wrote to Julian a third time.
On the eighth, Ben Carter drove up Point Road to film the gate from the outside, which he is entirely allowed to do, and which he did carefully and from the road, and which took eight minutes.
Then Arthur Finch came round the corner of the wall with an axe in his hand and Ben apologized so hard he nearly fell over.
On the ninth, somebody from the production emailed the county about the deed transfers.
And on the tenth, in my grandmother’s kitchen at half past ten at night, Julian says, “I’ve given the firm the thirty-first.”
“Of January?”
“Yes.”
I put down the mug I’m drying. “That’s three weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve given them a date.”
“I have given them a date to work towards. It’s not the same as—”
“Julian.”
He stops. He’s standing in my kitchen doorway with his sleeves down and his coat still on, which he hasn’t worn indoors since the storm, and it’s the coat that does it.
Not the date. The man has been staying overnight in this house on and off for weeks and tonight he is standing in it wearing his coat.
“Take that off,” I say.
“Penny.”
“Take the coat off or go home. I’m not doing this with you halfway out the door.”
He takes the coat off. He hangs it on the hook that used to be my mother’s, and then he stands in my kitchen with his hands at his sides looking like a man in front of a judge.
I lean back against my counter and start talking, because I have been planning this for eight days and I don’t trust myself to keep it quiet much longer.
“I want to say something and I want to get all the way through it,” I say. “You can respond afterwards. Because I’m going to lose it if you help.”
“All right.”
“On the tenth of December you stood in that little room with a journal in your hands and you told me that Black Harbor is the only place on this earth where you are not a guest.” My voice is steadier than I expected. “Do you remember what I said back?”
“You said I was allowed to be in it.”
“And you said that hadn’t always been available to you. And I said I knew. And you said yes, and it wasn’t a little yes, it was a big yes, and I have thought about it a lot.”
“I remember.”
“And this is what you’re telling me now.
” I cross my arms because I have to do something with them.
“Your plan is Lisbon. Your plan is a house with the shutters closed and a caretaker who genuinely doesn’t know anything and a very dull lawyer in Boston, and six episodes about a locked gate.
Then twenty years later somebody arrives up that hill with your face and a different name and starts again from nothing. ”
“That is broadly correct.”
“So your answer to being in danger is to become a guest again.”
His expression doesn’t change.
“You told me you left,” I say. “You told me about Nova Scotia and Lisbon and eleven years in Bristol. Decades of leaving. And you told me you outran the grief, but you outran being a person, and you came home, and you have been home for—how long, this time?”
“Two years as Volkov.”
“And overall?”
Julian is quiet for a second.
“A hundred and thirty-four years, near enough,” he says.
“A hundred and thirty-four years. And you’re going to give it to a podcast.”
“I am going to give it to a podcast,” he says, and his voice hardens a little, “because the alternative is to give it to three hundred people outside that gate at two in the morning with telephones, which is the thing Victoria drove three hours in December to describe to you, and which you have not mentioned once since.”
“I’ve thought about it every day.”
“Then you know it is not an imaginary risk.”
“I know it’s not.”
“Then what precisely am I to do?” He doesn’t shout.
It’s worse than shouting. It’s the flat voice, the enough voice, happening for the first time.
“Give me the other plan. I would take it. I’ve spent four hundred years looking for another plan and I’ve never once found one. If you have one I will hear it gladly.”
“I don’t have a plan. I’ve got about half of one and it isn’t any good yet.”
“Then—”
“But I’d like you to notice,” I say, “that I’m not the reason you’re going.”
That stops him.
“What?”
“You keep doing this thing where you look at me while you say it. Like I’m the cost. Like the terrible part of going to Lisbon is me.
” I move away from the counter. “So I want to take myself out of it, because I think I’m making it impossible for you to see the actual question.
And the only way to do that is to say this out loud. ”
“Penny.”
“I’ll come with you.”
He goes absolutely still.
“I mean it. Say the word and I’ll come. I’d have to sell the building, which would take a year, and I’d cry about it for another one, and Lucy would never entirely forgive either of us.
” My throat is threatening to close, but I keep going.
“I’d do it anyway. If the answer is Lisbon, then the answer is Lisbon.
I’d rather be with you in a rented flat in a city where I can’t speak the language than here without you, and that is the least complicated feeling I have ever had in my entire life. ”
He doesn’t say anything at all.
“So it’s not about me,” I say. “That’s my point. I’ve just taken me off the table, and the question’s still standing there.”
“Penny—”
“You’ve had four hundred years, Julian. You’ve had Nova Scotia and Bristol and a century of being safe and being a guest everywhere else you went.
Then you came back here and you sat at the head of a table and let a woman put food in front of you that you couldn’t eat because it meant somebody had made a place for you.
You wrote down the name of a child who died in 1809 so it would be somewhere.
” I make myself stop and breathe. “This is the only life you have ever actually chosen. Not a life you’ve survived, but a life you’ve chosen.
Don’t let one man with a podcast walk into the only place on earth that’s ever been yours and turn you back into a guest in it. ”
His face changes, just a little.
“I’m not asking you to stay for me,” I say.
“I want you to understand that. I think if I really insisted you’d do it.
I think you’d stay for me and call it love and hate every minute of it, and I don’t want that.
I want to know whether you think this life is worth defending.
I don’t need the answer tonight. But I’d like you to find the answer before the thirty-first, because after that there’ll be shutters and a very dull lawyer in Boston telling everyone you aren’t available. ”
The kettle ticks. It boils and thinks about it and boils again.
“I love you,” he says.
“I know.”
“But I have never defended anything, and I have no idea how it is done. I want you to understand that I am not being modest. I have four hundred years of leaving, and I am extremely good at it. I don’t have anything else.”
“Then that’s the answer for tonight,” I say. “It’s an honest one, and I’ll take it.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
“You would come to Lisbon.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I am not doing anything. I am attempting to hold on to it.”
I go over and put my arms around as much of him as I can reach, which is not all of him, and he holds on to me in my grandmother’s kitchen for quite a long time, and neither of us settles anything whatsoever.
He stays, but something has gone out of the evening and neither of us is going to say what.
After I eat and he watches me, we do the dishes. There are four of them.
“You wash,” I say.
“I always wash.”
“Because I dried once, in October, and I have never recovered.”
“You have mentioned it.”
“I’ll mention it at the funeral.”
His hands freeze in the water for about half a second. Then they carry on. I have said something enormous by accident, the way I do. I let it go past, because taking it back would be worse.
Afterwards, I take his hand and lead him up the stairs and he doesn’t hesitate. He undresses with his usual neatness, and I sit in the bed and watch him do it.
This is what I would be giving up, I think. No. This is what I’d be taking with me. Then I stop, because both of those are unbearable in different directions.
He gets under the covers, but he doesn’t put his arm around me the way he usually does.
I turn over and find him flat on his back looking at the ceiling like a man at his own wake.
He does this. I’ve seen it twice, and both times he answered things in the dark that he would not have answered with the lights on.
But tonight I don’t want to ask questions.
“Julian.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
He comes here. His mouth is cool on my lips and at my collarbone. His hands are certain and unhurried and so, so thorough. He takes his time in a way that is not restraint. At some point I realize he is memorizing me.
Don’t, I think. Don’t do that. That’s what you do before you go.
“Look at me,” I say instead, and he does. He is extremely good at doing what I ask as long as I know what to ask.
“Say my name.”
“Penny.”
“Again.”
“Penny.”
I put my hands on his chest and push him over, and he goes without hesitating.
And then I kiss him. I kiss his lips and his jaw and when I press an open-mouthed kiss to his neck, his fingers close hard on my hips.
The red flares in his eyes, and suddenly I’m on my back again with his body covering mine.
He catches one of my hands and guides it behind my head, to the metal rail of the headboard.
“Hold on,” he says, and I wrap both hands around the rail.
His mouth on my throat makes me gasp. He keeps kissing and licking and nibbling until I’m shaking beneath him. Only then does he slide inside of me, cool and hard and perfect. He pushes in until I’m completely full, then stops. His head is bent over my neck, but he’s not touching it.
“Move,” I gasp.
He moves. Slowly at first, then harder and deeper, his hand gripping my hip and holding me still while I hold onto the rail with everything I have.
He watches my face the whole time, and when I start to come, he closes his mouth on my throat.
Not hard, just enough to pin me in place while my orgasm washes over me.
He follows right behind me, groaning into my skin, and the weight of his body is the only thing keeping me from flying apart.
Afterwards, he puts his arm around me and kisses the side of my head. I listen to his heart not beating, and think about him making himself into a guest again. But I don’t say anything, and eventually I fall asleep.
Sometime during the night I wake up because the bed is wrong. I find him sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me, not doing anything, and it looks as if he’s been like that for a while. Down the lane a truck goes past too fast, the way they always do in the middle of the night.
I don’t say his name.
I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades instead. He goes rigid for a second, which tells me he genuinely didn’t know I was awake, which tells me how far away he went. Then he covers my hand with his own and holds it there.
Neither of us says anything for a long time. His back is cool under my palm. It doesn’t warm except in the exact shape of my hand—which is, apparently, the thing about him I will be thinking about on my deathbed. He turns his head, but not far enough to see me.
“I have sat on the edge of a great many beds, in a great many houses. I have always been on my way out of them,” he says finally, very quietly, and I have to swallow before I can ask.
“And tonight?”
He is quiet for so long that I hear the truck come back the other way.
“Tonight I cannot work out what I am supposed to do with what you said in the kitchen,” he says. “I have been sitting here attempting it for two hours.”
“Attempting what?”
“To find the version of it,” he says, “in which you do not pay the price for me.”
My chest aches and I wonder if he can hear that, but I stroke his back instead. “You don’t have to work it out tonight.”
“I know.”
“Julian. Lie down.”
“In a moment.”
“Now,” I say, “or I’ll put my cold feet on you.”
“You know I don’t feel the cold.”
“You can still feel the disrespect.”
He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, the first one all night. Then he lies down and lets me put his arm around me, and he stays. He is still there when I go under. He is still there in the morning, which is not nothing. It is, in fact, the largest possible something.