CHAPTER TWO #2
He never told me to pack. He gave me a number and stood at the window and let me spend it.
He was at the glass and he was not watching the street. I knew it with my back turned, the way a person knows which way the draft is coming from, and my hands started doing the jacket up wrong and had to start over.
I took the jacket off the hook by the door. Canvas, torn lining, the one I work in. Not my grandmother’s picture, not the box in the closet. The nearest heavy thing, because my hands were making these decisions now.
The receipt and tag went from my trouser pocket into the jacket. My wallet was already there: sixty-one dollars, my license, a spare house key. The rest of my life stayed in the apartment.
While I did it, headlights came on across Clement Street.
Not moving. Not pulling out. Two orange smears sitting in the fog at the curb, where a gray sedan had been parked since Sunday.
Marcus saw them. I know he saw them, because he stopped once and then he didn’t.
Neither of us mentioned it on those stairs, and that is how I found out what kind of night it was.
?
The passenger seat was warm.
Not warm from the sun. Warm the way a chair is when you take it straight off another person. There was nobody in the car. There had been nobody in the car the whole time he was upstairs.
He opened the door before I got to it and put me in with a hand between my shoulders.
“Whose car is this?”
“Mine.”
I spread my fingers on the seat between us, on the warm part, and left them there.
“Somebody was sitting here.”
“Yes.”
“Where did they go?”
“Luca. He checked the street while I came up. He’s gone ahead to open the gate.” He checked the mirror. “You’ll meet him.”
He shifted into second and leaned on the throttle, and the engine growled down under the floor, and the fog came apart in front of us and closed again behind.
“Give me the phone.”
I had lifted it off the counter inside my ninety seconds. He had known that when he said the word ninety.
“Battery out, or it’s a map with your name on it.”
“No,” I said. “Give me one reason that isn’t you saying so.”
“Two men came up your stairs to an address that sits on a manifest with your signature at the bottom of it,” he said. “I’d like the next ones to have to work for it.”
“That’s six years of my—”
“I know what it is. Give it to me.”
I gave it to him. He drove with his knee, took the back off, and had the battery out in the time it takes to say so, and every one of those movements was a movement he had made a hundred times before.
The dead battery went into his coat pocket. He handed the empty handset back to me until we reached the water.
The three rings caught the sodium light coming off the harbor, orange, once a block, on the top of the wheel where his hand sat.
I watched that hand for four blocks and told myself I was watching the road.
“I want my life back,” I said.
“I know.”
“Don’t do that.” My voice came out with more in it than I wanted. “Don’t agree with me like it costs you something.”
“It costs me the next ten minutes of you talking to me,” he said. “I’d rather have those.”
“You’re funny.”
“On purpose. It’s the cheapest tool I own.”
“You’ve got no claim on me,” I said. “You know that.”
“I don’t take anything I haven’t asked for, and I haven’t asked you for a thing yet.”
Something turned over low in my stomach at the word yet, and what it wanted was for him to stop asking.
?
He parked at the end of Thames Street and we walked out on the pier, boards that didn’t look like they would bear both of us, and the air out there was salt and iron and cold enough to raise everything on my arms.
I gave him the empty handset on the pier. He held it out over the rail.
“Why the water?”
“Because they can replace a battery faster than they can find a phone at the bottom of it.”
“That’s my whole job in your hand.”
“It stopped being a phone on your kitchen counter,” he said. “Now it’s a thing that says where you are, out loud, every few seconds, to anybody who pays for the answer.”
He let go. It went in without a sound I could hear over the chop.
I stood at the rail and looked down the line of pilings going out into the fog, black and furred with weed, and I counted them under my breath.
My knuckles went down on the cold rail and my hand handed me the kitchen back instead. His fingers coming up under mine. The rings. The whole arm going stupid. It arrived without being sent for and it took what it took, and when I came back the fog had moved down the pier.
I got to thirty-two before they went into the orange and there was nothing left to see.
I did not explain it to him. I have never explained it to anybody.
When I stopped, I was standing closer to him than I had been, and the pier was fourteen feet wide.
“You’re standing closer than you were an hour ago. I’m not moving. I’m just saying I noticed.”
“Don’t.”
“Wasn’t asking. That one was free.”
I looked at the water where six years of my life had gone in, and the anger came up so clean and so hot that my eyes stung with it, and the anger was the only thing holding my knees.
?
South of the water the streetlights change. White goes to that low orange, and then the orange stops pretending, and there are whole blocks with nothing lit but the fog itself.
The Ironline came up out of it. Brick, a rail spur, a cooling tower with the top gone.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Somewhere with iron on the doors,” he said, like a man giving an address.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the honest half of one.”
I turned in the seat to look straight at him, which is a thing I do when I want a man to have to work.
“Give me the other half.”
“There’s a man called Adrian. He’s going to be angry when he sees you, and none of it’s at you.”
I had never heard the name in my life.
My chest went tight anyway, one full step ahead of understanding, the way it does when the body has already read something the eyes are still working on.
“Angry about what?”
“That you were out there where anybody could reach you.” He came off the throttle. “He’s had a bad summer.”
“What is he to you? Boss?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“Pack,” he said, and put his eyes back on the fog. “That’s the name we use when club isn’t enough.”
“You people are unbelievable,” I said. “I’ve had a bad Tuesday.”
“I know,” he said, and he did not laugh, and I hated that I had wanted him to.
“He doesn’t know me.”
“No.”
I sat with my hands in my jacket pockets, and the thing that moved in me then was not about the man beside me at all, and I did not know that yet.
“Then he doesn’t get to be angry about me.”
“Take that up with him,” Marcus said. “Not with me. And eat something first, because he’ll ask, and he asks it like a threat.”
Rosewood Street. Chain link, then a foundry wall, two stories of brick with the windows bricked shut.
The lights found the gate. Marcus braked.
The man beside the bolt was holding a photograph of me.
“Before you decide this is another ambush,” Marcus said, “let me get out first.”