Chapter 20 Bastien — Day 53 #2
Leonie lifted her head from the book that had been open on her lap. She wasn't reading it. She hadn't been reading it. The book was a prop for whichever face she'd meant to have ready when he came through the door.
She'd lost weight. That was the first thing. Her wrists in the sleeves of the pale wool cardigan looked like a girl's. The second thing was the way her mouth wouldn't quite settle — she kept it in a half-smile that broke and re-formed with every second.
“Mon fils.”
He crossed the room and knelt by the window seat and took her hand. Her skin was cool and dry and papery. He could feel every bone of her fingers.
“You came,” she said.
“You called.”
“I called days ago.”
“I came as soon as I could.”
Her eyes were the same as his, only tireder. She reached up with her other hand and touched his hair like it was a fact she needed to confirm.
“You've caught the sun,” she said, and gave a small watery laugh.
“A little.”
“You're eating.”
“Yes.”
“You look like your father.” A breath. “You look like Julien too. From certain angles. I try not to look at those angles.”
He couldn't answer that. He held her hand a beat tighter and let her look.
“I'm not going to ask you,” she said. Her voice steadied on that. “I'm not going to ask you to take it. Ilya asks enough for both of us.”
“He asked in the drive.”
“Yes. He would.” A small breath. “He isn't cruel, Bastien. He's frightened. He's carrying a house that isn't his and he doesn't know if any of us will forgive him for holding it up.”
“He isn't asking for forgiveness.”
“He's asking to be relieved. That's the same word said differently.”
Bastien squeezed her hand once and let go. He didn't want to argue Ilya with her. He wanted to sit here and let her look at him.
“Where are you, mon fils?” she asked. “The place you are.”
“Texas.”
“I know Texas. Where in Texas.”
He hesitated.
“I won't tell him,” she said, without looking at Ilya's absence. “I'd like a picture in my head. I'd like to know which sky.”
“West Texas,” he said. “A ranch outside a small town. Cattle. Hay. Horses. A woman who runs it alone.”
Something in her face changed. It wasn't a smile. It was the shadow a smile leaves.
“A woman.”
“Yes.”
“Does she know?”
“No.”
“Bastien.”
“I know.”
“You must tell her before someone else does.”
“I will.”
“When.”
“Soon.”
She looked at him a long moment. He watched her decide not to press. She'd been a woman who pressed, once. Grief had taken that from her along with the weight in her wrists.
“Call me from there,” she said. “In two days. Or three. I'd like to hear the — what do they call it. The wind.”
“I'll call.”
“Go, before your cousin decides to come inside.” Her mouth managed the whole smile that time, barely. “Tell your girl her sky is very lucky.”
He kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled like the same cedar sachet it had smelled like when he was six. He held it a beat longer than he meant to.
At the door of the salon he looked back. She'd already closed her eyes.
Ilya was gone from the drive. The driver held the door of the car and Bastien got in and put his forehead against the cold glass and let the estate pull away behind him.
Poplars, gate, gravel, road. The rain that had smelled like coming had finally come, and it hit the windshield in a slow measured beat that he found, in spite of himself, calming.
At the airport he sat in a lounge that pretended not to know him and drank water and didn't check the news.
He'd promised himself, in Whistler, that he wouldn't check the news outside of daylight.
Daylight was hours away. He kept the promise.
It was one of the few he'd kept without trouble in nine weeks.
He tried to write Mara a text and deleted it four times. In the end he wrote: On the way home. She'd know he meant the plane he hadn't taken yet.
Toronto boarding was slow. He walked the concourse to burn the restlessness out of his legs.
At a newsstand near his gate his eye caught, without any warning at all, on his brother's face on the cover of a business magazine three weeks old.
Julien in the suit. Lorne Ascend in white capitals across his chest. He didn't buy the magazine.
He didn't touch it. He walked past and didn't look back.
On the plane he took the window. He watched the wing tip lift over Lake Ontario and thought about the sentence Ilya had said on the drive. He turned it in his head like a stone. I'll drag you back into the light one way or another.
He'd been the son who didn't fight. That was his job in the family, the one Julien had picked for him at nine and he'd worn ever since. Julien fought; Bastien watched. Julien flew; Bastien stayed. Julien died, and here he was, still doing his job.
He closed his eyes. He could see Mara's braid against the pale wall of the kitchen.
He could see her thumb on her opposite palm.
He could see the small hitch in her face when she'd said You coming back and the small give in it when she'd said Okay.
He could see the ledger by the phone in her handwriting, every red line she'd drawn under numbers she was still trying to make behave.
He'd watched her stand under those numbers for seven weeks and never flinch. She'd never once asked him to fix them.
That was the part that undid him. She didn't ask.
He'd bought her another week. Maybe two. That was what he'd come out of the drive with. Ilya would move on some other timeline — a memo, a meeting, a leaked photograph in six months, a lawyer in eight. He had his no on the record now. He had the hard sentence between them. He had time.
He let himself have that thought.
He didn't know yet that Ilya had already been in a stone-walled study on the second floor at four in the morning with a phone in his hand.
He didn't know yet that a voice at the other end of the line, in an office off Adelaide Street in Toronto, had taken careful notes: West Texas.
Marfa. A ranch called Vale. A woman, early thirties, brown hair, runs the place alone.
Get someone out there with a long lens by the weekend.
He didn't know because he hadn't asked. He'd taken the win of the no and hurried out through the door, and that was the shape of his mistake.
The plane crossed cloud and country. He slept a little. He woke to the announcement, the wheels, the smell of dry desert air pushing back into the cabin as the door hinged open.
El Paso.
He walked through arrivals in his sun-faded jacket like a man who'd been away a long time and had permission to come home. He picked the truck up from the long lot. He pulled onto the highway and pointed the hood east into a sky already going pink at the edges.
He'd bought her another week. Maybe two. He let himself have the thought. He held it all the way past the last blinking signal of the city and out into the open where the road turned into a straight ribbon under the biggest sky in America.
He was wrong.