Chapter 21 Bastien — Day 55 #2
She was crying. She was trying not to let him hear it and he heard it anyway.
She'd been crying quietly for two months, and once, at the reception after Julien's memorial, he'd found her in the pantry with her hand flat on a shelf of preserves, shoulders down, making no sound at all.
She was making sound now. It was very small.
“Then come home,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about the caliche road at dusk.
The pale dust rising off the tires. Roman at the fence.
Opal at the sink with her wooden spoon. The rosemary bread on the board.
The porch step and the last of the sky. Mara's palm on his cheek this afternoon and the small cool line of the scar on her hand and the way she hadn't asked, the way she'd said tell me at dinner and given him back the day to be a person in.
He thought about the desk in the guest room, and the envelope in the drawer.
“I am home,” he said.
She was quiet a long time.
He listened to her breathing, three thousand miles north.
He could see her at the little inlaid table in the front parlour with the lamp on, in the blue robe she'd had for twenty years.
He could see the way her hand would be closed around the phone.
He could see, without looking, the framed photograph of Julien on the piano behind her, and the empty place on the wall where his own graduation portrait had been taken down when he was twenty-two and put back up when he was twenty-four and taken down again, he suspected, sometime in the last three days.
“Then tell her,” she said.
He didn't speak.
“Bastien.”
“I hear you.”
“Then tell her. If you're home, tell her. Don't do to a good woman what your grandfather did to me.”
“Mother —”
“Tell her,” she said. Her voice steadied into the one she'd used with the funeral director in August, with the lawyer the week after, and with him the morning he left. “Tell her before someone else does. Tell her before the papers do it. Tell her before Ilya does it. Tell her tomorrow.”
“I tried tonight.”
“I know you did.”
“How do you know.”
“Because you're my son, and you tried, and you're on this phone at midnight, and if you'd told her you wouldn't be sitting in a strange room in the dark. Tell her tomorrow.”
He set his elbow on his knee and dropped his forehead into his palm and didn't answer.
“Son.”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her.”
He almost laughed. It was the first thing that had almost made him laugh in three days.
“Yes, mother.”
“Then tell her both things.”
“Both things.”
“That you love her. And that you've been in her house under a name that isn't entirely yours. In that order, if you can. Together, if you cannot.”
“I —”
“I'll let you sleep.”
“Mother.”
“Yes.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Not to me,” she said. “Sleep.”
The line went dead.
He held the phone in his hand a long time after that. When he finally set it on the bedside table it made a small clean sound against the wood, and the room stayed dark, and he sat with his elbows on his knees looking at nothing until the light at the window began to grey.
He drove into Alpine at eight in the morning.
He hadn't slept. He'd showered, put on a clean shirt, and left a note on the kitchen counter for Opal saying he'd be back by noon.
Before he left, he took Cassia's copy of Blood Meridian from the guest-room shelf—the old hardback with the spine broken twice, the one she'd loaned him in September when he'd first walked into her shop alone and she'd said he looked like a McCarthy man.
He'd meant to give it back weeks ago.
Cassia's shop was open when he got there. She was behind the counter with a mug of coffee and an invoice book, and she looked up when the bell went and smiled the way she smiled at everyone, warm and unhurried.
“Beau.”
“Cassia.”
He set the book on the counter.
She looked at it. She looked at him.
“You finished it.”
“Twice.”
“Good?”
“Good enough that I wanted my own copy so I could stop borrowing yours.”
She smiled, and then the smile eased down into something more careful. “You look like you didn't sleep.”
“I didn't.”
“You want a coffee.”
“No, thank you. I want to go back.”
She nodded. She picked up the book and set it on the low table behind the counter, where the loaned books lived, and she wiped a bit of caliche dust off the cover with the flat of her hand.
“Beau.”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right.”
Twice in twelve hours. Two women, twelve hours apart, one over a phone line and one across a bookshop counter, asking him the only question that mattered.
He almost said yes. He'd said yes to it a hundred times in his life, easily, without thinking, the way one said fine to a stranger in an elevator. He heard himself take a breath to say it now.
He didn't.
“I will be,” he said.
Cassia looked at him a long moment. She was good at long moments. She'd been Mara's friend for a decade.
“All right,” she said.
“Thank you for the book.”
“Any time.”
He drove back to the ranch the long way, out on the Marathon road and then in past the old windmill, because he needed the extra thirty minutes and couldn't go straight home yet.
The sun was well up. Late-fall light had begun gilding the country at the edges.
He drove with the window down and thought about his mother's voice, the envelope in the desk drawer, and Mara's hand on his cheek in the caliche dust.
He turned in off the county blacktop at ten to twelve.
Mara was in the yard, throwing a lead line into the bed of the smaller pickup, and she straightened when she heard the tires and shielded her eyes with her hand.
She smiled when she saw it was him.
He got out of the truck.
He walked across the yard.
He didn't tell her.