Chapter 5 #2
"I was."
"Were you there that night?"
My whiskey glass is in my hand. My whiskey glass doesn't move. My face doesn't move. I breathe with my face, in and out, and I look Derek in the eye with the calm of a woman defusing a bomb with all the time in the world.
"Which night," I say.
Derek opens his mouth. Derek closes his mouth.
Derek, I realize, with a certain delight, doesn't remember what year he's talking about.
Derek has told this story so many times that the story has become its own chronology and no longer attaches to a specific night.
Derek wants it to have been a class's worth of cadets in a specific event, and he wants it all to be one great incident, when, in fact, it was three separate drills across four months, one of which was mine.
"Which night, Derek."
"The — the sprinkler — "
"Which one."
"The — the main one."
"I wasn't there for the main one. I was in a class a year behind. You think I got sprinkler-drilled with Ty and Cal? I wasn't even in the same dormitory."
"Right. Right, right."
"I do know about it, though."
"Well, yeah, anyone who's been to this bar knows about it."
"Mm."
"You're not slick, Derek."
Derek laughs. It's good. It's a clean save.
I used to be better at this, and it turns out I'm still better at this.
I'm a woman who can walk through a loaded room of firefighters with the composure of a trained paramedic at a pileup, because I'm a trained paramedic at a pileup, and also because I didn't bury ten years of personal history just to surface it at the Watershed at the urging of Derek Kowalski in front of a jukebox currently playing Bruno Mars.
"To the only cadet in Oregon history," Derek announces, lifting his glass, "to successfully hide from a drill instructor inside a supply closet."
Ty chokes on his beer.
It's a subtle choke. An almost silent choke. The kind of choke that only I'd catch, because only I'd be tracking the specific muscles at the specific angle.
Rivera, at the jukebox, looks over his shoulder.
Rivera's eyebrow goes up exactly a quarter of an inch.
Rivera's eyebrow goes back down. Rivera was probably at the academy too and has probably been watching this whole thing with the slow-burn interest of a man who makes bets with Big Jim about other people's love lives.
Across the booth, Riley, whom I've met now for about twenty minutes, is looking at me in a way I don't like.
Riley is an arson investigator. She is someone whose entire working life is figuring out where the heat came from.
Riley's eyes go from me, to Ty, and back to me, and her eyebrows do one tiny calibration, and then she picks up her water glass and drinks it, like nothing happened.
Riley knows.
Riley has known since approximately the second I sat down. In a town this size, I should've expected it — information in Copper Ridge doesn't travel, it teleports. But Riley is an arson investigator. She doesn't even need the town. She reads burn patterns.
"I'm going to the bathroom," I say.
"I'm going too," Ty says, at the exact same second.
The whole booth pauses.
"Wait," Cal says. "Together?"
"No," Ty says.
"No," I say.
"Different bathrooms."
"Obviously."
"They're right next to each other," Cal says.
"That's how bathrooms work in bars, Calvin."
"I'm just saying."
"You aren't just saying anything, Cal."
"I'm — okay, I'm — "
"Stop talking."
"I'm stopping."
I get up. Ty gets up. We walk to the little back hallway where the bathrooms are, and at the hallway, without a word, Ty peels off toward the men's, and I peel off toward the women's, and we don't speak, we don't touch, and in the five seconds we're in the hallway together before the swinging doors close, neither of us looks at the other.
I lock myself in the bathroom stall. I put my forehead against the cool metal door. I count to thirty.
When I come back out, Riley is at the sink.
"Hi," Riley says.
"Hi."
"That was fun."
"Was it."
"Mmhmm."
"Riley."
"Yeah."
"Whatever you think you saw — "
"Oh, honey." Riley dries her hands on a paper towel. Her eyebrows, up close, are something else. Riley's eyebrows are — they're an instrument. "I didn't see anything. I don't need to see the fire. I can read the burn patterns."
"Riley."
"Your secret is safe."
"There isn't a secret."
"Mmhmm."
"Riley."
"You want to grab coffee next week?" Riley tosses the paper towel and leans against the sink. "I have a lot of opinions about this station, and I've been waiting for a woman I could share them with. Gemma's wonderful, but she's in love. I need someone bitter."
"I'm not bitter."
"Please. You're so bitter."
"Fine. Yes. I'll get coffee."
"Excellent."
She pats me on the shoulder, the same way mom pats cheeks, with the easy confidence of a woman who's already made up her mind. She leaves.
I stand in the bathroom for another ten seconds.
I come back to the booth. I smile at Derek and order another whiskey. Derek tries to make me laugh, twice, in the next twenty minutes, by means of a napkin puppet. I don't laugh. Derek loses ten dollars to Rivera, right there at the table. Rivera doesn't look up from his phone.
"Your control," Rivera says, as I leave at eleven, "is art."
"Thank you, Rivera."
"I don't say that to many people."
"I know."
"I respect it."
"Thank you."
He nods and goes back to his phone. He's, I'm sure, updating the ledger he keeps for Big Jim.
I walk out of the Watershed into the cold parking lot.
Ty is in his truck, two spaces down, engine off, not looking at me.
He's waiting for me to leave first so Cal doesn't make a comment.
I walk to my car, get in, start the engine, back out, and drive home to my mother's house.
I don't let myself think about a single thing until I'm under the covers in my old bedroom with the cat on my feet, at which point I allow myself to think about exactly one thing, which is the way Ty's mouth went flat around his beer when Derek said supply closet, and I think about that for longer than I should, and I fall asleep, eventually, with my face pressed into the pillow I had as a teenager, and I dream about water.