17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
No Count
For three days I carried the bill around the apartment, waiting to find out what was on it.
The courtyard service door had been in the building as long as I had. I hadn’t been able to see it until Wednesday, when Jess said it out loud in the hall on six.
Mateo held it open at two forty-five.
Not the tan vest. A denim jacket, a shirt with a collar. He had come in unbilled on a Saturday to stand in a doorway, and held it one-handed, face turned toward the building so it could not file the angle of his head.
“Ninety minutes,” he said. “Then it asks. Lauren knows. She’ll seat you at the back. Her phone stays in a drawer when you’re in the shop.”
“The camera.”
“Broken since June.”
“She has not fixed it.”
“She broke it.”
He didn’t mention his daughter. He would leave the answer in my foyer on Sunday morning, and Mateo never said a thing twice.
The schedule read Salon Visit, four o’clock. I had let Penelope’s office book it on Thursday. A woman with a four o’clock intends to be back by four o’clock, and the building had already decided about her.
I stepped through.
The door shut behind me and nothing read me. No chime. Nothing at my wrist. Every door in that building had opened because it knew my body. This one let me out without learning a thing.
The avenue was the avenue. I had never been on it. One of the things the apartment took in the act of becoming the apartment, in increments the band called a radius and I called my life.
Marlowe and Co. sat three blocks past the last one the building let me cross, under a green awning. A green that came off a roll, in a lot of three hundred, faded on the street side.
The green over this door was the green of an awning, and he wasn’t here. My body took the absence of him the way it takes a missed stair.
Lauren didn’t greet me. Lauren tilted her head at the back.
The booth was wood, green vinyl, a bottle of olive oil on the Formica. Jess was in it with Noah asleep in the carrier and her hand spread on his back.
I sat.
“I’ve been on five three years,” she said. “That part is real. Lauren, the stairwell, the loaf in the tea towel. All of it real. Keep that after I say the next part.
“Then you came, and they came to me. The loaf wasn’t mine. It was on a sheet. They gave me a woman.”
The bottle of oil had a fly in it, a long time in there.
“I’m the woman.”
“You’re the woman. And I report. Every Friday. Four lines. Six if there’s something.”
“To Penelope.”
“That’s what I thought the whole time.” She went on through the place where she stopped. “Two weeks ago, near enough, I found out who reads them. He does. Himself. Not the office. Friday afternoons he sits down with four lines about you in my handwriting, and that is where they have always gone.”
Friday. I had a Friday. He had the same one.
“The pills,” I said. “And the hand. You knew about both before I sat down in that chair.”
“They tell me first. That’s the arrangement. They tell me what’s coming so I can write down what it did.” Her hand didn’t leave Noah’s back. “I’m not the one watching you, Amber. I’m the instrument they read you with.”
“Say the rest.”
“In your first month I wrote that you watch for him.”
I didn’t move.
“Four words,” Jess said. “It was true. I thought if I gave him the small ones I could hold the big ones back, and I held them back, Amber, every one of them, and it did not matter. He didn’t need the big ones. He needed the four words.”
I watched for him. I had not decided to.
It had been sitting on a Friday desk, in a friend’s handwriting, before I ever thought it.
Everything downstream of it lined up like a hallway. The orchid in the exact green, chosen. The finger in the elevator, in the hollow over my collarbone, one beat past the count and then gone. He had not been guessing. He had been reading.
I waited for the cold.
The cold always came when Penelope read my number off her tablet. It came at the sound of a bowl set down where I could not see it. I knew its shape. It didn’t come.
What came was lower and it was mine and it didn’t consult me. I wanted the four lines. I wanted to know what else she had written, in what order he learned it, which sentence he read on which Friday, what his face did in a room with nobody in it.
A man had been reading me since the day I arrived, in the handwriting of the only friend I had. My body didn’t produce one degree of cold. It produced the other thing, fast, and I sat with my hands around the water while it came.
That was the report I would not be making to anyone.
I put my hand over hers on the table.
“Keep writing them,” I said.
Her face came apart the way it had in the hall on Wednesday, and she pulled it back, because Noah was on her chest and she was still, in every hour of her life, holding something.
“Amber.”
“Four lines. Make them true.” I didn’t take my hand off hers. “You’ve been telling him what I am. I’d like to choose which four.”
“You’re not angry.”
“No.”
“That’s what he counted on.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s what I’d have counted on.”
“I gave you to him.”
“You did. You also carried my mother’s name to me against a warm wall when nobody else would say it.” The fly turned over in the oil. “Everyone who has helped me in that place has held the other end of it.”
“That’s not forgiveness.”
“No,” I said. “It’s worse. Ask me for forgiveness and I’d have to decide.”
I came back up the avenue with sixty minutes gone.
Ninety minutes off the grid before the system asks a question. The building never told the residents. Mateo told me, Jess told Mateo, Lauren told Jess three years ago. It had moved through the women one mouth at a time. Jess wrote four lines a week. She had never written this one.
I stood on the avenue side of the service door with thirty minutes in my hand.
Thirty minutes is a bus. Thirty minutes is two stops out on a train. The first question gets asked while you are already somewhere with a name nobody has told you. I had no coat, no phone, nothing they hadn’t issued me, and none of that was the reason.
I did the arithmetic twice. The first time was not honest.
Then my hand was on the door, and I had turned around before I finished, and the body had gone first. It always went first. It would go first every time until somebody took the count off me.
I pulled the door.
Mateo was not in the doorway. The door came open under my hand with no one behind it.
Caldren was in the courtyard.
No coat. Shirtsleeves, on a Saturday, on the service side of his own building.
He had taught me to find the dead spots. He was standing in one he had never shown me.
It was the bench. The one where my own reach had gone up my throat and found nothing at the top of it, and the band ticked and took even that.
“You have the salon at four,” he said.
“I do.”
“You’ll be on time.”
He didn’t ask where I had been.
A man who logged the angle of a doorman’s head didn’t ask where a woman had been for sixty minutes off his property. He would have it Friday. Four lines.
He put his hands at his sides and left them there, open, in the light, where I could see both of them.
On Wednesday I had killed that hand with a word, in front of a lens and a recorder and a dome and three phones in bags. Here there was no gallery. Glass held three sides of that courtyard and the lobby held the fourth. Every step I took to reach him would be on film. The last four feet would not.
I understood it while it was happening. He was running it again, hands down, where nobody could ever say he had crossed a distance. The record would show a woman walking toward a man who was standing still.
Knowing the shape of the room didn’t put me outside it.
I crossed the stone. It was warm. It had been warm for every woman before me.
“Matthew.”
I had never said it out loud. He had named me. I had never named him. The name had gone behind my face where the Friday lived, and it came up out of that place now, ahead of me, without asking.
I put my hand on the side of his neck.
He didn’t move until I had finished. He let me have the reach and the arrival and every inch of the distance, so all of it would be mine, on my record, not his.
Then his hand came up and landed where it had stopped on Wednesday, and it didn’t close.
It stayed. Warm and dry and holding me at the exact site of the inch he had not crossed.
Every rung I had climbed since that bench ended under his palm, my pulse going into his hand, and into the band, and the band didn’t tick.
He kissed me.
There was no count in it.
The man had built thirteen months of my breathing, and his mouth opened on mine and he didn’t count.
His breath went where it went. His hand came off my throat and into my hair and closed, once, hard enough to say the thing his face had never said, and I made a sound into his mouth that no session had ever gotten out of me, and I was not going to stop.
He stopped it.
He put me back with both hands at my shoulders and set the distance to what it had been, and I watched him do the work, the small reset at the eye.
It didn’t take.
He gave me the elevator smile and it didn’t fit him. He stood on his own stone with his hand still half up between us, his color wrong, nothing to put in the air. I watched Matthew Caldren run out of language.
“Four o’clock,” he said.
It was the only thing left in him with a number on it.
“I know.”
He went through the lobby door and didn’t look back. The hard small fact I was left holding was that he had gone first, and that he had gone because he had to.
I took the service stair. Seventy didn’t run the elevator, and I wouldn’t have gotten in it.
The salon was the salon. A woman I had never met put her hands in my hair for half an hour, and I gave the mirror a face.
Cortisol was steady. It had been steady in a coffee house, and on an avenue with thirty free minutes in my hand, and under a man’s palm on my throat. The machine built to know me spent the afternoon watching the wrong organ.
The band warmed at my wrist.
Adherence: 70 → 73.
Three points for the hair.
I had walked into a session room straight out of his mouth, and it read me, and it paid me. On Wednesday the number was done to me. On Saturday I spent it. There is about an inch between those two things, and I crossed it without a session, and nobody logged that either.
The body had been, for thirteen months, the only thing that had remembered me. It had remembered him too. It had not asked me first, either time.
The folio had been under my bedroom carpet since Willson put it in my hands. Nine days in hotel stock, the receipt for the room he took to wait for me in. The way in and the way out were printed on the same page, and only one of them was on purpose. It had been lying under my floor all afternoon.
Wednesday was four days out. I had set the terms in front of witnesses. I gave them away for free on a Saturday, in the one square his own camera could not hold, with my own mouth, and he never had to ask.