45. “You didn’t hear it from me.”
“YOU DIDN’T HEAR IT FROM ME.”
A MONTH AFTER THAT
HALE
Yasmine had been gone a hundred and nine days.
I knew because her first email had come the morning after she left, and I’d counted every one since.
Ricochet on a Monday was half-empty and low-lit, the way I liked it lately. Grant sat on the stool beside me, working on the same beer he’d had for an hour, watching the TV over the bar.
My friends had been taking turns with me since Yasmine left. Nobody admitted to it, but I was pretty sure there was a schedule.
Monday was Grant’s night.
I didn’t know why. Maybe he’d volunteered. He’d started finding reasons to stay late at the shop, then reasons to end up here. I hadn’t asked any of them to do it, but nobody seemed to think that mattered.
We’d been sitting a while when Grant said, without looking over, “You planning to go home tonight?”
“Eventually.”
“Before or after the bartender starts stacking chairs?”
I grunted and turned my glass a quarter turn against the wood.
“You’ve been leaving the shop later,” he said.
“Busy.”
“And ending up here.”
“Thirsty.”
“Right.”
He went back to the TV, leaving the lie where I’d put it.
I’d lived in that house my whole life. Knew every creak in the floorboards, every rattle in the pipes when the temperature dropped, the way the wind hit the east side harder than the west. Knew the settling noises it made at night.
None of it had ever bothered me.
Now every sound seemed to point out the one that was missing.
The first week hadn’t been bad. I kept busy, got to the shop early, stayed late, came home tired enough to fall straight into bed. I ate standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone felt pathetic.
Dolores was furious with me, which helped. Gave me something to manage. I fed her, cleaned the coop, stood in the yard and listened to her complaints.
She’d gotten used to Yasmine talking to her like she was a person. Now she was stuck with me, and I mostly told her to hush.
“She’ll be back soon,” I told her once.
Dolores looked at me like I was slow.
Fair enough.
The second week, I started finding things.
A hair tie on the edge of the bathroom sink. One of those stretchy ones Yasmine wore when she edited, scraping her hair up off her face. Her gray sweater over the back of the study chair, still soft, still holding a little of her if I got close enough.
Which I did once.
I felt like a fool about it for the rest of the night, but I didn’t move any of it. Told myself moving it took more effort than leaving it.
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth week, everybody had decided I shouldn’t be left alone too long.
Nico kept finding furniture deliveries that needed another set of hands. When he ran out of those, one of his cousins was always having a birthday, graduation, engagement, baby shower, or cookout I apparently couldn’t miss.
Tabby dropped by with books and gossip and no convincing reason to stay an hour. Ava sent leftovers home with me in containers big enough to feed a family.
Annie took a different approach. She showed up at the farmhouse one Saturday morning and announced the Chevelle looked neglected.
It did not.
She spent four hours washing it by hand, cleaning wheels that were already clean, and informing me that my technique was shoddy and unworthy of such a high-performing instrument.
When she finished, she announced that cars weren’t meant to sit pretty and disappeared in the Chevelle for forty minutes.
She never once asked how I was doing.
I appreciated that.
Even Carter had started handling me differently.
Normally, he hunted me down for invoices like late paperwork was a personal betrayal.
Then one bad morning, after no sleep, Harry the day before, and too many hours in that empty house, I walked into the office and found the stack beside my printer gone, everything entered and filed.
Three forms clipped together with tabs where I needed to sign, and a to-go coffee cup from Divine Grounds beside them.
I looked at him. “Something you want to tell me?”
“Nope.”
“You buy me coffee?”
“Nope.”
The next week, he cleared another stack without saying a word. I told him if he kept being nice to me, I was going to put a rattle in his car he’d never find.
He said, “All right,” and brought me a breakfast sandwich the next day.
They all had their methods, but I liked Grant’s the most.
He just sat beside me and drank, minding his business and showing up wherever his wife told him to. Nico would’ve tried to go all Yoda on me if I’d given him the opening.
Yasmine’s emails came twice a day.
I learned the rhythm. Morning my time, which was her evening. Then again at night, which was her morning. Satellite windows, she’d explained. Limited bandwidth. Everybody down there lined up to send and receive messages like rations were being handed out.
She wrote long. Longer than she talked most days.
She wrote about the ice. The light that didn’t behave like any light she’d shot before. The way her lenses fogged solid the second she came in from the cold. The people.
The penguins.
She wrote about the penguins a lot.
I’d always been good at talking. Good enough to charm a room, argue a man down, talk my way sideways out of anything I didn’t want to say straight.
Writing to her was different.
The screen didn’t let me fix anything after. Once the words were down and sent, they stayed there. No walking them back. No softening them with a look.
So I sat with drafts longer than I’d ever sat with anything I said aloud. Then sent them anyway.
The alternative was not saying it, and I was done with that.
Mostly done.
I didn’t tell her I’d quit eating at the table. Didn’t tell her I’d stopped shaving because there wasn’t anybody left to be presentable for. Didn’t tell her the house had gotten so quiet I’d taken to leaving the radio on for a chicken.
She had a job to do at the bottom of the world. She didn’t need to be hauling me around while she did it.
So I told her about the shop. Carter’s new girl, who was either a saint or hadn’t been paying attention. The weather, which was always the same thing, but she’d asked, so I gave it to her.
Dolores made every email.
So did Harry.
Then one night, I told her I missed her.
Just once.
It was late, after a Tuesday that had gone bad. Harry had been agitated, somewhere far off and angry about it. Called me by my grandfather’s name, then got mad when I didn’t answer, like I was the one who’d gotten it wrong.
I came home and sat in the dark kitchen a long time before I opened the laptop.
The house is just as quiet as I thought it would be, I wrote. I miss you.
She didn’t answer for twelve hours.
Satellite windows.
When she did, it was short.
I know. I’m sorry.
I sat with that for a while, trying to work out what she was apologizing for.
Being gone.
Being the reason quiet had turned into absence.
I didn’t ask. Some things you don’t go picking at.
I called her once.
I should’ve known better.
I’d meant to keep it simple. Check in. Hear her voice. Let her hear mine. Hang up before either of us said anything we’d have to carry afterward.
Instead, I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear and listened to her try not to cry.
She told me she was fine. I asked how she really was.
“It’s dark here,” she said. “All the time now. I forgot what the sun looks like. I miss you.”
I didn’t have anything for that.
I couldn’t fix the sun. Couldn’t fix the cold or the dark or the distance.
She was freezing on the other side of the world, alone in the dark, and all I could do was sit in a warm house and listen to her breathe.
She needed me, and I was here.
I’d built a whole life around being where I was needed. The one time it counted, being here didn’t mean a damn thing.
“I know,” I said.
“That’s it? You know?”
I had more than that. All of it sitting right at the front of my mouth.
“I know,” I said again, quieter.
“Say something else.”
“Three more weeks, darlin’,” I said, because it was the only thing I had that was both true and good. “Christchurch. Your R&R. Three more weeks.”
A pause. “You remembered?”
“I remember everything you tell me, Yasmine.”
The line crackled over nine thousand miles of quiet, and the sound of her breath.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. If I stayed on the line another minute, I was going to say something I couldn’t take back over a bad connection to a woman who couldn’t do anything with it but ache.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I ended the call and sat staring at the wall for a long time.
Then I opened the laptop and went back through her emails until I found the one about the penguins.
They huddle for warmth, she’d written. Thousands of them pressed together, rotating. The ones on the outside work their way in, and the ones who’ve been warm take a turn at the edge. Nobody freezes, because nobody has to stand out there alone the whole time.
Sounds miserable, I’d written back.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, she’d written.
I read it three times.
Beside me at the bar, Grant shifted and set down his empty bottle.
“You should go see her.”
“Who?”
He gave me a look so pitying I regretted the question.
“It’s the middle of the season,” I said. “She’s working.”
“She’s got the R&R.” He stood. “Christchurch, right?”
I looked at him.
“Ava mentioned it.” He shrugged. “Said it was coming up.”
“And?”
“And you look like hell.”
He started toward the door.
“Same time next Monday?” I said.
Grant stopped. “What?”
“On the schedule? Nico’s Sunday. Carter’s Thursday. You’re Monday.”
He turned around slowly. “There’s no schedule.”
“Rotation a better word?”
His mouth twitched.
I thought so. “Ava’s doing, I assume?”
“You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Does knowing about it get me out of it?”
“No.”
I thought about the penguins, rotating through the dark. “Lucky me,” I said.
“Yes, you are.” He opened the door. “Go see your girl.”
Then he left me with the tab, the quiet, and his empty stool.
I sat with what he’d said longer than I wanted to.
I couldn’t go.
I had the shop. I had Harry. I had a whole life bolted down around me, every piece of it a reason to stay put.
All of them true.
I counted them off like they still added up.
They didn’t hold the way they used to.