Chapter 30 #2
"Please what?" And there, for one second, the level broke, and what was under it came through raw and burning.
"Please stop making you feel like a jailer?
Learn to love the view? My grandmother's house is empty, Raq.
The lights are on a timer. Nina is calling a phone that's getting nothing, and she's been calling since Sunday, and by now she's either at my door or at a precinct, and either way you did that too.
" Her voice cracked and she hated it; I watched her take the crack and bend it into a blade.
"You know what the worst part is. You'd be perfect at this.
You'd bring me anything I asked for. Books.
Brushes. The right solvents. You'd build me a studio with an ocean view and stand outside it for fifty years, and you'd call it love, and it would be the nicest cell anyone ever died in. "
She came back up the stair past me. I let her by.
I stood on the keeper's stair over the empty beach for a long time, and the tide came in over the shingle, patient, the whole ocean arriving one small cold hand at a time.
That night I stood the perimeter in the dark and something moved at the edge of my hearing.
Not close. Far out — over the water, miles off, a pressure so faint it could have been a ship's engine or a storm-front building or nothing at all. I went still and opened everything I had, every register, the full listening, and held it for twenty minutes, and it did not come again.
It was nothing. It was almost certainly nothing.
I went inside. She was asleep — the keeper's bed, door shut, the small heartbeat audible through the wall at its steady nighttime pace.
And beneath it, hers. I did not choose to listen.
I have no way not to. Every turn under the blankets.
The catch and release of her breath. The warm animal fact of her, twelve feet and one door away, a woman I have held in the dark with her mouth on my throat, whose body I know the way I know the watches of the night — and who would put a knife in me before she let me cross that room.
I stood in the main room in the dark with every nerve in me lit, and I thought: this is what I brought her here to prevent.
This exact moment — the faint thing, the far pressure, the question that might be nothing and might not.
And here I am, standing between it and her, and the plan is working, and the woman behind that door would walk into the Atlantic before she would call this working, and she would be right.
I am holding a woman hostage against a sound I heard once, over the ocean, that was probably the wind.
I stood the rest of that night without sitting down, and every hour I watched the sky, and every hour it was empty, and in between I listened to her breathe through the wall and hated how useful I felt.
On the third morning she walked again. Freezing rain, before dawn, without her coat.
I brought the coat. She dropped it on the road behind her without breaking stride.
I picked it up and followed. Ten paces. The distance at which a man escorts and the distance at which a man follows, and mile by mile, in the sleet, I felt it change from the first into the second.
She did not speak. She walked in the rain with her arms crossed over the front of her, not protecting herself from me — protecting the one thing in this arrangement that had not asked to be here.
The rain soaked through the cardigan and her hair went flat and dark against her neck, and she walked, and I followed, and she did not once look at me.
At a mile and a half she stopped.
Not because I stopped her. Not because the road stopped. She stopped because her body stopped — a stumble, caught, one hand on her knee — and she stood bent over in the rain, breathing hard, and I came up beside her and she put her hand out without looking at me, flat, the traffic-cop stop.
"Don't."
I stood in the rain two feet away from her and did not touch her.
"I'm fine," she said, to the road. "I'm fine. I'm just—" And she straightened, and she wiped the rain off her face, and she looked at me, and something in her face had changed — not softened, not broken, just shifted, like a load resettled — and she said, "Take me back to the house."
Not home. The house.
I carried her back in the rain without a word, and she let me, and she put her face in my shoulder this time, not forgiveness, exhaustion, and I felt the small fast heartbeat against my chest the whole way — quicker than yesterday, quicker than this morning, running hot in her like a wire.
And underneath the fear, in the part of me that has no decency: her breath on my collar.
Her cold hands finding my chest and taking the warmth without permission.
She hates me and her body borrows my heat, and I wanted her the entire mile and a half — soaked, furious, forbidden twice over — and I would rather carry her hating me through freezing rain than stand in heaven dry.
I set her down inside and she went straight to the keeper's bed without looking at me and shut the door, and I stood in the main room with her wet coat in my hands and the rain still running off me, and I listened to the two heartbeats through the wall — hers slowing, settling, the small one still running fast — and I stood my watch through the night, and toward morning the small one slowed too, and I did not move until it did.
Something was wrong. I could hear it. I had nothing in me that could name it, no vocabulary for this, no file — but the rhythm had changed, and I stood on the other side of a door I was not permitted to open, listening, and I was afraid in a way I had never been afraid of anything, not the field, not the fall, not the whole weight of the sky.
I was afraid of something the size of a spark.