Chapter 31
CATE
Iwoke up in a bed I had never seen, in a room that smelled like salt and old wood, with my shoes still on.
Gray light through a window I didn't know.
A ceiling I didn't know. Stone walls, thick, old, and outside the window nothing but grass and the edge of something — a bluff, the sound of water a long way down.
My hands hurt. Both of them, across the knuckles, a deep bruise-ache that didn't make sense until I sat up and remembered hitting him.
I flexed them. Good. They still worked. I'd hit harder things than him — a frozen pipe, once, with a wrench, the winter Nonna's heat went — but nothing that deserved it more.
The door was shut. I'd shut it. I got up and opened it and stood in the frame and looked at what he'd brought me to.
One room. Stone floor, low ceiling, a kitchen that was barely a counter and a stove.
A fireplace with a stack of wood beside it — he'd made a fire sometime in the night.
A table, two chairs. The front door, heavy, not locked.
Past it, through the glass, a dirt track going down to a road going nowhere, and beyond that, ocean on every side I could see.
He was standing outside. Of course he was standing outside. Hands at his sides, face toward the water, the collar I used to fix standing wrong against the wind.
I opened the front door. He turned around before it was all the way open.
"Caterina."
"What time is it."
"Ten past seven."
"What day."
"Wednesday. You have been asleep a long time."
"I was carried across a state," I said. "It's tiring." And I shut the door on him, and sat down at the table, and went through my pockets.
Right cardigan pocket: phone. Still there — he wouldn't take it; I'd made sure of that on the track when I held it up between us and dared him. I pressed the button. No bars. Eight percent battery and no bars.
Left pocket: a gum wrapper and a fifteen-cent square of dried varnish I'd scraped off my thumbnail two days ago in another life.
Jeans: nothing. Nothing, nothing, and a laundry receipt.
No wallet. No keys — my keys, my house keys, the ones with Nonna's brass Sacred Heart on the ring, sitting in a dish on a counter forty miles west. His coat over the chair, enormous, the only coat in the building. My shoes by the bed, thin-soled, already ruined from last night's road.
The room was cold and the coat was there and I put it on.
It went to my knees and smelled like him — rain and cedar and that low warm thing underneath that no cologne ever made — and my body did something traitorous and glad inside it, some animal recognition I want no part of, and I wore it anyway, all morning, furious, because being warm and being weak are not the same thing no matter what my skin was trying to tell me.
I sat back down at the table in his coat and took stock of my estate.
A dead phone, a gum wrapper, and a laundry receipt.
And, folded on the shelf by the bed where I had not asked about them: clothes.
New, tags on, my sizes — jeans, two sweaters, wool socks, things with a receipt from some village store on this island — sitting there like an apology in cotton.
I hadn't touched them. Three days in the same cardigan out of spite, because wearing them meant he'd thought of everything, and I wasn't ready to live in a world where the kidnapping came with a wardrobe.
"Okay," I said, to nobody. "Okay."
There was bread in the cupboard over the stove. Fresh — a good semolina loaf, the kind from a real bakery, the kind that goes stale in a day, which meant he had gotten it somewhere in the last twelve hours and put it in a cupboard in a house at the end of the earth.
Butter in a cold box. A jar of honey older than the plumbing.
I stood at the counter and ate three slices with my hip turned so the window wasn't in my eye, because he was in the window, and I chewed and swallowed and did not enjoy one crumb of it on purpose.
The bread was very good.
I hated that it was very good. He'd thought of bread.
Afterward I washed the plate and the knife and set them in the rack — the only rack, nothing like mine, no second cup beside the first — and I dried my hands on the enormous coat because there were no towels, and I stood in the kitchen of a house at the end of Long Island that I had not chosen, and I talked to the only person in the room who hadn't kidnapped me.
"Here's the situation," I said, one hand low.
"Your father is an ancient, very large, very stubborn man who has confused love with a padlock, and your mother is going to get us home.
That is not a plan. That is a fact. We do not live in houses other people put us in. That is from your great-grandmother."
The door opened behind me.
"Who are you speaking to?"
"Get out."
"I heard a voice. I thought—"
"I know exactly what you thought." I didn't turn around. "Nobody's here, Raq. That's the whole design. Congratulations on the design."
He stood in the doorway a second longer.
"There is more bread," he said. "In the box on the step. I will not come in."
The door shut. I stayed where I was with my hand low and the counter under my elbows.
"He brings bread," I said, quietly. "That's his whole vocabulary now. Bread and doorways."
He spent the middle of the day at the woodpile, in shirtsleeves, in March — splitting logs he could have snapped like breadsticks, doing it the human way, the long way, the swing and the drop and the crack — and I watched him do it before I remembered I wasn't watching.
The body votes first, and mine voted: the shoulders under the wet shirt, all that power making hard work look effortless, and heat rolled through me low and slow before the anger could catch it.
I turned my chair toward the land and told myself I was studying the road.
So that's what I did. I studied it properly, out of spite — the track, the turn where it met the road, the scrub pine that blocked the sightline south — and I was still at it when he came in with the firewood and stacked it without speaking.
"You haven't eaten," he said.
"I ate."
"The bread. That was six hours ago. There are—"
"I ate, Raq."
He stood there with the wood dust on his hands, filling the room, filling every room he has ever been in, and I watched him try to find a sentence that wasn't an order and fail, and try again, and fail again, and finally he just set a can of soup on the counter and went back outside.
I looked at the soup for a long time. Chicken noodle. The kind with the red label, the kind Nonna kept in stacks, the kind you heat up when somebody's sick or sad or nine years old and out of parents.
I heated the soup and ate it and washed the pot and set it in the rack next to the plate, and if he heard me through the wall and took it as a victory, that was his problem.
The baby needed the sodium. Everything I did in that kitchen, I did for the six weeks.
If he wanted to read it as softening, he could stand outside and be wrong.
The bed was narrow and cold and faced the wrong direction — east, toward the water, away from everything — and I lay in it with the door shut and listened to him not sleep on the other side of it.
No footsteps. No shifting. Just the particular density of a room with him in it, the pressure I'd gotten so used to sleeping inside that its absence had woken me the morning of the note.
Now it was back, and I was back inside it, and I had not agreed to either.
I put both hands on my stomach in the dark and did the breathing — slow, counted — and through the wall, very quiet, as if he knew exactly how thin it was:
"Caterina. Can I bring you anything."
And that voice, through two inches of pine, did what that voice has done since a crosswalk on Fifth Avenue — went straight down my spine like a struck match, low and certain and made for the dark, and I lay there hating physics.
You can lock a door against a man. Nobody's built the door that stops a voice.
"No."
"Water. A blanket. The—"
"No."
A long silence. Then, almost too quiet to catch: "I'm sorry."
I lay there and looked at the ceiling I'd already counted.
"Say what you're sorry for."
"I am sorry that you are frightened."
"Wrong." I sat up. "Try again."
The pause on the other side of that door went on a long time.
"I am sorry that you are in this house."
"But you'd do it again."
He didn't answer.
"Say it, Raq. It's the only true one you've got. You'd do it again tonight."
"Yes," he said, through the wall. "I would do it again tonight."
"Then don't say sorry to me. Sorry is for things you'd undo." I lay back down and pulled the blanket up. "Go stand outside."
I heard him go.
And I talked to the six weeks instead, under my breath.
"I am going to tell you about your great-grandmother's house.
It has eleven saints on the walls. The kitchen has a table that seats four but has fed thirty.
There is a woman named Nina six blocks away who is going to love you past all reason, and she has a daughter named Gina who is going to ask you every question she's been saving, and there is a stoop with a light on a timer that your great-grandmother put in and nobody has ever changed the bulb schedule because nobody would dare. "
I stopped, because my voice was cracking, and I was not going to crack in this house.
"We're going home," I said. "That's all. We're going home."
By noon the next day I had counted the nails in the ceiling. Forty-seven. I was lying on the bed on my back with my hands folded on my stomach doing it a second time, to check, when I heard the door.
He came in and set something on the table and went out again without a word.
I gave it ten minutes, because I was not going to move for him. Then I got up.
A sketchbook. Hardbound, cold-press, the good kind. A box of pencils — Faber, full range, the exact set Sal keeps in the flat drawer and lets nobody touch. Somewhere on this island, at dawn, he had walked into an art supply store and bought the correct pencils.