Chapter 5
Callum
The Norfolk event ran ninety minutes long, and the weather shut the airport, so they took two rooms at a hotel by the water and a rental car for the morning.
It had been a good night. Four hundred people in a ballroom with bad acoustics.
A shipyard local that had endorsed him in October and wanted to say so again in public.
A woman in the third row who cried during the water section and came up afterward to tell him about her mother's well in Sussex County.
He'd stood there and let her tell him the whole of it while Dara made faces at her watch.
Then the rain came across the harbor sideways, and the last flight went, and the advance guy got on the phone.
The bar downstairs was shut by the time they had keys.
Senna knocked at eleven with a bottle of hotel-shop wine and two of the paper cups off the bathroom counter. They sat on the floor of his room with their backs against the bed, since both chairs had a table between them and neither of them said why that wouldn't do.
They didn't talk about the bill.
They talked about her mother's house in Wilmington, a job she'd nearly taken in Denver, a man she'd nearly married.
She asked him what he'd wanted to be at nineteen and he told her the truth, which was that he had gone out to Montana that summer to shoe horses badly, on the theory that it would kill the Fairbanks in him.
"That's the most Fairbanks thing I have ever heard," Senna said. "You ran away to become a ranch hand."
"I ran away to become a person."
"You ran away to a ranch your family owned."
"I did not know that at the time."
"Callum."
"I didn't! I found out in August! There was a plaque."
She laughed until she had to put her cup down on the carpet. He sat with his head back against the mattress while she did it. The rain came at the window in handfuls. His chest was so loose he could have gone to sleep sitting up.
"Can I ask you a thing," she said, "and you can tell me it's not my business."
"Ask it."
"Why do you do this job."
"That's an easy one. Six hundred and forty households—"
"No." She pulled a knee up. "The other answer. You've got about four hundred million dollars behind you and a family that would have found you something soft, and you get in a truck at five in the morning to go stand in a fire hall in Grayson County. Why."
Callum turned his cup around on the carpet.
"Because in a fire hall in Grayson County nobody's ever heard of my grandfather," he said.
"That's not true. They've all heard of your grandfather."
"They've heard of him. They don't care. There's a difference and it's the only clean air I get." He shrugged. "When I stand up in that room I'm either any good or I'm not, and it takes them about ninety seconds to decide, and they're never wrong."
Senna looked at him for a second.
"Okay," she said. "That's a better answer than the one you give the paper."
"Don't print it."
"I'd never."
At some point the laughing stopped.
She was turned toward him, one knee up, her hair out of its thing. The room was doing the yellow that hotel rooms do at midnight. The heater came up, and went down.
"I should go up," she said, and didn't.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to."
Her foot was six inches from his. Her cup was empty on the carpet between them.
He knew every inch of the next thirty seconds. The whole shape of it sat there in front of him, one motion away, entirely up to him. And what came up in his chest on that floor, with the rain going sideways off the harbor, was not desire. Or it was not desire first.
It was relief. That was the piece that got him. That she knew him, and it had cost him nothing, and he had not had to perform one syllable of it for two hours.
Then his phone lit up on the nightstand and it was the house line.
Callum stood so fast his shoulder hit the corner of the mattress. He didn't take the call. He stood in the middle of the room with the phone going in his hand, heart slamming, and the whole night rearranged itself around him in about a second and a half.
"Senna."
"Yeah." She was up too, cup in one hand, shoes in the other. Her voice had nothing wrong with it. "Six-fifteen for the car?"
"Six-fifteen."
"Get some sleep, Senator."
She went. The door did its slow hotel close, hydraulic and patient, and clicked.
Callum sat on the end of the bed a long time.
He had been in a hundred hotel rooms with staff on the same floor and had never once put a chain on a door in his life.
The rain went on doing what it was doing. Down on the water a tug was working, and its engine came up through eleven floors of hotel as a vibration in the frame of the bed rather than a sound.
He got his phone and looked at the missed call.
Eleven-oh-four. One from the house, no message.
He nearly called it back and then it was nearly one in the morning, and there was no version of that call that did not begin with him explaining why he had not answered the first one.
He got up once and put the chain on, which was ridiculous, and stood there with his hand on it feeling ridiculous.
Then he took it off again, which was worse, and put it back on, which was worse than that.
He had not touched her. Nothing had happened. There was not one thing in that room a photograph could have hurt him with.
He'd have given a great deal to still believe those were the same sentence.
Six-fifteen came. Senna was in the lobby at six-twelve with two coffees and a face that had nothing on it whatsoever. She handed him one and said the rental was in the second row. They drove four hours back to Richmond talking about Kellerman.
Not one thing in that car was strange. He kept checking. It kept not being strange. By Fredericksburg he had stopped checking and started believing it, which he would think about a great deal later on.
***
Thursday he did four events in the Valley and slept in his own bed. Friday he did three, and Dara told him twice that his wife had confirmed the Saturday thing and he had said good both times without hearing it.
He got home Saturday at two, and the house was full of light.
Winslow was in the kitchen with her laptop shut and her hands on the island. Standing. Which is not how a person waits for someone she's glad to see.
"How was Norfolk," she said.
"Long. Airport closed."
"I know. I called the house line at eleven to say the pipe under the mudroom sink went, and Nadine had gone home, so I called Roanoke. Then I called you." She said it in order. She was very calm. "Where were you?"
"In my room."
"You didn't pick up."
"It was eleven at night, Win."
"You always pick up."
He put his bag down on the stool and started to say a thing about the airport and stopped. She was looking at him. She had been looking at him the entire time, and her face had nothing on it at all.
"Was Senna with you," she said.
And here is what he could have said. He knew it then, and he knew it every hour of the next four months. He could have said yes. Two letters, nothing attached to them.
"She was in the hotel," he said. "So were Dara and the advance guy and about six people from the Norfolk office. We were all in the same hotel, because the airport shut, which is what happens when—"
"Was she in your room?"
"For twenty minutes, we were going over the Tuesday—"
"Callum."
"—and I don't love where this is going, honestly.
" His own voice changed gear on him. He let it.
"I want to be fair to you, so let me say plainly that I understand why that lands badly, and I'm not going to be defensive about it.
It's a reasonable question and you're entitled to ask it.
I want you to feel that you can ask me anything. "
Winslow didn't move.
"There it is," she said.
"There's what."
"That." She lifted two fingers off the counter and put them back down. "The voice. You just did the voice at me, in my kitchen, at two in the afternoon. You've got a hand on my shoulder and you're not even in the room."
"That's not fair."
"You said entitled to ask. Callum, I'm your wife."
"And I'm answering you!"
"You're handling me." Her hands were still on the island and the tendons had come up on the backs of them.
"I have watched you handle four hundred people.
I taught you how to do it to the Chamber of Commerce.
I sat in a car in Bristol and gave you a line about a pump you've been running for two years.
I know exactly what it sounds like when you decide somebody needs walking down off a ledge, and you're doing it to me right now, in my own kitchen. "
"Winslow."
"Say one thing to me without a frame on it."
"I have not touched her." It came out too loud in a kitchen. "Not once. Not one time. You can look at anything you want. My phone, my calendar, ask Dara, ask anybody in that office, there is nothing—"
"I didn't ask you that."
He stopped.
"I didn't ask you if you'd touched her," Winslow said. "I asked you where you were."
The icemaker went off in the freezer and dumped. The whole room had that noise in it for four seconds. Then it was over, and there was nothing behind it.
"You know what the worst part is," she said. "You're not even lying. That's the thing I can't get past. You could take a polygraph tonight and pass it. There's nothing to find."
"Then what are we doing?"
"You told her about the pantry."
Callum's mouth was open. Nothing came out of it.
"Your mother told me that story in October," Winslow said.
"Standing at her own sink. She said, he's never once talked about it, I don't think he even remembers.
And I said, no, he doesn't talk about it.
" She nodded slowly, at the counter, at nobody.
"And you told her. Didn't you. Some night. On a phone."
He could not think of one word that was not a paragraph.
"That's what I thought," Winslow said.
"Say something," Winslow said.
"I'm trying to find a way to say it that isn't wrong."
"That's the problem. That's the entire problem, right there in that sentence."
"Winslow, give me a second."
"You've had ten years."
She picked up her laptop and held it against her chest with both arms.
"I don't want a speech tonight," she said. "I want you to understand that I already know what one costs, so please don't spend it on me."
She went up. She didn't slam anything. He stood in the kitchen with the light going long across the floor and listened to her go down the hall over his head. The steps stopped. The guest room door opened, and shut, and did not open again.
He was still standing there at four.
At some point he thought about going up. He built the first two sentences of it. Then he caught himself building them, which was new, and he stood in a kitchen at four on a Saturday afternoon without one honest way to climb his own stairs.