Chapter 14
Callum
He rode the gap road on the last Saturday in April and did the climb eight minutes slower than his best. At the top he was not hollow. It took him most of the descent to work out that he had come up there for no reason.
That was the shape of the whole month. He kept reaching for the old handholds and finding them gone.
He'd started sleeping. That was the first thing. Seven hours, most nights, in a house with nobody in it, which made no sense to him at all and which he mentioned to nobody.
He'd also stopped taking the phone into the bathroom, stopped checking the aggregators at six in the morning, and had gone eleven days without reading a comment section. Dara noticed inside a week and asked him whether he was ill.
"I'm not ill."
"You didn't respond to the Hobson thing."
"The Hobson thing doesn't need a response."
"The Hobson thing has needed a response from you every single time for six years," Dara said, and wrote something on her pad, and did not tell him what.
The bill went to the floor in the second week of May with the language rewritten, the fifteen percent set as a base with an escalator on it, which was uglier and better.
It passed by four, with Kellerman voting no and shaking his hand afterward.
Dara cried in the parking deck and was livid about it.
Somebody put a picture on the internet of Callum with his tie off and his head back against a wall.
The caption said he looked exhausted. He had, in fact, never slept better in his life.
His father called the night of the vote and said four words and hung up. That was well done. Callum sat in a parking deck and looked at the phone for a while afterward.
Adair sent flowers to the office with a card that said nine million dollars unspent, still winning, insufferable, which he kept in a drawer.
He told Winslow about it on a Thursday, in a kitchen, in eleven minutes, without one adjective in it.
"Four votes," she said.
"Four."
"Was it worth the three weeks?"
"It was worth the three weeks."
"Good," Winslow said, and got up to get the coffee, and put her hand on his shoulder on her way past.
Two seconds. Maybe three. Between the shoulder blade and the neck, once, and gone. She didn't say anything about it and neither did he. He sat at that table and did not move a muscle. Afterward he drove ninety minutes home and could not have told anybody one single thing about the road.
That was the joy. It came in pieces that size, and he had gotten to be a man of forty who could live on it, which was either growth or a diagnosis and he had stopped needing to know which.
The dread came with it, in the same hour, every time. He would be sitting in that kitchen with his wife's hand going past his shoulder, and there would be a cold spot under his sternum. It was not guilt, exactly. It was not fear of losing it, either.
It was the arithmetic. Nine Thursdays to get a hand on a shoulder.
Two seconds of it. He had driven ninety minutes home on that and would have driven three hundred.
Nine, against four years of damage. His father had spent four years on it.
The whole thing was so slow and so breakable that one bad hour could take it down to the studs.
He caught himself managing it. Twice in one week he decided what to bring into that kitchen and what to leave in the car, and both times he told himself it was consideration.
The second time was a piece of news he'd have given anybody.
The foundation had put four hundred thousand dollars into a water district in Lee County, quietly, at his request, in a way that would never appear next to his name.
He'd have told her about that in 2016 inside of an hour.
He worked out on the drive that it would sound like a man buying an opinion.
He did not mention it. He drove home telling himself that had been taste.
***
Senna came to see him on the twenty-eighth of May in a parking lot off Broad Street.
She texted first, which she hadn't done in three months. Ten minutes, in person, work thing, not a thing. He read it standing in a stairwell and his stomach went down an elevator shaft. He wrote back 4pm, the lot behind the coffee place. Then he looked at what he'd written and did not change it.
She was leaning on her car when he came out. She had cut her hair. She looked well, and he noticed that he noticed, and filed it.
"Ilsa Whitcombe called me," Senna said.
"The Sentinel."
"She's doing a follow. The bill passed and the profile did numbers, so now there's a longer piece with a Washington byline attached, and she wants twenty minutes with me on the record about the set-aside reversal.
" Senna crossed her arms. "She also asked me, and I want to give you this exactly, whether I was, quote, the staffer at two in the morning. "
The lot was hot. There was a dumpster ten feet away and the whole corner smelled of it.
"What did you tell her?"
"Nothing. I said I'd get back to her." Senna's chin came up. "I'm not here for instructions, Callum. I don't work for you. I'm here because if I answer that question wrong it lands on your wife, and I'm not going to do that to a woman I've met twice."
Callum stood in a hot parking lot and, for a second and a half, felt the entire old machine come up in him. There were four ways to handle this and he had all four of them, fully built, before she'd finished the sentence.
"Tell her the truth," he said.
Senna blinked.
"Tell her you're the staffer who was right about the floor language at two in the morning in February," he said. "That's true, it's on the record already, and I said it in a markup with a stenographer. If she asks you anything past the bill, tell her to call me and I'll answer it."
"You want me to send her to you."
"I want you to not carry this."
"Callum—"
"You've carried enough of it." He got his keys out and put them in his hand and closed his fist on them. "There's a second thing," Senna said, "and it's smaller and it's worse."
"Go on."
"She's got the room number. Norfolk. She's got 1114 and she's got the fact that I was in it, and she's not going to print it, because there's nothing to print. But she has it. Somebody gave it to her. Four people had that, and one of them talked, and I'd like you to understand that."
Callum put his hand on the roof of her car.
"Who."
"I don't know and I don't want to know, and neither do you." She said it evenly. "That's the actual reason I drove over here rather than calling. If it ever does come out, I wanted you to have heard it standing up."
"How's the committee?"
"It's good." A flicker. "It's actually good. They're not smart, but they're kind, which is a trade I'd make again."
"Take the raise in the fall. Don't let them slow-walk it."
"I know."
They stood there another moment.
"Callum," Senna said. "Is she okay? Your wife."
"She's making a film."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know it's not." He looked at the dumpster. "She's better than she's been in six years and I had nothing to do with it, and I'm trying to learn to be glad about that without needing a receipt for it."
Senna was quiet a second.
"Does she know about the four hundred thousand in Lee County?"
"No."
"Callum."
"It's not a secret. It's a foundation line item."
"It's a foundation line item you asked for at eleven at night in December and told nobody about," Senna said.
"I'm not your chief of staff anymore. I'm going to say the thing your chief of staff wouldn't. You've got a habit of doing the decent thing quietly and then treating the quiet part as though it were also decent. "
Callum stood in a hot parking lot with his keys in his fist.
"That's a hard one," he said.
"It's free. I've got a title now."
Senna laughed once, short.
"That's the most un-Fairbanks sentence I've ever heard you say."
"Yeah, well."
She got in her car. It took her four tries to back out of the space, since somebody in a truck had parked badly. Callum stood in the sun and let her do it. Then he went and sat in his own car with the engine off.
He sat in the car for a while with his hands on the wheel.
Nothing had happened.
Eleven minutes in a public lot. A work question, answered in the plainest available way, in front of a dumpster. If somebody had photographed the whole thing, it would have made a picture of two people talking about a bill.
He drove out to the lake house two days later.
She had her working headphones around her neck and paint on one hand.
She'd made the coffee before he got there.
She asked him about the escalator language and let him answer the whole of it.
At forty minutes she told him about a man in Dickenson County with a jar of 1974 water sealed with wax.
She got her laptop to show him the shot.
She stood behind his chair while it played with one hand on the back of it, and her thumb moved once, and he stopped breathing.
The hour went to seventy minutes. Neither of them said anything about that.
At the door she handed him back his coat rather than letting him take it off the chair, which meant her hand was on it when his was, and she did not move hers for about a second.
Driving out, at the top of the gravel, with the engine running and the radio off, he thought about Senna in the parking lot. Eleven minutes. Nothing at all.
If I tell her, she's going to hear the word 'Senna' and everything in that kitchen goes back to March.
He worked it four different ways on the road home and every one of them came out the same. By Bedford he had a sentence for it.
The four ways were these. Tell her tonight, on the phone, which was cowardly.
Tell her Thursday, in the kitchen, which would take the whole hour and end the way March ended.
Tell her after the bill cleared conference, when there'd be a piece of ground to stand on.
Or tell her nothing, on the grounds that nothing had occurred.
He picked the fourth and dressed it as the third, which is a thing he'd have caught in a staffer inside four seconds.
It isn't a secret. It's just not information she needs.
He was proud of it. That was the part he'd think about in a hallway in July with his coat half off.
He drove ninety minutes with a sentence in his mouth and he was proud of the sentence, the way he'd been proud of a good close in a markup, and at no point in ninety minutes did it occur to him to notice that he had written it rather than said it.
He did not tell her.
He came out the next Thursday and stayed seventy minutes. She laughed twice. He drove home in the dark past mailbox, mailbox, a dog's eyes, gone, with the radio off and the whole thing lying under the floorboards where he'd put it.