CHAPTER 20 #2
She came first. Back arched off the pine an inch.
One hand fisted in the collar at the seam I would not repair before morning.
She tightened around me and held there and every second of it landed in the palm settled at the base of her neck that had not moved and would not move if the roof came down.
I followed a beat later. Buried. Forehead against her sternum.
Breath first. Words after.
I remained inside her.
I held there for a long minute. She was warm under my hands and her forehead was against my hair and her fingers had loosened from the collar and settled into the ash-brown at the back of my neck. Her breath came back down.
The crucifix on the counter caught a fleck of lamplight and I turned my head enough to see it. I said nothing. I let the silver hold the light for the count I needed to reset my own breath.
Only then did I move.
Careful. I refused to leave her the wrong way even in this register. I lifted her clean off the pine with both arms under her and did not set her down on her feet on the boards. The varnish had left a print on her right hip and she needed to be off the table before the print stopped being warm.
I carried her the four steps to the Navajo rug in front of the cold woodstove and laid her down on it.
She weighed what she had weighed at the courthouse steps and what she weighed the first time I lifted her onto the counter and what she had weighed against my ribs in bed since the storm.
That had not changed. It was one of the small unchanged things I had counted tonight.
Red and cream under her. The rug that had carried us in front of this same woodstove on the night I killed Karn held only her tonight.
I did not lie down with her.
I crossed to the couch. I pulled my gray T-shirt off over my head — damp at the shoulder where her teeth closed, damp at the collar where her fists held — and came back and tugged it down over her arms and her head, careful, one hand at the back of her neck.
Her white button-down was on the great-room floor in a shape it did not usually take.
Her jeans and underwear were still on the kitchen tile where they came off her ankles. Neither of us went for them.
She sat up wearing my T-shirt.
Her eyes went the color of moss in the low light and she reached. I let her. She got to her feet with a hand at my forearm. She walked the four steps to the couch and settled at the arm and lifted her face at me.
I sat with my back against the arm and she settled between my knees, back against my chest. I pulled the gray wool blanket with the red edge off the top of the couch and put it around us both.
Her hand came to rest on my right forearm, fingers open, palm down, over the faint pink line the Karn knife left in the shale before dawn on Day 30.
Her thumb stayed still against her opposite palm.
That was how I knew how far into this she was and how far out.
I put my mouth against the crown of her head.
I did not talk about what she read.
I turned the signet ring once on my left pinky with my thumb — the L. C. W. against the pad of the thumb, and then the flat of the silver against the outside of my knee under the blanket — and settled it.
I talked about coffee.
“There's a coarser grind in the mason jar on the second shelf,” I said.
“Marta brought the beans up on Tuesday. Peru.
I'm going to run two heaping scoops in three cups of cold well water for eighteen hours and set the jar under a linen.
It'll pull sweeter off a coarser grind than a hot press if the day comes up ninety again by noon.”
She listened.
“Cover it after you fill it,” I said. “Set it before you go up to bed. Turn it once on the shelf. Come back to it after dinner tomorrow. That's the ratio.”
I said it steady. The way a man reads out a lot number in a room where the lot number does not matter and the reading out is the point.
“Marta's raspberry preserves are behind the mason jar,” I said. “Two spoons in the cold brew is not a farm thing. That is a thing I learned in a kitchen on East 71st the year I was thirty-two and I have not made it for anyone since. I want to make it for you tomorrow.”
Her hand on my forearm did not tap. Her breath came down and stayed down. My fingers were in her hair — she had been wearing the low twist down in the cabin since Sunday — and I combed slow with my thumb against her scalp.
The voice I was using was the register the interior of me still kept for a boardroom that had been closed for six years. I knew she had clocked it three times in three days. Tonight I let it come and let her let it.
“Celia.”
She turned her face just enough to be against the underside of my jaw.
“Yes.”
Just after midnight. The wick on the kitchen lamp had burned down half an inch since I trimmed it Sunday.
Outside the wind was up at the dry hush I knew from every June-through-September of every year I had run this ridge.
No rain. Not tonight. Not for the next five days by the pressure I had read on the barn wall that morning. Fire danger still High.
She sat up in my lap.
“You have to tell me all of it,” she said. “Tomorrow. All of it.”
“Tomorrow.”
She turned in my arms and put her forehead to mine — the second time tonight the two ridges of bone met on a level.
Her breath was against my mouth. She kissed me once, closed-mouth, the way she kissed me on the courthouse steps in the mid-morning heat of a summer that felt like another summer entirely.
She said: “Bed.”
I said: “Yes.”
I lifted her off my lap and set her down on her feet on the boards.
I crossed to the kitchen. The lamp on the emptied pine.
I bent and picked up the closed file from the floor.
I picked up the passport. I took the crucifix off the counter.
I stacked them on the pine, silver-side up, passport atop the crucifix, file under my palm — the shape she put them in an hour and forty-five minutes ago because leaving a room in the dark still required leaving it right.
The safe under the plank in the utility hall behind me was still open. I would close it before dawn.
I rested the tips of two fingers against the base of the lamp — hot — and turned the wick down.
The flame folded.
The kitchen went to the blue-black the cabin held an hour after full dark.
I let my eyes come to it. Her outline at the doorway to the bedroom in my gray T-shirt too big on her shoulders.
Her hair a rope down her back. On the nightstand behind her, where the dim carried just enough to catch it — a paperback closed, and the leather cord of a silver bookmark laid flat on its cover, not inside it anymore.
She had finished the book two mornings ago. She had not opened it since.
I crossed to her.
She was standing at the frame in a shirt that had held her sweat and her mouth-print and no lie.
Her hand was up on the pine of the jamb the way she stood at the fence the day I told her the three options.
She did not look at the closed file behind me.
She did not look at the passport. She looked at me and only at me and the small green shift in the hazel was the last piece of light in the room.
I put my palm at the small of her back at the height of her spine and walked her the six steps to the bedroom door.
Outside, the tin roof had the low dry hush and there was no rain and tomorrow was still warm in the air between us.
The safe I had not yet closed sat open in the utility hall behind us with the plank leaned against the wall exactly where she left it.
We went in.
The bedroom held the last blue off the west window. The quilt was turned down. The sheet on my side still carried the shallow crease of the night before, and the room smelled of pine, her skin, and the dry dust our boots had brought in from the porch.
She stopped at the foot of the bed and turned inside my T-shirt.
“On your back,” she said.