CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Choice
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Choice
February was the worst month, and next to nothing happened in it.
Nobody writes that bit down about waiting. I had six weeks and a date and no way out, and I’ve read any number of stories where the heroine spends her last weeks doing something significant. What I did was mend things.
I mended the shutter on the back bedroom.
I mended two of Liora’s chairs badly and one of them well.
I went through the house room by room and made a list of what was in it and what it was worth and who ought to have it, and I wrote it out fair and put it in the dresser drawer under the linen.
I didn’t tell Elias. He found it in March and we had the worst row of our lives over it, and he was right.
So was I, as it goes, which is the trouble with the worst rows.
The herring didn’t come back. The men went further out and came in later, and the talk in Wren’s went careful, the way it does when everyone’s doing sums in their heads and nobody wants to say the total.
In the second week Ness stopped baking on Thursdays because flour had gone up again, and she told everyone it was her hip.
? ? ?
He was horrible on the sixth. I’d been waiting for it, and it was still worse than I’d bargained for.
It started over a candle. People say couples who fight about small things are really fighting about big ones, and that’s true, but it leaves something out, because at the time the small thing is honestly, genuinely infuriating.
He’d taken the last of the good candles up to the back bedroom to read by and hadn’t said.
I came down at six in the morning in the dark and went through both drawers and the dresser and found the stub end of one, and I stood there in my own kitchen in February, freezing, with an inch of tallow in my hand, and something that had been sitting in me since January came straight up my throat.
“You take things and you don’t say.”
“I took a candle.”
“You take things and you don’t say, Elias.
You’ve done it since September. You took four days in October over the pressure, you took fifteen days deciding whether to tell me about the transfer, and I’ve been perfectly reasonable about all of it because the alternative was being a woman who counts.
Well. I’m counting now. And you’ve had the last good candle. ”
He put down the cup he was holding with enormous care, the way you put down something you’ve decided not to throw.
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t pretend it is. If we pretend it’s a candle we’ll have it sorted in ten minutes and be having it again on Thursday.”
“Then say what you think it’s about.”
“You’re leaving in six weeks.”
“I know when I’m leaving.”
“You’re leaving in six weeks,” Elias said, “and you’ve started making lists of the furniture.”
? ? ?
I hadn’t thought he knew about the lists. He’d never mentioned them, and I’d assumed, being my father’s daughter, that a man not mentioning a thing meant he didn’t know it.
“That’s mine to do.”
“It’s entirely yours to do. I haven’t said a word about it and I’m not going to.”
“You’ve just said several.”
“I’ve said one. I’ll not say another.” He picked the cup back up and then put it down on the table again, because his hands weren’t steady enough to be trusted with it.
“Rose. I’ve got six weeks, and I’m spending them being careful.
I’ve been careful so long I’ve started doing it in my sleep.
And this morning you came down and shouted at me about a candle, and I’d like to be able to tell you my first feeling was hurt.
” He looked at the cup. “It was relief.”
“That’s a dreadful thing to say.”
“It’s the truest thing I’ve said this month.”
? ? ?
We didn’t resolve it. I’d like that known, by any woman who thinks the good ones do.
We were foul to each other most of the day and neither of us said sorry in any form you’d recognise.
At about four in the afternoon I came in from the yard and found he’d cut bread and put it on a plate and laid a cloth over it and gone out.
When he came back at six he said, “There’s a candle,” and put three on the dresser.
“Where did you get three?”
“Rellhaven.”
Rellhaven’s nine miles. “You walked eighteen miles for candles.”
“I walked eighteen miles because I needed to walk eighteen miles. The candles were an excuse.”
And then we both laughed and that was the end of it, and nothing whatsoever had been settled.
? ? ?
I went to see Hallam’s boy in the second week because I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
He was fifteen, his name was Tom, and I’d known him since he was a baby in a basket on the harbour wall. On the eleventh of January three men who happened to be standing right there had pulled him out of the water, and inside a fortnight the whole of Duskmere had agreed he was fine.
He wasn’t fine.
His mother let me in and pulled a face at me in the passage that told me more than anything she said out loud. I went through. He was sitting by the fire with a piece of netting in his hands, not working it.
“They said you’d come.”
“Did they.”
“Ma said. She said you’d come because you go and see people.” He kept turning the net over and over. “You came when Nan died.”
“I did.”
“You brought a thing. A cake or something. It was a bad cake.”
“It was an appalling cake, and I’ve never once claimed otherwise.”
He laughed, loud as a gull, and then stopped dead, the way people do when a laugh gets in under something and finds it sore.
? ? ?
“They keep telling me I slipped.”
“I know.”
“Da says it, and Ma says it, and Mr Fenn says it, and I stopped arguing about the third week, because what’s the point arguing with everybody.” He looked up at me properly. “Do you think I slipped?”
I’ve thought a lot since about what I should have said. I’ve come up with maybe nine wiser answers, and every one of them would have been kinder to me than to him.
“No,” I said.
The net stopped turning.
“I think the water came up,” I said. “I think it came up and took you off that jetty, and I think you’ve been sat in this house for a month while every grown-up you trust tells you you’ve got it wrong about the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to you.”
He started to cry. Fifteen years old, in front of a woman who wasn’t his mother, the netting bunched up in his fists. It went on a while. I kept my hands in my lap and my mouth shut, and in the end it stopped.
“I can’t go out,” he said.
“No.”
“I’ll have to. Da’s boat. I’m meant to be on it in March, it’s all settled.”
“Tom.”
“I can’t get down the steps. I got to the top of them on Sunday.
Thirty-one steps, I counted them from the bottom when I was little, I know every one of them, and I couldn’t do the first.” He scrubbed at his face with the heel of his hand, furious at it.
“And there’s nothing wrong with me. That’s the thing.
I’m not sick and I’m not soft and I sleep fine, and then I get to the top of the steps and my legs just stop. ”
I sat with that.
I knew exactly what he meant. My legs have stopped. They stopped on a terrace in a drowned city when a woman said six syllables, and they stopped on a floor with a slate over my head, and there’s nothing wrong with you, there’s nothing to point at, and the whole town tells you you slipped.
“It won’t mend on its own,” I said. “I’ll give it you straight, because everyone else in this town is going to be kind to you instead, and kind’s going to be worse.”
“Then what?”
“Then you go down one step. Not to the water, one step. Stand there, come back up, and do it again tomorrow.” I got up.
“And you find one person you can tell the true version to, once a week, out loud. It needn’t be me.
It probably oughtn’t to be your dad. Try Wren.
She’s extremely good at this and nobody’s ever noticed. ”
He wiped his face again.
“Did something happen to you?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Something came up out of the water,” I said, “and it wasn’t a slip, and there were eleven people who got the version I told them instead.”
? ? ?
I walked home the long way and was angry for about a mile before I worked out what at.
I’d spent two months being angry at the sea in a general sort of way, and at the Court, and at Sevrid Anvarre’s arithmetic, and at a slate in a rack, and if I’m honest all of that anger had really been about me.
This was something else. There was a boy in a house on Cooper’s Lane who couldn’t get down a flight of steps, and the reason for it was a gate out past the headland nobody had stood at since before I was born.
He’d carry it forty years. Nobody down there would ever know his name, or that he existed at all, or that the thing they called a thirteen per cent shortfall had a face on it and a bad cake in its memory.
He isn’t why I went. Wren was right about that, on the harbour wall, and I’ve never stopped thinking she was.
But that was the day I couldn’t go on pretending the question was only mine.
? ? ?
I tried the fire in the yard on the nineteenth, at night, while he was asleep.
I hadn’t called it since the vents. Three months, the longest I’d gone since I was twenty. I told myself that was discipline. It wasn’t, and I knew it wasn’t. I’d felt what came out of me over that vent field and I didn’t want to find out what else was still in there.
The yard in February at eleven at night. Hard frost. The gate square and true in the dark, everything still, and down below the cliff the sea dragging its gravel back and forth.
I opened my hand and asked.
It came the way it’s always come up here, warm at the fingertips first and then the wrists, and it sat in my palm the size of a hen’s egg, gold and steady and entirely ordinary. I stood in the frost looking at it.
Then I did what Kael had taught me. I turned the listening inward and asked the water what I wanted. Only there isn’t any water up here. There’s air, and air doesn’t carry it, and what came back was next to nothing.
A faint thing, like a conversation through a wall.