Chapter 14
The last Thursday in July was the hottest night of that summer, which she had not thought about at all.
She had spent two weeks imagining a cold room, because the cold was the whole of it in her head, and she came up the county road at ten to eight in a T-shirt with the windows down and the air going past warm and green and full of the sound of every insect in the county.
The gate was open. He’d gotten the key from the township.
She parked where she had always parked and sat in the truck for a minute and looked at the house.
It did not look like anything. New siding on the north end where the wall had come out, primer on the trim, a county notice stapled to the porch post, and no curtains anywhere, so it was just a big pale box with nine rooms of nothing in it, waiting for somebody to put bunks in.
Seth was sitting on the steps.
* * *
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He stood up. He had a flashlight and a bottle of water and nothing else, and he was in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he looked like a man who had not slept either.
“Power’s off at the meter,” he said. “I checked this afternoon. There’s nothing in there — they took the last of it Monday.”
“Good.”
“There’s a county lamp in the truck if you’d rather—”
“No.”
“Okay.”
They stood in the drive. The light was going. Out past the house the lake had gone the color it goes in July at nine o’clock, a color she could never name.
“Where do you want to be?” he said.
“The back room.”
* * *
They went in through the mudroom because that is how you go into that house.
The back room was empty and white and smelled of primer. The stove was gone — they’d taken it out with the rest — and there was a rectangle on the new floor where it had been, and the hearth was still there because you can’t take a hearth out.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the wall.
He sat down against the wall opposite, about eight feet away, which she had not asked for and was exactly right.
The flashlight was between them on the floor, standing on its end, throwing a circle on the ceiling.
“One thing,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“If you need it to stop, say stop. I mean that. This isn’t a punishment, and if I turn it into one I’ll have wasted the only chance we get.”
“I won’t need it to stop,” he said.
“Okay.”
She put her hands flat on her knees.
“The ice started a little after four,” she said, “and by five I could hear the trees.”
* * *
She told him all of it.
It took hours, and there is no version of this where the whole of it can be set down, because the whole of it was three days long and most of it was ordinary.
That was what she had not been able to explain to anybody for five months.
The terrible part was not dramatic. The terrible part was the length of it — a woman in a cold house doing sensible things for three days, over and over, well.
She told him about the buckets in the mudroom and about her father’s rule. Water first, then wood, then light.
She told him about counting to twelve for the generator and about it coming on at ten and how she had laughed out loud, alone, in her own kitchen, and how she had not laughed again until the twentieth of March.
She told him about his text. Not angrily. She said it the way she’d said everything else, in order, at the right place in the sequence: at half past ten you texted me the driver’s number and told me your mother was at the Park Place, and I read it twice, and then I typed okay and it didn’t send.
He did not move.
She told him about Saturday. About opening every cabinet under every sink with a headlamp on. About the cellar and the boiler drain and the bucket, fourteen times, which she knew because she had counted. About counting the rooms for the first time in eight years and getting nine.
About lighting the candle in the front window at four o’clock because her father always had, and standing there for a minute afterward feeling stupid.
About the beans.
About lying on the couch under three blankets and the dog quilt listening to the hill come down all night, one tree at a time, and telling herself it was getting closer and knowing that was not true and not being able to stop.
* * *
Somewhere around midnight she got to the Sunday and her voice changed, and she heard it change and kept going.
She told him about the shed roof. About the saw, and pulling the cord until her shoulder went hot and her fingers stopped reporting in, and standing in the garage with her hands under her arms doing the arithmetic on six hours of wood.
About putting on everything she owned and her father’s Carhartt over the top of it.
About taking the keys off the hook.
“The Tierney House keys,” she said. “They’ve been on that ring for eight years. I don’t know why I took them. I’ve thought about it and I don’t know.”
She told him about the walk. About what walking on glaze actually is, and about going in the ditch on purpose because the grass grabs, and about the whole world for six feet around her being lit up like something in a case.
About going down twice.
About lying on her hip in the ditch the first time with her face against the ice and thinking, perfectly clearly, nobody knows where I am.
Then she stopped for a while.
He did not say anything. He did not move, and he did not come across the floor, and she understood that not coming across the floor was costing him more than anything she had said so far.
“Okay,” she said, to herself, and went on.
* * *
“I wasn’t looking for you,” she said. “That’s the part I need you to have. I’ve heard three people in this county tell it like I went down there to catch you and I want it out of the record. I was walking past a window with a bag in my hand.
“You had your coat on the back of the chair. There was a lamp on the table and half a bottle of wine and two plates with almost nothing left on them. She had her chin on her hand.
“And you had both hands up, and you were talking.
“That’s it. That’s the whole thing, Seth.
Not the wine and not the woman. You were leaning in with your forearms off the table and your hands going the way you used to at our table in the first two years when you’d come home with some ridiculous thing and take twenty minutes to tell it.
And you were —” Her voice went and she let it.
“You looked like yourself. You looked like the man I married and I had not seen him in a year and a half and I did not know that until I was standing on a sidewalk in the freezing rain watching you be him for somebody else.”
The circle of light on the ceiling did not move.
“I didn’t go in because of what I looked like,” she said.
“I’ve told myself a dozen versions of that and the true one is the small one.
I was soaked to the shoulders and my hat was frozen to my head and I hadn’t washed in three days, and if I’d gone through that door every face in that room would have come around and I’d have been the emergency at your table.
And I would not be that. Not in front of this village.
So I got the kerosene and I turned around, and that was mine, and it nearly killed me, and I’m not going to pretend you did that part. ”
* * *
The ditch took twenty minutes.
She gave it to him in order and without any mercy, because by then she could not have stopped if she had wanted to.
The warmth coming up and unzipping her collar.
Catching the edge with her right boot. The five-foot bank, three times.
Being annoyed. Being embarrassed, in a ditch, on the county road she grew up on, like a woman who had dropped a tray in a full room.
The hill going quiet.
The water moving under the ice out past the fence line.
The stars coming out at the back edge of the storm.
“And then I stopped thinking in sentences,” she said, “and the last thing I’ve got is my dad saying water first, then wood, then light, which wasn’t any use to me at all.”
She stopped.
The flashlight had gone yellow. It had been going yellow for an hour.
“That’s it,” she said. “Ten past six, Bailey’s light bar, and I don’t remember any of the rest of it. That’s the three nights.”
* * *
He did not say anything.
She had made it a rule and he kept it, and she found out in that minute what the rule had been for, because the silence was unbearable and it was the first honest thing that had happened in that house in two years.
He sat against the opposite wall with his forearms on his knees and his head down, and he did not say sorry, and he did not come across the floor, and he did not explain where he had been.
After about two minutes he wiped his face with the back of his wrist, once, and put his hand back down.
The flashlight died.
It went out the way they do, dim and then gone, and neither of them reached for it, and the room went black except for what came in the uncurtained window off the water, which by then was almost nothing.
“Okay,” she said into the dark. “Your turn.”
* * *
He started with the dinners, because she had asked for the dinners.
It took him a long time, and he was careful about it in a way that she understood only afterward was the whole of the change in him: he did not summarize.
He had been asked for every dinner and he gave her every dinner, one at a time, and when he could not remember what he’d eaten he said I don’t remember what I ate, which is a thing a man building a case does not say.
The office, most of them. The place on Front Street twice. Her table four times, which he said flatly and did not soften and did not follow with anything.
He told her what he’d talked about.
That was the part Talia had braced for and it was worse than the bracing, because it was so small.
The board. A man called Doyle who wanted the orchard.
His father, and the winter the freight company nearly went, and standing in a yard at fourteen watching his father count trailers. The kitchen floor.