Chapter 14 #2
“She asked me what the best week of my life was,” he said, “and I said the week in 2018 when we did the floor. I told her about the board by the sink. I told her you wouldn’t let anybody fix it.”
Talia sat in the dark and took that one the way he had taken the ditch.
“Go on,” she said.
* * *
Then the Saturday.
“Ian came into my office about ten,” he said. “He said, do you want somebody to run up to the house. And I said, yeah, can somebody run up and make sure Talia’s all right.
“And I want to be exact about this, because you asked for exact. I felt good when I said it. That’s the thing I’ve had in my mouth since February. I said it and I thought, there, I’ve thought of her, and then I went back to what I was doing.”
The room was black now.
“She came to the doorway about forty minutes later. She said the house had been checked and the generator was running and you’d been offered a car and said you’d rather stay put.
“And I said, okay, good. And then I said, did we get the Dearborn numbers back.”
Talia did not move.
“Four seconds,” he said. “Maybe five. I’ve timed it. I’ve sat in a truck and said it out loud to see how long it takes and it takes about four seconds.”
* * *
“Here’s the part you haven’t got,” he said, “and it’s the part I’d give anything not to have to hand you, and it’s why I’ve been trying to get you to let me do this since March.
“I didn’t believe her.
“I mean — I did. But that’s not the right word and I’ve been trying to find the right word for five months. Believing is something you do. Believing takes a second. You hear a thing and you weigh it and you accept it, and there’s a you in the middle of that doing the weighing.
“There wasn’t. She said the house was checked and it went into me like a number going into a column. I didn’t weigh it. There was nothing in me that went is that right. Not for a quarter of a second, Talia. Not once, not that day, not Sunday.
“I have gone at this from every direction since February looking for the moment I chose wrong, because if I chose wrong then I’m a man who made a mistake and mistakes can be fixed. And there isn’t one. There’s no moment. I didn’t fail to believe her and I didn’t decide to. I just — put you down.
“You were a thing that had been handled, and I have spent twenty years building a life where things that have been handled do not come back up, and it worked perfectly. It worked exactly the way I built it to work. It worked on my wife.”
She heard him stop and get his breath.
“That’s what I did,” he said. “Not the seven weeks. The seven weeks are the worst thing I’ve ever done and I’ll answer for them for the rest of my life, but they’re not the thing.
The thing is that in February my wife stopped being a person I’d go and look at and became a line item that somebody else had closed out, and it didn’t hurt, and I didn’t notice, and if you hadn’t walked down that hill I would still be like that. ”
* * *
No one said anything for a while.
“Say the rest of it,” Talia said.
“There isn’t—”
“There is. Say it.”
He was quiet for long enough that she thought she’d asked for a thing he did not have.
“I could have walked it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“They told me nine o’clock for the crew and I sat down.
Two miles. I’ve walked further than that on a golf course.
” His voice had gone somewhere very flat.
“And I’ve tried to tell myself it was dark and it was iced and a man could break his neck on that road, and all of that’s true, and it’s not the reason.
The reason is that I’d been told you were warm, and so there wasn’t anything to walk toward.
There was just two miles of ice between me and an empty errand.
“You climbed that tree twice,” he said. “I’ve been up there. I went and looked at it in March after they cut it up and there’s a stump there four feet across and I stood next to it for about half an hour.”
“Seth.”
“You climbed it twice, in the dark, with fifteen pounds in each hand, to get kerosene, and I sat down two miles away and had dinner.”
* * *
It was starting to get light.
Not properly. The window had gone from black to the color of a nickel, and she could see the shape of him against the wall for the first time in hours.
And she found that she did know something, and that it was not what she had gone up that hill expecting.
She had wanted, she understood, sitting on the floor of an empty house at half past five in the morning — she had wanted him to be guilty.
Not of neglect. Of something with a shape.
She had wanted there to be a man in a conference room doorway who had weighed his wife against a dinner and chosen the dinner, because you can hate that man cleanly, and you can leave him, and everybody would tell you that you were right.
And there wasn’t one. There never had been. There had been a man who had built a machine over twenty years and then stood inside it while it did precisely what it was for.
That was so much worse.
And it was the only thing in the world that could be fixed, because a machine can be taken apart, and she had watched him spend five months taking it apart in the dark where no one could see him do it.
“I’m going to say one thing,” she said, “and then we’re going to go outside, because I can’t be in this room anymore.”
“Okay.”
“You asked me the right question sixty times this year,” she said. “Is your heat on. Have you got somebody coming. You asked it of three old people on a cold road and you never told a soul, and Walt Ostrom told me about it over a fish sandwich because he assumed I knew.”
She heard him make a sound.
“That’s what I’ve got,” she said. “That’s all I’ve got. You didn’t ask it of me once in February and you’ve asked it sixty times since of people who can’t do a thing for you.”
She stopped. The window had gone gray behind him.
“You’ve got your question,” she said. “Ask it.”
He did not move for a moment.
“No,” he said.
“That was the deal. One question, and I’ll answer it.”
“I know what the deal was.” He had his forearms on his knees and his head down and he did not lift it.
“Talia, I’ve had the same question since a nurse called me on a Monday morning.
And I sat here tonight and listened to nine hours of you and somewhere around the ditch I stopped wanting it answered. ”
“Ask it anyway.”
“No.” He said it without any heat. “Because the question is do you still love me, and there are two answers and I don’t want either of them from you at five in the morning in this house.
If it’s yes I’d have taken it out of you while you were empty.
If it’s no I’d have made you say it in the room where it happened.
” He got his breath. “I’ve spent twenty years getting answers out of people at the convenient moment. I’m not doing it to you.”
Talia sat on the floor of the back room with her hands flat on her knees and did not say anything at all.
It was the first time in her adult life that a man had been handed a thing he wanted and put it down.
* * *
They went out and sat on the steps.
The sun came up over the hill behind the house, late, the water going first and the land after.
They did not touch each other. They sat about a foot apart on a concrete step in front of a building that belonged to the county now, and the insects started, and somewhere down the road somebody’s dog was going.
“I have to go,” she said, eventually. “I’ve got a delivery at seven and Marilyn’s off.”
“Yeah.”
She stood up and got her keys out.
At the truck she stopped, with the door open, and looked back at him sitting on the steps of the house he grew up in.
“Thursday,” she said.
He looked up.
“Come to the restaurant Thursday. Not at five in the morning. At eight, at night, like a person, and come in the front.”
He did not say anything at all, which by then she understood was not him being careful.
“Okay,” he managed.
“Okay,” she said, and drove down the hill with the sun coming up on her left, and got halfway to the village before she had to pull over.