Chapter 1 #2
The dogs' vet appointments, which she did, and the foundation's gala seating, which she did, and the ridge road easement, which she had handled entirely herself for three years and had never been thanked for, and did not want to be thanked for, and had wanted somebody to notice.
The list got long. She lay on her side in the dark and worked on it, and she was not crying.
That was the part she could not explain later.
She was not crying at all. She was calm, and thorough, and she went through it like a seed inventory, and somewhere in the middle of it she understood that she had been putting this list together for about four years and had never once let herself get to the end of it.
At some point she said her mother's name out loud, once, to hear a voice.
The boxes were four feet from her the entire time.
She did not open one. She thought about it for a long stretch in there and decided that if she was going to die under that hill she was not going to spend the last part of it crying over a dead woman's dish towels, and if she was not going to die, she would open them upstairs, in daylight, like a person.
She was still working on the list when she heard the digging.
It was Truman Fenner, and it was ten past eleven at night, and he had come back up the ridge at seven and been turned around twice and had come back again.
He got the cellar door clear with a pry bar and a shovel and forty minutes of his own hands. When it came off, the sky behind him was orange in three directions and there was nothing standing above her except the chimney and one wall of the kitchen.
Renee climbed out.
She was filthy and her hands were black and her hair had grit in it down to the scalp.
She was not burned. She was not cut. Her lungs were fine and would stay fine.
She was, by any measure a doctor would use, completely undamaged, and she found out later that this was the single most annoying fact of her whole life, because it meant that nobody could see a thing.
Fenner had his arms around her before she was all the way up.
He was fifty-six years old and he had known her since she was a kid and he was shaking harder than she was.
"I counted the trailer," he kept saying. "I counted the trailer, Renee, I counted the horses, I did not — nobody said — I counted what I was told to count —"
"Truman."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"Truman. Stop."
He stopped. He put her in his truck with the dogs, who lost their minds, and he drove her down a road with the ditches still smoking on both sides, and neither of them said one word the whole way down.
The shelter was the gym at the county fairgrounds.
It was one in the morning and it was still full.
Two hundred cots and everybody's dog and a table of donated coats already picked over.
The lights were the flat white kind that make everyone look like they have been sick for a week.
Somebody's grandmother was asleep sitting up in a folding chair with her purse on her lap.
Chase came across the floor of that gym so fast he knocked a chair over.
He got hold of her and he did not say anything for a long time. He was shaking. His hands were shaking on her back and his face was in her hair and he said her name twice and that was all.
Renee stood in it.
That was the honest word for what she did. She did not push him off and she did not hold him back. She stood in it, the way you stand in weather, and over his shoulder she watched a man at the coat table hold up a child's jacket and put it down again.
"I thought you were in the truck," Chase said. "Renee. I thought you were in the first truck."
"I know."
"I thought —"
"I know." She heard how flat she sounded. She could not do anything about it. "Chase. My phone's dead. I need to call Maggie. She's going to have heard by now."
"Yeah. Yes. Here —"
He put his phone in her hand.
He was still talking. He was saying something about a hotel in Boulder, about how they had rooms, about how Gil had already handled it, and Renee had unlocked the phone with the code she had known for nine years and was looking at the screen.
The recent calls were right there. Nobody has ever put a thing where you would not see it.
Kendall Croft — 4:41 PM — 1h 30m
She looked at it.
Four forty-one to six eleven.
At 4:41 she had already been in the dark for an hour.
At 5:00 she had stopped expecting anybody.
At 6:11 she had been on the floor with her face by the drain, working on a list of everything she had given away, and he had been on the phone, and the phone had not been busy for anybody else, because it had been busy with that.
Renee stood in a gym full of people who had lost their houses and did the only arithmetic that has ever mattered to her.
Ten minutes to clear the ridge. Three vehicles. Two hundred cots in a room. And ninety minutes, unbroken, in the middle of the worst afternoon in the history of Boulder County, given to a woman who was not his wife.
She thought, clearly: he did not choose her over me.
And then, right behind it, worse: he never had to.
"Renee?"
She scrolled up. She did not decide to. Her thumb did it.
Croft. Croft. Croft. Monday. Sunday, 11:40 at night. The Thursday before that, twice. It went back and back and it did not stop, and she quit at a point where she could still tell herself she had not gone looking.
She locked the phone.
"Sorry," she said. "I couldn't remember her number anyway."
She handed it back to him.
Chase took it. He was looking at her with his whole face open in a way she had not seen in probably four years, and he had smoke in his eyebrows and a burn hole in the sleeve of a coat that cost more than Fenner's truck, and he loved her.
She could see him loving her from two feet away.
That was the thing. That had never once been the question.
"Let's get you out of here," he said.
"In a minute."
"Renee —"
"In a minute, Chase."
He nodded. He backed off half a step, which for him was an enormous act, and he went to find somebody to sign something.
Renee stood where she was, under the flat white lights, with her hands black to the wrist and her mother's four boxes still in a hole in the ground under a house that no longer existed, and she watched her husband cross the gym.
She was thirty-eight years old. She had a lease in her coat pocket that he did not know about. She had lain on a dirt floor for six hours and made a list.
And now she had one more thing for it.