Chapter 4 #2
"He remembered the name," Porter said. "He wrote it on his hand in the ambulance so he wouldn't lose it.
He never had to use it, so he never called, and he's thought about that every week since October.
" He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
"That's what you were doing at eight-twenty at night.
Upside down in the trees. You were two hours from bleeding out and you were setting up somebody to protect me. "
Tess did not say anything.
There wasn't anything. She remembered none of it and she believed all of it, because it was exactly what she would do, because she had been doing it for twelve years, and hearing it out loud in her own kitchen from her own husband was like being shown a photograph of herself asleep.
"I would have said that," she said finally.
"I know."
"That's not you being wronged, Porter. Don't take that as—"
"I'm not taking it as anything," he said. "I'm telling you what you did."
"Twelve-fifty in the morning, you're closed and in recovery. One-twenty, you're in a bed on the fourth floor. Two-ten, the night nurse writes in the chart that the patient is asking for her husband."
Tess had her hand over her eyes.
"Three-forty. Same note. Four-oh-five, same note. Five-fifty, same note." He closed the notebook. "Six-ten, I walked in. That's where it stops."
He put the small thing from his coat pocket on the table between them.
It was in a hospital property bag, the kind with the red seal. Inside was her wedding ring, cut through the band on one side.
"They cut it off in the ER," he said. "Your hand was swelling. It went into property in a bag with your watch and the keys out of your pocket, and nobody told you, and it's been in a drawer in a room in the basement of that hospital for six weeks with a number on it."
She picked it up through the plastic. It was so light. That was the thing she'd never noticed about it in twelve years — how little it weighed.
"I got it out Tuesday," he said. "I haven't had it fixed. I thought about it, I got as far as the parking lot of the place, and then it seemed like—" He stopped. "It's yours. I'm not going to make a decision about it."
Tess set it down and looked at it and could not look at him.
"Why did you do all this," she said.
"Because you were by yourself," Porter said, "and I wasn't there, and I can't undo that.
There's nothing I can do about the thirtieth of October.
It's just true now, forever." His voice went.
"But you shouldn't have to carry a night you can't remember.
That's the only piece of it I could actually get for you. So I got it."
They sat with the fire and the coffee going cold and neither of them said anything for a long time.
The wind came around the north corner of the house the way it did, hunting for a way in.
"Porter."
"Yeah."
"Where were you at eight-oh-five."
He didn't flinch. That was the thing. She was watching for it, some part of her was always watching for it now, and there was nothing there to see.
"In the kitchen," he said. "At the island.
We'd come out of the study around nine— no.
Sorry. That's wrong, that's later. At eight I'd have been in the study still.
The phone was in her bag by the door, where she always puts it.
I didn't have it in my hand at any point that night and I did not look at it until she woke me up.
" He rubbed his eyes. "I've gone over it about four hundred times looking for a version where I heard it ring, because I would rather have heard it and ignored it than been asleep for it.
At least then it would be a thing I did. "
That was such a strange sentence that she let it go by.
She would think about it later. She would think about it for a long time, actually, in this same room, and she would not be able to remember whether he'd looked at her when he said it.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"I'm not saying okay to anything else. I'm saying okay to that."
He left a little after one in the morning.
He put his boots on at the door and stood there in his coat and looked around the mudroom like a man memorizing a place, and then he said, "Do you want me to come back."
"I don't know."
"That's fair."
"I'm not going to know for a while."
"That's fine," he said. "I'm not asking for a date. I'm asking whether I'm allowed to want it."
Tess leaned on the doorframe. Her shoulder ached; there was weather coming.
Everything in her was tired and running hot and she could feel the shape of what she was about to do, the way you can feel a slope going wrong under a horse two seconds before it does.
She thought: he made himself go and find Ziegler. He sat in a surgeon's office for an hour. He drove to a hospital basement and signed for a bag.
She thought: nobody in my life has ever done anything like that for me.
"Come up Sunday," she said.
Something went across his face that she had not seen on it since they were much younger.
"Sunday," he said.
"For the day. Not to stay."
"For the day."
"And Porter — you don't get to think this means something."
"I'm not going to think it means anything," he said, which was a lie, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so.
She watched the taillights go down the county road until they were nothing.
Then she got her coat and went out.
It was well below zero and the sky had that hard scrubbed look it gets up there when there's no moisture left in the air at all.
She walked down to the corral and stood at the rail.
Nothing in it. No horses at Elkhorn since the year she sold the outfit — she'd kept two for a while and then boarded them out and then let that go too, the way you let things go, one reasonable decision at a time.
Her breath went up and hung there.
She was not confused about what she had just done.
That was the part she wanted on the record, if there was a record.
She had not been tricked and she had not been swept off her feet.
She was forty-one and she had spent twenty years making calls with people's lives on them, and she had just made one, awake, at one in the morning, in the cold.
He had gone and gotten her night back for her.
That was a real thing. It could not be bought and it could not be delegated and there was nobody on earth he could have paid to do it, and he had done it and then he had put his boots on and driven three and a half hours back down.
You go back one ok at a time.
"I know," Tess said, out loud, to nobody, in a corral with nothing in it.
She stayed out there until her fingers stopped working, and then she went back into the kitchen and stood over the little bag on the table with the cut ring in it, and she did not pick it up, and she did not put it away.
At two in the morning she called Toni and got voicemail and remembered that Toni went to bed at nine like a farmer.
"It's me," she said. "I said I'd call after. So — I'm calling after."
She looked at the ring.
"He's coming back Sunday," she said. "Don't say anything."