Chapter 5 #3
The bedroom was freezing. The old radiator under the window knocked twice and did nothing. She got under the quilt and he got under it after her and for about a minute all either of them could do was shake.
"This house is criminal," he said, through his teeth.
"You grew up in it."
"I grew up in a wing of it. There was a fireplace."
"Poor baby."
"Come here," he said, and she came there, and the shaking turned into something else about ninety seconds later.
The second time was nothing like the first.
The first had been a dam going. This was slow, and quiet, and face to face, with a quilt over both of them and the window frosted white and no light in the room except what came up off the snow.
He got over her and took the weight on his forearms and went in slow, and stopped, and stayed there.
"Okay?"
"Yes."
"The arm—"
"Porter, if you ask me about my arm one more time tonight I'm going to hit you with it."
He laughed, and she felt it everywhere, and then he moved and neither of them laughed again for a while.
He kept his face close. That was the thing about the second time.
He kept his forehead against hers or his mouth at her temple and he talked, low, more than he ever had in twelve years — not dirty, nothing performed, just her name and there and I know and once, into her hair, in a voice that had come completely apart, "I'm not going anywhere. "
She didn't answer that. She got her legs around him and pulled him down and put her mouth on his throat instead, and he made a sound like he'd been hit.
It built for a long time. She had that experience she'd read about and never entirely believed in, of not being sure where she stopped — of being warm all the way through, and safe, which was the word that arrived and would not go away afterward.
Safe. In this house, on this mattress, under this man, seventy days after lying upside down in the trees while he slept thirty minutes from the hospital.
When she came the second time it was long and slow and she made almost no noise at all, and he held still inside her and let it happen, and then he pressed his face into her neck and followed her over.
Afterward he didn't move off. She didn't want him to. She lay there with his weight on her and her hand on the back of his neck and the cold air on her shoulders and she thought, this.
"Say something," he said eventually, into the pillow.
"I don't have anything."
"That's a first."
"Shut up." She turned her head. "Porter."
"Yeah."
"What time did you get to the hospital?"
She had not planned to ask it. It arrived the way happy questions do, drifting, weightless, out of a warm room — she had been thinking about that morning, about him unshaven in the chair, and she had wanted, absurdly, to be told about it.
She felt him breathe.
"Ten past six," he said.
"No, I know that. I mean when did you leave the house."
"As soon as I knew," he said. "I was in the truck about four minutes after she woke me up.
There was still weather on the front range and I got behind a plow on Sixth.
That was the longest hour of my life." His hand kept moving in her hair, slow, unbroken.
"I've thought about that drive more than almost anything. "
She lay there.
Something in it did not fit. She could feel the shape of it the way you feel a stone in a boot — she had asked when he left and he had answered about the drive, and both things were answers, and only one of them was to her question.
And under that, quiet, patient, the arithmetic.
He said Marin woke him at four. He said he was in the truck four minutes later.
The gate at that house had opened, on his code, at 5:40 in the morning. She had copied that line out in her own hand and she could see it the way you can see a word you have written a hundred times.
Tess lay very still in the dark with her husband's arm across her and did the sum twice, and got the same answer both times.
Ninety-six minutes between the truck he says he was sitting in and the gate that actually opened.
She had the number. It was in her own handwriting on a legal pad in a drawer in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.
It would have taken her two minutes to go get it, and she could have said Porter, tell me about the ninety-six minutes, and it would have been an ordinary question between two people who had just been as close as two people get.
"You cold?" he said.
"No."
"You want the quilt up?"
"Yeah."
He pulled it up over her shoulder and settled his arm back down and was asleep in about four minutes, the way he always had been, the way she used to complain about.
Tess lay awake for another hour.
She thought: he got behind a plow.
She thought: he was probably rounding. People round.
She thought: I will ask him in the morning.
She did not ask him in the morning.
She would come back to that night for the rest of her life, and not to the good part.
Not the fire, not the rug, not the second time under the quilt with her hand on the back of his neck.
This. The dark, and the number, and the moment where she had it in her hand and set it down, because she had been happy for six days and could not stand to stop.