Chapter 5
The gain knob problem took her nine days and was solved, in the end, by a piece of a bicycle inner tube.
She had tried everything else first. She tried bracing her wrist. She tried her left hand, which was steady and stupid. She tried taping two fingers together, which did nothing, and a wrist weight, which helped for a few minutes and then made everything worse.
Then one evening she was standing in the feed room looking at a bucket with a patch on it and she thought: bigger.
Not steadier. Bigger. The problem was not that her hand shook.
Her hand was going to shake for a long time, possibly forever, and no amount of wanting was going to change it.
The problem was that the knob was the size of a shirt button and she had been trying to be the old Mila operating the old gear.
She cut a strip of inner tube and wrapped it around the knob until it was the size of a bottle cap, and taped it, and it was ugly, and it worked on the first try.
She sat on the cottage floor and laughed at the ceiling.
Nine days on a problem and the answer had been to stop asking her hand to be different and start asking the machine to be.
She thought about that for a while, sitting there with an ugly recorder in her lap, and she did not push the thought any further, because some thoughts you leave on the table where you can see them.
* * *
She started recording the barn.
There was no plan in it, and she would have been embarrassed if anyone had asked. She simply had the thing working and the thing wanted to be pointed at something, and the barn was there.
So she got up in the dark, which she was doing anyway, and she sat in the aisle on an overturned bucket at ten past five with the recorder on her knees and the ugly knob under her thumb, and she caught the place waking up.
Grain hitting the bottom of a bucket. The particular squeal of the second stall door. Tansy banging with a front foot, which she did every single morning and which Nikki swore at every single morning. A kettle in the tack room. Somebody’s radio, far off, playing the same six songs.
And underneath all of it, all the time, the huge slow sound of animals breathing in a building.
She had forgotten. That was the shameful part. She had forgotten what it was like to sit still inside a room with her ears wide open and let it come, and six years had gone by in which she had been in rooms constantly, every week, hundreds of rooms, and had not once heard a single one of them.
The first morning she recorded forty minutes and listened back twice.
The second morning she went out to the far field with a windscreen and got the sound of the mare herd coming in over frozen ground, which is a sound like nothing else on earth, and she sat in the cold afterward with the headphones around her neck and felt better than she had felt since before October.
* * *
The friendships came back the way a bad knee comes back. Slowly, and then all at once, and with some swelling.
She had let a great many of them go. She could see that now with an awful clarity: eight years of we should and next month for sure, of becoming someone who was always at something.
When she had married Jason she had had a whole life full of people who worked odd hours and owned no good coats, and by the time she came off that horse she had a Christmas card list.
In January three of them found her.
Corby, who had cut the port series with her and now taught at Towson, drove out and sat in the cottage for half a day with her boots on the woodbox and talked shop until it was dark.
A woman named Maribel who she had not seen in five years sent a package with no note in it, just a hard drive full of everything they had ever made together, which undid Mila entirely for about half an hour.
Corby was the one who said the thing that stuck.
She had gotten to the bottom of a bottle of wine Mila was not drinking any of, and she was doing what she always did when she got there, which was tell the truth in a slightly louder voice than necessary.
“I’ll say it, then,” she said. “We all thought you’d died.”
“Corby.”
“Not died died. Obviously. I mean at the wedding.” She waved the glass.
“You went in and the door shut. Eight years. And we all sat around at things saying, oh, Mila’s doing the foundation, she looks great in the pictures — and I want to be clear, we were all also being cowards, because none of us called either. ”
“It wasn’t a door shutting.”
“Wasn’t it?”
Mila opened her mouth to say no, and found she did not have the sentence.
“Anyway,” Corby said, more gently. “I’ve missed you. And I’ve missed the work, which is a separate thing, and I’m going to keep saying both until one of them takes.”
She left at nine. Mila washed the one glass and stood at the sink for a while afterward with the water running over her hands, thinking about the difference between a door shutting and a woman closing it from the inside, an inch at a time, over eight years, so slowly that nobody in the hallway heard a thing.
She put Maribel’s hard drive on one night at the end of the week and could not do it.
She got about ninety seconds into the third episode of the port series — a man in his seventies talking about the last day of the grain pier, and behind him the water, and behind the water the whole city — and then her own voice came in over the top of it.
Twenty-nine years old. Asking a question.
She stopped it with her thumb.
It was not the content. It was the voice.
She had forgotten that she used to sound like that: unhurried, interested, entirely certain that the man would answer her and that she had a right to be in the room with a microphone.
There was nothing in it that was performing.
There was nothing in it that was managing anybody.
She sat with her hand over her mouth for a while.
Somewhere in the eight years after that recording she had acquired a different voice — warm, smooth, unfailingly pleasant, a voice for a podium and a hundred and fifty donors — and she had gotten so good at it that she had used it on her own husband in her own kitchen without noticing.
She put the headphones back on and listened to the whole episode standing up.
Then she went and looked at herself in the small mirror by the door for a minute, which she had been avoiding for three months for reasons she had assumed were about the scar.
“Okay,” she said out loud, to nobody, in the old voice.
And Corby told somebody, and that somebody told Nate Halloran.
* * *
Nate called the landline on a Tuesday, which meant Corby had given him the number, which meant Corby had decided something on her behalf.
“I hear you’re alive,” he said.
“Hello, Nate.”
“I also hear you’ve got a barn full of tape and you’re not telling anyone, which is very like you and I’ve always hated it.”
She sat down on the arm of the couch. Her chest had done something unexpected at the sound of his voice, and it took her a second to identify it, and the answer was that it was the first time in three months anybody had talked to her like she was a person who did a job.
“It’s not tape,” she said. “It’s forty minutes of a horse kicking a door.”
“Is it good?”
“Nate.”
“Is it good, Mila.”
She looked at the recorder on the table with the inner tube taped around the knob.
“Yes,” she said.
“Right. I’m coming out Thursday. Don’t tidy, I don’t care, I’ll bring lunch.” A pause. “And listen — I’m not going to do the thing where I say I’m sorry about all of it for ten minutes. I am. That’s the ten minutes. Thursday.”
* * *
He came out Thursday in a car full of coffee cups and stayed four hours.
He was forty-five and going gray and still carried his own gear in a bag with a strap he had repaired himself, and he looked exactly the same as he had looked the last time she saw him, which had been at a wrap party in a bar on Aliceanna Street with a drink in his hand and her husband’s car waiting outside.
He walked in, looked around the cottage, said, “This is great, actually,” and meant it.
Then he put the headphones on.
She had not been in a room with somebody listening to her work in six years. She had forgotten how unbearable it is. He sat at her little table with his eyes on the middle distance and his face doing absolutely nothing, and she went and washed two mugs that were already clean.
Twenty minutes in he took the headphones off and set them down.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Where’s the rest of it?”
“That’s all I’ve got. That’s three weeks of a barn.”
“No it isn’t.” He turned in the chair to look at her. “Mila. Come on. Who am I talking to. That is not a barn.”
She stood at the sink with a dish towel.
“There’s a bit,” he said, “about nine minutes in, where you’re in the aisle and there’s nothing happening.
Nothing. Just the building and the breathing.
And it goes on much, much too long for a barn, and you didn’t cut it, and you’re the best editor I ever worked with, so don’t sit there and tell me that’s a barn. ”
The radiator ticked. Out in the yard somebody dropped a metal gate latch.
“It’s a room where nobody knows anyone’s listening,” Mila said.
“There it is.”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
“You don’t have to know what it is yet.” He rubbed his face.
“God. Okay. Listen, I’m going to say the thing I drove out here to say, and then you can throw me out.
There’s money for a long-form series at the network, two of the four slots are gone, and the ones they’ve got are fine and forgettable, and I’ve been sitting in a room every Monday for a year listening to people pitch me things I could make with anybody. ”
“Nate.”
“I want you to do one. A real one. Six parts, a spring deadline, proper budget, proper post, you’d have to actually be a person with a schedule again.
” He held up a hand. “And before you tell me about the hands — I’ve got a kid on staff who does nothing but rig.
That’s her whole job. You point and she builds it.
The hands are not the problem you think they are, and I say that with love. ”
Mila stood there and found she could not speak for a moment.
It was not gratitude. It was something worse and more useful. It was the feeling of being handed back a version of yourself you had privately decided was gone, by somebody who did not appear to think it had ever been in doubt.
“What’s it about?” she said.
“I don’t care. You tell me in March.”
“That’s not how it works and you know it.”
“It’s how it works when it’s you,” Nate said, and started gathering the coffee cups. “I’ve got to go, I’m supposed to be in Washington. Think about it.”
* * *
At the door he stopped and looked at her, and the register changed, and she saw it coming a full second before it arrived.
“You look well,” he said. “I mean — you look like hell, obviously, you’ve been through a war. But you look like yourself. More than at that wrap party.”
“That was six years ago.”
“I know.” He shrugged his bag onto his shoulder. “You stood there all night with your coat on.”
Then he said goodbye and drove off down the frozen lane, and Mila went back inside and stood in the middle of the cottage for a while.
She was thirty-eight years old and separated from her husband and a man she had known for twelve years had told her she looked like herself, and something in her had gone warm all the way down.
That was all. He had not done anything. He had been perfectly correct, and he would go on being perfectly correct, and she would bet money he had thought about it in the car and decided not to.
But it had landed. She let herself notice that it had landed.
She stood there in her borrowed room and let the whole thing be true for about a minute: that she was still a woman that a man might look at like that, that she had not known whether she was, and that not knowing had been sitting in her for longer than three months.
Then she put the kettle on.
* * *
She said yes on Sunday.
She called him from the barn office with the index card on the wall in front of her, the one with the number on it and the date in the summer.
“It’s not for the money,” she said.
“It’s a bit for the money.”
“It’s a bit for the money.”
“Good,” Nate said. “That’s healthy. When can you come in?”
“I can’t drive yet.”
“Then I’ll come to you until you can.”
She hung up and sat in the office chair with her hands flat on the desk, and outside the window the girls were bringing horses in, and the light was going, and she listened to the whole yard at once the way she used to.
Then she took a notebook out of the drawer, because there were things she was going to have to look at now that she had not looked at yet, and she wrote at the top of the first page:
What do people say in a room when they think nobody can hear them.
She sat and looked at that for a long time.
Then she wrote, underneath it, in a hand that had gotten much worse in three months but was still legibly hers:
What did the nurses hear. What do all of them hear. Who else is in there.
And she put the pen down, because her chest had gone tight, and because she knew what she had just started and it was not a barn.
* * *
She did the reading that week, on the barn office computer, at night, with the door shut.
She had been avoiding it since November. She had told herself it was because she did not want to be a woman who looked up her own condition at two in the morning, and that was true, and it was not the reason.
The reason was that she was afraid of finding out that it was common.
It was not common, exactly. It had a name, which she had not known, and which she wrote down and looked at for a while: covert awareness.
There were studies. There were numbers, and the numbers were not enormous, and they were not small enough to be comfortable either.
One in something. Enough that every long-term unit in the country was going to have one.
Enough that it was not a story about her.
There was a paper about what they did with the finding.
That was the part she read four times. Some places ran an assessment, and if it came back positive they told the family, and they changed how the room worked: talk to her, tell her what day it is, tell her before you touch her, do not have conversations over her that you would not have in front of her.
Mila sat back in the office chair.
I’m going to turn you now. I’m going to be about a minute.
One nurse. One, out of all of them, the whole six weeks. The rest of that floor had stood at the foot of her bed and read her name off a chart, and it had never once occurred to her to wonder why one of them was different.
She looked at the screen for a long moment. Then she wrote a third line in the notebook, under the other two, and this one she wrote slowly, because she already did not like where it went.
Did anyone ever test me?
Outside, a horse kicked a door. She heard the whole building answer it, and then settle, and then go on breathing.