5. Nadia
five
Nadia
I'm rolling the mylar overlay when the cabin door opens.
Creed comes in with his satellite unit in his hand and stands with his back against the door. He went up to the shoulder before first light, alone, and told me he'd meet me at the north pins, and he did not meet me at the north pins.
Thursday, the twenty-fourth. Two days from the end of his contract. Seven from my filing deadline. Nine days since I got out of my truck in the mud at the bottom of those steps and decided that twelve words weren't worth the trouble.
"I pulled an email," he says. "Up at the repeater. Old one, from the society — they send a delegate list out after every event and I never delete anything."
I keep my eyes on the Mylar.
"The Marine Building," he says. "Five years ago this month.
There's an N. Osei on the student list, poster session, ecological corridors, northern BC.
" He sets the unit down on the table. "I stood by the window with a woman for about twenty minutes and she told me she wasn't mapping what was there. She was mapping what wasn't."
"Creed—"
"Was that you?"
"Yes."
The stove ticks. He doesn't move off the door.
"How long have you known?"
"Since the second I got out of the truck."
He takes that the way he takes everything, all the way in, without visible motion. Then he crosses to the table and sits down across from me, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted.
"Explain it to me," he says. "I'm not angry.
I want that on the record, because I can hear how this sounds.
" He turns his hand over on the table. "It's the nine days.
" He looks at his own hands on the table.
"Every hour of the nine days, you knew something about the two of us that I didn't, and you let me keep not knowing it.
I've been walking around inside a version of this where I'm the one who found something unusual.
Where the strange part — the ease of it, how fast — was mine to be surprised by.
You watched me be surprised by it. That's what I can't get level. "
And there it is, said plainly, without one cruel word in it, which is so much harder to hear than cruelty.
So I tell him. All of it.
I tell him about the borrowed shoes and the poster tube and how the entire room had spent two hours looking at my badge and then over my shoulder, and how he took his award lanyard off and put it in his pocket and asked me what I was mapping and then didn't interrupt me once.
Twenty minutes. I tell him I went home and wrote down the thing he said about scale so I wouldn't lose it, and that I've used it in every project I've run since, and that I could never once say where I got it because I couldn't find him again — no profile, no site, a business line that rolled to a service, a P.O.
box in Kamloops. Six weeks of looking. Then eleven years of good work in a city forty minutes from wherever he was, and never once a room with both of us in it, because he signs field books and I sign reports and they don't route through the same desk.
My contracts come through regional planning.
His come through inventory and tenure. Meridian even subcontracts the survey work through a broker, so I have never in my career seen a surveyor's name on my own file until this one, when the Ministry wanted a wet signature and Ravi Bhatt read me a name over the phone and I sat down on the edge of my desk.
"I got to the top of that fire road," I say, "and you didn't know me. And it was — Creed, it was such a relief."
He doesn't say anything.
"That's the part I'm ashamed of. Not the lying.
The relief." My hands are shaking, so I put them flat on the table.
"For five years you were the thing I couldn't have.
A conversation I couldn't get back and couldn't stop thinking about, which is a genuinely pathetic way to spend your twenties, and I knew that, and it didn't help.
And then there you were, and you had no idea, and it meant that whatever happened next was going to be new.
Not a rerun. Not me trying to get a thing back.
You'd be choosing me on the evidence in front of you and not on anything I'd been carrying.
" My voice goes somewhere I don't authorize.
"And every day it got harder to give that up.
That's why I didn't say it. It wasn't fear, at the end. It was greed."
"And Saturday night?"
"Saturday night you told me it doesn't happen to you that fast, and I had to look away, because you meant five days and I meant five years" I make myself look at him.
"Why didn't you say it Sunday, then?"
"Because Sunday was better than Saturday.
" My voice cracks straight down the middle of it.
"That's the answer. Every day it got worse to say and better to have.
Monday you kissed me at the truck before I'd got my gloves off and I thought, he's doing that because of this week, not because of a room in Vancouver.
I wanted that more than I wanted to be a good person about it.
Tuesday you told me I wasn't wearing the armour up here.
Do you know what it's like to hear that from someone who doesn't know he's already the reason? "
He doesn't answer.
"I've been an honest person my whole career.
I've walked away from two contracts over data I wouldn't sign.
And I sat at that table for nine days holding the one thing you'd have wanted to know, and I told myself it was kindness.
" I press my palms flat. "I didn't want it to be about the thing I couldn't have five years ago," I say. "I wanted it to be about now."
Creed puts his elbows on the table. Looks at the wrecked aerial photo still weighted under the rock, the one with the crease across the north end from the middle of my back.
"It can be both," he says. "You have to let it be both."
"That's not how—"
"It is exactly how. It's the only thing I know how to do.
" He taps the map twice, the way he does.
"You've got a benchmark from 'seventy-eight and a bank that's moved.
You don't throw out the pin because the ground changed and you don't pretend the ground didn't change to protect the pin.
You hold both readings and you resolve them, and what you get is more true than either one on its own. "
I have to press the heels of my hands against my eyes and let out a laugh. "You're comparing me to a benchmark." That is so him.
"I'm comparing us to a survey." He reaches across and takes my wrist, the same one, thumb over the faded mark the chain left.
"Nadia. Five years ago I met someone at the worst point of my life and I lost her in the fog with everything else in that year, and I'm not angry about eleven days.
I'm angry about five years, and there's nobody in this room to be angry at for those. "
"You're allowed to need some time."
"I've had five years of time," he says. "I've had nothing but."