Chapter 5
Sullivan
The next nine days are a slow, methodical breach of the system.
Day one: caulk on the casement. Forty-five minutes. I refuse coffee. I refuse a cinnamon roll.
Day two: she’s on the woodpile. Wrong end.
I stand at my window and watch her try to lift a round of pine that weighs a third of her.
Before I know it, I’m back at her cabin, splitting her wood wordlessly while she stands on the porch with two mugs of coffee and tells me about a podcast she heard about salt mining in Polish history.
I take the coffee and refrain from commenting about Polish salt.
She doesn’t stop talking, which appears to be acceptable to her.
Day three: door hinge.
Day four: leak under the kitchen sink, which she identified by the highly diagnostic method of putting a plastic mixing bowl under it and giving it a name.
Day five, I stay for an hour, only because she’s decided to refinish a drawer with a piece of sandpaper she found in said drawer, and watching her sand gives a man a headache.
“Like this,” I say finally, taking the sandpaper. “With the grain. Long strokes, not short, or you’ll polish yourself a bald spot.”
The words sit between us for a moment that neither of us acknowledges.
“I’m sanding a drawer with religious intensity.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Her hair is tied up in a kerchief. She has smudges on the back of her hand, her glasses have sawdust on the lenses, and she’s wearing a smile I cannot look at directly.
On day six, she puts a plate down on the porch step before I can leave. The plate has a sandwich on it, and the sandwich has mustard on it, and I do not want to know how she figured out that mustard is my favorite.
“Don’t make a thing of it,” she says.
“Don’t quote me to me.”
“Eat your sandwich, Mercer.”
I eat it on the porch step.
She goes back inside. Like it’s nothing. Like she didn’t figure out the one food I keep in my refrigerator at all times—yellow mustard, not Dijon, not anything with seeds in it—and put it on a sandwich without comment or expectation of credit.
I eat the whole sandwich.
I sit with the plate on my knee and the afternoon light turning gold and try not to think about how warm her hands would have been when she made it. I fail.
On day seven, she called me Mercer like it’s a nickname.
On day eight, she does it again.
On day nine, my head turns when she says it. Some part of me has started to think of it as my name.
On day ten, she says, “Sullivan, can I ask you something?”
The system collapses on day ten.
We’re on the porch. Late afternoon. The sun is doing the thing it does at altitude, where it gets golden and serious about it.
Tess is sitting on the new step in a sweater the color of daffodils.
I’m leaning against the porch rail, holding a coffee mug she pressed into my hand thirty seconds ago, mid-job and unprotesting because somewhere along the way I stopped pretending I had somewhere better to be.
“Yeah.”
“Why are you up here?”
I look at her.
She’s not looking at me. She’s looking out at the valley, the line of the ridge, the cold blue of distance.
Her cheek is in profile and the light is doing very nice things to it and I have answered a version of this question for nine days through silence and labor and the studious avoidance of the part where a person tells the truth.
“Personal preference,” I say.
“Mm.” She tips her chin. “Okay.”
She lets it go. Just like that.
A muscle in my chest unknots, and three seconds later, ties itself in a different shape.
“You?” I ask before I can stop the word.
She turns her head and looks at me from behind those glasses with the sawdust on them. Her eyes are a shade of blue I’m not going to name.
“Personal preference,” she says.
A quarter laugh. Mine. I don’t know where it came from.
She grins at me. “Easy,” she says. “We’re easy.”
“Yeah.”
For a long minute, we sit with it. The wind comes east, the casement holds, and a hawk shrills somewhere out over the slope, and—
The hawk shrills again.
The cry is sharp. Right above us. A second one calls back from across the ridge. A higher pitch, urgent, angled wrong.
A branch cracks behind the cabin. Loud and sharp. Wet wood, snapping.
The crack comes through me sideways.
I’m on the porch.
Then I’m not.
The porch is an empty dwelling, and the dwelling is concrete, and the concrete is hot, and there are men on either side of me whose names I haven’t said for two years and whose voices I can hear like a radio I can’t turn off, and the bird isn’t a bird; the bird is the whistle of something incoming, and I know with the part of my brain that can still narrate that I’ve lost time, but I don’t know how much, or how to get it back—
“Sullivan.”
A voice. Close. Small.
Not a man’s voice.
Tess.
Tess.
“Sullivan, hey. Hey. You’re on a porch. You’re in Hollow Peak. The cabin’s at your back, and the wind’s coming east, and it’s three p.m. on a Thursday.”
Her voice is calm.
“In for four,” she says. “Hold for four. Out for four. You’re not alone. You don’t have to come back fast. I’m just here.”
It’s the four-count I used to give other men. The roles have flipped. I can’t move yet, but I can hear her.
I close my eyes.
I breathe in for four because she’s asking. Hold for four. Out for four.
A second time. A third.
The nightmare scene recedes.
The porch comes back: the worn pine of the rail under my hand, the mug I’m somehow still holding, the smell of woodsmoke from the chimney, the citrus aroma of orange marmalade from the toast we ate.
Tess is sitting on the step.
She hasn’t left me, but she hasn’t come closer. She’s put her own coffee mug down and turned her body slightly toward me, hands open and resting on her knees, her face calm in the soft, awful way of people who’ve been on porches with people in this state before.
She’s not afraid of me.
She’s afraid for me.
There’s a difference, and the knowledge sinks deep into my chest.
“I’m—” My voice is like sand. “I’m here.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
I close my eyes. “It was a hawk.”
“Yes.”
“Two hawks. Calling each other.”
“Yeah.” She nods slowly. “And a branch. And a wind shift. I almost startled too.”
She says it kindly, and we both know it’s not the same.
“Can I ask,” she says, as carefully as someone walking on ice, “how long have you been doing the four-count?”
“Four years.”
“Mm. It’s a good one.”
“Yeah.”
A long, long quiet.
The wind moves the branches. The hawks—real hawks, plain old red-tails, shrill and rude and ordinary—call again. Just a call. Just birds.
“I’m not asking what happened,” she says softly. “I’m not asking what they trained you to do, or what you did or what you didn’t, or who you lost, or any of it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“Okay.”
“And if you want me to leave the porch, I’ll leave the porch.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out before I’ve considered it. Hard and quick, like a man pushing back from a ledge.
“Don’t,” I say again. Softer. “Don’t leave the porch.”
“All right.” She picks up her mug and holds it in both hands. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I look at her sideways. At the ridge above her, the sky behind her, the dust of sandpaper on her cheek where she wiped sweat with the back of her hand earlier. She’s the most ordinary, beautiful, terrifying thing I’ve seen in five years.
“Six,” I say.
She looks at me, a question in her eyes.
“Call sign,” I say. “Six. Because I always—” I clear my throat. “I always watched everyone’s back.”
“Six,” she says softly, as if she’s been handed something precious.
“Yeah.”
“Hi, Six,” she whispers.
“Hi, Tess.”
She smiles. It’s the smallest, most undeserved thing I’ve ever received.
“Drink your coffee,” she says. “It’s getting cold.”
I drink my coffee. It’s warm, and the porch holds, and the wind comes east, and the woman on the porch step doesn’t run.
The system is gone. It crumbled into pieces around me, and I didn’t even hear it collapse.