20. Sacha #3
"The person who didn't walk out of the doorway. You told me I could have the rest later." Her fingers had not moved off the scar. "It's later."
I lay there and looked at the rafters and discovered, to my considerable surprise, that the sentence was already assembled and waiting.
"His name was Rourke," I said. "Daniel Rourke, and he was twenty years old, and I have not said the whole of it out loud since the night it happened."
"Say the whole of it again."
So I said the whole of it again. It did not come easier the second time, and it did not come worse either, which was new information.
"That's better," she said. "I've got two left. Did anybody ever tell his mother what actually happened inside that building?"
"Nobody did."
"That includes you."
"I found her address eleven months afterward.
I drove nine hours, and I parked across the road from her house, and I sat there from four in the afternoon until it went dark.
" My voice went flat and level and correct, laying the facts out in order, since the order is the only piece of it I have ever controlled.
"She came out once to bring in a rubbish bin.
She had his build. I sat in that car and I ran every version of the conversation, and not one of them left her better off than she was before I knocked.
So I did not knock. I drove nine hours home, and I have never gone back. "
"That's the coward's version, is it?"
"That is what I have called it, yes."
"I didn't ask what you call it." She lifted her head. "This is the last one, and then I'll leave you alone. What's in the drawer you never open?"
I have been read by professionals. None of them managed it as fast as she does, and she does not appear to be trying.
"You have been through every drawer in this house."
"I've been through all of them but that one, and I've watched you not open it for two weeks. You set the whetstone on top of it like you're weighting down a lid."
I got up. I have carried grown men out of buildings with less effort than it took me to cross my own floor and pull that drawer open.
Under the whetstone and a coil of wire there was a flat tin, and inside the tin there was a wristwatch of the cheap kind.
It had a steel bracelet, a scratched dial, and a crystal cracked clean across the twelve.
I carried it over and put it into her open hand, and then I sat on the edge of the bed. I could not say the rest of it lying down beside her.
"It came off in my hand," I said. "I do not remember taking it.
I had hold of him, and then I did not, and when I stood up it was in my palm, and I put it in my coat, because a man's hands will do their own filing at a time like that.
I have moved house four times since then.
I have burned papers, and put a car in a lake, and buried two names I used to answer to.
That has come with me every time." I looked at it lying in her fingers.
"I cannot give it back and I cannot throw it away, and I have not managed to decide which of those two would be the greater cowardice. "
She turned it over. She studied the crack across the glass the way she studies everything, all the way to the bottom of it.
Then she said, "I'm not going to tell you it wasn't your fault."
"I would not have believed you."
"I know. I've had it said to me in a hospice corridor, and every single person who said it made it worse.
It's a door being shut in your face by somebody who wants the conversation to be over.
" She closed her fingers around it. "So I'll give you the only thing I actually know, and it is not a comfort, it's just true.
I have been in the room at the end more times than I can count.
The ones who go with a stranger's hands on them and a stranger's voice telling them to hold on, they know it.
Whatever else is shutting down, that much gets through. They are not alone in it."
"That is not absolution."
"I know. I'm not qualified to issue that.
" She sat up and set the watch on the crate beside the bed with the dial showing, where a man would see it first thing.
"You keep telling me you couldn't fix him.
You couldn't. Nobody could. But you did not leave him, and you are the one who has carried his watch through four houses and two names, and I would like it noted that none of that is the behavior of a man who doesn't care. "
I had no answer for her. There was none to have. She did not appear to require one.
She pulled me down and got both arms around me, and it should have been ridiculous, a woman that size holding a man this size, and it was not ridiculous in the slightest. She held on.
She did not pat me, and she did not tell me it would be all right, and she did not ask one further question, which after the previous ten minutes I recognized as an enormous act of restraint.
I'd never told a living soul about the boy in the doorway. She held me like I was something worth holding instead of something that got someone killed. And I fell asleep, just once, believing her.