25. Lily
LILY
I'm a nurse. I can tell you the precise difference between stress and a symptom. That night I lied to myself with a clinician's confidence.
It started with the floor. I was reaching for the coffee tin on the high shelf and the whole room took a slow quarter turn to the left, and I went down onto one knee with my hand flat on the cupboard door and stayed there until it stopped.
It ran twelve seconds. I counted every one of them, because counting is what I do instead of panicking.
Then I got up and did what every nurse in the world does with her own body, which is to run the differential and then throw it away.
He had spent all of the previous day out on the ridge with a pole and a rifle, and he had come in after dark with about nine words in him, so there was nobody to notice me not eating.
Dehydration was available, given that I had not had water since the night before.
Low blood sugar was on the list too, because I had skipped breakfast twice that week.
I could blame my inner ear and the cold.
It might have been postural, except that I had not stood up, I had reached up, and there is a difference and I know exactly what it is.
There was sleep debt. There were two weeks of adrenaline.
And there was a head wound nineteen days old that had come with a concussion nobody ever scanned, and the nearest scanner sat in a hospital I had no business walking into, in a town I was forbidden to enter.
That last one was the useful diagnosis. I took it and I held onto it, and it got me all the way to lunch.
Sacha came in around ten with the cold on him and his eyes already somewhere else, and I put my back to the stove so he was looking at the side of my face.
"I am going out on the ice," he said. "I will cross to the far shore, and I will be gone six hours and possibly eight."
"You mean the lodge."
"I am going to look at a building."
"You're going to break into somebody's summer house."
"I will start on the outside." He was pulling the second pair of socks on standing up, which is a thing he can do and I cannot. "If a man means to watch this slope he does it from that deck. I would like to know what he will see, and where he will stand, and what is between him and the water."
"Take the dog."
"The dog stays. If somebody comes up that road I want a hundred and forty pounds of noise in this house."
"Tank's not going to bite anybody."
"He does not have to bite. He has to be enormous and loud in a small room.
" He straightened up. "Here are the rules while I am gone.
Bar the door. The rifle stays where I have left it and you know where that is.
Nobody comes in for any reason. You do not go outside past the woodpile, and you do not go anywhere near that road. "
And here is the part I am least proud of, since I am the one who stood in this kitchen a week ago and made that man swear he would never hand me anything false.
"Understood," I said.
I lied to him. Not by inventing anything, which is the sort of distinction he taught me and which I had no business borrowing.
He said do not go near the road, and I said understood, and I already knew that the second his shape moved out onto the white I was going to take his truck and drive it forty miles.
He stopped at the door. He looked at me a beat too long, which he does, and which is why living with him is like living with a very quiet polygraph.
"You are pale."
"I'm always pale. I'm indoors and it's the middle of winter."
"You did not eat."
"I ate at six." I hadn't. "Go and look at your building."
He went. I watched him from the window until he was a dark stroke a long way out on that lake, moving at the flat unhurried pace of a man who has decided how long something is going to take, and then I turned around and took the calendar down off its nail.
It is one of those free ones from a farm supply store, with a tractor on it, and I had been marking my days on it since the second week, out of the habit of a woman who has spent two years knowing exactly how many days she has left in a place.
Here is what I have to admit before I tell you the arithmetic.
I stopped keeping track of my own cycle a long time ago.
Two years of nights and a new time zone every three months and grief sitting on my chest had made it unreliable to the point of uselessness, and at some stage I quit writing it down, on the grounds that a number meaning nothing is worse than no number at all.
Every nurse on every unit I have ever worked has a woman like me on it.
We take a thousand histories and ask a thousand strangers the first question on the form, and we do not ask it of ourselves, because our bodies have stopped being things we live in and become things we commute in.
So I sat down at his table with the tractor calendar and a pencil and I asked myself the first question on the form.
And then I counted.
I counted from the last date I was sure of. I counted forward, and I counted back, and I did the whole sum twice on the back of a gas receipt in the hand I use for charts, small and neat and legible to a stranger, and some part of me had already decided this was a document.
The window landed on the night of the storm breaking. It landed on the night I took his hand and led him eight feet across his own house.
I sat there with the pencil in my fingers and did not move for a while.
Here is the clinical part, and I want it written down properly, since it is the only piece of this where I was still doing my job.
It was ten days. Ten days is early. Ten days is too early for nausea in most women and much too early for anything to be certain, and a test taken at ten days can come back with one line and mean absolutely nothing at all.
Four or five more days and a negative would start to be worth something.
I knew all of it. I could have taught it.
I got up and put my coat on anyway.
The truck started on the second try and resented me for it.
I took the ridge road down at a crawl with my hands at eleven and one and my heart going like something trapped, and I did not go left toward Cutter's Hollow, where Earl Dombrowski would have had the news airborne before I made it back to the truck.
I went right, and then right again, and I drove half an hour through country with nothing in it but tamarack and mailboxes until I came to a curve with three buildings on it and a sign that said OTTER BEND, and one gas station with two pumps and a lit window.
I sat in the truck for four minutes talking myself into being an adult about it.
The store smelled of hot dogs that had been turning on their rollers since morning.
I did what I have done in eight states, which is to go in with a plan.
Three items I actually needed went into my hands first, and the fourth one went in among them so it would arrive at the counter as part of a crowd.
Chips, a roll of tape, and a jar of instant coffee, because his tin was almost out and I am apparently the kind of woman who thinks about a man's coffee while buying a pregnancy test.
The tests were behind the counter. Of course they were.
The clerk was about sixty, in a cardigan the color of oatmeal, and she had a chin I recognized immediately, and I want to be clear that I noticed the chin a full second before I noticed the danger.
"Will that be all, hon?"
"I'll take one of those as well." I pointed at the shelf behind her without looking at it directly, the way you point at something in a police lineup.
She turned around. She took her time. She came back with the box and set it on the counter between the chips and the tape, and then she looked at my face with the frank, unhurried interest of a woman who has all afternoon.
"You're the girl from up the ridge," she said.
The floor did the quarter turn again, and this time it had nothing to do with my blood sugar.
"I'm sorry?"
"Earl's my cousin. He runs the Gas-N-Go.
" She tapped the counter, pleased with herself.
"Earl told Deborah, and Deborah told my sister, and my sister telephoned me inside the hour.
Chinese girl with a camera, staying with the fella off the ridge road.
You've got the strap mark." She nodded at my neck as though presenting evidence. "Marge said the same. You'd be Lily."
There are moments when your entire body tries to leave a building without you. I have been in a room with a man who wanted me to tell him where I sleep, and I was not as frightened then as I was standing at that counter with a cardboard box under my hand.
"That's me," I said.
"He's a quiet one." She rang up the chips. "Deborah says he's been up there three years and never once bought a Christmas tree."
"He's not really a tree man."
"No." She rang up the tape. Then she picked up the box and held it, not moving it toward the bag, and raised her eyebrows about a millimeter. "And there's this."
And I panicked, and what came out of my mouth I will be paying interest on for the rest of my life.
"It's for a friend," I said.
Ronda Dombrowski, whose name was on a little tag pinned to that cardigan, did not say a single word. She let the silence sit there and do the work, which is a trick Earl's family is apparently born knowing.
"She's a nurse," I heard myself continue, over the roaring in my own ears.
"We worked together in Phoenix. She's up visiting, and she asked me to pick this up, because she can't face doing it herself.
She lives in a small town and people talk.
" I want it understood that I heard every word of this as it left me. "Her name's Denise."
"Denise, is it?"
"That's the one."
"Well," Ronda said, and she put the box in the bag with the tenderness of a woman handling something that was going to be extremely useful to her socially. "You tell Denise good luck from me."
"I will."
"And you tell that man of yours the county's got sand on the ridge road now, so he's got no excuse."
I got out of there. I want to say I walked, and I did technically walk, but there was a great deal of purpose in it.
I sat in the truck in the cold with the bag on the passenger seat where the camera used to ride and I laughed until it turned into the other thing, and then I sat with my forehead on the wheel until I could see well enough to drive.
Somewhere in the next thirty miles it occurred to me that within about two days, Earl Dombrowski would know that the girl from the ridge had bought a pregnancy test in Otter Bend for a nurse called Denise, and that there is no version of that county in which Sacha does not eventually hear it from a man handing him a coupon.
I built four futures on the drive home and left all of them by the county line.
That is the thing I am best at, and I have never once done it on purpose.
It runs by itself, like a reflex. In the first one I told him tonight and he held me and said the word ours.
In the second one I told him tonight and watched his face empty out and heard him say the word arrangements.
In the third one I did not tell him at all, and took a contract in Duluth, and mailed a photograph in six years.
In the fourth one there was no man on any ice and no number on anybody's head, and it was the shortest of the four, because I could not make it stand up long enough to live in.
That is my whole system, laid out on a county road. I plan the exit from a feeling before the feeling has finished arriving. It has worked flawlessly for two years, and I sat in that truck and understood, with total clarity, that not one road on that map went anywhere I could outrun this.
The cabin was dark and cold when I got back. Tank did his enormous unhelpful greeting. I put the coffee in the tin and the tape in the drawer and the chips on the shelf, and I took the box out of the bag and stood holding it, and it weighed nothing at all, which felt like an insult.
I did not open it. I want to be honest about why, and it was not the ten days, though the ten days were true and I said them out loud to the room like a defense attorney. It was that as long as the box was closed, both futures were still in it.
I put it at the bottom of my duffel, under the envelope with the rest of my prints in it, and then I sat down at the table with the tractor calendar and the receipt with my own figures on it and did the count one more time, slowly, hoping the numbers would come out differently for somebody who wanted them to.
I stared at the calendar until the numbers stopped pretending. "It's stress," I said out loud, to the dog, to the cabin, to no one. I'm a nurse. I know the difference between stress and this. I just didn't want to.