28. Sacha #2
"He is in the country," Alexei said. "A car went out on a card we know in Minneapolis, and a room in Duluth was paid for in cash under a name he used in Antwerp. Three men traveling with him and seven left at home. He does not think you are a job that requires a crowd."
"That is an opinion about the errand. It is not an opinion about me."
"It is the same insult wearing a hat. Take it however you like.
" Somewhere on his end a page turned. "You have five days, and possibly four.
Dmitri put four men into two cars this morning and they are twenty hours out, which puts them a day behind whatever you do.
He asks me to tell you that if you die before he arrives he will take it as a personal discourtesy. "
"Give him my regards."
"I will not. It would only encourage him.
" Then the pleasure drained out of his voice, which happens perhaps twice a year and never for a good reason.
"The car is done. It is a gray sedan, four doors, nothing on it that anybody would look at twice, Illinois plates that are clean and paid for.
It is in the long lot behind the motel at the highway junction, the key is in the wheel well behind the front tire on the driver's side, and there is a full tank in it and a road atlas on the seat.
Your man in Duluth says the debt is settled and he would like never to hear from you again. "
"He has my word and my gratitude, in that order."
"There is nine thousand in the envelope you asked for and a telephone still in its wrapper.
I have written a number inside the front cover of the atlas.
It belongs to a woman in Chicago who has taken people in for us before, and she will not ask your nurse a single question about anything.
" He waited. "Now the part I telephoned for. Does she know she is leaving?"
The wind came across that snow and I stood in it.
"She does not know yet."
"Do not do this to me, Sacha."
"I will say it to her tomorrow."
"You said tomorrow to me yesterday, and I let you have it." Something went out of him. "You have four days to say eleven words to a woman who is already in love with you. I have laid money on Kos."
"Take it off."
"I will not. It is the safest money I have ever put down." Then, quieter, "And what will you do if she refuses to get in that car?"
"She will get in the car."
He let that stand, and there is nothing in that man heavier than his silence, and I stood in my own drive after the line went dead and understood that a man who has to say a thing twice has already heard the answer.
The house was warm and smelled of onions, and the lamp was lit, and I walked in out of all that arithmetic into the middle of an ordinary evening, which had not happened to me since I was a boy.
She had found a pair of sewing scissors in a drawer that came with the house and she had decided about my hair.
There was no discussion of it. She put a towel around my shoulders and stood me under the ceiling bulb.
Then she declared the bulb useless and handed me the flashlight to hold up over my own head.
There is no more undignified posture available to a grown man.
"Hold it higher."
"My arm is not a light fixture."
"Hold it higher, or I take a piece out of your ear and we both live with it." She had her fingers in the back of my hair, working up from the neck, and she was humming those same four words. "You have gray coming in at the sides."
"I am aware of it."
"I am not complaining. I am taking inventory." She turned my head with two fingers on my jaw, the way she must handle patients, with no hesitation in it at all. "Hold still. You keep looking at the window."
"I look at windows."
"You have looked at that window nine times since you sat down."
She was counting. I had spent three days trying to work out what that woman was counting, and she had just told me, and the answer was me.
Afterward she made me play cards, and she cheated.
She did it the way people do who have never once been caught by anybody who minded, boldly and out loud, with a running commentary on my own play.
Then she took the last hand off me by claiming a rule that has never existed in the history of the game. I laid my cards down and looked at her.
"My mother did precisely that with her sleeve."
"Then your mother and I would have gotten on." She was enormously pleased with herself, and it lasted about a minute. Then she went for the pot on the stove, and rose too fast, and put her hand flat on the table, and waited there.
Her face went the color of the wall behind her.
"Sit down."
"The floor is uneven in this corner."
"That floor is level and you have walked it for three weeks. Sit down."
"I stood up too fast, which is a thing people do." She sat down, however, and drank half a cup of hot water with honey in it, and she had not touched coffee in two days, and I have spent fifteen years being paid to notice things a great deal smaller than that.
"I am bringing a doctor up here in the morning."
"You're not doing any such thing."
"Nobody has ever looked at that head properly. There's a man in Cutter's Hollow called Halvorsen with a license on his wall, and he will drive up this road for cash."
"My answer is the same as it was two seconds ago.
" It came out fast and it came out hard, and then she made herself smile, and the smile was the only false thing she had shown me all day.
"I'm a nurse, Sacha. If I needed a doctor I would be the first to say so, and I would be insufferable about it. "
I let it go. That is the whole of my crime and I am not going to dress it up as anything better.
I let it go. We sat in the lamplight, and she flattened out a paper sack and drew four circles on it, and told me where the trees were going on the south slope.
She wanted two apple and a plum, and there was a fourth circle she had not named.
"What is the last one?"
"That one is a peach."
"It will die."
"It almost certainly will." She was shading in the little circle with the side of the pencil. "I would like to watch it try."
She had put a peach tree on my hill. That is what I sat there holding.
A woman who will not print one photograph of me in case a stranger looks at it had sat in my lamplight and drawn me a tree that cannot survive at this latitude, in a summer I had no intention of being alive for.
There were nine thousand dollars in an envelope under the seat of the truck outside while she did it.
I said nothing at all about any of it. I have talked men out of rooms they had every intention of dying in, and I could not find the eleven words.
Here is what I decided instead, sitting at that table with the pencil going and the dog asleep on my foot, and it is the worst piece of reading I have done in twenty years of the work. She had finally understood what I am.
The story she has had since her second week in that house, and a story can be held out at arm's length and turned over.
What she had now was the fact of it. The fact is a length of pipe braced across a door, and a row of loaded magazines lying where the salt ought to be, and a man who leaves at four in the morning and comes back at ten with another man's notebook buttoned into his coat.
She had put it all together and she had frightened herself with it, and she was too kind and too stubborn to say so out loud, and she was sitting in my kitchen drawing trees while she worked out how to tell me.
If that was it, then the car solved everything.
I would put her in it before he came. She would be four states away with her feet on the dash, the relief would catch up with her somewhere past the second state line, and she would never have to say the sentence out loud at all.
I could give her that much. I could be the one who ended it, and let her keep her hands clean of it.
That is what I built out of a hand flat on a table and a cup of honey water and one false smile. Every piece of the evidence was in front of me and I assembled it upside down.
She was hiding something, and reading what people decline to say out loud has been my whole working life.
I sat out on my own porch afterward with the dog and the cold and went through every method I own.
What I came away with was a theory that fit and a certainty that would not settle, and underneath the pair of them sat the thing that frightened me worse than either one.
I wanted the answer to be nothing. A man who wants a particular answer has stopped working and started praying.
And nothing was the one answer not available to me, because a woman who is carrying nothing does not stop in her own kitchen to wait for the floor to settle, or go quiet about her own body, or turn down a doctor in a voice like a door closing.
Whatever she was carrying outweighed Dragan Kos. She had decided to carry it by herself, in a house you can cross in four strides, three feet from the one man on earth who was supposed to be able to see it.