31. Lily
LILY
We fled into the dark with a go-bag, a dog, and a houseplant named Kevin. I have genuinely made worse decisions.
The truck was where he said it would be, nose out, tucked into the alders at the culvert with a skin of snow over the hood. He had the tailgate down, the bags in, and the dog loaded before I finished climbing up out of the creek bed. Then he stopped, because I was still holding something.
"What is that inside your coat?"
"Do not make me say it out loud in the cold."
"You carried a plant two miles down a frozen creek."
"He fits under one arm. He weighs about as much as a sandwich." I got the passenger door open and set Kevin in the footwell where he wouldn't tip. "And I had a hand free."
"Lily, be serious."
"This is me being serious."
"There are two men on the floor of my house."
"I am aware of the men." I went back to the tailgate and got the flat cardboard out from under my arm, and I didn't look at his face while I did it. "These are coming as well."
He took the box off me and opened it. Inside were the two prints, the sunrise from beside the door and the hospital windows he had never once said a word about, squared up the way he had left them on the shelf.
He stood there in ten below with his breath going and looked at them for longer than the situation allowed.
"They are paper," he said. "They weigh nothing."
"So you understand why I brought them."
"That is not the argument I was making."
"It is the only argument available." I took the box back and put it under the seat, flat, where nothing would sit on it.
"If we are going to have a dramatic safehouse, it is going to have one nice thing in it.
That comes to two nice things and a plant.
That is the whole of my luggage philosophy and you married into it. "
He looked at me the way he does when he has decided that arguing costs more than losing.
Then he shut the tailgate and got in and started the engine.
We went down that county road with the headlights off for the first mile and a half, at fifteen miles an hour, with nothing to see by but the moon on the snow.
Running for your life is mostly quiet, mostly boring, and unbelievably cold. Nobody puts that part in the movies.
"Tell me what my job is," I said.
"Sit still and stay warm."
"Try again. I am not luggage, and you are down one set of eyes with that neck."
He drove another quarter mile before he answered, and when he did, his voice had changed into the flat one, the working one, and I understood that I had just been promoted.
"Watch the mirror on your side. If a set of lights comes on behind us, do not tell me it is there. Tell me how far back and whether it is gaining. If it stays with us through two turns, say the word tail out loud and nothing else."
"What if it is one headlight?"
"Then it is a farm truck and we are both going to feel foolish." He reached over and killed the dome light with his thumb before I could touch the glovebox. "That light does not come on again tonight, not for the map and not for anything else."
"Where is the map?"
"It is under your seat. You will read it with the red flashlight when I ask, and you will hold it low."
So that was the drive. He put us on two lane roads and then on roads that weren't really roads, and he never once used a signal. Every twelve or fifteen minutes he pulled over and shut it all down and sat with the window cracked, listening to a county that had nothing in it but wind.
I did my job. I watched that mirror until my eyes burned. I gave him mile markers and crossroads off the map by the light of a flashlight the size of a lipstick, and twice I said a number out loud that turned into a farmer, and once into a plow.
Tank took up the entire middle of the bench and slept like a bag of cement, and at one point he laid his head across my thigh and sighed the long-suffering sigh of a dog denied a bed on a technicality.
I didn't move for forty minutes so he could keep sleeping.
Both of us know what that dog is worth, and neither of us has ever said it out loud.
Somewhere in the second hour it caught up with me all at once.
"Pull over."
He had us stopped on the shoulder inside four seconds. I got the door open and was sick into the snowbank with the cold pouring in over me. He didn't say a word until I was finished. Then he put the back of his hand against my forehead, the way I've done to a hundred strangers.
"You are not warm."
"I am freezing. That is the opposite of a fever."
"You have been sick twice in two days."
"Somebody was killed in our kitchen about four hours ago." I took the water off him and rinsed my mouth and spat, and I hated every syllable of what I said next. "My body is having opinions about that. Give it a night."
He looked at me for two seconds too long. Then he opened the glovebox and handed me a sleeve of crackers old enough to vote. He didn't ask me one more question about it. That's how I know he didn't believe me.
I ate four of them. They were the best crackers I have ever had in my life.
At the third or fourth stop he did something I didn't understand for another day.
We came down a hill into the orange sodium wash of a highway junction, one gas station, one motel with half its rooms dark, and he pulled around the back of the motel into the long lot where the trucks park.
He was out of the cab for maybe ninety seconds.
I watched him in the mirror. He walked past a row of parked cars without slowing at any of them, put his hand on a wheel well for about a second, and came back.
"What was that?"
"Call it insurance," he said, and put us back on the road.
I let it go. The feeling in my stomach when he said that word wasn't nausea, and I ignored that too. We had three days on a clock, and I wasn't going to spend one of them arguing with a man who had just carried me out of a firefight.
The talking got better after that. It always does at two in the morning in a warm cab.
"What happens when somebody finds them?"
"Nobody goes up that road until the plows do, and the county does not plow a private drive.
" He kept his eyes forward. "Nothing in that house is going to make sense to whoever eventually walks into it.
It will not be a police matter for the people who care about it, and I am not saying any more about that part tonight. "
"That is a real answer. I appreciate it."
"You will not appreciate the next one."
"Try me."
"The truck dies at the camp. It is written in a boy's notebook and it has been seen twice by a man who does this for a living, and it goes into a shed and it does not come out."
"And then what do we drive?"
"There is a car."
"Where is it?"
"There is a car," he said again, in the voice that means the road is closed, and I put my hand on the back of his neck, on the good side, and left it there and didn't press him.
For the last hour of that drive I wasn't thinking about the car, and I wasn't thinking about the men.
There was a plastic stick folded into a square of paper towel at the bottom of my duffel, and a prescription from an eighty-year-old man with a canary, pushed down into the toe of my spare boot.
There was something in me the size of a poppy seed, with a heart that hadn't started beating yet and would inside of two weeks.
It belonged to the man driving, and he didn't know.
Every mile of that road I ran the same argument in a loop. It cannot be tonight. He is bleeding. He hasn't slept. Let him get us in and get the stove lit and let him have four hours, and tell him at first light when he can hold it properly.
And every mile I gave myself the same answer back, and it was the one my mother used on me when I was twelve and didn't want to go to a funeral. There's no good hour for a true thing. There's only before you say it and after, and you have to live in one of them.
It had to be tonight. Whatever the room looked like, whatever else was sitting on his mind, it had to be tonight.
The camp came up on us at the end of what he called a track and I would have called a suggestion. He took a turn at a mailbox with no name on it, then a fork, then a long slow climb through jack pine with the branches coming in at the windows on both sides. Then the trees opened and there it was.
It was a deer shack, tar paper and one window and a stovepipe with a coffee can over the top of it. It sat with its back against a rock face and its front toward two hundred yards of open ground, and there was one road in.
"Three winters ago I paid a widow in the next county four hundred dollars for a year of it," he said. "I have paid her every year since, in cash, by mail, under a name that is not mine. She has never seen my face. There is nothing anywhere with this place and me in the same sentence."
"So you have been paying rent on a room you prayed you would never need."
"Every year I mailed that money I hoped I was throwing it away."
I sat there with my hands pulled up into my sleeves. "Sacha, that is a terrible sentence, and you delivered it like a weather report."
"It is warm inside within twenty minutes. I would rather you took that part."
Inside it smelled of cold ash and mouse and old pine.
There were four bunks with bare ticking, a barrel stove, a table, two chairs that didn't match, and a hand pump at a dry sink.
He got a flashlight in his teeth, pulled up two boards by the stove, and came out of the floor with an ammunition can.
Out of the can came candles, matches, a radio, batteries, cash in a rubber band, and a first aid kit better than anything I ever worked out of on a night shift.
I had the stove going before he finished counting the cash. My father couldn't hold a job or a promise, and he was very good at one thing only, and that thing was fire.
"You have done that before," he said.
"I have been cold in eight states." I got the damper set and shut the door on it and stood up. "Sit down on that chair and take the coat off. I am doing your neck properly now, and you are not going to enjoy any of it."
He sat. That's the part I haven't been able to put down.
A man who had walked us two miles into the dark and never once asked anybody's permission for anything sat down on a mismatched chair in a deer shack and let me put a light on his neck.
I picked the last of his own window out of him with a pair of tweezers I had sterilized in the candle flame.
It was ugly under the dressing. There was one piece I hadn't been able to reach in the cabin, and it had worked itself sideways, and when I got hold of it he didn't make a sound, which I've decided is worse than making one.
"There it is," I said. "That is out of you. It needed three stitches an hour ago, and now it's going to leave a mark."
"I have a collection."
"You have a museum." I taped it, stripped my gloves off, and took his jaw in both hands to turn his face up to the candle. "Look at me. What is the actual number?"
"It is three days, and possibly two."
"Where are the men your family sent?"
"Dmitri is a day behind whatever happens, and that has not changed, and I do not want you counting on him.
" He caught my wrist, gently, and held it.
"You did well tonight. I do not say that to make you feel better.
You did the mirror properly, you did not panic, and you were sick in a snowbank and got back in the truck.
Most people I have worked with could not have done the last part. "
"That is the first compliment you have ever paid me, and you were bleeding at the time."
"Then you have been keeping poor company."
He put the rifle by the door and made a bed of every blanket in that place on the lower bunk.
Tank arranged himself across the doorway like a draft excluder with teeth, and every time the building ticked as it warmed, one ear went up and came back down.
Sacha lay down on the outside, between me and the room, and I don't think he even noticed doing it.
I lay in the dark with the stove ticking and my head on his chest and his heartbeat going under my ear, slow, the way his always is, and I rehearsed.
The entire announcement is two words long. I'm pregnant. I have a positive test in the bag and a second one from a doctor. I'm about fifteen days along and I've known for certain since yesterday morning. It should have been said in the kitchen, and a window opened first.
Then I lay there and made myself look straight at the thing I was actually afraid of, since I've spent twenty-four years stepping neatly around exactly that, and I was finished with it.
I wasn't afraid he would go quiet on me. He wouldn't.
I wasn't afraid he would be sorry, or unkind, or that he would look at me the way men look at women who have complicated their plans. He is not that, and he has never once been that.
What I was actually afraid of is not the thing anybody would guess.
I was afraid he would sit up in the dark and take my face in both hands and tell me he loved me.
Then he would put me in a car by myself before the sun came up and drive back into that county alone, and call the whole of it love.
He would be gentle about it, and that's the part I couldn't have survived.
There would be an envelope of money and a number in Chicago and a full tank, and that he would kiss me goodbye like a man closing a door quietly so as not to wake anybody.
That's what he does, every single time. He takes the thing he cannot bear to lose and puts it somewhere he cannot see it, and then he stands out in the open by himself and calls that arithmetic.
Whatever came next, he deserved to know he was going to be a father. I prayed it would make him fight harder, not push me further away. Curled in that cold safehouse with his heartbeat under my ear, I prayed with everything I had. I prayed wrong.