34. Sacha
SACHA
We said goodbye the only honest way we had left, and that was every way except with words.
I told myself I was going for the truck.
That is the sentence I used on myself while I put my boots back on at nine at night with the stove banked and the dog watching me from the doorway.
The truck was sitting in a motel lot forty minutes down a road I had no vehicle to drive, and a man who is going to be hunted in two days cannot be on foot, and every part of that was true.
I have made a career out of true things arranged in an order that produces a lie.
It is nine and a half miles from that camp to the junction if you take the road, and I did not take the road.
I went down the creek bed, across the cut, and out along the power line, which comes to eleven miles and change.
It took me a little over three hours at ten below with a rifle on my shoulder.
I stopped once, at the top of the last rise, where the sodium light of that junction came up orange over the trees.
I stood there in the dark a long time doing arithmetic I already knew the answer to.
She was still there. The gray car sat in the lot with frost on all of it except the windshield, which meant it had been driven and parked again.
The room at the end had a light behind the curtain.
The curtain stood two inches open, on the side you leave it open on if you want to see a parking lot without being seen in it.
I had taught her that. Four weeks ago I stood in a kitchen and taught a travel nurse how to watch a road, and there it was, the two inches, and I had to put my hand on a tree.
She opened the door before I reached it.
She was in one of my shirts with her hair up in the thing she does with a pencil. The chain was already off and the door was open with her hand still on it. She looked at me standing out there in the cold with a rifle and eleven miles on my legs, and she said nothing at all for about four seconds.
"You walked."
"I came for the truck."
"Say that again with your face where I can see it."
I did not say it again.
She stepped back out of the doorway, and that was the whole of what happened. I came in. She shut the door and put the chain back on with the care of somebody who has been taught to do it properly.
The room was what those rooms are. There were two beds and one bad painting of a moose.
The radiator under the window came on with a sound like somebody dropping a wrench.
She had left the bathroom light on with the door pulled to, the way she does instead of sleeping with a lamp.
Her duffel was open on the second bed with everything in it folded.
There was a paper cup of tea on the nightstand going cold and an atlas with a napkin marking a page.
She stood there with her arms folded and let me look at all of it, and then she said the only thing that mattered.
"Is this you changing your mind?"
"It is not."
"Then say the rest of it, so we both know what this is."
"You leave in the morning. That has not moved." My voice did what it has done since the shack. It came out level and it cost me everything. "Nothing about tonight changes tomorrow."
"Then we understand each other." She nodded once, and her chin came up, and there was something in her face I will be paying for as long as I am upright. "Then take your boots off. You have got frost in your eyebrows and I am not doing this with a man who is halfway out the door."
I took my boots off.
She got a towel out of the bathroom, stood in front of me, and dried my hair with it, roughly, the way you dry a dog.
She was not gentle and she was not kind.
Then about halfway through, her hands slowed down and stopped being angry and became something else, and neither of us remarked on that either.
Then she took my head in both hands. She looked at me a long moment with that bathroom light coming across one side of her, and then she kissed me.
It was not the kiss from the storm. That one had a question in it, and there was no question in this. It was not the kiss from the night after the town either. That one was all anger and appetite and nothing left to lose. This one had all of it in it, every hour of twenty-six days.
It was slow and it went on. She kept her hands on either side of my head and would not let me hurry it.
She opened her mouth under mine by degrees.
When I finally got my tongue against hers she made a small sound that I would trade years of my life to have back.
I could taste the tea she had been drinking.
Her top lip was chapped from the cold and I went over that place carefully with my mouth and she let me.
She kissed me the way you drink water when you have gone a day without any.
Then she stopped that and started something slower and a good deal worse, holding my face, taking her time, breathing me in and refusing to be hurried.
By then I had both arms around her and one hand up under her hair at the back of her skull.
She got up on her toes to reach me better. I felt her fingers go into the hair at the back of my neck and close, and I felt her whole body come against mine from the knees to the shoulders, and there was nothing under that shirt but her.
I put my hands under her arms and lifted, and she came up off that floor without any protest at all. I carried her the four steps to the bed with her mouth still on mine and set her on the edge of it. Then I got down on my knees on the carpet in front of her.
"What are you doing down there?"
"You are cold."
"You walked eleven miles."
"You are cold," I said again, and took her feet, one and then the other, and put them inside my coat against my ribs.
She sat above me on the edge of a motel bed with her feet inside a dead man's coat and pressed both hands over her mouth. She cried for about four seconds, silently, the way she does. Then she took her hands down and got herself level again.
"That's a filthy trick," she said. "You don't get to do that."
"I have got nothing else."
"Don't say that."
"It is the only true thing I have said all week."
She pulled me up off that floor by the front of my shirt, and after that it stopped being an argument.
I want to be exact about the next part. It is the last of it, and I have gone over it more times than I have gone over anything else in my life, including the doorway.
She got my shirt off, and she did it slowly, and she did not do the thing she used to do, the running commentary she keeps up to cover how serious she is being.
She was quiet. She laid her palm over the scar under my ribs, the one on the left that she has decided belongs to her, and she left it there.
She held it there long enough that I understood what she was doing.
She was doing to me exactly what I had spent a week doing to her without her knowing, and it opened me up like a blade.
She was memorizing me. That is what that was. And I had made her do it in a motel room off a junction, for the single reason that I had not the courage to let her do it at home.
Then I took the shirt off her. It was my own shirt. She had slept in it for three weeks and was about to carry it four states away.
I did not do it quickly. I got the buttons open one at a time, and she watched my hands the whole while.
Before I took that shirt anywhere I put my palm inside it against her ribs, so that she would feel the whole width of my hand on her skin before she felt the cold of the room.
Her breath went out when I did that. I opened the shirt the rest of the way, pushed it back off her shoulders, and let it fall behind her onto the carpet.
She reached up and pulled the pencil out of her hair and shook it loose, and it came down over her shoulders the way it does.
She stood in front of me in a stripe of bathroom light in nothing but a pair of plain cotton things she had been wearing for two days, and she did not cover herself and she did not make a joke.
I got down on one knee again and put my mouth on her stomach, low, on the exact place my hand would find later without being sent there.
Then I took hold of the waistband on both sides and drew them down her legs.
She put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself and stepped out of them, one foot and then the other, the way you step out of anything.
After that there was nothing on her at all, and nothing between the two of us except that one line of light.
I have been given a certain number of good things in my life and I have kept exactly none of them.
That is not self-pity, it is a record. I stood in that room looking at her, with two days on a clock and eleven miles of dark still in my legs, and I understood the difference between what I have called living for three years and this.
"Sacha, look at me."
"I am here."
"Talk to me tonight." She had her hands on my belt and she stopped them there and made me look at her.
"Not about the road and not about the plan and not about what I have to do in the morning.
I do not want any of that in this bed. You talk to me about anything else and you do not stop, because if this is quiet I am not going to survive it. "
"Then get me out of these."
She got the belt open and the button after it.
She was not gentle about it and she was not quick.
Her hand went inside and closed around me before she had the rest of it down my legs.
I had been hard since the doorway. She found that out and made a low sound about it against my throat, and she worked me slowly in her fist for a while, watching my face for what it did.
"You walked eleven miles in this condition," she said.
"Not the whole eleven."
"You're a liar."