35. Lily
LILY
Imade it exactly one goodbye too many. The last one was to a friendly fisherman, leaning on my car like he had been waiting there all winter.
I left that motel room at twenty past five with my boots in my hand.
He sleeps like a man who has trained himself out of it, which means he doesn't, except once or twice a night when his body takes what it needs without asking his permission.
I'd been lying awake in the dark for an hour waiting for the second one.
When it came I got out from under his arm one inch at a time and dressed in the bathroom with the door pulled to.
On my way past the window I put that radiator up as high as the dial would go, so the room would still be holding heat whenever he surfaced. I'm apparently a woman who does that.
I didn't look at him from the doorway. Nothing has ever cost me more than keeping my eyes off that bed, and I'm including the corridor outside my mother's room.
Then I got in a gray car with Illinois plates and drove east out of that junction with the sun coming up in my eyes, and I didn't cry, which surprised me.
There was nothing left in me to cry with.
There was a plant on the passenger seat, a duffel on the back seat, an atlas open to the wrong page, and a napkin with a phone number on it stuck to the dash where I could see it.
Rhinelander was four hours east if I took the state road, and I drove east for the better part of an hour before I did anything foolish.
I got sixty miles down it like a sensible woman, with the heater going and the sun coming up, and then I sat at a crossroads with my blinker ticking for a very long time.
Cutter's Hollow was an hour back the way I'd come and then twenty minutes north of the junction, which made it the single worst destination available to me, and I went there anyway.
I've gone over that decision about nine hundred times since and it comes out the same way every time, so I'm going to be honest about it.
The man in the flannel had spent a week teaching a boy to sit on the ridge road and count vehicles.
Sacha had spent that same week teaching him that everything worth watching was out on the ice.
Three nights ago somebody had shot up a cabin at the top of a ridge road forty miles out of that town, and the man behind it had gone back to whatever hole he sits in.
Every last piece of the danger in that county was pointed at a lake and a man with a rifle.
Nobody was watching the town. That's what I told myself in the car. It was a reasonable conclusion, and it was wrong, and I've had a long time to think about how comfortable a reasonable conclusion feels while you're driving toward it.
The truth underneath it's simpler. I couldn't leave without saying goodbye to them. I'd done that to people my whole adult life, and I'd been good at it, and I had just decided in a motel parking lot that I was finished being that woman. So I turned north.
The diner had four cars outside it and every window fogged from the inside. I parked around the back by the propane cage where the car couldn't be seen from the road, which is a thing I did automatically now, and which tells you exactly how much of that man I'd taken with me.
Marge saw me through the pass and came out from behind the counter with a coffee pot still in her hand.
"Look at you," she said. "You're a liar."
"I am aware."
"You told me on the telephone you were on the road."
"I was. I am. This is a detour." I sat down at the end stool and put my hands flat on that counter to keep them still. "I've got about twenty minutes and then I really am gone."
She looked at me for a while. Marge is somewhere past sixty and has been reading faces across that counter since before I was born, and I watched her put together the coat and the boots and the fact that I hadn't asked for coffee.
"You're not coming back," she said.
"I am not."
"Is it him?"
"It is not what you think."
"Sweetheart, I have got four hundred people in this town and every one of them thinks something different by lunchtime. You are going to have to be more specific."
"He is in trouble that has nothing to do with me." I got that out steadily, which took some doing. "He tried to get me out of the way of it. He did it badly and he did it cruelly and he wasn't entirely wrong."
Marge set the pot down on the burner and didn't pick it up again.
"Are you safe?"
That's the question. Out of the whole county, that woman is the one who asked it, and she asked it first, before the gossip and before the sympathy.
"I'm going to be," I said.
She went into the back without another word. I heard her banging around in there and shouting at somebody about a fryer, and when she came out she had a paper sack folded over twice at the top and she set it in front of me like a verdict.
"That's two of the roast beef and a wedge of the cherry and the last of the good rolls. Don't open it until you have been driving an hour, or you'll eat all of it standing at a gas pump like an animal."
"Marge, you don't have to do this."
"And there's a plastic fork in there." She put both hands on the counter, mirroring mine, and for a second there was nothing at all between us. "You'll call me when you land."
"I cannot do that."
"Then you'll call me when you can." She said it the way you close a door properly. "That's not a request, hon. I've got a telephone and it works from anywhere."
Earl came in about a minute later with the cold coming in with him, still in his Gas-N-Go apron, because in a town that size a car parked behind the diner is news before the engine has finished ticking.
"There she is." He was rubbing his hands and grinning and about halfway through the grin he saw the bag and the boots and the face, and the whole thing came down. "Oh, that's no good at all."
"Do not look at me like that."
"You are leaving."
"I am."
"Is he going with you?"
"He isn't."
Earl Dombrowski stood in the middle of that diner with his mouth open and his glasses fogging. This is a man who had known me one month and spent most of it inventing a romance for the entertainment of his customers. He took his hat off.
"Well, that's just terrible," he said. "That's a terrible thing. Deborah is going to be sick about it."
"Tell Deborah I am sorry about the Christmas tree."
"I will do no such thing, she will have hysterics." He came over and hovered and then patted my shoulder twice, very hard, the way men in that part of the world hug people. "You take the good route out, past the elevator, the state road has frost heaves on it that will crack your teeth."
"I'll take the good route."
"And if he's being an idiot," Earl said, "he's being an idiot, and men in this county are idiots for about four to six weeks and then they come to. You give him six weeks."
I couldn't answer that at all.
Here is the part I didn't expect, and it's the reason I stayed the extra ten minutes that cost me everything.
For two years I'd been nobody in forty towns, and I'd made an art of it.
Then I sat in a diner in a town with one traffic light and a feed store calendar by the register.
A woman I'm not related to packed me a lunch.
A man who sells gasoline took his hat off.
Nobody holds a ceremony when a place decides to keep you, and you only find out it happened on the day somebody starts cutting you back out of it.
Leaving him was a wound. Leaving them was a different kind, and it caught me completely unprepared.
Marge came around the counter at the end and took hold of me with both arms. She smelled of griddle smoke and the cigarettes she pretends she quit, and she said one thing into my hair.
"You showed up here, and you were kind to everybody, and you didn't have to be. We're keeping that."
Then I picked up my paper sack and pushed the door open into the cold, and the bell went over my head, and I came out into the lot behind that diner at ten past nine in the morning.
He was leaning against my car.
He had his ankles crossed and one hand in his coat pocket, comfortable, patient, the way a man leans on his own gate.
He had new flannel on under a good parka.
His boots had never seen water. He looked up at the sound of that bell and gave me the same warm neighborly smile he had used on me in a booth by the window a lifetime ago.
It went all the way up to his eyes and there was nothing whatever behind it.
"Miss Chen," he said. "You have made this a very long assignment."
The bag went out of my hand. I heard it hit the ice.
"I parked around the back," I said. "Nobody has any business being back here."
"There is one reason, and you are looking at it.
" He straightened up off the fender without any hurry.
"Do not go for the diner door. There is a man in a vehicle at the end of that alley and another at the front of the building.
If you take this inside, I will have to make it a matter for that nice woman with the coffee pot, and I would very much rather not. "
That is when I understood the whole shape of it, all at once, the way you understand a diagnosis.
They had never been hunting Sacha's cabin.
They had been hunting me, for days, because I was the piece that could be moved.
And the reason they had waited was that a woman who is running away by herself in a car with nine thousand dollars in it's a great deal easier to collect than a woman standing next to that man.
"How long has this been going on?" I said.
"Since the day you had the pie." He said it kindly. "You are not an easy woman to keep track of, if it helps. He taught you a very great amount in a short time and you took all of it in. Those two inches of curtain at the motel were very good."
"You were at the motel."