35. Lily #2
"I was across the road the whole night, and I want you to hear that I did nothing about it, because he was in that room and I am not a fool.
" He tipped his head. "He walked eleven miles for you in the dark and he walked back in a truck, alone.
I have been doing this for a long time and I am not certain I have ever seen anything sadder. "
I was frightened out of my mind and my mouth kept going anyway, which it has done at every significant moment of my life, including my mother's funeral.
"Can I say something about your work?"
He blinked. "You may."
"That fisherman thing was overacted." I was moving my weight onto my back foot while I said it, slowly, the way you do when you're about to run and would rather nobody noticed.
"Nobody in this county is that cheerful before noon.
Real ice fishermen are furious from the moment they wake up.
They are furious about the ice, they're furious about the auger, they're furious that somebody took their spot in nineteen ninety-four.
You came in beaming and asking about the pie. "
Something actually moved across that man's face. There wasn't much of it, and it was completely genuine, and it was the only honest thing that came off him all day.
"I have used that character for eleven years," he said.
"And in eleven years nobody has told you that it plays like a brochure. When he comes for you, and he is coming, you might reflect on the fact that you got made by a travel nurse in about nine minutes."
"Get in the car, Miss Chen."
I ran.
Let it be said that I did every last thing that man taught me in that kitchen.
I didn't run in a straight line and I didn't run for the road.
I went hard to my left, off the packed ice and into the deep snow beside the propane cage.
There's a crust out there that will carry a hundred and twelve pounds of nurse and will not carry two hundred pounds of professional.
I heard him go through it behind me and swear, which I'd never once heard him do.
I got around the corner of that building.
Past the dumpster and into the alley, and there was the black SUV sitting at the mouth of it with its exhaust curling, precisely where he had said it would be.
I turned and went the other way without breaking stride.
For about four seconds I thought I was going to make it.
There was a chain link fence at the end of that alley with a gap at the bottom where the plows had pushed it up.
I went down on my knees to go through it, and that is where it ended, and this is the part I'm going to have to live with. I had my hands in the snow and my shoulder under that wire and I could have made it, and instead I stopped.
I stopped because of the baby.
On the far side of that fence there was a drop onto a foot and a half of hard packed ice and gravel, and I would have gone down on it flat on my front.
Something in me refused. It wasn't a decision I made.
It arrived from somewhere underneath the part of me that decides things, and it was absolutely non-negotiable, and it cost me the four seconds that mattered.
That's what seventeen days does to a person. A cluster of cells with no name and no face yet stopped me dead in a place where a man with a gun couldn't.
He got a fistful of my coat at the shoulder and pulled me back through the gap, and I fought him.
My heel went into his shin and my elbow went back into somewhere soft.
When he got an arm across me I put my teeth into it through two layers of wool, and he made a noise that wasn't neighborly at all.
The second man came up the alley at a jog.
Two fingers of my right hand went into the web of the second man's thumb and bent it back the way you're taught.
He let go and I got half a step. Then he had me around the middle from behind and lifted me off the ground, where nothing I know how to do works.
Then I saw the syringe in the Fisherman's hand and everything in me went cold in a completely different way.
"Not that," I said. "Listen to me. You cannot use that on me."
"It is a short one, and you will be perfectly comfortable."
"I am pregnant."
The alley went very quiet.
Two people in the world knew, and one of them had thrown me out of a building for it. Now I was handing it to a professional in a back alley behind a diner, because I didn't know what was in that barrel and I've seen what the wrong thing does to a first trimester.
He lowered the syringe. He looked at me a long moment with his head slightly on one side. I watched a man do arithmetic and I watched the number come out. In the space of one sentence I'd made myself the most valuable object in the state.
"That is unexpected," said the Fisherman softly. "It changes the shape of my whole week."
"Good. Then you will do exactly as I tell you from here. No needles, nobody lifts me by the arms, and if you put me on a concrete floor I will be sick on your boots inside the hour."
"Nobody is going to hurt you." He capped the needle and put it away, and he sounded so completely sincere that it took the ground out from under me.
"You're worth a great deal more to my employer with a heartbeat in you than without one.
I'm telling you that so you'll stop fighting and hurt yourself.
It's the only honest advice I've got and I would take it. "
They put me in the back of that SUV. Nobody touched my head or my arms. The Fisherman held the door the way they do at a restaurant.
One of the others picked my paper sack up out of the snow, brushed it off, and set it on the seat beside me, and that's the detail I cannot get out of my head.
Marge's roast beef, riding out of town beside me with three strangers and a man who books contracts.
I did what I could while there was still light.
I put every part of it into my head the way I chart a patient.
Three men, one driver, one in the back seat with me who never spoke and had a scar through his eyebrow.
There was a Michigan dealer frame around a Minnesota plate.
There was an air freshener shaped like a pine tree and it didn't work.
We went out past the grain elevator and turned west, away from Rhinelander, back toward the lake and the ridge and everything I'd spent all morning driving away from.
Somewhere out at the end of that road a man had one day left on his clock, and I was about to become the reason he spent it wrong.
The last of Cutter's Hollow was the diner sign going into the fog behind us and the light burning in the window of the Gas-N-Go. Earl was moving around behind his own counter, folding something, with no idea at all.
There's one thought out of that morning that has never once let go of me.
For two years I made certain that no place could hold me. Then I stopped on my own, in the cold, at first light, and picked out a town and a job and a yard with room for a tree. And the thing that finally held me still was a hand in the collar of my coat.
The friendly fisherman was leaning on my car when I came out of that diner, smiling like a neighbor. "Miss Chen," he said. "The boss would love to meet the woman who thawed Sacha Volkov." I ran. In the end, it turns out, I didn't get far at all.