39. Lily
LILY
My mother always swore I could talk my way out of anything. I had about six hours to prove her right or die trying.
The house woke up angry.
Nothing had happened. That was the trouble.
A man had been ordered onto a lake at dusk and the lake had stayed empty, and by morning the five men in that lodge had discovered that waiting is far harder work than doing.
The one who sat in the kitchen turned the radio up and then off again eleven times.
The one who slept in the bunk room came out at six and went back in at seven and didn't sleep.
Kos stayed upstairs until well past two, and when he finally came down he had shaved, and the shaving told me more than his face did.
At two o'clock they tied my hands.
The one whose eyebrow is split by an old scar did the tying. He did it badly. He had a plastic tie in each pocket, like a man who has been told to carry more than he needs.
"Give me your hands."
"You have had me in this chair since yesterday morning and I have not once got out of it."
"I said give me your hands."
So I gave him my hands. This is what a person does with the two seconds she's given.
I put my wrists together with the bones crossed rather than flat, which is how a person makes the widest possible circle, and I pulled everything in my forearms tight, and I held my breath in the middle of my chest. He ran the tie down and pulled it, and I made a small sound that cost me nothing at all, and he stopped one click sooner than he would have if I had said nothing.
Then he walked away and I let all of it go.
Half an inch came back to me when my forearms went soft and my wrists uncrossed. That will not free anybody. It is only the difference between a hand that is trapped and a hand that will come out if you're willing to leave some of the skin behind, and I'd already decided that I was willing.
I sat with my tied hands resting on my knees and made myself look the way a bound woman is expected to look, which is smaller.
The young one came off the deck at four with his coat buttoned wrong.
He had been out there since one and his ears were the color of raw meat. He came in eleven minutes early, the way he always does, and went straight to the fire. I watched him hold his right hand out to the heat and then snatch it back.
"Show me your hand," I said.
"What about it?"
"You have been favoring it since yesterday, and you have just pulled away from a fire you walked eleven minutes early to stand at. Heat only hurts a hand when something underneath it has gone bad. Turn it over."
He looked at the stairs. There was nobody on them.
He crouched in front of my chair and turned his right hand over, and one look was enough.
There was a puncture in the meat below his thumb, four or five days old, sealed over at the top the way the bad ones always seal.
The web of that hand was tight and shining.
Under my fingers the skin ran hotter than the rest of him by a wide margin.
A faint red line went up the inside of his wrist toward the elbow, as though somebody had drawn it there with a pencil.
"What did you do to it?"
"I caught it on the hitch of the sled. It is nothing."
"It is not nothing. Do you feel that ache in your armpit? That is a node the size of a grape, and there is a streak on your arm that was not there yesterday, and if you keep telling yourself it is nothing you are going to lose the whole hand. Nobody here is talking about a finger."
His face lost every bit of its color.
"You are saying that to frighten me."
"I've looked after two hundred of these and buried two men who said that exact sentence to me." None of which is true. There was one man, it was his foot, and he kept it. I was working. "What is your name?"
"My name is Milo."
"Milo, go into that kitchen and put the kettle on. Bring the salt as well, and I want a good handful of it rather than a spoonful, and the water as hot as you can stand it and then a little hotter. Bring me the sharpest thing you're allowed to carry."
I want to be clear about the last part of that sentence.
I said it in exactly the voice I use for a frightened relative in a corridor at three in the morning, flat and warm and busy, and that voice has never in my life been refused.
He brought me a folding knife with a two inch blade, and he brought it handle first, because his mother raised him properly.
The scarred one glanced over from the window once. He saw a tied woman bent over a boy's hand, and he turned back to the glass. The world has trained that man not to find such a picture interesting.
"Hold it flat. This will be unpleasant, and it will be finished in four seconds."
"You are tied."
"Then you had better hold very still, because I've got about nine degrees of movement in my fingers and I'm doing this from the wrist."
I opened it. One press with the point at the softest part of the swelling and the whole thing let go. Milo made a sound like a door in a wind and then went limp with relief. The pain of a thing like that leaving is the best feeling a person can have with their clothes on.
"Soak it in that salt water for twenty minutes. Do it again before you sleep and once more in the morning. You keep it above your heart while you're standing on that deck, which means in your armpit, and I don't care in the least what it looks like."
"It has stopped throbbing."
"That is only the pressure leaving, and it will be back by morning. What that hand actually wants is antibiotics. Unless one of these men keeps flucloxacillin in his kit, you should be sitting in a clinic by tomorrow night."
"There is no tomorrow night." He said it before he had decided to. "We are finished at the end of the week. Everybody gets paid then, whether or not the thing happens."
I kept my eyes on his hand and my voice on the level.
"That's a peculiar way to pay a man."
"It's his way. He doesn't talk to us." Milo looked at the fire and then at the stairs, and out it came, the way it always comes once a person has decided you're on their side.
"He takes his tablets at six and again at ten and he doesn't want anybody in the room when he does it.
He walks at night. He doesn't sleep more than two hours together.
Rolf, the one with the eyebrow, heard him being sick in the upstairs bathroom yesterday, and we're not to say one word about it. "
"And your friend by the door?"
"The quiet one is not with us. He came separately and he is paid separately and he goes down to the boathouse every two hours with a light, and none of us are allowed to go with him.
" He lowered his voice further. "Two of the others want to leave.
There is a machine in the shed with a full tank and there has been talk about it. "
"You should keep that hand clean," I said, "and you should keep that talk quieter."
He thanked me. He actually thanked me. He went off to the kitchen with his folding knife and a hand that would still work in the morning. He took eleven minutes of guarding the water side of that house away with him. Between the salt and the kettle he had handed me the shape of the entire evening.
Bedside manner is a weapon, and nobody ever thinks to warn a man about it.
The telephone came to me an hour later and I earned none of it.
Milo crouched to put a split log on the fire.
The coat cut for a bigger man gaped at the pocket, and a telephone slid out of it onto the hearth rug without a sound.
He straightened up. He walked away. It lay there in the shadow of the wood basket, eighteen inches from my left boot, and I looked at the ceiling for a while.
Then I put my heel on it and drew it in slowly, the way you move an ashtray along a bar with your elbow. When it was under the hem of my coat I bent forward and got it into the inside pocket where the paper sack from the diner had been.
There was no signal in that house. I knew that before I looked, because a man doesn't carry a satellite unit around under his own hand in a building where the mobiles work.
One look at the screen gave me no service and twenty-two minutes past five.
Then I turned the thing all the way off, and it took four tries with two thumbs.
I didn't take it to make a call. I took it because a screen is a light, and a light is a thing you can put where you want a man to look. And because a boy who cannot find his telephone spends the rest of his shift searching himself instead of watching the water.
Then I went back to the work I'd been doing since the dusk went by empty, which was learning that building the way I learn a floor plan on a first shift.
Sacha taught me on a ridge in a storm to give a name to anything I might one day have to escape through. He was extremely serious about it. He was also the man who ended up saying the name of a window out loud with a rifle in his hands, so I've never once let him take it back.
I named three.
The water door at the bottom of the boathouse stairs is Margaret, because she's old and locked from the inside and everybody assumes she's not going anywhere.
The deck rail on the lake side is Nine Feet. That is less a name than a measurement, and the measurement matters because of the drift underneath it, and a drift will take a fall like that off a woman my size.
The service hall behind the kitchen is Halvorsen, after a man who kept no record of anything, because that hall has a door onto the propane pad and nobody in this house has so much as glanced at it since I arrived.
Then Kos came down and nearly ended all of it.
He came at half past six with the color of the tablets still on him, and he stood in front of my chair, and he said, "Let me see your hands."
There's a second in a thing like that where your whole body wants to explain. I've watched a hundred people lose everything in that second.
I put my hands out.
He took my wrists and turned them over, and he looked at the tie sitting loose against the heel of my thumb, and he looked at the skin under it, which was pink and unmarked and entirely wrong.
"This has been worked," he said.
"I loosened it myself, in full view of your man at the window, and I would do it again tonight."
He raised his eyes to mine and waited. That's his weapon and it's a good one.
"Your man laid that tie across the ulnar side and pulled it in the cold," I said.
"By four o'clock there was no radial pulse in my left hand and the fingers had gone the color of a candle.
Do you know what six hours of that does?
The muscle in the forearm dies inside its own sleeve, and it swells, and nothing brings it back except a surgeon and a blade.
So I took the pressure off it myself. If you would like a woman with two working arms standing on your ice tonight, somebody in this house has to be prepared to think about circulation, and it was never going to be him. "
The fire ate a log somewhere behind him.
"You could have called out for help."
"Twice yesterday I asked for something about the cold and got a shrug from a man who will not speak to me. You are the only person in this building who can give an instruction. You were upstairs being unwell, and I did not think you would thank me for coming to find you."
It went into him like a splinter, and I watched it happen. Nobody had said a sentence like that in his hearing in twenty years, and part of him hated it and a larger part of him had been starving for it.
"You put a knife into one of my men."
"I opened an abscess that was two days from being a systemic infection. You have five men. You do not have six. Losing one to sepsis on the same night you have something planned would be careless, and whatever else you are, I do not think you are careless."
"What did he give you for it?"
"His name," I said. "That's all he had on him."
Kos held my eyes a while. Then he took a fresh tie out of his own coat pocket and put it on my wrists himself, and he did it perfectly, one finger's width, over the flat of the bones where it belongs.
"You are very good," he said.
"I am tired and I am cold and I would like my coat done up."
He fastened the top button of my coat with two fingers, the way a man does for a child, and then he leaned down close enough that I could smell the sickness under the soap.
"Miss Chen, you have been managing everybody in this house since yesterday afternoon, and I have watched every minute of it, and I have allowed it because a woman with something to do is quiet.
" His voice never went above the fire. "But if the Fisherman is right about your condition, you would be wise to say so now.
It would change how tonight is arranged, and the change would fall on your side. "
There it was, the whole trapdoor standing open with a lamp burning at the bottom of it.
"I'm not carrying anything," I said, "and if I were, you're the last man on this earth I would tell, because the moment I said it I would stop being a person to you and start being a piece of arithmetic. You would put it in the ledger with everything else. I've watched you do that all afternoon."
He straightened up.
"You are almost certainly right about me," Dragan Kos said, "and it will not save you." Then he went to the window.
I sat there with a correctly fitted plastic tie on my wrists and my pulse knocking away at the base of my throat.
Eighteen days is what it came to by that evening, and eighteen days is nothing at all.
It's a rumor with a heartbeat. There's no bump, no test result in that house, no proof of any kind anywhere in the world except one strip of cardboard in a bathroom bin in Cutter's Hollow and two people who love each other very badly.
That's my armor. It is the only thing in any of this that belongs to nobody but us. I sat in a stranger's chair with a stolen telephone against my ribs and understood something I'd never once understood in my life. No part of me will ever hand it over.
I've been running since my mother died. Ask anybody who knows me. Ask the eleven towns.
Nobody in this house has any idea what it does to a runner when she finally has something she will not run from.
At half past seven they brought me soup again and I ate all of it.
At twenty past eight the Fisherman came up from the boathouse two minutes early and said nothing at all. He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his head turned a little, listening to the generator behind the kitchen.
I heard it too. It wasn't a change. It was a smoothness, the sound of a machine that has stopped being asked for anything.
Then every light in the compound died at once, and each of Kos's men grabbed for a gun in the dark. Somewhere out there in the black, Sacha had come for me. For the first time in two days, I smiled, and I got ready to do my part.