46. Sacha
SACHA
Ispent thirty-nine years taking things apart for a living. It turns out I had absolutely no idea how to put a crib together.
The crib arrived in the back of a rented box truck along with everything else, and the everything else is the part I want recorded first.
Dmitri came up the ridge road at ten in the morning with a man from Minneapolis driving and the two of them in a state of high excitement.
There was a bassinet. There was a crib in a flat carton, two car seats, a bathtub shaped like a whale, and four hundred diapers.
There was a bouncing device with a jungle printed on it.
There was also a rocking chair made by hand by somebody who charges properly for that.
I stood in my own yard and looked at all of it laid out on a tarp in the snow.
"Dmitri, what is all of this?"
"You are going to say it is too much."
"It is more than one child could get through in four years."
"It is exactly the correct amount and I have receipts," he said.
"Also it is not from me. Nine people put money in.
Yuri put money in, and Yuri has never voluntarily parted with a dollar in his life, so you will accept it and you will say thank you.
Then we will eat something, since I have been driving since four. "
Lily came out onto the porch with her coat over her shoulders and one hand on the rail, and Dmitri stopped talking entirely.
I had told him. I had said the words out loud on a telephone. It did not prepare him in the slightest, and I watched a man the size of a door go completely quiet in front of a woman in a borrowed coat.
"You must be Dmitri," she said.
"He has described me, then."
"He described a door. Here you are."
He took his hat off. He has never once taken his hat off for me. "Miss Chen."
"Lily. If you call me Miss Chen I will make you carry all of that inside twice."
He carried all of it inside once and then sat at my table for four hours.
By the end of it she had the story of my first year in that family out of him, including two pieces I have never told anybody and one that is not true.
He showed her the ultrasound photograph on his telephone, and he had no business having it in the first place.
When he got to the part where he had described that heartbeat to a room of grown men in Minneapolis, his eyes went, and he blamed the wood smoke.
He left at four with the light going.
"Sasha, look at me." He stood by the truck and put both hands on my shoulders, which is a thing he has done twice in eleven years. "I am going to say one sentence and then I am getting into that vehicle."
"Say it."
"For eleven years I have watched you leave rooms." He shook me slightly, the way you would shake a fence post you were testing. "This is the first time I have driven away from you and known exactly where you will be. Do not ruin it."
Then he got into the truck and made the man from Minneapolis drive. I stood in that yard until the sound of the engine had thinned out to nothing. Then I went inside and said nothing about any of it for about an hour.
Alexei telephoned two days later and closed the business in nine minutes.
"Sit down for this one, because it is dull and it is important, and I know that you will not sit down."
"I am standing in my own kitchen."
"Then stand." Paper somewhere. "You are carried on the books as an outside consultant at a retainer you will never be asked to earn.
It is a formality and it protects you and it means nobody may ever approach you directly again.
Nikolai's exact instruction was that you answer the telephone at Christmas and nothing else. "
"Tell him I will answer it."
"I already told him you would argue and then agree. He already told me he knows you better than I do. I have decided not to pursue the matter." A cup went down on a saucer. "Now the other half, and then I will let you go. Do you want the number?"
I put my hand flat on that counter.
"Give it to me."
"Two of the eleven names in that drive were moving a container out of a port that I am not going to say out loud in a book about your wife.
It did not move. It is not going to move.
Eleven hundred rifles are sitting in a bonded warehouse with a hold on them that will outlive everybody involved, and there are four men in custody in two countries who did not expect to be.
" A pause. "That is what was on the thing you kept in the ground for three years. "
I said nothing at all for a while, and he let me say nothing, and that is the reason that man is my friend.
Daniel Rourke was twenty years old and he moved cartons for an hourly wage, and he died on a landing because I had that drive in my coat and somebody wanted it. That was the arithmetic for three years. I could not make it come out.
It still does not come out. There is no version of the sum where a boy is repaid with a warehouse.
But eleven hundred rifles are not going anywhere, and the paper that killed him is the paper that stopped them, and I am going to carry that in the same coat as the other thing for the rest of my life.
I am not carrying it as payment. I am carrying it as the first entry on the other side of the page.
"Aleksandr, are you still on this telephone?"
"I am here."
"Go and put the crib together," Alexei said, "and telephone me at Christmas," and then he hung up on me, which is how he says the other thing.
That brings me to the crib.
I have opened locked buildings on two continents.
I have taken a rifle apart in the dark by feel and put it back together while a man walked past the window.
I have defeated a safe with a stethoscope and a very long evening, and I once spent an entire night on a boat engine in the rain with a knife and a shoelace and got it running.
That carton defeated me for six hours.
It arrived with a folded sheet of paper on which no words appeared at all.
There were only diagrams of a faceless person holding pieces at various angles.
That person was calm in every single frame.
I came to hate him in a way I have not hated anybody since a warehouse three years ago.
There were seventeen screws in a plastic bag.
Every one of them was identical. The diagram showed four different kinds.
"There is a bag with seventeen screws and the drawing wants four sorts."
"Mm," said Lily, who was on the bed with a book and no intention of helping.
"Seventeen is a prime number. You cannot divide seventeen screws among four groups. This is not an oversight. Somebody has done this on purpose."
"You sound unwell."
"I am extremely well." I laid all seventeen out on the floor in a row. "There is a spare. That is what this is. One of these is a spare and the manufacturer has not said which, and I am now supposed to guess."
"Or you could count the holes."
I did not answer that, because it was correct, and because I had already counted the holes twice and got two different numbers.
By three in the afternoon I had it together in a way that looked entirely finished and rocked about an inch when you touched it.
By four I had it apart again on the floor with all seventeen screws back in a row.
At half past four I discovered that one side panel had been in upside down since the beginning, which meant every hole after that had been going into wood that did not want it.
At some point in there I became aware of a small mechanical noise behind me.
I turned around. She was up on that bed with her legs folded under her, the camera at her eye and her face perfectly straight.
"Do not."
"Too late," she said. "I have been waiting six weeks for that face."
"Delete it."
"Absolutely not. Hold that exact expression, actually. You're looking at that crib the way you looked at the tree line the day Gus came up the road."
The print came back from Rhinelander a week later, and she framed it, and she wrote the caption on the mount in pencil in her own handwriting, in small neat capitals.
FEARED brATVA FIXER, MEETS HIS MATCH.
I hung it by the door, next to her sunrise, out of spite.
Every single person who has come through that door since has remarked on it, and there have been a considerable number of them, and that is the next thing I have to report.
I once had my life engineered down to a population of one. I worked at that for three years and I was extremely proud of the work.
I have not had a solitary afternoon since the ice.
Earl Dombrowski comes up the ridge road twice a week, which he does not admit is twice a week.
He arrived the first time with a car seat and installed it in my truck himself, incorrectly, three times over, arguing with me about the tether anchor and being wrong at every attempt.
On the fourth he read the manual out loud in the yard in the cold and got it right, and then would not let me thank him for it.
"You'll be wanting a proper vehicle," he said. "That truck is a two-seat truck with a bench in it and a dog on the bench."
"The dog will move."
"That dog will not move, and you know it as well as I do."
Marge Kowalczyk has appointed herself. There was no discussion.
She telephoned the cabin and told Lily she had put the two of us down for the church hall in the spring.
When Lily asked what for, Marge said she would explain that when the time came, and that we were not to worry about the chairs.
Then she informed me in person, standing in her own diner with a coffee pot in her hand, that she has decided to be the grandmother.
"You have got no mother and she has got no mother," she said, "and that baby is not going to be short one on both sides. I've thought about it and it's decided."
"You did not consult anybody."
"I consulted Doris. Doris agrees. That is a majority."
Halvorsen keeps a card on Lily now, in a drawer in his front room, in handwriting that would embarrass a pharmacist. He has never once mentioned the fact that he is practicing again.
Sivertsen carved a rattle out of a piece of birch and left it at the diner without a note, and Marge knew who it was from inside four seconds.
Kenny Lindqvist has offered, twice, to take the whole family out on the groomer in the spring, and both times Lily has said yes before I could answer.
And a postcard came from Thunder Bay with no return address on it, in a young man's handwriting, and it said only this. The hand is fine. It works. Thank you for the doctor.
Lily read it four times and then put it in the cigar box where she keeps her mother's undeveloped roll.
The cabin does not look like my house anymore.
There are fourteen photographs on those walls now and every one of them is hers.
The sunrise still hangs by the door. Beside it are the hospital windows, and then Sivertsen's hands, and then Tank asleep in a doorway with his nose pushed under it.
Then there is Earl's plow with the yellow light going, taken from the shore on the night itself.
She got that one off somebody's telephone and printed it at full size.
There is an entire wall of them. A man cannot cross that room anymore without being looked at by something.
There are also, at this point, nine plants.
Kevin has been joined by a fern from Doris, two cuttings from Marge's window, something with red veins that came from the clinic and was not asked for, and four more I cannot identify and am not permitted to touch.
They are all on the south sill, in the light, and every one of them was dying somewhere else before she got hold of it.
I have started to see the joke. She has been picking up things that were left to freeze since the first week she got here, and I was simply the largest one.
We put the four holes in the south slope on the first day the ground would take a bar.
She was not permitted to dig and she was extremely annoyed about it, so she stood at the top of the slope with the camera and directed the operation. She moved me a foot twice, and she was right on both occasions, and I am putting that down in writing.
We put in two apple and one plum, and then a peach that has no business surviving this latitude and is going to be given every chance regardless.
"You know it'll die," she said.
"It may not."
"Sacha, it's a peach tree, and this is Wisconsin."
"Then I will plant another one," I said. She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to, and then went inside for something and did not come back with it for a while.
I got the house started as well. It is not built.
It is started. There are stakes in the snow with string between them and a footprint marked out sixty feet from the cabin door.
There will be four rooms and a porch that faces the slope.
The drawing lives on that table under a coffee cup and it carries both our handwriting now, hers in pen and mine in pencil, and the pencil has been overruled in four places.
This is what I have learned about the difference, and it is the one thing here I would want a man like me to read.
For twenty years I was called in after. That is the entire trade.
Somebody has already done the thing, and the bleeding has already started, and they send for the man who can find the seam and open it and let the pressure out before the building comes down.
I was very good at it. Every problem I ever solved was already a problem when it reached me, and every single thing I ever touched had been broken by somebody else first.
Nothing on that slope is broken.
The holes are not a repair. The string in the snow is not damage control.
The crib was not a crisis either. When I finally got it standing square on that floor near midnight with the last of the seventeen screws in my hand, I stood there and looked at it for a long while, and what I felt was not relief.
It was the other thing. The one I had never earned before.
I spent my whole life fixing other men's problems, cleaning up, containing, making the broken thing disappear. For the first time, I wasn't fixing anything. I was building something. It was the hardest work I'd ever done, and the only work that ever felt like mine.