Chapter 5
The Thing He Doesn't Say
Naomi had spent twenty years learning to tell what people were not saying, and it had never once helped her at home.
At work it was a gift. A man lying in a bed at the hospice, telling his daughter he felt wonderful, was a man saying he was afraid of the dark. A woman who asked every day for a glass of water, and never drank it, wanted someone to stay. Nobody came to the end of their life and said what they meant. They said the weather. They said, did you remember to feed the cat. They said, you've done enough, go home, and she had learned to sit down, instead, and take their hand, and wait.
It was a skill. She was good at it. She had been told so at her appraisals, in a narrow gray office, by a woman with a clipboard: You have a rare gift for presence, Naomi. She had thought, with a small private irony: Yes. And at home I'm married to a locked room.
She woke at ten to two on Friday morning with her hand on cold sheets.
For a moment she did not understand what had woken her. The house was quiet. The ceiling fan turned. A bar of moonlight lay on the floor like a dropped ruler, and in it, on the far side of the bed, the pillow was dented and the sheet turned back, and his side was cool.
She lay and listened.
He did get up in the night. She knew that. He had done it since the week they met; he'd sit in the kitchen with a glass of water, or on the porch, or in the dark of the front room, looking at nothing, and be back by three with his skin cold. She'd stopped asking. She had come to treat it the way a person treats a neighbor's dog that barks at the moon, as one of the sounds a house makes. But there was a different quality to the silence tonight. A held quality. A sense that the air in the house had been drawn very tight and was waiting to be released.
She put on his gray sweatshirt and went to the head of the stairs.
A light was on in the kitchen. Not the overhead; a small yellow glow, low down, as of a lamp on the table. She went down on the outside of the treads, the way he did, because she'd caught the habit. She stopped in the doorway of the hall.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with his back to the wall and his face toward the door.
He had spread a newspaper over the oilcloth. On it, laid out in careful rows, like instruments on a tray, were a dozen small black and gray pieces she did not recognize. A spring. A rod. A slide, with white letters stamped on it. A narrow oily rag, and a brush, and a tin of something. His sleeves were pushed up. His hands moved over the pieces with a kind of tender, mechanical absorption, slow and exact, the way a man handles something he knows is going to be used.
She understood what it was a full second before she let herself.
"Dean," said Naomi.
He looked up. He did not start. His face did not change. He laid down the piece he was holding, a small steel thing no longer than a thumb, and said, quietly, "Sit down, love."
"What is that?"
"You know what it is."
"I'd like you to say."
"It's a pistol," said Damen. "It's mine. I've had it for a very long time. I'm cleaning it."
She stood in the doorway in his sweatshirt with her hand on the frame. She was surprised, in a distant way, at how calm she was. She'd imagined this. Over twenty years, in the dark, a hundred times, she'd imagined the moment, the thing she would see, what her heart would do. She had thought she would scream. She'd thought she might simply faint. What she felt instead was a vast, still, curiously cold clarity, like the stillness in a room when the monitor has stopped and all the people have gone quiet.
"Ivy's upstairs," she said.
"I know."
"It's in the house."
"It was in the shed," said Damen. "Until last night. It's never been inside before. I'll put it back."
"Don't."
"Naomi—"
"Don't you tell me what you'll do." She came into the kitchen and pulled out the chair opposite and sat, very straight, with her hands on her knees. The lamp threw their shadows large on the wall. "You said it would never come to my door. You said it on the porch. You said, I made sure of it."
"I did."
"Then why are you sitting at my table in the middle of the night with a gun in pieces?"
He was silent. He looked at her for what seemed a long time, with those flat clear gray eyes in the lamplight, and she thought, as she had thought on the first night they met: I have never in my life seen anyone look so tired and so awake.
"A man came to the shed on Monday," he said. "Not an insurance man. Somebody sent him to see if I was still here. On Thursday, an old friend of mine drove four hours to tell me to run." He said it slowly, without drama, as one gives a report. "Someone's been watching the house. Not very well. I think it's a girl. I don't know whose. And on Monday night, at eleven forty-eight, the phone rang, and when I picked it up there was a clock on the line."
"A clock."
"A particular clock. It belongs to a man I used to work for." A muscle moved in his cheek. "He's saying hello."
She sat motionless.
It was a very odd thing, to be told. She'd supposed it would feel like a door opening. It felt like the opposite. It felt like the moment, at a bedside, when the family has asked for the truth and the doctor gives it, and the room, which was already full of fear, becomes at once a good deal smaller, as though the ceiling had come down an inch.
"What kind of work did you do for him?" said Naomi.
He didn't answer.
"Dean."
"The worst kind."
"I know it was bad. I'm not asking for a list." Her voice stayed even. It was the voice she used on the telephone to families at three in the morning. "I'm asking whether it was the kind of work that makes a man come to my daughter's door."
"Yes," said Damen.
"I see."
"I'm sorry."
"I know you are."
"I thought I'd made it safe. I did everything. I left no trail, I took a different name, I came to the place no one would come. I thought, if I never looked back, if I did nothing, if I was a good man for long enough..." He stopped. His hands, which had been so smooth and sure among the pieces, lay open on the oilcloth like things he did not know what to do with. "I thought I could pay it off."
"You can't pay off a person by being kind to other people."
"No."
"I've watched a lot of people try."
"I know."
She was quiet. In the next room, the clock on the mantel struck two. Somewhere in the walls the old house gave a long soft sigh and settled into its beams, and a moth knocked at the screen, and she heard her own pulse in her ears. Then she did something he did not expect. She reached across the table and took the oily rag out of his fingers, and wiped her own hands on it, slowly, one at a time, and gave it back.
"Show me," she said.
"Show you what?"
"The thing. How it goes together." Her eyes were bright and perfectly dry. "I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to keep it. But if there's a gun in my house, I'd like to know what it does. I'd like to know how it sounds. I'd like to know what you're afraid of."
For a long moment he did not move. Then, as though something had given way inside him, a single long breath went out of his chest, and the muscles of his face softened and changed, and she saw before her, for the first time since he had walked into the hospice with a bag of slippers, the whole of her husband, entire and open and naked, a frightened man of forty-six at a kitchen table with oil on his hands.
"I'm afraid of Saturday," he said.
"Why Saturday?"
"Because it's her birthday. And I think they know it."
They talked until the window turned gray.
He told her, in pieces, what he could. Not the names. Not the places. He did not say what he had done, and she did not ask him again. But he told her the shape of it: a man in a tower, who had kept him for eleven years and then let him go; a hunter named Mercer; a friend who wept and gave no reason. He told her that he did not think they would come tonight, or tomorrow. A man like Strand did not hurry. He would send people to count and to check, and he would let them see that they were counted. He would wait for fear to do its work. It was always the first stage.
"Then why don't we go now?" said Naomi. "Pack the car. Go to my mother's. Go to Pike's Landing. Go to the end of the world."
"Because he wants us to."
"What?"
"He's put a clock on the telephone," said Damen. "He wants me to run. A man who's frightened runs in a straight line, and he's easy to follow, and he leads you to everyone he cares about. He'd have us in a motel by nightfall, with the car packed and the child crying, and nowhere to put our feet." His eyes held hers. "If we run tonight, we run his way. I'd rather do it ours. I'd rather give it a day. I want to see who's here, and how many, and which of them is the one that matters. And on Sunday, in the morning, when they've had their look, we leave the way I choose, and nobody sees us go."
"And Sofi?" said Naomi. "You'll tell her in the car, I suppose. At a rest stop."
"I'll tell her the truth."
"She's eighteen. She was nine when we left. She's been asking since March why the stairs in the old house were green." Her voice was very quiet. "She remembers, Dean. Nobody told her not to. I just never told her to."
He closed his eyes. "I know."
"And the party."
"The party is the cover."
"It's a twelve-year-old's birthday, Dean."
"It's also the best cover I could ask for." He said it gently. "Forty neighbors on the lawn. Balloons. Nothing a man like Mercer wants less than witnesses. I'd sooner they came to a party than to a dark house."
"And what if you're wrong?"
"Then I've made a mistake."
"With our daughter."
"With our daughter," said Damen. "I know."
The words hung in the gray kitchen. She stared at the table. After a long time she said, in a small precise voice, like a nurse reading back an order, "I'm going to ask you for something, and I want you to think before you answer."
"All right."
"Promise me that whatever you do, you will not do it where she can see."
"I promise."
"That isn't what I said. I said, not where she can see. You can say it now." Her eyes lifted. "You can say it. Say, Naomi, I won't let my child watch me become what I was."
He sat very still. Outside, in the thin gray, a bird began, a single clear repeated phrase, and was answered from the far side of the hill.
"I won't let my child watch me become what I was," said Damen.
"Thank you."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." She put her hand across the table and laid it over his, on the newspaper, among the oily pieces of black steel. "I just don't know whether you can."
Deputy Tobin came to the hospice on Friday afternoon.
She was in the day room, with a cup of tea, sitting with a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Grady who was dying by degrees, and who spent most of her time explaining the French Revolution to a stuffed rabbit. The room smelled of lavender and sun-warmed linoleum. A radio played softly in the corridor. When the door opened, Naomi did not look up at once, because she'd learned a long time ago not to; but she felt the shadow fall across the floor, and the faint movement of a heavy belt, and heard the old scrape of a polished boot.
"Afternoon, Naomi."
"Ray." She smiled. It was a good smile, warm and a little tired. She had practiced it for twenty years. "Visiting hours aren't till four."
"I'm not visiting." He took off his hat. He was very tall, in his tan uniform, with the sandy hair and wholesome face of a man who has never had a bad idea in his life. "I just had a minute. Thought I'd stop by and say hello."
"That's kind."
"How's Ivy? Big day tomorrow."
"She's beside herself."
"I'll bet." He glanced round the room, at the vases, the television, the old woman and the rabbit. "You know I coach her Little League. She's got an arm."
"She says you're the best coach in the world."
"She's easy to coach." He turned the hat over in his hands. "Listen. Weird thing. I had a call at the office. A fellow from an insurance outfit, saying he's trying to locate Dean for a statement, some old accident. I told him Dean's lived here nine years and never had a ticket, but he said he needs some background. Where he came from. Where he worked." The pleasant eyes came to rest on her face. "I thought I'd ask you. Seeing as you'd know."
She did not stop smiling.
It was an extraordinary thing. She felt her heart go slow, and large, and very careful. She felt the cup in her hand, warm and smooth, and the sun on her wrist, and she saw, from a distance, with a vivid professional detachment, the small signs in the man's face: the way his eyes did not match his smile; the stiffness of his shoulders; the tiny bead of sweat at his hairline in a cool room. He was not a bad man. She had known him for six years. He'd carried her mother's groceries up the church steps. But he had never in his life, on a Friday afternoon, driven out to the hospice to ask about her husband.
"He was a contractor," she said.
"Where?"
"Ohio. Some outfit in Dayton, I forget the name. Commercial boats. It folded in the recession." She lifted the cup. "He doesn't talk about it. They let a lot of men go. He took it hard."
"Dayton."
"I think it was Dayton. It might have been Toledo. I'm hopeless with places." She smiled again. "Why? Is something wrong?"
"No, no. Nothing." He laughed, a boy's laugh, a little too loud. "It's just paperwork. They like to have it for their files." The hat turned another half-circle. "You'd say if there was anything, wouldn't you? If he'd, if you were worried?"
"Ray," said Naomi gently, "I've been married to that man twenty years. The most dangerous thing he's ever done is leave a ladder in the drive."
He laughed again. This time it sounded better. He said goodbye to Mrs. Grady, who told him sternly that Robespierre had been a good man misled, and went out, and she heard his boots go down the corridor, and the swing of the glass door, and the slam of a car.
She sat for exactly one minute, which she counted. Then she rose, set down her tea, and went to the window.
The cruiser was in the lot. It had not left. The deputy sat behind the wheel with the window down and a phone to his ear, and his free hand rubbing his forehead, up and down, up and down, as though he were trying to wipe away a stain. He was speaking quickly. She could see his lips. She could not hear a word. But at one point, as she watched, he lifted his head and looked straight up at the hospice window, and then, very slowly, as one looks away from a thing one knows to be unforgivable, down at the floor.
Oh, Ray, she thought. Oh, you poor fool.
She took out her own phone and typed three words with her thumb. She read it twice. She sent it.
Tobin is theirs.
That night, the house was full of balloons.
They were everywhere: yellow and blue and silver, nodding on their ribbons from the lintels, bobbing in the hall, banked against the ceiling of the front room in a vast trembling cloud. Ivy had been permitted to help. She had spent the evening inflating them, with enormous effort and enormous ceremony, and tying them in knots she insisted were pirate knots, and counting them aloud. There were sixty-three. She would not go to bed until she had written every one in her notebook.
Naomi stood in the doorway with a dish towel in her hand and watched.
Her husband was on a stepladder, hanging a paper banner across the mantel. It read HAPPY 12TH BIRTHDAY IVY. Ivy had painted the letters herself, in red and gold, with a lighthouse in the corner. He was frowning at it, measuring the sag with his thumb, and she saw that his hair had fallen over his forehead and that he'd a smear of blue paint on his cheek. He looked exactly like a man hanging a banner. He looked so ordinary and so tender and so much like what she had always wanted that for a moment she could not breathe.
Twenty years, she thought. And I never once believed I'd be lied to by anyone who loved me this much.
She didn't forgive it. She wasn't sure she would. But in the quiet of that room, with the balloons nodding overhead and her daughter's small voice counting, she knew that she had already decided something, and that it had been decided at the kitchen table at two in the morning with her hand over his on a sheet of newspaper, and that nothing now would undo it.
"It's crooked," said Ivy, from the floor.
"It's not."
"It's a little crooked."
"Then it's a pirate banner," said Damen. "They're always crooked. It's how you know they've been through a storm."
Ivy gave this serious thought. "Okay," she said. "But the next one has to be straight."
"Next year."
"Promise?"
His hand stopped on the banner.
It was only for an instant. But Naomi saw it, and the ladder shook, very slightly, and she saw his eyes find hers across the room over the top of the child's head, and in them she saw the thing he could not say.
"I promise," said Damen.
And, in the front hall, on the cream-colored table, the telephone began to ring.
It rang four times. Nobody moved. Sixty-three balloons nodded against the ceiling in the draft from the door. And a small voice said, in a puzzled tone, from the floor: "Who rings at nine o'clock at night?"
Damen came down off the ladder. He crossed the room, past the table, past the cake box, past his wife, without a sound. He lifted the receiver.
"Hello," he said.
Naomi watched his back. She watched it for eleven seconds. Then she watched it change.
It did not stiffen. That would have been easier to bear. It simply settled, as a plank settles under a load, into a deeper stillness; and a thing went out of his shoulders that she'd seen there every day for twenty years, a tension so constant that she had stopped noticing it, and in its place came something calm and absolute and quiet, like the face of the lake at dawn.
He put the receiver down.
"Who was it?" she said.
"Wrong number," said Damen.
It was the first lie he had told her in her presence since the porch. He told it well. She looked at the paint on his cheek, the banner, the little girl on the floor with her notebook, and saw in the gray eyes that met her own, very clearly, the truth.
It was not a wrong number.
It was a date.