Chapter 10
The Distance
The strange part was how well it worked.
That was what Sarah thought, in the second week of February, standing at the library desk with a stack of due-date slips and a very clear, cold head. It had been three weeks. It had gone without a flaw. On Tuesdays she walked to Ruth's at 5:20, and he was at the corner table, and they talked for an hour, politely, with their coats on the backs of the chairs. They talked about books. They talked about the weather, and the robotics club, and Tessa's husband's latest hot sauce, which was called Hindsight. At 6:20, one of them looked at the clock. They said goodbye on the sidewalk. He did not say text me when you get home.
She had stopped asking herself whether she missed it.
She did not text him. It was a decision, and she had made it herself, with a certain stiff pride. If a man wanted to be respectful, she would be respectful back. She was a grown woman. She did not need a friend to ring her at midnight to tell her about a squirrel. She had a boyfriend, and a job, and a mother, and a life.
She put the slips in a drawer, and shut it with a clack.
"You've done that four times," said Tessa.
"What?"
"The drawer."
"It sticks."
"It's not sticking. You're slamming it." Tessa had her chin on her hand. She was looking at Sarah over the top of a very large mug, with that wide, dark, patient gaze. "I'm not saying anything."
"Good."
"I'm just noticing."
"Noticing what?"
"That you've stopped smiling at your phone."
Sarah picked up a pencil. She put it down again.
"That's a good thing," she said.
"Is it?"
"It's, yes. It's what's supposed to happen. It was getting, it wasn't a, it's fine, Tessa. We're friends. We see each other on Tuesdays. It's healthier."
"Healthy," said Tessa.
"Yes."
"Okay."
"It is."
"I believe you," said Tessa, in a tone of great gentleness, and went to find the stapler. And Sarah stood at the desk and looked at the white mug on the shelf, and wondered, with a small dull ache she did not like at all, how a person could be so entirely right and feel so thoroughly like a thing that had been put away in a box.
Mark was happy.
It was impossible not to notice. He was happier than he had been since the summer. He came to her flat three times a week. He brought food. He kissed her on the back of the neck while she was washing dishes. He said, with a kind of glowing wonder, that she seemed more present, as if she had come back from a long way off, and she said she supposed she had been tired. He did not ask about her phone. He did not ask about Tuesdays. He had stopped, simply, as one stops fingering a bruise, and a sort of warm, expanded, grateful tenderness had settled over him that made her feel like someone he had won back from the sea.
He had not mentioned the dinner.
The one at his place, with the risotto, for Friday week. It had been a month. He had said, in a Tuesday coffee shop, to a man's face, write it down, Sarah, and he had not said another word. She had not reminded him. She had felt it hang there, in the air, a small crooked thing, and had let it hang, and each time she thought of it she felt a relief so deep that it frightened her.
"I've got a surprise," he said, on the eleventh.
"What?"
"It's for the fourteenth. I've booked it. I'm not telling." He was lying on her bed, on his back, with his hands behind his head, grinning at the ceiling. "Take Friday off. Pack warm. Don't ask."
"Mark."
"It's a secret."
"I've got story hour."
"Tessa can do it. I've already asked her."
"You asked Tessa?"
"I rang her at work. She said fine." He rolled over, and looked up at her, laughing. "Don't be angry. I wanted it to be perfect. It's the first time in a while that I've felt like we, that we're actually, I want to do something big."
She looked at him. He was so handsome, lying there, with his hair messy and his shirt open and the afternoon light on his face. He looked about nineteen. He looked entirely happy. She felt the hot flush of guilt come up her neck, because there was nothing wrong with this at all. It was a kind thing. It was a surprise, for her, from a man who adored her, and she was lying there with a quiet, small, dead feeling in her stomach, as of a piano with no strings.
"Okay," she said.
"Yes?"
"Okay. It sounds lovely."
"It's going to be the best weekend of your life," said Mark.
It was a cabin, in Vermont, in the snow.
It was exactly what she would have chosen, if anyone had asked her, and nobody had. It sat at the end of a long white track, in a wood of bare maples, with a log fire and a wide bed and a hot tub on the porch under the stars. It had been left spotless. There was a bottle of champagne on ice, and strawberries, and a card that said For the happy couple, which he had written himself, and a small box on the pillow.
He did not give it to her that night.
She saw it. It was a small square velvet box, dark blue, and she was careful not to look at it too long. She saw his eyes go to it, and away. She saw how he touched his pocket. She understood, in a clear dim unwelcoming way, that it was waiting for some better moment, and that she was supposed to be too happy to notice.
She was, she supposed, happy.
She sat in the hot tub, under a sky so thick with stars that it hurt, with her hair up and a glass of champagne, and Mark beside her with his arm round her shoulders. It was bitterly cold. The air burned in her nose. She could see her breath, and his, going up together in a single white cloud. He told her that he loved her. He said it into her hair, softly, three times. She said it back.
At ten, she said that she needed to go inside for a minute.
She did not need to. She stood in the cabin's little bathroom, with the door shut, in her wet swimsuit, with a towel round her, and turned on the tap so that the water ran. She took her phone out of the pocket of her robe. It was the first time she had touched it all day.
There were no messages.
She had not expected any. She had known that. It was only that she stood there with the screen glowing in her hand, looking at the empty list, and felt the whole of the bright cold bathroom go quiet around her. It was the fourteenth of February. A man had told her, in a library, that he would see her on Tuesdays.
Is it snowing there?
She typed it. It was a plain, innocent, perfectly neutral question. It meant nothing. It would not have broken a single rule.
She looked at it for a long time.
She deleted it, one letter at a time.
She put the phone in her pocket, and washed her face, and went back out into the firelit room, where a man in a white robe was standing by the bed with a small blue box in his hand and a smile that was nearly a prayer.
He had not meant to buy the record.
It was only that it had been in the box. It was a Saturday, the eighth, and he had gone to the Salvation Army on Grant Street to look for a bicycle pump, and it was there, in a crate marked LPs $3, between a Herb Alpert and a record of whale songs. It was blue and brown and faded. The cover showed a woman on a window seat with a cat, in a sweater, with her hair loose. Tapestry. It had a coffee ring on the front, and a price sticker, and somebody had written a name on the back in ballpoint. Jean.
He had held it for a long time.
She had told him, on the first of December, over a crossword. She had said her mother used to play it on Sundays, in the kitchen, with the window open, while she made the gravy. She had said that she could not hear the first bar of any song on it without knowing exactly what time it was. She had said it as one says a small, unimportant thing, and gone straight on to a clue, and he had not forgotten it.
He bought it for three dollars.
He had thought he would give it to her. He had thought about it for a week. He had put it on the passenger seat of the car, and taken it out, and put it on the shelf in the living room, face out, beside a row of old bicycle manuals. He had walked past it forty times. He did not own a record player. He could not afford to buy one for her, or have the nerve. And she did not need his gift, or his help, or the burden of a thing to be grateful for.
It stood on the shelf, and the woman in the sweater looked out at him.
He was not unhappy. That was what he told the dog. He had a full life. He had a class, and a club, and a Schwinn on a hook, and a sister and a nephew and a father who rang on Sundays. He ate. He slept. He told Priya, on the Thursday, that her laundry-sorting robot was a work of genius, and she did not smile, and said, "You say that every time, Mr. Moore," and then, after a pause, very seriously: "You're sad."
"I'm not sad."
"You've been sad since the snow."
"It's the weather."
"It's not." She stared at him through her thick glasses with great, relentless, unblinking clarity. "I think it's a person."
"Priya."
"I'm just saying. My mom did it. She was sad for months. And then she said sorry to my dad and they went to Florida."
"That's very helpful."
"You could go to Florida."
"I'll bear it in mind."
She went away. He stood in the lab among the benches, with a strip of litmus paper in one hand, and looked at it, and found that it had turned a shade of pink that he could have described, exactly, as the color of the inside of a certain person's scarf.
Get hold of yourself, he thought.
He went home. He took the dog round the block. At the end of the road, a window was lit in a house, and he saw, through it, a woman with a baby on her hip laughing at a man in an apron. He stood there on the sidewalk in the cold with the lead going slack in his hand, and the dog, who had stopped to smell a hydrant, looked back, and waited.
Don't be the man who waits.
He was not waiting. He told himself so, very distinctly. He was just a man with a good life who happened to miss a person. It was a different thing.
It was only that on the fourteenth he stood in the kitchen at ten forty-one, with his phone in his hand, and wrote a message that took him eleven minutes.
snowing here. pickles ate a mitten. hope you're warm.
He had cut it from two hundred words. He read what was left. It was perfectly harmless. It did not say a thing. It was a small plain pebble of a message, no larger than a thumbnail, tossed through a window.
He sent it before he could think.
It came while she was lying in bed.
She had her back to the fire. The cabin was warm, and smelled of woodsmoke and pine. On the pillow beside her, Mark lay on his side, sleeping, with his arm across her waist, heavy and damp and hot. His ring was on her finger. It was a lovely one. It was a small square diamond in a plain gold band, and it had been put there at eleven o'clock, by firelight, in a silence so full of hope that she had said yes without a pause, and burst into tears, and he had thought they were happy ones.
They were.
She did not know what they were.
The phone lit on the side table. She saw it from the corner of her eye, a small blue square in the dark.
She lay perfectly still.
It was a minute before she dared reach for it. She did it with the hand that wore the ring, stretching out in the dark, so slowly that the sheet did not stir. She held the screen close to her chest. She read it, with her face turned into the pillow.
snowing here. pickles ate a mitten. hope you're warm.
It was the best thing she had read all year.
She could not have said why. There was nothing in it. There was no question, and no feeling, and no word at all that anyone might have taken for a plea. It was only a dog and a mitten and a man at the other end of the state, in a kitchen, who had wanted her to know that the snow was falling. It was a small light, left on in a window.
She thought of a hot tub, and a sky full of stars, and a sentence she had said.
Yes, she had said.
She looked at the ring. It glinted in the glow of the phone, a small cold spark. She turned it once, round and round, with her thumb, feeling its weight. It was a good ring. It fitted. He had remembered her size.
I'm engaged, she thought. I'm going to be married.
It sat in her mind, neat and bright and entirely unconvincing, like a word in a foreign language that one has learned from a book.
She typed, with one thumb, very slowly.
Warm, she wrote.
She looked at it. It was one word. It was not true. She was so warm that she could hardly breathe, in a bed with a man's arm across her, and she was colder than she had ever been in her life.
She sent it. The phone went dark.
Behind her, Mark stirred in his sleep. He tightened his arm. He said, in a thick, loving mutter, "Love you," and she said, "Love you too," in the right voice, and lay with her eyes wide open, staring at the black wall, until the fire sank to a red line and the window turned gray.
Across the state, in a dark kitchen, a man was reading a word.
It had come at eleven fifty-eight. He had not been waiting. He had gone to bed at ten forty-five, with a book, and put it down, and gone to the kitchen for a glass of water. He had stood at the counter in his bare feet, and the phone had lit in his hand, and there was one word on it, in a gray bubble.
Warm.
He read it again.
He was a man who read words closely. He had spent six years correcting spelling. He knew the way a sentence could be built to keep a person out. He knew that it was one word, and a period, and no heart, and no thanks, and no you? He knew that it was the exact length of a very high, very narrow wall.
She's fine, he thought.
She's warm. It's what I wanted.
He stood still in the dark kitchen with the water running. He did not know what he had hoped. He had hoped, perhaps, that she would not answer. That would have been easier. It would have been a clean cut, with an edge, and he could have set a splint on it.
Instead there was a single word, and under it, plainly, without any help from the words themselves, a feeling like a hand on the other side of a pane of glass.
The dog padded in.
He sat down on the cold linoleum, with his back against the cabinet, and sighed, and put his chin on Daniel's foot.
"She's warm," said Daniel.
The dog said nothing.
"That's, I did it right. I did the right thing. Nobody's hurt." He drew up his knees. "It's all in order. It's what a decent man does."
He looked at the screen.
It's what a decent man does.
He said it again. It was a good sentence. It had the solid, rounded, comforting shape of a stone. He turned it over in his mind. And all at once, sitting on the floor at midnight, with the faucet dripping and a three-legged beagle against his shin, he had the clearest, calmest, most dreadful thought of his life.
I've been doing it for four weeks.
And I can't remember a single thing I've felt that wasn't about her.
He turned off the phone, and put it on the floor, and leaned back his head against the cupboard, and shut his eyes.