Chapter 12
The Night Everything Changed
The storm came in on the last Tuesday of March, and it took the lights with it.
They were at Ruth's. It was ten past six, and raining so hard that the front window had gone silver. Wind was throwing handfuls of water at the glass. Mia had been saying for an hour that the sky looked wrong. And then, in the middle of a sentence about a school bus, there was a sort of long soft electric sigh, and every light in the room went out at once.
Somebody gasped. Somebody laughed. Outside, the street lamps had gone dark, one after another, all the way down Elm, like a row of candles in a draft.
"Well," said Mia, in the sudden dim. "That's it. That's the end of the coffee."
"Is it just us?" said a man at the counter.
"It's the whole street. Probably the whole east side." She had a flashlight, and was already moving round the room with it, like a harried lighthouse. "I'm closing. I can't run the machines. I'm sorry, folks. Take your drinks. It's on the house."
They stood in the doorway, the two of them, with their coats on and their cups in their hands. The rain was streaming down in sheets. A transformer somewhere cracked, and a flash lit the whole street a ghostly blue, and went out. Sarah's Civic was three blocks away. Daniel's Subaru was at the end of Pearl.
"You can't walk in that," said Daniel.
"I've got an umbrella."
"It'll be inside out in four seconds."
"I live two minutes from here."
"The street's flooded. I saw it. At the corner by the bakery. It's up to a person's ankle."
"I'll wade."
"Sarah."
"I'm not made of sugar."
"I know you're not. I'm just saying, you're not going home in this." He looked round, and up the road, and the dark lines of the rain. "Where's the nearest place with a roof?"
She looked at him.
"The library," she said.
It had a generator.
It was one of the things that the branch was proud of. It was a squat gray box behind the building, installed after the ice storm six years ago, and when the lights went it coughed twice and kicked in, so that the emergency strips came on in the ceiling, low and amber, and the heat went on, and a single bank of lamps in the back office. It lit about a third of the building. The rest was dark. The long shelves stood up in the gloom like the walls of a city, and the rain drummed on the flat roof, which, thanks to a good deal of effort and eleven thousand dollars, had not leaked in six weeks.
"I need to check the nonfiction," said Sarah.
"Why?"
"The roof. If there's a drip, I have to put out a bucket. Tessa'd kill me."
"I'll help."
"You don't have to."
"I'm soaked," said Daniel. "I'd like to be useful."
They went through the dim aisles with a flashlight. Water was running down the windows in sheets. The nonfiction was dry. She checked every corner, seriously, with her light on the ceiling tiles, and he walked behind her with his hands in his pockets, and watched the yellow circle go along the spines. Biography. Cooking. Crafts. Dinosaurs. It was very quiet. It was a hushed, enclosed, warm quiet, like being inside a large animal asleep.
"It's dry," said Sarah.
"Good."
"I'm, wow. It's really dry."
"You sound disappointed."
"I wanted a bucket." She switched off the torch. "Do you know that I haven't been alone in here at night? Not once. Five years. There's always someone. It's, I've never seen it like this."
"How is it?"
"It's beautiful," said Sarah, in a small voice.
It was. He saw it, for a moment, as she did. A huge dim room, full of books, in the rain. A thousand lives, shut up in paper, waiting for the light. He stood with his shoulder against a shelf, and the amber glow falling on her hair, and he thought that he had never in his life been in a place so peaceful.
"I've got a thermos," said Sarah. "In the staff room. I make tea every morning, and I never drink it. It'll be lukewarm."
"I'll take lukewarm."
"I've got noodles, too. The cup kind."
"That's the finest offer I've had all year."
The staff room was a long narrow place with a sagging couch and a table covered in magazines. There was a small kettle. There was a refrigerator with a sign on it that said DO NOT EAT THE YOGURT. TESSA KNOWS. On the wall, a corkboard was layered with children's drawings, hundreds of them, overlapping, in crayon and finger paint. A dinosaur with eleven legs. A house on fire, with a smiling sun. A very large blue cat labeled MR. WHISKERS (RIP).
She boiled water on a camp stove from the cupboard. They ate noodles out of paper cups, sitting at either end of the couch, with their wet coats steaming over a chair, and a candle stuck in a saucer on the table between them because she said it would be more cheerful.
"This is the best dinner I've ever had," said Daniel.
"It's got chemicals."
"It's got chicken flavor."
"There's no chicken in it."
"That's why it's good. It has the idea of chicken, without the responsibility."
She laughed. She was cross-legged on the couch in a gray cardigan she kept at work, with her wet hair pulled up in a clip and her feet in two odd socks, one blue, one with a hole. She looked about nineteen. She was blowing on her noodles, and a loose strand of hair was falling in her face. She did not seem to mind that he was looking.
"Did you text Mark?" he said.
"I did. He's in Chicago."
"Oh."
"A conference. He gets back tomorrow. He said, stay safe, call you in the morning." She shrugged. "He's got a, they have a dinner. He'll be out till late."
"That's good."
"Is it?"
"I just meant." He swallowed. "That you won't have to explain."
"Explain what?"
"Being here."
She did not answer. She poked at a noodle. She said, after a moment, lightly, "I'd tell him."
"Would you?"
"I'd say, the power went out, and I went to work. Which is true."
"And you were with me."
"I'd say a friend."
"Okay."
"It's what you are."
"I know," said Daniel.
She looked at him over the rim of the cup. For a moment neither of them said anything. The rain had changed its note. It had dropped to a long, low, steady hush, and the candle shivered in its saucer, and there was a feeling in the room that neither of them wanted to name, like a held breath.
They talked until one.
It began with nothing. It began with a game, which she invented, called Worst Job. They each had to describe the worst job they had ever had, and the other had to guess what it was. His had been a summer in a pickle factory. Hers was a year as a flower girl at a very large wedding, aged five. She had bitten the ring bearer. They told each other about the boys who had broken their hearts at fifteen. They told each other about the first thing they had ever stolen. He said it was a pack of gum. She said it was a library book.
"You didn't."
"I was nine. It was about a horse. I couldn't bear to give it back."
"What did you do?"
"I kept it for eleven years. Then I paid the fine. It was four hundred dollars."
"You're the worst librarian in the world."
"I'm the best librarian. I know how it's done."
He read to her, from the shelf in the corner. He did the voices. It was a book about a bear, a very sad one, who sat on a hill and waited for the sun, and he did the bear in a deep, slow, terrible bass, with such solemn despair that she had to put her face in a cushion. He did the bird as a small, shrill, officious clerk. When he got to the last page, where the sun came up, and the bear said, in a whisper, oh, he stopped. He looked at the page for a moment. He did not say anything.
"That's my favorite part," said Sarah.
"It's the best one."
"It's the way he doesn't make a speech. He just says, oh."
"It's all you'd say."
"It's all there is." She had her chin on her knees. "I give that book to every child who comes in sad. They never know why. But they read it, and then they're, there's a thing that happens to their faces."
"What?"
"They stop trying to be good."
He closed the book. He put it on the table, beside the candle.
"Can I ask you something?" said Daniel.
"Yes."
"Why him?"
She did not move.
She sat with her chin on her knees and her eyes on the flame, and the light made two small gold points in them. He had not meant to ask it. It was a thing he had held down for six months, as one holds down a lid, and it had come up suddenly, in a rush, out of the warm dark and the rain and the sound of her voice. He wanted to take it back. He did not take it back.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's none of my business."
"No. It's all right."
"I shouldn't have."
"It's a fair question." She was quiet for a while. "I've been asking it too. Not that way. I mean I know why. I could give you the list." She smiled, rather crookedly. "He's kind. He's good with my mother. He sat with me. When my dad died. Do you know what that's like? There's a week, after, when you can't, you can't do anything. You can't pick a casket. You can't remember what he liked. And a person comes. He says, I've got it. And he does."
"That's a lot."
"It's the most anyone's ever done for me." Her voice was steady. "And I don't think, I don't know how to, you can't leave a person like that. You can't say, thank you very much, I'll take it from here. It's like, I'd owe him a, I'd owe him my whole life."
"That's not how it works."
"Isn't it?"
"No. I don't think that's what a kindness is." He kept his eyes on the candle. "I think if somebody does a thing like that, they're doing it because they want to. It's a gift. It's not a loan."
"Is it always?"
"I don't know," said Daniel. "I'd like to think so."
She was silent.
"Sometimes," said Sarah, very slowly, "I think it's the other thing. I think I'm frightened."
"Of what?"
"Of being by myself." She said it as one says an unwelcome truth in a hospital. "I don't mean the, I don't mind being alone. I like it. I like my own apartment. I mean the other one. The one where there's nobody who knows where you are. Where nobody'd, if you fell down. Nobody'd notice for a week." She gave a short, shaky laugh. "I think that's a very stupid reason to marry a person."
"It's not stupid."
"It's not a good one."
"It's a human one." He turned his head. "I'm afraid of it too."
"You?"
"I live with a dog, Sarah. I talk to him when I'm cooking. I told him about my day, last night. In detail. I did the voices." He shrugged, with a rueful, lopsided smile. "I had a girlfriend, once. Claire. She was lovely. She was funny and brave and way too good for me. And she left, in the end, because she said she never knew what I wanted. I said, I want what you want. She said, That's not an answer. She said I'd rather be agreeable than be known."
"Is that true?"
"A bit."
"Why?"
"I don't know. I think it's easier. If you never say what you want, you can never be turned down." He looked at his hands. "I watched my sister marry a man who told her what she wanted. For ten years. I think I made a, I decided that the safest way to be was to be the one who never asked."
She did not say anything.
"It's a bad plan," said Daniel. "I'd recommend against it."
"I do the same."
"Do you?"
"I never ask. I wait for people to notice." She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. "And they do. Mark does. He notices everything. It's, I never have to say. He's already got the, he's already made the list. And I think, how kind. And then I realize I haven't had a thought of my own in a week."
He raised his head.
It was the first time, in six months, that she had said anything like it. She had said it into her knees, in a thin dry voice, without looking at him. He saw her realize it. He saw her hear what she had said. Her shoulders went up, very slightly, and her hand went to her sleeve.
"I didn't mean that."
"Okay."
"It's not, he's not, I don't, it's me. It's something I do."
"Okay."
"Don't say okay."
"What should I say?"
"I don't know." She laughed again, wetly. "Say something that isn't, that doesn't sound like you're being very careful."
"I'm very careful."
"I know."
"I'm being as careful as I've ever been in my life," said Daniel.
He heard it. It went out, quietly, into the little room, and nobody caught it.
The rain came down. The generator hummed. And on the corkboard, in the amber light, a child's drawing of a sun with a smiling face moved a little in the draft, and was still.
She fell asleep at ten past two.
She did not mean to. She had been telling him about her father's last words. She had never told anyone. They had been in the hospital, at the end, with the monitor going. Her father had held her wrist. He had said, You'll be fine, Sar. It was all he said. And she had said, I know, and he had said, No. You will. And she had spent two years not knowing whether he had meant it as a promise or an order.
"Both," said Daniel.
"What?"
"I think it was both. I think that's what you say, when you're a dad."
"Did your mom?"
"She said I had to eat vegetables." He smiled. "It's the last thing. Eat the green ones. I think it covers everything."
She laughed. It was soft, and tired, and dissolving. She had tucked her feet up. Her cheek was against the arm of the couch, and her eyes were half closed. She said, in a slow, soft, drifting voice, "I'm just going to rest for a, it's only a minute. Don't go."
"I won't."
"Talk to me."
"What about?"
"Anything. Squirrels."
He told her about the squirrel. He told it in a low voice, very slowly, with all the details, the pizza, the half block, the crows. He had told it before. It did not matter. She was breathing deeper. Her hand had slipped from her sleeve, and lay open on the cushion beside her face, the left one, with the small stone on it, glinting in the candle.
He stopped.
He sat very still, looking at her. It was a thing he had not let himself do. He looked at her face in the amber light, and the long dark lashes, and the little freckle under the eye. He looked at the strand of hair that had come loose. He looked at her mouth. She was breathing through it, a little, like a child.
He did not move.
He knew exactly what he felt. It was no longer a question. It had stopped being one, he thought, some time in January, in a diner, over a plate of bacon, and he had spent two months carrying it round like a stone in a pocket, hoping it would turn into something else. It had not. It sat in his chest, calm and warm and perfectly clear.
I'm in love with her.
It was not a thunderclap. He had expected one. It was only a quiet sentence, in a quiet room, that he had known for a long time and had at last allowed himself to hear.
She's engaged to someone else.
She's asleep on a couch.
I'm sitting here watching her do it.
He got up, very carefully. He took the blanket from the back of the sofa, the old plaid one, which they used for the story hour, and laid it over her. He tucked it in at her shoulder. His hand hovered a moment, in the air, above her hair. Then he took it away, and put it in his pocket.
He went to the window, and stood.
It was past three. The rain had thinned. Far away, down the dark road, a single light was moving, a truck, with a yellow lamp on the roof, and a crew in orange coats. They would be here by morning. He watched it for a long time.
Behind him, on the couch, she said something in her sleep.
It was not a word. It was a soft contented sound, a little murmur, such as a person makes who has put down a heavy bag. He stood still with his back to her, and his forehead against the cold glass, and heard it, and did not turn.
Don't.
Don't, Daniel.
It's the right thing.
He said it to himself over and over, in the dark, in a very small voice. It did not sound, any longer, like a statement. It sounded like a prayer from a man who did not believe in it.
She woke at ten to seven.
It was gray in the room. The candle had burned out. The lights were on in the ceiling, bright and white, and the refrigerator was humming, and the whole building had the clean, scrubbed, startled air of a place that has just been told that it is morning. She lay under a plaid blanket with her cheek on a cushion. For a moment she did not know where she was.
Then she did.
She did not move. She lay with her eyes shut, listening. There was a small sound, a rustle. A scratch. She opened one eye.
He was in the chair at the far end of the room, with his feet on the table. He was fast asleep. His head had fallen back against the wall, and his mouth was open, and a pencil had dropped from his hand and lay on the floor. He had put his coat over his knees. His hair was sticking up. In his lap, face down, open at the last page, was a picture book about a bear.
He stayed.
He stayed all night.
She lay there, very still, in the early light, and looked at him.
It was a long look. It was not a look that she had ever allowed herself. She looked at the long, tired, untidy face, and the bony wrists, and the white scar on the thumb, and the soft rise and fall of his chest. And what she felt was not a rush, or a flutter, or any of the things people had told her about. It was larger and plainer and more terrible than that. It was a settling. It was the sense of a thing finding, at last, its weight.
Oh, she thought.
It's him.
She did not say it aloud. She did not need to. She heard it the way the bear had heard the sun. It rose up in her, slowly, in the cold gray morning, and she lay still with her hand over her mouth, and tears ran sideways across her face into her hair.
On the third finger of the hand at her lips, a small stone caught the light.
She looked at it.
She looked at it for a very long time. And then she did a thing she had never done in her life. She took off the ring. She did it quietly, slipping it over the knuckle, and she held it in her closed fist against her chest, with her eyes on the man in the chair. She did not put it on the table. She did not put it in her pocket. She only held it, as one holds a coin one has been given, and has not yet decided whether to spend.
Daniel stirred.
His eyes opened. They were red-rimmed and vague. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the clock. And then, slowly, he turned his head, and saw her watching him, and for about three seconds, in the unguarded blur of waking, he did not hide a thing.
His whole face softened.
It was a look so open that it frightened her. It was unmistakable. It was the face of a man who has dreamed all night of a particular person, and woken, and found her in the room. He said, in a thick, sleepy, wondering voice, "Hi."
"Hi."
"What time is it?"
"Ten to seven."
"Did the lights come on?"
"They came on."
"Gus said twenty minutes," said Daniel.
She laughed. It broke out of her, wet and shaky and sweet. She put her face in the cushion, and he laughed too, hoarse, and then they were both laughing, helplessly, like two people at a funeral, and she lay on the couch with her knees drawn up and her fist pressed hard to her chest, and felt, plainly, that something between them had gone and would not come back.
When she looked up, he had stopped.
He was sitting forward in the chair, with his elbows on his knees, and his eyes on her face, and they were clear. He did not look away. He opened his mouth. She saw the first word begin.
"Sarah," said Daniel.
"Don't," she said.
She did not know why she had said it. It came out in a whisper. She sat up, and put her feet on the floor, and the blanket slid off her shoulders. She had the ring in her fist, tight, so that the stone bit her palm.
"Not yet," she said. "Please. I can't, I need to, if you say it, I won't be able to."
"Okay."
"I'm not saying no."
"I know."
"I'm just, I'm saying I'm not ready to hear it." She was crying. She did not try to stop. "And I'm not ready to say it either. And I think you know what it is."
"I do."
"Then we both know."
"Yes," said Daniel.
He leaned back. He closed his eyes. Then he opened them, and looked at the ceiling, and smiled, gently, in a way that went right through her. It was a brave, rueful, entirely tender smile, the smile of a man who has lost a thing and found something else in the same moment.
"Okay," he said. "We'll wait."
She nodded.
Outside, the sky was clearing. A thin cold sun came through the window, and lay across the floor in a long pale stripe. A garbage truck went by. Somebody in the street was running a hose. And in the staff room of the Eastside Branch of the Ashford Public Library, two people sat in the early light, a few feet apart, without touching, and did not say any of the things that were in the air between them.
It did not matter. They both heard them.
It was the quietest conversation of their lives.