Episodul 113 · Enough to Stay

That evening they gathered in Maxim’s yard without arranging it beforehand.

Tesa came first, one hand in a cast and a bag of apples, because she had heard about the bridge from Soles and wanted to see the broken headlight with her own eyes. She looked at the headlight. Looked at Maxim. Said nothing. Just bumped her good shoulder once against his, the way you do after a match. Krista came straight from the archive, paper dust on her sleeves. Soles came with the dogs, Lucky limping in his spoon splint because Soles did not want to leave him alone. Then, around eight, Varren came too, with a large loaf still warm and a bottle of wine, and the excuse that he had happened to be passing through the area.

No one asked what he happened to be doing on the edge of the city, on Maxim’s street, carrying warm bread. No one ever asked that when Varren showed up.

They carried the kitchen table into the yard beneath the bulb above the door. Maxim brought mismatched chairs from every corner of the house. Varren found the mugs without asking where they were, first try, in the upper cabinet on the left, and set one in front of each person, placing Maxim’s beside Soles’s. Maxim looked at each of them in turn the way Ordric looked at seals: Tesa’s cast, the paper dust on Krista’s sleeves, Soles’s palm. He let Varren pass without looking.

The boat engine sat on an overturned crate beside the table, uncovered.

Soles had taken half of it apart before the others arrived, using his good hand while Maxim held the parts. The carburetor lay cleaned on a rag. Beside it waited the new spark plug Maxim had kept in a drawer for two years, bought for this engine and never installed.

— It doesn’t run, Tesa said, looking at the engine.

— It runs tomorrow, Soles said.

— He doesn’t have a boat, Krista said.

— No one said he does, Maxim said.

Varren tore the bread with his hands instead of using a knife and passed it around. He gave Soles the end crust without looking, the way he always did, because Soles ate the crust first. Tesa looked at the gesture briefly, then looked away. Krista did not look. She tore small pieces from her slice and ate slowly, eyes on the bulb.

Maxim told them about the bridge. Not about Ordric. Not about the gate, nor the nephew holding the lantern. He told them about the yellow truck, the strip of water, the front wheels left hanging over the canal, and Soles told the part about the second, how he had needed five seconds and did not have them. Tesa laughed. Really laughed, head thrown back, the way she had not laughed since her brother disappeared.

— You park crosswise in front of a truck, she said, pointing at Maxim, and you do calculations. You two should start a company.

— We have one, Soles said. Opens tomorrow. Repairs boat engines for people without boats.

They all laughed. Even Krista. Even Varren, quietly, one hand around his wine mug, eyes moving over them one by one, pleased.

Maxim looked at them beneath the bulb. Tesa with the cast on the table beside the apples. Krista with paper dust on her sleeves. Soles with his stitched palm and the crust in his good hand. Varren pouring wine without asking who needed more and getting it right every time.

He thought he would not leave first here either. But for the first time, he was not staying so no one would be left waiting. He was staying because he wanted to.

— V —

The train arrived at night, four hours late.

The young man was the last to step down from the car. No one was waiting for him on the platform. The station had a name he had never heard before seeing it on the transfer paper. It smelled of salt and diesel, and beyond the roofs beside the station cranes stood black against the night sky.

The man at the transfer office found him a bed in a dormitory near the port and told him to come back the next day. The next day he found him work. A month later, the young man found something better on his own. A year later, something else.

The voices had not gone away. They sat beneath his thoughts, one, then the others. He had learned to keep them there: counting his knuckles, tying knots, doing things for people who did not notice he was doing them. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not. Nights were the worst. At night he walked through the city until dawn so he would not be alone with them in a room.

One autumn, many years later, while walking, he reached a quiet street in the upper part of the city. A small house for sale, with an untrimmed hedge and a wooden gate with peeling paint. He went into the yard without knowing why.

There was a pool in the yard. Empty. Its bottom cracked, dead leaves gathered in one corner, a rusted iron ladder descending into nothing.

The young man stopped at the edge and looked down.

He thought of ice. Of the black water beneath it long ago, where there had been silence. For the first time in a very long time, the voices beneath his thoughts grew small, the way people in a large hall grow quiet when someone they have all been waiting for enters.

He bought the house that same month.

The pool would not hold water. He tried to fix it himself and failed. He called two tradesmen, and they failed too. One told him the bottom needed to be broken up and poured again. The other told him there was no point. The young man did not want a new pool. He wanted this pool, with its rusted ladder and its crack, to hold water. He wanted to be able to sit beside it.

So one morning he came to a workshop in the port with a folded plan and several photographs of an empty pool.

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