Episodul 122 · The Word He Needed

Soles remained with the phone to his ear. The sentence had entered him along the same path as it had the first time, in the office, from Kerr’s page, and settled in the same place beneath his ribs. Varren had said it gently. He had said it the way he said everything, as though it were obvious, like the crust at the end of the loaf.

He turned around. Tesa stood in the kitchen doorway. She had heard everything. Krista was beside the table, hands wet. Maxim had opened his eyes and was trying to get up from the couch without waking Lucky.

— Stay here, Soles said.

— No, Tesa said.

— Tesa.

— I told you once to call me at three in the morning. You didn’t. I also told you I’d ask where you were before I came.

She jerked her chin toward the phone in his hand.

— Now I know where you are. There’s nothing left to ask.

Maxim was on his feet. He looked for the crowbar, found it leaning against the wall, and tucked it under his arm like a crutch, with a dignity that did not suit the bandage around his ankle at all.

— I’m not allowed to walk for a week anyway, he said. So it doesn’t matter where I walk.

— You have a sprain.

— You’ve cracked the same rib three times and had your palm stitched twice. Don’t teach me medicine.

Krista dried her hands on the towel. She did not hurry. She dried them finger by finger, the way Soles dried his hands after washing them, and only when she finished did she look at him.

— He called you there with us, she said. That means he wants us there. So we go to show him we came, not because he called us.

— And the investigator?

Krista took out her phone. She typed something short and held her finger over the screen without sending it.

— I’ll send it when we get there, she said. If he comes before then, Varren leaves. If he never comes, no one knows where we are.

Soles looked at all three of them in his kitchen, beneath the bulb Kale had promised for years to replace. He wanted to tell them no. He had the word in his mouth the way he had had Stay in the archive basement. He did not say it.

— The dogs stay, was all he said.

Mina got up from beside the door, looked at them, then lay down again with her muzzle on the threshold. Lucky did not move.

They drove Krista’s car as far as the temporary fence on the canal side. From there, they went on foot. The service gate was locked. So was the small gate. Krista took Key Fourteen from her pocket, the one Varren had placed in her palm, turned it, and opened the little gate only halfway, just as he had advised her. It did not squeak. Krista looked at it for a long time before going through.

The garden was black and wet. The collapsed paths smelled of turned earth, and the greenhouses stood empty in the darkness. Tesa went first. She did not turn on a flashlight. She listened. Now and then she raised her good hand and they all stopped, and she listened farther, head tilted slightly, until she lowered it again.

Toward the far end of the garden, the air changed.

It grew warmer. Not much. Just enough to feel against your cheek that somewhere ahead the ground was breathing. Then they saw the steam, white and low over a sheet of water that never froze, at the edge of the old riverbed between the old stones of the bank.

A folding chair stood open beside the water.

Varren sat in it with his back to them and his face toward the water, hands clasped between his knees. On the stone beside one chair leg stood a mug. Steam rose around him and drifted into the dark, slowly, without touching him.

He did not turn.

— You all came, he said. Good.

Soles stopped three steps from the chair. Tesa stayed to his left, slightly behind, where she could hear everything. Maxim leaned on the crowbar to Soles’s right, at the edge of the stones. Krista stopped last, phone in hand, and sent the message without looking at the screen.

Varren did not turn even then. He picked up the mug beside the chair, took a drink, and set it back exactly on the damp ring it had left on the stone.

— Here I can’t hear anything anymore, he said. I don’t know whether I ever told you what it’s like. I told you it was quiet. Quiet is a bad word. At home, in my head, there are people standing around a tree. They don’t all talk at once. They speak one at a time, and every one of them is right. Here they all go quiet and step back. I sit in this chair and I’m the only one left under the tree.

At last he turned. His face was tired and clear, and his eyes were the ones Soles had trusted since the empty pool. That was the hardest part. He had expected a different face. The man sitting in the folding chair was the same man who brought him warm bread, who had sat beside his hospital bed while he cried, who had emptied a locker at the port so Soles would not have to empty it himself.

How does this man want me to see him?

The question came on its own, the way it did with strangers. Soles had never asked it about Varren. Now he did, and no answer came. Varren did not want to be seen in any particular way. He sat in front of him with his hands open on his knees and let everything show.

— Why? Soles asked.

He did not ask what. He did not ask how. Kerr’s pages told him how, and Kale’s notebook told him when. One word was all that was missing.