Episodul 131 · Names Beneath the Pictures

The water at the far end of the garden did not grow cold even after the first frost.

Soles checked it once a week, on Tuesdays, with his palm. He did not know why. The day guard said it was because of the pipes from the greenhouses, which had cracked in the flood. The investigator, whom Soles met once on the path with a bag of bread in his hand, said he had not been sleeping well lately. He did not say why. He only said he woke at the same time every night and counted the doors in his house, though he had only three.

Soles told him nothing. There was nothing to tell.

Krista’s exhibition reopened on the first Saturday in November.

The small room was the same, with the same shelves photographed before the key was surrendered and put back exactly as they had been in the photograph. The new committee, three people Krista did not yet know well and owed nothing to, had voted to reopen it without debate. The foundation had sent no one. Castell was awaiting trial. His name appeared nowhere on the walls.

Other names did.

Soles read every one of them from the entrance to the far end, with Lucky limping beside him on the paw that had healed crooked. Beneath the old black-and-white photographs—people in work clothes on the greenhouse scaffolds, women with their hands in the soil, a boy of about twelve holding a wheelbarrow larger than he was—the label no longer said “Staff.” It gave a name. Sometimes two. Sometimes a name and a question mark where Krista had not been certain and had refused to lie.

Some she had found in Alden’s registers. Others in the gate book, in the daytime column no one had ever looked at. Others had been given to her by people who came carrying photographs from their elders’ drawers after word spread through the city about what she was doing.

Beneath the photograph of the boy with the wheelbarrow it said: Ilion, age 12, son of the night guard. Later day guard.

The day guard stood in front of the photograph with a mug in his hand and did not move. He stayed there all afternoon. People passed him and looked at the photograph, then at him, and he said nothing to them, only nodded slowly. He had waited for this so long that he no longer knew what to do with it.

Krista stood in a corner with a glass of wine she was not drinking and watched him. Soles went to stand beside her.

— You gave him his name back, he said.

— I gave him his. Not mine.

Soles did not understand at first. Then he did, and said nothing more.

Tesa arrived late, straight from the gym, hair wet, wearing the new cast someone had drawn a fish on in pen. She looked at every photograph, one by one, without hurry, from the entrance to the far end, the way she read a contract. She stopped longer in front of one. A group of night guards on the steps of the booth at the service gate, lanterns in hand. Beneath it, Krista had written four names and a question mark.

— He isn’t here, Tesa said without turning. My brother. I thought maybe. He isn’t.

— No, Krista said.

Tesa stood in front of the photograph for a moment. Then she opened her good fist, which she had been holding closed without realizing.

— The lawyer has a new office, she said. On the boulevard. I saw him through the window yesterday. Drinking coffee.

No one said anything.

— I’m not going after him, Tesa said. Not now. I can’t hear him anymore. If I go after him now, I go blind, and I know where that ends.

She turned toward them.

— But I know what street he’s on. And I know he remembers my brother’s name.

It was not a threat. It was a list spoken aloud so it would not be lost.

All four ate dinner that evening at Soles’s house. Maxim had brought pretzels. Tesa had brought a bottle of wine no one opened because everyone was drinking tea. Krista had brought bread from the bakery on the corner, still warm, and Soles looked at that bread for a long time before tearing a piece from it, and all of them saw him looking, and no one said anything.

They ate. They talked about Maxim’s engine, about the fish on Tesa’s cast, drawn by a child at the gym who had asked whether it hurt, about the new committee, which wanted a second exhibition in spring. They did not talk about the bank. They did not talk about Varren. They spoke around them, carefully.

At one point, Soles set his mug on the table and looked at them.

At Tesa, her cast on the table beside the pretzels. At Maxim, his ankle stretched on a chair and his crutches leaning against the refrigerator. At Krista, tearing her bread into small pieces and eating slowly, eyes on the bulb.

He wanted to say something. He did not know what. He had no speech. He never had. He only had a kitchen with four people who had gone with him to that bank knowing where they were going, and who had not left afterward either.

— Thank you, he said.

Tesa looked up from the pretzels.

— For what?

Soles thought. He could not find an answer small enough to fit inside the kitchen.

— For everything, he said. For coming.

Maxim coughed and looked out the window. Tesa looked at Soles with her head tilted slightly the way she listened in the ring, then smiled with her whole face, the way she rarely did.

— You said “thank you,” she said. Maxim, write that down. He’ll deny it tomorrow.

— I heard it too, Krista said without lifting her eyes from the bread.

— Shut up, Soles said.

But he was smiling too.

After tea, Maxim took a pack of cards with worn corners from his jacket pocket and set it on the table between the pretzels like a challenge.

— I’m not very good, Krista said.

She was lying. Soles heard the lie clearly and said nothing.