Episode 132 · Where It Was Warm

They played for matchsticks until almost midnight. Krista won nearly everything. Not quickly and not gracefully. She lost the small hands with an annoyed expression Soles did not believe and took the large ones without lifting her eyes from her cards.

— You’ve got an ace, she told Maxim at one point in a bored voice. And nothing with it.

Maxim stared at her for a long time. Then he threw his hand on the table. An ace and nothing else.

— How do you know?

— Your foot, Krista said. The good one. When you have a high card, you stop tapping it under the table.

Maxim looked beneath the table at his foot like a traitor.

Krista turned to Soles and pushed all her matchsticks into the middle.

— I have a bad hand, she said.

She was lying again. This time she looked straight at him while she lied, and Soles understood that she was not doing it to fool him. She was showing him the lie like a card turned faceup so he would know where it was. It was the first thing she showed him without his asking.

Soles set his cards facedown on the table. Krista turned hers over. Three queens.

— You cheat, Tesa said.

— I play, Krista said. It’s different.

That night, Krista did not go home.

Nothing was decided. Soles washed the dishes while she dried them, and at one point, when he handed her the last mug, she did not take it. She took his hand, mug and all, and held it there above the sink with the water running.

— You said “here,” she said. On the bank. After.

— Yes.

— What does it mean?

Soles thought. He thought honestly, the way he had in front of the investigator, and this time he found it.

— It means I don’t have a “not until” anymore, he said. I had one my whole life. Now I only have this.

He looked at the kitchen. At her.

— Here.

Krista watched him for a long time. Soles felt read, rib and all, and everything he did not say, and he did not flinch away from it.

She turned off the faucet. Then she rose on her toes and kissed him briefly on the mouth, one hand still over his hand on the mug, the way you sign a document you have, this time, read all the way to the end.

— All right, she said. Then here.

In the morning, Soles dressed in the dark so he would not wake her. Shirt, coat. His hand went on its own to the bedside-table drawer, the way it had almost every morning since the bank, and stopped on the handle.

On the nightstand stood the little box with Kale’s screw, receipt, and cord. In the drawer beneath it lay the blade.

Soles did not open the drawer.

He left it.

No one took it from him. He left it himself. His hand opened from the drawer handle the way it opened from a coffee mug in the morning. Phenom’s attention stayed on that empty hand. No urging came. He remained in the garden, and Soles went to make the coffee.

Krista slept facing the wall. Soles went into the kitchen and made coffee for two.

At the end of November, the newspaper reported on page seven, between the weather and the death notices, that in four cities far from one another, the water in a pool, a fountain, and two canals refused to freeze even though the nights had been bitterly cold. A professor at the university said it was because of springs. A priest said something else. The paper said nothing about the people who lived beside those waters.

Soles read the article twice at the kitchen table, his coffee cooling beside him. Then he turned the page. He showed it to no one. He told himself there was nothing to show.

One morning at the beginning of December, with snow still thin along the edge of the sidewalk, Soles came out through the garden’s service gate and took the street toward the canal, beside the old wall.

A man was coming from the opposite direction. An ordinary man of about fifty, wearing a wool cap and carrying a woven shopping bag with a long loaf of bread sticking out of it. He walked slowly, like people who have time in the morning. Soles looked at him without meaning to, the way he looked at everyone.

How does this man want me to see him?

The answer came immediately, the way it always did. As a careful man. One who counts his money twice at the bakery. Who holds the bag close to his body, bread upright so it will not be crushed. A man with nothing to hide.

And beneath him, another came.

The man stopped beside the garden wall, exactly where, beyond it, the warm water lay beneath the snow. He stopped abruptly, like a man called by name. For a moment he rested his free hand against the stone wall, then took it away and turned his head toward one end of the street, then the other, quickly, his eyes lowered to the height where a child’s face would have been. His hand opened in the air beside his hip, palm down, the way you hold out a hand for someone small to take.

How does this man want me to see him?

Like a mother who has lost her child in a market and has not become frightened yet. But is about to.

The answer did not fit the man. It did not fit the wool cap, the bread, the snow along the edge of the sidewalk. It was as though Soles had laid a hand on a familiar part and found beneath it a second, foreign piece that had no business being there, fixed into the same housing.

The man’s hand stayed in the air another moment. Then it closed slowly around nothing. The man blinked once, like someone who had forgotten why he stopped, adjusted the shopping bag, and walked past Soles slowly with the bread upright, without looking at him.

Soles remained beside the wall.

He did not call after him. He did not follow. He watched until the man disappeared around the corner, then turned toward the wall and placed his palm on the stone exactly where the man had.

The stone was warm.