Episode 149 · When to Stop

The man looked at him for a long moment. Then he took the glove from his pocket and drew it over the bare hand.

— Keep it close, he said.

— I intend to.

— You’ll die one day.

Maxim straightened. The movement made him wince, but he did not sit.

— Get away from him.

The man was still looking at Soles.

— When you die, I’ll be there to take it. The rite will continue.

Soles had no idea what rite he meant. The certainty in the man’s voice made him want to ask. He kept his hand on the table instead.

— Not today, he said.

The visitor turned toward the wall.

— What rite? Krista asked.

He was already stepping into it. His coat disappeared first, then the side of his face. There was no scrape of cloth. Soles stared at the place where his shoulder should have struck. The last boot went through above the baseboard.

Tesa moved before anyone else. She stopped short of the wall with her good hand raised. Then she touched it with her fingertips.

— Still here, she said.

Soles knew she meant the plaster. For a moment he had thought she meant the man.

Maxim reached for the door bolt and stopped with his fingers on it.

Lucky sniffed the floor where the visitor had stood. He sneezed, moved back toward Maxim and stayed beside his leg.

— Did any of you feel him? Soles asked.

Tesa shook her head. Krista was looking at the wall. Maxim let go of the bolt.

— I heard him speak, he said.

Soles sat. His hip hurt badly enough that he could not make the movement look deliberate. He brought the jacket onto his lap with his left hand.

The man had been in the room without any of them knowing. He had stood beside Lucky, beside the wet cloths they had used on Soles’s arm, beside the chair where they had left the one thing he wanted.

Soles tried once more to feel where the wall’s weight rested. Nothing in it had changed.

Nobody reached for a cup.

Soles put the jacket on the table. He wanted both hands free, though his right one was not much use to him.

The chair scraped when he stood. Tesa caught its back before it fell.

— What are you doing?

— Looking.

He went to the wall. The pain in his hip made him shorten the last step. Up close he could see the paint lifting at the baseboard, a thin edge he had meant to scrape off months ago. He put his left palm above it.

The wall held the roof. It had held it before the man came through, and it held it now. Soles could find no place where the load had changed.

— You won’t find him by staring harder, Tesa said.

— I found the others.

— And you didn’t find this one.

He took his hand away.

What bothered him was how little the man had needed to do. Soles had told him to leave. He had stayed. Soles had refused the blade, and the man had accepted the refusal because taking it was not an option. When he left, it was at a time of his own choosing.

The rest of them had watched.

In our own kitchen, and he chose when to leave.

— If he’d wanted one of you instead, Soles said.

He did not finish. Maxim pulled out a chair and sat, slowly.

— We’d have done what we could.

— You were leaning on the table.

— So were you.

The swelling in his arm had not gone down.

— We need to get stronger.

— You need to get that looked at first, Tesa said.

— After that.

— After that too.

Krista gathered the wet cloths into the basin. She rinsed one, wrung it out and stopped with it in her hand.

— At the prison, we didn’t know what touching it would do, Krista said. Here we didn’t even know someone was in the room. I don’t want to watch you get thrown into something else because pushing harder is all you’ve practiced.

— Being stronger would’ve helped.

— I know. I’m saying I’d like you to see him before he’s standing beside us.

Soles sat on the edge of the chair. He had pushed at the thread because pushing had seemed possible. He had wanted to take the blade out here because it was the one thing the visitor could not take from him. Neither had left him with much room to choose.

— Then quicker too, he said. Quicker to notice. Quicker to do something useful.

Tesa rubbed the base of her recovering hand with her thumb.

— That’s work, she said.

— I know.

— You want to get stronger. That’s not the same as doing this every day.

— Will you teach me? Soles asked.

She let go of her wrist.

— Yes. Once you stop needing the furniture.

— I can stand.

— I know. Staying there is what we’ll work on.

Maxim gave a short laugh. Soles could not quite manage one.

— I mean properly, he said. Where to put my feet. How to get away. What to do when there’s nowhere to get away to.

Tesa considered him the way she considered a new student at the door of the gym, then nodded.

— And when to stop.

Soles did not answer quickly enough.

— Especially that, she said.

Krista’s phone buzzed on the shelf. She looked at the number, then put it on the table between them and turned on the speaker.

— The men at the prison measured it again at noon, the investigator said. It’s past the next mark.

Nobody looked at Soles’s elbow. He felt them not looking.

— Can we go back in? Krista asked.

— Not with their permission. I’m working on it.

— And the guard?

— Which one?

Krista glanced at Soles.

— Either.

— The one you met is at home, on leave. The older one walked out of the hospital last night. They found him at the prison gate this morning, in uniform, with his keys. He told them someone has to watch the exit.

The line went quiet. Soles thought of an old man on an ambulance step, counting car doors, starting again each time the number came out wrong.

You’ll start to like it.

He had been warned too. He had pushed anyway.