Episodul 153 · What Comes Back

Varren lifted one hand, palm open, well away from the door, the way people show a dog they mean no harm.

— It can grow, he said. Yours. You can hit harder. Keep at it longer. Take a blow and still have your feet under you.

He listed it the way a man lists what an engine will do after he has rebuilt it himself: each part fitted to something Soles had felt, the promises still untested and the price nowhere in it. Soles waited for the price.

— And?

— And see a movement in time to answer it. Your body stops giving out where it used to. Not all at once, and not all of it equally. Being able to take a blow won’t teach you how to avoid one.

There it was. Soles looked down at his arm in its sling, at the proof that being able to take a blow and choosing to were two separate kinds of stupidity.

— Does it come back when you remember how?

— I remember things I can’t do anymore. Remembering doesn’t make them possible.

Varren lowered his hand.

— First I find out what’s left. Then I work it without wrecking myself. When it gets easier, I ask more of it. That’s all there is.

He made it sound like a gearbox: find the fault, replace the part, test it under load. For a moment Soles could see him at the workshop bench, telling him to try the joint again before trusting it with the full weight, and the picture was so ordinary that it frightened him.

— You could have told me this before.

— Yes.

— Before the bank. Before I went into that place. When you sat at my table.

Varren said nothing.

— Why now?

His mouth moved and then stopped. Soles watched him set one answer aside and pick up another, so whatever came next would be true and not the reason.

— Because you’re still here.

— Meaning that next time you come, I might not be.

Varren’s eyes went to the pocket again. That was answer enough.

— Leave it, Soles said. You’re not getting that from me either.

He had begun to close the door when Varren spoke again.

— Don’t go looking for more strength in the place that’s already hurting you.

Soles stopped with the edge of the door against his shoulder.

— Which place?

— You didn’t do that to your arm at the workshop.

Soles said nothing, which was a mistake, because silence told him.

— Somewhere you thought you could push a little further, Varren said quietly. I know what that feels like. Right up until it doesn’t.

— People are getting hurt there. We have to go back.

— Then go back for them. Just don’t tell yourself it’s for them when what you really want is to find out how much you can take.

The question about his parents was right there, sharp and ready: what kind of help Varren had meant to give them. Varren was waiting, as if he had already decided how he would answer it.

Soles gave him something else.

— I’m learning with Tesa.

— She knows how to teach.

— She’s going to teach me. You aren’t.

He shut the door before Varren could make anything warm out of that, and held it shut while he drove the bolt home with his left hand.

Footsteps went down the path. The gate clicked. After that, nothing. Soles watched the street from the side window until it had been empty long enough to believe, then a little longer, because believing came cheap tonight.

He sent the same message three times, to Krista, to Maxim and to Tesa: Varren came. I didn’t let him in. I’ll tell you properly in the morning. It was not enough, and they would tell him so. He sent it anyway. Waiting until they woke felt too much like keeping a secret, and he had seen where secrets led.

In the living room, Mina lifted her head from her blanket. She watched him check the window with the grave attention she gave a closed door before a walk. Then she got up, unhurried, and pressed her nose against his knee.

He sat on the sofa because it was kinder to his hip than the kitchen chair. Mina waited for his nod, jumped up beside him, turned once and settled with her chin across his thigh. Lucky came in from the hall, considered the arrangement and took the other side.

He had my parents killed. And I stood in the cold and asked him for lessons.

He had told Varren to go. He had kept him on the step. He had also opened the door, asked how strong he could become and stood in the cold waiting for the answer like a customer who already knew he was going to buy. Shutting the door afterward did not take the questions back.

The one hour when I’d have nobody else to ask. He didn’t pick it by accident.

What a filthy way to make yourself needed. And how well it had worked.

Varren had been the man beside his hospital bed, catching the phone before it slid from his hand while he cried. The man who came around to the workshop with bread. Who sat at his table while Soles asked him things. For a long time, a knock from Varren had been one of the good sounds the house made.

Soles found that the hand on Mina’s back had closed into a fist. He opened it one finger at a time and laid it flat.

He could follow the whole chain now, the way he could follow a fault through an engine: wanting a place at someone’s table, paying Kerr, a stranger in the yard, two people who went to work that morning and bought bread and never knew what had already been decided about their evening. He could follow every link. Being able to follow it made him feel sick.

He got up before he could put them in the yard again.

In the kitchen he drew the room on a clean sheet, left-handed and badly. The table. The wall. A square for the chair where the jacket had hung. A mark for the Hunter, closer than he had been drawing him in his head, close enough to have reached the pocket first if the blade had allowed it. Tesa by the mug. Maxim at the table. Krista beside him, one hand near the pencil he was holding now.

He searched the paper for the place from which he would have known the man was coming. There was none.

Fine. Then I learn to be somewhere else when he comes.

He wrote Tesa’s name in the corner. She had been there. She could tell him what he was remembering wrong, and so could the others.

Back on the sofa, Mina shifted to make room for his leg without opening her eyes. He put the phone where he would hear it and let his own eyes close.

He had questions for the people who would come in the morning. Varren would not be the one answering them.