Episode 186 · Not on the Phone

In the morning the phone rang at ten past seven.

Soles found it by feel on the nightstand. Krista made a sound into the pillow that was not a word, and turned over, and put her cold feet on him by way of protest. He answered with his eyes still shut.

— It’s me, the guard said. I’m sorry. It’s early.

— It’s fine. What’s happened?

There was a pause in which he could hear the guard deciding how to say it.

— He went to my sister’s.

Soles opened his eyes.

— When?

— Seven. Ten minutes ago. He rang the bell. She opened the door in her robe. He had flowers, she said. A big bunch. White ones. He said he’d heard her brother hadn’t been well and he wanted her to know that everyone at the department was thinking of him. He asked her to make sure I got plenty of rest. He said it twice. Then he gave her the flowers and he left.

— Did he threaten her?

— No. That’s what she keeps saying. He was lovely. She says he was the loveliest man she’s ever had at the door at seven in the morning, and she’s going to be sick.

Soles sat up too quickly, pulling the blanket off them both.

Krista was awake now, up on one elbow, watching his face.

— Where are you? Soles said.

— At hers. I came as soon as she called. I don’t know what to do. If I go back to the investigator, he’ll know. He knows already. That’s what the flowers are for.

Yes. That’s exactly what the flowers are for.

He thought about the man in gray stepping over the slush so as not to get his shoes wet. A man who brought flowers to a woman in a robe so that her brother would understand where he was standing. He did not threaten. He did not have to. He made sure that everyone around you knew he could find them, and then he was polite to them, and then he went away and let them do the rest.

— Stay with her, Soles said. Don’t go to work, don’t go to the investigator, don’t go anywhere on your own. We’ll come.

— You can’t fight a man with flowers.

— Tesa can fight anything. Mostly.

He heard the guard breathe out.

— Thank you.

— Don’t thank me yet. Give me the address.

He wrote it on the back of Tesa’s note, badly, on his knee. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap.

Krista was sitting up now, with the blanket around her shoulders. She did not ask. She had heard enough.

— He knew about last night, Soles said. In the street. He said he’d heard last night was very hard on everyone. I thought only the people in the yard knew. Tarn, his people, the vans that came in the morning.

— So someone in that yard talks to him.

— Or he talks to them.

He picked up the phone again and found the number Tarn had given him on the day of the passes, the one he had never used, and rang it before he could think better of it.

Tarn answered on the second ring. He sounded as though he had not been to bed at all.

— Yes?

— It’s Soles. The man in the gray coat. The one who took the guard’s report at the prison. He was outside my house last night, and he knew what happened in the washroom. This morning he took flowers to the guard’s sister. I want to know who he is. I want to know who he works for. And I want to know who in that yard told him.

There was a silence on the line. Not the silence of a man thinking. The silence of a man listening to the room around him, to see who else was in it.

— Not on the phone, Tarn said.

Then he hung up.

The morning after he met Zora, Varren came back to the pontoon with a thermometer.

It had cost him more than his dinner, from a bait shop by the depot whose owner had wanted to know what anyone could be fishing for in this cold. It came in a cardboard tube with a cord already knotted through the eye. Walking down to the river in the dark, Varren found that he had tied a second knot above the first, small and tight, without deciding to. His thumb went over it once and left it there.

Zora was already on the pontoon when he unfolded the chair. She did not look up. She read the board, drew her own thermometer up out of the black water, wrote, and only then held out her free hand behind her, palm up, without turning around.

He came down the steps and put the tube in it.

She lowered his thermometer beside hers and held the two cords together over the water for a long time, much longer than either instrument needed. Then she drew them up and read them side by side, and wrote a second figure under the first. The same figure. She underlined them both, twice.

— Two of us, she said.

— Two thermometers.

— That’s how it starts. First one thermometer is broken. Then they’re both broken. Then it’s the river’s fault for being in the wrong place.

She laughed, short, through her nose, and pressed her wrist to her mouth. Varren did not laugh. He found that he did not need to. She had laughed enough for both of them, and the morning seemed satisfied with that.

After that, the mornings had a shape.

She came down at a quarter to seven and found him in his chair at the top of the steps. She read the board and the water, he read his thermometer, and she wrote his figure below hers, a footnote agreeing with her. She never asked where he stayed; he never asked why she did not shiver. Each morning she told him a joke and laughed before he could decide what to do with his face. On the fifth morning she called it across the road, as if to save time.

People began to notice him. A woman walking a dog said good morning on successive days, in the tone people use for a bench. A boy on a bicycle slowed on the bridge to inspect him. By the end of the week Zora had stopped calling him anything, until one morning she said to the notebook:

— The chair man’s thermometer says the same as mine.

He let it go. He did not mind being the chair man.

He minded something else, and it took him some days to find it. In the half hour at the top of her steps, the voices kept their distance, as they had the first time, a hall full of people talking behind a shut door. When she went up into the brick hut at eight, they came back. He had begun to wake before it was light, without an alarm, already reaching for his coat. The walk down from the room he had taken above a shoe repair shop had grown shorter, though it was the same walk. He had spent his whole life arranging to be the thing other people woke up and reached for.

He did not look at that for long.