Episode 201 · After, Not Before

— He came into the kitchen, he said. The night before last. While we were asleep. He left the guard’s keys on the table.

He told them the rest. He did not decorate it. The line through the walls, the stone at the river, the ice, the ferry steps. The fight. The plate breaking away. The dam. The ladder. The hut and the stove, and the building on the north ring road with nine windows on every floor and nothing around it with a name.

He told them about the voice that had said The river., and that he had not listened. He did not tell them how close he had come to listening. He was not that brave yet.

Only once did anyone interrupt him.

— You punched the river, Maxim said.

— I missed a man and hit the river.

— That’s worse, Maxim said. That’s much worse. I wanted to be impressed and now I’m worried.

When he had finished, the kitchen was very quiet. The clock ticked. The guard’s sister had lifted her head somewhere around the third floor, and was looking at him now as if he had told her her brother was alive. Which he had.

Maxim put the truck keys down on the windowsill, carefully.

— So he’s alive, he said to the sister, gently. Your brother. He’s in a building. We know which one.

She nodded. She could not say anything. Tesa went and stood behind her chair and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder, and the woman put her own hand over it, and held on.

Krista had not sat down.

— You went onto the river alone, she said.

— I knew where he would be.

— Don’t.

It was the polite voice. The one for officials. The one for people who had frightened her. He had heard it at the ring. Here there was no bell to end the round. It went in somewhere under the ribs, exactly where the strength lived, and the strength did nothing at all about it.

— I didn’t know what would happen, he said. I thought I could get back before you knew.

— Thank you.

She came around the table and crouched in front of him and began to undo his wet coat, slowly, the way she undid everything, because his own fingers still could not manage the buttons. He watched her face. He had promised himself, a long time ago, that he would not read the people he loved. He did not need to. Her hands were perfectly steady and much too gentle. He could bear the anger in her voice better than that gentleness.

— Say so before, she said, very quietly. Not after. You remember.

— I said so before.

— You said a lie before.

He had nothing to answer that with. There was nothing in him that was true and would also help.

— I thought, he said, that if I told you, you’d come.

— Yes.

— He was waiting in a wall nine meters deep. I didn’t want you walking up to it.

— So you decided.

— Somebody had to.

— Somebody did, she said. You decided for me. For all of us. You do that very well. You’ve had a great deal of practice.

Tesa looked at the floor. Maxim looked at the ceiling. Neither of them said she was wrong.

It was Tesa who spoke first, and not about that.

— On the ice, she said. When he came at your right side. You stepped in, not away?

— In.

— Which foot first?

— Left. Small.

— And you turned him. With one hand. On ice.

— Mostly by accident.

She nodded slowly, as if he had given her a score she had been waiting to hear for a week. Then her jaw went tight.

— You should have taken me, she said. Not because you needed me. Because I’d have liked to see it.

That was Tesa. She could be furious and proud of you in the same breath, and make you feel the second one more.

— Dorin’s going to want paying, Maxim said to the ceiling. For the alibi. I know him. He’ll invoice it.

Krista finished unbuttoning the coat and eased the wet sleeves from his shoulders. She laid it over the back of a chair, smoothing one fold before letting go.

— Thank you for coming home, she said. I mean that. I’m very angry, and I mean that too. You can have both.

Then she stood up and went to put the kettle on, because her hands needed something to do.

When the tea came, she put it down in front of him and did not touch him. He saw that she had put two sugars in it, which was how he took it when he was cold and never when he was not, and which he had never once told her.

The guard’s sister looked up from her cup.

— Is it cold there? she said. Where he is. He hates the cold. He always wears two vests.

— It had a lot of windows, Soles said. None of them open. I think it’ll be warm.

It was a guess. She took it like a promise.

— I lost his keys, Soles said. In the river. I’m sorry.

She looked at him as if he had apologized for the weather.

— He’ll get new ones, she said. When he’s home.

Soles sat with Lucky against his legs and the wet coat dripping onto the floor, and understood that he had won something on the ice, and that he had paid for it here, in this kitchen, with a coin he had not known he was spending.

Won on the ice. Lost in the kitchen. Same night.

Next time, the truth first. Even if it’s the wrong truth. Before.

He did not know if he would manage it. He knew he would have to.

Maxim had picked up his phone from the windowsill. He frowned at it.

— Your agent, he said. His phone’s on.

Krista turned from the kettle. Tesa’s hand tightened on the sister’s shoulder. Since the balcony, that silent phone had been the one thing in the house nobody mentioned, the way you don’t mention a sound in the engine that you hope will go away by itself.

He turned the screen toward Soles. A message, sent a few minutes ago, to all of them.

They know about the river. Don’t go anywhere near the north ring road. I’ll find you. Tonight. Not at the house.