Episode 206 · Decided for Me

At five he woke, with her still asleep against him. He did not wake her. For half an hour he listened to the house, waiting for someone else to move. Nobody did. At half past five he eased out from under her and went downstairs.

He stood at the kitchen window with the card in his hand and did the sum one last time. A man with a plant on his windowsill, and a review at nine, and a basement nobody would describe. Against that: three months, and a promise he had made to her about before and after.

He knew what she would say. She would say they should start again at five. They would start again at five, and at seven they would still be starting, and at nine a man who counted doors would be taken downstairs while they sat in a kitchen being careful.

The thought that had settled in him on the ice was simple: Do it now, while it’s easy.

He called the number on the card, one digit at a time.

The man in gray answered on the first ring. He did not sound as if he had been asleep.

— I’ll do it, Soles said.

— Good. Seven o’clock, the gate. Bring nothing you’d mind leaving behind.

He put the phone down on the kitchen table, next to the cold cup of tea, and sat there until he heard her on the stairs.

Before that, Lucky came and put his crooked paw on Soles’s knee, and Soles rubbed the dog’s ears until the house began to creak with people waking. He did not know what he would say to her. He had had all night to decide, and he had spent it on the other thing.

She knew from the doorway. She did not have to read him; she had never needed to. She looked at the phone on the table, and at his face, and at the clock, which said ten to six, and he watched her understand the whole night in about a second, the way she had understood the empty doorway in the washroom.

— We said five, she said.

— I know.

— We said we’d start again at five. All of us.

— There wasn’t anything to start, Krista. I took every plan apart last night. You watched me. There’s no way in. There’s only the front door, and he’s holding it open.

— So you walked through it.

— Somebody had to.

— You keep saying that. As if it’s a law. Somebody has to. And somehow it’s always you, and somehow you always find out before the rest of us that there’s nothing to discuss.

She came into the kitchen and did not sit down.

— You told us before. I’ll give you that. You told us every single thing, very clearly, before. And then you waited until we were asleep and decided for us anyway. That isn’t before. That’s just a longer after.

He should have said nothing. He knew it as he opened his mouth. Every part of him that had ever stood beside a broken engine and kept quiet while the owner shouted knew it. But he had not slept, and somewhere in the night something cold had settled into him that had not been there before the ice, and it was tired of being told what it was.

So he looked at her.

He had promised himself he would not. He had promised it long ago, without ever saying it out loud, about the people he loved: that he would not do to them what he did to strangers, would not take them apart to see how they worked. He looked anyway. And it was easy. It was the easiest thing in the world. She was standing right there, open, furious, and he could see exactly what was underneath.

— You’re not angry that I decided, he said. You’re angry that you’d have decided the same, and you’d have wanted to be the one who did it. You’d have stood in that office with your notebook and made him write it down properly. And you can’t stand that for once it isn’t your name on the paper.

There was truth in it. He had used it to dismiss everything she had actually said. He watched her fingers tighten on the cup. She had watched him do it to strangers. Now he had done it to her.

The kitchen was very quiet. Upstairs, Maxim’s door opened, and then stayed open, and nobody came down.

Krista put down the cup she had picked up without noticing.

— Thank you, she said. In the polite voice. The one for officials. You’re very good at that. I’ve watched you do it to other people, and I always thought, he’ll never do that to me.

She went to the hall and took her coat off the hook.

— Krista.

— Go, she said, at the door, without turning around. You’ve decided. Go and do it properly. Don’t do it halfway because of me.

The door closed behind her very quietly. That was worse than if she had slammed it.

Her cup stood where she had put it down. He moved it away from the edge, slowly, with both hands. Since the stairs he did not trust one hand with anything he cared about.

Soles sat at the table with the cold tea and the phone and the blank card, and the clock moved on toward seven, and his first relief was that there would be no more argument. He let that relief stay.

Maxim came down the stairs a few minutes later. He stood in the kitchen doorway in his socks and looked at Soles, and at the card, and at the hook where Krista’s coat had been.

He did not ask. He went to the stove and put the kettle on, and stood with his back to Soles while it boiled, and when it clicked off he said, to the wall:

— Fine.

It was a whole sentence, the way Maxim said it. It meant that he had heard, and would not argue, and was not fine at all.

Soles did not question the relief. That was the first thing he would be ashamed of, later. Not what he had said to her. That he had let himself feel relieved.