Episode 279 · Thirty-One

On the second evening after the chamber, Zora came down the pontoon steps at six with the lamp from the hut, humming, and stopped humming at the bottom, the way she did when she reached the board.

Varren had been there since seven in the morning. He had not meant to stay. He had come down to carry the lamp for the first reading, because she had asked him to, and the number had been wrong, and he had stood at the railing waiting for the next one to be less wrong while the day went past him like traffic.

At seven the river had stood at one degree, the way it had for three weeks, with a lip of ice along both banks thick enough to hold a duck. At noon it was three. At four, five and a half. By then the ice on the near bank had gone gray and soft, and plates of it were breaking off and turning slowly in the current, going downstream to wherever ice went.

Zora let the thermometer down on its cord. She counted under her breath while it hung. Then she drew it up, and held it to the lamp, and looked at it longer than she needed to.

— Eight, she said.

— Since four?

— Since four.

She wrote it down. Her hand was steady. Her hands were always steady when the work was bad; it was afterward they shook.

— Rivers don’t do this, she said. Not in two hours. Not in winter. Not with nothing coming down from the mountains. She tapped the pen against the page. I keep wanting to take it inside and check it. I checked it at noon. It’s fine. It’s the river that isn’t.

Across the water the houses on the far bank were going soft at the edges. The steam had started a little after four, thin, the way it had been the morning he came to the town, and it was thickening now with the dark. The bakery’s window was still there, yellow, at the foot of the bridge. Halloran had gone out an hour ago with a loaf under his arm and had not said where.

Zora sat down on the bottom step with the notebook on her knee. She did not open it. She set the thermometer on the boards beside her with the cord coiled, and looked at the water and not at him.

— I was on the stairs, she said.

He knew which stairs.

— I saw where it went in. I had the lamp. I saw your hands, both of them, on the handle. She said it quietly, the way she told him things she knew he would not want, so that nobody else heard. There was nobody else. She said it quietly anyway. They didn’t turn.

The river talked under the pontoon. A plate of ice knocked against the board and went on.

— You were a long way up, Varren said. In the dark.

— Eleven steps. I counted them going down. She turned the pencil over. I’m not good at a lot of things. I’m good at seeing what a thing does when it says it’s doing something else.

He heard it the way other people heard her readings, the ones who decided the instrument was at fault. He felt it arrive, and felt it not go in.

— I know what I felt, he said.

— I know what I saw.

She looked at him at last.

— I’m not telling you so you’ll change your mind. I said all right in the bakery because you needed to sleep, and you did. I’m telling you so it’s been said. Once. Then I’ll leave it where you put it.

He looked at her hands on the notebook. Blue at the knuckles again. She had taken her gloves off for the cord and forgotten them on the rail.

— All right, he said.

She heard what it was. She let it be.

He went and got the gloves from the rail and held them out, and when she reached for them he kept one, the way he did, between his palms, until she curled her fingers against his. Her hand was cold right through. One life in her, at Echo, barely awake.

The thought he had set down on the bridge came back up by itself.

— If there were a way, he said, to give you another one.

— Another glove?

— Another life. A second one. So that if anything ever—

She took her hand back, not quickly.

— Whose? she said.

He had no answer, and she watched him not have it.

— That’s the only place they come from, isn’t it, she said. Somebody. She pulled the glove on finger by finger. I’ve got one. I’m using it. Don’t you dare go and fetch me somebody else’s. She thought about it. I’d only leave it on the rail with my gloves.

She laughed at that, short, through her nose, and pressed her wrist to her mouth. He did not laugh. After a moment, neither did she.

At nine it was fourteen.

The ice was gone from the near bank by then, all of it, and the far bank had gone behind the steam except for the bakery window, which was there and then was not and then was there again, like somebody blinking. The ducks began to come back a little before ten. He heard them first, out in the dark, a long rustling line of them coming low over the water, and then they were settling on the open river around the pontoon in their dozens, talking about it, as many as the morning he had come, more than one river should have been asked to hold.

Zora stood at the railing and watched them land.

— They know something, she said.

— They know it’s warm.

— That’s what I mean.

She went up to the hut at eleven to call the reading in to the office in the capital, and came back down with the lamp and said that nobody had answered, and that she had left it on the machine anyway, every number since seven, so that in the morning somebody would have to listen to her voice saying them.

At midnight she let the thermometer down again.

He watched her count. He watched her draw it up, and hold it to the lamp, and go very still.

— Thirty-one, she said.

Then she laughed, because it was not possible, and stopped, because nobody had made a joke.