Episodul 85 · An Empty Line

Maxim drove them all to Soles’s house before dawn. Soles and Krista fit in the cab, with Lucky and Mina at their feet. Tesa climbed into the empty bed without asking anyone and sat with her back to the cab, facing the road they had left behind. The wind before dawn found its way under her wet jacket. She did not care. From there she could see everything coming after them, and nothing was.

Daylight was coming when they stopped. Soles’s street was gray and empty, its windows still blind. Maxim kept the engine running and let the dogs out. Lucky went through the gate ahead of everyone and waited at the kitchen door, his tail going, as if the house had only now been switched back on. Mina stayed by the truck, looking up at Maxim.

He rolled down the window and looked at Soles, who already had his feet on the asphalt and was leaning against the open door, the leather-wrapped bundle tucked tight under one arm.

— I have a delivery at seven, he said. The load’s been on the truck since yesterday. I’m not moving it.

— All right, Soles said.

— “All right” is mine. Find your own.

He watched him another moment, long and hard, the dead headlamp still strapped to his forehead.

— Feed the big one. If he eats for you, you’re both alive. If you die before noon, call me. If you don’t die, call me anyway, or how am I supposed to know?

Krista opened the door with the key Soles had left her on Monday, took him inside and left him in the bedroom with the door half closed. Tesa heard water running in the bathroom, a basin set down on the tiles, and Krista’s voice saying small things: lift your chin, hold still, no, don’t get up. That polite, orderly voice Krista used only when she was afraid. Tesa had learned it in three weeks.

She stayed in the kitchen. She took off her jacket, then drew her brother’s copies from the inside pocket. The mud beneath the block had soaked through the lining. The pages were damp and stuck together, their edges rippled, a brown stain spreading from one corner toward the center. She separated them one by one with the tip of a fingernail and laid them over the radiator like little pieces of laundry. Her brother’s sprawling handwriting had survived. His heavy-handed pen marks survived anything.

In the hall, a kitchen chair stood facing the wall, in front of a patch of plaster no one had painted over. Tesa knew whose guard post it was. She took another chair, set its back against the kitchen wall and sat facing the door. Mina came in from the yard after a while and lay down across her feet.

She knew the door meant nothing. The people who wanted what Soles carried under his arm passed through brick as if it were smoke. She watched the door anyway. In the ring, you did not watch the gloves, even though the gloves were what hit you. You watched the shoulders, where the movement began.

Around eight, Krista came out of the bedroom, picked up her keys from the table, and said she was going home to get the file and would be back in an hour. At the door, she stopped.

— If he wakes up…

— I’ll make him count to ten, Tesa said. If he gets there, he’s fine.

Krista did not laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved. For Krista, that morning, it was a great deal.

Soles woke before she returned.

Tesa heard his footsteps in the hall first, slow and spaced apart, with a pause halfway down where the floor creaked. Then he appeared in the kitchen doorway, barefoot and wearing a T-shirt, the blood washed from his chin and a yellowish bruise climbing from beneath his collar toward his ear. He wore the bundle against his ribs, under his shirt, fastened by a strap across his shoulder. Tesa understood that he had not parted with it even in the bathroom.

He passed her without looking and went to the sink. He turned on the faucet. He washed his right hand for a long time, with soap, then the fingers beyond the fresh bandage on his left. He scrubbed as though he had been working with oil, though there was nothing left to wash away.

Then he stopped.

The water kept running. Soles bent over the sink, his wet hands held above it, his head slightly tilted, and did not move. He stood like a man who had entered a room and forgotten why he had gone in. Tesa knew the posture. She had seen it in the old people in the clinic waiting room and in people who stopped in the middle of the sidewalk with a bag of groceries in one hand. She had never seen it in a man his age.

She did not call to him. She waited.

Soles turned off the faucet. He dried his hands on the towel hanging from the cupboard door, slowly, finger by finger, and remained holding it, staring at the sink as if it were a piece he could not fit anywhere.

Then he opened the drawer beside the stove, took out a spiral notebook and a pen, and sat at the far end of the table, away from the sheets on the radiator.

He wrote slowly. Tesa did not pretend she was not watching. From where she sat, she could see the lines upside down: two short words, underlined, one at the top and one halfway down the page. She did not need to read them.

Under the first word, Soles wrote a few lines, short and straight, in the small, even letters of someone who had learned to write on drafting sheets. Then he stopped, the pen above the paper, and skipped a line. Not by accident. Tesa saw him move his hand carefully, leave that line blank, draw a small dash at its edge like a mark on a map, and continue beneath it.

Something tightened beneath her ribs, in the place that hurt only when she thought of her brother.

Her brother did that. He could not remember anything: phone numbers, birthdays, whether he had turned off the gas. So he wrote things down. On receipts, on his palm, on the backs of electric bills, in his night-watch notebooks. And when he could not remember something, he did not make it up. He left room. I don’t want to write nonsense where something true is supposed to go, he had told her once, when she laughed at the empty lines in his planner.