Episode 95 · The Borrowed Name

Varren opened the gate before the bell finished ringing.

He was barefoot, in a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and a small towel over one shoulder. He looked from Krista to Tesa, then at the new cast, and something in his face settled, the way water settles after a stone is thrown into it.

— Your hand, he said. They let you leave like that?

— They let me leave, Tesa said.

— Come in. I’ve just made coffee.

The basin was no longer empty. The water was clear and still, a blue unlike anything else in the city, and from somewhere beneath the terrace came a steady hum like the breathing of a large sleeping animal. A wooden chair stood by the edge with its back toward the house. On the stone beside its leg was a mug no one had drunk from.

Varren brought two more mugs to the table under the eaves. He did not ask why they had come. He poured, pushed the sugar toward Tesa because Tesa took sugar, and sat opposite them with his back to the water.

Krista opened the photograph and put her phone on the table between them, screen up.

Varren read from where he sat, and Krista, who had spent her life watching people read documents, saw exactly where his eyes went: the key, the number, her name. Nothing moved in his face. Only his right thumb stopped moving along the edge of the mug.

Then he put a hand in his pants pocket and took out a key.

It was long and old, iron, with a stamped tin tag wired to its ring. He set it beside the phone and pushed it with his fingertips until it rested in front of Krista.

— Fourteen, he said.

Krista had known since the bench. It changed nothing. Only now did it become real.

— Four years, she said.

— Four years.

— One hundred and ninety-seven nights.

Varren looked up.

— You counted them.

— Everyone has asked me that today. Yes. I counted them.

— I didn’t know there were so many, he said quietly. I thought there were fewer.

Tesa said nothing. Her eyes did not leave Varren’s hands.

— How? Krista asked.

— I asked nicely. At the administration office. In your name. I knew no one would ask you, because no one ever asks you anything. You’re the one who is allowed.

Krista felt the sentence enter her like a splinter. She had been fair to everyone for years, and that had turned her name into a key.

— You took my name.

— Yes.

He did not apologize or soften it. He left the word there, bare, on the table beside the key.

— What for? Tesa said.

Varren turned a little toward the water, toward the empty chair at its edge.

— At the far end of the garden, he said, where the warm water gathers, at the edge of the riverbed. You know the place.

— We do, Krista said.

— It’s quiet there.

He said the word as someone else might speak of a loved one. Krista did not understand at first. The whole garden was quiet at night.

— Not like that, Varren said, as if he had seen her thinking. Quiet here.

He touched his temple once with two fingers.

— What’s been happening to Soles since the night he was shot has been happening to me for as long as I can remember. Not the same way. But close enough that I recognized it when I saw him. I’ve lived with this all my life, and there are few places where it stays still. Here, by my own water, it doesn’t. There it does. An hour, maybe two. I sat on the stone beside the water and did nothing. I didn’t go through your greenhouse. I didn’t touch your exhibition. The door, the temple, none of it. I didn’t know until you found it.

Krista thought of pale leaves and the smell of wax, and said nothing. Beside her, Tesa’s good hand closed slowly on her knee.

The basin hummed behind him.

— You held the slab, Tesa said.

— I did.

— And your palms were dry. When I held it, I thought it was pulling my soul out through my hands. You took your hand off it like it was a cupboard door.

Varren looked at his palms.

— I don’t know why, he said. You felt it pulling at you. I didn’t. That frightened me more than the door. I put my hand there because someone had to hold it and I was closest. Then I saw that I could. And then I kept quiet, because I didn’t know how to say it without saying the rest.

— The rest being this, Krista said, touching the key with her fingernail.

— The rest being this.

Krista watched him as she would an old photograph. She looked for the place where the story did not fit. She did not find it. She found a tired man, barefoot, with a key on the table and his back to the only thing in the courtyard that made no sound. She could not tell whether she found nothing because there was nothing to find or because she did not know where to look. She disliked not knowing.

— Why didn’t you tell Soles? Tesa asked.

Only now did Varren not answer at once.

— Because since I’ve known him, he’s the only person I haven’t had to explain myself to, he said. He sees everything. He has never asked me anything. I wanted to keep that a little longer.

— I’ll tell him, Varren said. Myself. I don’t want him to hear it from you, and not because I’m ashamed. I am ashamed, but that isn’t why. I want him to hear it from the man who did it. Just not now. He has a rib cracked twice over and an investigator who has only just begun to believe him. Let me tell him when he’s stronger.

— How much stronger? Krista asked.

One corner of Varren’s mouth lifted wearily.

— Strong enough that laughing doesn’t hurt his rib.

Tesa looked at Krista. Krista looked at the key.

She knew what she should do. Stand up, go straight to Soles, and put the photograph, the key, and that bare word, yes, on the table in front of him. Except she had spent four years with her name on a key she had never seen, and right now all she wanted was for one thing in this whole story to remain in her hands.

— All right, Tesa said first.

Krista looked up in surprise. Tesa was not looking at Varren. She was looking at the water.

— All right, Krista repeated. You tell him. But you do tell him.

— I will.

Varren stood. He picked up the key, and for a moment Krista thought he was taking it back, but he only weighed it in his palm. Then he set it in her hand and closed her fingers over it with his own, dry and warm.

— The little wicket squeals if you open it all the way, he said. Open it only halfway.

— I’m not going to open it at all.

— I know. But if you do.