Episode 98 · True Card

Krista woke because her throat hurt when she swallowed.

She lay still for a while beneath Mina’s blanket, staring at the ceiling, and counted what she knew. She was in Soles’s house. Daylight had come. In the hall, a chair propped up the cellar trapdoor so no one else would fall through it. On the wall beside the coat rack were the lighter patch and the brown finger marks, now dry. Her coat still hung there. The keys were still in its pocket. That was the first thing she checked.

Soles was in the kitchen. He sat at the table with his left hand wrapped in a dish towel and Lucky stretched out at his feet, a wooden spoon taped to the dog’s front leg as a splint.

— It’s a splint, Soles said before she could ask. I saw a vet do it once.

— You saw a vet tie a dog to a spoon?

— I saw a vet tie a dog’s leg to something straight. The spoon was what I had.

Lucky thumped his tail once without lifting his head, as if confirming it.

Krista poured coffee from the pot on the stove. Her hands no longer shook. Something else shook deeper within her, where she could not put a hand. She sat across from him and looked at the towel around his left palm, rust-colored in the middle.

— It needs stitches.

— Maxim’s on his way back from the night run.

— Maxim isn’t a doctor.

— Maxim has a truck first-aid kit he never opens. He says today is the day.

Maxim arrived at eight with the kit under one arm, a box of nails, and an oak plank on his shoulder that he had found somewhere. He stopped in the hall and looked at the trapdoor, the wall, the finger marks, and said nothing for a long time. Then he lowered the plank to the floor slowly and carefully, without a sound.

— Through the wall, he said.

— Through the wall, Soles said.

— Three?

— Two came out. One stayed.

Maxim nodded slowly and went into the kitchen. He looked at Soles’s hand, at the dog with the spoon, at the mark on Krista’s throat that she had tried and failed to hide with her collar. His gaze rested there a moment longer. Krista saw his hand close on the doorframe, then open, one finger at a time, like a man setting down something heavy he did not trust himself to hold.

— You stayed here last night, he said.

— I did.

— All right, Maxim said, and Krista did not know what he meant.

Tesa came around nine without ringing, her casted hand held against her chest. She stopped in the doorway and looked at the trapdoor, the wall, then at Krista. Not at her throat. Into her eyes. Krista met her gaze. Nothing was said between them.

Maxim stitched Soles’s palm at the kitchen table with the curved needle from the kit while Tesa held a flashlight in her good hand and Soles looked out the window and counted the posts in the neighbors’ fence aloud so he would not watch the needle. He reached thirty-one. There were twenty-four posts.

— Count again, Maxim said, his eyes on the cut.

— I’m embarrassed.

— Why?

— Because I reached thirty-one.

Afterward, Maxim nailed the trapdoor shut, and Soles was sent back to his chair three times before he gave up. Tesa sat beside him. Krista cleared the mugs. No one spoke about the night before, and the longer no one spoke, the more space that night took up in the kitchen, and the harder it was to talk about anything else.

Maxim was the one who took out the cards.

He carried them in his breast pocket, an old deck with corners rounded by use, bound with a rubber band.

— The doctor said he shouldn’t move, he said, nodding toward Soles. I’m not a doctor. But I know how to keep a man in his chair.

— For money? Soles asked.

— For matches. You have no money. You have a new trapdoor.

Tesa played with one hand, fanning her cards across the cast. Soles played badly and happily, as he always did. Krista did not play. She did not know how. She had never learned because, in her family, cards had always belonged to the uncle who lost his wages over them and then wept in the kitchen. She sat in the chair by the window with the mug between her palms and watched.

On the third hand, Maxim raised the stakes by five matches at once.

Soles whistled. Tesa looked at Maxim, then at her cards, then back at Maxim with the face of a boxer trying to guess which side the blow would come from.

Krista looked at Maxim too.

He held his cards close to his chest. His face was its usual self, the face of a man who never left first. Only his left thumb moved slowly along the cards’ edge, up and down, up and down, like a man smoothing a tablecloth with no creases left in it.

He has nothing, Krista thought, startled by how certain she was. He has nothing and wants to believe he has everything. The thumb. He does that with his thumb so he won’t do something else.

She did not know how she knew. She knew the way she knew where the light came from in an old photograph.

She thought of last night’s “Yes” on the hall floor. How easily it had come out. How Soles had looked at her and believed. It had not been hard. It had been easy in a way that did not feel like hers, as though the ease had been waiting in her a long time for someone to use it.

The light from the window turned yellow. It sank and grew heavy, like the light of a lamp with a green shade, and the smell of coffee changed to cheap tobacco and wet clothes drying on a radiator. Somewhere far off, a siren began to wail, long and loud, then stopped.

Krista tried to set the mug down. For an instant she stood beside her tree, with the remembered cup still warm in her hands. A new light filled broad, curling leaves. A name was cut into the stone beneath them.

Casimir.

No one stood beside the plant. Krista touched a leaf.

Then there was a table again. A different one.