Saturday, 11:10 a.m.
Denise Albright had come in on a Saturday in a fleece vest and running tights, and she had brought her dog. The dog was an old chocolate Lab named Duke who lay under the desk with his chin on Rob’s boot and sighed every few minutes, as if he’d heard all this before.
The office was upstairs on Main, over the title company, two rooms with a window unit and a view of the stoplight. Rob had sat in the same chair two years ago signing the papers, with Jo in the other one. It had a wobble in the left rear leg. He’d wanted to shim it every time since.
“You look like hell,” Denise said.
“I was up.”
“I saw.” She turned her laptop around on the desk. She didn’t have to press play. He knew what it was. A phone video through the glass doors of the Sheriff’s Office lobby, shaky, with the ring light flaring in one corner, and a big man on his knees on the tile with his hands locked on an old man’s chest, going up and down. You couldn’t hear the counting. You could see his mouth doing it.
“Four hundred thousand views,” Denise said. “Since last night. Brynn Kessler posted it at nine with the caption Rob Voss performs CPR on mystery man. By midnight the comments had turned. You want to know what they’re saying? They’re saying hero. They’re saying maybe we got him wrong.” She turned the laptop back. “Rob, I have been trying to get people to say that for eleven days.”
Rob turned to the window unit. It dripped into a coffee can on the sill.
“So here’s what we do.” She folded her hands on the desk. She had a way of laying a thing out that he liked, straight, no talk, like a stair stringer marked out on the horses. “The old man is your way out. Delusional drifter. He’s got intimate knowledge of your family he can’t explain, he turned up at Jo’s camper, and the state lab says he’s related to Jo. Ann’s already halfway there. She thinks he’s Jo’s father.” She tipped her head. “Maybe he is. I don’t care. What I care about is that there’s a man in the story now who isn’t you, who knew things nobody should know, and who was in the vicinity. We point at him. We don’t have to say a word, Rob, we just stop standing in front of him. The DA drops you Tuesday. I’d put money on it.”
Duke sighed.
“He’s in the hospital,” Rob said.
“I know where he is.”
“His heart stopped. I had my hands on it.”
“I know that too. I’ve watched it nine times.” Denise didn’t look away. “It doesn’t change what he is to the DA.”
Rob sat in the chair with the wobble. He thought about the ribs. The green board going under the heel of his hand. The kid in the steel cell with the carpenter’s pencil, holding it right without being shown.
“Give me a day,” he said.
“Rob—”
“A day.”
Denise studied him over her glasses. Then she wrote something on the legal pad in front of her and underlined it twice.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Noon. I need it by noon, or I can’t do anything with it before Tuesday.”
◆
He pulled back into the lot behind the Sheriff’s Office on Court Street at twenty to two. He’d seen the tailgate that morning when Dee dropped him at the truck: #THREEBEERS still there in orange, and under it now, in black, smaller, HERO? With the question mark. He still didn’t know which one made him feel worse.
The oilcloth coat was on the seat where he’d put it that morning, folded in its square. It smelled of smoke and eel and faintly of grape.
Ann Treadwell was in her office with the door open. She had her readers on and a piece of paper in both hands, and she didn’t put it down when he came in. She held it up so he could read it.
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH. STATE OF NEVADA. A seal in the corner. GARY WAYNE PRUETT. Date of birth, 1961. Date of death, March 11, 2019. Place of death, Renown Regional Medical Center, Reno, Washoe County. Cause: pneumonia, with something under it in a doctor’s words he didn’t know.
“Washoe County faxed it at nine-forty,” Treadwell said. “On a Saturday. I had a girl there owe me a favor.” She laid it on the blotter and put her hand flat on top of it. “He’s been dead seven years. He’s got a plot in a county cemetery with a number on it.”
She took her readers off. She looked older than she had on Thursday. She looked like a woman who had built a thing plumb and square and then stood back and watched it lean.
“So the man in 412 isn’t Jo’s father,” she said. “But the state lab says he’s her parent or her child. Parent or child, Rob, that’s what the machine says, and I’ve been reading it the one way because the other way is—” She stopped. She picked up a pen and put it down. “Your swab’s in Portland. They say tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not asking me what I think it’ll say.”
“No,” Rob said.
She didn’t push. Behind her was the dying plant on the file cabinet and the picture of her on the snowfield in a red jacket, younger, with a coil of rope over her shoulder.
“The hospital called at twelve-fifteen,” she said. “Since he’s a person of interest. Your ex-wife had them put a hold on him. Psychiatric. He tried to sign himself out, and she went to the attending and told him the man thinks he’s her son and he’s going to crawl into a lava tube and die.” She let that sit. “So he’s not going anywhere till a shrink sees him. Which on a holiday weekend could be Tuesday.”
Rob stood very still.
A room at St. Anne’s with no handles on the inside. He’d said it to Jo himself, Friday morning, in this building. He’d said it as a reason not to tell. She’d heard him.
“Why are you telling me this,” he said.
Treadwell got up. She went to the door and called down the hall for Haskins, and then she came back and didn’t sit down.
“Because I’ve got a twenty-nine-year-old kid in my holding cell who hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday but half a cheese sandwich and a cup of water,” she said. “No ID, no charge I can make stick, and the DA laughed at me. He didn’t touch your daughter. Every witness in that park says so, and your daughter says so, and she says it louder than any of them.” She tapped the paper on her blotter, the seal, the dead man’s name. “I’ve got nothing to hold him on, your daughter says he was kind to her, and I want to see where he goes.”
She held out a clipboard.
“Sign here. He’s released into your custody. Don’t lose him.”
Rob signed. She didn’t mention the car that would be parked on Juniper Road by the time he got there. He didn’t ask.
◆
Haskins brought him out through the booking door. He’d had his boots back for five minutes and he’d already laced them, tight, and he stood in the hall in his linen shirt with his arms around himself, blinking at the light.
Rob held out the coat.
The kid took it with both hands, and before he put it on he put his face down into the collar, the whole of his face, and breathed in, and stood there like that. Then he put it on and pulled it tight across his chest, and looked up at Rob, and said a short run of words in his own language with Pip’s name in the middle of it.
“Yeah,” Rob said. “She wore it all night.”
“Pip,” the kid said again. He put his hand flat on the front of the coat, over his heart. “Okay?”
“She’s okay. She’s with her aunt.”
“Okay.” He nodded hard. Then: “Toby?”
Rob didn’t know how to do it. He put his own hand on his chest, the way the kid had, and then he held it there and made the fingers close, slowly, into a fist, and opened them.
The kid watched the hand close. His face went still.
“He’s okay,” Rob said. “He’s alive. He’s in a bed.” He put his palms together and laid his cheek on them, like Pip playing sleep. “They won’t let him go.”
He didn’t know how much of it got across. Enough. The kid stood in the hallway in his coat and looked at the floor, and then he looked at Rob, and said, “Sorry,” in English, carefully, as if he’d been saving it.
◆
At 3:00 Rob sat in the truck in his own driveway on Juniper Road with the engine off and called her.
The kid was inside. Rob had shown him the shower, and the kid had stood looking at it while the water ran hot out of the wall, the steam coming up, and put his hand into it and taken it out and looked at his hand, and Rob had left him there with a towel and a Voss Decks & Fence sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants on the lid of the toilet and shut the door.
Across the ditch, fifty yards down, a county Explorer was parked on the shoulder with its engine running. It had been there when they pulled in.
Jo picked up on the fourth ring.
“What.”
Somewhere behind her it was quiet, carpet quiet, a TV going low.
“Ann told me,” Rob said.
Nothing.
“Jo. Undo it.”
“No.”
“Jo—”
“Feist says the crawl will kill him.” Her voice was flat, the voice she used on the phone with insurance companies. “Very likely, he said. He’s got a slot Monday. It goes in through the leg, it’s not open-heart, he’d be out Tuesday morning. The door doesn’t close till Tuesday late morning. There’s time, Rob. I did it. There’s time.”
“You did it.”
“I did it three times.”
“And what does he say?”
She didn’t answer that.
“He says no,” Rob said. “He told me no. He looked right at me. You put our son in a room with no handles, Jo.”
“I put him in a room where he doesn’t die tonight.”
“He’s sixty-three years old.”
“He’s eight.”
Rob put his forehead down on the steering wheel. The horn didn’t go. He’d pulled the fuse on it years ago, after it stuck on him in the Safeway lot.
“Undo it,” he said. Lower.
The line went dead.
He put the phone on the dash, face down, and went in.
◆
The kid slept all afternoon.
He’d come out of the bathroom in the sweatshirt, which came down over his knuckles, with his black hair wet and flat and his face scrubbed pink, and he’d sat down on the end of Rob’s couch to look at the room, and five minutes later he was over on his side with his knees up and his mouth open, gone. Rob put the throw from the back of the couch over him. He sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and watched the county car through the window over the sink, and watched the kid breathe on the couch, and didn’t do anything else.
At six the kid sat up all at once, like a dog, not knowing where he was. Then he saw Rob and knew.
Rob put a pizza in the oven. It was a DiGiorno out of the freezer, pepperoni, the last one. He set the oven to 400 and put the pizza on the rack and shut the door, and when he turned around the kid was standing right behind him, looking past him at the oven.
He crouched down in front of it. He put his face close to the glass and looked in at the pizza on the rack and the two elements glowing orange at the top and bottom. He put his hand flat on the glass and took it away fast. He looked at his palm. Then at the stove top, and the back of the oven, and then he got down lower and peered underneath it, at the drawer, as if the fire must be somewhere.
“No fire,” Rob said. He pointed at the elements. “Electric. It’s—” He didn’t know how to say electric. He pointed at the light switch by the door, and clicked it off and on, and pointed at the oven.
The kid’s eyes went from the switch to the oven. He sat back on his heels on the linoleum in Rob’s sweatshirt and watched the cheese start to bubble through the glass, with his hands on his knees, not blinking.
“Awesome,” he said.
He said it exactly the way Toby said it. Rob had to turn around and look out the window at the county car for a minute.
They ate at the table. The kid ate four pieces and folded each one in half first, lengthwise, after watching Rob do it once. When he got up to put his plate by the sink he opened the refrigerator door, because Rob had, and stood in the cold light looking at everything in it, and his eye went to the bottom shelf, behind the ketchup, to the six cans of Rainier in their plastic rings. He reached in and touched one. He looked at Rob and tipped his hand at his mouth, like drinking, and his eyebrows went up.
“No,” Rob said.
The kid took his hand back and shut the door.
◆
After, Rob gave him the pad.
The Calder Ranch & Lumber one, with the steer’s head. The kid had kept it in the cell. It was in the pocket of the coat, the top sheet torn off, with the carpenter’s pencil clipped through the wire at the top. He took it out and turned to a clean sheet and started drawing without being asked, bent over the kitchen table with the pencil held flat, and Rob pulled his chair around to see.
It was a bridge.
Rob knew it before there was enough of it to know. He knew it by the first lines, by the way the kid laid down the top chord and the bottom chord, straight and parallel, and then went back and dropped the verticals between them at even spaces, and then the diagonals. Triangles. A long run of them, leaning one way and then the other, every panel closed. Then under it, stone. Arches, low, stepping across, five of them, and under the road between them the triangles, trusses on trusses. Piers going down into water drawn in quick flat lines, one, two, three, four, and the whole thing going across the page and off the edge of it, so the kid had to turn the pad sideways and keep going.
Rob sat and looked at it. He’d built maybe four hundred decks and fifty fences and a barn once, a pole barn out on the Crane Butte Road, and he’d never built anything like that. Nobody had built anything like that since the railroads.
The kid drew little figures on the deck of it for scale, stick people, a cart with a horse. It went a long way across. It went across a river you’d need a bridge like that for.
Then he stopped. He went back to the third pier from the left, and he drew it again, over the top of itself, slower. He drew it broken. The stone pier split at the middle with the top half sheared off to one side, and the truss above it sagging into the gap, the triangles pulled out of true. And under it, in the water, three small figures. He took his time with them. He made them very small.
He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t point to it. He just drew it and went on, and finished the far end of the bridge, and put the pencil down.
Then he put his finger on the bridge, in the middle, on a truss. He tapped it. Then he reached across the table and tapped Rob on the chest, on the breastbone, with the same finger, hard enough that Rob felt it.
“Ata-ata,” the kid said. And then, carefully, “Rob.”
Rob didn’t know the word. He knew the finger. The truss and then his chest. The truss and then his chest.
Box’ll fold on you. Triangle won’t.
He put his hand over the place where the kid had tapped him and kept it there.
The kid wasn’t done. He stood up from the table. He put his hands out in front of his own stomach and drew a curve in the air, big, round, and held it there, and looked at Rob until Rob nodded. A woman. A baby coming. The belly in the dirt drawing, gone over twice. Then the kid dropped his hands. He held one of them out flat, palm down, beside his own hip, at about the height of Pip’s head, and held it there, and looked at the hand.
The flat hand held out in the air at the height of a kid.
It had come after he left, Toby said. He’d never seen it.
The kid stood there in the kitchen in Rob’s sweatshirt with his hand held out beside him over nothing, and he didn’t take it down, and Rob understood that it was getting taller. Right now. While the pizza box sat on the counter and the county car idled across the ditch and the clock on the stove said 7:21. While Jo sat in a hospital in Bend with her hand on a bed rail, waiting until Monday.
The kid took his hand down. He sat back down at the table and looked at the drawing.
◆
Rob called Denise at 7:30. She picked up on the first ring, a TV going behind her.
“Kill the old-man angle,” he said.
“Rob.”
“He’s my son. He’s Toby. Put it on the record.”
There was a silence on the line, long enough that he heard her turn the TV off.
“Rob,” Denise said, “that’s the only thing between you and—”
“Put it on the record.”
“If you say that out loud, you’re not a man the DA might have gotten wrong. You’re a man who thinks his eight-year-old came back as a senior citizen. You understand what they’ll do with that? What Brynn Kessler will do with that?”
“Put it on the record, Denise.”
She was quiet again.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. “Get some sleep.”
He put the phone down on the counter.
The kid was watching him from the table.
Rob opened the refrigerator. He reached in behind the ketchup and took out the six-pack of Rainier by its rings, all six, cold, and carried it out the front door and down the driveway in the last of the light to the curb, where the bins were. He flipped up the lid of the gray one and put the six-pack in on top of a pizza box from Tuesday and let the lid drop.
Across the ditch the county Explorer sat with its parking lights on. The deputy’s face showed in the dash glow, watching him.
Rob stood at the curb with his hand on the bin. Behind him in the lit kitchen window the kid had pulled the pad back across the table and was bent over it again with the pencil flat, going over something he’d already drawn.