Wednesday, 4:20 p.m.
I stood in front of the bumper with both hands flat on the hood and the heat of the engine coming up through my palms.
Through the windshield, under the crack from the gravel truck, he watched me. Beet pulp still clung to his sleeve. He had the ring in the ignition, the brass farrier-school tag swinging on it, and his right hand on the shifter, and he didn't put it in gear.
The driver's window was down. I'd cranked it down myself, that morning, to let the heat out.
"Move, Hanne."
"No."
"I'm not going to run you over."
"I know you're not."
"Then move."
"No."
We stayed like that. A hen crossed the yard between us on some business of her own. The diesel ran and ran, and in the barn behind me Pilot shifted her weight and knocked her bucket against the wall.
Then I walked around the fender to his door. I didn't hurry. I reached in across his lap, and he could have stopped my hand with two fingers, and he didn't. I turned the key and the engine died, and the quiet that came down after it was very large. I drew the ring out of the ignition and closed my fist on it.
He looked at my fist. Then he looked straight ahead.
"You read my mail."
"Yes."
"Eleven years." He said it to the windshield. "It was in a drawer. It wasn't hidden. You could've asked me any day of your life."
"Would you have answered?"
His mouth moved. The scar went white and then it eased. "I don't know," he said.
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in two days, and it had come from the man I was about to put to sleep.
"And you hid my keys." He turned his head and looked at me, finally, and his eyes were wet and furious. "Like I'm somebody who can't be trusted with them."
At the end of that sentence his face went flat and old, older than this afternoon, and then it was his again.
I had the ring in my hand and a rule in my ear. You will not ask him anything. I had nothing left that wasn't a lie or an order. So I gave him the one true thing I had.
"Please. Stay today. I need you."
"For what?"
"I can't say."
"Can't or won't?"
"Please, Cal."
The tag on the ring bit into my palm. Then he pulled the door handle and got out, slowly, favoring the shoulder, and stood there with his arms hanging, a big man in a farrier's apron, with no more idea what to do with his hands than a boy.
"There's things in that drawer I ought to have told you," he said. "Not today. I can't do it today. Don't ask me."
"I won't."
"That's the whole trouble with you," he said. "You mean it." And he walked past me toward the house, and I stood at the front of a dead truck with his keys in my fist.
* He sat on the couch with his boots on and watched me put the kettle on.
"I've got a head," he said. "I'd like something hot."
"Tea."
"Not that stuff."
"The chamomile."
"God." He leaned his head back on the cushion and shut his eyes. When I came to the door of the front room with the kettle still ticking behind me he said, without opening them, "You're shaking. I can hear you doing it."
"I'm not."
"Come here." He held out an arm on the back of the couch. "I'm still mad. Come here anyway."
I went. I sat in the crook of it, and he smelled of coal smoke and scorched steel and the sour of a long day, and his heart went under my ear, slow and heavy and entirely his. He didn't say anything else. His hand came up and lay against the back of my head, and stayed.
I got up when the kettle went. I stood at the stove with my back to him and the receiver hissing on my belt, though I didn't need it. He was twenty feet away.
It had all narrowed down to a kettle.
The blue pills sat by the dish rack in their brown bottle, label to the wall, where he had put them back that morning. I picked the bottle up and turned it round and read his own name on it. The voice came into the kitchen with me. The man in your bed is how I keep Callum. If he learns you know, I will not need Callum.
He had learned something. Not all of it. Enough to sit there in his boots with the keys gone and his temper on a short rope, and every minute he sat was a minute nearer to getting up. If he walked out that door he would go to his sister, or to whoever he goes to, and know would be loose in the air. And a man I had never met, whose name was Callum Reeve, would stop being worth keeping.
I tipped one tablet into my palm. Small, blue, an oval no bigger than a lentil. I didn't know what it was. I had seen what two of them did, because the shoulder had been bad and he takes two when it is. Two put a man of a hundred and ninety pounds on his back, stopped his breath, and kept him out for ten hours, and left him with no yesterday. A benzodiazepine, the app said, possible. I do benzodiazepines all day, in dogs and horses, and there is a floor to every one of them.
He took two last night and stopped breathing. Half of one is a quarter of that. It would be daylight, and he'd be on his side this time, with the receiver at my hip and me beside him and the clinic oximeter on his finger, and a jaw I know how to thrust.
I set the tablet on the cutting board and cut it with the paring knife. It broke crooked. I took the smaller piece, and crushed it under the back of a spoon, and stirred it into the chamomile with a spoonful of honey until there was nothing to see. I rinsed the paring knife and set it in the dish rack with the others, and the kitchen looked exactly like a kitchen.
"Here."
He took the mug in both hands and looked at me over it. "You're being nice."
"I'm being nice."
"It's very suspicious." He drank. His nose wrinkled. "Tastes like a tack room."
"It's the chamomile. Finish it."
He finished it. He handed me the empty mug and shut his eyes again, and I sat down at the other end of the couch, three feet from him, and put the empty mug in my lap and held it in both hands like something that might spill.
* He went quietly. By twenty past five he'd stopped talking, and by half past his breath had gone long and heavy, and his hand lay open on his thigh, the fingers curled over nothing.
I put two fingers under the corner of his jaw. Fifty-eight. Slow and even. I sat with them there a minute more than I needed to.
Then I went up. In the bedroom the monitor's transmitter sat on the dresser with its little red eye, and I unplugged it and carried it down against my chest as if it were something alive, and set it on the floor by the end of the couch, and plugged it in. The receiver in my pocket picked up the room a half second late: the room as sound, the breath, the catch, the letting-go. I had thought I'd never be so glad to hear anything.
Then out to the truck for what I'd need: the oximeter from the drug box, the portable generator that shoots a fetlock, the plate in its padded sleeve, two lead aprons, the tablet that runs the plate. I made two trips with a hand on the receiver the whole way. Between the first and the second my legs went, and I sat on the tailgate with the generator on my knees until they came back.
I clipped the oximeter to his finger. The number came up green and stubborn: 97. Pulse 56. I set the alarm at 90. Then I sat on the low stool ten feet away and watched the number hold, 97, 97, 96, until I believed it.
"Cal," I said, quietly.
He didn't stir.
I started with the penlight, because I'd promised myself I would. If it could be done with a light, it wouldn't have to be done with a beam. I drew his upper lip back with my thumb, the scar under the pad, warm and smooth, and read the top row. I lifted the lower. I looked at the crowns, both sides, every cusp, for twenty seconds in that thin white circle, with the taste of chamomile on the air. He has good teeth. Some wear, a chipped molar, a filling I knew about.
I couldn't tell. In a horse the caps, the baby teeth, can stay on a long time and pass for the permanent ones under them, and I pull them every spring. A person can do the same for forty years. A crown is a costume. Only the roots tell you what's under it, and the roots were under the gum.
A photograph can be flipped. I had known that in the loft, at ten o'clock in the morning, with a hot sun on the screen, and I'd put it aside. A man who flips a photograph is either lying or being clever, and I couldn't tell which, and a picture wasn't going to tell me. Bone doesn't flip.
I warmed the plate between my hands first, as I do for a nervous horse, and I set it against his cheek and put the generator on the low stool, and wrapped myself in lead, and drew the second apron over his chest and up to his chin, and dialed the technique down to what I'd use on a cat's skull. It's a fraction of a fraction of what I give a fetlock. It's still a beam through a head. I stood well back at the end of my cable and pressed the button.
The generator gave its click. The tablet lit gray. Tansy came out from under the couch at the noise, looked at the lead apron I'd dropped, and sat down on it. I moved her with my foot.
Left side. Then the plate around the other cheek, and the angle again, the oblique, and the click. Two views. I swabbed the inside of his cheek, and I couldn't have told you what for, only that a swab is a thing you can take. I sealed it and wrote nothing on it. I photographed the scar from four sides with a ruler beside it, on the left, where a fence rail took him at nineteen, and held the newsprint face from the loft on my phone beside it, the scar on the other side. On the low stool the generator ticked as it cooled. Through the receiver the room went in and caught and let go. It was ten past six, and the light had gone long and yellow through the front window and lay across his chest like a hand.
I bent to move the plate to a better angle for the third.
His hand closed around my wrist.
It came up off his thigh so fast the oximeter clip jerked on his finger and the alarm gave a shrill chirp and cut off. His eyes were open. They were on my face, and they weren't on me. They were on nothing, some bright wide place a long way behind my head.
I had not decided to say it. It went out of me on a breath, low, the question I'd been forbidden since the loft, and I said it to a sedated man as you say a thing in a church.
"Who are you?"
He looked through me. His voice came out slurred and slow and perfectly clear.
"I'm the one who got out."