Thursday, 11:52 a.m.
Eight minutes.
I stopped the rig at the top of the ramp with the trailer's tires in the weeds and the engine ticking under the hood. The landing was a half acre of gravel gone to dandelion, a rusted fire ring, a picnic table with one bench, and the brown state sign with its top half shot off. From the sign the ramp went down in a single graded tongue, steeper than any driveway, and at the bottom the lake lay flat and gray-green under the cloud, so still it looked poured.
My husband's truck sat on the ramp with its nose down and its front wheels in the water to the hubs. A dark-green Silverado with a crack across the bottom of the windshield. In front of its left rear tire, jammed against the tread on the downhill side, was a wedge of tarred four-by-four, and out of a hole bored through the wedge ran a yellow rope. It lay along the edge of the ramp and up onto the shore end of a short gray plank dock, where the slack pooled in loose yellow coils, and it ended in a man's hand.
He sat on a bench at the shore end of the dock in a clean white shirt buttoned to the neck and a cardigan over his knees, and a plaid thermos beside him on the boards, and his canvas cap on top of the thermos. The rope was wrapped twice around his right palm, and he held that hand in his lap like a bird he had found.
I looked at the truck. He'd said at the top, and I'd stopped at the top, and at twenty yards a person is a shape behind glass. His head lay against the driver's window. His shoulders moved. I gave myself that, and only that, and put everything else in a drawer.
"That's the dust," Aubrey called across the gravel, the rope still wound round his hand. "That's far enough, Hanne." It was his voice, and not the one I had been listening to for thirty-six hours, low and dry and pressed flat. This was the one from my barn aisle yesterday afternoon, when he'd stood with his cap against his chest and asked me to take his mare. Warm. A bit hoarse. The vowels of someone raised a long way north who had not entirely stopped being polite about it. The courtesy had been in the other one too.
"If you'd shut her off, I'd appreciate it. It's hard to hear a person over a diesel."
I shut it off. The quiet came up over the hood like water, and in it was the lake: a slap against the pilings, a small wet sound against the truck's front tires.
11:52, by the dash. I got down.
"You're punctual. I'd wondered," he said, watching me come round the front of the rig with my hands where he could see them.
"Where's Callum?"
"You can see where he is," he said, with a small lift of the chin toward the truck.
"Is he alive?"
"He's been breathing since half past seven," he said, and his voice did not change. "I've watched him do it."
A green strap was shut in the passenger door and trailed out onto the gravel, the ratchet of a hand winch on its end, the one I'd seen bolted to the nose of his trailer on Tuesday night. He hadn't lifted anybody. He'd walked a drugged man down a ramp on what was already in him, let the grade do the carrying, and cranked the rest a notch at a time.
Then Aubrey lifted the hand with the rope in it an inch, and the yellow line came off the gravel and tightened. "You brought it?"
I took the bottle from the zipped pocket and held it up. My own label. The clear fluid slid in it.
"Put that on the fender, please, where I can see it. Thank you." He said it as though I'd passed him the salt. "And there's the other thing. I expect you've brought that too. I wouldn't blame you."
I said nothing and set the bottle on the trailer's fender, and I left my hand near it because I did not know where else to put it. I could feel the syringe in my jacket, warm from my ribs, a few ounces of pink that would stop a nineteen-year-old mare's heart in under a minute, and I kept my hand where it was.
Behind me Pilot shifted her weight. The trailer rocked, one hoof, then another. On the bench the old man's head turned toward the sound, and his face changed in the space of a second and was made up again, a sheet pulled over something.
"You brought the mare."
"You left her to me."
"I did," he said. "I did, at that." He looked at the trailer a while. He was thinner than he had been on the road last night, and even at twenty yards his face was the yellow of old paper. He coughed into his fist, twice, a dry scraped sound, and looked at the fist afterward as though it belonged to someone else. "I'd rather you left her in there. It's no place for a horse."
"It's less of one for a man in a truck."
"No." He didn't argue it, only shifted the cardigan on his knees. "Now, I'd like you to walk down."
* "Walk down the ramp," Aubrey said, easing the rope a half turn on his palm. "You've got the bottle, and I'd bet you've got a needle, and the passenger door isn't locked. I'll want to see it done. Then I put this rope down, and you and I will sit on the dock."
"And if I don't come down?"
"Then I pull it anyhow."
"Then you'd be the one who did it."
"Yes," he said, "I've thought about that, and it doesn't trouble me as much as you'd expect."
Under the truck the gravel shifted with a small dry sound, and the whole gray bulk of it settled a quarter inch toward the lake, and every muscle I owned leaned after it and stayed where it was. My mouth was very dry, and I thought of the wedge at that tire, and the ramp, sixty feet of wet gravel with the truck on it nose-down, and how many seconds there were between an old man leaning back on a rope and the water coming over a hood.
"He trusts you," Aubrey said, looking at the truck. "He trusted me too." He let the lake slap the pilings twice. "She trusted him."
All I could think of to do was the one thing I had not done for anyone since Tuesday. I asked.
"What was she like?"
He had been reaching for the thermos, and his hand stopped over it.
I waited. I let the quiet run out to the end.
"Nobody's asked me that in a good while," he said.
"I'd like to know," I said, and meant it more than I had meant anything since Tuesday.
"She was a horse girl." He laughed once, through his nose. "You'd have liked her. She had a bay gelding called Dory that she'd started herself, and she could ride anything with four legs, and she couldn't parallel park to save her life. She carried a hoof pick in her back pocket to school and was sent home for it in the tenth grade, and came back the next day with it in the other pocket. She wanted your job. She'd been eighteen seven weeks. She'd have been forty-three this January." He took his hand from the thermos and laid it on his knee. "I do the arithmetic every morning. It comes out the same."
"Dr. Tessier," I said.
I hadn't planned it, and it went across the twenty yards like a stone.
He didn't move, and the rope sat in his fist.
"Nobody's called me that in seven years," he said. "Nobody but Callum. Half past four this morning."
"Dagny Reeve told me something this morning, in my yard." I made myself say it slowly, one word at a time, so that it came out even. "Callum went back down for her. Twice. His blood was on her door handle."
Nothing on the lake moved.
"They'd have said anything," Aubrey said.
"They were divers," I said.
"They were his friends' fathers." He wasn't looking at me now. He was looking at the truck, at the glass over the water, at the shape in the seat. "They'd have said anything. It was a small town."
"He went down twice," I said. "He was nineteen, and he went down twice, and he never once stopped going."
"Walk down."
It wasn't loud. It was the voice of someone carrying something heavy a long way and just handed one more thing. He said, "I let him have twenty-five years of it. A wife. A nice horse to shoe. Now walk down. It's noon in six minutes."
"No," I said, and took one step toward the ramp, not toward him but toward the truck and the gravel. Aubrey's fist closed on the rope, and the yellow line rose off the ground and hummed.
"Not that way either," he said. "I'm not quick, Hanne. The rope is."
My phone said 11:55. I stood where I was.
* I went to the trailer and let the ramp down.
He didn't call to me. The boards of the ramp rang under my boots, and the mare's hooves answered, and then I had her, the whole enormous warm breadth of her, backing out into the light with her ears swinging and her eyes going all the way around the landing, the sign, the gravel, the sheet of gray water at the bottom of the slope. She stopped when the water came into her eyes. Her head came up and her nostrils went wide.
And then she saw him.
It's in the ears first: hers went forward like two hands, and a sound came out of her that was not a whinny, low, a noise from the barrel, the noise a mare makes at a foal. She stood at the top of the ramp with her whole weight leaning down the slope toward a man on a bench.
On the bench, Aubrey stood up.
"Pilot," he said.
"Sit down," I said. I hadn't decided to say it. It came out level, each word set beside the last.
I took the syringe out of my jacket, and I pulled the cap off with my teeth, and it tasted like plastic and cold, and the pink in the barrel was the pink of a child's cough medicine. I put my left hand up under the mare's jaw. I set the needle against the groove under the crest of her neck where the jugular runs, a place I have found with my eyes shut on a thousand horses. The skin rippled once down her shoulder, and she settled. She had stood for my needle two hundred times, for her shots, for her blood, for a tube down her nose on Tuesday night. She stood for it now.
"Now I have your horse," I said.
He did not sit.
The mare stood with her muzzle in my collar, breathing on my neck. My voice was level, and my hand did not shake, and I could hear how easy it was. She trusted me. I kept the needle where it was.
"Put that down," Aubrey said.
"Take your hand off the rope."
"I can't do that."
"Then I'll finish what I brought."
He looked at the mare. He looked, past the syringe, past me, at the white blaze down her face and the heavy old head laid against my shoulder as if it were the only place in the world it wanted to be, and his face did what it had done at the trailer while nothing else on him moved. The rope hung slack in his hand.
Then he looked at me, and he was almost smiling.
"You won't," he said. "You're a good vet."
I stood there with the needle against her skin.
He was right. I found it out like the bottom of a stair in the dark, with a foot that comes down flat, expecting more. My thumb was on the plunger. It was very steady, and it did not push.
"It's all right, girl," Aubrey said to her, without taking his eyes off me. "You're all right."
The mare's ears went to him.
The truck was still where it had been, and the lake lapped it. A single cloud had torn open in the west and a piece of light slid across the water and went out again. My phone said 11:58, and the numbers were very clear.
He lifted his watch to the light, and looked at it, and let it fall.
Then he leaned back from the waist, as if starting a mower, and pulled.
The yellow rope came whipping along the ramp, and the chock jumped out from in front of the tire and went clattering down the gravel and off into the water with a small flat splash, and the truck, with my husband in it, began to move.