Dark
The first tread comes off the saw a quarter inch short.
I hold it against the opening. The stringers are thirty-seven and an eighth apart. I wrote thirty-seven and an eighth on the board in pencil, and I cut to the line, and the tread is thirty-six and seven-eighths. You could slide a nickel in the gap on the left.
Deshawn is on the third step with the level across his knees. He doesn't say anything.
I go back to the tape. Thirty-seven and an eighth. It says what it said. I lay a new board on the horses and mark it and the pencil line looks all right. I set the blade. Then somewhere behind the Hallorans' garage a woman calls a kid in from a yard.
"Maddie!"
I put the saw down. I don't remember deciding to. I walk out to the truck in the drive and get in and turn on the radio. The AM talk station comes up in the middle of a sentence, two men arguing about a school levy, and I turn it up until the cab hums with them. I sit there with the door open. Across the lawn a screen door bangs. The woman's voice stops. A kid's voice says something back, small, and that's all.
I sit until the levy is done. Then I go back in and pick up the pencil.
The second tread comes off a quarter inch short. I cut on the wrong side of the line. Thirty years of carpenters have said leave the line, take the waste, and I cut the line in half and took the waste from the good side.
Two treads. Quartersawn white oak. Nobody sells me a third one at a discount.
"Adam," Deshawn says.
"I know it's two."
"I'm gonna say it. Go home, man. I got the case. I can do the crown, you showed me the cope."
"Cut it right, and you don't need to be shown."
He looks at me. He's twenty-two and he's been with me since April, and I taught him to stay proud of the line. He looks at the two short boards on the horses, and back at me, and I can see him working out which questions get you an answer in this house.
Doug Halloran comes down the stairs in his socks with his phone in his hand.
"That's the second one," he says.
"I'll make them good."
"It's not the oak." He stops on the landing. "Look. Pam says you look like hell. I said he's a professional. I said don't ask him. Then I come down here and there's a two-hundred-dollar pile of oak on the horses." He isn't shouting. That's worse. "I've got a guy who can finish this stair if you can't, Adam. I'd rather not. I'm asking. Are you all right?"
I have the pencil in my hand. I look at it. It's a flat carpenter's pencil, the lead worn to a chisel, and I sharpened it with my knife this morning in the truck. I set it on the sawhorse. I unclip the tape off my belt and hang it on the newel post.
"Key's on the hook," I say to Deshawn. "Finish the case."
"Adam."
"I'll send you the number for the oak."
"Where the hell are you going?" Doug says behind me.
I go out. The radio in the truck is still on. I shut it off and start the engine.
Monday night I slept on the floor. The bed's done. White oak, mortised, pegged, the posts as tall as my hip, and it's the best thing I've made this year, and the mattress is on the boards beside it because I haven't lifted the mattress onto the frame. I lay there and said it to the ceiling. Then it's mine. She said it's always been. In nineteen years nobody's said that to me. My father never said it. He said we don't discuss it, and then he went out and mowed.
I drive to Wealthy Street with my father's skiff lantern riding behind my seat. Every time I take a corner it slides and taps the frame.
The party store is on the corner two doors down from the vacuum shop. The light inside is yellow and a cooler hums along one wall, and the kid at the register has his phone propped against the lottery machine. I walk down the back aisle. The pints are on the bottom shelf on the right, where the cheap rye is, under a hand-lettered sign. I find it by the label before I read it. They haven't changed it.
I take one to the register. Nineteen years.
"That all?"
"That's all."
He doesn't card me. I'm thirty-six. He puts it in a paper sack and I don't need the sack and I carry it back down Wealthy Street in one hand like a loaf of bread.
The door at the top of the stairs sticks at the head jamb. I put my shoulder in it. I pull the chain and the bulb comes on over the middle of the room. Then the lamp on the floor by the mattress. Then the light over the stove, and the one in the bathroom, and I leave the bathroom door open so it lays a yellow bar across the fir. There's nothing else to turn on. I stand in it. The radiator knocks three times and hisses.
I sit in the cherry chair with the sack on my knee.
The cap cracks when I break it. The smell comes up out of the neck and I'm on the boathouse steps in the dark, seventeen, the cold coming through my shirt. My father's cabinet over the fridge. The stair that groaned. I put the neck in my mouth.
It goes down like a hot wire. My eyes run. I hold it in my mouth and it burns the split in my lip and I swallow, and it goes down and lands, and sits there, and starts to spread. I wait for something. Nothing comes but the heat. I take another one.
I drink it the way I'd lay a floor. From one wall to the other, with no gaps. The bulb's light goes soft at the edges. The bed frame stands in the middle of the room and the shadow of it lies across the boards, four posts and two rails and a headboard, and none of the joints show.
She said she lit it. I turn that over. The paper said a lantern. Now the one person who'd know says she lit it. Two people. I have the paper, and I have her mouth.
If it was lit, it was there. That's all it can be. It was there and I was looking at the shore, and I put the boat through it.
I get up once and go to the window. The truck is at the curb under the streetlight. I can see the back glass and the dark behind the seat where I can't see what's there.
I sit back down. The radiator knocks. I drink what's left.
Wednesday I wake on the floor at ten past twelve with my cheek on the boards. The bottle's on its side by the chair leg. I lie there while the room decides which way is down. Then I get up and put my head under the tap and drink from it and stand there with the water running down my neck.
I don't shave. I put on the shirt I had on yesterday because it's on the chair.
I drive north. The sun's out. It comes at me through the windshield low and flat off every wet spot on the road. My hands on the wheel are bad. I hold it at ten and two and they keep moving. Past Cedar Springs I open the window and the cold gets in and helps.
The lantern slides and taps on the curve north of Big Rapids. I let it.
At the rest area I pull in and get out and go behind the picnic shelter and get rid of what's in me. Then I sit on a table with my head down till the trucks stop being loud. A man walks a spaniel past. He gives me the room a man gives another man in that condition.
She said stay away from her mother. That's what she said, standing over me. You've done what you were going to do to her.
I'm not going to stay away. That isn't what this is. I'm not going to see her mother. I'm going to tell her mother. That's different. I've never told anybody. I've sat on a dock nineteen years and said one word to the water, and the water doesn't need it, and it never once said it back.
It's half past two when I get to Traverse City. I don't stop for gas.
Birchwood's a low brick building with a pitched roof and pines around the lot. Five rows of spaces. I park in the fourth, back end to the trees. I sit with the engine off and look at every car in every row.
Her Subaru isn't here. I look twice.
Inside it's warm and it smells of hand foam and something under the foam, sweet, that doesn't go away. There's a binder on the desk with a pen on a chain. I write my name in it. All of it. Adam Voss. In the next column it wants to know who I am to the patient, and I leave it empty. The older nurse behind the desk looks at me over her glasses and then up at my face.
"The closet door," she says. "She'll be glad. She's been up and down all day."
"Thanks."
The hall is ninety feet. I've counted it before. The floor's a beige that shows every scuff, and the lights hum, and a cart with a pitcher and a stack of paper cups stands against one wall. The door of 114 is open a hand. I push it with two fingers.
She's propped on three pillows with the tubes in. The TV's off. The blind on the window is half down and through the bottom of it I can see the lot, and the fourth row, and my truck. Her hands lie on the blanket, one on the other. There's a plastic clip on one finger with a red light in it.
She looks smaller than the last time. She looks at me and her whole face works.
"Adam," she says.
It's a whisper. I've heard about half of what she's ever said to me.
"It's me."
"You shouldn't." She looks past me at the door. "She said."
"I know."
"Close it."
I close it. The closet door in the corner has swung open an inch on its own. It doesn't stick now. I fixed that. I sit in the chair by the bed, the one I sat in the first time, and it's warm under me from somebody else.
She watches me. Her hands have started to move on the blanket, the fingers picking at the weave, and her eyes go to the door and back to me, to the door and back.
"I have to tell somebody," I say.
She doesn't answer. Her breath goes in and out through the tubes with a small dry sound.
"I was driving the boat—"
Her breath catches.
It goes in and doesn't come out right. It hitches at the top, and comes out in pieces, and the next one hitches sooner. It's a sound like a stair taking weight. On the wall the monitor goes from one slow tone to a faster one. There's a number on it. Eighty-eight. Eighty-four. Her mouth comes open. Her lips have gone a color.
Her hand comes off the blanket and closes on my wrist. It's the strongest thing about her. The nails go in.
"Nell—" she says.
That's all. Nothing after it. The breath goes out of her on the end of the word, and she's looking at me, and the number says seventy-nine.
The button is on a cord clipped to the pillow. It's six inches from her other hand. It's a yard from mine. She pushed it on me last time. A woman came in the door in under a minute.
My hand's on my knee. I tell it to go. It stays on my knee.
Seventy-four.
I lift her fingers off my wrist. One, and one, and one. They don't fight me. I lay her hand down on the blanket with the others, and the marks she left on me fill in white and then red.
I stand up. I push the chair back against the wall where it was. I go to the door. I don't look at the bed. There's a sound behind me that I know the shape of and I don't turn around for it. I open the door and go out and pull it shut behind me and it doesn't latch, it stands open a hand.
At the desk a tone starts. Two notes, down and up, and it keeps going. The older nurse says a word into the phone. A door bangs somewhere and Marisol comes out of the med room at a run, the navy fleece, the lanyard swinging off the left shoulder. She comes down the hall right at me. She goes by so close her sleeve drags across mine. She doesn't look at me. She hits the door of 114 with her hip and it swings and she's gone in.
I walk. Ninety feet. The nurse is on her feet with the phone against her chest and her eyes on the hall behind me, and she doesn't look at me either. The doors slide open by themselves and the cold comes in.
Fourth row. I get in the truck. I put both hands on the wheel.
The blind in the window of 114 is half down. Something goes across it, and another thing. Then nothing. The clock on the dash says five past three. I don't turn the key.
The skiff lantern taps once behind the seat. Nobody touched it.
A car comes in off the road too fast.
It takes the speed bump like it isn't there and comes across the lot with the nose down and swings into a space, across the line, and stops with the back end still rocking. The door's open before it's still. I know the gray Subaru and the charcoal coat, the hood down, the coat open, her bag left on the seat.
She runs. I've never seen her run. She does it the way she does everything, straight, no wasted motion, and her boots ring on the asphalt. She goes for the doors before they finish opening and turns sideways to get through.
She doesn't look at the lot. She doesn't look at the fourth row. She doesn't see the truck.
I let her not see it.