4:31
The second hand came up onto the twelve, and Rob said it to himself. Four thirty-one.
The watch was steel, with a steel band that pulled the hair on his wrist. Jo had given it to him on their fifth anniversary, and he’d had the crystal replaced once after he put it into a joist hanger. He held his wrist up into the circle of his headlamp and kept it there.
The last he’d seen of her was the soles of her sneakers. Gray tread, worn smooth at the balls of the feet. They’d gone into the slot and the dark had closed after them like water after a dropped stone.
Pip weighed what she weighed. Forty pounds, give or take the otter. She was across his lap in Dee’s blue fleece with her head in the crook of his left arm, and her breath went in and out against his collarbone, warm, then cool. She hadn’t woken.
His right shoulder was open. The shirt was stuck to it. The slot had taken the skin off it when he went in behind Toby, and held him there like a clamp somebody had gone off and left.
Forty-two degrees in here. The whistle went up and came down.
Treadwell was on her stomach at the slot with her arm in to the shoulder and her flashlight pushed out ahead of her in her fist. Her red jacket was torn across the back. She lay there a long time.
“Rock,” she said. “And a bend.”
She didn’t go in again. She pulled her arm out and got up onto her heels and sat back against the wall across from him with her knees up. She checked her own watch. Then she looked at him.
Four thirty-one and forty. He breathed in on the second hand and out on the second hand.
Ten minutes was six hundred seconds. He could count six hundred. He’d counted to thirty on his own son’s chest on the tile of a sheriff’s lobby, over and over, and got to the end every time.
Day One
It was the lead aprons. That was the first thing she thought, and it was stupid, and she thought it anyway. The lead aprons from operatory two, a dozen of them, and then a dozen more, and then the whole building. The weight came down on her chest and her ears and pushed. A roar went through her head like a truck going by on the highway an inch from her face. The cold came in through her mouth and found her fillings, all four, and lit them.
Her hands were on his heels. Then they were on nothing.
She pushed on nothing. Her nose filled up, and there was the taste of pennies, and it ran over her lip.
Then it was rock. Just rock, cold and wet and ordinary, and her own breath loud against it. She couldn’t hear the whistle. Someone was talking, ahead of her, fast and low, and it wasn’t English.
She crawled. The rock scraped her hip bones. There was light ahead, yellow, not the white of Treadwell’s flashlight, and it moved a little. There was a smell of smoke and some kind of fat burning.
The slot opened. She came out of it on her elbows onto a stone floor.
A room. Small. Stone walls, and a low roof of black beams, and a clay lamp burning in a deep square window with a night outside it. A hearth against one wall with the coals banked. A pallet. A boy, a big one, fifteen maybe, all wrists and neck, sitting against the wall with his hands held out in front of him as if they had just let go of something heavy. And on the floor between the boy and the hole she’d come out of, Toby, on his back, with his coat open and his arms flung out, and Aurel kneeling over him.
Aurel had his mouth on Toby’s mouth. He breathed into him. He sat up and threw a short hard run of words at the roof beams, and bent and breathed into him again. Toby’s chest came up with it and went down again and didn’t do anything on its own.
Toby’s lips were blue. His face had gone the color of putty.
Jo got her knees under her. She pushed Aurel’s shoulder, and he looked at her with his whole face, and moved.
She found the notch at the bottom of the breastbone with two fingers. She put the heel of her hand above it and the other hand over that and locked her elbows, and she leaned.
The ribs on the left side went under her hands with a grinding give. Rob had broken them on Friday. They went again and she kept going.
“One and two and three and four,” she said, out loud, in English, the way they’d drilled it in the break room at work. “Five and six and seven.” Her nose was running blood onto his coat. “Twenty-nine and thirty. Now.”
Aurel caught the pause. He bent and breathed into his grandfather twice, and sat up, and she leaned again.
“One and two and three.”
The boy against the wall was crying without any noise. The lamp in the window moved on its wick.
She did it five times. On the sixth, at nineteen, something under her hands kicked. Not her. Him. She took her hands off. His chest came up by itself, and caught, and he coughed, a wet terrible bark, and rolled onto his side toward her, and his hand came up and took her by the wrist.
She put two fingers on his neck. It was there. It was all over the place, hills and a flat and a crowd of hills, and it was there.
He opened his eyes. He looked at her for a while from the floor.
“Your nose,” he said.
She wiped it on the cuff of the Ducks hoodie. It came away red.
Aurel sat back on his heels. He spoke to the ceiling again, softer this time, and put both hands over his face. He’d had time to build the fire up. There was a bowl on the hearthstones with a wooden spoon in it and a crust, and Rob’s sweatshirt was folded on the end of the pallet, and he was wearing a long wool shirt she’d never seen.
Jo sat down against the wall beside the hole.
The wall by her face was covered in scratches. Short lines, cut into the stone with the point of something, in bunches of five with a line across, the way Pip did it on her chalkboard. They went up past the window and along under the beams. Hundreds. More than hundreds. Somebody had been sitting up in this room with that lamp every night for a long time and had wanted to be able to see it.
She started to count them, and stopped.
4:32
Treadwell took her readers off and folded them and put them in her breast pocket.
“Your Y-STR came back last night,” she said. “I called Jo. She hung up on me before I got to it.”
Rob waited.
“Paternal line. It matched him.” She said it to the slot, not to him. “Not close. Matched. He’s your son, or he’s your father’s son.”
Rob thought about his father for as long as his father deserved, which was not long.
Pip’s hand had come out of the blanket. It was in a fist against his shirt with a hank of the fleece in it. The nails were bitten, like Jo’s.
“He’s mine,” Rob said.
Treadwell didn’t write it down. She didn’t have anything to write on. She looked at him across the Bell Room in the white of his headlamp, and he let her look.
Four thirty-two and thirty. The whistle dropped down low and hung there.
Day Two
They came up the mountain in the morning, and Jo went outside to be out of the way.
The hut was built against the slope, so that its back wall was the mountain, and the front of it looked down a long white fall of snow and black stone to a line of trees, and below the trees, smoke. A village. Roofs. A river with ice on it. She stood in the snow in her running shoes, which were soaked through in the first minute, with her arms wrapped around herself in Toby’s hoodie, and watched them come.
A chair first. It was a wooden chair on two poles, carried by a big gray-bearded man at the front and two younger men at the back, and in it, wrapped in fleeces to the chin, an old woman. Behind them a crowd. Women, children, a woman with a slate under her arm, a golden dog running ahead and back. The boy from the hut had gone down in the dark to fetch them. He was at the front now, walking backward, pointing.
They put the chair down at the door. The big man stooped and lifted the old woman out of it as if she weighed nothing and carried her into the hut, and the door was too low for him and he went in bent double with her in his arms. Everybody looked at Jo once, and then away.
She stood outside it.
Through the door came the old woman’s voice, small and dry and going on and on, a scold, it sounded like, a long one. Then Toby’s voice, low. Then the old woman again. Then a laugh, and it went up at the end, so that it sounded like a question.
She moved to where she could see in. She didn’t mean to. Senna was on the pallet beside him, sitting up with somebody’s arm behind her, and she had her hands on his face. They were brown. Not tanned. Brown to the wrist, dark as a walnut shell, stained into the creases and under the nails. The hands went over his forehead and his eyes and his beard and the back of his skull, slowly, the way Jo’s hands went over a patient’s jaw, finding the hinge. Her eyes were white with cloud. She wasn’t looking at him. She was reading him.
Her fingers found the clip in his braid. The purple butterfly. They stopped on it and turned it over.
Her voice lifted on two words. A question.
“Pip,” Toby said.
“Pip,” Senna said. She had it right the first time.
The big man carried her out again and set her in the chair by the door. She turned her face toward Jo. She couldn’t have seen her. She turned toward her anyway, exactly.
“You are the Mom,” she said.
In English. The words came out flat and careful, each one set down separately, like stones on a wall.
Jo said, “Yes.”
A woman brought a cloth bundle and opened it on a flat rock by the door. Flatbread, gray and blistered from a griddle. Pieces of some dark oily fish, smoked. A handful of shriveled red fruit. Senna pointed at the rock and then at Jo.
Jo didn’t move. Senna said it again, sharper, and the big man took Jo by the elbow, not ungently, and sat her down on the chair’s pole and put the bread in her hand.
So she ate, and they all watched her do it, the children and the women and the dog with its chin on its paws. The bread was dense and sour and still warm. The fish was so smoky it burned the inside of her nose. The fruit was sour enough to make her eyes water, and she ate all of it, and Senna sat in her chair with her cloudy eyes on nothing and listened to her chew. When Jo had finished, a shawl came from somewhere and landed across her shoulders, gray wool that smelled of sheep and smoke. Senna had thrown it. She hadn’t aimed. It landed anyway.
Then Senna said two short things. She pointed at the empty cloth. Then she pointed past Jo, back through the door of the hut, at the dark hole low in the wall.
Jo knew what pointing meant.
4:33
Treadwell took her phone out. No bars. She didn’t need bars. She thumbed something, and a red dot came up on the screen, and she held it out between them.
“Sunday, September sixth,” she said. “Four thirty-three a.m. Sheriff Ann Treadwell. I’m with Robert Voss.” She tipped the phone at him. “Go ahead.”
He’d had it in his mouth for fifteen days. He found it didn’t need arranging.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he said. “On the twenty-second. I told the deputy I dozed off. I didn’t. I was up at the turnout on the phone about a job. Forty minutes. I left them for a deck bid.” Pip shifted against him and he waited till she settled. “I came back and he wasn’t at the table and I thought he was with Jo. She thought he was with me. Each of us thought the other one had him.” He looked at the red dot. “Put it in your report.”
Treadwell didn’t stop the recording.
“You understand what that does to you,” she said. “Right now you’re a drunk. People forgive a drunk. That woman’s got eighty thousand people who’d forgive you a drunk by Christmas.” She held the phone steady. “They won’t forgive a phone call.”
“Put it in.”
She held it there a while longer. Then she touched the dot, and it went gray, and she put the phone back in her pocket and buttoned the flap.
Four thirty-three and fifty. His shoulder had stopped bleeding. It was knitting to the shirt.
Day Three
They had carried him down on a litter the afternoon before, and he slept now in a box bed built into the wall of a long low room in the village, under a heap of fleeces, with the fire going in the middle of the floor. The house was stone at the bottom and timber above, with walnut trees around it so close that their bare branches scraped the eaves at night. There was a timber store built on against the gable. Cut wood, and sap. It was the first thing in the whole country that smelled like home, and it smelled like Rob.
Nobody told her where to sleep. She slept on the floor by his box bed on the second night in the gray shawl, and in the morning nobody told her to move, so she didn’t.
In the afternoon a woman came up from the lower village with a child. The woman was tall and wore an apron black with some kind of oil, and her forearms were burned in old white spatters. The child was a girl of about eight with black curls exactly like Aurel’s, and she came in holding a fistful of the woman’s skirt and got behind her the moment she was through the door.
Aurel was sitting on a bench by the fire. He stood up so fast the bench went over.
Aurel looked at the woman, and at her apron, and at the burns on her arms, and said one word, Mira, and the woman put her hand over her mouth and nodded. Then he looked at the skirt, at the one dark eye showing past it.
He went down on his heels. He reached into the long wool shirt and took something out and held it on his flat palm, out toward the skirt. It was Rob’s carpenter’s pencil, flat, whittled to a chisel point.
The eye looked at the pencil. Then it went back behind the skirt.
The woman spoke to the child, low, with a name in it. Tali. The child didn’t come out. Aurel stayed down on his heels with his hand out until his arm must have ached. Then he set the pencil on the floorboards halfway between them, and went back to the bench, and righted it, and sat with his back to them.
When Jo looked again an hour later, the pencil was gone.
That night the house sat at the fire. Senna was brought to the stone lip of the hearth in her chair. The big man. The woman in the apron, with the girl asleep across her knees. The boy from the hut, whose name was Bram. Others. Toby lay in the box bed with his head propped on a rolled fleece and his face turned to the fire.
Senna held her brown hand out flat over the coals, low, where it must have burned, and began.
Jo knew what it was. She had heard it through a glass window on Thursday and in a hospital bed on Saturday. The names, one at a time, and the space after each. She didn’t know most of the names. She knew Oss. Senna left a long space after that one.
Toby’s hand came out of the fleeces. He held it out over the side of the bed toward the fire, shaking a little, not low enough to burn. He said a name. Then another. Then he turned his head on the rolled fleece and looked at Jo on the floor beside him, and moved his hand an inch, so that it was over her.
“Jo enna,” he said.
She didn’t know the word. She didn’t need it. He didn’t leave any space after it.
Senna had not stopped. Her hand stayed where it was over the coals. She finished the name she was on, and left its space, and said the next one.
“Jo.”
And left the space. The waiting one. The same length as the space she’d left for all the others who weren’t in the room.
Toby snapped a few words at her. It was the first time Jo had heard him raise his voice in any language. Senna didn’t turn her head. She said the next name, and left its space, and the next.
Jo sat on the floor with the shawl around her and her hands in her lap, and was named among the absent in a room where she was sitting, by a woman who could hear her breathing.
4:34
Treadwell stood up.
She did it all at once, the way a person stands when they’ve been deciding for a while and have decided. She clicked her flashlight on and off, checking it.
“I’m walking out to call this in,” she said.
Rob didn’t move. Pip was on him.
“Ann.”
“Three minutes and change. There’s a woman in that rock with an old man with a heart condition, and there’s no way on God’s earth I can get to either of them, and neither can you.” She put the light on the passage, on the way out. “I call it in at the mouth, I’ve got SAR up here in two hours. Floodlights. A drill, maybe. Somebody who fits.”
And the van, he thought. And the woman with the phone held out like an offering. And the whole of it on a screen by breakfast, and Jo coming out of the rock into that.
He couldn’t get up. If he got up, Pip woke. If Pip woke, she saw the hole and didn’t see her mother. He did the sum and it came out the same every time. He could talk. That was it.
“You gave her ten,” he said.
“I gave her ten minutes to bring an old man out of a hole, Rob. Not to go in after him.”
“You gave her ten.” He kept his voice down, for Pip. It came out like something dragged over gravel. “Give her ten.”
Treadwell looked at him, and at the slot, and at the child on his lap in the blue blanket with her mouth open.
Then she turned and went up the passage with the light, and the light got smaller on the rock.
Day Four
Pell came on the fourth day, in a cart from Ostrey, with a bag over her shoulder that clinked.
She was sixty and broad and came into the long room shedding a coat and giving orders. She went straight to the box bed. She put her ear on her father’s chest, on the left, and then lower, and then she sat up and slapped him lightly on the cheek and told him off, and he laughed.
Then she turned around.
Gray eyes. With the darker ring around the iris. Rob’s eyes, on a sixty-year-old woman with flour or something like it on her forearms and her hair gone iron at the temples. Toby had them. Jo stood there by the fire in the gray shawl and looked into Rob’s eyes in that stranger’s face and couldn’t do anything with her own.
Pell crossed the floor. She took Jo’s face in both hands, hard, so there’d be no looking away. Her palms were dry and hot.
“Ama-ama,” she said.
Behind her, from the bed, Toby said, “Pell means seed.”
“You told me.” It came out like a cough. “Wednesday. You told me Wednesday.”
Jo sat down on the bench by the fire, because it was there.
Pell sat down beside her and didn’t let go of her hand.
She had English. Her father’s, from the fire, from sixty years of listening. She said, carefully, “One one four seven Larch,” and then, “Five little monkeys,” and laughed at herself, and it was her mother’s laugh. She went slowly and pushed the rest of a sentence out with her hands when the words ran out. It was halting, and it was the best thing Jo had heard in four days.
She had other words too. She’d been told them in the cart, maybe, or at the door.
“My mother says,” Pell said, and stopped, and turned to the fire, and made herself go on. She held Jo’s wrist. “Eat. Then go.” She shook her head, and her face apologized for all of it, for her mother, for the house, for the snow. “Sorry. She says it.”
“She pointed,” Jo said.
Pell stared, and then laughed again, and put her other hand on top of Jo’s, and held on.
Day Five
On the fifth day Senna put her to work.
The dyers’ yard was down by the river at the bottom of the village, a walled square of trampled snow with three great vats in it on stone hearths, steaming, and racks of wet wool hanging in the cold, brown and red and blue. It smelled like a pot of coffee left on the burner all night. It smelled like iodine. Senna was carried down in her chair and set by the middle vat, and she gave an order, and somebody handed Jo a wooden paddle as long as she was.
The water in the vat was black-brown and hot and full of split green-black hulls. Walnut. Jo put the paddle in and stirred, and Senna listened, and spoke, and Pell, sitting on an upturned basket by the wall, said, “She says, from the bottom. Not like a man.”
Jo stirred from the bottom.
They gave her wool to lift out on the paddle and lay over the racks, a sodden skein at a time, heavy as a wet dog, and it dripped down her wrists into the cuffs of the hoodie. By the second hour her hands were brown to the wrist. By the third the brown had gone into her bitten cuticles and into a cut on the back of her knuckle she’d gotten in the rock, and it stung like peroxide, and then it stung worse, and then it just burned all afternoon, steady, a pilot light.
Senna said things. Pell passed them on or didn’t. “Faster, she says.” “She says you are slow like him.” “She says, the Mom has soft hands.” Once Senna went on longer, and Pell only shook her head and would not.
In the third hour Senna put out her hand without turning her head, and somebody put Jo’s hand into it. Senna held it palm up in her own. Her fingers went over it as they had gone over his face on the pallet, the pads, the knuckles, the split cuticles, the cut. She pressed the cut with her thumb until Jo’s breath went in through her teeth. Then she turned the hand over and felt the stain on the back of it, how far it went up the wrist, and she said one word and let go, as if she had been handed a skein that was not dyed through and was sending it back.
“Again,” Pell said, not looking at her. “She says, again.”
Jo put her hands back in the vat. She didn’t stop. She was good at being told what to do. It was the only thing she’d been good at for weeks.
At the end of the day she walked back up through the village beside the chair with her hands held out in front of her, stained to the wrist like Senna’s. They crossed a little footbridge over a stream running black between banks of ice. There was a triangle cut deep in the stone at the end of the rail. She put her brown hand on it as she passed and felt the edges with her thumb.
Bram was on the step of the house when they came up, lacing his boots, with a lantern and a bundle of bread at his feet, complaining to nobody. It was his night. Somebody from the house went up every night before dark, and sat.
Jo picked up the lantern. Bram reached for it with a word she didn’t need translated, and she did not give it back, and he looked past her at Senna in the chair. Senna turned her cloudy eyes toward the two of them and gave no order. After a while Bram sat down on the step and began to unlace his boots.
It was a long climb, up through the orchards and out onto the Hem on the track the litter had packed, and her running shoes were wet through before the last of the trees. The light was going. She did not stop to rest, because the lamp had to be lit by dark.
The hut was cold. She built the fire up from the coals as Aurel had done it, and lit a splinter, and lit the clay lamp in the window with it, and sat down on the stool under the window, which was the watcher’s place. It was worn to the shape of other people. The scratches went up the wall beside her head. The hole was low in the back wall, black, and the cold came out of it steadily, and nothing else did.
She sat there all night with her brown hands in her lap and the lamp over her head, and kept the wick trimmed, and watched the hole.
In the morning Bram came up with the bread and found her there, and took the stool back without a word, and she walked down.
4:35
Treadwell’s light had stopped.
It was at the passage mouth, where the Bell Room narrowed into the tube going out. It lay on the rock up there, a white oval, steady. Pointed the way out. Not moving.
He didn’t call to her.
Four thirty-five. He’d been counting under his breath and he checked it against the watch, and he was two seconds fast. He took the two seconds back.
Pip turned her face into his neck. Her nose was cold. She mumbled into his collar, thick, the way she talked in her sleep.
“Mom.”
He put his hand on the back of her head. Her hair was fine as corn silk. He didn’t answer her. There wasn’t anything to say that was true and would let her go on sleeping, so he said nothing, and she went on sleeping.
Up at the passage mouth the white oval didn’t move.
Days Six and Seven
He wanted to go to Ostrey. Pell said no, and Senna said no, and he said it again from the box bed until the big man, Davit, went out without a word and came back with a cart and a pile of sheepskins, and they propped him on them like a king in a painting, gray-lipped and pleased with himself, and Jo climbed up beside him with her brown hands in her lap.
It was a day’s ride downriver, beside a river frozen at the edges and black and fast down the middle. At Ostrey the river was wide and frozen across, and across it went the bridge.
It was stone. Five arches, long and low, stepping across the ice, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen a person make, and she’d seen the Golden Gate on a school trip in eighth grade and thrown up on the bus after. Under the road, between the arches, where she would have expected more stone, there were timbers crossed in triangles, black with pitch, a whole long row of them like a zipper, holding.
He could not walk it by himself. He sat on the sheepskins at the near end and pointed, and Pell took her out along the parapet to the middle arch and showed her where to lean over and look.
The keystone. It had a triangle cut into it, the size of her hand. Beside the triangle, three rows of the angular stitched letters she could not read, and under them, smaller, in square capitals that someone had cut with great care, one at a time:
TAM
She could read that.
An old woman with a basket was watching them from the far end of the bridge. When Pell saw her, Pell’s face changed. The old woman came along the parapet slowly, and when she got to them she did not look at Jo. She looked back down the bridge at the cart and the man propped on sheepskins at the end of it. She spat on the stones. Not at anyone. Just on the stones.
Then she turned to Jo and began to talk.
Pell did it in pieces, with her hands. Brisa. Tam’s wife. This pier was the old one, from the bridge that stood before. Father wanted to use it. Tam said it was rotten under the water. Tam said he could hear it. The thaw was coming, and Father wanted to finish before the thaw. And the ice came down, and the pier went, with Tam on it, and two boys.
“Tam said no,” Pell said. “Two times. Three times. Father said, use it.”
Brisa went on, pointing at the cart.
“At the court. At the fire, in front of all the people. He said, It was my choice.” Pell’s hand was on the parapet. “Not the ice. Not the pier. My choice.”
Brisa said one more thing, and turned, and went back along the bridge with her basket.
“She says, and my mother stayed,” Pell said. “She says, I would not have stayed.”
When they came back along the parapet he was already getting down off the sheepskins. Davit took one arm and Jo took the other, and they walked him out to the middle arch, and it took a long time, and he stopped twice to breathe.
He leaned out over the parapet as far as Davit would let him and put his fingers on the letters. The T, then the A, then the M, the way Pip read.
“Tam told me the old pier was rotten,” he said. “He told me three times. He said he could hear it in the water. I wanted it done before the thaw. I wanted it to be mine.” His fingers stayed on the M. “So I said use it. He went out on it because I said. Him and two boys.”
The ice ground against the pier below them.
“I cut his name in English,” he said. “So nobody else could read it. Only me.”
Jo had fifteen years of things to say to people who were sorry. You couldn’t have known. It wasn’t you. He had known. He had been told three times.
“You built it anyway,” she said.
“Yes.”
She left his hand where it was.
That night they stayed at Pell’s house on the square, where a golden dog with a white chest came and put her head in Jo’s lap as if she had been waiting for her, and sighed and went to sleep there, and Jo sat very still under the weight of it. In the morning, in the Hall, there was a dog tag on a square of gold wool. BISCUIT. And a 541 number. She looked at it until Pell touched her arm.
The second night, Toby was asleep in the back room, and Senna sent for her.
She was by the fire in her chair with a cup in her brown hands. Pell was on the bench. There was nobody else. Senna did not wait for Jo to sit down.
She talked. Pell put it into English a piece at a time, looking at the floor. Then Senna cut in, short, and Pell flinched and started again, slower, and plainer.
Senna said, and Pell gave it to her in English: “You sat at my lamp. I lit it for him every winter night. It is not yours.”
Senna went on, and Pell after her: “The Mother gave me a boy. Who took my brother. And I stayed.”
Senna again: “You took seventeen winters. Four days, for you. Seventeen winters, for me. And I waited.”
Then Senna held up her hand, and Pell stopped, and Senna said the next part herself, and Pell put it into English after her. “He has—a few. A handful. They are mine.”
Jo looked at her hands.
Senna listened to the nothing. She drank from her cup. She spoke again, and Pell raised her eyes to Jo for the first time and gave it to her.
“I will not forgive you.”
The fire ticked. Senna added something, not louder, and Pell swallowed, and passed it on.
“I will feed you.”
Jo sat on the bench with her stained hands on her knees.
Senna leaned forward in the chair. Her cloudy eyes were a foot from Jo’s face and looking past it, and she said a long thing, slowly, and Pell said it after her in pieces, and did not soften any of it.
“He was mine fifty-five winters. You had him eight. We are not—even.” Pell put her hand flat, then tipped it. “Eat. Then go home.”
Senna sat back and drank from her cup.
4:36
The light came back down the passage.
Treadwell came with it. She came down over the breakdown at the passage mouth, slow on the loose rock, and across the floor of the Bell Room, and she sat down against the wall where she’d been sitting before, in the same place, as if she’d left a mark there and wanted to fit it. She put the light down on the rock with the beam against the wall.
Her knees were gray with rock dust. The tear across the back of her jacket had opened wider, and the white of her undershirt showed through it, and the strap of the vest. She was fifty-eight years old and she’d been on her stomach in a crack in a mountain in the middle of the night, and she’d walked a hundred feet toward her radio, and stood there, and walked back.
She kept her eyes on the slot.
“She said ten,” Treadwell said.
He didn’t thank her. She’d have hated it.
Four thirty-six and eleven. Rob let his head go back against the stone. Pip’s weight went on being exactly what it was.
Day Eight
The river was still frozen, and on the eighth day Davit walked her out onto it.
He came to Pell’s door in the morning and jerked his head at her, and she went, and Pell came after them, pulling on a shawl. He was fifty-seven. He was built like Rob. He had Rob’s way of standing at the edge of a thing and looking at it before he would put his weight on it, and he stood at the edge of the ice below the square and looked, and then he walked out, and she walked out after him.
The ice was gray and scored with the tracks of sledges and dogs, and it creaked, a long low creak like a door somewhere. The bridge went over them in its five arches. Under the middle one it was dark and cold and the sound of their feet came back off the stone.
He stopped under it. There was a post there, sticking up out of the ice near the far bank, a thick old post gone silver, with a groove worn into the top of it by a rope. He put his hand on it.
He talked. Pell stood close and gave it to her low, a little behind.
“His boat went from this. A rope, across, and he pulled.” Pell made a pulling motion with both arms. “The boat-man. From when he was small. Then Father made the bridge, and nobody wanted the boat.”
Davit patted the post and took his hand off it. He looked up at the arches over them like a man looking at weather.
Then he held his hand out at the height of a small child’s head, and made a shape in the air above it, a small shape, a lamp, and held it up. He looked away up the river toward the mountains, where the valley went up white into cloud and somewhere above it all was the hut with its lamp and its hole.
Pell did not say it right away. Jo waited.
“He says, he came back,” Pell said. “He says, that is the part I remember.”
Davit stamped once on the ice, hard, with his heel, as if to check it. It held. He walked on toward the far bank without looking to see if she was following.
Jo stood under the arch with her brown hands in the sleeves of the hoodie. Upriver, the mountain. She had been told to go in two languages and by pointing, and she knew the way, a day up the river and a climb, and she stood on the ice under his bridge and thought about the walnut stain, and how long it would take to wear off, and did not want it to. She wanted to stir the vat from the bottom and be told she was slow. She wanted to sleep on the floor by his bed in a stranger’s shawl while an old woman named her among the absent, and wake, and do it again.
Davit had reached the far bank. He turned and looked back at her across the ice.
She went after him. She put her feet where he had put his.