4:37
Pip’s feet pushed against his thigh. Both of them, hard, the way she pushed off the end of the bed in the morning.
Rob looked at the watch. Four thirty-seven and eighteen.
She lifted her head off his arm. Her hair was stuck flat on one side and her eyes weren’t open all the way. She looked at the rock, and at the white oval of Treadwell’s light lying against the wall, and at Treadwell sitting beside it with her knees up, and she didn’t know where she was. He watched her not know.
“Where’s Mom?”
He had the answer ready. He’d had it since four thirty-one.
“Mom’s in the tunnel,” he said. “She’ll be right back.”
Pip thought about that. She was five. She took things the way they were said. He’d always liked that about her and he didn’t like it now.
“In the hole?”
“She’ll be right back.”
She looked at him a while longer with her mouth open. Then her head went down again onto his arm, heavy, all at once, and her fist found the fleece again and closed on it. Her eyes shut. They didn’t stay shut. Her lashes moved on the inside of his elbow, going.
Across from him Treadwell had turned her head. She was watching Pip. She wasn’t watching the slot anymore.
Four thirty-seven and thirty-one. He breathed in on the second hand.
Six and a half minutes. He’d built stair stringers that took longer to lay out than this. He’d stood at the overlook turnout on the phone for forty.
He tightened his arm.
Day Nine
They went home up the river on the ninth day, and Davit drove, and Senna rode ahead in Pell’s cart, so that for the whole of that long day it was only the two of them in the back on the sheepskins, and the river, and Davit’s broad back in front of them, which did not understand English and did not turn around.
He was stronger. It was in his color and in the way he sat, not propped now but sitting, with one arm along the side of the cart and his face turned up to the weak sun, and it was in his voice when he talked, which he did, all morning, more than he had talked in any of the days since the floor of the stone hut. He showed her things. That orchard was sour cherry, and it would come into flower a moon after the thaw and the whole slope would go white, and the bees came up from Ostrey in skeps on a cart to work it. That bridge, the small one over the side stream, was his fourth, and it was ugly, and it had not moved in thirty winters. That was the road to Sethry, where there was a bridge he was proud of, and another he had fallen down on. He pointed with his short finger. He laughed at his own bridges. When the English ran out he went on in Varran, where he had the words, the names of farms and dogs and the people in them, and she did not remember any of it and did not try to, and she sat beside him in the gray shawl with her brown hands in her lap and let it go past her like the river.
At a village of six houses and a mill, children came running out along the road after the cart, barefoot in the slush, shouting one word over and over, and pointing at her, and running backward to see her face. A girl threw a dried cherry into the cart and it hit Jo in the chest. Toby laughed so hard he had to hold his ribs.
“Amrin,” he said, when he could. “That’s you. You’re the Given now. They’ll tell their grandchildren they hit you with a cherry.”
She picked the cherry out of the shawl and ate it, and the children shrieked, and ran alongside until the road left them behind.
In the afternoon he stopped talking for a while. The cart went up through a gorge in the shade, and the ice on the river beside them groaned and ticked, and he looked at her.
“Stay a season,” he said.
She looked at the river.
“Just the one. Until the orchards. Until the Breaking and after.” He moved his hand on the side of the cart. “I want to show you the Long Bridge in the flood, when the water comes all the way up the piers. It’s awesome. I want to show you Sethry. I want you to see Senna’s porridge made right, not the one I made in your kitchen. I want you to see the cherries.”
The cart creaked on.
“A season with us is an hour in the Slow Country, Mom. Pip won’t even wake up.”
The wheels went over a stone and came down.
She could see her. That was the trouble. She could see her exactly, on Rob’s lap against the wall of the Bell Room in Dee’s blue fleece, with her mouth open and her fist in the blanket and her hair stuck flat on one side, asleep the way she slept in the car, gone, all the way down, and Rob’s arm around her, and Rob awake. She could see that it was true.
She did not answer. She put her hands in her lap and watched the river going black and fast down the middle of the ice, and she let the silence stand there between them in the cart, and she did not touch it.
He did not ask again.
After a while he lay back on the sheepskins and shut his eyes, and she sat with her stained hands in her lap, and the cart went up the river toward the house.
4:37:50
He felt her wake.
It went through her all at once, the whole length of her, a jolt like a hammer on a nail, and she was sitting up in his lap before he’d got his head off the wall.
She looked at the rock. At the white light. At him.
“Where’s Mom.”
Not a question this time.
“Pip—”
She looked past him at the slot. The black mouth of it at the bottom of the wall, a knee high.
She was out of his lap. The fleece was in his hands and she wasn’t in it.
“Pip.”
She was on her belly at the slot. She went in headfirst, arms out in front of her. She was so small. The rock that had stopped him at the shoulders didn’t touch her. Her head went in, and her shoulders, and her middle.
“Somebody comes,” she said. It came back off the rock, flat and small. “I’m somebody.”
He was already down. He was on his face on the floor and his right arm was in the slot to the shoulder, the raw shoulder, the rock taking it again, and his hand closed on her ankle.
It went all the way round. Nine and a half inches, thumb to little finger. Her ankle was nothing. The bone of it in his palm like a dowel.
She kicked. She screamed into the rock, words he couldn’t make out. Her other foot caught him on the wrist, again and again, a good kick, and he held on. He didn’t pull. If he pulled, the rock took her face. He held. His cheek was flat on the wet stone and his whole weight lay behind that one hand.
She was stronger than forty pounds. She was pulling toward something.
He held.
Treadwell hit the floor beside him and got her arm in along his, under it, her shoulder against his shoulder, her breath loud in his ear. “I got her,” Treadwell said. “I got her waistband. I got her. On three.” She didn’t count. She just pulled, and he pulled with her, steady, the way you draw a nail you want to use again.
Pip came back out of the rock screaming. Her leggings came first and then her middle and then her shoulders, scraping, and then her head, and her face was wet and gray with rock dust and there was blood on her chin, and she was still kicking, and then she was in his arms.
He didn’t know what second it was. For the first time since four thirty-one he didn’t know. He had her.
Day Ten
On the tenth day her shoes were gone from the door.
The shoes of the house stood in a row on the stone inside the threshold, where everyone left them coming in. Davit’s great boots, and Pell’s, and the little wooden clogs of children whose names she had not learned, and Senna’s felt slippers, which she no longer walked in. Her running shoes had stood at the end of the row every night she had slept in that house, gray, with the laces still tied from the crawl because she had pushed them off her heels without untying them. There was a space at the end of the row now the width of two shoes. That was all.
She stood and looked at the space.
Toby was at the hearth with his back to her. He was feeding the long fire, a split of wood at a time, and he did not turn around. He had heard her get up. She knew the back of his neck. She had washed it every night for eight years. He fed the fire and did not look at her, and it was the back of a boy who had done something and was waiting to be asked about it.
She did not ask.
What came over her was not anger. She waited for the anger and it did not come. What came was a letting go, low down, in her stomach and her shoulders and the backs of her knees, the way her whole body let go at the end of a double shift when the last patient cancelled, and she had to sit down on the bench by the door, and she sat there in her socks with her hands between her knees and breathed. It was taken.
She let the day go.
She sat by the fire. She shelled walnuts for Pell into a bowl and her hands went browner. She ate what she was given. She did not look at the door. In the afternoon Pell came and sat down behind her on the bench and took her hair out of the elastic she had worn since the campground and combed it out with a wooden comb, slowly, working through the knots from the bottom, and then she divided it into three and began to braid it. Jo sat between her knees with her eyes shut. Pell’s fingers pulled and crossed and pulled. Nobody had braided her hair since her mother. She had not known she remembered what it felt like and she did.
Halfway down, Pell began to talk, low, with her hands full of hair so that she could not help the words along with them.
“The boots,” she said. “My mother sewed the names. All of us. Inside.” Her fingers crossed and pulled. “Last, one more. Here.” She let a strand go and put two fingers on the bone of Jo’s ankle through the sock, and took the strand up again. “Ama Jo. Mother Jo. Where he feels it, every step.”
The braid pulled tight against Jo’s scalp. She did not open her eyes.
“She did not tell him,” Pell said. “She will not tell you. She says your name at the fire still, with the space.” She tied off the end with a strip of wool bitten from her own sleeve and laid the braid down Jo’s back. “I tell you. That is all.”
Toby sat at the hearth all day and did not look at her once, and she did not look at him, and the space at the end of the row stayed where it was.
That night the river broke.
It came as a sound first, a crack like a rifle shot down the valley, and then another, and then a long grinding roar that went on and on under everything, and the whole house was on its feet. They went out. They carried Senna out in her chair to the edge of the yard where the ground fell away, and everyone went down the slope with lamps, the whole village, a string of little lights going down between the dark houses to the river. The ice was going. It was moving in the lamplight down there, great gray plates of it heaving up on end and turning over and going down under, and the noise came up the slope and into her chest.
Jo stood in the doorway in her socks. She did not step out.
Toby stood beside Senna’s chair. He spoke to her in Varran, low, and his voice had a smile in it.
Pell was beside Jo in the doorway. She put her mouth near Jo’s ear.
“He says, I made it before the thaw.”
Senna did not turn her head. She said two words, dry, down at the river.
“Which one,” Pell said.
Toby laughed. Senna did not. Down on the banks the lamps moved along the water and the ice went on breaking, and Jo stood on the threshold of the house in her socks with her hair in a braid and did not go out, and did not go in.
4:38:30
She was crying. He was crying. He didn’t know which of them had started.
He was sitting against the wall again with his back to the rock and his legs out, and she was in his lap facing him with her arms around his neck so tight it hurt, and the scrape on her chin was bleeding onto his collar. Her whole body was going in and out with it. So was his.
Treadwell was on her knees beside them. She had one hand flat on Pip’s back. Her other hand was shaking. She put it under her arm.
“I’m somebody,” Pip said into his neck.
“I know it. I know you are.”
“She’s in there.”
“She’s coming.”
He didn’t know that. He said it. He looked at the watch over Pip’s shoulder and it was four thirty-eight and thirty-two, and he’d lost forty seconds somewhere, and he took the second hand and held on to it.
“Count with me,” he said. “Bug. Count with me.”
She didn’t. She cried. He started without her.
“One. Two. Three.” Out loud. Slow. A second each, on the hand. “Four. Five.”
At nine she said “ten” with him, wet, into his shirt. At eleven she said “twelve.” By twenty she was saying all of them, a hair behind him, the way she sang in the car.
“We stay put,” he said, after twenty-two. “Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-four,” Pip said.
Day Eleven
She woke before the first bell, in the dark, and she knew what she was going to do before she was awake enough to know that she knew it.
She got up from the floor by his box bed and tied the gray shawl around her shoulders. She did not look for the shoes. She went down the long room past the sleepers and the banked fire, and Senna was awake. Senna sat in her chair by the hearth with a fleece over her knees and her brown hands folded on it, and her cloudy eyes were turned toward the room, and they found Jo in the dark and followed her to the door. She did not call anyone. She watched her go.
Jo opened the door and went out in her socks.
The yard was thaw mud over old snow, and her feet went into it to the ankle, and it was so cold that it did not feel like cold, it felt like a burn, and then it did not feel like anything. She went out through the gate and up through the orchards between the black rows of trees, and up onto the mountain where the snow still lay crusted over the stones, and she did not stop. Above her, far up on the dark side of the mountain, there was one small light, yellow, in a window, where somebody was sitting up with it, and she climbed toward it.
Her feet came back as fire. Every step on the crust was a nail going in, and she walked on them anyway, and she did not cry out, because she did not want anyone to hear her and come.
Nobody came.
Then, a long way up, he was behind her.
His breathing came first, down the slope in the dark, the catch at the top of every breath, and then his feet on the stones. She did not turn around, and he did not call her. They went up like that, her in front in her socks and him behind with his heart doing what it did, and the light in the window came nearer.
Maris was on watch. She opened the door of the hut before Jo reached it, the tall woman with the slate, and looked at Jo’s feet, and at the old man coming up the slope behind her, and stood aside.
Jo sat down on the stone step of the hut with her feet out in front of her in the mud. The socks were black to the ankle and torn through at one heel.
He came up the last of the slope gray to the lips, and stood at the bottom of the step with one hand on the doorpost of the hut and bent over and breathed, and she waited, and Maris waited. Her shoes were in his other hand. He held them by the heels, both in one hand, the laces hanging.
When he could, he knelt down in the mud in front of her.
He did not say anything. He took her right foot in both his hands and held it, the way you hold something you are going to have to give back, and the cold of it went into his palms, and he held it there until the heat of his hands came through the wet wool. Then he worked the shoe onto it. It went hard over the mud. He pulled the tongue straight. He took the laces and crossed them and pulled them tight, and made the two loops, and crossed them over and pulled, and then he did it again, and pulled that tight too. He did the left one. He sat back on his heels in the mud and put his hands on his knees and looked at her shoes.
Below her was the top of his head. The white braid, and the purple clip in it.
“I said I wished you weren’t my mom,” he said.
He said it to her shoes, in a boy’s voice.
“I said I needed ten minutes without you,” Jo said.
He looked up at her then.
The light was coming gray over the far side of the valley, and the river was loud below them, and nobody moved.
“Ost ta fael?” he said.
“At home,” Jo said. “With Pip.”
He put his hand flat on the top of her shoe, over the knot, and left it there, and then he took it away.
Behind her Maris spoke, one short run of words. Jo turned. Maris was writing on the slate with a stub of chalk, a line of the angular letters, and she said it again to Toby.
“First bell,” Toby said. “She’s putting it in the Tallies.”
“Tell her thank you.”
He told her. Maris nodded, and wrote something more, and did not look up.
He got up by the doorpost, one hand and then the other. They went into the hut together. The hole in the back wall breathed cold, and the whistle was in it, very low. Maris took the clay lamp out of the window. Toby shook his head and reached into his coat and took out the red flashlight and turned it on, and it still worked, and he knelt down beside the hole and held it in at arm’s length so that the beam went along the rock.
She lay down on the floor of the hut on her stomach in the shawl. She put her hands out in front of her into the light.
She did not look back at him. She had looked at him for eleven days. She put her head down and went into the rock with his light going ahead of her, and the stone closed over her back, and she crawled, and then there was the weight, and the roar, and the black water, and she went into it.
4:39:38
Hands.
In the slot, in his headlamp. Two hands, reaching out along the rock, palms down. Brown. Brown to the wrists, dark brown, stained into the knuckles and under the nails.
Rob didn’t know them. Then he knew them.
He put Pip off his lap onto the rock and was on his face at the slot and had both her wrists before he’d thought any of it, and he pulled, and Treadwell was beside him again, and she came.
She came out of the slot on her elbows with a braid down her back. A braid, thick, tied off with a strip of something. A gray wool shawl over the Ducks hoodie, crusted with mud and dark with wet. She smelled of smoke. There was blood dried under her nose. Her shoes were black with mud to the ankles, and the laces were tied in a double knot, and the knots were packed with mud too.
Pip got there before he did. She went into her mother so hard they both went down on the rock, and Jo got her arms around her and held on, with her brown hands flat on Pip’s back.
Rob looked at the watch.
Four thirty-nine and thirty-eight. Eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
She’d said ten.
Treadwell was sitting back on her heels. She looked at her own watch, for a long moment. Then she looked at Jo’s hands.