Chapter 14: ch.14 [A Home]

Ingrid stopped in the doorway and did not come in.

That was how Seth knew it was bad.

She stood there in her camel coat.

Tablet held against her chest.

And let her eyes travel the room the way a doctor reads an X-ray.

Left to right.

Slowly.

No expression at all.

The long white wall.

The bare floor.

A window that looked over half the city and had nothing in front of it but glass.

One table. Two chairs. One lamp.

"Six years." she said.

"Ingrid..." Astrid began.

"Six years, and I assumed the rest of it was somewhere. Storage. A second floor."

Ingrid’s gaze reached the kitchen counter and stopped.

"Is that a sticker?"

Seth looked down.

He was holding the cup.

The only cup.

The one that had sat in the cabinet since before he arrived, and that he had finally, nervously, used for water that morning, because the alternative was drinking from his hands.

A small yellow tag clung to its base.

$4.99.

"It had not been used..." Astrid said.

"I can see that."

"I do not often have guests."

"You have never had guests."

Ingrid walked in at last.

Her heels were loud on the empty floor, the way only an empty room makes a sound loud.

"You have all that money and still no sense of hospitality."

She said it flatly, like an item on a list.

Then her eyes found the second chair.

The cushion.

The faint dent in it, in the shape of a boy.

Something in her face shifted a quarter of an inch.

It went back.

"Sit," she told them both. "I have a budget."

? ? ?

They sat.

Ingrid did not.

"One. Plates. Not a plate. Plates. Plural. Matching. In a number greater than one."

Astrid opened her mouth.

"Two. A kettle that does not sound like a man being lied to. Three. A couch. Any couch. Four."

She tapped the window with a nail.

"Curtains. There is a man with a long lens on the roof across the street, and this apartment has the privacy of an aquarium. Five. Rugs. Shelves. Lighting. A room, Astrid. A room."

"It is a room."

"It is a waiting room."

Seth made a small noise.

He pressed his lips together to stop it.

"If a photograph of this place reached the internet as it stands," Ingrid said.

"I would not resign. I resign for controversies. For this, I would merely suffer."

"That is generous."

"It is accurate." She scrolled.

"Funds are not the constraint. You have a little over fifty million dollars and a cup."

Silence.

Seth heard the sentence arrive.

He heard it the way you hear a plate hit the floor in another room.

Not yet understood.

Just wrong.

Fifty million.

He thought of two thousand dollars.

He thought of ten percent. No interest. Section 15.

A woman had lent him two thousand dollars like it was a significant sum.

She had set it up with a clause.

She had typed a clause.

His ears went red.

Then they went white.

The room tilted, very gently.

The way a board tilts when a piece you were sure of turns out to be hanging.

His glasses began a slow, dignified slide down his nose.

"Seth?" Astrid said.

He wanted to answer.

The floor had other plans.

? ? ?

He did not fall.

That was the first thing he understood, lying there.

He had expected the floor to be hard, and it wasn’t.

A hand was behind his head.

Another was under his arm.

Astrid had gone down with him.

It was the only way to keep him off the boards, and she had done it without a moment’s thought.

Now the World Champion sat on the floor of her own penthouse with an ex convenience-store clerk across her knees, her formal trousers rucked up, her spine perfectly straight.

"Seth."

Over her shoulder, Ingrid had not looked up from the tablet.

"Fainting clause," she said.

"Invoked. Noted for the record."

"Ingrid."

"He is breathing. I checked."

She had not.

Seth’s eyes opened to a ceiling.

White.

Plaster.

Smooth.

No tiles.

Under his head, something soft and black.

Wool.

He turned his cheek a fraction and understood that it was a coat.

One of fourteen.

She had folded it under him in the time it took him to fall, and it was now being used as a pillow on a floor that had never held anything.

"Do not sit up." Astrid said.

"Did you say fifty..." he whispered.

"I did not. Ingrid did."

"Round number." said Ingrid.

"Is it large?" Astrid asked her.

"It is large, Astrid."

Astrid looked down at him with the grave attention she gave to openings.

"I am told it is large," she said.

He laughed.

It came out as a wheeze.

"Don’t you know?"

"I have never checked or bought things, Ingrid does."

She said it plainly.

She did not say it proudly.

It was the same voice she used for her Elo.

For her it was just a number that happened to be true.

"I looked once. It was a figure. It did not appear to be about me."

"She also," Ingrid added.

"Stood under a crystal chandelier for one full minute and told me it looked like it was waiting for someone more important."

"It was."

"It was returned."

"A room should not look at me," Astrid said.

"I have been looked at enough."

Seth lay very still and thought about that.

Then he sat up, slowly, and was not stopped.

He looked at the room from the floor.

The long white wall.

The glass.

The lamp that was always on, burning in the corner by itself.

It wasn’t that she could not afford a room.

It was that no one had ever asked her what she would put in one.

"What do you want in here?" Ingrid said.

She had said it to Astrid, but she was looking at him.

As if she had seen the question land on his face before it landed on hers.

Astrid said nothing.

She looked at the cup in his hand.

She looked at the board by the window.

At the second chair, at the lamp.

Her fingers moved against her knee, squaring something that was not there.

"I do not know..." she said.

Plain. Almost a whisper.

Nobody moved.

"I would like," she began.

She stopped.

She tried again, carefully.

As though picking up something that might still be hot.

"I would like to eat from a decent plate, I guess."

Ingrid looked at her for a long time.

Then she wrote something on the tablet, and Seth, who was close enough to see, saw that it wasn’t a number. It was a single word.

Plates.

? ? ?

They arrived on a Thursday.

A box.

Then another.

Then a third.

Stacked on the counter with the confusion of things that did not know where they belonged yet.

Astrid took the first plate out of its tissue and held it up to the light.

White. Plain. A thin blue line around the rim.

It was a small, ordinary thing.

And she handled it as if it might be a trap.

"It is lighter than I expected."

"They’re plates."

"I am aware." She set it down.

Squared it to the edge of the counter.

Then another beside it, aligned.

Then a third.

Seth took the cup from the cabinet.

The price sticker was still there, curling at one corner.

"Can I?"

She nodded.

He peeled it off with a thumbnail.

It came away in one piece.

$4.99.

He did not throw it away.

He folded it once and slid it into his pocket.

Right next to the bottle cap.

And the cup went up on the open shelf where anyone could see it.

It was not a stranger’s cup anymore.

Behind him, he heard a clatter.

He turned.

He had stacked the plates on the shelf.

One on top of another, slightly crooked.

A small leaning tower of blue rims.

Astrid stood in front of it.

Her hand rose.

It hovered over the topmost plate, ready to straighten it, and for one very long breath, it stayed there.

Then she lowered it.

She left the tower crooked.

? ? ?

The rest came slowly, then all at once.

A long walnut table for the window, plain and heavy, with no gold on it anywhere.

Ingrid had brought a catalog with a chess set of gilded ivory and said.

"A champion should be seen."

Astrid had looked at it the way she looked at cameras.

"A champion should be able to put her feet up,"

Seth said.

Nobody said anything.

"I do not put my feet up."

"Yet," said Ingrid.

The white wall filled up with shelves.

The bare floor disappeared under a rug the color of old wheat.

The window, the great naked window, finally got a pair of sheer curtains that let in the morning and kept out the man on the roof.

And the lamp.

The lamp that had burned alone in its corner for as long as she had lived there got company.

One by the couch. One by the books.

One on the window table, small and warm, throwing a pool of gold across the board.

Seth stood in the middle of it, turning slowly.

The ceiling was high.

The glass was wide.

Anyone who came in would know, instantly, that someone important lived here.

And then they would look at the couch, with its dented cushion, and the crooked plates.

And the cup on the shelf, and know something else.

That someone lived here.

***

The new kettle came last.

Stainless steel, plain, with a spout like a swan’s neck.

Ingrid unwrapped it herself and set it on the stove with the air of a woman installing a flag.

"The old one," she said.

"screamed."

"It had a voice."

"It had a grievance."

Astrid was already filling it with water.

"I will make the tea."

Seth glanced at Ingrid.

Ingrid glanced at the ceiling.

"I do not make tea for guests,"

Astrid said, to the kettle.

"I know."

"You are not a guest tho..."

She said it so quietly he almost missed it.

The kettle clicked.

Steam began to rise.

She stood over it with the severe concentration of a woman defusing a device.

When she turned around she was holding two cups.

The tea was the color of a pond.

Seth took the first sip and kept his face very, very still.

"It’s good."

"It is not."

"It’s yours."

She stared at him.

Her mouth did the unauthorized thing again, the quarter-centimeter.

This time it did not go back.

Ingrid watched them from the doorway with her coat already on.

"I will see myself out."

she said, and, a moment later.

With her hand on the door.

"It had massive potential. I want that on record."

"It is on record..." said Astrid.

The door closed.

? ? ?

By evening there was nothing left to carry.

They sat on the rug, because the couch was too far away and the floor had somehow become the right size.

Between them, two cartons of takeout, and a stack of chopsticks neither of them had opened.

He had meant to say something.

He didn’t know what.

His arms felt like wet rope.

His feet ached from standing in a room that had finally given him a reason to.

Across from him, Astrid sat with her shoes off, lined heel to heel at the edge of the rug, and her back against the leg of the couch.

Her eyes half closed.

Neither of them spoke.

The lamps hummed. The curtain moved once.

Somewhere outside, the city kept going without them.

He thought of his own apartment.

The closed room.

The quiet that wasn’t peace, just the sound of nobody there.

This was quiet too.

But it was a different kind.

The kind a room makes when someone is in it.

Gus. The banana man. The old man in the park. Astrid.

His list, the short one.

He added something to the margin of it, in his head, in very small writing.

A home.

Across from him, Astrid had tilted her head back against the cushion.

Her eyes were on the plaster.

She was not counting.

He watched her not count.

Neither of them said it.

Neither of them would have known how.

But it was the warmest place either of them had ever lived.

? ? ?

The knock came a little after the food went cold.

Ingrid’s key had been in the lock before the knock finished, as if the door had given up resisting.

"I left my tablet."

She crossed the room, collected it from the counter, and paused.

Her eyes went over the rug, the cartons, the two of them on the floor.

She did not comment.

She reached into her coat instead and produced an envelope.

Cream. Heavy. A seal pressed into the flap.

"This came for you," she said. "By hand."

Astrid took it.

She turned it over once.

She did not open it.

She looked at it exactly the way she looked at a lens.

Patiently, like something that needed her to be someone else.

"The federation..." Ingrid said.

"The annual ball."

Seth saw her thumb find the seal and rest there.

For a long moment, the lamps hummed.

Then Astrid set the envelope on the new table, squared it to the edge, and said it simply and finally.

"I never go."