Chapter 33: ch.33 [Who Am I?]

The door closed behind him with a soft, expensive click.

He had half a second of the corridor.

Pale carpet.

A bench under a framed bridge.

A tall woman standing in front of it, black coat over her arm.

She had stood up when the handle turned.

She kept her eyes on him until the wood met the frame.

Then a lock.

Then a hall.

Then his mother.

"Hey, Mom."

It came out level.

Level like a stranger asking for the time.

"Hey, Seth."

Same weight.

Same temperature.

Two people handing back each other’s change.

She stood with one hand still on the door handle, as if the door might need her again.

Charcoal blazer, cut so sharply it looked ruled.

Pencil skirt.

Black hair in a smooth twist at the back of her head, not one strand loose.

Black-framed glasses.

A small dark mark beside her mouth, like a period.

She looked young for the age she had to be.

She held herself like someone who had never been allowed to look it.

She had always been tall in his head.

She was a hundred and eighty centimeters flat-footed, and she still was.

But for weeks he had been looking up at someone, and the habit had followed him through the door.

His mother’s eyes sat almost level with his.

She seemed smaller.

He had no place to put that.

She didn’t hug him.

Her hands stayed where they were.

"You took the day off?"

"I took the day."

She glanced at her own sleeve as if it had been issued to her.

"Didn’t know what to wear."

His right hand went to his hip.

Denim.

A bottle cap was inside a claw machine on the other side of the city, being a queen.

The hand had not been told.

The reach was smaller than it used to be.

He did not look at why.

He put the hand in his pocket where she couldn’t see it.

On the mat sat a pair of gray slippers.

His size, down to the half.

The left heel had a faint dent.

Someone had worn them in first, so they wouldn’t be stiff.

On the sole, a rectangle of glue where a price sticker had been, picked off with a fingernail.

He thought of a cup on an open shelf.

He took off his sneakers.

He didn’t ask.

He put them on, because refusing them would have been a sentence, and he did not have the rest of it yet.

They fit.

? ? ?

The apartment was beautiful.

That was the first thing wrong with it.

White walls.

Pale oak floor.

A low cream sofa with no dent in it.

A glass table holding one bowl of smooth gray stones.

An orchid with exactly two flowers open.

Floor-to-ceiling windows, and the whole city behind them, arranged.

It looked like a photograph of an apartment.

It smelled of bleach and ginger.

Nothing else.

No mug in the sink.

No coat over a chair.

No shoes kicked off in a hurry.

Nobody had ever come home in a hurry to this room.

Somebody lived in it the way you live in a hotel you’re paid to stay at.

She’s never here.

He knew it from the doorway, the same way he’d known it at eight.

A closed room has a sound.

This one had been expensive to close.

His eyes went to the refrigerator before he could stop them.

Tall.

White.

Bare.

One magnet.

A lemon.

It had survived three apartments and two schools, and it sat dead center on the door, holding up nothing.

Around it, a clear space.

Exactly the size of a note.

"Came with the first place," said his mother behind him.

"Saw no reason to throw it out."

"Okay."

"Sit."

A round table by the window.

Four oatmeal chairs.

Two places set.

Two.

A fork squared to each napkin.

He sat.

The chair scraped.

She sat across from him.

It scraped again.

She folded her hands and looked at him like a package she had signed for and not yet opened.

Behind her, on the only wall that held anything, hung one photograph in a plain black frame.

He looked.

Then he couldn’t stop.

A boy of six.

A school sweater two sizes too big.

Smiling so hard his cheeks had packed up round on both sides.

And in the middle of the smile, a gap.

One front tooth, gone, and the whole face proud of it.

He remembered none of it.

Not the sweater.

Not the afternoon.

Not ever being that pleased with a hole in his head.

The glass was spotless except at the lower corner.

There, a worn circle, cleaner than the rest.

The size of a thumb.

"You’d just lost it," said his mother.

She hadn’t turned around to look.

"Wouldn’t stop showing people. You showed the bus driver."

"I did?"

"Twice."

"You were there?"

"I was there."

She said it to the tabletop.

He still had no place to put that.

"A colleague showed me," she said, abruptly.

"Last week. On her phone, at her desk. The stream."

Seth went still.

"She turned it around. She said, isn’t that your son?"

"What did you say?"

"I said I’d have to check."

A pause.

"Then I did."

Her voice rose one degree on did.

It cracked at the top.

A hairline, like a plate.

They both heard it.

"Sorry," said Seth.

It came up the way a hand goes to a hip.

He shut his teeth on the rest.

She watched him do it and said nothing.

"You do something with your hand," she said.

"In the games."

She touched two fingers to the middle of her own chest.

Flat.

Once.

She did not seem to know she had.

"Here. Every time before a hard move."

"You watched more than one."

"The one with the clock."

She turned a spoon over on the cloth.

"Thirty-eight seconds. You drew. I didn’t know what that meant."

"Mom."

"I looked it up."

His mother had looked something up.

Eleven years of notes.

Dinner is in the freezer.

And somewhere in a white kitchen she had typed a number into a search bar to find out what it meant that her son had gotten through it.

He pressed his fingers into the edge of the table until the wood stopped being furniture.

Behind her, a boy with a gap in his teeth went on grinning at nobody.

? ? ?

Twenty-six minutes.

Then twenty-nine.

Astrid lost count somewhere past thirty and began again at one, which was a mistake, because the number kept being a number.

She had sat for the first ten.

She had played a game on her phone and lost it on time to a nine-hundred.

Then she had stood.

A seat was a decision to wait, and she had made that decision once already, in a hotel hallway, at nine.

Her body declined to make it twice.

She stood with the coat folded over one arm.

Her phone lay face-down against the wool.

It shook.

It stopped.

It shook.

Twelve now.

She did not turn it over.

Pale gray carpet, worn in a path down the middle.

A radiator ticking half a beat slower than she liked.

The bridge in its frame, hanging a degree to the left.

She had seen it in the first four seconds.

She had not touched it in twenty-nine minutes.

Two scrapes had come through the wood a long time ago.

Then silence.

Then a woman’s voice, climbing one degree and breaking.

Then nothing.

Nothing was the worst data she had ever been given.

She could read a position from one move.

She could not read a door.

Her hand was against the wall.

She did not remember putting it there.

The plaster was cool.

Under her palm there was a pulse, and it was hers, and she did not count it.

Through another wall, weeks ago, she had heard him once.

A breath that caught on the way in.

A second that never made it out.

Nothing in twenty-eight years had landed in her like that.

Not the fever of thirty-nine point two.

Not the camera at seventeen.

It had lived under her sternum ever since, a swallowed stone.

She had never known a sound could be located.

I do not want to hear that again.

It was not a thought.

It was a force.

Every fiber trained to move a piece toward the thing it wanted was already on its way to that button.

Ring it.

Open it.

Cross.

The hand left the wall.

It rose.

It stopped an inch from the small round bell.

Who are you?

She asked it the way an arbiter would.

Who are you to stand at that door?

The door belonged to a family.

It had stayed shut for eleven years and opened today, on its own terms, for him.

I will wait, she had told him. It is yours.

She had said it forty minutes ago in her own voice, and she had meant it.

She held the roof.

She held the contract.

She held a name that made rooms rearrange.

A woman who held all that did not also get to open his doors.

She knew what that looked like.

Somebody had always opened them for her.

Every door of her life, held, by a hand that had a schedule.

If I go in, I am Solveig.

If she stayed, he might come out the way he had come out of that pillow, wet, and trying to smile.

If she went in, he might look at her like someone who had come to collect.

He will hate it.

He will hate me.

She lowered her hand.

She walked to the bridge.

She straightened it.

One degree.

It was perfect.

It solved nothing.

? ? ?

Inside, the questions had started.

His mother unfolded a sheet of paper and smoothed it with one flat palm.

"I wrote a list."

"Easier?"

"Than the other way."

He knew that one.

The top line had been struck through so hard the paper had thinned.

He recognized the pressure.

He did not count the lines.

"One. Eating."

"Eggs. Pasta. A hot dog, sliced into coins."

"Two. Sleeping."

"Better."

"Three. Where."

"Her apartment. Ninth floor. I have a room."

"With a lock?"

He blinked.

"It’s on the internet," said his mother.

"The whole thing. Someone posted the PDF."

She laid it on the table.

Printed.

Every page.

Red pen in the margins, neat, not one letter out of place.

She had read it the way she read everything.

Every clause.

"Section eleven. Twelve. Fourteen. Fifteen."

Her finger moved down the margin.

"Four thousand eight hundred dollars a month to cook for a woman who can’t."

"Mom."

"A lock on the inside. A clause for fainting. A loan she wrote herself."

Her voice stayed very even.

"Are you sure," she said, "this isn’t a way of owning you?"

He had not expected that one.

It landed behind the ribs.

It was fair.

It was exactly the question.

"I can leave," said Seth.

"Can you?"

"She says so every time. I read the whole thing. I fainted in the middle, but I read it."

"Fainted."

"There’s a clause."

She looked at him over the page.

She wrote one word beside line three.

He couldn’t read it upside down.

"Four," said his mother.

She didn’t look down.

"What is she to you?"

The orchid held very still.

"My coach."

"And."

"My employer."

"And."

He opened his mouth.

He did not have a third word.

He could feel exactly where it would go.

? ? ?

In the corridor, Astrid stood in front of a straight bridge.

She had tried everything else.

She had not tried the one thing.

I am not going in.

I am ringing a bell.

It was a terrible argument.

A bell had no knuckles.

It could not be soft.

It could only be there.

She lost the argument.

Her hand rose.

She extended one finger.

It shook.

It hung one inch from the button long enough that she thought she might still put it back.

She could not hold it any longer.

She pressed.

Ding.

Two clear notes.

They went the whole length of the corridor.

They broke the silence in half.

In the white kitchen, a red pen stopped on the page.