I pick up the book on the arm.The River Runs Out.I turn to the page she has folded. She has folded it halfway through. I read one paragraph. It's a book about a woman who drives a hearse in a small town in Montana, which is not what I was expecting. I put the book back, page folded, arm up, exactly as I found it.
I think about the landline.
I could call the number on the fridge and ask for Hale and she would come for me. That is the system she set up. I could call London and tell my friend I'm alive and hear her voice for the first time in eleven months and scare her enough that she would fly here and I could tell her everything. I could call the police. I could call my father. I could call Daniel's attorney, whose name I have begun to remember this morning, somewhere under the coffee. I could call anybody.
Every one of those calls puts me on a record somewhere. And I realise I want to disappear. I thought I wanted to die, but maybe it isn’t that. Maybe I just want to disappear.
I have lived in a man's house for eleven years, and one of the things I have learned from living in a man's house is that calls you make from a landline in a cabin in the hills go through a switching station in a town whose name you don't know, and somebody, somewhere, is billed for them, and the bill has an address on it. Max told me yesterdayif somebody comes, it's wrong. She said it looking at me like I am at risk. I believe her. That fire was no accident. Someone came to kill Daniel and me. I survived, but I don’t want to be next.
If I call from this cabin today, I have told somebody where I am.
And if I call out of this cabin today, and I am right about Max, I have put her in a list I don't know the shape of.
I don't make the call.
I am a woman who has spent eleven years not making calls. I am good at not making calls.
---
The afternoon is long.
I bathe. I change the gauze on my palm using the small first aid kit on top of the bathroom cabinet, which I open only because she told me yesterday she cleaned my hand with what was in it. I heat the stew slow on the stove the way her note told me to. I eat at the kitchen table by myself with a view of the drive and the pines.
I read four chapters of the novel.
I fold the blanket on the sofa the way she folded it.
I put a piece of wood in the stove when the fire gets low.
I sit at the kitchen table in her flannel shirt with my hands around a mug and I think about how many afternoons Daniel and I sat in a house that had six other people paid to be in it, and in all those afternoons I was never alone. Even in the rose garden, even in my own bedroom, there was a staff member somewhere in the wings, a radio on someone's hip, a footstep in the hall. I have not been truly alone for eleven years. I have not been truly alone in a house in my life.
I am alone in a house. Well, a cabin.
It is not what I thought it would be. I thought it would be bigger. I thought I would fill the rooms with something. I sit at the kitchen table in an oversized shirt and I find I take up a very small amount of space, and I do not have to apologize to the air for taking it.
The light goes long through the pines. The rain starts again, very light.
At six forty-five I hear the truck.
---
She comes up the porch hard.
It is the first thing I notice before I see her. The step of her boots is not the step she had yesterday. Yesterday she came up the porch quiet and even. Tonight she comes up the porch the way a person comes up stairs when the stairs have done something wrong to her. She is not running. She is walking. The walk is heavy.
The door opens.
She stands in the doorway for a beat and sees me at the kitchen table. Her shoulders change.
I watch her shoulders change.
They drop a quarter inch. The tension behind her collarbone moves. It is the smallest thing, and I do not know her face well enough to read her face yet, and I know her shoulders from one morning, and her shoulders drop. Seeing me drops them.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"Sorry I'm late."
