"It seemed a reasonable question."
"Do not answer it."
"Can I ask you something?" She set the phone face-down, and the teasing drained out of her. "Why are you really doing this? And don't give me the debt again. Nobody rebuilds a stranger's apartment to settle a debt."
"People have done a great deal more for a great deal less," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," I agreed. "It is not."
I stepped out onto the narrow balcony that none of those clever windows would let her open, on the excuse of making a call, in truth to put a wall between myself and the lamp and her bare feet for one minute.
I do not protect people because I am a good man. I prefer to be honest with myself on that point, since I am the only one who hears it. I protect because once, long ago and far from here, I did not, and a man I should have stood in front of did not getback up, and I have been paying that account in the only coin I own ever since. I have killed. I will not pretend the number is small, or that it robs me of sleep, because most of it does not. But there is one man I did not kill and should have, and one I killed and should not have, and the second is the reason I now spend my evenings in doorways while strangers fit deadbolts. A man can give his whole life to buying back a single decision. I gave up expecting the sale to close. I simply keep the next person breathing, and the one after, and tell myself the books will balance eventually. They never do. There is a face I still meet on the nights I allow it, a man with his hand half-raised and surprise where his certainty used to live. I do not speak of the face to anyone. I add one more stranger to the count of the living and call it penance, though penance implies an ending, and this has none. I keep running the numbers regardless.
When I came back inside, she had folded herself into the one decent chair with her shoes off and her feet tucked beneath her, reading the list of rules my men had left on the counter, mouthing the words, snorting at intervals. She had found a pen. She was crossing things out. By my count she had been awake for the better part of two days, and she was still picking a fight with a sheet of paper, and the lamp had found the side of her face and made a liar of every dangerous thing I know about the world.
She is twenty-four and made of morning. I am forty-one and made of scar tissue. The math is not in my favor, and I cannot stop doing it.
I shut the thought the way you shut a door on a cold room. There is a long list of things a man in my position does not get to want, and I added one more item to it and turned the lock.
"You're staring," she said, without looking up.
"I am assessing."
"Assess somewhere else."
The words came to me the way they had been coming since the hospital, a small and useful liturgy. She is a debt. A job. Nothing else. I have lied to better men than myself and been believed. I said them, and went to find my coat.
"What did she say?" Ruby asked. "My abuela. You went gray."
"That you do not eat when you are afraid."
She watched me a moment, the pen going still. "She likes you. Do you have any idea how rare that is? She hasn't approved of a single person in my life since the second Bush administration."
"Then I will try not to disappoint a woman with that much free time."
"Smart." She almost smiled, and then a yawn took the whole thing and folded it in half.
It was a short drive back to her place, and she did not last half of it. One minute she was explaining, with enormous conviction, every reason my men were forbidden to touch her thermostat, and the next she was simply gone, tipped sideways against the door with her cheek on the belt, out the way only the truly spent go out, all at once and without negotiating the terms. For a woman who fought everything that moved, she surrendered to sleep like it was the last safe room in the building.
I drove the rest of the way slowly. I am not, as a rule, a man who drives slowly.
I carried her up. She did not stir. Four flights, and she weighed almost nothing, and that unsettled me more than any number on a scale should, because it meant she had been thinning out by degrees while the rest of us stood around arguing about doors. Her apartment smelled of the new steel my men had hung in the frame and, beneath it, faintly, of her, clean cotton and the ghost of hospital soap she could never quite scrub off. I laid her on the bed she had dragged away from thewindow and drew the blanket up over her and stood there. The apartment had gone quiet in the particular way a room quiets when the person inside it has finally stopped bracing for the door. Her hand had come uncurled on the pillow. I have watched a great many people sleep, most of them because I needed them not to wake. I had never once kept watch over someone for the single reason that I could not yet make myself leave.
I stayed a beat too long.
She is a debt. A job. Nothing else.
I almost believed it.
7
RUBY
Three days in, I had memorized the new geography of my own life. There was always a man in the hallway. Never the same man, which somehow made it worse, a rotating cast of large, courteous strangers who said "Ms. Castillo" like a password and pretended not to hear me sing in the shower. My groceries arrived pre-searched. The afternoon before, I'd come home to find a guard roughly the size of a chest freezer standing in my kitchen, holding a box of tampons at arm's length with the grave focus of a man defusing ordnance, having clearly decided this particular item was above his clearance.
"Those are tampons, Yuri."
