Page 30 of Havoc

"All of it." He says it flat. "I did take you out of a lot. I did put you in a house. And I ain't got a plan and you've known it since the first night, and I've let you stand there and say it to me twice now because it's true and I don't have anything to put next to it."

"Then let me go."

"Can't."

"Why?"

And that's the one that lands.

He opens his mouth and there's nothing behind it. I watch it happen. A man who has an answer gets the first sound out and then finds the words behind it, and he gets the first sound out and there's nothing there at all, and his hand comes up off his side and does something and goes back down.

"Don't know," he says.

"You don't know."

"No."

"That's it? That's the whole⁠—"

"I said I don't know." Louder. And then quieter, and worse. "Nine days ago I'd have made a phone call from that lot before the engine cooled. I've made a hundred of 'em. And I sat there with my thumb on it and I could not do it, and I have gone over it every night since and I cannot tell you why, and I would very much like to be able to."

The frogs.

"That's the most honest thing you've said to me," I say.

"It ain't worth much."

"No. It isn't."

He gets the first aid kit out of the trunk, which surprises me, because nothing else in his life suggests he'd own one.

I sit sideways in the passenger seat with the door open and both feet on the gravel and he crouches down in the road in front of me with the flashlight in his teeth.

He takes the boot off.

The sock comes with it and I make a sound I'd rather not have made and he doesn't say anything about it. He pours water over it from a bottle, and the alcohol goes on, and I put my hand flat on the roof of my own car and hold on and count to twenty.

He works with his head down. Big hands, and slow, and the rings catch the light.

Nobody's touched me since April.

I want to be clear about the order it happens in, because it matters. It isn't the man. It's the hands, and the fact that they're careful, and I have been so completely alone for four months that my whole body comes up off the floor of my chest to meet the first careful thing that's come near it.

He tapes the gauze and looks up.

And he's right there, close enough that I can see the mark inked at the corner of his eye, and something goes through his face that I haven't seen on it before — the first honest expression the man's had all night, and it isn't gentle at all.

His hand's still on my ankle.

Everything in me leans about an inch.

"No," I say.

He's gone before the word's finished.

Not a step. He comes up off the ground and back and he's four feet away with both hands open at his sides, and it happens so fast that the air moves, and it is the single most convincing thing anybody has done in front of me in a decade.

He turns and puts both hands on the roof of the car and stands there with his head down.