Page 64 of Soft Erasure

“Four words,” Jess said. “It was true. I thought if I gave him the small ones I could hold the big ones back, and I held them back, Amber, every one of them, and it did not matter. He didn’t need the big ones. He needed the four words.”

I watched for him. I had not decided to.

It had been sitting on a Friday desk, in a friend’s handwriting, before I ever thought it.

Everything downstream of it lined up like a hallway. The orchid in the exact green, chosen. The finger in the elevator, in the hollow over my collarbone, one beat past the count and then gone. He had not been guessing. He had been reading.

I waited for the cold.

The cold always came when Penelope read my number off her tablet. It came at the sound of a bowl set down where I could not see it. I knew its shape. It didn’t come.

What came was lower and it was mine and it didn’t consult me. I wanted the four lines. I wanted to know what else she had written, in what order he learned it, which sentence he read on which Friday, what his face did in a room with nobody in it.

A man had been reading me since the day I arrived, in the handwriting of the only friend I had. My body didn’t produce one degree of cold. It produced the other thing, fast, and I sat with my hands around the water while it came.

That was the report I would not be making to anyone.

I put my hand over hers on the table.

“Keep writing them,” I said.

Her face came apart the way it had in the hall on Wednesday, and she pulled it back, because Noah was on her chest and she was still, in every hour of her life, holding something.

“Amber.”

“Four lines. Make them true.” I didn’t take my hand off hers. “You’ve been telling him what I am. I’d like to choose which four.”

“You’re not angry.”

“No.”

“That’s what he counted on.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s what I’d have counted on.”

“I gave you to him.”

“You did. You also carried my mother’s name to me against a warm wall when nobody else would say it.” The fly turned over in the oil. “Everyone who has helped me in that place has held the other end of it.”

“That’s not forgiveness.”

“No,” I said. “It’s worse. Ask me for forgiveness and I’d have to decide.”

I came back up the avenue with sixty minutes gone.

Ninety minutes off the grid before the system asks a question. The building never told the residents. Mateo told me, Jess told Mateo, Lauren told Jess three years ago. It had moved through the women one mouth at a time. Jess wrote four lines a week. She had never written this one.

I stood on the avenue side of the service door with thirty minutes in my hand.

Thirty minutes is a bus. Thirty minutes is two stops out on a train. The first question gets asked while you are already somewhere with a name nobody has told you. I had no coat, no phone, nothing they hadn’t issued me, and none of that was the reason.

I did the arithmetic twice. The first time was not honest.

Then my hand was on the door, and I had turned around before I finished, and the body had gone first. It always went first. It would go first every time until somebody took the count off me.

I pulled the door.

Mateo was not in the doorway. The door came open under my hand with no one behind it.