Fall Back (3)

The door opened the width of the chain. Four inches of her kitchen came out onto the step with the light behind it, and one side of her face, and one hand holding the edge of the door at the height of her chin.

"Security," he said. "You called about a car."

He had heard the guard say things on his rounds, to the boys who sat on the hoods of their cars in the lot, to the woman two doors down who locked herself out every other week. He had the voice. It was the voice of a man who would rather be sitting down.

She didn't look at him. She looked past him, past the jacket and the flashlight, out at the lot. "It's still out there," she said. "By the entrance."

He didn't turn around. "I'll take a look at it. Mind if I check your windows first? Back door, all that."

Her eye came back to him. It went down to his hand on the flashlight, where the cuff of the jacket hung past his knuckles, and it stayed there a moment. Then it came up to his face.

"Hang on," she said.

The door closed. The chain ran back along its track and dropped and swung against the wood. The door opened again, all the way this time, and she stood back against the wall of the little entry with her arms folded the way she had stood at the sink, each hand on the other elbow.

"Come in," she said.

---

He had been asked in before. He had never been asked by someone who had been watching for him.

The threshold gave. For eleven nights her door had been a wall laid flat against the world, and now he put his foot on her side of it and the wall was not there, and he stood in her kitchen with the overhead light on him and the smell of her dish soap and the furnace ticking under the floor.

She shut the door behind him. She turned the deadbolt without looking at it, the way you do in your own house.

"It's the back slider," she said. "The lock on it's no good. I told the office in August."

"I'll look."

She was a little taller than he had thought. There was a white crease across her cheek from the pillow, and the hair at her temples had come loose from whatever held it back. Up close her eyes went everywhere, the way they had gone everywhere from the window. To the door. To the window over the sink. To his hands.

He said her name.

He had read it off her mail, on the second night, through the window slot of the box by the office. She hadn't told it to the guard on the phone. She hadn't told it to him. Her eyes stopped going everywhere and came to rest on his.

"Turn off the light," he said.

She reached behind her without looking and found the switch on the first try and turned it off. The kitchen went to the gray of the lamp outside the window over the sink. Her arms came down from where they had been folded. Her hands hung at her sides with the fingers a little curled, the way hands hang on someone asleep in a chair.

---

All of it had been for him. For eleven nights she had been coming to this door, and she had made him wait, and walk up her steps in another man's jacket with the light on him.

He took her by the shoulders. She weighed nothing at all. He turned her so the gray light from the window lay along the side of her neck, and she let her head go to one side, as far as he turned it, and stopped there.

Her eyes were open. They were on the ceiling, on the dark rectangle where the light fixture was. They didn't move. He told himself it was because she didn't want to look away from what was happening to her.

He put his mouth below her ear, where the pulse was.

It was a small thing, after all that waiting. It always was. The skin, and then the warmth, and her pulse coming up against his mouth, steady at first, the pulse of somebody standing in her own kitchen at one in the morning. One of her hands came up and took hold of the front of the guard's jacket, a fistful of the nylon, and held on. He took that for what he wanted it to be.

He drank slowly. There was no reason to hurry. He had the hour, and the hour after it.

---

The light came across the room from left to right.

It came in through the window over the sink, white and flat, and climbed the far wall and crossed the refrigerator and the calendar and the clock and the towel hanging through the handle, and went across her face where it lay against his shoulder, and was gone. Out in the lot a car had backed out of its space and swung around. Its engine went up through its gears, too fast, and the sound turned onto the road and drew away toward the Watterson.

He lifted his head.

The kitchen was gray again. Her hand still had hold of the jacket. Her mouth was a little open, and her eyes were still on the ceiling, and there was a sound in her throat each time she breathed out, small, like a hinge.

He looked at the window. There was nothing out there now but the lot and the lamps and the cars that were always there. He could not have said which car had gone.

He was finished. He had been about to stop. He would have stopped there in another moment anyway, with the headlights or without them, because he had decided that he would. She wasn't something to finish in one night, standing up, beside a refrigerator. She had waited eleven nights for him. He could leave her something to wait for.

He unfastened her fingers from the jacket one at a time.

---

The couch in her front room had an afghan folded over the back of it, brown and orange, the kind somebody's mother made. He laid her down on the couch and put the afghan over her to the chin. Her eyes had closed. The place under her ear was dark in the gray light and he pulled the edge of the afghan up over it.

He knelt by the couch and put his mouth close to her ear, the other one.

"You went up to bed," he said. "Nobody came to the door tonight."

Her breathing changed. It went long and even.

He stood. He went through the dark kitchen and opened her front door and stood on her mat under the white bulb. He could have turned the knob lock from the inside before he pulled the door to. He didn't. He wanted her to find something in the morning she could not explain. He pulled the door shut and heard it latch and nothing else, no deadbolt, no chain, and he went down her three steps.

---

The guard was where he had left him.

It was a long way to the river, and he was heavy, and it took the rest of the dark to do it. He kept to the bed of Beargrass Creek, which went where he was going and where nobody walked at night. The radio he took too. It had gone quiet in the leaves. Somewhere on the way the clocks of the city went from two back to one, and nobody he passed on the empty streets was awake to see it happen. He had the hour twice. He spent it the second time the way he had spent the first, carrying the man who had come across the lot because she called him.

Below the bridge the Belle lay against the wharf with her stacks cold. Out in the channel the fountain sat on the water, dark, a low raft of pipe and housing he could just make out against the lights of Indiana. Six hours of the night it was nothing at all, a thing parked in a river.

He went down the slope of the wharf to where the paving ran under the water. The river there was black and quick, and it took what it was given.

When he walked back up the bank he still had the guard's jacket on. He looked down at the cuffs hanging past his knuckles and thought of her hand closed in the front of it, holding on. He thought she would be watching for him tomorrow night. He thought she would leave the slat bent down a long time.

 

To be continued...