32

32

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

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Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. — Proverbs 22:6

Chapter One: Fourteen

NORA

The first thing I know is the floor, because my cheek is on it.

It’s cold and it’s clean, which is wrong. Cold floors are supposed to be dirty. This one has the faint tackiness of the cafeteria right after they’ve mopped, and when I get my eyes to open it’s a foot from my face: a black square, a white square, a black square, going away from me in rows like a game nobody has started yet.

I don’t move. Mrs. Okafor, the counselor, says that when your body forgets how to breathe you name five things you can see. So I do.

One: a lightbulb in a wire cage, burning.

Two: a gray door with a wheel in the middle of it, like the door on a submarine in a movie.

Three: a shelf with tin cans on it, and a Bible, and a toothbrush and a hairbrush still in their packages, and a picture frame turned to face the wall. The hairbrush has a pink plastic handle. I stopped using that kind in third grade. I don’t turn the frame around.

Four: a cot with a quilt on it. The quilt is new. It still has the fold lines from the store.

Five: my hands, which are shaking, which is the part that makes it true.

Five isn’t enough, so I count the black squares. Eight rows of eight. Sixty-four squares, so thirty-two black and thirty-two white, but I count them anyway, and then I count them again. Thirty-two.

Then I sit up, and the room tilts and slides back, and something at my ankle goes tink.

It’s a cuff. Metal, with a chain that runs across the floor to a ring in the wall. And under the cuff, folded around my ankle bone, there’s a dish towel. A yellow one with a rooster on it.

Somebody thought about whether it would rub.

My pockets are empty. My phone is gone. My shoes are gone. I still have my socks, and the left one has a hole in the toe that Mom has been nagging me about for a month, and it is the only thing in this room that’s mine, and I start to cry about the hole, which is stupid, which doesn’t stop me.

The last thing I remember is the bus stop on Dilworth. The thing I think about, lying here, is breakfast. Mom at the stove, humming that Cyndi Lauper song, wrong, the way she always does, with the wrong words and total confidence. I said, “Can you not?” I said it the way you’d swat a fly. I didn’t even look up from my phone.

I scream. I scream Mom and I scream help and then a word that isn’t a word, and the sound goes out of me and doesn’t come back. No echo. The walls take it the way a paper towel takes a spill. I scream until something tears in my throat, and the bulb keeps burning, and the cans on the shelf don’t even shiver.

Then a sound that isn’t mine.

Footsteps. Above me, and then not above: coming down. I count them, because I count everything now. Thirteen. The third from the bottom groans under his weight, like it has something to say. A pause on the other side of the door. Somebody breathing the way you breathe after carrying something carefully.

Two knocks. Polite. Evenly spaced.

Like I might say come in.

WENDELL

I knocked twice. One knock is impatience and three is the police, and Mother raised me never to enter a young lady’s room unannounced, whatever the circumstances.

I should say at the outset that I am not a hasty man. The room was three years in the making, if you count from the day I first had the thought, and a good deal longer if you count from 1961, when my father poured the concrete. He built it behind the garage for the end of the world. The Russians were coming; the newspapers said so, and Father believed what was printed. He laid in water drums and a radiation meter and tins of pale square crackers, and he made Mother and me practice the steps in the dark. He also had the floor laid in black and white tile, because even at the end of the world, he held, a room ought to be cheerful.

The Russians never came. Neither, in fifty years, did anyone else. A room built to keep a family safe from the world, and not one soul ever kept in it. I never could bear the waste. It seemed to me, standing down there one spring with a flashlight, that a thing built for safekeeping ought, at some point, to keep something.

I will not set down how Miss Pruitt came to be in it. That is a matter between myself and my Maker, and the particulars were tedious. What matters is the result. A child who stood at a bus stop with the whole indifferent world at her back is now warm, and dry, and out of the traffic. They will say I took her. They always say took. I prefer brought. One brings a person in from the rain.

I had written a card for the first conversation, and I carried it in my breast pocket, and I had rehearsed it in the bathroom mirror until Mother’s voice stopped saying Wendell, you look ridiculous. (She has been dead eleven years and has not once let me finish a sentence.) Good evening, Miss Pruitt. I am so sorry for the circumstances. You are perfectly safe. Three sentences. I thought they struck the right note.

I had typed the House Rules on Mother’s typewriter and tacked them inside the door, at a height a person could read from the cot. I went back and forth over the fourth. We are grateful reads, to the careless eye, like a command. It is nothing of the kind. It is merely a description of what a person in her position ought naturally to feel, and I thought it only fair to say so at the start.

I had made the soup myself. I cut the crusts off the bread, because a child is never so frightened that she will refuse buttered bread with the crusts off, and I put a doily under the plate, because kindness is in the details. I had framed a photograph for the shelf and turned it to the wall until she should be settled. One doesn’t spring things.

My hands were not entirely steady. I attribute that to the stairs.

I set the tray on the floor, turned the wheel, and took the tray up again. It is a loud wheel. Father held that a door which couldn’t be heard couldn’t be trusted.

NORA

The wheel squeals, and the door swings in, slow, with a sound like a very old animal. And he isn’t what I thought. I don’t know what I thought. Somebody with a knife. Somebody with teeth.

He looks like a substitute teacher. Gray cardigan, a necktie with tiny anchors on it, reading glasses on a cord around his neck, hair combed flat and wet like he’s just come from church. He’s carrying a tray in both hands, like a waiter in a movie, and he stops in the doorway and smiles at me. That’s the worst part. The smile. It’s so relieved.

“Good evening, Miss Pruitt,” he says. “I am so sorry for the—”

“Let me go.”

“—circumstances, and I want you to know that you are—”

“LET ME GO. LET ME GO. MY MOM—”

He flinches. Not at the words. At the size of them. His eyes jump to the ceiling and then the corners of the room, fast, like there’s somebody up there who might tell on us, and his whole face draws in the way a mouth does around a lemon.

“Please,” he says. “We don’t raise our voices in this house.”

This house. He says it like it’s a place I live.

There’s an index card tacked to the inside of the door, and he tips his head at it the way you’d tip your head at a menu. It’s typed. The ribbon was running out of ink.

HOUSE RULES

We say please and thank you.

We keep our voices low.

We keep our room tidy.

We are grateful.

Under the fourth, in pen: Prov. 22:6. It looks like a phone number for God.

He sets the tray down on a black square at the very end of the chain’s reach, not an inch farther. He’s measured it. Of course he’s measured it. Tomato soup. Bread and butter cut in triangles, the crusts gone. A plastic tumbler of milk. A paper napkin folded into a little tent, and under the bowl, a doily. A doily. Nobody has cut the crusts off my bread since I was six.

“My mother,” I say, and my voice cracks down the middle, “is going to—”

“I know.” He nods, and he means it, and that’s what makes my skin go small on my bones. “And I’m sorry for her distress. It’s a cost. I’ve allowed for it.” He folds his hands in front of his tie. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Then he waits. He stands there with his hands folded, looking at me with this soft, patient, expectant face, the face of someone who has held a door for a stranger, and I don’t understand what he’s waiting for until he tells me.

“We say thank you, Miss Pruitt.”

I kick the tray.

Soup goes across the checkerboard and up the leg of his trousers and over the cuff of his shirt. The tumbler is plastic, because of course it is, he thought of that too, and it just rolls away while the milk goes wherever it wants.

I wait for him to hit me. I’m pretty sure it’s coming. I’m pretty sure I’ve earned it, and some terrible small part of me almost wants it, because then I’d know what this is.

He doesn’t. For a second his face goes smooth, like a hand wiped across a chalkboard, and what’s under it isn’t anger. He looks hurt. He looks like I’ve said something unforgivable about his mother.

Then he gets down on his knees in his good pants and wipes up the soup with the little paper tent. One square at a time. Working in rows. Humming under his breath, something thin and tuneless that I almost know.

It’s the most frightening thing that has happened yet. Worse than the knock. Worse than the chain.

When he’s done he stands, and brushes his knees, and says to the floor, not unkindly, “Rule four.”

At the door he turns. “We’ll begin again tomorrow with a clean slate,” he says. “Sleep well, Miss Pruitt.”

The door closes. The wheel turns. Something heavier clicks home. Thirteen steps, and the third from the bottom complains.

WENDELL

The soup was a loss, but a modest one. I always make enough for two; it is a habit from Mother’s time. I ate the remainder standing at the sink while the cuff of my good shirt soaked in cold water, and I will admit I was not, just then, in the best of spirits.

I had cut the crusts off.

I had imagined that evening for three years, and in no version of it did she kick the tray. I am not a fool. I know that a frightened child is a child unlike herself. Mother used to say there is no such thing as a bad child, only a child who has not yet been shown, and I mean to show her. Train up a child in the way she should go. I have taken the liberty with the pronoun, and I am confident the Author wouldn’t mind. He did not say eventually, but neither did He say immediately, and I take comfort in the omission.

I looked after Mother for the last nineteen years of her life, and she did not once say thank you. I do not mention it to complain. I mention it so that it is understood I know exactly what is owed.

At ten I allowed myself the television, volume low. They used the school photograph. The anchorwoman said Nora Pruitt, fourteen, last seen wearing a blue jacket, and gave a number to call, and then it was the weather. Mrs. Pruitt was not on; they said she was too distraught to speak. A woman who lets a child stand alone at a bus stop on a main road has, I think, forfeited some portion of her claim. Still, I have entered her distress in the ledger, under costs. I am not a man who pretends there is no cost.

At twenty to eleven I went down and withdrew the light. This is not, strictly, among the Rules, but it follows from them; one does not leave the porch lamp burning for a person who will not come in. I stood outside the door with my palm flat against the steel. One can’t hear a thing through it. Father saw to that. I stood there all the same, for some time. A person ought to be nearby.

Then I wrote up the day. I keep the log in the green ledger Father used at the hardware store, the one with the cloth spine, ruled in two columns: Provided, and Owed. I don’t hold with the vagueness of kindness. A kindness not recorded is a kindness forgotten, and I have found that people forget what is done for them with remarkable speed.

DAY 1.

Provided: Room. Bedding (new). Toiletries (new). Supper: tomato soup, bread and butter, milk.

Owed: Thanks.

Remarks: Spirited. Supper spilled; left cuff. Not to be held against her. Rule 4 explained. Light withdrawn 10:40.

Scripture: Prov. 22:6.

I ruled the columns for tomorrow in advance, with the straightedge. There is a great deal of ledger left.

NORA

The light goes out.

I’ve been waiting for it for hours, I don’t know how many, watching the bulb the way you watch a pot, and I still make a sound when it happens. A small, humiliating sound, like a dog that’s been stepped on.

Black. I didn’t know black had weight. I hold my hand an inch in front of my face and it isn’t there.

I don’t scream. Something happened inside my head while he was down on his knees with that napkin, a click, like a lock, and what the click said was: he doesn’t like it when you’re loud. So that’s two things I know about him. He cuts the crusts off. He can’t stand loud. I put them away in the only pocket he didn’t empty, the way you’d pick a bobby pin up off the sidewalk. You never know.

So I lie on the cot, on a quilt that smells like the store, and in the dark I count from memory. Eight rows of eight. Thirty-two black. I get thirty-two. I start over and get thirty-two again.

It’s the first thing in this place that has agreed with me.

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Chapter Two: Please

NORA

The light comes back without a sound. No click, no warning. One second I’m in the black with my eyes open, and the next the bulb is burning in its cage as if it never left, and I’m a person lying on a cot with her arm thrown over her face.

I don’t know what time it is. That’s the first thing I figure out. There’s no window, no crack under the door, nothing to tell morning from midnight. Only the bulb and the clean cold floor.

The soup is gone. So are the napkin, the doily, and the tumbler. Somebody came in while I was asleep. That’s the second thing, and it’s worse than the first. I slept, and he came in, and I didn’t wake up.

I check myself. Socks on. Jeans buttoned. The quilt is tucked up to my chin, tucked in at the sides, the way you’d tuck in a little kid. My stomach rolls over, and not from hunger.

There’s a bucket in the corner now, with a lid. Beside it sits a roll of toilet paper on an upside-down coffee can, a plastic basin, a bar of soap still in its wrapper, and a washcloth folded in thirds. Last night, I’m almost sure, none of this was here.

He thought about that too.

I get up as far as the chain lets me and do the inventory the way Mrs. Okafor would want, slowly, out loud in my head. The chain is nine of my steps long, I measure it heel to toe. It reaches the cot, the bucket, the shelf if I stretch, and not the door. Not close. The door is a gray wheel I can look at the way you look at the moon.

The shelf, then. Cans: peaches, green beans, creamed corn, something called Vienna sausages. A Bible, black, with a ribbon hanging out of it. The toothbrush. The hairbrush with the pink handle. And the picture frame, facing the wall.

I put my finger on its edge and don’t turn it. Not yet. If it’s Mom, I’ll lose it. And if it isn’t Mom, I think I’d lose it worse.

The Bible has a name inside the cover, in blue ink gone brown. *Wendell Alden Marsh. Confirmed, 1958.* I say it out loud, once, very quietly, in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine. *Wendell.* It makes him smaller. A man with a middle name is a man who can be found.

Then, from far above, the sound of a door. Footsteps crossing a floor, heavy, unhurried. A chair. Then nothing, and the nothing goes on long enough that I realize I’m waiting for it to stop, the way you wait for a teacher to say your name.

WENDELL

I rise at six. I have risen at six since 1971, and I saw no reason a guest should alter it.

I made oatmeal. I have always thought oatmeal an honest food: it asks nothing of you but attention. I added a spoonful of brown sugar and a little cream, because she is growing, and I sliced a banana into rounds of an equal thickness. I used the good tray, the one with the rose-patterned oilcloth Mother kept for invalids.

On the way to the basement stairs I paused at the hall mirror and made an adjustment to my tie. It was the blue with the small anchors, the same as yesterday. I had considered a different one and decided against it. A girl in her situation wants consistency. Nothing is so frightening as a man who changes his ties.

I knocked twice. I turned the wheel. I confess I stood a moment with the tray before I opened the door, collecting myself, as one does before an interview.

“Good morning, Miss Pruitt,” I said. “I trust you slept.”

She was sitting on the very end of the cot with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, and she looked at me with an expression I cannot altogether describe. It was not fear exactly. It was more like a person reading small print. I found it unsettling, and I found, to my surprise, that I did not dislike it.

I set the tray at the end of the chain’s reach.

“Oatmeal,” I said. “With banana.”

She said nothing. I had expected this, and I had prepared. I folded my hands.

“We say thank you,” I said gently. “That’s all. It’s a very small thing. It costs nothing.”

She looked at the oatmeal. She looked at me. I will say for her that her chin did not tremble. It was Mother’s chin, in point of fact, the same stubborn shelf of bone, and I had a brief and unwelcome sensation of being nine years old.

“No,” said Miss Pruitt.

I was not angry. I wish that understood. A man who is angry has lost the thread, and I have never lost the thread in my life. I simply nodded, as one nods at a child who has put her hand on a hot stove, and took up the tray.

“Then we shall try again at noon,” I said. “Rule four. I’m sorry, my dear. I take no pleasure in it.”

I did take, I should note, a small comfort in her face as I turned the wheel. She had expected me to leave the oatmeal. People do not understand the first principle of instruction, which is that a thing offered without a condition is a thing despised.

NORA

I thought it would be like a movie. I thought the girl would be brave, and the bad guy would yell, and somewhere around the middle there’d be a part where she gets the chain off with a bobby pin.

What it’s like is waiting for noon in a room with no noon.

I count. It’s all I have. Heartbeats, at first, but I lose track around a thousand and start over. Then the squares. Then the steps overhead, which are the only clock in this place. He crosses the floor every few minutes. Kitchen, I think, because of the sound of water. A long quiet, which must be a chair. Every hour or so, a deep, slow *bong* from somewhere far upstairs, soft as a cough, and I count those too. It rings seven times. Then nine. I’m losing hours, and I don’t know whether it’s the clock or me.

My stomach starts to talk, first like a polite question, then like a fist. I eat none of the cans. I can’t open them, anyway. No pull tabs, and nothing here to open them with. He thought of that too.

By the time the footsteps come down the thirteen stairs, I’ve figured out three things.

One: I am going to say it. I know I am. I can feel it sitting in my mouth like a swallowed coin. Pride is for people who aren’t hungry, and I’m fourteen, and I’m going to say thank you to a man who put me in a basement, and I hate that I already know it.

Two: the point isn’t the oatmeal. The point is the words. He wants the words so badly his whole face leans toward them. That’s a thing about him, a handle, and I put it in the pocket with the crusts and the loud.

Three: I should make it cost him. Even a little.

Two knocks. The wheel squeals. He comes in with the tray, and it’s sandwiches now, cut in triangles, a glass of milk with a paper napkin tented over the top like a hat. The oatmeal’s gone. He doesn’t mention it. He sets the tray down on the line, folds his hands, and looks at me with that patient, hopeful, terrible face.

I wait. I let him stand there. Four seconds, five. I watch him not fidget. His thumb moves against his knuckle, round and round.

“Please,” I say.

It’s not what he asked for. I see it land anyway. Something in his shoulders lets go, and a little color comes up under the combed-flat hair.

“Please,” I say again, “may I have my lunch.”

“Of course,” he says, and his voice is thick. “Of course you may.” He pushes the tray the last inch toward me with his foot, gently, as if it might be startled.

I take the sandwich. It’s peanut butter, the crusts gone. I’m so hungry my hands shake, and I eat it the way an animal does, in three bites, with my eyes on his shoes.

When it’s gone I wipe my mouth on the back of my wrist. And I say it, flat and small, like paying a fine.

“Thank you.”

The change that goes over him is awful to see. His eyes go wet. He takes off his reading glasses and holds them at his chest, and he looks at me like I’ve given him something, like I’ve handed him back a lost dog. “You’re quite welcome, Nora,” he says.

*Nora.* Not Miss Pruitt. He used my name. I don’t think he even noticed.

He leaves the tray. At the door he says, “I’ll bring the afternoon things at four. You may have the light till ten. I think we shall be very good friends.” The wheel turns. Something heavier clicks. Thirteen steps. The third complains.

I stay very still until I’m sure he’s gone. Then I put my face in the quilt and make no sound at all, because he doesn’t like loud, and I’m learning, and I hate that I’m learning, and I’m learning anyway.

WENDELL

DAY 2.

*Provided:* Breakfast (oatmeal, banana; declined). Luncheon (peanut butter sandwiches, milk). Sanitary arrangements, as per plan. Reading material: Bible (shelf).

*Owed:* Thanks.

I drew the line through it with the straightedge, slowly, so that it would be even. I will confess that my eyes were not quite dry. There is something about a thing owed and then paid. It settles in the chest.

*Remarks:* Please, 12:04. Thank you, 12:11. Called her Nora; will try to remember not to, until she has earned it. Appetite good. Slept sound; I looked in at midnight while she slept and corrected her quilt.

*Scripture:* Prov. 22:6. (Still.)

I read the entry over twice. Then I took up the pen again and, beneath the line, in smaller letters, wrote one more thing, which I would not have written in anyone else’s ledger.

*She said please first.*

I think she is cleverer than I allowed for. I find that I am pleased.

NORA

I don’t have a pencil or a wall I’m allowed to scratch. But I have something better, which is that he doesn’t know what I know.

At ten the light goes out, right on the minute. I lie in the black with my hand in front of my face and say it to myself the way you’d say a rosary.

*Day two.*

If I say it every night, in the dark, in my own head where he can’t get at it, then it’s mine. Nothing he’s done to the room belongs to me. The cuff doesn’t, or the soup, or the quilt with the fold lines in it. But the number does. He can’t take it out of my head, and he can’t write it in his book.

*Day two,* I say. And then, because I’m fourteen and the dark is very big: *Mom. Please. Day two.*

Somewhere above me, faint as a cough, the clock rings ten, and I count every stroke.

-

Chapter Three: Day’s

WENDELL

The days have a shape, and I have been careful to keep it.

Six o’clock, rise. Six-forty, oatmeal, which I prepare in the small saucepan, never the large. Seven, the basement stairs. Two knocks. The tray at the line. The bucket emptied and scalded, the basin refilled, the washcloth changed for a fresh one every second day and the towel under the cuff laundered on Sundays and returned to her ankle still warm from the line. I will not have it said that she was left to chafe.

Noon: luncheon. Four: afternoon things, an apple or a graham cracker or, on Fridays, a small square of chocolate. Six: supper. At ten the light, which I withdraw from the panel in the hall rather than from the room itself, so that she is never obliged to watch me do it. Between these fixed points, I read aloud to her through the speaking tube.

I should explain the tube. Father had it put in with the rest: a brass pipe the width of a man’s wrist, running from the pantry above through the concrete to a little flared mouth beside her shelf. It was meant for orders in an emergency. *Now hear this*, that sort of thing. I tested it in the spring and found it worked beautifully. Hold your mouth to the horn upstairs, and a voice arrives in the room below as if from the wall itself. It is quite natural. She cannot tell where I am. She can only tell that I am near, and I have found that this is the whole of what a young person wants from an adult.

I read her a chapter of Proverbs each night after supper. I began at the beginning, of course. I have never held with skipping about.

I will be candid about the first week. It was not what I had pictured. I had pictured a gradual softening, a thaw, but the first week was a siege. She would not say thank you. She said *please*, and she said it neatly enough, but when it came to the other word she clamped her jaw and looked at the tray as though it were an insult. Rule four applied, as it must. The tray went up with her. Not as a punishment. I wish to be clear. A punishment is something done in anger, and I was never angry. It was merely that a thing offered without acknowledgment cannot be offered again, and I could not in conscience reward the omission.

On the fifth day she went without supper, and on the sixth, without breakfast. On the seventh, she said thank you before I had set the tray down. It was almost inaudible. I do not believe she knew that she had done it. I stood there in the doorway with a bowl of tomato soup, and I was so moved I had to look at the ceiling.

Since then there have been, I think, nine refusals out of the last twenty-five days, and I note a steady improvement. They come further apart. They have a different quality, too. Less rebellion, more arithmetic. She watches me while she decides, and I find I rather admire it. *She is weighing my feelings*, I wrote in the ledger on the nineteenth day, *against her own supper.* She is a girl of some intelligence, and it will take her far, once it is properly directed.

I turned my attention, around the fifteenth, to the matter of the calendar.

Nothing marks the passage of time for her in that room. I had taken care of that, in the early planning, because a person must not be given anything to count against. But I had not reflected enough on the consequences. A young person with no occasions in her life will go strange. I have seen it in the very old, in the homes: the ones who have no visitors and cannot tell Tuesday from Easter. They stop eating. They stop being *there*. I did not intend that for her.

A child ought to have holidays. It seems to me one of the plainest points in the whole science of upbringing. Mother kept every one of them, however thin the year. A paper turkey on the sideboard when there was no turkey. A single candle in a jelly jar on Christmas Eve. *A house with no occasions*, she used to say, *is a house with no one in it.* She said many things that were unkind, but that was sound.

And so I looked at the calendar I keep on the kitchen wall, the one from the Rexall with the picture of the covered bridge, and I saw what I had not seen. The thirty-first of October was a Friday. It would also be Day 32.

I sat down at the table for some time.

Thirty-two. It is the number of squares of each colour, black and white, that Father laid in the floor. I had not planned it. I want that noted. I had counted forward from the thirtieth of September and arrived at Halloween by the plainest arithmetic, and the number simply was. I am not a superstitious man. But I have never been able to look at a coincidence without suspecting that someone has been kind.

I started preparations that same afternoon.

I drove to three different grocery stores for the candy, one in each of three towns, so that no clerk should see a pattern. A single bag from each. Caramels in their cellophane. The orange and black wax-paper taffy. A box of the little chalky hearts that say things, though I could not at first remember why I wanted them, and put them back, and then went and got them again. At the third store a young man with a ring through his eyebrow asked if I was expecting many trick-or-treaters, and I said, “A very particular one,” and he laughed, and I laughed too, and drove home with my hands a little wet on the wheel.

I carved a pumpkin on the kitchen table. I want to say that I enjoy it. I had not carved one since Mother’s time, and I had forgotten the sound of the knife going into the rind, the wet resistance and then the give. I made it a plain face, not a frightening one. Triangular eyes, a crooked smile with two teeth. I roasted the seeds with a little salt, as she used to. The house smelled of it for two days. For a moment, on the second evening, I could have sworn I heard her say, from the next room, *You’re cutting those too thick, Wendell*, and I stood very still with the knife and said, aloud, *Yes, Mother*, and the house was silent.

The costume was the simplest part. A ghost. There was a flat sheet in the linen closet, the one with the faded blue border and a small burn near the hem, and I cut two eyes in it with the pinking shears. I tried it on in front of the hall mirror. A white shape, tall, patient, with a pair of ordinary shoes beneath. It seemed to me a very gentle sort of figure. Not a monster. A visitor.

The only difficulty was the wheel.

It squeals, as I have said. Father insisted on it. But I have come to see that the squeal gives rise to a certain tension each time I come to the door, and tension is not what I wish at a holiday. On the afternoon of the thirtieth, while she slept, I stood in the stairwell with a can of three-in-one oil and treated every hinge and every turn of that wheel. I did it slowly. I did the bolts. I did the little brass pin on the latch. And when I turned the wheel afterwards it went round as quietly as a thought.

I thought: *tomorrow, she will not hear me come.* And I confess that I found it a lovely idea. She will be in the dark, and then I shall be there, and it will be like something given.

NORA

Thirty-one days. I know because I’ve been saying it in the dark every night, and because the old clock upstairs has told me, and because on Sundays he takes the dish towel off my ankle and brings it back warm, and I’ve learned to count the Sundays too.

I’d like to say I’m brave. I’m not. I’ve just gotten organized.

Here’s what I know. He rises at six; I hear the bed through the floor, the particular groan of the third stair on the way down, and then, a minute later, the faucet. He goes out on Tuesdays and Fridays at ten, for about three hours, and I know it because there’s a different sound then, a heavy mechanical grumble overhead that must be a garage door, and an engine, and then nothing at all. The first time, I screamed myself raw. The second time I understood it didn’t matter. The room swallows everything. It’s a mouth. The only person who can hear me is the person I don’t want to.

I know the tube, too. It’s a brass horn on the wall behind the shelf, the size of a trumpet bell, and I thought for the first three days that it was decoration. Then at nine o’clock on the fourth night it cleared its throat, and a voice that didn’t seem to come from anywhere said, very gently, “*The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.*” I put the pillow over my head. It didn’t stop. It never stops. It goes on every night for twenty minutes, a man reading to a wall, and he does all the voices. When the proverbs say *my son*, he reads it *my daughter*.

I haven’t told you what I did about the tube.

I stuffed it with a sock. It took a week of working up the nerve. I figured he’d go crazy. He didn’t. The next morning the sock was gone, and in its place on the shelf there was a small pair of fresh white socks, folded together, and a note on an index card in his tiny typed letters: *In case you were cold.* And after that, the voice came through the tube a little closer to the horn, a little warmer, a little more *hurt*. I took that as a lesson. It’s a thing about him: if you do something to him, he doesn’t get mad, he gets *sad*, and then you’re the one who’s done something wrong.

I put that in the pocket, too. The pocket’s getting full.

What else.

I’m thinner. I can feel my hip bones under the jeans, which Mom says is “a phase,” except that I haven’t had a phase in a month. I haven’t had my period either, which I think is the cold, or the stress, or him, and I don’t let myself think about which. I lie on the cot and say the multiplication tables backward. I recite the Pledge. I try to remember my locker combination, and I can, and then I can’t, and I have to start over from the middle. Sometimes in the afternoon I feel my face go slack and I have to slap it. Mrs. Okafor says you can lose yourself that way, in the quiet, like a coat left on a bus.

And here’s the thing that scares me most, and I’m only going to say it once, in here, where it can’t get out:

I’ve started waiting for four o’clock.

Not for *him.* For the apple. For the sound of the stairs, the three weird little rhythms of the knock, someone coming. I hate that I feel it. I hate that my chest lifts when the wheel turns, like a plant bending to a window. I’ve figured out what it is: a person alone for a long time will love anything that moves. A dog. A moth. I tell myself it’s the chain talking, the cell talking, a cheap trick my brain’s pulling to keep me from going crazy.

But I can feel it anyway. It’s a little more every day.

On Day 31, the light goes out at six.

Not ten. Six. I’m sitting on the end of the cot with a graham cracker half-eaten, and the bulb just dies, with no click, no warning, nothing. I think: *it’s the power.* I think: *he forgot.* Then I remember that he never forgets.

In the dark I hold my breath. You learn to do that. You listen with your whole skin.

Nothing. Nothing. The house settles somewhere far above me. The clock bongs six, slow and soft, and I count them, and I keep counting even after it stops.

Then, thirteen steps. I know there are thirteen. I count them anyway.

Only the third one doesn’t complain.

It should. It *always* does, it has for thirty-one days, and I’ve come to depend on it the way you depend on a dripping tap. But tonight it doesn’t make a sound, and the only way that can happen is if somebody who knows where it is has *stepped over it.*

I stand up. The cuff snicks. I back up until my calves are against the cot.

I wait for the knock.

There’s no knock.

There’s no squeal either. The wheel, the horrible wheel, turns without a whisper, and the door, the door that’s moaned at me for a month like an old dog, swings open on the dark without a single sound. And what’s worse, what’s so much worse, is the *smell.* Mothballs. Wintergreen. A clean old man’s smell, the smell of a closet. It comes in like a hand.

I don’t scream. My throat’s shut. I stand there with my fists clenched and my heart going so hard I can hear it in my ears, and then very close, much closer than I expected, near the end of the chain’s reach, somebody *breathes in*, slowly, the way you do when you’re about to say something nice.

“Trick or treat,” says Wendell Marsh.

WENDELL

I had wondered, in the planning, whether I should say it from the doorway or from within. I decided the doorway. A person is entitled to see where the voice is coming from. But when it came to it, in the dark, with the bedsheet making its soft sound at my shoulders and the little battery lantern held down beside my leg, unlit, I stepped one pace into the room and I said it from there. I could not help myself. I wanted her to know I had come all the way in.

“Trick or treat,” I said again, because she hadn’t answered. “That is how it’s done, Nora. One says the words, and then one is given something. It is a very old arrangement.”

I could hear her breathing. I could not see her, but I did not need to. I know the room. I know where the cot is; I know where the chain falls across the floor, to the inch. The dark was a kind of intimacy. I thought, *I am standing in her dark, and she is not afraid enough to run.* I believe she was afraid. But she did not run. There was nowhere to go, of course. Still.

“I’m going to put a light on,” I said. “I should like you to see the costume. I think it’s rather good.”

I raised the lantern from beside my leg, and I pressed the switch, and held it under my chin the way the children do in the pictures.

I will say that she made a sound I had not heard before. Not a scream. A kind of small indrawn *oh*, like a person pricked with a pin. I took it as a compliment to the sheet.

“I am the ghost of Halloween Past,” I said. “I’m told it’s traditional.”

“Please,” she said. Her voice was very tiny. “Please turn the light on.”

“Ah,” I said. “Now. That’s a different question. The light is for after the treat.” I lowered the lantern so that it lit only the floor between us, a pale circle on the tile, and I sat down in the folding chair I had brought and unfolded beside the door, a good eight feet from her, well inside the radius of safety. I arranged the sheet. I set the paper sack on my knees. “First the words.”

She said nothing for a long time. In the glow from the floor I could see her feet, in their grey socks, one with a hole in the toe. I have noted the hole. I intend to see to it.

“Trick or treat,” she said.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

I do not know how to put this in the ledger. I have tried. The thing is, I have said those words to a closed door perhaps ninety times in my life, on one night or another, and in sixty-odd years no one has ever opened it. The porch light, the paper skeleton, the bowl of caramels, Mother standing at the curtain. The neighbours’ children passed our house the way one passes a blank lot. And now a young person stood in my father’s room in the dark and said the words to me, *to me*, and her voice was shaking, and she meant it. She was frightened and she said it anyway. I thought: *this is what Mother meant by an occasion.*

“Thank you, my dear,” I said. My own voice was unsteady. “Now. A treat.”

I took out a caramel and held it up into the lantern’s circle, the cellophane crackling, and I let her see it, and then I rolled it across the tile to the end of her chain.

She did not pick it up.

“It’s quite all right,” I said. “It’s not tampered with. I would never. I unwrapped nothing. They are exactly as the store sold them.”

She picked it up. She turned it over in her fingers with an expression I couldn’t read in that light. And then she did something that I did not expect and have been turning over ever since. She said, very quietly, “Mr. Marsh?”

I sat very still.

I had not told her my name.

I looked at the lantern for a moment. I looked at my hands. I became aware that the sheet had slipped a little at the neck.

“The Bible on your shelf,” I said slowly. “I’d forgotten.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s all right. That is perfectly all right.” I found that I was smiling beneath the cotton. “That is what we should expect, from a clever girl. I think it’s very well observed. Though I would ask that you not use it without leave. We do say *Mr. Marsh*, of course. But for the moment, perhaps, on a holiday, you might call me Wendell.”

“Wendell,” she said.

It went into me like warm water.

NORA

He tells me a story.

That’s what the ghost does. It sits in its folding chair in the dark, eight feet away, with the lantern making a little circle on the floor, and it tells me a story in his mild, teacherly voice, and I sit on the cot with a caramel I haven’t eaten in my fist, and I listen, because I don’t have a choice, and because I’m so lonely I could cry.

It’s about a girl, naturally. A girl who lived in a house on a hill with her mother and her father and a little brown dog. The girl was very clever, and very beautiful, and she had everything she wanted. But she never said thank you. Not for her dinner, not for her coat, not for her new shoes. And one night a ghost came to the house, a very old ghost, a patient ghost, who’d been dead a long time and had a great deal of time on its hands, and it sat at the end of her bed and said:

*“Because you will not say it, you will not be let go.“*

And the next morning the girl woke and the house was empty. Her mother, her father, the dog. The furniture was gone. The doors had no knobs. And in the middle of the floor was a table set with a single plate, and on the plate was a word, written in icing, and the word was *thanks.*

He lets that sit. I can hear his breath.

“She ate it, of course,” he says finally. “What else could she do? And she lived there, quite contentedly, for a very long time. And do you know, she became the most polite young woman in the county.”

“What happened to the ghost?”

It slips out. I don’t even know I’m going to say it.

And he laughs, a soft, delighted, old-man laugh, the kind you give a child who’s asked the right question. “Oh, he stayed on,” he says. “Of course he did. Somebody had to look after her.”

I put the caramel in my mouth. I don’t even know why. It’s the saltiest, sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, and it tastes like the inside of a paper bag at the bottom of the world, and I chew it very slowly, and he watches me do it, and I’m crying a little and not making any sound.

“There,” he says. “That’s the thing about a holiday. It makes a house feel full.”

Then he stands. The sheet shushes along the floor. He turns the lantern up, not all the way, just enough to let me see what’s in the circle: a tall, narrow white shape, two black holes where the eyes ought to be, and beneath the hem the gray cardigan and the ordinary shoes and the little anchors on the tie. That’s what I’ll see in my sleep. That’s what I’ll see for years. A kindly sheet with a tie.

“I have one more thing,” he says. “I had meant to save it. But it’s a night for it, and you’ve been so good.”

He crosses to the shelf. I watch him do it, I watch the white shape go to the one thing in the room I haven’t touched, and a cold feeling opens in my stomach like a trapdoor.

“No,” I say. “Please don’t.”

“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s nothing to be afraid of. I only wish you to know that you have been *looked after.* That you’ve been looked after for some time.”

He takes down the picture frame. He turns it in his hands, the way you’d turn something over to check its price, and then he walks it across the tile and sets it down in the lantern’s pale circle, right at the end of my chain, and steps back.

It’s a photograph.

It’s me.

I’m eleven or twelve, I don’t know. I’m in the old purple coat, the one I outgrew. I’m standing in front of our house, on the sidewalk by the mailbox, and I’m *laughing*. I’m looking off to the side at somebody who isn’t in the picture, and my mouth is wide open, and there’s a gap where I’m missing a canine, and I look so happy it hurts to look.

It’s a good photograph. It’s the kind that gets framed. And I have no idea when it was taken, and I have never in my life stood in front of that camera, because the angle is wrong. It’s from low, from far away, from across the street, through the gap in the Hendersons’ hedge. Whoever took it was *crouching.*

There’s handwriting on the white border in blue-black ink, small and level. I read it. I read it again. It says: *Nora. Oct. 14. Age 11 yrs 9 mos.*

“That’s three years ago,” says the sheet. “I did a great deal of looking, before I was ready to call. I wished to be certain.” There’s pride in his voice. A hush. “I wished to be certain that you would be worth the trouble.”

I can’t feel my hands.

“You were,” he says.

WENDELL

DAY 32.

*Provided:* Breakfast. Luncheon. Afternoon things. Supper. Holiday (All Hallows’). Costume; pumpkin (displayed upstairs; she may see it in time). Treats: caramel (1); taffy (2); hearts (see Remarks). Story. Photograph (disclosed).

*Owed:* Thanks (paid, 7:48 p.m., on leaving; she said it before I asked).

*Remarks:* Used my Christian name. Twice. Does not seem to realise.

I put down the pen. I looked at it for a long time.

I am aware of the possibility that I was too soon with the photograph. A man who is hasty is a man who spoils things. It was, I will admit, not in the plan to show it until at least the second month. But she had said *Mr. Marsh*, and I was moved, and I had the thing in my hand. There are moments, in any undertaking, when one ought to trust the moment.

She did not scream. I have gone over it. At the end, when I took up the lantern and the folding chair and went to the door, she was sitting on the cot with the frame in her lap and both hands flat on the glass, as one might lay them on the face of a sleeping animal. She did not look up. She did not say anything. She was shaking from head to foot, a fine, continuous tremor, and her lips were moving, though I could not make out the words.

I stood at the door in my sheet. I thought of Mother.

It came to me, quite clearly, as though it had been spoken, that for the first time in a long while I was not lonely.

I turned the wheel. It made no sound. I went up the stairs, stepping over the third.

And in the hall I took off the sheet, and folded it in thirds, and set it on the shelf of the linen closet, and stood there for a moment in the smell of cedar and soap. I became aware of a sound in the house that I could not at first identify. It was a faint high wavering note, very close. It was my own voice. I was humming.

I ruled the columns for tomorrow with the straightedge. There is a great deal of ledger left.

NORA

The light comes back at ten, not a second early. It always does.

I’m still sitting where he left me. I haven’t moved. My legs have gone to pins and needles and I don’t care. The picture frame’s in my lap, face-up, and I’ve been looking at it for four hours, though I couldn’t see it for three of them. I know it by heart. I know the gap in my teeth. The mailbox with the dent. The Hendersons’ hedge, and the green blur of it in the corner where the lens caught a leaf.

Three years. Three *years.*

I think about the mornings. I try to think of one. A morning when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, and I walked to the bus stop, and something felt wrong, and I told myself it was nothing. Every time I ever looked over my shoulder and felt stupid. Every time Mom said *you’re being paranoid, baby.* I think about all the times I stood at that stop and he was *there*, somewhere, in a car, a bush, a window, with the camera in his lap and a ledger on the seat beside him, writing me down.

I’ve been *provided for.* The whole time.

My mother’s face, over the stove. *Can you not?*

I lie down on the cot with the picture on my chest, and I do the thing, the thing I do every night, in my own head where he can’t get at it. I say it. I make myself.

*Day thirty-two.*

And then, because the number’s too big now and I can feel it crack something in me:

*Thirty-two.* The squares. Thirty-two black, thirty-two white.

It was always going to be thirty-two. He *knew.* He knew before I did, he’s always known, he’s been ahead of me since before I even got here, and there isn’t any pocket big enough to hold that.

Far above me, soft as a cough, the clock begins to ring ten, and for the first time in thirty-two nights I don’t count the strokes.

I lie there and let them fall.

-

Chapter Four: Eighty-Seven

WENDELL

By December, I had begun to believe in the work.

I do not say this lightly. I have been disappointed by belief before. But there is a point in any undertaking, a carpenter will tell you, when the joints stop fighting you and begin to draw together of their own accord, and I felt that point arrive in the second week of the month, on a Tuesday, at about ten past four.

I had brought the afternoon things. An apple, quartered and cored, a graham cracker, and a small paper cup of cocoa, which was new. I turned the wheel, which now makes no sound at all, and she looked up from the cot and said, “Hi, Wendell.”

*Hi.* As one says it to a person one has known for years.

“Good afternoon, Nora,” I said. I set the tray at the line, and, my hands being free, I did not fold them. I merely stood there. “I trust you’re well.”

“I’m okay.” She reached for the cocoa. “Thank you.”

I did not remark on it. That is the whole art. One does not point at a bird that has landed on one’s hand.

I should record the other improvements. She keeps the room tidy without being asked: the quilt squared, the shelf in order, the bucket lidded and set against the wall at the correct angle. She has taken to humming, very softly, when she thinks I cannot hear her. I can hear her. The tube carries upward as well as down, and it is a poor sort of host who does not listen to his guest. It is some pop tune. The words are wrong. She makes up the words, with total confidence, the way a person does who has never in her life been corrected.

It has begun to alarm me, how much I enjoy it.

She has also begun to ask questions. Not the old questions, *let me go, where is my mother*, which I have by now learned to receive in silence, the way one receives rain. These are the questions of a person with an interest. What year was the house built. Did I ever have a dog. Why anchors on the tie. I told her about the anchors, which were Father’s, a gift from a man he had served with, and she said, “That’s nice,” and I felt as though I had been handed a flower by a stranger in the street.

I looked at the ledger that night, and in the column headed *Owed* there was, for the first time since September, nothing.

*Nothing owed.* I ruled a line under it. I laid the pen down. I sat in the kitchen with the clock ticking over the stove and thought: *So this is what it is. This is what the others were never given.*

Mother, I mean. Father. The neighbours and their children. The clerk at the Rexall who has sold me my stamps for thirty years and who looks at me as at a piece of furniture. Everyone I have ever stood in front of, holding something out. None of them took it. I have always been a man holding a plate in an empty room.

I mended the sock on the nineteenth. I had not forgotten the hole. I took the grey ones from the basket where I keep her laundered things, and I sat under the lamp with Mother’s darning egg and a needle and matching wool, and I closed the toe with a small, even weave. It took forty minutes. I am a poor hand at it, but I had her foot very clearly in my mind. I wrapped the pair in tissue and put them on the Christmas tray, where they sat looking, I thought, like a very modest sort of love.

I had arranged the date in my mind a long time ago. It would be Day 87. I had worked it out before ever I brought her down, and I had never told a soul, which is to say I had never told Mother.

There was to be a tree.

A small one. Artificial, three feet, from the attic, where it has lain in its box since 1998, with the tinsel still wound on it in the shape of Mother’s hands. I set it on the shelf beside the Bible, and I put on it the little glass birds, and I did not light it, because there is no outlet in that room, and because the cord would have been a danger. Instead I had a single candle in a jelly jar, as Mother used to, on Christmas Eve, and I brought it down in both hands and set it on the shelf where it could be seen from the cot.

There was also the gift.

I had taken a great deal of trouble. She is fourteen, and one does not know what fourteen is anymore. I stood in the toy aisle for forty minutes with my hat in my hand while a woman with a cart gave me a wide berth. In the end I chose a doll. A fashion doll, very tall, in a pink gown with a stiff net skirt, her hair in a yellow ponytail, her little feet bent already into the shape of the shoes. It cost nineteen dollars. The box had a window in it, and she looked out of the window with an expression of perfect contentment.

I wrapped it in red paper with a bow. I wrote a card. I sat for some time with the card, and in the end I wrote only: *To Nora, with love. W.*

And then, because I am a man who keeps accounts, I took down the green ledger, and under the *Provided*, I wrote: *One doll. One tree. Thirty-two minutes of conversation. One love.*

I looked at that last item for a good while. I did not strike it out.

NORA

I started the day I found out it was plastic.

The hairbrush, I mean. The pink one. It sat on the shelf for eighty-one days and I’d looked at it a hundred times without really seeing it, the way you don’t see a thing you’ve decided is harmless. Then on Day 46 I picked it up to brush my hair, and the handle was hollow on the underside, a narrow channel, and I thought: *that’s thin. That’s thin plastic.*

That’s all it was. That was the whole beginning. A thought you have in your hand.

It took a month and a half.

I did it at night, under the quilt, in the dark, with the cuff against the concrete at the foot of the cot, which is the only rough thing I can reach. Concrete beneath the tile, where a square’s been chipped. I rub the handle against it back and forth, back and forth, no louder than a sleeper turning over. Forty strokes. Rest. Forty more. My arm shakes by the end of every night. In the mornings I hide the brush in the one place he doesn’t look, the inside of the quilt cover, in the corner seam, where I’ve picked the thread apart with my fingernails.

I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. A point. A *thing.* It’s about four inches long now and it has an edge, and when I hold it to the bulb I can see it shine along one side.

Here is what I’ve worked out about Wendell.

He’s careful, but he’s careful about the wrong things. He’s careful about the chain. About the tray. About what’s on the shelf: plastic cups, soft things. He’s *not* careful about his hands. When he sets the tray down, he bends at the waist and his arms go out in front of him, wrists bare, palms up, a foot from the end of my chain. He does it every single time. He trusts me. That’s the thing I can’t get over. After everything, he trusts me to behave. He thinks I’ve been *taught.*

And the keys are on a ring on his belt. I’ve seen them, in the lantern light. Small ones. One of them is a little brass key with a flat head, and one of them, I’m almost sure, would fit this cuff.

So here’s the plan, if you can call it that.

On Christmas, he’ll bring the tray. He’ll bend. I’ll say *thank you*, and I’ll smile, and I’ll step in, one step, inside the line, which is a thing I’ve never done. And I’ll go for the arm, not the face. I can’t do the face. If I try to do the face I’ll freeze, I know it. The wrist, where the veins are. Hard enough to make him let go of whatever he’s holding. And then the belt. And then the key. And then the wheel, which doesn’t squeal anymore, which I’ll be able to turn without any noise at all, and thirteen stairs, and the third won’t matter, and *outside.*

I’ve never been outside. I mean, not since the bus stop. I try to imagine it and it won’t come. Air. A sky with nothing on it.

I lie in the dark on Christmas Eve and tell the number.

*Eighty-six.*

I say it, and then I say the other thing, which I’ve started adding. *Tomorrow, Mom. Tomorrow.*

I’ve never lied to myself so convincingly in my life.

WENDELL

I shall set this down as plainly as I can. I do not trust my memory of it, and the ledger is for what happened and not for what I should have wished.

At seven o’clock on Christmas evening I went down with the tray. I wore the good suit, the brown one, and the tie with the anchors, and a sprig of holly in the lapel, which Mother held to be correct. I carried the tray in both hands: the roast chicken, the potatoes, the cranberry in its small glass dish, a slice of pie. On the tray also was the doll in her red paper, and the socks in their tissue, and the jelly jar with the candle already lit and throwing its small unsteady light across my wrists.

The wheel turned without a sound. The door swung.

She was sitting on the cot with her hands in her lap, and her hair brushed, and she looked up at me and she *smiled*, and I remember thinking, with a kind of dizziness, *there*. There it is. It was the first smile that had not been a strategy. I could see it.

“Merry Christmas, Wendell,” she said.

I said it back. I could hardly manage it. I came across the tile to the line and bent to set the tray down, as I have done a hundred times, as I do it in my sleep.

“Thank you,” she said. “This looks amazing.”

And she stood, and took one step inside the line, and I saw her arm come up.

I will say that I did not understand. For a moment, a very long moment, as long as I have ever known, I thought she was reaching to embrace me. I thought: *she is going to put her arms around me.* I remember my own face softening. I remember starting, God help me, to smile.

It was a thing in her hand. A short bright splinter of pink. She brought it down across the back of my left wrist, and I felt it go in.

I cannot convey the sound I made. It was not a sound I knew. The tray went. The candle in its jelly jar went, and hit the tile and did not break, and rolled, and the doll in her red paper lay at my feet with her bow still on, looking up at the ceiling. And I stood in my brown suit with a thing standing out of my arm like a clothes peg, and I looked at her, and she was white to the lips, and she had both hands on my belt.

She had the keys.

I cannot tell you how simple it was, in the end, and I am not proud. She had the ring in her fist and she had the whole of her thin weight pulling, and she was going to take them. I saw it. I saw that she meant to turn the little brass key in the cuff and go past me up the stairs, and not look back. I understood, in that moment, with perfect clarity, what I had been to her for eighty-seven days.

I took hold of the chain.

It is a good chain. Father bought it from a ship’s chandler. I did not strike her; I want that on the record. I merely drew the chain in, hand over hand, as one draws in a line, and the cuff went tight, and she came to the end of it, and she fell, and the keys flew out of her hand and skittered across the tile and came to rest beneath the cot.

She lay there. I stood over her. My blood was coming down my wrist and dripping from my fingers onto the black and white squares.

She was not weeping. I had expected it. She was breathing very fast, and looking at me with an expression I have seen only once, in the face of a rabbit in a trap in the year that Father taught me, and she said, very distinctly, “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said. “You are not.”

I took the pink thing out of my arm. I did it slowly. I laid it on the shelf, beside the Bible, where it could be looked at.

“Not yet,” I said.

Then I retrieved the keys, and the doll, and the jelly jar, and I went up the stairs with a handkerchief wound round my wrist, and I did not step over the third. I let it complain.

NORA

He doesn’t come for two days.

I know it’s two, because I count. The first day, the light stays on, and nothing arrives. No tray. No tube. No one at four o’clock. The Christmas dinner is still on the floor where it fell, and by the evening it’s started to smell, and I sit on the cot with my knees up and I look at it, the chicken, the little glass dish, the pie. I don’t eat it. I don’t know why. I think I’m waiting for permission.

Rule four. We are grateful.

The second day the bulb goes out at noon, and stays out.

I lie in the black. It’s different, this black. It isn’t the black of ten o’clock, with the clock and the knowing. This one has no edges. I hold my hand in front of my face and I can’t tell whether I still have it. I say the number, but I can’t tell if I’ve said it aloud or in my head. I say *Eighty-eight, eighty-nine,* and I’m not even sure that’s right.

I have never been so thirsty.

I think about the pink handle on the shelf. About how it went in. How it felt, a small dull give, like a pen through a cushion, and the way his face went open. Not angry. *Bewildered.* Like a child who’s been slapped by his mother.

I think: *I did that.*

I think: *and I’d do it again.*

Both of those are true, and I lie there in the black and let them be true, and I do not know which is worse.

It’s the third morning when he comes back. I know because the bell upstairs has rung seven, and then, softly, wrongly, the wheel turns. There’s a new sound under it, a little second *clack.* A lock, a second lock, one I’ve never heard.

The light comes on.

He is standing in the doorway. He has a bandage on his left wrist, white and thick, going up under his cuff, and he looks tired, and he looks like himself. He has a tray in his hands. Oatmeal. A banana, sliced into rounds. It’s the first breakfast.

And under his other arm, tucked against his ribs, as one carries a baby, is the doll.

“Good morning, Nora,” he says.

I say nothing. He sets the tray on the line. Then he does a thing he’s never done. He doesn’t step back. He takes a pace *forward,* inside the line, and crouches, with a small grunt, so his face is level with mine, and I can see the little blue veins in his eyes.

“I have been thinking,” he says, “about what is owed.”

He turns the doll in his hands.

It isn’t how I remember. The gown has been peeled back at the left sleeve, and the plastic hand is *gone*, not broken, melted, blackened to a stump, its fingers fused to a single dark lump. A smell comes off it that I know. The stove. A match.

“I was hurt,” he says. “I don’t say it to reproach you. I’ve made allowances. But I was *hurt*, and I thought it only right that it should be shared.” He sets the doll gently on the tile between us, propped on her stump, so that her eyes are looking at me. “She was a gift. You were careless with her. We shall see about a replacement, in time.”

He rises. His knees crack.

“And you’ll find the chain a little shorter,” he says. “It’s only prudent.”

I look. I look down at my ankle and along the floor, at the links running away from me to the ring in the wall, and I see it. I’d never have noticed it. The chain doesn’t reach the shelf anymore. It doesn’t reach the bucket. It stops four steps from the cot, and the black-and-white squares go on past the end of it without me, looking like a board that nobody has started.

“There,” he says. “It’s all in order.”

At the door he turns, as he always does, with his hand on the wheel.

“We’ll begin again tomorrow, with a clean slate. I find it’s much the best way.” He smiles at me, the old smile, so relieved. “I’ve entered it in the book, my dear. Eighty-seven days, and nothing owed. You did that. For eighty-seven days I owed you nothing at all.”

The wheel turns. Both locks click. Thirteen steps, and the third one complains.

I sit very still, with the burned doll looking up at me.

I don’t say the number. Not that night, not for a long time. I’d had one thing that was mine. And I think I’ve just worked out, lying here with my cheek on the tile, that the number was never mine at all. It was his. He told me the date, and I counted it for him, every night, in the dark, like a girl in a chapel keeping his book.

-

Chapter Five: Three Hundred Sixty-Six

WENDELL

A year is a long time to be kind. I want that written down somewhere, and since this is the only place I write things down, I have written it here.

I do not complain. I mention it as a matter of fact, the way a farmer will mention that corn takes a season. The preparation of three meals a day, the scalding of the bucket, the Sundays, the proverbs at nine, the holidays, which I have kept faithfully, and the fact that I have not once been away from the house for more than the three hours of a Tuesday or a Friday. Most men could not do it. Most men would have gone to seed by Easter. I am pleased to say that I have not so much as missed a shave.

I have also, since Christmas, been a happy man. That is the part I find difficult to set down.

She is perfect now. I use the word precisely. When I turn the wheel, she is already sitting at the end of the cot with her hands in her lap and her feet together, and she says, “Good morning, Wendell,” in a clear, even voice, and when I set down the tray she says, “Thank you. It looks lovely,” and she eats, and she eats everything, and she folds the napkin afterward into thirds. She does not ask about her mother. She does not ask about the door. She asks, from time to time, after my health, and whether the bandage is bothering me.

It healed some time ago.

There is a scar on my left wrist, a pale seam, a little raised, about the length of the first joint of my finger. I think of it as the mark of the first lesson. I have caught myself turning it to the light.

I wrote in the ledger, in January: *Rule 4 observed without prompting. Rules 1–3 likewise. Has not raised her voice since the 25th.* And below that, in the margin, in pencil, which is not my habit: *Why, then, do I feel I am being politely handled?*

I rubbed it out in the morning. A man ought not to write what he cannot make use of.

The year was thus. I will give it briefly, because the particulars are in the ledger and I do not wish to be tedious.

*DAY 59.* Thanksgiving. I had thought long about the turkey. A bird would have been too much, and in any case I had no one to carve for, and so I trapped a pair of pigeons in the garage, where they nest in the rafters over Father’s workbench, and I dressed them as Mother used to dress a game hen, with sage and a strip of bacon. I served them with the cranberry. I said grace, aloud, through the open door. She ate the whole of hers, politely. Only afterward, when I came to take the tray, I found she had arranged the small bones in a row on the rim of the plate, in order of size, with great care, like a person laying out instruments.

I did not say anything. I took the plate away.

*DAY 138.* Valentine’s. I wrote the little candy hearts myself, which is to say I bought plain white ones, and with a fine pen, in my best hand, I wrote on each of them a short phrase. *BE GOOD. BE MINE. BE MINE. BE HERE.* There were thirty-two. They took the better part of an evening.

*DAY 161.* Her birthday. She was fifteen. I made a cake, yellow, with chocolate icing, and a single candle, and I stood at the line and I sang. I have no voice, but I sang the whole of it. She sat with her hands folded and her face composed, and when it was done she said, “Thank you, Wendell. That was very kind.” I held the cake out and she leaned forward and blew out the candle. I asked if she had made a wish.

“Yes,” she said.

“May I ask?”

“It won’t come true if I tell you.”

She smiled. It was a perfect smile, and I felt in my chest, quite distinctly, something that I can only call a draft.

I should say, too, that her hair had grown. It had come well below her shoulders, and it was in a condition I could not allow. On the Sunday following I brought down the kitchen scissors, a towel, and a chair. She sat very still. I cut it level with the jaw, in the style of the 1950s, with a curl at the ends that I made with a warm iron and a wet comb, and when I had done I held up Mother’s hand mirror so that she might see. She looked for a long time.

“You look like a girl in a picture,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

I swept up the hair myself and kept it, in an envelope, in the ledger, behind the page for Day 168.

Now. I will pass over the summer. It was hot in the house, and I am told the room below stays cool, which is a mercy. I kept the cuff cleaned and the towel changed. We got through the second dozen of the Proverbs. She asked once, in July, whether I had ever been in love. I said that I had not, in the usual way. She said, “That’s all right,” in a voice so gentle that I left the room without taking the tray.

And now I come to it. I will take this slowly.

Last night, on Day 365, I could not sleep. I sat up in the kitchen with the lamp off and the clock going and I thought: *tomorrow is a year.* I had not prepared a thing. I realised I had not planned for it at all, and I think now that I did not because I did not wish to find out what it meant.

I thought: *I have kept her for one year. It will be eighteen before she is a woman. And I have asked myself every day since the twenty-fifth of December whether she has been taught.*

I do not know the answer.

I went down at four in the morning, which I have never done. I stood in the stairwell, in the dark, in my stockinged feet, with my hand on the steel, and I listened. One cannot hear through it, I have said so. But I listened all the same, and for the first time I understood what it was I was listening *for.*

Not crying. Not a struggle. I wanted her to be awake. I wanted to know that on that night, of all the nights, she was lying in the dark thinking of it, that she had, in her heart, some small thing to mark the day. I stood there until the bell rang five.

And then I knew what I had to do, and I went upstairs and I took down the Rexall calendar from the kitchen wall, the one with the covered bridge, and I put it in the stove.

NORA

The first thing I forget is my mother’s laugh.

I don’t know when. Nobody warns you. You don’t wake up one day and *lose* it, you just go to find it, the way you reach into a pocket, and it’s a little farther away than it used to be. I can hear the shape of it. I can tell you it went up at the end. But I can’t hear it, and when I try, my brain gives me somebody else’s, a woman on a commercial, a teacher, and I put it down at once the way you put down a thing that’s too hot.

That’s how it goes. Not all at once. In pieces. Like a coat left on a bus.

I’m fifteen. I know it because of the cake. Yellow, with chocolate icing, and a candle I didn’t want to blow out, and I told him I made a wish. I didn’t. I’d tried to think of one and there wasn’t anything big enough, and anything small enough was just *out*, outside, a sidewalk, a bowl of cereal, a door that opens from the inside. So I blew out the candle and I let him think I had a secret.

He likes that. He likes it when I’m a person with a secret. It makes me *real* to him, the way a house isn’t a home till somebody’s left a light on.

I have worked out his weather. I’m good at it now. I know the faces: the one for *pleased*, which is wide and wet, and the one for *wounded*, which is small, and the one for *thinking*, which is the worst, because then he goes quiet, and his thumb goes round and round on his knuckle, and I know something is being added to a column.

I know what he wants. That’s the thing. I know it so well, I could draw it.

He wants me to be happy here.

Not *act* happy. He doesn’t care about acting. He’s had a year of acting, and he’s smart enough to see through it, a little, at the edges. He wants it to be *true.* He wants to come down the stairs at four o’clock and find a girl who looks at the door and *wants him to come in.* And I’m so good at the face now that I think sometimes he can almost see it, and the almost kills him.

I think that’s why he keeps looking at the scar.

I do other things in here, too. I’m the girl who talks to a doll. I’m sorry, but I am. It sits on the end of the shelf where he put it back when the chain got shorter, where I can see it from the cot but can’t reach it. She has a melted left hand, a stump, black and glossy as a licorice. I’ve named her Christmas. I tell her things in my head. She looks at me with that cheerful, unbothered face, and she never says *you’re being paranoid, baby*, she never says *can you not.*

I tell her the news. *Today he cut the crusts too short. Today he sang flat.* I tell her what I think about the pigeon, and I don’t tell her what I did with the bones. I put them in a row and I looked at them, small to large, and I thought, *this is how you make a person out of nothing,* and then I put the plate out and wished I hadn’t.

I’ve stopped saying the number. I stopped on Day 88, and I’ve never started again. It’s his.

But that’s not the same as not counting. I count other things. Apples, I’m up to a hundred and ninety-one. I count the steps. I count the days that he’s smiled, the ones when he’s said *my dear*, the Sundays on which the towel came back warm. I keep them in my head in a different place, not the pocket, the pocket’s full, somewhere deeper, a room in the back, where nothing goes but facts.

I don’t know why I’m doing it. I think it’s just because I can’t stop.

I think, honestly, it’s because somebody should.

WENDELL

I did it at noon.

I had taken the precaution of bringing the television. It is a small thing, a combination set with a handle, a tube and a cassette slot in one case, which I bought in the spring at a yard sale in Marlow for four dollars. I had taken some trouble in the months previous to record certain items, from the evening broadcasts, on the old machine. I had them labelled. *Day 5. Day 33. Day 88.* I do not know quite what I intended. A man collects.

On the folding chair I sat the set, and I plugged it into the extension cord I had run down the thirteen steps and along the wall, and I turned it to face her.

“I have something for you,” I said. “It is a little hard. I want you to understand that I give it to you because you are ready.”

She looked at it. I saw her see what it was. I saw her face go through the weather and come out calm, and calm is the thing I dread.

“All right,” she said.

I pushed the cassette in. There was the grey sizzle, and the blue, and then the picture.

It was the anniversary segment. They had aired it the night before, on the local station, at ten past six. I will say that I had watched it already, upstairs, with the lamp off, and I had been surprised by how short it was. Ninety seconds. There was a reporter in a red coat standing in front of a bus shelter on Dilworth, with the traffic going behind her, and she said *one year ago today*, and then there was the school photograph, the one with the blue jacket, and the number to call.

Then they cut to Mrs. Pruitt.

I should say that I had not seen her in months, not since the third week of the search. She has been, in the interim, a thing on the news that one does not look at too closely. She was sitting on a sofa. A grey sofa with an afghan over the arm. She had lost a good deal of weight, and her hair had gone dull and been pulled back flat, and she held in her lap, in both hands, a pair of small socks, a girl’s, that were not new, with a hole in the toe.

I went rigid in the chair. I had not known about the socks.

“My name is Diane Pruitt,” she said. “I’m Nora’s mother.” She stopped. She looked down at the socks, and then at the camera, and I will not say what her face did. It does not belong in the book.

“Nora, I don’t know if you can hear this. They say you can’t. The police have been very good, and I’ve been told, I’ve been told that it’s, that at this point the...that they’ve scaled back the number of people on the case, because there haven’t been any, there isn’t anything new. Some of them think you ran away.” She took a breath that shook. “And that’s okay. If you did. I want you to know that’s okay. I’m not mad. I’m not mad at you, honey. If you’re somewhere and you’re scared to come home, you can come home. I’m just going to leave the door.”

The reporter said something about a tip line.

“I’ve been doing a lot of laundry,” said Mrs. Pruitt, on the screen, suddenly, almost laughing. “I don’t know why. I keep thinking you’ll need something clean.” And then, in a voice like a thing coming apart on a seam: “I looked up the song. I finally looked it up. The one I always sing. I’ve been singing it wrong the whole time, Nora, did you know that? Did you know I had the words wrong? Why didn’t you *tell* me?”

I reached for the button.

“Don’t,” said Nora.

It was the first time in a year she had given me an order.

I took my hand away. I do not know why I did. I sat there on Father’s folding chair, with the set shining blue on my knees, and I watched the girl on the cot, and I understood that I had made a mistake.

She was not crying. That was what was wrong. She was watching the woman on the screen with her mouth slightly open, and her face had gone entirely smooth, and in her hands, in her lap, she was doing something with the hem of her sleeve: pulling it, over and over, into a thin tight cord.

Mrs. Pruitt said, “If you can hear me, Nora, if you can hear any of this, I want you to know I’m learning the words. I’m going to get them right. I’m going to know them all by the time you...” And she put the little socks against her face.

The picture went to a car dealership.

I switched off the set. The room was very quiet. I became aware of my own breath, and of the light, and of the pale concrete, and of the small girl on the cot with her sleeve wound tight around two fingers, and I heard myself say, in a voice I hardly knew, “Nora.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m okay.”

“You are not okay.”

“No,” she said. She looked up at me. “But I’m not going to be loud.”

I stood there with the set in my arms. I thought: *this is not how it was supposed to go.* I had planned a lesson. I had planned that she should see how the world had given her up, so that she might lay down her hope, and take up her home. I had a speech. I had a verse. I had even thought of what I should do if she wept: I had a handkerchief.

I did not have anything for a girl who sat with her face turned toward me and said, very quietly, “Thank you for showing me.”

I want to record what I did next, as I did it.

I put the television down. I crossed the line. I had never done that without the tray in my hands, not since Christmas, not once. I crossed it, and I knelt, with my knees on the black and white tile, and I took her two small hands in mine, the way one takes the hands of the very old, and I said:

“I will not let anything happen to you.”

I felt her hands go still in mine.

“I know,” she said.

NORA

When he’s gone I sit with my hands in my lap. They’re still warm where he held them. I don’t wipe them.

I hear him on the stairs. I hear him cross the floor, the long soft tread, and then something I haven’t heard in a year. A small, particular quiet. The upstairs clock, which has rung every hour of my life since the thirtieth of September, gives a half-stroke, a hiccup, and stops.

He’s stopped it. I know that. I know it the way you know somebody has taken a chair out from under you.

At four, there’s no tube. At six, he doesn’t come with the supper. It’s twenty minutes late, and then an hour, and I sit with my face to the door, my body very straight, and I think, *this is it.* *He’s finished with me. This is the day he stops pretending.*

At nine he comes, and it isn’t the tray.

It’s a card. He pushes it through a slot I’ve never seen at the base of the door, a narrow flap I’d have said was a drain, and it slides across the tile and stops against my foot. In the tiny typed letters.

HOUSE RULES (Revised)

We say please and thank you.

We keep our voices low.

We keep our room tidy.

We are grateful.

We do not count.

I read it three times.

And I understand. I understand all at once, with my skin, with my whole spine, what he’s done. The clock. The calendar he must have burned. The day he’s never going to name again. He’s taken the one thing I had left that was wholly his, the *number*, and he’s taken it away, so that now it’s not even *his*. It’s nobody’s. It’s gone.

I don’t know what day it is.

I don’t know what *year.*

I sit on the cot, and I watch the bulb, and I try to work it out. A year, a year, maybe a year and a day, but it could be two, couldn’t it, it could be any, it could be *any* number, and there’s nobody to tell me. I’ve got my apples. I’ve got my Sundays. I’ve got a hundred and ninety-one of something and a stump of a doll, and the walls come in an inch.

At ten the light goes out.

I lie in the dark. I’m shaking. I put my hand in front of my face, and it isn’t there, and I’ve started to be afraid, in a way I wasn’t even on the first night, because the first night I at least knew where I was. The first night I had the squares.

I say, in my head, *Mom.*

And I don’t hear her laugh. I hear a woman in a commercial. And then, very small, from some deep room in the back of me, where I keep the things that are only facts, I hear the other thing. *I’ve been singing it wrong. Did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?*

I put my fist in my mouth.

I don’t make a sound. That’s the most important thing. I don’t make a *sound.* I lie on my side in a quilt that has stopped smelling like a store and now smells like me, and I cry without any noise at all, in the way you learn to cry in a house where somebody’s sleeping, with my whole body going and nothing coming out of it, until I’m wrung out and cold and the shaking stops.

And then, for no reason, I start to count.

Not the number. I’m not going to count the number. They can have the number.

I count what he owes.

*One. A bus stop.*

*Two. A birthday. My fifteenth. A yellow cake. I did not ask for it.*

*Three. Mom’s laugh.*

I do it in a new place. Not the pocket. Not the back room. A third place, one I didn’t know I had, low down, behind my ribs. It’s quiet there, and cold, and very clean. It’s got two columns.

*Four,* I say. *A song.*

I say it again, as if it’s a prayer. *A song.* Then I say it as if it’s a bill.

Thirty-two black squares. Thirty-two white. A number that was always going to be thirty-two, and a man who knew it, and thought it was kindness. I lie in the dark with my hand in front of my face, and I find that I can see it after all. Not the hand. The ledger. Green, with a cloth spine. Ruled in two columns.

His is called *Owed.* So is mine.

I don’t know how many days there are. I don’t know how many pages. But I can feel, in the cold clean room behind my ribs, the first line going down, in a hand as small and level as his own, and I think of the way he says it. *There is a great deal of ledger left.*

*Yes,* I think. *There is.*

I fall asleep before the dark runs out. It’s the first time in a year that I haven’t said goodnight to anyone.

-