Part 5:
I know. I’ll explain tomorrow. 9:00? He thought about it. He thought about Emma at school. He thought about his $2. He thought about the look on her face in the parking lot when she’d said, “You have a good face.” 9:00, he said. Thank you, Ryan. Celeste? Yes? Who are you? There was a pause. A long one. “Someone who owes you a debt,” she said.
“I’ll see you in the morning.” She hung up. Ryan held the phone against his ear for another few seconds after the line went dead, listening to the silence on the other end like he might be able to hear something in it. He set the phone down on the coffee table. He got up. He went to the window. He looked down at Birch Street at the laundromat sign, at an old man walking a small brown dog, at the gray October sky pressing down on the rooftops like a hand on a shoulder.
Somewhere, very faintly, he could hear a siren. It wasn’t coming for him, not yet. He stood at the window for a long time. The light outside began to change the way it does in the late afternoon in Vermont in October, going from gray to a deeper gray to a kind of bronze that settles over everything before the dark comes on.
Ryan watched it change. He didn’t move. He was thinking about Carl Voss’s lanyard. He was thinking about the way Martin Delaney hadn’t been able to look at him. He was thinking about Emma’s hand on top of his at the kitchen table, sticky with something he couldn’t identify, and about how he had told her they were going to be okay.
He didn’t know yet that four black SUVs were already being scheduled to drive up his street in the morning. He didn’t know yet that the woman he had given his last $40 to owned a company with 18,000 employees on three continents. He didn’t know yet that the man who had framed him was, at that very moment, sitting at his kitchen table across town, pouring himself a third glass of whiskey, believing he had gotten away with it.
He stood at the window as the bronze faded out of the sky. Down on the street, the old man with the brown dog turned the corner and disappeared. A car passed. Then another. Then nothing for a long time. Ryan Hale stood at the window in a second-floor apartment above a laundromat in a small town in Vermont with $2 in his wallet and a 7-year-old daughter who believed him when he said things were going to be okay.
And he waited for the morning to come. He didn’t sleep well. That wasn’t unusual. Ryan hadn’t really slept well since Marlene died, not the way other people talked about sleeping, where you closed your eyes and woke up and the time between had felt like a gift. For him, sleep was more like an intermission. You sat in the dark for a while and waited for the rest of the show to start again, but this time was worse than usual.
He lay on his back in the bedroom that was really just a closet with a mattress in it because he’d given Emma the bigger room 2 years ago when she’d started asking for a space for her books. And he stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like the state of Michigan. He stared at it for so long that at some point around 3:00 in the morning, the state of Michigan became a horse and then a dog and then the face of Carl Voss grinning with his thinning hair combed forward. He got up.
The kitchen floor was cold through his socks. He filled the kettle. He stood at the counter waiting for the water to boil. Out the kitchen window, the sky was still full dark and across the alley, the windows of the building opposite were mostly dark, too, except for one on the third floor where a woman Ryan had never met stood at her own kitchen counter doing what he was doing, her face slit blue by the glow of a phone screen.
They did not wave at each other. They’d never acknowledged each other, but Ryan found himself oddly grateful she was there. The kettle clicked. He poured the water over a tea bag that had already been used once. He’d started doing that last month. One tea bag, two cups. Marlene would have laughed at him. She’d been the kind of person who bought fresh flowers every Saturday, not because they were rich, they weren’t, but because she said it kept the house from knowing they were broke.
He still thought about that. The idea that a house could know things. He carried the tea into the living room and sat on the couch with the cup on his knee and watched the window for a while. Just watching the dark go a little less dark, a little less dark until it was the color of wet cement and then the color of dust and then, finally, morning.
He looked at the clock. 7:14. He had an hour and 46 minutes before Celeste knocked on his door or didn’t. It occurred to him that she might not come. That this whole thing might be the kind of odd little episode a man has when he’s had a very bad day, where a stranger says something kind to him in a parking lot, and for a few hours he convinces himself the world has noticed him.
He half expected 9:00 to pass without anything happening. He woke Emma at 7:30. He made her toast with the last of the peanut butter. He brushed the back of her hair while she brushed the front, because she couldn’t see the back in the mirror, and she didn’t trust him to do the front. She put on her boots with the hole in the toe. He walked her to the corner where Rosa, her grandmother, met her on school days.
Rosa was a small woman in her early 60s with a face that had been beautiful once and was still interesting now. She wore a red coat that was too thin for the weather, and a scarf that Marlene had knitted her the winter before she got sick. Rosa saw Emma from half a block away and opened her arms without saying anything, and Emma ran the last 20 ft into them.
“Ryan,” Rosa said over Emma’s head. “Rosa.” “You look terrible.” “Thanks.” “Are you eating?” “I’m fine, Rosa.” “That’s not what I asked.” Ryan didn’t answer. Rosa studied him for a second, the way she studied everything, and then she nodded once, a small concession, and let it go. “You’ll pick her up at 5:00.” “I’ll pick her up at 5:00.
