BOUND BY BLOOD AND SILENCE

The steam wand at Wren’s had whistled on the same broken note since my first week in town, and somewhere along the way I had stopped hearing it as a fault. I heard it as eight forty.  I heard it as the third table from the window, the one with the wobble that made a full cup dangerous if you set it down too hard, the one nobody ever fought me for. I heard it as two years of mornings stacked one on top of another until they had acquired weight.

Nell had my cup waiting on the counter before I reached it.

She never wrote my name on anything. I noticed that during my second week and privately decided to be grateful for it. The truth was less flattering. Nell was lazy. She had stopped asking because she had stopped caring.

Both worked for me.

I counted out the coins and pushed them across the counter.

I had paid in cash so often that Nell no longer looked surprised, only faintly put upon.

"You want the seat by the radiator." She dragged a cloth across the counter, moving crumbs from one place to another place. "Sarah's leaving."

"I'm fine where I am."

"You're always fine where you are. It's a hundred degrees colder over there."

"I run warm."

"You run something." She flicked the cloth at a fly and missed. "Two of those muffins are from yesterday. I'm not telling you which."

“Then I suppose I’ll have to take my chances.”

“You’ve been taking chances for two years.”

She said it without looking at me.

I took my coffee and went to my table. The one facing the door.

I had chosen it on my first morning without thinking about why. By the time I noticed the pattern, I had already built a life around it, and pulling at the thread seemed more dangerous than leaving the thing intact. The door stayed where I could see it. The window stayed at my left. Anyone coming toward me had to cross half the room before getting to the table.

I didn’t think about any of that anymore.

At least, I tried not to.

Theo came in at eight fifty with his hood up and rain across the shoulders of a coat that had never been waterproof and had cost him too much to admit that. He set a paper bag on the table between us with the solemnity of an offering.

"Almond." He shook the water off his sleeve.  Some of it landed on the floor. Some, on my boot. "I still cannot believe you said the pistachio ones taste like soap."

"They do taste like soap."

"Nobody else thinks so."

"Nobody else has a palate."

He dropped into the chair opposite me and folded himself into it the way tall men do when furniture had been designed for people of a more reasonable height. He began peeling the wrapper from his pastry in one long, careful strip. He did that every time. I had watched him do it perhaps four hundred times and had never once seen him tear the paper.

He had a seminar at nine and he would be late for it. He was always late for it. Fenwick stopped commenting sometime in October.

"Your car's making a noise," he blurted.

"My car makes several noises. They're all intentional."

"There's a new one." He flattened the wrapper against the table and smoothed his thumb along the crease. “Under the front. Like a coin in a dryer."

I put the cup down. "Which side?"

"Left."

"Left facing the car or left sitting in it?"

He looked up. "Is there a difference?"

"There is an enormous difference and you know there is. I explained it to you in February, at length, while you pretended to be asleep."

“Driver’s side.” He grinned. He had known the whole time. He had wanted to see my face slightly in horror whenever someone mentioned my car.

I let him have it. 

The Alfa was the only thing about the old life I had let myself keep, not brought out of it, since nothing came out of that house with me.

A 1972 Giulia in the exact shade of green they had stopped making because producing it had been expensive and difficult. I had bought it under a name my father had never heard, with money I had earned myself, and there was nobody at Ashcombe I could explain the size of that victory to.

Bianca would have understood.

Bianca was six hundred miles from here and kept a phone in a shoebox beneath a loose floorboard. We spoke on the fourteenth of every month.

Today was the ninth.

A girl stopped at the end of the table on her way out, one of the ones from the Thursday seminar. Her hair was wet and she had keys in her hand.

"Sorry, I love your coat," she said gingerly. "Where's it from?"

"It was my mother's."

That wasn’t true. My mother’s coats were on hangers in a house six hundred miles away that didn’t have a room for me in it anymore. It was a good lie all the same.

"It's beautiful."

"It is." I turned the cuff over so she could see how the seam ran. "Look at that. Nobody finishes anything like that now. They can, they just won't pay someone to do it."

She laughed and said something about a market in town and went out into the rain with her collar up. I watched her go and knew four things about her that she had not told me. She had come from the bus, not from halls, because her shoes were soaked at the toe and dry at the heel. She had money at home and none here, because the keys were on a fob from a car she was not driving this term. She had asked about the coat because she wanted a way to stand at the table, and she had wanted a way to stand at the table because of Theo.

It wasn’t my intention to know any of that. It came whether I wanted it or not, the way other people hear a song they hate in a shop and find themselves knowing all the words.

"She likes you," I teased.

Theo, still working on the wrapper, did not look up. "She likes my notes."

"She has your notes. She's had your notes since September."

He considered that with the air of someone doing long division. "Huh."

"Yes."

"Huh," he said again, and went slightly red at the ears. I dropped it, because there was a version of me that would have kept pulling and I have been trying not to be her.

"You could take it to that place in Hallam," Theo said.

"That place on Hallam puts modern bushings in cars built before their fathers were born."

"So you'll do it yourself."

"I'll do it myself."

"In the rain."

"In the rain." I broke the pastry in half and gave him the larger piece. He always bought and never ate enough. "You'd hold the light."

"I'd hold the light badly."

"You'd hold the light badly and complain about your back."

"My back is a legitimate medical situation."

"Your back is twenty-one."

He laughed with his mouth full, which made Nell look over. I laughed too. The laugh went on a beat longer than I expected it to.

Somewhere in the tail of it, I realized I hadn’t thought about my father in four days.

Four days. 

There had been a stretch at the beginning. That first winter, when he seemed to sit inside my chest like a stone I carried up every staircase in every building I entered. I had learned to put the stone down.

I could never throw it away. But could only to leave it in a room, shut the door, and get on with the morning. Lately there were days when I couldn’t remember which room I’d left it in.

"You've gone somewhere," Theo had stopped eating.

"I'm here."

"You do that.”

“Do what?”

“You go and your face stays." He wiped his fingers on a napkin, unbothered, having no idea he had said anything remotely true. "It's unnerving. Callum says you're a spy."

"Callum thinks the library is haunted."

"The library is haunted."

"The library has a boiler. You’re going to fail your seminar.”

“I’m already going to fail my seminar.”

“Then you should hurry.”

He ignored that.

"Are you coming Friday?"

"To what?"

"The thing at his house."

"The thing at his house is a room with a speaker in it."

"There'll be forty people."

"There'll be forty people in a room with a speaker in it."

He pointed the last piece of pastry at me. "You're a snob."

"I'm correct. Those aren't the same thing, though I understand how a person might confuse them."

"See, that." He stood and began the long business of getting his bag onto his shoulder without knocking over anything. "That's exactly what a spy would say."

Outside, the rain had thinned to the drizzle that made the whole town look like a photograph of itself.

Two boys were arguing over a bicycle in the road. A woman passed with a dog that had strong opinions about being walked. She glanced through the window at us.

I looked back.

She was nobody.

Ashcombe had eleven hundred students and one road worth the name. My father's people looked for people in cities. They looked for money moving, for a name surfacing where it shouldn't, for the gravity a girl like me exerted on the world around her, what a person left behind in a room when she had never once had to think about the cost of anything. I knew how they looked because I had grown up watching them do it to other people.

I had spent two years making myself unremarkable in a town where almost nothing ever happened.

"You'll be late," I said.

"I'm always late."

"You'll be later."

He reached the door, then turned around and walked backward into the rain.

"Vance." He held the door with his hip. "Friday."

The name still landed half a beat behind where my own would.

Dolly Vance. Vance was my mother's, before she traded it for a house with rules in it. I had taken that half out of spite. Dolly came off a laminated menu in a diner outside Harrisburg at four in the morning.

Bianca had been sitting across from me with a pen in her hand and no patience left.

Pick one now, she had said. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Now!

Nobody heard a girl called Dolly and pictured a house with a gate around it. I hated the name for eight months. Then, one afternoon, somebody said it across a crowded room and I turned around before I thought it through.

"I'll think about it."

"That's a no."

"That's a possibly."

"It's a no with manners," he said, letting the door go. The bell above it gave its small, bright ring.

Nell switched on the radio.

I sat with the cup cooling between my hands and listened to the morning continue around me without asking anything of it.

I knew exactly what kind of luxury that was.

I took it anyway.

I was fourteen minutes late by the time I crossed the quad. I didn’t not run.

That was the part I would remember. In cars. In safe houses. In rooms with the curtains taped down at the corners. There was a full minute in there where I could have moved faster and I chose not to, because the rain had stopped, because the light coming off the wet stone was a color grey I had learned to love about the place, because for the first time since I was eighteen years old I was a girl who was late for a lecture. Nothing worse than that.

A groundsman was scraping leaves off the path with a shovel. He said good morning. I said it back. Two years ago I would have made a note of him, the height, the hands, the direction he came from, anything unusual. I would have filed the details somewhere behind my teeth and carried on walking.

I had stopped doing that.

I had been proud of stopping.

Hoyt was warm in a way the rest of campus wasn’t. Warm and half-dark, smelling of wool drying on radiators. Aldiss was already talking when I entered, answering a question nobody had asked and looking wounded by the absence of one.

Two hundred and something heads faced the front. I took the aisle seat four rows from the back. I always took it. There was a fire door behind me.

I didn’t think about that any more than a person thought about which shoe went on first.

For eleven minutes I was a student. 

Aldiss said something about the collapse of a treaty. A girl near the front laughed at it alone, bravely. I wrote the date at the top of a clean page and left the rest blank because Aldiss took a while to get to his point, and I had learned to wait for him.

Then somebody sat down beside me.

There were nineteen empty seats in that row. I know the number because I counted them afterward, over and over. The way you press a bruise to see whether it still hurt.

I noticed his wrist first because his hand came to rest on the arm between us. The watch on it was old, thin, gold gone soft at the lugs.  The sort of watch a man his age didn’t buy for himself unless somebody dead had owned it first.

Then the shoes, which were wrong for a campus in November and wrong in a way that had cost money, and which had not been rained on, meaning he had come from a car. There was no parking on that side of Hoyt.

Then there was the stillness.

That was what put the cold through me.

Students shift and slouch and go through their bags and check the time and check it again. This one had not moved since he sat down. He had his coat folded over his knees rather than shoved under the seat. His attention remained at the front of the room. Everything about him screamed he had been raised somewhere that measured a man by how little he needed to fidget.

I had known a hundred men who sat like that. I grew up in a house full of them.

I put my pen down and started counting the people between me and the side exit. Twelve. Two of them asleep. One with headphones.

The counting was a thing my body did instead of the other thing it wanted to do. My father had paid a man four years to teach me the difference.

He didn't turn his head. He watched Aldiss like he was watching a lecture he intended to sit through.

Then he spoke.

"You're using the wrong name."