Unburning: Chapter 46

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[CLARITY]

The text comes right on time on Tuesday, and I read it twice because the first time leaves a taste like soap in my mouth, bitter and thin.

Remember the family friend I told you about, who was like a father to me? Silas? He’s here too. It’s great.

Silas Locke is at that camp. All month. The man who can read Robin across a room is going to have a month of rooms to do it in.

And It’s great. means just that: it’s great. That’s the part I sit with. He’s not being brave and it’s not code for anything. Silas is one of Robin’s people; Robin loves him and the month at camp with the man who raised him will have good mornings in it, real ones, and Robin will come home with those mornings in his pocket along with everything else. Great being true is worse than great being a lie. I don’t have anywhere to put that, so I move on.

That’s lucky. Tell him hi if that’s allowed. Goodnight, Robin.

Goodnight, Claire.

I bring the Book down and record the day. June 16. S. at camp, teaching, all month.

Then, because Esther’s text from this afternoon is still sitting there — Thursday still good, mija? Early, before the heat again — I answer that too. Thursday’s been on the calendar since Tomasa made her calls. The others want to see it for themselves.

Thursday’s good. I’ll bring water.

Wednesday I spend the daylight mining the only archive of the first timeline that exists, which is me. The Book open to the FIRST TIME page, a pot of tea, and hours of trying to walk back through a summer I lived once already, room by room... I only recorded four lines in the book, and three of them are about Caden. It’s not that the records are sealed. There are no records. The world that summer happened in is gone, and the only record is what’s in my own memory. I flip through the news sites, trying to watch for things that feel familiar, but I can’t come to any conclusions that feel like they mean anything.

At ten I put the phone on the cushion and wait for it to buzz.

It doesn’t.

Ten-oh-five. I wash the mug. Ten-twelve, I dry it, which it did not need. At ten-twenty, I sit back down and put my hands in my lap and leave the phone alone, because the rule is the rule I made: a night with no text is the signal, and one late text isn’t itself anything to worry about, just another Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. Same math.

At 10:38 it buzzes.

Long day. Evening session ran late. Goodnight, Claire.

Something happened tonight. He’s fine, or he couldn’t have sent anything. “Evening session” is carrying more than two words should have to carry, and he’ll tell me what it was when telling me is possible, and my job — the entire job, the one I volunteered for when I packed the sandwich and said goodbye at the gate — is to not ask. Not right now. I type Goodnight, Robin and turn off the lamp and sit in the dark a minute before going to bed.

On Thursday, I rise early, before the heat, the pull-out already has the Buick in it when I come around the rise. White and patient, nose toward the scrub.

There are two heads in it.

I park the Honda and do the arithmetic while I’m setting the brake. Esther, gray braid, driver’s side. And in the passenger seat, hair up, sunglasses pushed onto her head, already waving through the windshield: Paige.

Nobody told me Paige was coming. There is no version of asking why Paige came that doesn’t sound like a question, so when she comes across the gravel and squeezes my shoulder and says “Hey, you,” smelling like rosemary soap and sunscreen, I say “Hey” back, and take the water bottle she hands me, because she’s brought water bottles, because she’s helpful, because of course she is.

“I made her come,” Esther says, hauling the cooler out of the trunk. “Extra hands.”

“Happy to,” Paige says. To me: “You look better than last time.” Which is true, and kind, and lands like a rock hitting me in the back.

The second vehicle arrives while we’re unloading — a gray Subaru with a Stockton High Employee parking sticker and two women in it. Margaret gets out of the driver’s side the way she does everything, all at once, and has me by both shoulders before the dust settles. “Darling. Look at you. Esther, she’s too thin, what are we doing about it.”

“I brought sandwiches,” Esther says.

Reyna comes around the car more quietly, a canvas bag over her shoulder and both hands occupied with a large glass jar, which she hands to me to hold while she gets her hat, the way you’d hand someone your coffee. Someone’s punched holes in the lid.

There’s a white mouse in it, sitting on a fold of paper towel with a large slice of red apple and some sunflower seeds, cleaning its face.

“Don’t name it,” Reyna says. “It’s borrowed.”

We walk in from the pull-out, five women and a mouse in a jar, and the circle announces itself the way it does — that pressure at the edge of hearing that arrives and then quits, ears popping on a plane you’re not on. The sigil on my thigh warms to it, a hand-span of my own skin keeping time, and I keep my face doing what everyone else’s face is doing, which is squinting at the thing in the scrub.

It’s bigger.

Nobody says anything. Margaret and Reyna and Paige haven’t been here before to know, and it’s a small enough amount that I second guess myself at first. Esther and I stand back to let the others do their own thing first, before we measure it again.

Margaret walks the edge first, a quarter of the border with her hands behind her back, and Reyna stands where Tomasa stood and where Esther stood before that, head tilted like she’s listening to a radio between stations, and Esther unwinds the knotted cord from her bag and holds one end out to me without a word, because I’m the other pair of hands here.

We walk it across. She reads the knots, and reads them again the other way, and says, “Thirty-seven.”

“It was thirty-one and a half last Thursday,” Margaret says. “Tomasa called me from the road.”

“Twenty-six on the third,” Esther says. “Twenty when Claire found it.”

Nobody does the arithmetic out loud. The wind moves through the creosote and the creosote ticks and the circle sits there being even and pale and thirty-seven feet across, and Margaret finishes her quarter turn and comes back to us and says, “Well. Tomasa’s right. She’s always right, don’t tell her.”

“The birds,” Reyna says. “You wrote them down when you found them?”

“Yes.”

“Anything useful? Anything that looked like something?”

“No,” I say. “Six dead birds. They were just — dead.” True. To me it was six small horrors in the gray scrub, positions and all, and I drew them because the Book is for drawing things, and no part of me knows what they mean. If they mean.

“Alright,” Reyna says, and takes the jar back from me, and that’s the end of the birds.

She carries the jar to the edge, crouches, unscrews the lid, and tips the mouse into her hand, kneeling down to let it climb onto the ground just outside the boundary line. The mouse takes its time, but crosses the line after a moment, nibbling curiously at the dried grass and brush in the circle.

Nothing happens.

It sniffs a gray twig and sits up. It cleans its face again, the world’s most relaxed test instrument, and then it goes investigating along a line of dead scrub, unhurried, doing every ordinary thing a mouse does, alive the entire time.

“The birds died,” Margaret says, to nobody, to the theory.

“The birds died at the edge,” Esther says. “Facing out.” She watches the mouse a while longer. Her thumbs are hooked in her back pockets, my dad’s old flannel rolled to the elbows, and I have known her my whole life and I know what it looks like when she’s rebuilding something in her head from the foundation. “We don’t know what this does,” she says finally. “We’ve been saying it could kill. We don’t actually know that, other than the plants and the birds Claire found the first time.”

“So we find out,” Margaret says.

“So I find out,” Esther corrects her.

The argument that follows is short and conducted almost entirely in eyebrows. Margaret loses it. Reyna doesn’t enter it; she’s rewrapping the empty jar in its dishtowel like a woman who has decided the outcome is none of her business and the jar’s welfare is.

There’s no rope. I keep waiting for somebody to produce a rope, a line, anything, and nobody does, because really, what is a rope going to do if it kills her, and then Esther steps over the dead line like she’s stepping into a garden bed she doesn’t want to compact.

I count four in and four out with my nails in my palms.

She stands there. She takes ten slow steps toward the middle, stops, and turns all the way around once, unhurried, her boots loud in a way boots aren’t — and that’s when I place what’s wrong, which is that they’re the only sound coming from in there. The wind’s moving out here. It isn’t moving in there, or if it is, it’s moving quietly. Four in. Four out.

“Esther,” Margaret says, conversational, from the line.

“It’s quiet,” Esther reports, in the voice she’d use to say the pilot light’s out. “Air’s off. Cool where it shouldn’t be.” She stands another moment, her head turning slow, like a woman in a dark kitchen waiting for her eyes to adjust. “There’s nothing here.”

“Nothing how?” Margaret says.

“Nothing at all.” Esther looks down at the pale ground, stoops, scoops up the mouse and then walks back out of the circle the way she walked in, stepping over the line again. She dusts her free hand off on the leg of her jeans, and holds the hand with the mouse out for Reyna, who takes the lid off the jar so the mouse can return to his apple and seeds.

“Well,” she says. “It didn’t kill me.”

Nobody has any answers, after that. Reyna walks in, looks around for a moment, and comes back out again, shaking her head. “I can’t tell what it is, either. Tomasa said something about setting up a watch-ward outside?”

Esther nods. “So when whoever did it comes back, we’ll know.”

Building the watchline takes longer than any other part of what we’ve done so far.

It’s not showy. Margaret pulls up a GPS app on her phone and she and Reyna bend their heads over the screen to pick a point for the center, and slowly walk out into the brush to flag a ring with small pieces of white fabric, two hundred yards out — far enough that whatever the circle is doing stays out of the working, near enough that nothing crosses toward it unnoticed. Then we all walk it, the queens, Paige, and me, pockets full of rock salt and round grey garden stones from a bucket Margaret brought, to mark the edge first.

After we’ve marked it, Esther goes around the circle again with me following her, quarter by quarter, reciting a spell under her breath at every quarter and crossquarter point and adding more salt, blessing it as she goes. It takes two hours. Paige goes out and takes the salt bucket for the last quarter and is thanked for it.

“It won’t stop anyone,” Esther tells me, on the last anchor. “That’s not what it’s for. Whoever made that” — a nod at the circle — “will come back to look at it. They always come back. When anything with a heartbeat crosses this line, we’ll know — that something came, which way it was headed, and roughly what: grown or small, man or woman if the working gets a decent look. It won’t tell us a name or a face, but it’s a start. More would take blood, and we’re not doing that out here.”

“And it tells you?”

“It tells me.” She seats the last stone and stands up with her hand on her knee. “And it tells you too. You’re local, mija. You’re already keeping an eye on things for us, you’re the one who stands a chance of getting here fast enough to see who it is.”

So that’s that. Somewhere between the stone and the sentence I’ve been made the watchwoman for their stakeout, first responder for a hunt I can’t steer, and the only thing to say is what I say, which is, “Okay. Whatever helps.” And then we gather up the materials, and go back to the cars, and have lunch.

Esther’s brought a cooler full of sandwiches, and we eat at the vehicles, standing up, the cooler on the Buick’s bumper. Margaret eats like she’s starving, while Reyna spreads a gas-station map on the Subaru’s hood and draws on it in ballpoint with a sandwich in her free hand: the road, the pull-out, the circle with today’s number next to it, the watch-ring around it drawn in dashes with the anchor count. The queens talk shop over the hood. Distances, dates, who calls whom. Paige stands at my elbow being easy to stand next to, laughing in the right places, refilling Margaret’s water without being asked.

At some point in the lunch I do the geometry: Paige is the closest one of us to the circle. Not by much. A few feet. Everyone else drifted toward the cars the way you drift away from a drop-off, and Paige is at the edge of the gathering with her sandwich, facing it, looking at the pale ground the way you look at the ocean.

Nobody else notices. There’s nothing to notice.

It’s Esther, packing the cooler, who says it — easy, over her shoulder, to me, in front of everyone: “And your Robin’s still up at that camp?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Keeping busy.”

“Mm. Good he keeps his commitments.” And she goes back to the ice packs, because to her it’s nothing, a thing you say, an aunt being an aunt — and Paige’s face doesn’t change at all, which is how I know she heard it. One look, half a second, filed wherever Paige files things. Camp. She doesn’t ask. She hands Margaret the last sandwich and tells her a story about the bathhouse door, and everyone laughs, including me.

The goodbyes run long the way they do. Margaret’s hug moves ribs. Reyna presses the jar against my arm so I can say goodbye to the mouse, which I’m apparently doing now, and tells me to call if the line speaks. Esther holds my face for a second and doesn’t say anything at all, which from her is a paragraph. Paige hugs me from the side, careful, her old shoulder-squeeze, nothing near my neck — she learned that in a kitchen back in the spring and never mentioned it — and says, “Don’t be a stranger, Clairey.”

Then the Buick and the Subaru pull out one after the other, and the dust hangs, and I stand in the pull-out alone with the water jugs, two hundred yards from a ring of salted stones with my name keyed into it, and thirty-seven feet of nothing in the middle.

The lamp, the loveseat, the Book.

I draw it the way Reyna drew it, but in my book, to my scale: the circle, and the number 37 with the date, and around it, in dashes, the new ring, with the little marks for the anchor stones. Two circles in the desert now. I look at the page for a while.

The entry under it, short, precise, the way I’ve tried to record all of the entries in the book: June 18. Circle 37 ft. Mouse crossed — alive, recovered. Esther entered — no effect. “Nothing at all.” Watch-line set, ~200 yd. Keyed: E + C. Paige present.

I don’t write anything interpretive, because I don’t have an interpretation. I have a wrong model with a hole in it, a hunt pointed at somebody I can’t prove exists, and a tripwire with my name on it. I hope it helps. That’s the part I keep arriving at: everyone out there today was careful and competent and right by every rule they know, and I stood in the middle of it lying to all of them and hoping it won’t make a difference. Because I can’t imagine how telling them could help, either.

At ten the phone buzzes, on time. His is short, nothing to report or record. Mine back:

Aunt E and some of her friends came out today. Long day of yard work. Goodnight, Robin.

Goodnight, Claire.

I turn off the lamp. A week from today is the twenty-fifth and the renewal for Robin. Too early to think about, not too early to worry. The Book stays open on the file cabinet, the new page up, two rings and a number, drying in the dark.

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