The Night I Tried to Leave

She let the phone ring four more times before she crossed the kitchen, and she crossed it of her own decision, the brown-ink proof still folded in her fist, past Marek's hand that hung now in the air where her arm had been a moment ago and did not follow her. The fourth stair sang under her on the way up the dark stairwell. She had stopped counting the eleven treads a week ago. Tonight she counted them again, because counting was a thing she could hold, and at the top the cold came off the landing window in a steady sheet and the black telephone sat in its little pool of nothing and went on ringing.

She picked it up between rings, so that her uncle would not hear it cut off and know exactly which ring she had broken.

"Sabine." The warmth poured down the line, and tonight she heard it for what it was, a thing arranged for her the way her mother had arranged a room. "I've been trying you for an hour. The girl at the inn says the clerk never came down. They're worried about him, sweetheart. In this weather a man can walk off that road and not be found till the thaw."

"The roads are bad," she said. She kept her voice even and gave him nothing, the way she would have wanted to be given nothing, and she watched her own breath go white against the dark glass.

"They are." A pause, and in the pause she heard, faint, the second breath beside his receiver that had been there on every call, the listener who was never named. "Which is why I want you out of there before they close past saving. Sweetheart, listen to me. I have spoken to a man who knows about these orders, and what I'm told frightens me. The guardianship can be set aside if the ward is found to be at risk. If a man is keeping a grieving girl in a house at the end of a shut road, against family who want her, with the doors locked and the staff his own. It does not matter what is true. It matters what it looks like. And it looks, my darling, exactly like what it is."

The honey had a wire in it now. She felt the wire go in under her ribs, cold, precise, and she understood that the mask had not slipped so much as turned: he had stopped pretending the threat was the weather.

"You're saying you could take me from him," she said.

"I'm saying I am the only one trying to. There's a deadline on you, Sabine, whether you believe me or not. The accounts lock for the quarter on Friday and a great many things have to be in order before then, things that are easier with your name on them and a great deal uglier without. Come down tonight. I'll send a car to the bend, the boy can drive it up as far as the gate. One signature, one short drive, and you are warm and safe and out of that man's reach by morning. Or stay, and let me find out from a court what he has been doing to you up there in the dark."

She stood very still on the cold landing with the proof of his theft in her hand and his voice in her ear naming Marek the thing Marek was being framed as, and the horror of it was how well it fit, how a court would hear exactly this story and believe every word, the snowbound house, the locked east wing, the man twenty-two years older with his hand an inch from hers on the bannister.

"I'll think about it," she said, and put the receiver back in its cradle before he could pour anything more into her.

She did not go back down. She stood at the window where the one bar of signal lived, and below her the long flat white of the lake gave back what little light the snow held, and somewhere out there under the ice was the road that had killed her parents and Marek's wife both, the road her uncle wanted her on tonight, in the dark, in a car driven by a frightened boy.

And the want came up in her like a tide, the old want, the want she had been raised in. To be told. To be taken in hand. To put her name where a warm voice said put it and have the deciding be over, to be small and held and steered out of the cold by someone who was sure. Roland was sure. Marek was never sure, Marek had told her to her face that she should not rest in his certainty even when he was right, and the unbearable thing was that the uncertain man was the safe one and her own blood was the wire, and she was so tired of holding the two of them up to the light.

She would leave. Not with Roland. She would leave Roland's car at the bend and walk past it, walk down to Crayle herself in the dark on her own feet the way Tomas had walked up, and be no man's ward and no man's story, out of the house where every door she had begun to want was a door a court would hang Marek with. She would take herself out of the picture and the picture would have no girl in it to ruin anyone over.

She had her coat half on at the foot of the back stairs, the proof sheet buttoned inside it against her heart, her boots in her hand, when the kitchen door opened and the warmth fell across her and Marek was standing in it.

He looked at the coat. He looked at the boots in her hand. He did not move toward her and he did not reach, and the not-reaching was its own held breath.

"He told you it looks like what it is," Marek said. Not a question. He had heard enough of her side of it, or he simply knew the shape of Roland's mind. "And he is right that it does. So you decided to take the girl out of the story. To leave on your own feet so no one can say you were kept." A muscle moved in his jaw. "I would have thought of the same thing, at your age, in your shoes. It is a clean idea and it is wrong, and I am not going to stand in front of the door, because I told you I would not be the man who decides which way you walk."

"Then let me past."

"In a moment. There is something I have to say first, and then the door is yours." He stood with the foot of cold air around him, his hand at his side, and she watched him decide to spend something he had been holding for twelve years. "If you walk down that road tonight, you will not be taking the girl out of the story. You will be putting her on the exact stretch of ice that took your father and mother and took my wife, in the dark, in a thaw that has not come, and I will be the man who let his ward walk into the lake road after dark." His voice did not rise. It went lower, and rougher, and the flat iron came off it like a sheet coming off a covered thing. "I have done that once. I told a woman to wait out this weather, and she came to me through it anyway, because of something I said, and she did not come up the way she went down. I have spent twelve years making this house cold enough that no one would ever be in it that I could lose. And you walked in three weeks ago and warmed it, and I have been standing an inch off you ever since telling myself the inch is the whole of my honour. It is not the whole of it. The whole of it is that I cannot watch the lake take one more person I." And there he stopped, hard, the way a man stops at a cliff he did not know was there, and he did not finish the sentence, and the not-finishing was louder than any word he could have put in it.

She stood with one boot in her hand and the cold coming up off the stone floor, and the whole shape of him was in front of her at last, the locked wing and the ring on the chain and the iron, and it was not the shape of a jailer. It had never been the shape of a jailer. It was the shape of a man who had built a fortress out of his own guilt and had just, for her, opened one door of it and let her see the dark inside.

"You said the door was mine," she said, and her voice was not steady now.

"It is." He stepped back, deliberately, the length of one tread, clearing her path to the cold hall, giving her exactly what he had promised and nothing more, his hands open at his sides. "I will not stop you. I am only telling you the truth, which is the one thing I have, and you can weigh it and walk anyway. That is yours too."

She looked at the open door and the dark hall beyond it and the eleven stairs and the landing where the phone could ring again, and she looked at the man who had just told her the truest thing he owned and then stepped out of her way, and the want and the wire and the cold floor and her father's proof against her heart all came up at once, and she did not know, standing there with one boot on and one in her hand, whether she was about to walk out of the house or set the boot down.

And then the light in the kitchen behind him guttered, and went out, and every other light in Hollowmere went with it, the dark dropping over the whole house at once like a lid, and from somewhere down the black valley, faint and certain, came the long low growl of an engine climbing the closed road in the dark.