Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven: What Damian Learned

He had been standing in the car park for forty minutes.

Damian did not know this precisely. He had stopped looking at his watch at about the twenty-minute mark, when he realized that he had checked it eleven times and absorbed none of the information. He knew only that the snow had been falling when he arrived and was falling still, that his shoes had long since soaked through, and that somewhere in the long gray building on the hill, a woman he had wronged was sitting at a table, speaking to the one person in the world he most wanted to see.

Four Saturdays, he thought. This is the fourth.

He had come the first time in December, in a rented car, with a speech prepared. He had parked at the far end of the lot, rehearsed it twice in the mirror, and sat for an hour and ten minutes with his hands on the wheel. Then he had driven home. The second Saturday he had gotten as far as the visitors' center door. The third, he had spoken to the guard at the desk, and been told that Inmate 417 had not put his name on her approved list, and that he was welcome to submit a request, if he liked.

He had not submitted it.

It was not that he was afraid, he told himself. It was that he did not deserve the answer. If she said no, he would have to accept it. And if she said yes, he would have to look her in the eye, and say aloud what he had done, and he was not certain, yet, that he could say it without breaking in half.

So he came, and parked, and sat, and watched the snow.

The last three months had taught him a great deal, most of it humbling.

He had learned, for instance, that a man can resign from a company in a single morning and spend the next ten weeks discovering what he is without it. He had always assumed, in some unexamined corner of himself, that the title chief executive was a kind of skeleton: that if one took it away, there would still be a body underneath. He had not known there would be so little.

He had sold the apartment in the second week of November. It had not been difficult. He had walked through it once, alone, with an estate agent murmuring behind him about natural light and the generous master bath, and he had found, to his faint surprise, that he did not want a single thing in it. The sofa with its oatmeal pillows. The glass wall with its long view. The big bed in the room at the end of the hall. He had given the furniture to a charity and the rest to Ruth Delaney, who had put it, without comment, in the back of a van.

He lived now in a small two-room flat above a bakery on the east side. It had one window, a hissing radiator, a stove with two working rings, and a kitchen not much larger than a closet. It smelled, from five in the morning, of yeast and sugar. He had been astonished to discover that he liked it.

He had learned to make coffee. That had been first. It had taken him nine days, and a great deal of ruined water, and a woman at the café on the corner who had taken pity on him and written the ratios on a napkin. He kept the napkin taped to the cupboard door. Two tablespoons per six ounces. Not too hot. Be patient.

He had learned to cook, after a fashion. He could make eggs, now, and a passable soup, and a stew that tasted almost, but not quite, like a stew he remembered from a yellow kitchen. He had tried it eleven times. It was always wrong. He had begun to suspect that this was the point.

And he had learned, in the long cold hours of those evenings, what it was to be alone in a room with his own mind.

It was not a comfortable companion.

He had gone to see Tomas Reyes in November.

He had not called ahead. He had simply driven to the modest brick house in the western suburbs whose address he had found in the personnel files, and parked at the curb, and walked up a short cracked path to a green front door. A girl of about nineteen had answered, with a chemistry textbook under her arm and her father's broad, honest face. She had looked at him for a long moment without speaking.

"You're him," she said.

"I am."

"Papa's in the garden. Pruning the roses." Her chin lifted. "He told me you might come. He said if you did, I was to let you in, and not to say what I think."

"What do you think?"

"That you should be ashamed."

"I am."

"Good." She had held the door open. "Then you can go through."

Tomas had been kneeling in a bed of frozen earth with a pair of secateurs, his left arm still stiff, his cap pulled low against the cold. He had looked up, and his weathered face had gone still.

"Mr. Cross."

"Mr. Reyes. I don't expect you to welcome me."

"No."

"I wanted to say that I'm sorry. For the road. For what I said to the paramedics. For all of it." Damian's voice was not quite steady. "You pulled her out of that car. You saved her life, and mine, and Miss Marlowe's, I think, though she'd never say so. And I repaid you with an order to drive up a road you'd warned me about. I would like you to know that I understand what that was."

Tomas had set down the secateurs. He had wiped his hands slowly on his trousers. He had looked at the man before him, at the gray in his hair, the hollows under his eyes, the cheap overcoat, and something in the broad face had altered, very slightly.

"You came to my house," he said.

"Yes."

"You didn't send a lawyer."

"It seemed the wrong thing."

"It was the right thing." Tomas nodded, slowly. "I'll tell you something, sir. I've driven for rich men for twenty-six years. And the one thing I've learned is that most of them can't say sorry. They pay someone else to say it. They write a check." He gave a short, grim smile. "You did a hard thing. I won't forget it."

"I'm not asking you to forgive me."

"Good." Tomas extended a work-hardened hand. "I'm not offering. But I'll shake yours."

Damian had taken it. It was a rough, warm, strong hand, and when he left, ten minutes later, he found that his own eyes were stinging, and that he could not have said why.

"Damian."

The voice came across the snowy car park, quiet and a little unsteady, and he stood quite still.

She was standing perhaps twenty yards away, at the foot of the visitors' path, with her hood up and her hands in her pockets. Her face, in the white light, was small and pale and calm. She wore a gray wool coat he did not recognize and a scarf the color of old roses, and there was snow on her shoulders. She looked, he thought, with a sudden painful tightening of the throat, extremely well.

He took a half step, and stopped.

"Lena."

"What are you doing here?"

"I..." He faltered. "I come on Saturdays. I haven't gone in."

"Why not?"

"I haven't been approved."

"Ah." She considered that. "Have you asked?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not sure she'd say yes." He drew a rough breath, and the cold air burned his lungs. "And because I'm not sure I want to hear her say no."

Lena looked at him for a long moment. Snow drifted slowly between them, white and silent.

"That is the most honest thing you have ever said to me," she said.

"I've been practicing."

A small, wry movement touched the corner of her mouth. She crossed the car park, her boots squeaking in the snow, and stopped a few feet away, close enough that he could see the pale scar at her temple, almost invisible now, a thin silver line beneath her hairline. He had not seen it since the hospital. It was very faint. He wanted, with a sudden rush of feeling that startled him, to put his hand over it.

He kept his hands in his pockets.

"You look well," he said.

"So do you."

"That's a lie."

"It's a kindness." She tilted her head. "You've lost weight."

"I learned to cook. It's not going very well."

"What do you make?"

"Eggs. Mostly." He gave a small, rueful laugh. "And a stew, in the evenings. I've been trying to get it right."

Something flickered across her face, too quick to read.

"Your mother's?"

"I can't get the bay leaf right," said Damian. "It always tastes wrong. Either there's too little and it's thin, or there's too much and it's bitter." He looked down at his sodden shoes. "I was thinking, last week, that perhaps that was the point. That she'd put in too much, always, and that it wasn't a recipe at all. It was a habit. A thing she did because she was tired, and cared, and didn't measure. And I've been trying to measure it." He drew a long breath. "It's very hard to measure love."

For a long moment, she did not answer.

"Damian," she said, at last, very gently. "I think that's the first true thing you've ever understood about her."

"Is it?"

"I think so."

He bowed his head. For a while, there was only the snow, falling, and the faint hum of the road beyond the fence.

"I should tell you what I have done," he said.

"You needn't."

"I'd like to." He lifted his eyes. "Not to be forgiven. Only so that you know. I think you ought to know."

"Then go on."

"I resigned. You've heard."

"Ruth told me."

"I wasn't fit to run it. I'm still not. The board made me a different offer, and I took it. I spend my days now in a small office on the nineteenth floor, reading grant applications." A faint, wry smile crossed his face. "It's rather nice. Nobody calls. Nobody wants anything from me but a signature, and I read every page before I sign."

"Good."

"I sold the apartment. You know that. I gave the proceeds to the pension fund. The one that my father robbed." His voice dropped. "It isn't enough. It's a fraction. But Ruth says it's a start, and that there's a woman in Halbrook who runs a trust for the families of the employees who were let go in the lawsuit. I've been writing to her. I've been trying to find every one of them."

"How many?"

"Forty-three. I've found twenty-nine." He swallowed. "I'm going to find the rest."

She was looking at him intently now, with her head slightly tilted, in the way she had looked at him in the hospital. Not coldly. Not warmly, either. But with a clear and level attention, as of a person reading a page.

"And Tomas's daughter," she said.

"Ah." He looked away. "That wasn't supposed to be..."

"It was you."

"The ring covered a year. I'm paying the rest from my salary." He rubbed the back of his neck, awkwardly. "I didn't want it known."

"I only guessed."

"Celeste knows, I think."

"She does."

"She said she wasn't surprised." He gave a short, painful breath. "She told Detective Quill that she had always known there was something in me worth the trouble. She said I just hadn't been given the chance to look for it."

"She said that?"

"She wrote it. In a letter." He hesitated. "She wrote to me last month. The first thing I've ever received from her that wasn't a lie."

Lena was silent for a moment.

"What did it say?"

"That she was sorry. That she didn't ask for forgiveness. That she wanted me to know I had a mother who made a stew for a little boy on Sundays, and that I should hold on to that, and not let anyone take it away from me again." His throat worked. "I've read it forty times."

"She's a remarkable woman."

"She is. God help us all." A broken laugh. "I think I'd have liked her, in another life. I think she'd have been a very good friend."

"I think so, too."

For some time neither of them spoke.

The snow had thickened. It fell on his bare head and on her hood and on the dark hood of the long gray car, and it hushed the whole world, so that even the traffic on the distant road seemed muffled, as if wrapped in felt. Damian stood with his hands in his pockets and his heart beating very slowly, and for the first time in his life, he found that he was not afraid of silence.

I could say it, he thought. I could say it now.

Please come back. Please give me another chance.

He had said it on the roof. He had said it in the stairwell, and in the letters he had written and never mailed, and in the long dark hours of three months of nights. And every time, it had sounded exactly like what it was: a request for one more thing, from someone who had taken so many.

He drew a long, slow breath.

"I didn't come to ask for anything," he said.

"I know."

"I came because it's Saturday. And because I owe a woman an apology, and I haven't had the courage to go in and give it." He looked at her. "And because I thought, if I stood here long enough, you might come out, and I could say something I haven't said."

"Which is?"

"Thank you."

She blinked.

"For what?"

"For the thing you said, on the roof. About being chosen." His voice was rough. "I've thought about it every day. I used to think that love was a thing you earned by being impressive. By being good at things. By being right." He shook his head, slowly. "I never understood that it was something you did. In small ways. In the morning, with the coffee. In noticing that a person is tired."

"Yes."

"You taught me that."

"I didn't teach you anything. I only left."

"That's how you taught me." The words came out low and raw. "You were so patient, for so long. And I never learned. And then you went, and the whole house fell down, and I had to start over from the beginning." He wiped his face with the back of his glove. "I'm learning. Slowly. I make a great many mistakes. But I'm learning, and it's because of you, and I wanted you to know that it wasn't wasted."

She was silent.

In the soft white light, her face was very gentle. She stood with her hands in her pockets and her head a little bowed, and a few flakes had caught in her eyelashes, and for a moment she looked like the girl on the rooftop, three years ago, in the blue dusk, with a diamond on her finger and her eyes wet.

"Damian," she said. "I would like to tell you something, too."

"Please."

"I have two letters from you. In a drawer."

"I know. Ruth told me."

"I haven't read them."

"I understand."

"I'm going to." She said it simply. "Not today. Perhaps not for a while. But I'm going to, one day, when I've stopped being angry. Or rather, when I've stopped being sad. I don't know which it is. It keeps changing." A faint smile touched her mouth. "It's very odd, having feelings again. I'd forgotten how complicated they are."

"Are they returning?"

"In pieces. A little at a time." She hesitated. "I remember loving you. I remember it very clearly. It's like a house I used to live in. I can walk through all the rooms. I know where the windows are. But I don't want to move back in."

He bowed his head.

"No," he said. "I wouldn't, either."

"I'm glad you understand."

"I do." He lifted his eyes. "I think... I think it might be the first thing I've ever understood about you."

She laughed. It was a soft, surprised sound, and it hung in the snowy air like a small bright bird.

They parted at the edge of the car park.

She had turned to go, and then stopped, and looked past him, toward the far gate of the facility, where the long white road curved away through the trees. He followed her gaze. At the bend, a hundred yards off, half hidden by the falling snow, a dark car sat idling at the verge. Its headlights were off. Its windshield wipers moved slowly, once, twice. A tall figure in a black overcoat stood beside it, one hand resting on the roof, looking across the snow toward the two of them.

Damian knew the shape of that figure. He had known it for eleven years.

"He's been there for an hour," he said quietly.

"I know."

"I saw him arrive. He didn't come any closer. He just waited." He turned his head. "He's a patient man, your Mr. Vance."

"He isn't my anything."

"Isn't he?"

"He's a friend. He's..." She stopped. A faint color rose in her cheeks. "I don't know yet what he is."

"But you'd like to find out."

She did not answer.

He looked at her for a long moment, at the pink in her cheeks, the soft light in her eyes, the small private smile she was trying, and failing, to hide. And he felt something move in his chest, a deep slow wrench, as of a door finally closing on an old room. It hurt. It hurt very much. But beneath the hurt, quite unexpectedly, was something else, a clear and strange and quiet gladness, like the first thin light before the dawn.

"Go," he said.

"Damian..."

"Go on. He's freezing. He's been standing there for an hour, pretending not to look." He managed a small crooked smile. "I'd hate to be responsible for the death of a rival CEO. It would be a poor way to end the year."

She laughed. She put a hand to her mouth, quickly, and the laugh turned into something else, half a sob, half a sigh.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For letting me go."

"You'd gone already." He shook his head. "I'm just finally catching up."

She stood a moment longer. Then, very lightly, she stepped forward and kissed him, once, on the cheek, a brief warm touch like a snowflake, and stepped back.

"Goodbye, Damian."

"Goodbye, Lena."

She walked away across the white field. He watched her go, small and gray in the swirling snow, until she reached the far car, and the tall figure straightened and opened the door for her. He saw her say something. He saw the man answer, awkwardly, with a stiff little bow, and saw her laugh. He saw them both get in, and the car pull away, slowly, and vanish around the bend into the white.

Then he stood alone in the empty car park, with the snow falling on his bare head, and breathed.

After a time, he turned and walked, slowly, toward the visitors' center. At the desk, he gave his name to the round-faced guard with the ginger mustache.

"I'd like to submit a request," he said. "To visit Inmate four-one-seven."

The guard looked at him, with some surprise.

"Do you want me to say who's asking?"

"Yes," said Damian Cross. "Tell her it's the man who left her on the road. Tell her he'd like to say he's sorry. And that he'll wait as long as she needs."

End of Chapter Twenty-Seven