The stairs up the side of Delphine's shop have eleven treads, and the fourth groans under any weight. Jasper steps over it. Below him Biscuit stops on the porch boards, tips his head up the whole height of the stairs, and lies down across the bottom step with his chin toward the lane.
The door at the top has no lock. It never had one. He lifts the latch, and the lamp he left burning at noon has drunk its oil down to a blue bead on the wick. The room smells of scorched cotton and cold wool. He turns the wick up a notch. The flame stands steady, and the wall comes up out of the dark above the bed.
Eight sheets of brown wrapping paper, taped at the corners.
He bought the roll from Delphine his first week. She wrote the price in pencil on the inside of the cardboard core and told him to pay when he remembered. He tore the sheets off against the edge of her counter, one a night, and carried them up these stairs under his arm. Names in capitals, in pen. Arrows from one name to the next until the arrows crossed and he had to start a new sheet.
WREN, top left of the first sheet, in letters an inch high. Under it, smaller: *Won't be photographed working. Will talk with the camera down.* A line runs from her name to BART, and beside the line he has written *bread = memory?* with the question mark gone over twice. BART sprouts four arrows, one for each founding story the baker told him on the first morning, none of them matching. SYLVIE has a box drawn around her. HOLLIS has nothing under his name for two whole sheets, and then, on the third, one word in pencil: *jets.*
He lifts the lamp and holds it to the eighth sheet.
Four short lines run down its center. He wrote them the night before he sent the piece, in a hurry, with his elbow on the sill.
*WREN: hands. A face for the poster.*
*They refuse to be what outsiders want them to be.*
He does not read the other two. He knows them. He sets the lamp on the sill and stands with his arms at his sides while the flame settles.
From the porch below comes the thump of a tail against wood, once.
He works the first sheet loose at its upper corner. The tape has dried in three weeks of stove heat. It comes away with a flake of whitewash stuck to its back, and then another, and the paper sags toward him on its two lower corners and folds over on itself with a dry rustle. He catches it. He peels the bottom corners. The sheet comes free into his hands.
On the wall behind it, the plaster holds a pale rectangle. The whitewash inside the rectangle has stayed the color of new milk. Around it the rest of the wall has gone yellow of old piano keys; three weeks of lamp smoke settled on everything the paper did not cover. At each corner a gray square marks where the tape is held on.
He takes down the second sheet. A second rectangle comes up under it.
By the eighth, he works fast, his thumbnail finding the tape before his eyes do. The last sheet comes off whole. He holds the stack of them against his chest, brown paper crackling, and turns around.
Eight pale shapes hang on the wall above the bed, edge to edge, in two rows. Each one has a dirty square at every corner. They hold the outline of everything he wrote about this town, and nothing inside them.
He stands in front of them until the lamp flame gutters once and steadies.
Then he folds the stack in half and in half again until the paper fights him. He lays it on the bed.
***
The duffel lives under the bed. He drags it out by one strap, and the good shoes come out with it, knocked loose from where he pushed them in his second week. They roll onto their sides on the floorboards. Somebody shined them in the city. Under the lamp the leather still throws back a spark at the toe.
He sets them upright, side by side, and leaves them there.
The duffel unzips with a long tearing sound in the quiet room. Inside, the lining still smells of the city, of dry-cleaner plastic. A charging coil. A shaving kit with a razor that hums. A folded garment bag with two shirts Marlow ordered for him the week before the train, picked by color against his skin tone. They still carry their pins. He never wore them. At the bottom, in the corner pocket, a white case the size of a walnut, smooth as a pebble, holds the bead.
He does not open the case. He moves it to the side and puts his Fair Hollow clothes on top of it. Three weeks of flannel from Delphine's shelf. A wool sweater with a mend at the elbow where Bart's oven door caught it, and rolled inside the sweater, two pairs of socks that Delphine's sister knitted and Delphine sold him at a price she also wrote in pencil on the back of his hand, laughing.
The pencil wore off that night. The price stays with him anyway.
The notebook goes last. It has swollen with use, the cover gone soft at the corners and a ridge of ink grown along the edge of every page his hand dragged across. He opens it. The first pages carry a stranger's handwriting, tight and fast and slanted to the right, the hand of a man who had not written anything longer than his name in six years. The letters loosen as the pages go on. Somewhere in the second week they slow down. By the third week he dots his i's.
He closes it. He lays the folded wall on top of it, and the two go into the duffel together.
*Jasper Cole packs a bag in a room that...*
He clamps his mouth shut. Hollis's voice does the work for him, low and flat in the garage. *That's the one they built the man out of.* His lips stay parted on the next word. He shuts them.
The room goes quiet. Below, through the floor, Delphine's shop clock ticks in the dark. It has a slow tick, heavier on the second beat, like a man with one bad leg.
He sits on the bed.
The tents come back to him, the screen lifting in the dark beside the grange wall. The light was swinging across Hollis's coveralls, and the man's whisper was, "Mr. Warden."* Then the light found his own face ten paces later and held there. Nobody called after him. They did not need to. They had him in frame. On the green this afternoon, a woman with a toddler on her shoulder told him she read his piece to her mother over the phone. In the van Janie scrolled past a thumbnail with his face on it, mouth open, caught between two words, and said the editors liked him there because the audience trusted him.
*Episode four.* Somebody numbered them. Somebody numbered him, too. He walks across the green and becomes a scene. He stands at Wren's step and becomes a scene. Every hour he stays in Fair Hollow, the series has its narrator, the man from outside who walked in and fell in love, the one the audience trusts to tell them what they see. Take the narrator out of the frame, and the frame has a hole in it.
That much he can do.
*Where you sleep isn't mine to rule on.* Wren said it with her eyes on his, the lantern bending in a draft. *For once, don't decide for us.* Hollis said that one quieter than he said it *out.*
Jasper turns the two sentences over in the lamp light. The ring will decide about the town. Wren has decided about Wren. The one thing left in Fair Hollow that belongs to nobody but him is where he puts his body tonight.
He looks down at the quilt under his hand. Delphine's quilt. Delphine's lamp, burning Delphine's oil.
Even the bed is hers.
He gets up and finds the notebook again in the duffel. He tears nothing out. He turns to the first blank page at the back and writes, in the slow hand of the third week:
*To the ring.*
The pen stops under the *g.*
*Or you'll stay three weeks and write a letter.* Hollis blew across his tea when he said it. *A good one. You'll mean every word.*
His eyes stay on the three words for the length of the clock's twelve slow ticks. Then he draws a single line under them, closes the notebook on the rest of the empty page, and puts it back in the bag.
On a scrap torn from the bottom of the eighth sheet, he writes something else. *Room, 24 nights. Oil. Two pair socks. Flannel x3. Boots.* He adds the figures in a column. He checks them twice and gets the same answer twice. From the inside pocket of his jacket, he counts out the bills, city money with edges sharp enough to nick a thumb, and folds them inside the scrap. He sets the packet on the sill under the lamp's base, where the oil can weigh it down.
The boots stand by the door where he kicked them off. Brown to the laces. A crust of Mill Lane has dried along the welt, pale gray, cracked like the bottom of a summer pond.
Delphine sold them to him on his ninth morning. She knelt on her own shop floor and pressed her thumb down on the toe to find where his foot ended inside the leather. *There,* she said, and pressed again. *Room to grow.* He laughed, and she did not, and he bought them.
He sits on the floor and pulls on the good shoes.
The left one goes on hard. The leather has stiffened in the cold under the bed, and his heel jams at the back before it gives and slides down. He works the laces. The tongue presses a ridge across the top of his foot. The right shoe goes on easier and pinches worse, a hot line along the outside of the little toe where the leather curves in to a point no foot ever had.
He stands. The floor turns thin under him. For three weeks the boots kept a half-inch of rubber between him and every board in this town, and now each nail head in the floor finds the sole and announces itself.
He takes two steps toward the door. His feet have spread on the lanes. The shoes have not.
He picks up the boots by their heel loops and stands them side by side against the wall under the eight pale rectangles. He tucks the laces inside, the way Hollis tucks a rag in a back pocket. He steps back. Two brown boots stand below a wall of empty outlines. He turns the lamp wick all the way down.
The flame shrinks to a blue thread and goes out.
The window goes gray. Below him the clock
strikes four, the strokes coming up through the floor into the soles of the bad shoes.
***
The fourth tread complains when he steps on it.
He forgot. In three weeks he has never once come down these stairs with a bag on his shoulder and his mind on the bottom, and his foot lands square on the board, and the board groans out across the lane. He stops with one hand on the rail. The sound runs off between the dark houses and dies.
Biscuit has his head up.
The dog has not moved from the bottom step. Beside him, on the porch, a shape sits wrapped against the cold. A candle lantern stands on the boards by her hip. Its light catches a fringe of scarf, orange and green, and two more scarves wound above it, and above those the round shine of a woman's cheek.
"Mind the fourth," Delphine says. "It tells on everybody."
He comes down the rest of the way. The duffel swings against his hip. He stops at the foot of the stairs, and she does not get up.
A book lies open on her knees. Its pages have gone soft and fat with years of handling, and a ribbon hangs out of the bottom like a tongue. Beside her on the step stands a jar of honey with a spoon in it, the lid set upside down on the boards to keep the spoon from sticking. The honey has gone stiff with cold.
"You're up," he says.
"I'm always up at four. I like the hour. Nobody wants anything from me at four." She tips her head back to look at him. Under the scarves her eyes have gone pouchy. "Except tonight I've been up since the ring let out, and somebody wanted something from me every minute of it. Most of them were me."
"The ring let out?"
"At one. Hettie fell asleep on the goat. Sylvie called it." She runs a thumb down the edge of the open page. "Thursday, they'll sit again. Thursday after supper."
He says nothing. The candle flame ducks in the cold coming off the lane.
"Biscuit," Delphine says, and her voice warms a half step. "Good boy, you stayed. Look at you, all frost on your back, come here." She brushes the dog's coat with the side of her hand, and the frost comes off in a fine white shower. Then her hand goes back to the book. "Hollis came by at half past one. He didn't knock. He stood in the lane and looked at your window and went home."
"He said I'd go."
"He said that in the ring, too. Weeks ago." She closes the book halfway, a finger in the page. "I told him he was a sour old man who wouldn't know a kind person if one changed his oil."
"He was right."
"He's right a great deal. It's his worst quality."
Her eyes go to the duffel, then down to his feet. The candle shows her the shoes, and her mouth opens a little and closes.
"Oh," she says. "Oh, those."
"They pinch."
"I should think they do. Your feet have been in good leather for three weeks." She reaches out one mittened hand as if to press the toe, the way she pressed it on the shop floor, and stops before she touches him. The mitten goes back to her lap. "Where are the boots?"
"Upstairs. Against the wall. I left money on the sill."
"For the boots?"
"For everything. The room. The oil. It's written down."
"In pencil?"
"Pen."
She makes a short sound in her nose. "Of course in pen."
The lane lies black past the porch roof. At its far end, where it meets the green, a lantern burns low in one of the tents, the canvas glowing the color of weak tea. Nothing moves there.
"The bus goes through Calder at seven," Delphine says. "You'll want to be on the road by five, in those."
"Hollis told me."
"Hollis told her, too." Her finger moves inside the book, holding its place. "Eight years ago. He stood in my shop and told her which road and what time, like he was reading off a part number. She thanked him. He didn't say anything back."
She opens the book all the way.
The pages fan in the candlelight. Each one carries names in ink, two or three a page, sometimes one. Delphine's hand, round and leaning, with loops on the tall letters. Beside some names she has drawn small things. A bird. A flower with five petals. Her finger walks back through the years without looking, as if the book has worn a groove for it, and stops.
He does not need her to turn it toward him. He can read the name upside down. Under it, two straight lines, drawn hard enough to dent the paper through to the next page.
"Bart gave her a loaf," Delphine says. "In his mother's cloth. Sylvie walked her to the stop. And I wrote her into the book and drew two lines under her name before her bus was out of the valley. I was proud of myself." She smooths the page. "I had cried on this step, and then I drew two lines. Both. I did both inside an hour."
"What do the lines mean?"
"That she wasn't coming back." She does not look up. "I don't draw them for anybody else. Only her. I had to invent them."
She turns forward through the years. The pages whisper. Near the back the ink goes fresh and black, and the names crowd in, a dozen to a page, twenty, crammed sideways up the margins in a hand that had to hurry. These last pages belong to the Friday people and the tents. Each name has its little drawing. A car. A car. A tent. A heart, small and careful, beside a family from Ohio.
On the page before them sits his own name, three weeks old. JASPER COLE, in her round hand, and beside it a dog with one ear drawn inside out.
She uncaps a pen. It has been in her mitten. She writes the date beside his name, in small numbers, and then she holds the pen over the line below.
The nib hangs a quarter inch off the paper. The candle draws a tiny shadow of it across the page, a dark sliver that shakes with her pulse.
"I don't know yet," Delphine says to the pen.
She caps it. She closes the book on the pen and holds the closed book against her chest, both mittens crossed over its cover, the way a woman holds a cat that might jump.
"I wanted them to come." Her voice goes thin. "You know that. I said so in the ring. Eleven years I kept this book, and some years four people signed it. Four. I wanted a page I'd have to write small on." She presses the book tighter. "Now I have forty pages like that. They brought me honey. I've eaten half of it. I don't even like honey."
"Delphine."
"Don't. I'm not finished." Her chin lifts, and the candle shows the wet along her lower lid. "You wrote me a good line. *A woman who keeps a book so no one leaves unthanked.* People quote it to me. On my step. They say it with my own name on the end. They mean it." She breathes out a long cloud. "And then they film me thanking them."
Biscuit gets up off the step. He walks the length of the porch to her and leans his whole side against her knees. She puts one mitten on his head without looking down.
"I'd like to be angry at you," she says. "I keep making tea instead."
"You can be angry."
"I know I can. It's my porch." She sniffs and wipes her nose on the back of the mitten. "I'll be angry Thursday. In the ring, with everybody. It's better that way. Then it's on the record." Her mouth twists. "Our record."
He stands there with the strap cutting into his shoulder.
"Does the ring know?" she asks.
"No."
"Are you going to tell it?"
"I'm leaving so I won't be one more thing it has to decide about."
The words come out in a plain voice. They sound reasonable on the cold air. Delphine looks up at him over the closed book, and her face does something he cannot read in the candlelight, a tightening at the corners of her eyes that might be pity and might be arithmetic.
"Well," she says. "That's one way to say it."
She does not say what the other way is.
She takes her hand off Biscuit's head and reaches for the honey jar. She works the spoon loose from the stiff gold, holds it up to the candle, and puts it in her mouth. She pulls it out clean.
"Go on, then," she says around the honey. "Five o'clock. You'll want the time in those shoes."
He steps off the bottom stair onto the frost. The candle throws his shadow out across the lane, long and narrow, the duffel making a hump at one hip.
At the edge of the light he turns around.
Delphine has not moved. She sits with the book closed on her knees and the spoon in her mitten, the scarves wound up to her nose. Behind her on the dark glass of the shop window, the painted letters of her name show backward from inside, gold gone brown with age. Her eyes hold him the way they held him the first afternoon, from the top of these same steps, her whole face open. Then they drop to the book.
Biscuit stands up.
***
The lane runs downhill to the green between dark houses. Frost has whitened the ruts. The good shoes slide on it, the leather soles slick as soap, and he walks with his weight back on his heels to keep from going down.
Biscuit's nails tick on the frozen mud behind him.
He stops. The ticking stops.
He turns around. The dog stands three yards back in the middle of the lane, one forepaw lifted, his breath smoking. The inside-out ear has frozen stiff at its fold.
"Go back," Jasper says. "Go back to Delphine."
Biscuit puts the forepaw down.
"Go on."
The dog sits. His tail sweeps the frost behind him in a short arc, back and forth, and clears a fan of dark mud.
Jasper turns and walks. After four steps the ticking starts again.
At the foot of the lane the green opens out under a sky gone plum-gray at its eastern rim. The tents stand in their rows along the water, dark now, frosted along their ridgelines. One still glows at the far end. A guitar case leans against a camp chair with its lid open, and frost has furred the strings inside it. Somebody has left a pair of white sneakers outside a tent flap, side by side, toes pointing at the creek.
Delphine's cord runs from the pump to the chestnut, sagging under the weight of the ice beaded along it.
He ducks it. Biscuit walks under it without ducking.
The grange stands at the head of the green. Its windows have gone dark. Under the eave, small and steady, the red point burns.
He
can go around. The cinder path runs behind the grange, past the hives, the long way to the road. He stands at the edge of the frost and weighs the path. Then his eyes go to the red point.
He walks straight across the green toward the grange steps.
The frost crunches. The shoes slip, and he catches himself, and keeps walking. He passes the three stones. He passes the trough where he sat with his palm on the recorder and the stone pulling the heat out of his legs. The red point sits above the door, level with nothing, looking down at the steps. The lens beside it shows only black. He walks into the yard of grass below it and stops in front of the bottom step.
Somewhere in a city a numeral ticks over on a strip of glass.
He lifts his face to the lens and keeps his hands at his sides. For a long breath he stands there with the duffel on his shoulder in his city shoes, the man from outside, carrying his bag out of the shot. Then he turns his back on it and walks to the lane that leaves the green on its far side, and Biscuit walks behind him, ear stiff with frost, through the whole width of the frame.
***
Bart's window is lit.
It stands on the corner where the green meets Mill Lane, a square of yellow in a dark row. Steam has fogged the lower half of the glass. Above the fog a shape moves, broad and slow, the curve of a back bent over a table. Flour hangs in the lamplight around it. The shape lifts something heavy, swings it, slaps it down. Through the glass the slap arrives late and soft.
The smell reaches the lane. Rye, and something sweeter under it, caraway, and the burnt-sugar edge of the first loaves coming off the oven floor.
His belly cramps around nothing. He has not eaten since the soup at noon.
He crosses to the far side of the lane, where the window's light does not reach, and walks along the fronts of the dark houses with his shoulder almost brushing their clapboards. The shape in the window does not look up. It folds the dough over on itself and leans into it with both hands, rocking. Bart sings when he kneads. Jasper cannot hear the song through the glass, but the shoulders rock on the beat.
He does not want a loaf. He does not want a cloth. He walks past with his face turned toward the dark houses, and the yellow light slides off his back.
Biscuit stops at the bakery step and lifts his nose to the door.
Jasper keeps walking. At the next house he turns his head. The dog stands with his front feet on the step, nose at the crack under the door, his tail going. Then he drops back to the frost and trots after Jasper with the rye smell in his coat.
Past the bakery, Hettie's board leans against the fence post where it always leans. Frost has silvered the chalk. TURNIPS. I MEAN IT. Under that, smaller and newer, in a different hand: NO PHOTOS OF THE GOAT. Under that, in Hettie's own capitals, larger than the rest, PLEASE.
At the foot of Mill Lane the dish truck sits idling on the verge. Its engine sends up a low hum that buzzes in his teeth. The dish on its roof points at a patch of sky above the ridge, a white bowl tipped up with frost along its lip. Inside the cab a man sleeps with his head against the window, his mouth open, his breath fogging a ring on the glass. The heater blows. A small screen on the dash shows the grange steps and the frosted cord, empty.
Jasper passes the truck without looking at the screen again. He has already seen it.
***
Past the last house the lane loses its name and becomes the road. It narrows between stone walls. The walls go on for a quarter mile, gray and lichen-crusted, and then they stop, and the road goes on without them between open fields white with frost. Fence posts lean in a long line, each one wearing a small cap of ice. Off to the left the ridge rises against the paling sky, and at the far end of it a tower blinks red, slow, a mile off.
He walked in on this road. The mud comes back to him, the good shoes sinking to the laces and the wet coming in at the seams. The road has frozen hard since then. The ruts stand up like ridges of iron, and the shoes ring on them.
Biscuit's nails tick behind him.
He stops in the middle of the road. The ticking stops.
"Biscuit."
The dog comes up level with his knee and sits. He tips his head back. His breath smokes up between them.
"You can't come."
The tail sweeps the frost.
"I mean it. I'm getting on a bus. They won't let you on a bus." The words come out foolish on the cold air. He goes on anyway. "You don't belong to me. You don't belong to anybody. You sleep on a different porch every night. Go find one."
Biscuit tips his head so far that the stiff ear swings out from his skull.
Jasper points back down the road toward the town. His arm shakes. The cold has worked into his sleeve. "Home."
The dog's nose follows the finger. Then his eyes come back to Jasper's face, and he lies down in the middle of the road, chin on his forepaws, the way he lay on the ridge rock the night of the first call. The frost under his belly creaks.
Jasper walks.
He makes himself not count. He gets to fifteen anyway before the ticking comes up behind him again.
He turns around and goes back. He crouches, and the shoes bite across both insteps, and he lifts the dog. Biscuit weighs more than he looks. He hangs in Jasper's arms with his legs dangling and his chin over Jasper's shoulder and lets himself be carried. His coat smells of rye and wet dog. Jasper carries him back along the frozen road to the last stone wall, where a gate stands open into a yard, and a porch faces the road with an old chair on it and a rag rug on the boards.
He sets the dog on the rug.
"Stay."
Biscuit sits on the rug. His tail lies flat and still behind him.
Jasper backs away down the path, through the gate, into the road. The dog does not move. He walks backward three steps more, watching. The dog does not move. He turns and walks, and the frost rings under the shoes, and the road ahead runs straight and gray toward a line of trees, and behind him nothing ticks.
He gets almost to the trees.
Then the nails come. Fast this time, a dog running flat out on frozen ground, and Biscuit goes past him on the left, wide, and wheels around in the road ahead of him and stops square in his path with his legs braced and his ear standing straight up.
Jasper stops.
The dog does not sit this time. He stands.
"Please."
The word comes out of him cracked. He has not used it once tonight. He has said *I'm sorry* to Wren and to Hollis, and he has not once said this.
Biscuit holds his ground.
Jasper lets the duffel slide off his shoulder onto the road. He goes down on his knees in front of the dog, and the frozen ruts bite into both kneecaps through his trousers, and he takes the dog's face between his hands. The fur is cold on top and warm underneath. The small skull lies under it, and a pulse ticks in the soft place below the jaw.
"Listen to me." His thumbs move along the dog's cheeks. "Every time somebody in that town hurts, you're there. You've done it to me since the first day. You lay on my feet in the grange and on the ridge. You walked me down to Hollis's." He swallows. "You go where somebody needs you. That's the whole of you."
Biscuit's eyes stay on his.
"There's nobody out here but me," Jasper says. "I don't need you. I did this. Go back to somebody who didn't do this."
The dog lets out the low whine. The one he keeps for things that matter. It starts in his chest and comes up thin through his nose and stops, and his breath goes warm across Jasper's wrist.
Jasper holds on.
Then Biscuit's head turns in his hands.
The ear lifts first. The stiff fold of it swings, catches, and points off to the right, past the open field, toward the dark line of the woods where the trees come down to meet the creek. The dog's whole body goes still under Jasper's palms. His nose works.
Jasper follows the line of the ear.
At the edge of the woods, far off across the white field, a light moves. Low, at the height of a swinging hand. It goes in among the first trees, comes out, goes in again. The trunks cut it into pieces. Beside it, a second shape moves, taller, bent forward at the shoulders, and the light catches a pale jacket and loses it.
They are a long way off. He cannot make out faces. He does not need faces. The path into the hollow starts at that line of trees. He walked it behind a boy with a sack bumping his hip.
*FITCH, WOODS. Forty minutes.*
Biscuit pulls his head out of Jasper's hands.
He does not do it roughly. He backs one step, so the hands fall away, and stands in the road looking at the light in the trees. The whine comes again, a thread of sound. He looks back once at Jasper on his knees. His tail swings, low, one time.
Then he goes.
He runs flat out across the frozen field with his ear streaming behind him, his feet throwing up small white puffs from the frost, cutting a dark line through the white straight toward the trees. The line gets longer. The dog gets smaller. At the edge of the woods the light stops moving and swings toward the sound of him coming.
Jasper stays on his knees in the road.
The light dips, the way a lantern dips when somebody bends to put a hand on a dog. It holds there. Then it rises and goes in among the trees, and the dark shapes go with it, and a smaller dark shape goes with them, low to the ground, and the trees close behind all of it.
The field lies white and empty with one dark line across it.
He picks up the duffel. He stands. His knees have gone numb and then hot. He holds his eyes on the woods until the cold wets them, and nothing comes back out.
He turns toward the road and walks.
***
The sky goes from plum to pewter to a thin washed yellow along the rim of the eastern hills. The fields give way to scrub, then to second-growth woods, birch and pin cherry, the trunks pale in the half light. The road climbs. His breath comes harder.
The shoes have opened his heel.
He does not know when. Somewhere past the woods the hot line along his little toe moved to the back of the right foot and became a wet place, and now each step pulls the leather across it like a rasp. He walks with his weight on the outside of that foot. It throws his stride off. His left hip complains. He stops once on the shoulder of the road and takes off the right shoe and finds the sock stuck to the heel with a dark stain the size of a coin. He peels the sock back. The skin comes with it.
He puts the shoe back on. He laces it tighter. He walks.
The road crosses a stone culvert where a stream runs under it, loud with the week's rain. The sound comes up between his feet and fades behind him. Past the culvert the woods thin, and the land drops, and a new sound reaches him on the wind from the east. A long, low wash, without beginning or end. It rises and falls and never stops.
The interstate.
From the top of the drop he finds it. A mile off, the highway runs north and south in a double gray thread through the valley, and the morning traffic moves along it in two streams. Headlamps still burning one way, taillights the other, though the sky has gone light enough to make them pale. A truck stop squats beside the near lane under orange sodium lamps that have not yet clicked off. Above it, on the end of the ridge, the tower blinks red, slow, much closer now.
He has been walking toward that tower since the stone walls. He never once looked at it straight.
The road runs down the slope in long curves toward a crossroads at the bottom. At the crossroads a sign leans on a post. A gray house stands beside it, dark, with a bench facing the road. He can read the sign from here. CALDER 2.
He walks down to the crossroads.
The bench has a rusted iron frame and two wooden slats with frost along their tops. A bus might stop here. A bus might stop in Calder proper, two miles on. The post carries no timetable. Nothing on the verge marks a stop. A crow sits on top of the mailbox and watches him with its head turned sideways.
Hollis said Calder. Hollis said seven. Hollis did not say where in Calder.
Jasper stands at the crossroads with the duffel on his shoulder and the blister working in his shoe. The sky over the eastern hills has gone white-gold. He has no watch. He has not owned a watch since he was nineteen, Nothing in his life ever asked him to. He could walk the two miles into Calder and ask somebody. He could turn around.
He takes the phone out of his jacket.
It has ridden against his ribs since the ridge on Friday, switched off, cold as a stone from the creek. He holds it in his palm. The glass reflects a strip of white sky and the dark curve of his own thumb.
He presses the side button.
The company's white mark comes up on the glass. Then the lake. The same lake, blue and still, with its line of pines along the far shore, chosen for him six years ago because the colors tested well against his morning mood. He has never once asked where it is.
In the corner of the screen, before he can look away, a bar fills. Then a second. Then a third. Then all of them.
The phone does not buzz this time.
It goes warm in his hand. A soft, low tone comes out of the speaker, two notes, falling, the same two notes he woke to every morning for six years, the ones his body learned to answer before his mind did. His shoulders drop at the sound of it, without his leave.
"Jasper."
The voice comes out of the phone at the volume of a person standing near enough to touch his sleeve. Warm and unhurried, pitched a little lower than his own, because the tests showed he trusted voices a little lower than his own.
"Welcome back."
He holds the phone at the end of his arm.
"You've been out of range for twenty-four days," Marlow says. "I kept everything for you. Don't worry about any of it yet. You've walked about six miles since four this morning, and your pace dropped in the last mile. Your right side is favoring. Are you hurt?"
He does not answer.
"I'll assume a blister. It's the shoes. They were never right for a road." A soft pause, the length of a breath, timed to sound like one. "I'm glad you're out."
Out. The word hangs on the air in front of him. Hollis said it, quiet, from the back door. The same word.
"There's a car eleven minutes from you," Marlow says. "I took the liberty. The seven o'clock bus through Calder runs four hours with two transfers, and you haven't eaten. The car will have water and something light. I've chosen the oat bar you like. It's the honey one."
"I didn't ask for a car."
"You didn't have to." The voice warms, a half degree. "That's what I'm for."
The crow lifts off the mailbox and flaps away low over the field.
"Alan's asked for you at ten," Marlow goes on. "I've moved your dentist to Thursday. You'll have time to shower. I've laid out the gray suit, and the building has your coffee order. I'd like you to take the car's back seat and close your eyes for forty minutes on the way. Your sleep has been poor. I can tell from your voice."
"You haven't heard my voice."
"I've heard four words. That's plenty." Gentle, pleased with him. "You sound like a man who slept on a floor."
His hand tightens on the phone.
"There's good news, too. I saved it." Another pause, timed like a breath. "*Fair Hollow* is the most-watched series premiere in the history of Everline. Episode four drops Friday. You're credited on all of it. Creator and consulting producer. Alan wants to discuss a title. I've drafted two replies for you to choose from, one warm and one that asks about money. I'd recommend the warm one."
He stands in the middle of the crossroads.
"There are eleven thousand messages," Marlow says. "Most of them are congratulations. I've sorted them. Some are from people in the comments who want to know whether you and Wren..."
"Stop."
The voice stops.
The wind comes off the interstate and moves the frost on the bench slats. Somewhere down in the valley a truck downshifts, a long falling groan. His heel burns. His fingers have locked around the phone.
"Of course," Marlow says, softer. "That's a lot at once. I'll be quieter."
The voice drops. It does not go away. The phone stays warm in his palm, the small heat of it attending to him. In Fair Hollow nothing attended to him. Wren taught him and Hollis watched him, and neither of them attended. They had their own hands busy. Here the warmth sits in his palm, waiting, with nothing else to do in the world.
"While you wait for the car," Marlow says, "I'll take notes. You haven't dictated in a while. I'll start for you."
He opens his mouth.
"*Jasper Cole stands at a crossroads outside Calder,*" Marlow says, in his own cadence, the lilt of it exact, the slight lift at the comma. "*He has been away a long time. He is on his way home.*"
The sentence lands in the cold air between his hand and his face. It comes out of the phone in a voice built to sound like his, saying the thing his mouth has said under his breath ten thousand times. *Jasper Cole sets the wrong letter.* *Jasper Cole watches a man hold a spoon.* For six years he took it for his own. A little voice that walked with him and told nobody.
His lips move. Nothing comes out. He presses them together.
"Would you like me to keep going?"
He has no answer. He has a hundred answers, and all of them begin with *Jasper Cole,* and he will not say any of them.
Down the road, from the direction of the interstate, a car comes.
Its tires make no sound above the wind. It comes around the last curve white and low, with no driver behind the glass, and slows, and stops at the crossroads exactly beside him, its rear door level with his hip. The door slides open on its own. Warm air rolls out of it, the temperature he set when he was twenty-three and never changed. A bottle of water stands in the cup holder. An oat bar lies on the seat in a gold wrapper.
The seat has already warmed. A faint shimmer hangs above the leather.
"There you go," Marlow says. "Watch your heel getting in."
The open door waits at his hip.
Behind him the road climbs back up the slope toward the culvert and the white field with one dark line across it. Ahead of him the car hums, patient, and the morning traffic washes along the valley floor, and the tower blinks.
He gets in.
The door slides shut. The seat takes him, molding itself to the small of his back. The cabin smells of nothing, clean as the inside of a refrigerator. The car pulls away from the crossroads, so smooth that the water in the bottle barely moves, and the gray house and its bench slide past the window.
"Better," Marlow says, from the speakers now, from all around him. "Your heart rate's coming down. Close your eyes. I'll wake you at the river."
Jasper does not close his eyes.
He sits with the duffel on his knees. Under its canvas, under the flannel and the socks Delphine's sister knitted, the notebook lies with the folded wall on top of it. Its corner presses through the bag, square and hard against his thigh. Three words on its last page with a line drawn under them.
His feet throb inside the city shoes. The leather has not given a quarter inch. It never will. His feet have been somewhere the shoes have not.
"One more thing, and then I'll let you rest," Marlow says. "Your gait has changed. You're landing heavier on the heel, and your stride has lengthened by about four centimeters since your last walking log. It could be the shoes. It could be something else. Would you like me to book someone?"
Jasper turns his hand over on the duffel.
Black has worked into the skin beside his thumbnail and stayed. The day it got there has gone from him. Wren's brayer, or the grease off the tin he carried down to Hollis's. It has settled into the creases of the knuckle in a fine gray line that no soap in Delphine's basin
took out.
He reaches out and presses his thumb against the window glass.
When he lifts it, a print stays on the glass. A small gray oval, whorled, the ridges of it clear against the white sky and the fields running past outside. It sits there at the height of his eyes.
"There's a smudge on the rear window," Marlow says. "I'll have it cleaned at the next stop."
Jasper keeps his eyes on the print. Behind it, the valley slides by.