DEAD MAN’S HAND

If you had asked Win Callaghan, in the first week of January, what the happiest days of her life had been, she would have said that she did not keep track of such things. And then, because she was truthful, she would have admitted that she had kept a record of them in a ledger, and that there were eleven.

They came all together.

It began with a Tuesday. Callum arrived at the apartment on Fifth Avenue at seven in the morning without a card, a driver, or a game, wearing a canvas jacket and a pair of faded jeans that she suspected he had never worn, and said, "I've cleared the week."

"You've what?"

"The board. The Singapore thing. Margaux is handling it." He stood in her hall with his hands in his pockets, looking about thirty and rather embarrassed. "I thought we might go somewhere. Nowhere specific. I've got a plane."

"Of course you've got a plane."

"It's a small one."

"How small?"

"It has only eleven seats."

She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the stairs.

…

They went west.

They landed in Napa on a day of low white sun, in a valley full of bare vines like the knotted hands of old women, and drove out in a rented convertible with the top up and the heater on high. He drove badly. He drove, she noticed, the way a man drives who has been driven all his life: with great concentration, a little too fast, and an air of faint astonishment at the existence of other cars. At a stop sign outside St. Helena, he turned to her with a look of dawning horror and said, "There's no one in the front seat."

"Callum, you're in the front seat."

"There's no one driving."

"You're driving."

"Oh," said Callum. "Yes. So I am."

They tasted wine at a vineyard so old that its cellar was a cave. The sommelier, a gray-haired Frenchwoman in a leather apron, poured a Cabernet that tasted of earth and black cherry and the inside of a violin, and watched with narrowed eyes while Win swirled and sniffed and said, "Cedar. Tobacco. A little cigar box." The Frenchwoman said, Ah. She poured again. Callum, who had told Win on the plane that he knew nothing about wine, listened to a ten-minute dissertation on tannins with the tender, unfocused attention of a man who has found that he can enjoy things without understanding them.

"You like this," said Win, afterward, in the car.

"I like you liking it."

"That's a different thing."

"It's the only thing I know how to like." He looked at her sidelong, and his mouth tilted. "It's new. I'm told one begins with the basics."

They stayed in a stone farmhouse at the end of a gravel road, with a fireplace in the bedroom and a pair of mismatched Adirondack chairs on the porch. They watched the sun go down over the vines, and the mist rise out of the valley like smoke from a thousand small fires. He wrapped her in a blanket. She told him, in the lowering gold light, a long and thoroughly invented history of the man who had built the farmhouse, a Swiss ex-dentist named Hans who had fled his wife with a ukulele, and he laughed until he coughed.

He had a good laugh. She had not known. It was low and surprised and rather rusty, and it seemed to catch him unawares each time, as if he had found a coin in an old coat.

At night she lay awake with his arm across her and counted the cracks in the ceiling.

Seventy-one. It was the evening that the ache under her ribs, which had settled into a steady, dull, well-behaved presence, took it into its head to stand up and rattle the bars. She lay and breathed through it. He slept, for two hours, with the watch in his fist. She did not move. When it was over, she turned her face into the pillow and let herself be thankful for a moment, with all of her body, that it had come in a farmhouse and not in a hospital.

…

On the fourth day they drove down Highway 1.

It was the loveliest road she had ever seen. It ran along the face of the cliff above the Pacific, in great looping curves of gray asphalt, with the sea breaking white a thousand feet below and the mountains going up on the other side in a haze of gold and green. A fog bank lay offshore. The sun came through in long bright rays. Whales, he said, went by here in January; the early migrators, heading south. She did not see one.

"Look," said Callum, suddenly.

"Where?"

"There. By the rock."

She looked. A tiny black fin had come up out of the swell, rolled, and gone down. A second, larger, followed it. Then a plume, a thin white column of mist rising from the surface, hanging a moment in the light, and dissolving.

"Oh," said Win.

"They always come back," said Callum, in a voice of quiet wonder. "They make this journey every year. Seven thousand miles. They've been doing it for fifty million years."

"How do they know where to go?"

"Nobody knows."

"Do they ever get tired?"

"I should think constantly."

"I think that's the best thing I've ever heard," said Win.

He pulled over at a turnout above a beach of black stones. They sat on the hood of the rented car with the engine ticking and watched the whales surface and sink. A gull wheeled. The wind blew her hair across her face, and he reached out and tucked it behind her ear with a hand that was, she noticed, perfectly steady.

"I don't know how to do this," he said.

"What?"

"Be happy. I appear to be doing it, and I've no idea what to do with my face."

"Keep it exactly as it is."

"It's unbecoming."

"It's lovely."

"Win."

"Yes?"

"I'd like you to know," said Callum, "that I haven't had an ordinary day in twenty-two years. I've had good ones and bad ones. I've had days of the most extraordinary victory. But I haven't had a day when I sat on a car and looked at a whale and did not once think about what I was supposed to be afraid of."

She leaned against him.

"You'll have more," she said.

It was a lie, or nearly. She heard the shape of it as it left her mouth. She had been carrying it for so long that she had begun to hear it in her sleep, a small steady ticking beneath every sentence she spoke: the sound of a woman making promises on behalf of someone who would not be there to keep them.

"Will I?" said Callum.

"I'll make you a list."

"A list of what?"

"Ordinary things." She smiled. She felt it settle on her face like a mask, and for the first time since the beach it hurt. "You can start with the whales."

…

They reached Las Vegas on the ninth day.

She had never liked the city. She had been there once, at twenty-four, for an industry conference on actuarial fraud, and had spent three days in a hotel ballroom listening to a man in a lanyard describe the lifespans of smokers; and she remembered it chiefly as a place where the air was always too cold and the light always too bright and every surface was designed to make a person forget what time it was.

Now she stood in the doorway of a private suite on the sixty-fourth floor of a casino hotel and found that she was smiling.

It was ludicrous. It was gold and mirrors and carpet the color of port. The glass wall at the end looked out over the Strip, which lay below like a spill of jewels, shaking and flickering in the desert dark; and in the center of the room, under a ceiling-high chandelier, stood a round green baize table with two chairs and a deck of cards.

"I thought we'd play," said Callum.

"Poker?"

"It's called Dead Man's Hand."

"That's aces and eights."

"Black aces, black eights. Wild Bill Hickok was holding them when he was shot." He pulled out her chair. "The rules are simple. We play five hands, five cards each, draw one. Whoever loses a hand tells the other something true."

"That's against clause eleven."

"It isn't. The clause forbids asking. This is telling." He sat. "There's a difference. Nobody asks; you volunteer. You may tell me anything you like. The only rule is that it has to be true, and it can't be small."

"It can't be small."

"No."

"And if I tell you nothing?"

"Then you've lost," said Callum, "in a different way."

She looked at him. In the gold light of the chandelier he seemed very still, his hands flat on the green felt, his collar open at the throat. He had shaved that morning, and missed a place under the jaw. There was a sort of terrible patience in him, as of a man who has been dealt a hand and has decided that he will play it, win or lose.

She sat down.

"Deal," said Win.

…

She lost the first hand on purpose.

She knew she was doing it. She had a pair of queens and he had a flush, and she could have drawn, and bluffed, and made him fold; she was very good at bluffing. But when he turned his cards over, one by one, hearts, five of them, and looked up at her with that careful face, she folded her queens and laid them down, and said:

"My mother's name was Maureen."

His hands stopped.

"She was fifty when she died. It was breast cancer. She did the full course. Chemotherapy, radiation, the whole armory. I was twenty-two and I was in my last year of college, and I took a leave of absence to look after her." She was looking at the felt. "She had been the sort of woman who ironed dish towels. She used to say that dignity was the only thing you could take with you. And in the last six months I watched her lose it, one piece at a time, in a plastic bucket."

He said nothing. He had put his cards face-down on the table. He sat with his hands folded and his eyes on her face.

"It's why I said no to the chemo," said Win.

It fell into the room like a stone into deep water. She had said it. She'd actually said it, in a gold room above the Strip, in a quiet, even voice, to a man who was not allowed to ask what it meant. Her heart was going like a hammer. She waited for the thing she had feared: the flinch, the sharp intake of breath, the first small crack in the surface.

It didn't come.

He sat very still. His expression did not change. But the muscle in his jaw tightened, and she saw the hand on the felt turn slowly over, palm up, as if offering something; and he said, in a voice she had to lean forward to catch:

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For telling me the part you could."

She stared at him.

He knew. Some part of him knew, and had known for weeks; and he was sitting there, in his perfect shirt, holding out his hand across a table, and saying thank you for the part you could. He was not asking for the rest. He was not even pretending not to have understood. He was simply leaving the door open, on its hinges, with the light on, and letting her decide for herself whether to come in.

She thought she would cry. She picked up the deck instead.

"Your deal," said Win.

…

He lost the second hand. He lost the third.

She suspected afterward that he had thrown them. She had not, at the time, been capable of reasoning. They had been drinking a bottle of the Cabernet from Napa, which he had brought on the plane in a case wrapped in straw, and the room had gone soft at the edges. Below the window the Strip glittered. She had taken off her shoes. She sat curled in the gilt chair with her feet beneath her, and each time he lost, he turned over his cards, and told her something.

He told her that he had never learned to swim.

He told her that his mother kept a drawer of his brother's socks, washed and folded, in the east wing of the house on Lake Road, where she still lived alone.

He told her that he'd hated his father for being kind.

And at the fourth hand, at a quarter to two in the morning, with the chandelier dimmed and the baize table scattered with chips, he looked down at a black pair, aces, and then at the black pair of eights she'd laid beside it, face up. He looked at them for a long time.

"Dead man's hand," said Win softly.

"Yes."

"You win."

"I seem to."

"So I tell you something."

"No." He lifted his gaze. His eyes in the low light were nearly black. "That's the rule. The winner is the one who doesn't have to. But there's something I'd like to say, and I'd like to say it anyway. May I?"

"Please."

He put the cards down. He took the silver watch from his pocket and set it on the felt between them. It lay on the green baize, small and dull and cracked across, the only unlovely object in the room.

"His name was Theo," said Callum.

She didn't breathe.

"He was eleven. I was seventeen. It was a lake in Ohio, in August, and there was a dock, and I was reading a paperback." He spoke slowly, evenly, like a man reading aloud from a distance. "He went after a towel. He went in off the end. And I sat there. I sat on the dock and watched him for thirty-eight seconds, and I didn't move. I thought he was playing."

"Callum."

"Let me finish. I've never said it. I think if I stop, I won't." He pressed his thumbnail into the groove in his palm. "I wasn't paralyzed. I've always told myself I was, and it isn't true. I was looking. I saw him go under. I saw the watch catch the light. And I sat there, and I thought, he'll come up. And by the time I understood he wouldn't—"

He stopped.

The chandelier hummed. A long way below, on the Strip, a siren rose and fell. She did not move, and she did not touch him; she had the clear unwavering sense that the slightest motion would be fatal, like startling a bird off a wire.

"That's why I can't be afraid," said Callum. "That's the whole of it. That's why I built the house. I'm not a monster, Win. I'm only a man who stood on a dock."

She reached across the table.

She laid her hand on his. She held it, hard, the one with the groove, the one that had spent twenty-two years closing round a stopped clock, and felt it tremble and then, slowly, as a drawn bow is slowly let go, go still.

"Thirty-eight seconds," said Win.

"Yes."

"You were seventeen."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters more than anything." She said it very clearly. "A boy of seventeen sat on a dock and thought his brother was playing. That's not a crime. That's what it is to be seventeen and have a brother who plays." Her voice cracked. "You've spent your whole life punishing a child for being a child."

He lowered his head.

She watched it happen. She watched the great grave bowed head of Callum Draycott, with its dark hair and its streak of early gray, go down onto his arm on the green baize, and she heard, quite distinctly, in the silence, the breath that left him: a long, rasping, shuddering exhale, like a man coming up out of deep water.

She did not say it's all right. It wasn't. She sat with his hand in hers and watched the lights of the Strip flicker across the back of his neck. After a while she got up, and went round the table, and put her arms around him from behind, and laid her cheek against his hair.

They stayed like that for a long time.

…

"Marry me," said Callum.

It was past three. They were lying side by side on the vast gold bed, in the dark, with the curtains open and the neon throwing red and blue across the ceiling. She had been nearly asleep.

"What?"

"Not marry. I mean—" He stopped. She heard him swallow. "I mean the contract. Renew it. Not for ninety days. For a year."

She opened her eyes.

"I had planned to say it differently," he went on, in a rush, to the ceiling. "I'd drawn up a clause. I'd thought of a formula. But I find that I can't do anything gracefully when I'm lying next to you, so I'm saying it now, badly, in the dark. I'd like the term extended to twelve months. I'd like to draw up a new agreement. I'd like you to read it with your red pen. I would like—" His voice broke on the word. "I would like you to be here in February."

February.

She lay quite still. The neon pulsed above her, red, blue, red. She listened to the sound of his breathing, high and shallow, a man at the top of a very long staircase, and she did what she had done in the doctor's office, on the vinyl bench, in the car in the parking lot with the engine off.

She did the math.

It was not complicated. She knew exactly how many weeks she had. She knew it from the bathroom scale and from the whites of her eyes and from the dull steady creep of the ache. It was not a year. It was not six months. It was something nearer three, and the number was getting smaller, and she had known when she signed clause eight that it would be smaller than the contract.

I could tell him, she thought. Now. Here, in the dark. I could say, it's Stage IV and there's no point and I have until about April.

And he would hear it. He would take it. He would sit up in bed with that face.

And he would look at me for the rest of what's left the way he looked at Theo.

She turned her head on the pillow. He was lying with his face toward her, in the red light, waiting; and she looked at the line of his cheek, the pale groove at the corner of his mouth, the dark exhausted blazing hope in his eyes. She thought, with a sudden fierce clarity, I would do anything not to be the second one.

"Let me think," said Win.

"Of course."

"I'm not saying no."

"I know."

"I need to—" She closed her eyes. "It's a lot, Callum. It's a very big clause. I want to read it properly."

"Take as long as you like."

"I will."

"There's no hurry," he said. And then, in the dark, so quietly she was not certain she'd heard it, "I find I'm not afraid of the answer."

She turned and put her face against his shoulder so that he would not see it. She lay with her mouth against his skin and felt the beat of his heart, steady and quick and absolutely alive, and she thought, you are.

You are afraid. You're more afraid than you've ever been in your life.

And so am I.

Outside the window, a hundred stories down, the Strip went on burning, wasteful and radiant and indifferent, like a casino built on the edge of a very large sea. She lay and listened to it. She counted, silently, from ten. She got to three before she gave up.

If only I had a year, she thought.

If I had a year, I'd say yes to everything.