PAID IN FULL

She did not die at once.

That was what no one had told him, in all the pamphlets and the forums and the careful gray pages he had read in a stranger's kitchen. He had expected a moment: a door, a breath, a drop. He had imagined a thing with an edge. But the morning went on, and the light came up the wall, and he sat with her hand in his and learned that death, like everything else worth knowing, was a matter of attention. It came by degrees. It came as the tide comes up a long beach, so slowly that one cannot see it move, only that the stones that were dry are wet.

At six she was talking.

At half past, she asked for water, and he held the glass to her lips, and she took a little. Nell came in with her hair in a plait and looked once, and did not speak. She went round the bed on soft feet, adjusted the line, checked the small gray box that hummed against Win's hip, laid two fingers lightly on the inside of her wrist. Then she drew back and met his eye. She nodded, once, very slightly.

It is today, said the nod.

He nodded back.

She went out. She closed the door behind her, with the greatest delicacy, and he heard her say something low to Josie in the hall, and then a sound, a small stifled cry, that was cut off at once, as a hand is clapped over a mouth.

"Is that Josie?" said Win.

"Yes."

"Tell her it's all right."

"She knows."

"Tell her anyway."

He didn't need to. The door opened a hand's breadth and a small figure in a trench coat put her head in, red-eyed, wild-haired. She looked at the bed. She looked at him. Then she came across the room in four steps and knelt by the pillow and put her forehead against Win's, and the two of them stayed that way for a time, without speaking, the black head and the dark one. He turned his face to the window.

"I love you," said Josie, thickly. "I'm going to be so angry."

"I know."

"For years."

"Good." Win's voice was a breath. "Keep it up. It's the best of me you'll have."

"You're an idiot."

"I'm told it runs in the family."

Josie laughed, and it turned, and she kissed Win's cheek, hard, and got up. At the door she looked back at Callum. She did not say anything. She put her hand flat against her breastbone, a quick, fierce, formal gesture, as one salutes. Then she went out, and he heard her feet on the stairs, and the back door bang.

…

He held her for the last two hours.

He had got onto the bed. There was no one to forbid him. He lay on his side with his back against the headboard and drew her up against his chest, her head under his chin, her thin hip against his thigh, as he had held her in the white room under the skylight. She weighed nothing. She was warm. Her hair smelled of lemon and, faintly, of the sea.

The sun climbed. It came through the south window and lay in a square on the quilt and moved, a hand's breadth every quarter of an hour, toward the floor. The watch ticked on the table. Outside a robin sang in the madrona, the same four notes over and over, with a tireless idiot cheerfulness.

"Callum."

"Yes."

"I've got the line."

His heart turned over. "Tell me."

"Lean closer."

He bent his head. Her lips were at his ear, dry and light, and he felt her breath, which was the lightest thing he had ever felt, a flutter, a moth against a screen.

"Balance," said Win. "Zero."

He held very still.

"Paid in full."

She drew back a little. He saw her face. It was quite calm, quite clear; the yellow had gone from it, or he had stopped seeing it, and it was only her face, the pointed chin and the gray eyes and the small mark by the lip where, at nine, she had run into a swing. She was looking at him with a faint, shy, mischievous expression, like a child who has told a joke and is not sure it was understood.

"You see?" she said. "I did the arithmetic. I thought for the longest time I'd end in debt. I thought I'd have to write deficit, or pending. I was so sure I'd cost too much." She smiled. "But it comes out even. I gave you everything I had. You gave me everything you had. There's nothing owing on either side. It's the first time in my life I've closed an account and not been afraid of the total."

"Win."

"That's it, you see. That's the whole of it. The ledger's clean." Her eyes were very bright. "You're not to say I left you a bill."

"I will not."

"Say it."

"You left me no bill."

"Louder."

"You left me—" His voice failed. He swallowed. "You left me nothing owing. You left me everything. It is all paid."

"Good," said Win, and put her head back on his chest, and sighed. "That's good. I was so worried you'd get it wrong."

…

At seven she was quiet.

She lay with her eyes shut, breathing in small light sips, and he lay with his cheek against her hair and counted them. He did not mean to. It was the old habit; it was the one thing he could not unlearn. He counted her breaths, as he had counted a boy in a lake, and found that the interval between them was growing, by a half-second, by a second. Ten. Twelve. He felt her heart under his hand. It was a faint quick flutter, a little arrhythmic, going on.

"Callum."

The voice was so soft he nearly lost it.

"I'm here."

"Are you hungry?"

For a moment he did not understand.

Then he did, and something happened in his chest that he'd have said was impossible: a laugh came up through all of it, through the grief and the terror and the long gray months, clean and bright as a bell. It shook him. It shook the bed. He put his face down into her neck and laughed, helplessly, with the tears running into her hair, and she began to laugh too, very faintly, a breath, a flicker, her shoulders moving against his chest.

"Yes," said Callum. "God help me. Yes, I am."

"There's an omelet," whispered Win. "In the— in the pan."

"I'll have it."

"With cheese."

"With cheese."

"Don't burn it."

"I won't."

"You always—" She sighed. "You always burn the edges."

"I'll learn."

"That's what I want." Her hand lifted a little from the quilt, an inch, two, and fell back on his wrist. "I want you to learn things."

He turned his head. He kissed her temple. She smelled of lemon.

"Win," he said. "Look at me."

She opened her eyes.

They were quite clear. They were the color of rain on slate. They were looking at him with a perfect attention, the look she had given him across a crowded hall in a mask, the first of a hundred thousand: the look of someone who was not afraid of him, who saw him whole, who did not flinch. He had spent twenty-two years looking for it in the faces of strangers. He held it now with the whole of himself. He did not look away.

"Harbor," said Callum.

And she smiled.

It was a small thing. It was the shy, sidelong, lopsided smile of a girl from Parma Heights, who had been told that she was to die in the autumn and had decided to see the town first. It lit her whole face. It lasted, he thought, perhaps three seconds; and then her eyes were looking past him, at the window, at the light, at something beyond it; and the breath she drew went in, and in, and came out in a long, soft, unhurried sigh, like a woman setting down a bag that she has carried a long way.

It was twenty-three minutes to eight.

It did not come again.

…

He did not move.

He knew. He had known at once. But he did not move, and did not speak, and did not call out. He lay with the weight of her against him and his hand over her heart, and waited for it to begin again, and it did not begin. The room was entirely still. The robin sang. On the table the watch ticked on, bright and brisk and indifferent, counting something that could no longer be reached.

He waited a minute. Another. Five.

Then, quite gently, as one turns a sleeper so that she may lie more easily, he moved her head on his arm, and looked at her face. It was only her face. It was at peace. The mouth had a small curve to it. The lashes lay on the cheek. She looked, he thought, about twenty-two, and he understood in a flash of terrible clarity that she would always, now, look about twenty-two, to him; that he would never see her grow old, and that this was a thing he could not forgive her for.

I forgive it, he thought.

I forgive it. I forgive it. I forgive it.

He pressed his lips to her forehead.

He did not cry. That was what he marveled at, in the long afterward. He had cried at the table in Cleveland; he had cried on the porch with the watch against his ear; he had cried in the dark in the storm. He had thought, when this came, he would break into pieces. But he lay there, in the gold light, with the dead woman in his arms and nothing at all in his eyes, and felt only a vast, still, ringing quiet, such as one feels after a great bell has stopped.

Zero, he thought.

Paid in full.

…

He sat with her all that day.

He did not let them touch her. This was understood, without a word spoken, from the moment Nell came in at eight, and saw, and stood in the door with her hand to her mouth. She did not come further. She said nothing at all. She turned, and went out, and he heard her say to someone in the hall, low and level, "Leave them. Let him have the day." And the house went quiet round the sunroom like a held breath.

At noon Hollis came, in his plaid shirt, with his cap in his hand, and stood at the foot of the porch steps and said nothing to anybody, and went round the side of the house and sat down on the chopping block and stayed there, a very old man with his hands between his knees, keeping watch over a door.

He washed her face. He found a cloth and a bowl of warm water, and did it as he had seen Nell do, gently, round the brow and the closed eyes, along the jaw. He combed her hair. He had never combed a woman's hair; he did it badly, and tore a knot, and said "I'm sorry," aloud, and heard himself, and laughed. He drew the quilt up to her chin. He folded her hands.

And sometime in the afternoon, when the sun had passed into the west window and the square of light had crept across the floor to his feet, he took up the book.

It lay on the table beside the watch. The navy leather was warm from the sun. He opened it at the last written page, where her small upright hand ran down the margin and stopped. The Montblanc lay in the gutter of the fold. He took it. It was heavier than he'd thought. It weighed what a pen weighs, when it has been used for something that mattered.

He looked at the empty line.

He did not know how to write it. He had signed ten thousand pages. He'd written contracts that moved markets. But he held the nib over the cream paper, and his hand, the healed one, with the scar across the heel, did not seem to belong to him. He thought of a signature that wobbled like a man on a gangplank.

In your own hand, she had said. Not mine.

He wrote.

It was not a good hand. It was large and uncertain, like a child's, with the letters leaning on each other for support. The ink skidded on the B. But it was legible. It went across the page, from the margin to the edge, and he did not stop, and did not cross it out.

Balance: zero.

Paid in full.

He laid down the pen.

He sat looking at the two lines for a very long time. Then he reached out, and took her hand from beneath the quilt, and set the open book against the palm of it, lightly, as one lays a flower, and closed her fingers round the spine. He held them there.

"It's done," said Callum.

The sun moved. The robin had stopped. And in the whole of the house, in the long gray rooms, in the sunlit hush of the sunroom with its petals on the floor, there was no sound at all but the small bright patient ticking of a watch, which had been wound by two people on a porch, and which did not stop, and did not stop, and did not stop.

…

They buried her in Cleveland, in May, in the rain.

It was not what she had asked. She had asked, in the nineteenth paragraph of the will, to be put in the sea. But Josie had read it aloud at the kitchen table at Saltwick, with a glass in her hand, and had stopped, and said hoarsely, "Under that, in pencil, she's written or Parma Heights, if Josie insists." And Josie had put her head on her arms and wept for the length of a minute, and then said, quite firmly, "I insist."

So it was a church on the west side, a squat brick one with a green copper spire, where Maureen Callaghan had been buried eight years earlier. It was very full. He had not expected that. He had thought it would be Josie and Nell and perhaps a dozen strangers from Hartwell; but they came in the rain, with umbrellas, by the hundred. Claims adjusters in their good suits. A woman from the deli. Mrs. Dray, in black, with a hat. A stout old man with a white mustache and a stick, who stood at the back and wept without a handkerchief, and whom Callum knew, by the set of his shoulders, for Arthur Vance. Dr. Voigt, small and gray in the third pew, with her glasses in her hand. Odessa Pell, alone, in a plain black coat with no crocodile, who did not speak to anyone and left before the end. Vivienne Locke, with her pale bob and her sensible shoes, who put her hand briefly on his sleeve as she passed and said nothing. Margaux, standing at the rear of the nave with her hands behind her back, as she'd stood at the end of every hall he had ever walked down.

A wreath had come from New York. It was very large, white roses and lilies, hung with a ribbon; and the card said With deepest sympathy, K. Pruitt. It stood in the porch, in the rain. He had seen it as he came in, and had said to Margaux, in a low voice, without breaking stride, "Please have that removed."

"Where to, sir?"

"I don't care."

"The dumpster behind the rectory?"

"That will do."

It was gone before the service began.

Josie stood beside him throughout. She wore a black dress that did not fit, and the trench coat over it, and she held his arm, hard, through the readings and the psalm and the priest's low kind voice; and when the moment came to carry the coffin she stepped up with the other five and took the front left handle, though she stood five foot two, and bore it, shaking, down the whole length of the aisle, with her chin up and her teeth bared in something that was not a smile. He took the right. It weighed nothing. It weighed what a thing weighs, when everything that mattered has been taken out of it.

They laid her next to her mother. He stood in the rain. He had no umbrella; he'd refused it. He stood with his head bare and the water running down his face, and heard the priest's voice, and the dull sound of the earth, and a woman's sob somewhere to his right; and he looked at the little hole in the ground, and thought, quite clearly:

I am standing at the edge of the dock.

And I am not looking away.

When it was over they went and stood in the porch of the church, a small crowd, damp, subdued, murmuring. Josie put something in his hand. It was small, and square, and white, with a bit of cotton coming out of the edge.

"Nell found it," she said. "At the cabin. In a drawer. She said Win told her it was for you, if she didn't get the chance."

He opened it.

It was a ring. A plain band of white gold, a man's size, with nothing on it. He turned it to the light, and read inside it, in letters so fine they were barely there, the one word.

HARBOR.

He stood looking at it for a long time.

Then he put it on. It went onto the third finger of his left hand, as though it had been made for it, and it was cold for a second, and then warm.

…

He went out of the church alone.

The rain had lifted. A thin pale light lay over the street, over the wet slate roofs and the black glistening trees and the rows of parked cars with their windows beaded. A bus went by. A boy in a yellow slicker was splashing in the gutter, and his mother called him in a long flat Ohio vowel. It was all quite ordinary. It was just a street in a city. He stood on the top step with the white-gold ring on his finger, and a thin wind on his face, and the smell of wet earth and bus exhaust and, very faintly, from somewhere beyond the roofs, the cold green breath of a lake.

He put his hand in his waistcoat.

He took out the watch.

It lay in his palm, silver, scratched, the lid worn by his thumb. It was warm. He opened it. The white face looked up at him, calm and serious, with its small black numerals and its two thin hands, and its quick bright second hand sweeping, with the faint tireless tremor that he had never, until this spring, heard.

It said four-seventeen.

He looked at it. He looked at it for the space of a long breath.

It was a quarter past four in the afternoon. It was an hour he'd known all his life, and had never seen. And the second hand swept, and went on, and the minute hand moved, with a small clean step, to eighteen.

It did not stop.

Theo, he thought.

Win.

He closed the lid. He put it back, against his heart, where it ticked. And he went down the steps, one at a time, into the rain-washed light, and got into the car.