Number Zero

Dess

The last audit took her eleven minutes.

It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, the fifth of September, a quarter to eleven at night. The house was quiet in the way houses are quiet when they have finally stopped being afraid. The window over the sink stood open on a warm black night full of crickets. A single lamp burned at the end of the kitchen table, under a shade of green glass, and in its small bright pool lay a blue notebook with a squared cover and a spine held together by three bands of masking tape.

She had made tea. She had sat down. She had not touched the book for nearly twenty minutes.

Upstairs, in the back bedroom, in a crib that had belonged to Joelle's son and still bore, on the left rail, a faint set of teeth marks, Calder slept. She had put him down at nine, fed and changed and sung to. He had gone down with a small contented sigh, like a man lowering himself into a hot bath, and she had stood over him in the dark with her hand on his chest, feeling it rise and fall, for a full ten minutes, until the old terror had gone out of her shoulders and she could straighten her back.

Twelve weeks, she thought. Thirteen on Tuesday.

He sleeps. I sleep. The house is quiet. The door is open.

She opened the ledger.

…

There were four hundred and eleven pages. She had counted them, once, in a bad week in April, in the way one counts the stairs in a house one is afraid to leave. They were ruled in pale blue and numbered at the corners, in a round clear hand that changed, imperceptibly, as the book went on, from the careful print of a girl of nineteen to the quick looped script of a woman who has signed a great many claim forms. The first entry, on the first page, was in pencil. She did not need to look. She knew it by heart.

Dess gave: nothing.

Dess received: 1 bus pass (Mom). 1 sandwich (Joelle's mom). 1 ride to the bus (Mrs. F).

Net: owe 3. Pay back by Friday.

She had been nineteen. She had been working nights at a Dunkin' and taking classes at Bristol Community, and she had come home to a house in Fall River with a man in the kitchen who said, over a plate of her mother's meatloaf, "I'm paying for this." And she had gone up to her room, and shut the door, and sat on the bed, and written it down. It had seemed like the most sensible thing in the world. It had seemed like a wall.

Never be the one who owes.

She turned a page.

She turned a hundred. She went through them slowly, with her thumb on the margin, past the years. Past the apartment on Ives Street and the first promotion. Past the bad winter, and Gabe's brief earnest spring, and the long gray stretch after she turned down his ring, when the entries had thinned to one a week and said only Rent. Groceries. Called Mom. Past the clinic. Past a page in October on which, in an unsteady hand, with a blot where the pen had stopped, was written: Dess received: 1 vial. Donor 4417. Cost: unknown.

And then the part that was different.

…

It began on the twenty-fourth of November, in a different ink.

Dess received: 1 card, cream, anchor watermark. Dess gave: nothing.

She turned the page. Dess received: 1 window. Cost: unknown. Dess gave: 1 sign. She turned the page. 1 fridge, full. Net: owed. $81 (salmon). She turned. 1 soup debt. 1 handkerchief (pending). She turned, and she turned, and the pages went by under her thumb in a long soft rustle like the shuffling of a deck: the building, the chicken, the sealed vestibule, the night in the corridor, the snow, the napkin. 1 chair, mended. 1 watch. 1 man on the floor with his ear to a vent. Page after page. Entry after entry. Each with its date, its cost, its neat penciled total.

And each, she saw, with a number at the bottom that was not quite a number.

Net: unclassified. Net: pending. Net: owed, but he won't let me. Net: too much. Net: not enough. Net: stop.

She had never, in twelve years, left a balance blank. She had never in her life been a woman who couldn't total a column. It was the one thing she knew about herself: that whatever else was lost, whatever else had gone wrong, whatever else she had not been taught, she could always, at the bottom of a page, draw a line, and find out where she stood.

And now she had a book in which for nine months she had failed to do so.

She turned to the last written page. The twenty-eighth of August. Dess received: 1 key. 1 letter. 1 boat. 1 true thing. Net: just a good day.

That's the problem, she thought.

That's the whole problem. It's not an account. It stopped being an account a long time ago. It's a diary. It's a love letter. It's a record of the days when someone was kind to me, and I couldn't bear it, and wrote it down to make it small.

She picked up the pen.

…

She sat for a long time with the nib an inch above the page.

She was aware of the ticking of the kitchen clock, a cheap plastic one from the Stop & Shop. She was aware of the crickets. She was aware of her own pulse, steady and slow, and of the breeze from the window on the back of her neck, and of a thin thread of music, very far away, from a radio on someone's porch, playing something old. She thought of her mother in a booth at the Blue Plate on a Thursday morning with her coat on and her purse in her lap, saying, I'm not good at it. She thought of Gary in the kitchen, with the meatloaf. That's a hundred and ten dollars I'm putting on this table.

She thought of a man in a gray suit kneeling in front of a broken chair on a dark landing, setting a peg.

What would be the number? she thought.

What would be the number if I added it all up?

She tried. She actually tried; it was the old habit, and it came up in her like a reflex. She tried to count the nights in the corridor. She tried to count the fourteen days. She tried to put a figure on the card in the vestibule and the hand on the glass at 5:54 and the letter in a stranger's handwriting that said Be a tree. She tried to weigh a building against a lemon and a boat against a ledger and a man's whole terrible adoring effort against four months of silence, and the numbers came up in her head and fell apart, one after another, like a sandcastle in the tide.

It doesn't total, she thought. It was never going to total.

Because it's not a debt.

It's not a debt, and it's not a gift. It's not owed and it's not paid. It's a thing that two people do in the same room.

You can't balance it any more than you can balance a conversation.

She laughed, once, softly, to herself, in the kitchen, and wiped her eyes.

Mom, she thought. You were right.

It's just a nice afternoon.

…

There was a sound in the doorway.

It was the lightest of sounds: a single knuckle, rapping twice on the frame of the open kitchen door. She did not look up. She had been expecting it for four minutes. She had heard, a quarter of an hour before, the creak of the third stair at No. 14 and the fall of footsteps on the shared landing and the faint hesitant pause that always came just before the door to the back stairs, a pause she had learned to read, like a word.

"It's open," she said.

"I know. That is why I knocked."

"You can come in."

"May I?"

"You may." She turned her head, at last. "That's the third time, Theron. You've asked three times. We said twice."

"I am being thorough."

"You're being a lunatic."

"The two are not mutually exclusive." He came in. He stood at the end of the table, in shirtsleeves and a pair of old gray trousers, with his hair standing up on one side where he had pushed his hand through it, and a paperback of The Wind in the Willows in his left hand. He had not been reading it. His thumb was between the pages, three-quarters through, and the spine was cracked. "I saw your light. I could not sleep. I was reading the part about the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and I came to the conclusion that I was a fool."

"What part?"

"The part where he asks if Mole is afraid." He gave a shy, crooked smile. "I looked it up. 'Afraid? Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!'"

"That's the Rat."

"Is it? I may have conflated them." He glanced at the notebook under her hand. "You are doing the ledger."

"I'm closing it."

"Closing it?"

"Don't look at me like that. It's not what you think." She turned the page toward him. "Come here. Sit. You can read over my shoulder. You've earned it."

He sat.

He sat in the chair at the corner of the table, the mended one with the crooked peg, which had been returned to its place on the twenty-fifth of June with a note and a watch and, since then, had never once been moved. He drew it a few inches closer, on the linoleum, and leaned in, and she felt the warmth of him along her shoulder, and smelled soap and cedar and the faint dusty sweetness of old paper. He looked at the page. He did not touch it.

"It's empty," he said.

"It's not."

"There is no entry."

"Not yet." She dipped the pen. "I'm going to write one. It's a short one. And I want you to see it, and I want you not to say anything until I'm finished."

"I shall not say a word."

"Not even 'magnificent.'"

"I shall hold it in."

"You'll try."

"I shall try," said Theron, solemnly, "and ask, and say thank you."

She laughed, and bent over the page.

…

She wrote it in four lines.

September 5th.

Dess gave: —

Dess received: —

Balance: 0.

She put down the pen.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. The crickets sang. The lamp hummed. A moth came in through the window and blundered, thudding softly, against the green glass of the shade. And Theron, beside her, did not move at all, not a muscle, not an eyelash. He sat with his hands flat on his knees and his eyes on the page, and she saw the line of his throat work once, and then go still.

"It's zero," he said, at last, in a very low voice.

"Yeah."

"It is... I do not understand. We are not even."

"No."

"There is a building. There is a—" He stopped. "You do not mean that it is paid."

"I don't mean it's paid. I mean it's over." She took a breath. "I mean I'm done counting, Theron. I'm not saying I don't owe you. I'm not saying you don't owe me. I'm saying I've decided to stop keeping the book. The book's been a wall. It was a good wall. It got me through a lot. But I'm thirty-one and I've got a baby, and a man across the hall with a lemon tree and a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and I'd like to live in a house that isn't made out of numbers."

"Dess..."

"I'm not done."

"I beg your pardon."

"The building's still a loan. The lemons are still due. I'll pay it. That's not the same as counting." She turned to face him. "A loan is a thing between two people who trust each other. A ledger is what you keep when you don't. I want the first one. I'm giving up the second."

"And the balance?"

"Zero doesn't mean we're equal." She heard her own voice, low and unhurried. "It means we're starting. It means everything from here on out is new. I don't know if I'll give you more than you give me. I don't know if you'll give me more than I give you. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to write it down."

He turned his head.

He looked at her. His eyes were gray, and wet, and enormous in the lamp, and the muscles of his jaw were moving as though he were trying to hold back something very large with very small hands. "Dess," he said. "May I say a thing?"

"You may always say a thing."

"I do not deserve this."

"Term Fourteen."

"I accept the thanks. I do not apologize." He closed his eyes. "I am merely stating a fact. I do not deserve it. And I have the most extraordinary sense that it does not matter in the least."

"It doesn't."

"I find that unsettling."

"I know."

"I find that—" His voice cracked. "I find it the best thing that has ever happened to me."

"I know," she said, very gently. "Me too."

…

She closed the book.

She did it slowly. She laid the cover down over the last page, and pressed it flat with both hands, and ran her thumb once down the length of the spine, along the tape. The notebook gave under her palm with a faint sigh. It was warm from the lamp. It smelled, as it had always smelled, of paper and pencil lead and twelve years of other people's kitchens.

"What will you do with it?" said Theron.

"I don't know yet."

"You could burn it."

"I'm not burning it." She smiled. "It's the story of my life. It's the only record I have of who was kind to me. I'm not going to burn it, I'm going to keep it. I'm just going to put it somewhere I don't have to look at it every day."

"Where?"

"I have an idea."

She rose.

She picked up the ledger and carried it out of the kitchen, down the narrow hall, past the framed photograph of her mother at nineteen in a Fall River Blue Bombers jacket, past the coat pegs and the umbrella stand. At the foot of the stairs she paused. She looked up. Above her, in the dark, the landing glimmered faintly; a night-light in the shape of a seahorse, which Theron had brought on the second of July, burned beside the baby's door.

She climbed.

He followed, one step behind, silent, with the paperback still in his hand. The treads creaked. The air grew warm. At the top she turned, not to the bedroom, but to the little room next to it, the nursery proper, with its sloped ceiling and its sprigged wallpaper of tiny yellow ducks, and pushed open the door.

Cal slept in the crib in a pool of lamplight, on his back, with his arms thrown up in the careless abandoned posture of the very young, as though he had just fallen from a great height and been caught. His mouth was open. His chest rose and fell. The seahorse night-light threw a faint gold glow over the rail and the mobile and the crown of his hat, the crooked-stitched one, which he had refused to take off.

She crossed to the dresser.

It was an old pine dresser, painted white, that Mrs. Ferreira's husband had found at a yard sale in Tiverton and refinished with his own hands. It had four drawers. The top one held diapers. The second held blankets. The third held a heap of impossibly small sweaters, knitted in four colors by a woman in the second pew at Our Lady of the Rosary whom Dess had never met. And the fourth, the bottom one, the deep one that stuck in damp weather, held the clothes that Cal had already outgrown.

She knelt.

She worked the drawer open. It scraped. She lifted a layer of tiny things, a green sleeper, a yellow hat, a pair of white booties with frogs, and laid the notebook down in the hollow underneath, flat, on the bare pine, with its taped spine facing out. She covered it. She smoothed the little clothes back over it, one at a time, with the gentle, deliberate care of a woman tucking in a child.

There, she thought.

There you go. You can sleep too.

She closed the drawer.

…

"That's the bottom one," whispered Theron, from the doorway.

"Yeah."

"Under the baby clothes."

"Yeah."

"In case he wants it." She did not turn around. "When he's twenty-five and has a vote and a sailboat and a girlfriend I don't approve of. I want him to be able to find it. I want him to open this drawer, and see a book, and read what his mother's whole life looked like before he was born." She drew a breath. "I want him to know how it ended."

"How does it end?"

"Zero."

"That is not an end. That is a beginning."

"I know. That's what I mean." She got to her feet. She stood with her hand on the top of the dresser, looking down at the sleeping child, at the thick dark lashes lying on the round cheek and the damp swirl of hair at the temple. "He gets a mother who stopped counting. It's the best thing I could think of."

"It is a most excellent gift."

"It's not a gift."

"What is it?"

"It's a handle on the inside of a door," said Dess.

She felt him go still.

She had not meant to say it. It had come out of her in the dark, quite simply, as a thing comes out that has been waiting a long time. And she turned, at last, and looked at him: a tall lean man in the doorway of a nursery with a battered paperback in his hand and the golden glow of a seahorse on his face. He looked like he had been struck. He looked, she thought, like a man who has been walking for a very long time through a cold country, and seen, at the end of the road, a light.

"Dess."

"Yeah."

"I—"

"Don't."

"I was not going to say it."

"I know. That's why I said don't." She smiled. "Not tonight. You'll say it in June. You said you'd ask every June. I'm holding you to that."

"I did say that."

"So save it."

"I shall save it." He took a breath, ragged, as though it hurt. "I shall save it for ten months. I shall carry it with me like a lit candle through a draft. I shall put it, I think, in the bottom drawer of my own."

"Under what?"

"Under the winter socks."

She laughed. She was crying a little, and laughing, and trying not to do either aloud, because of the baby. She crossed the room. She stood in front of him in the narrow doorway, close, so that she had to tip her head to see his face, and put her two hands flat against the front of his shirt, over the bones of his chest, over the thudding, enormous, unsteady heart.

"I'm going to bed," she said.

"Of course."

"I'm going to sleep for six hours in a row."

"I hope so."

"And tomorrow's Labor Day, and Mrs. F is doing a cookout in the yard, and I'm going to eat a hot dog and let an elderly woman tell me about the Azores."

"I look forward to it."

"And at some point you're going to wind that stupid watch."

"It is four minutes slow."

"I know it is. I've got it." She looked at her wrist. It lay there in the dim gold light, the steel Hamilton, loose on the bone, ticking steadily. It said eleven thirty-one. It was, she knew, eleven thirty-five. "I like it slow. It gives us a little extra."

"A little extra what?"

"Time," said Dess.

He bent his head.

He did not kiss her. He laid his forehead against hers, very lightly, and stood there with his eyes closed and his breath on her face and his hands, for once, quite empty, hanging at his sides. She felt the warmth of his skin. She felt the faint tremor of his lashes. She stood in the nursery doorway of a house on Ives Street at the turning of a summer and held a man's head against her own, and for the first time in her life she did not count the seconds.

Then she let him go.

"Good night, Theron."

"Good night, Dess."

"Leave the door open."

"Which door?"

"All of them," said Dess.

…

She slept.

It was the first night in three months that she did not wake at two, or at four, or at five. She lay on her side in the big bed with the window open and one hand under the pillow, and the sounds of the house came to her, soft and far, as through water: the tick of the cooling radiator, the creak of a joist, the faint sleepy breath of the child through the monitor on the nightstand. Somewhere below, in the dark of the garden, the lemon tree stirred in the breeze, and on its lowest branch, a pale gold fruit, no bigger than a hen's egg, turned slowly on its stem.

Across the landing, behind a door that stood ajar, a lamp burned in a third-floor window at No. 14 until past midnight and then, quietly, went dark.

And in the bottom drawer of a white pine dresser, under a green sleeper and a yellow hat and a pair of frog booties, a blue notebook with a taped spine lay flat in the dark, and kept its last line.

Balance: 0.