Daylight
At ten past four Calvin was sitting on the edge of Leigh's bed in the dark, looking for his other sock.
He found it under the chair by the window, where the blind didn't quite meet the frame and a bar of orange streetlight came through and lay across the floor. He put it on quietly, the way he always did, though there was no point being quiet anymore. Somewhere around October she had stopped pretending to be asleep for this part.
The warmth was going. He could feel it under his breastbone, the way you feel the heat go out of a bath. It always started about now. By the time he reached his own street it would be thin, and by sunrise it would be gone, and the small warm thread would go with it, the one that left him every morning and drew away across the city toward the harbour. After that he would be what he was the rest of the week: a thin man with a long face, whom people's eyes slid over.
Twenty Thursdays, give or take. He had stopped counting at sixteen, because counting felt like tempting something.
Most of them it had come. He sat at the end of the bar by the taps and wanted it, all the way down, and somewhere in the first drink it rose in him and the room turned. Some Thursdays it hadn't. There had been one in September after a shift he didn't talk about, and one in November when he'd had a fever and could barely want his own dinner. On those nights he had sat beside Leigh as himself, grey and ordinary, and she had talked to him about the Mets the same as always and put her hand on his arm the same as always. He had gone home at eleven anyway. She hadn't seemed to mind. He didn't trust that. He thought it only meant she hadn't noticed yet. He thought that one Thursday it might not come back at all, and then she would notice, and he didn't let himself think past that.
He stood up and reached for his shirt.
"Calvin," Leigh said.
She was lying on her side with the sheet pulled up to her shoulder. Her reading glasses lay folded on the nightstand next to the clock. Without them, in the orange light, her face looked younger and more tired.
"Hey," he said. "Go back to sleep."
"Stay."
He stood there with the shirt in his hands.
"You don't have to go," she said. "You never have to go. You just do." She didn't say it angrily, and that made it worse. "I'm not asking for anything big. I want to wake up and you're here. I want to make you terrible coffee and find out if you take sugar. Twenty weeks, Calvin. I don't know if you take sugar."
He opened his mouth. Nothing came. Even now, with the warmth draining out of him, there should have been something easy and kind to say, and there wasn't. There was only the true thing, which was that at half past seven she would open her eyes and see what was actually lying next to her, and he couldn't let that happen.
"Not tonight," he said.
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay," she said. "Not tonight."
She didn't say next week. She turned over to face the wall. After a while he put the shirt on and leaned down and kissed her hair, and she let him, and he let himself out.
He walked home. It was the hard dry cold of early December, and the streets were empty except for a sweeper crawling along the gutter with its orange light turning. He walked with his hands in his jacket and felt the warmth go out of him a little more with every block.
At home he didn't go to bed. He sat at the kitchen table with the cat on his knees and his coat still on, and waited.
The sun came up a little before half past seven. He felt the thread leave him the way it always did, out through the place where she had once laid his hand on her chest, away toward the harbour. Then it was gone, and he was what was left.
He got up and looked at himself in the dark window over the sink. Long face. Hair going at the temples. Eyes a little too close together. He tried to picture Leigh opening her eyes to that on the pillow beside her, in the grey light, and he saw her face do what faces did when they looked at him: the small polite nothing, and then the slide.
He stood there until the cat complained about breakfast.
He had looked up the number in July and never used it.
It was on her website under Management, a downtown landline. He had saved it in his phone as a single letter, as if someone might go through his phone and work it out. For five months it had sat there between his landlord and his mother.
On Monday, on his break, he sat in the cab of the truck in the ambulance bay at County with the engine off and called it.
He expected a machine. He had a message worked out from the drive: his name, that she would know it, his number, nothing else. It rang twice, and a man picked up.
"Good afternoon."
The message went straight out of Calvin's head.
"Hi," he said. "Sorry. I don't know if this is the right... My name's Calvin Rusk. I'm a paramedic. I don't expect, I mean, if you could just tell her I called..."
There was a short pause on the line. It wasn't a confused one. It sounded like someone putting down a pen.
"Hold on for me, Mr Rusk," the man said. "Don't hang up."
The line went quiet. There was no music. Calvin sat with the phone against his ear and watched a porter push an empty wheelchair across the bay, and thought about hanging up, and didn't.
"Calvin," she said.
He knew her voice. Everybody knew her voice; it had been on the radio and the news all autumn. That wasn't how he knew it. He knew it from a truck bumper at six in the morning, low and a little hoarse, saying his name as if it were something she'd decided to keep.
"Hi," he said. "Sorry. I didn't think I'd actually..."
"I'm glad you called."
"I need to ask you something. About what you gave me." He looked at the dashboard. "I don't really want to do it on the phone."
"No," she said. "Where would you like to meet? Somewhere you're comfortable."
He hadn't expected that. He looked out across the bay.
"Murphy's," he said, before he could think better of it. "It's a bar. It's..."
"I know where it is."
He didn't ask how. "Not Thursday," he said.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Three o'clock."
Murphy's at three on a Tuesday was nearly empty. Naru came in out of the cold with the hood of her black sweatshirt up and stood a moment inside the door while it stuck behind her, letting her eyes get used to the brown light. A television over the bar showed a horse race with the sound off. Behind the bar a big man with a dishcloth over his shoulder looked up, looked at her, and kept looking.
She felt him recognise her. It dropped through him like a coin into a well, and she waited for what usually came after: the hand going to the phone, the want to have been near it. It didn't come. He looked past her to the end of the bar, where Calvin sat alone by the taps with a glass he hadn't touched, and then back at her, and his face closed up into something careful.
"Afternoon," he said.
"Afternoon."
She pushed her hood back and went and sat down next to Calvin.
She hadn't seen him since the morning at the station. She had felt him every day. Every sunrise the thread came to her across the city, small and warm and nearly always the same weight, a little heavier on Fridays. She knew it the way she knew her own hand. Looking at him now was strange. He was thinner than she remembered, or she had only remembered him with the sky going gold behind him. He'd had his hair cut. He looked like a man who had slept four hours.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
The barman came down the bar. "Get you anything?"
"Coffee, if you have it."
"I have it," the barman said. "I wouldn't call it coffee." He looked at Calvin. Calvin looked at his glass. The barman went away.
She let the quiet sit. She could feel Calvin's want under it, and it had changed since July. In July it had been wide and old and shallow, a groove worn by thirty years of wanting someone, anyone, to stop and look. It was narrower now, and deeper, and it had a name in it.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her. He told it to the mirror behind the bar, to the strip of himself between the bottles, and she let him. The Thursdays. The nights it came and the nights it didn't. The streetlight in the bedroom, and Leigh on her side, asking.
"She wants me to stay," he said. "For the morning. That's all she asked. And I can't, because in the morning it's gone. Every time. Around four it starts going, and by sunrise..." He stopped and turned the glass a little on the bar. "And something else goes too. Every morning. From here." He touched his chest under the breastbone without looking at her. "I've felt it every day since July."
"Yes," she said.
He looked at her then.
"That's me," she said. "That's what I take. You feel it go at sunrise because that's when it comes to me." She held his eyes. "I should have told you that in July. I'm telling you now."
She watched him take it in. He wasn't frightened. If anything he looked relieved, the way people are when a pain they've carried for months is finally given a name.
"Okay," he said slowly. "And the other part. What happens to me. Why does it go?"
So she told him that too, and every word of it was true.
She told him it came up out of him, not out of her. She had only opened a door, and what came through it was his own want, the whole weight of it, turned outward so that other people could feel it. It came when he wanted it all the way down, which was why it failed him after a bad shift, or on the nights he was too worn out to want anything. And nobody could want like that for a whole night and on into the morning. It ebbed, the way anything ebbs, and the daylight took the last of it.
"So it can't stay," Calvin said.
She had felt the question coming the way you feel a wave lift under a boat.
There was another way. She could see it as clearly as she could see the bottles behind the bar. She could reach into him, here, now, and set something in him that would not go out at dawn. It would be smaller, a great deal smaller. It would never turn a room. It would never bring a stranger across a bar to him. It would only sit in him from now on, steady, a little warmth that held people's eyes on him half a second longer than they used to stay, every day for the rest of his life, whether he wanted it or not.
And he would stop needing to want so hard. She knew that as surely as she knew the rest. The groove would fill. A man who is a little bit seen every day of his life doesn't sit at the end of a bar on Thursdays wanting it all the way down. The thread that came to her every sunrise would go thin, and then thinner, and it was the only one she had. The others were out of reach. Two thousand of them had been held out to her in the dark at the Aldine, and she hadn't dared to take them, because of what lay in the silt and what it would do with them.
"Not this," she said. "This one doesn't stay. It isn't made to."
It wasn't a lie. She heard herself not lie. She had once been very good at that.
She gave herself the rest while she said it. He hadn't asked what else there was. He had asked about this. He was happier than he had been in his life; she could feel it in the Friday mornings. He was better off with what he had. She was keeping herself whole, and a whole thing was more use to him than a hungry one.
All of that was true as well. None of it was why.
Before there was a world for it to happen in, she had gone to war over whether they should be allowed to know what they were. She had lost everything for her answer. Now a tired man in a bar had very nearly asked her, and she had decided for him that he didn't need to know. She felt it settle in her, small and cold, with nowhere to go.
The barman put a coffee down in front of her. It was as bad as he'd promised.
"Then I'm stuck," Calvin said. "Thursday comes, and either it comes or it doesn't, and either way I'm out of there by four."
She wrapped her hands round the cup.
"No," she said. "You're not."
"Tell me a story," she said. "One you've told her."
Calvin stared at her. "What?"
"Any story. One she laughed at."
He thought about it. There was only one, really. He told her about the woman who had called 911 because her parrot had learned to do the smoke alarm and she couldn't find the smoke.
She stopped him in the second sentence.
"You're telling it to the mirror," she said.
He looked. He was. He'd been looking at the strip of himself between the bottles without knowing it.
"Look at me."
He looked at her. It was very hard. Her eyes were that strange pale blue-green that the papers had written about all autumn, and up close they were worse, or better. He started again and got as far as the parrot's name.
"And you're apologising," she said.
"I didn't say sorry."
"Your shoulders did. Before you'd started. They told me you were about to waste my time." She put her hand flat between his shoulder blades and pressed down, not hard, until they came away from his ears. He hadn't known they were up there. "Again."
He told it again. She stopped him again.
"Breathe out first. All the way. Then talk."
"Why?"
"Because I knew a woman who threw up before every show for ten years," she said, "and that's what got her on stage."
She said it lightly. He didn't know what to do with that, so he breathed out, all the way, until his chest was empty, and when he started talking his voice came from lower down than he was used to. It sounded like somebody else's. It sounded like his.
She let him get further this time. Near the end she put up a finger.
"You keep checking if I'm still listening."
"Do I?"
"Every few words. Your eyes come up to see if I've gone." She tilted her head. "I'm listening. Stop checking. And the bit before the end, where the fireman opens the cupboard. You rush it."
"Because..."
"Because you're afraid I'll leave before you get there. I won't. Nobody leaves before the parrot." She picked up her terrible coffee. "Let it sit."
He laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, short and surprised, and she smiled at him over the cup, and something in his chest that had been held tight since Friday morning loosened a notch.
The third time, he told it to her face. He breathed out first. He kept his shoulders down, mostly. When the fireman opened the cupboard he stopped and let it sit, a whole second, then another, longer than he could bear. Then he said what the fireman found in it, and she laughed.
It was a real laugh. It came out of her all at once, and she put her hand over her mouth. At the end of the bar the barman looked up from his glasses.
Calvin sat very still. He was checking himself, inside, under the breastbone. Nothing was there. No warmth, no rising. It was three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and he didn't want anything all the way down. He was a man telling a story, and it had been a good story, and she had laughed.
"Was that real?" he said.
"I don't lie," she said.
He believed her. He looked at her a moment longer anyway, because she was Morgana Gray and had smiled on a thousand red carpets, and then he let it go.
"Go and get yourself another drink," she said. "And ask him something. Something you actually want to know."
He looked down the bar. "Mick?"
"Is that his name?"
"I've been coming here eight years."
"Then you've got eight years of questions."
He got up. He breathed out on the way. He put his glass on the bar in front of Mick and asked him, because it was the first true thing that came into his head, how long he'd had the place.
Mick looked at him. Then he put the glass he was drying down.
"Nineteen years," he said. "My old man had it before that. Twenty-six years, him." He picked up the bottle and poured without being asked. "Eight years you've been sitting on that stool. You never asked."
"I'm asking now."
Mick told him. It took four minutes. It was about his father and a fire in the kitchen in 1994 and a dog that had lived under the pool table. Calvin listened, and asked one more thing, and Mick answered that too. When Calvin went back to his stool he found he was smiling, and that his shoulders were where she'd put them.
She was watching him over her cup.
"That's all it is?" he said.
"That's most of it. The rest is doing it on days you don't feel like it."
He sat down. He turned the new glass on the bar, and the question he'd come with came back up, the real one, the one under the others.
"What if she wakes up," he said, "and it's just me."
"Then it's just you. She's had just you before."
"On the bad Thursdays."
"What did she do on the bad Thursdays?"
He thought about it. "The same. She talked to me the same."
"And who went home at eleven?"
He didn't answer.
"I can't tell you what she'll think when she wakes up," she said. "I've never met her. I don't know her. You don't know her either, not in the morning." She put the cup down. "That's what she's asking you for."
He left at half past four. He paid for her coffee, and she let him. At the door he turned and lifted his hand, and she lifted hers, and the door stuck behind him and then gave.
Naru sat on at the end of the bar.
The barman came down after a while and wiped the wood in front of her, though it didn't need wiping.
"He's been different," Mick said. "Since the summer."
"Has he."
"Thursdays he's somebody else. Whole room looks at him." He folded the cloth. "Today he was just himself. Asked about my dad." He looked at the door, and then at her, with the same careful face he'd had when she came in. "I liked today better."
He went back up the bar and left her alone.
She sat with the cold coffee and the small cold thing she had put down inside herself an hour ago. It hadn't gone anywhere. It wasn't going to. She had given him the breath and the shoulders and the bit before the end, all of it true, everything Morgana had ever learned from mirrors and vocal coaches, and none of it had cost her anything. The one thing that would have cost her she had kept.
Tomorrow at sunrise the thread would come to her across the city, small and warm, from a flat above a laundromat. She would feel it arrive. She would take it. She already knew she would.
It was dark by the time he reached his street. The laundromat under his flat was lit, the long row of dryers turning behind the steamed glass, and he stood on the pavement outside it in the cold and took out his phone.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Hey," Leigh said. Her voice was careful.
He breathed out, all the way, until his chest was empty. He put his weight in his feet.
"Hi," he said. "I wanted to tell you something before Thursday."
The line was quiet. He let it sit.
"I don't take sugar," he said.
Behind the glass the dryers went round, warm and lit, and he stood on the cold pavement and listened to her begin to laugh.