Small Print
The trees leaned against a chain-link fence at the back of a supermarket car park, under a string of bare bulbs that buzzed in the cold. They were tied up in netting like something that had been caught. A man in a hat with ear flaps sat in a shed with a space heater and a cash box and didn't come out.
"Six foot," Lou said. "Not bigger. Last year I got her a bigger one and she called me every day until New Year to tell me it was too big."
"Then why did you get a bigger one?"
"Because she called me every day the year before that to tell me it was too small."
Naru walked along the fence with her hands in the pockets of her coat. Morgana had remembered a great many Christmas trees. Most of them had stood in hotel lobbies, white and silver and fourteen feet tall, with nobody looking at them. One had been in a television studio, made of tinsel, with a cameraman counting down beside it. There was one very old one, small and crooked in the corner of a living room, which smelled of something Naru couldn't place until she was standing in the cold among these, breathing it in. It was resin. It was the smell of these, sharp and green and a little sweet, coming off the cut ends in the frost.
She stopped in front of one and pulled the netting aside to look at it.
"That one's bald on the back," Lou said.
"It's got a back?"
"Everything's got a back." Lou came and stood beside her and looked at the tree with her head on one side, the way she looked at a snare. "Turn it round."
Naru turned it round. It was bald on the back.
They looked at eleven more. Lou had opinions about all of them, and a system that she wouldn't explain, which seemed to involve shaking each tree by the trunk and listening to it. In the end she chose one near the shed that Naru wouldn't have looked at twice, and stood it up on its cut end and turned it slowly round in front of her, and it was perfect. It wasn't bald anywhere. It was exactly six feet tall.
"How did you know?"
"Thirty years," Lou said. "My dad did it before me. He shook them too."
She paid the man in the shed, who took the money through a gap in the door and didn't look up. They carried the tree between them to the van, Lou at the heavy end, Naru at the top with the needles going down the collar of her coat. They got it up onto the roof rack on the second try.
Lou had a ball of green twine in her coat. She threw it over the roof to Naru, and Naru threw it back under the rack, and they did that four times until the tree was lashed down front and back. Then Lou went to tie it off.
She got the first knot. On the second her left hand wouldn't close.
Naru saw it from the other side of the van, through the branches. The fingers went round the twine and stopped, curled, not quite meeting. Lou looked at them. She tried again, and they came another quarter of an inch and stopped there. Her face did nothing at all. She took her left hand off the twine and put it in her pocket, and tied the knot one-handed, with her right hand and her teeth.
Naru looked away before Lou could see her looking.
She had felt it before. She'd felt it for weeks, under everything else in Lou, the way you hear a fridge in a quiet kitchen and stop hearing it. Every time they met there was a small thread of want running through her about that hand. She wanted it to stop aching in the mornings. She wanted to know whether it was going to get worse. Under that, much quieter, was the oldest fear Lou had, older than the van and the chapel. She was afraid of the day she sat down behind a kit and the hand didn't answer. Naru had kept her attention off it on purpose. It wasn't hers to look at.
It was loud now. Lou stood by the van with her hand in her pocket and the want came off her like heat off a road.
"Get in," Lou said. "It's freezing."
The van smelled the way it always smelled, of cat and coffee and the cold. Lou ran the engine for the heater and they sat in the car park with the tree on the roof, drinking the coffee the man in the shed sold in paper cups, which was nearly as bad as Murphy's.
Lou had both hands round her cup. Naru noticed that she held it mostly with the right.
"Can I ask you something," Lou said. "About the thing."
"Which thing?"
"In the chapel. You said I'd know. If I'd made a deal with you." Lou was looking straight ahead through the windscreen, at the trees in their nets along the fence. "I've been thinking about it. I keep thinking about it. And I realised I don't know what it would even look like. A deal. I've got nothing to go on except Sunday school and a lot of movies." She drank some coffee. "So, what. Is it a contract? Do I sign something? Is there blood?"
"No blood."
"That's something."
"No paper either." Naru turned her cup in her hands. "It's just what it sounds like. Somebody wants something. I can give it to them. They give me something back. We both say yes and we both know what we're saying yes to. That's all of it."
"That's all of it," Lou repeated.
"That's the shape. What's inside it is different every time."
Lou nodded slowly. "So what's inside it," she said. "Give me one. A real one."
Naru thought about the bumper at Station 14 and the sky going gold. She could tell Lou what it had been. Who it had been was his to keep.
"There's a man," she said. "One of the two I told you about. Not Theo. He wanted to be seen. Nobody ever looked at him, his whole life, and he wanted that more than anything. So I gave him a way. When he wants it badly enough, people look."
"And what did he give you?"
"His silence, about something he saw. And something every morning."
Lou turned her head.
"Every morning, at sunrise, a little of what he feels comes to me," Naru said. "He feels it go. He's felt it every morning since July."
Lou was very still.
"What is it?" she said. "The thing that goes."
Naru knew what Lou was really asking. She could feel the word in her as clearly as if it had been said.
"It isn't your soul," she said. "I can't touch that. Nobody like me can. It's..." She looked for the word, and there wasn't a good one in this language. "It's what you'd give a god, if you had one. A little of it. Belief. Whatever you feel when you think about what I did for you. You make more of it. You'd never run out. But it's mine, every morning, for as long as the deal holds."
"And if I wanted out?"
"You could ask me to end it."
"Ask."
"Yes. It's not yours to end. It's mine." Naru held her eyes. "You could ask. It would only end if I agreed."
"And would you?"
"I'd like to tell you yes," Naru said. "I can't promise you that. And you shouldn't believe me if I did."
Lou looked down into her coffee for a long time.
"Okay," she said. "So say it was me. Hypothetically. What would I want." She said it lightly, the way you'd poke at a dog you weren't sure about. "What would you even give someone like me?"
Naru didn't answer at once. She could have said she didn't know. That would have been a lie.
"Your hand," she said.
Lou's face didn't move.
"I'm not offering," Naru said. "You asked me what one would look like. That's what one would look like, for you. It hurts in the mornings. It's getting worse. You haven't told anyone." She kept her voice level. "I could make it stop. That's the kind of thing I mean."
The heater ticked. Out past the windscreen the man in the shed came out at last, in his ear-flap hat, and dragged one of the netted trees across the asphalt to stand it with the others.
"How do you know about the hand," Lou said.
"I saw you tie the knot."
"That's not all."
"No." Naru looked at her. "It's loud. When you want something that much, I can feel it. I try not to listen to you, Lou. I mostly manage. I couldn't, today."
Lou took her left hand off the cup and laid it on her knee, palm up, and looked at it. She opened it and closed it, slowly. It went about as far as it had gone on the twine.
"Every morning," she said.
"Every morning."
"For the rest of my life, or until you let me go."
"Yes."
"And if you let me go, it would hurt again."
"Yes."
Lou nodded. She put the hand back round the cup.
"There's something else," Naru said.
She felt Lou brace for it.
"Theo has something from me," she said. "Nobody can get into his head. Nobody can make him forget anything. He's sharper than he was, and steadier." She held her cup in both hands. "I gave it to him in July. I take nothing for it. Nothing at all. No morning, no breath, nothing. He doesn't owe me anything."
Lou turned and looked at her properly.
"So you can do that," she said. "For free."
"Yes."
"Then why..." Lou stopped. Naru watched her work it out, and watched her not like where it went.
"Why not everyone," Naru said. "Why not you."
Lou didn't say anything.
"Because every person who carries something of mine is a door," Naru said. "There are things looking for doors. I don't know where they are, or who. I know they're there. Everyone I give something to is a way someone could find me. And when I take nothing back, it costs me that risk and gives me nothing for it." She said it plainly, because Lou would want it plainly. "I'm not a charity, Lou. I'm kind when I can be. I'm not that kind. Theo is Theo. There's one of him."
Lou was quiet for a while.
"That's a hell of a thing to tell somebody," she said finally. "When you're trying to get them to sign up."
"I'm not trying to get you to sign up."
"I know." Lou rubbed her eyes with the heel of her right hand. "That's what's bothering me."
Naru sat with her cooling coffee and watched the bulbs over the trees swing a little in the wind.
She could have done it differently. She knew that, sitting there, as plainly as she knew the cold. She could have told Lou about the hand and stopped. Lou would have taken it, or come close. A second thread every morning, from someone who wasn't Calvin. She'd have stopped needing one tired man in a bar to want so hard. She had thought about that before, in the small hours, with the pool lit outside and nothing to do but think.
She had told Lou everything instead. The cost, and that the way out would be hers to open and not Lou's. Theo, and why there would only ever be one Theo. She had put it all on the dashboard between them like the change from the man in the shed, and she hadn't once tried to make any of it sound better than it was.
She thought, briefly, of a Tuesday afternoon at the end of a bar, and then she put it away.
"Here's what I don't get," Lou said.
"Go on."
"If you were trying to get me. If that's what all this is." She made a small gesture, taking in the van, the coffee, the tree, the whole last month. "Wouldn't you do exactly this? Tell me everything. All the bad parts. Make me trust you because you told me the bad parts."
"Yes," Naru said.
Lou looked at her.
"That's exactly what I'd do," Naru said. "If I were that. It's what I'd do if I weren't. There's nothing I can say to you that would sound different either way. I've thought about it. There isn't."
"So how am I supposed to know?"
"You're not. Not for a long time." Naru turned the empty cup in her hands. "Maybe not ever."
Lou let out a long breath that fogged the inside of the windscreen. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed, short and tired.
"My mother would have a stroke," she said. "Sitting in a car park with you, talking about this. Over a Christmas tree."
"Is the tree for her?"
"It's always for her." Lou put the van in gear. "Come on. She wants it before dark, and it's a forty-minute drive, and I have to drop you first."
She drove them back across the city with the tree on the roof and the heater going. The streets had their lights up, strings of them across the main road and wreaths on the lamp posts. Lou drove with both hands on the wheel. She didn't say anything about the hand, or the deal, or the morning, and Naru didn't either.
At a red light by the river Lou took her left hand off the wheel and looked at it.
She opened it. She closed it. It went as far as it went.
Naru felt the want come up in her again, the whole long thread of it, the aching mornings and the old fear under them. It didn't turn toward her. It didn't reach out or ask. It just ran there in the quiet of the van, the way it had for weeks, and Lou looked at her hand in the red light.
The light changed. She put the hand back on the wheel and drove.
At the building she pulled into the turning circle and stopped and didn't turn the engine off. Naru got out into the cold. A few needles had come down off the roof onto the pavement, and the smell of resin was everywhere.
She leaned back in through the open door.
"Thank you for the tree," she said.
"It's not your tree."
"I know."
Lou looked at her across the passenger seat. She looked tired, like someone who had been handed something heavy and hadn't decided yet whether to put it down.
"Next week," Lou said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Next week," Naru said, and shut the door.
She stood on the pavement and watched the van pull out into the traffic with the tree on its roof, the netting pale under the streetlights. She watched the knot at the back, the one Lou had tied with one hand and her teeth, all the way to the corner, until the van turned and was gone.