Sheathing

The sawhorse was empty at 6:04 on Wednesday and Gray stood in his kitchen door and looked at it for the length of time it took the compressor not to kick on, because he hadn’t set it, because there was nothing to nail.

No tarp. The tarp was in the boat basin somewhere, blue, under a troller. No mug. He looked at the bare crossbar in the gray light and then he looked at the garage, at the door at the top of the stairs, and it was shut, and no light was on behind it, and it was six in the morning and she’d be up. She was always up. She’d be standing at her counter with the press going and the READ LOCAL mug in her hand and the white one from Salem on the rack, drying, where it had been drying since Sunday.

He’d shut a door on her.

He’d stood in this kitchen last night with a coffee can of screws in his hands and heard it close behind him and he’d stood there and waited to feel the thing he was supposed to feel, which was relief, which was the shape of a rule holding. And what he’d felt instead was the sound. A door closing in a house with nobody in it. He’d lived in that sound for two years and he’d forgotten what it was until he made it again with her on the other side.

He went into the parlor.

He’d hung two walls Tuesday night after the door. He’d done it with the clamp light on and the radio off and he’d screwed sheet after sheet of half-inch drywall to studs that had stood bare since March, and it had gone up fast because he’d needed it to, and he’d stood at eleven o’clock in a room that was two-thirds a room and one-third a drawing on old wood and he’d stopped. He’d told himself he was out of screws. He’d had half a box.

Now it was morning and the light was coming in the tall window across the subfloor and the dust hung in it and the seat was on the wall where he’d left it. Fifteen inches. Nine. Forty-eight. A plant with one runner and a baby on the end of it that he’d drawn with the pencil going slow because he’d wanted to get the curve right, and he’d told himself that was about the curve.

He’d drawn it the night of the window.

He could put a date on it now, standing here. He hadn’t let himself before. The rain, and the wax, and his pencil line on her frame — NOT PAST HERE, WET — and then his kitchen with the knots book face-down where he’d dropped it, and her light going off and on and off across the gravel. He’d stood at the sink. Then he’d walked through the dining room past the mattress and the box and into this room with the pencil still behind his ear, and he’d stood in front of the studs, and the next thing he remembered clearly was being on his knees on the subfloor with the pencil worn flat on one side and the plant done.

Six weeks. It had been on the wall six weeks and he’d walked past the pocket door every day and not looked at it, the way he didn’t look at Pier 6 from the hose tower, and then he’d sent her in for a tape measure he knew wasn’t on the sill.

He knew that too, standing here. He’d had the tape on his belt Sunday. He’d taken it off to draw and left it on the floor under the drawing and he’d bought another one at the hardware store Monday because he couldn’t go in and get it, and Tuesday he’d stood at a sawhorse with glue going off and said kitchen, sill, by the plant to a piece of wood, and some part of him that lived a half second ahead had known exactly where that tape was.

He’d sent her in. He’d sent her in and then he’d shut the door on what she found.

He picked up the drill.

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He worked all day and didn’t think about it, which was a thing he was good at.

He cut the sheets for the window wall. Three of them, to fit around the jambs and under the sill, and he cut them on the sawhorse outside in a cold that had teeth in it and carried them in and leaned them against the north wall beside the stack, face out, so he wouldn’t have to look at the drawing while he measured. He set the screws out in a coffee can. He plugged in the clamp light and aimed it at the ceiling so he’d have something when the window went. He swept the subfloor and unfolded the drop cloth and spread it under the window wall to catch the dust, because drywall dust in a floor you were going to sand was a thing you regretted for a year.

He ate standing at the sink at two. The runt was on the sill. It had a new leaf all the way open now and he turned it a quarter turn and didn’t think about that either.

At four the light started going.

He knew the light in this room. It had been the reason a man named Hanratty built the house — the parlor window took the whole of the afternoon and held it, and when the sun got down toward the jetty the light came in flat and long and turned the sawdust gold and lay across the floor in a shape exactly the size of the window, and moved, and you could watch it move. He’d watched it move a hundred times from the doorway. He’d never been in the room for it. He’d never had a reason.

He picked up the first sheet.

It was heavy. Half-inch, four by eight, cut down to fit under the sill from the left jamb to the corner, and he got his hands under it and lifted it and carried it to the wall and set the bottom edge on the subfloor and tipped it up.

It covered the left third of the drawing. The end of the seat. The first four columns of cubbies. The corner of the sill and the pot and the first of the long striped leaves.

He held it there with his shoulder. He got the drill. He put the first screw on the bit and set the bit against the sheet at the height of the top plate, where the stud was, where he’d marked it, and his finger was on the trigger.

The kitchen door opened.

He heard it. He’d left it unlatched — he’d been in and out all day for the saw — and it opened the way a door opens when the person opening it hasn’t decided yet, and then it shut, and there were sneakers on the fir.

He didn’t turn around.

He stood with his shoulder on a sheet of drywall and a drill in his hand and listened to her come through his kitchen. She stopped at the sink. He knew she’d stopped at the sink because he knew where the runt was and he knew she’d look at it. Then the dining room. Slower there. He’d have given the whole of the house to know what her face did going past the box, and he stood there with his back to the door and didn’t ask.

Then the pocket door. He felt her stop in it.

He felt her stand there. The light was going out of the window and it was still gold, still on the floor, and it was on him and on the sheet and on the two-thirds of a drawing that still showed to the right of the sheet, the seat and the cubbies and F. FRANK and the runner going out and down with the baby on the end of it, and she was in the doorway behind him, and he could hear her breathe.

“You’re sheeting it,” she said.

He didn’t answer. His finger was on the trigger. All he had to do was pull it.

“Wednesday. You said.” Her voice was very even. “You said it to a baluster.”

“I’m out of light in an hour.”

“Then you’d better hurry.”

He didn’t pull the trigger.

She came across the room. He heard her on the drop cloth — the canvas gave under her sneakers with a soft dry sound — and then she was beside him, at his right, where the drawing still showed, and he kept his eyes on the sheet.

Her hand came up.

It closed over the drill. Over his hand on the drill — her fingers went across his knuckles and the seam on the back of his hand and around the grip, and they were cold from the gravel, and she didn’t pull. She held. She held his hand on the drill against the sheet the way he’d held Owen’s hands on the rope, and then she moved it. Down, off the mark. Away from the wall. And he let her, he stood there with his shoulder still on the drywall and let a woman who came to his chin take the drill out of his hand like it was a thing she was allowed to take, and she bent and set it on the drop cloth at their feet, square to the wall, the bit pointing at the baseboard that wasn’t there yet.

She straightened up. She looked at him.

She didn’t tilt her head. Her glasses had slid and she didn’t push them up. There was gold light on one side of her face and the other side was in the shadow of the sheet, and her hair was in the clip that was losing, and she stood eighteen inches from him on a drop cloth in a room he’d torn to the studs and said it plainly, the way she’d said because I haven’t read them yet across twelve feet of bare pine.

“You don’t get to lock this one.”

He didn’t move.

“You shut a door on me last night. You’ve got — I know what you’ve got. I know you’ve got rooms. I grew up in a house with a door and I know how to stand outside one and I’m good at it, Gray, I’m the best there is. I’d stand outside yours for a year.” Her voice didn’t shake. Her hands did, at her sides; he could see them. “But not this one. You drew my plant on your wall. You drew a seat for somebody whose feet don’t reach. You put picture books in the bottom row in your handwriting and you sent me in to find it and then you shut the door like it was a — like I’d walked in on you. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to draw it and then lock it.”

The sheet was still on his shoulder. He could feel the weight of it, the whole four feet of it leaning on him, wanting to go over.

“June —”

“I’m not asking you what it’s for. I asked once. You said you didn’t know. I believe you.” She took one step. Twelve inches. “I’m telling you I saw it. That’s all. I saw it and I’m standing here and I’m not going anywhere, and you can put the drywall up in front of me if you want, but you’re going to have to do it with me in the room.”

He let go of the sheet.

It went over. It went over slow, the way a four-by-eight of half-inch goes, and it hit the drop cloth flat with a sound like a door in a big house and a puff of dust came up off the canvas and hung in the gold, and the drawing was all there again. The seat. The sill. The plant, the runner, the baby.

She didn’t look at it. She was looking at him.

He put his hand on the back of her neck.

He’d done that once. On a porch in fog with a truck coming, and he’d taken it off before he knew he was doing it. He put it there now and left it, and her neck was cold and then it wasn’t, and her pulse was under the heel of his hand going the way it had gone that night, and he’d known then what it was and he knew now, and he pulled her in.

Her back went against the studs.

Not the sheet — the studs, the old gray fir of them standing bare between the sheathing, and he’d put her there without deciding to, turned them both so she was against the wall with the drawing beside her head and he was against her. His mouth was on hers before he’d finished turning. It wasn’t like the landing. The landing had been rain and a decision. This was a wall he’d torn out with his hands, and sawdust, and the smell of fresh-cut drywall and old wood and her, and she opened her mouth under his and made the sound she’d made once before, that he’d thought about every day since, and he wanted —

He wanted her on the floor of this room.

He wanted it plainly, the way she said things. He stood with her against the framing of a house he’d bought with his hands and he wanted her down on the drop cloth with the drawing over her and the light going and nothing between them, and he wanted her to look up at that wall while he — he wanted her to see it. That was the thing. He’d never wanted anyone to see anything. He’d built forty feet of gravel and a rule and a house with a door, and he stood here now and wanted her to see the whole of it, the seat and the sill and the plant, wanted her to lie under it and know he’d drawn it on his knees with a pencil going slow and not known why, and he wanted to be inside that knowing. He wanted it like a man wants air at eight seconds.

Her hands went under his shirt.

The flannel — he was in the flannel, the old red one, over a T-shirt, and her hands went up under both of them at once, cold, flat, on the skin of his stomach, and he made a sound into her mouth that he didn’t recognize. Her palms went up his ribs. Her fingers found the scar on the left side where a hose coupling had opened him in his second year and stopped there, learned it, moved on. She went up to his chest and spread her hands and pushed, not away, just pushed, the way you’d put your hands on a wall to feel if it was warm, and it was.

He got the clip out of her hair.

He didn’t know how. It was in his hand and her hair came down, all of it, dark and everywhere, over his fingers, and he put his face in it at the side of her neck and breathed, and she said his name against his ear the way she’d said it into his shoulder asleep, the one word, and then said it again awake.

“Here,” he said. Into her neck. “Here. This room.”

“Yes.”

“Floor’s —”

“I don’t care what the floor is.”

He got the cardigan off her. He did it with one hand at the back of her neck still and the other pushing the wool off her shoulder, and it caught at her elbow and she shook it and it went down onto the drop cloth, and under it the gray Eugene sweatshirt with the letters gone soft, and he put his hand flat on the front of it over her heart and felt it go.

She pulled the flannel off him. Both hands, over his shoulders, down his arms, and it went, and then her hands were at the hem of the T-shirt and she looked up at him with her hair down and her glasses crooked and her mouth already kissed open, and she waited.

Nobody had ever waited for him either.

“Look at it,” he said.

She didn’t understand. He turned her head with the hand on her neck — gently, an inch — toward the wall. Toward the plant on the sill with the baby on the runner, six inches from her face.

“I drew it the night of the window,” he said. “I didn’t know I was doing it.”

She looked at it. He watched her look. Then she turned back and she wasn’t crying but her eyes had gone the way eyes went before, and she took the T-shirt up in both hands, and the last of the gold came off the drop cloth and went up the wall and over the drawing and out through the top of the window, and the room went blue.

---

The clamp light was on the ceiling.

He’d gotten up at some point and reached it and turned it on and aimed it up, and it made a soft white circle on the bare joists and the light came back down gray and even and lay over everything — the fallen sheet of drywall, the drill on its side, the cardigan and the sweatshirt and the flannel in a heap at the edge of the canvas. Her glasses were on the subfloor beside the coffee can of screws where he’d set them. She hadn’t asked for them.

They were on the drop cloth. It was canvas and it was cold and it smelled like a year of drywall dust and he’d have put a floor under her if he’d had one, and he’d said that, and she’d said the floor’s fine, Gray, stop talking about the floor, and he’d stopped. She was on her side against him with her head on his arm and his flannel over her — he’d reached it and pulled it up over her shoulder and she’d put her arm through one sleeve and left the other empty, and the red of it was the only color in the room.

Above them, on the wall, the drawing. It was gray now like everything else and you could still read it. 15 — LOW. 9“. BOTTOM ROW — PICTURE BOOKS. F. FRANK. The plant.

She hadn’t said anything about it. She’d looked at it, at the end, with her hand in his hair and her mouth open, and then she’d closed her eyes, and she hadn’t said one word about it since, and she was a woman who’d written a hundred cards too long because she was afraid people would forget her before the end. He lay there and understood that she was keeping something. For him. That she’d learned how.

The window was black. The harbor was in it, the town’s lights along the bottom edge like something spilled, and somewhere down there a green door was shut with a rug behind it that eleven thousand boxes wanted.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said.

She didn’t move. Her hand was on his chest, flat, where she’d left it.

“You know some of it. Rosie told you. She told me she told you, the day after, on the tailboard — she said ‘I told her about the pier’ and I said ‘okay’ and that was all.” He looked at the joists. “She told it the way she’d give a report. She’s good at that. She didn’t have the radio.”

He stopped. He’d never said it. He’d said the probie should never have been sent in into a microphone in a room with fluorescent lights and he’d said the rest of it to nobody, not to Nora, not to Brannigan, not to a ceiling. He lay on a drop cloth with a woman’s hand on his chest and found the beginning the way you’d find a wall in the dark.

“I was on the line,” he said. “On the pier. Mulcahy had me on the pump because he wanted a senior man there and he wanted Fitz on the search because Fitz is big and he wanted Teddy with Fitz because — he said reps. He said the kid needs reps. I had the nozzle in one hand and the radio in the other, and Fitz and the kid went through the door, and I keyed it.”

Her hand didn’t move.

“He was scared. Teddy. You could hear it. He said ‘Nine to command, we’re in, visibility zero, we’re on the left wall,’ and his voice went up on wall, the way a kid’s does, and I — I’d been doing that job six years. I knew what to say. You tell them the floor’s soft. You tell them where the door is. You count steps. I’d done all of it, a hundred times, to probies and old men and Fitz, and I keyed the radio and I didn’t say any of that.”

He could hear it. That was the thing. He could hear his own voice coming out of the shoulder speaker in a room full of black smoke, steady, sure, like a man who knew.

“I said ‘I’ve got you, kid.’” He said it flat. He said it to the joists. “‘Keep your hand on Fitz. I’ve got you.’ And he said — you could hear him breathe out. On the channel. Like he’d been holding it since the door. He said ‘Copy, Lieu,’ and then he said ‘I’ve got Fitz,’ like he was telling me he’d done the thing I said, and that was the last thing that came over the radio from Teddy Naughton. ‘I’ve got Fitz.’ Thirty seconds later the roof went.”

The clamp light hummed.

“I didn’t hear it come down. That’s what people think, that you hear it. You don’t. The channel just — it was Fitz’s voice and then it wasn’t, and I’m standing on a pier with a nozzle going and I keyed it and said ‘Nine, command’ and nothing. I said it eleven times. I counted. I was counting the whole time, I couldn’t stop, I stood there saying ‘Nine, command, Nine, command’ with the water going into a building that didn’t have a roof anymore and on the eleventh Fitz came back. Fitz. Not the kid. Fitz said ‘Mayday’ and then he said ‘I lost him, Gray, I lost him, I had his hand and I lost him,’ and I said —”

He stopped.

She’d moved. Not much. Her hand had come off his chest and gone down his arm to where his hand lay on the canvas, and her fingers went into his and closed, and she didn’t say anything, and her hand was warm now and steady, and his wasn’t.

“I said ‘I’ve got you,’” he said. “To Fitz. I said it again. I didn’t even hear myself. I said it to a man who’d just told me he’d lost the kid I’d said it to, and Fitz came out the door on his hands with his collarbone in pieces and his neck on fire and he got out because he was six feet from it, not because I had him. I didn’t have anybody. I was standing on a pier.”

The harbor was black. He looked at it.

“The funeral was a Saturday. Tillamook. I stood in the back in the dress blues with — I stood in the back. His mother came down the aisle after with his father on one side and a girl on the other, a sister, fourteen maybe, and she saw me. Mrs. Naughton. She’d heard the tape. They play the tape at the inquiry and the family can sit in and she’d sat in and she’d heard her son breathe out on a radio when a man said I’ve got you, and she came down the aisle and she looked at me, and she didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She knew whose voice it was.”

He turned his head. She was looking at the wall, at the drawing, not at him, and her eyes were open and wet and she didn’t blink and she didn’t say a word.

“I stood in the parking lot after. Beside the truck. Nora — somebody was getting the truck. And I put my hand on the door and I said it. Out loud. To the door. I said I would never say those words to another living person as long as I drew breath. Not on a scene. Not off one. Not to Fitz, not to Rosie, not to a kid on a rock, not to — anybody. I’d tell them the floor was soft. I’d count steps. I’d say hold. I would not say I had them, because I’d said it to a twenty-two-year-old with hands he hadn’t grown into and it was the last thing he heard and it was a lie.”

He stopped.

“That’s the whole warehouse,” he said. “That’s all of it. Everything else is joinery.”

She didn’t say anything.

He waited for it. He lay on a drop cloth on the subfloor of a house he’d bought without reading past the second page and waited for her to say the thing people said — it wasn’t your fault, you couldn’t have known, he’d have gone in anyway — the things Nora had said at a kitchen table with the coffee going cold and he’d let go past him like weather. He waited for her to tilt her head. He’d never once seen her do it and he waited for it anyway, because this was the room, this was the one behind the door, and nobody had ever stood in it, and he didn’t know what a person did in here.

She held his hand.

That was all. She lay on her side in his flannel with one arm through one sleeve and her hair down over both of them, and she held his hand on the canvas between them with her fingers laced in his, and she didn’t squeeze it and she didn’t let go and she didn’t say one word, and after a while he understood that she wasn’t going to. That the not saying was the thing. That she’d stood on a landing with coffee running down her wrist and reached for an answer and found nothing there, and he’d let it be nothing and not left, and she was giving that back to him now on a drop cloth in the dark. Exactly. Measured.

The clamp light hummed. The harbor lay black in the window. Above them on old gray wood a plant with one runner and one baby leaned toward a sill that didn’t exist yet, and the sheet of drywall that was supposed to cover it lay flat on the floor where it had fallen, and he wasn’t going to pick it up.

He’d known that too. Since the tape. Since a wet apron. Since a room with a rug in it and a boy in a helmet saying I’m a fireman from inside the dark.

He closed his hand around hers, finally, and she let him, and neither of them moved until the light on the joists was the only light there was.

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