The third night of rain, Eli quit pretending to sleep.
He went down to the stones with the lantern, and for the first time he carried it in his right hand.
The dead hand.
It had been coming back all month in installments, from the far end, like a refund nobody had asked him to sign for.
He could hold the handle now, if he thought about nothing else, and the grip held while the flame swung.
He set the lantern on the cairn and sat against the stones with his collar up, and watched the rain land on the lake, and the lake not rising.
She came at the blackest hour, before any moon, along the land bridge.
Not out of the water.
Along it, walking, the way a woman walks a road she has measured for three years.
He stood up when she was ten yards off, and the lantern light went out to her across the mud, and she came into it a piece at a time: gray clothes gone the color of the lake’s floor; buttonholes empty, every one, because the buttons were laid out on a rock behind him; hair down and heavy, because the pin was on the rock too; no ring on the middle finger where a seal used to turn; one boot and one bare foot, and the bare foot not minding the mud.
Her face was her face.
The same hand, with less room to stand in.
“You still tie it double,” she said.
He looked down.
The lantern sat where he’d set it, the wire handle looped twice around the stone.
“I knew you by the knot,” she said.
“Don’t look like that. The face was priced high. I’m not paying it.”
“You sound like your letters.”
“I’d hope so. There’s not a lot else of me left to sound like.” She came to the cairn and looked at the stones, and did not touch them, and turned and looked at the flat rock, at the row laid out in the rain—buttons, lace, cloth, the pin, the stud, the ring, the boot—and past them all, the glove.
She stood before her own effects the way a woman stands in a house she built, rented out, and is shown through at the end of the term.
“Whose is the glove?” she asked.
“Nobody’s now. It was given.”
“To who?”
“To your sister. For you, she says. It’s the first thing to reach this rock that wasn’t borrowed, priced, or owed.”
Mara looked at it a long time.
The rain ran off her hair.
“Leave it out, then,” she said.
“It’s been dry long enough.”
They stood together in the rain, an arm apart, not touching, and it was she who did the talking, the way the letters had done it—short lines, everything load-bearing.
“How many left?” he asked.
“Two.”
“The day the wagon burned.” She said it like a figure read off a barn wall.
“I’ve carried it three years, forty feet down. It’s the heaviest thing I own, and I’ll set it down at the head of the bridge, and I won’t know afterward what I set down. That’s how it works. You don’t feel the weight go. You notice the room.”
“And the last?”
The rain fell on the lake behind her, a mile of it, patient.
“The why,” she said.
“The reason I walked in. The water’s holding it for the final payment, and I mean to make that payment, Eli, because the alternative is staying down there as collateral. When I step on that shore I’ll be paid out in full. Owing nothing. Owning nothing.” She looked at him with the lake’s gray in her eyes.
“And I won’t know why I did it.”
“I know why.”
“Do you.” Not a question.
“Then keep it dry. I’ll want it back when I land, and I don’t intend to owe you for it.”
He almost laughed, and didn’t.
“There’s a woman up the strand who’s kept every button you paid. Dated. She’ll give you an accounting of yourself.”
“Good.” Something crossed her face that in anyone else would have been a smile.
“I’m told I had a suspicious nature.”
“Have.”
“Have,” she agreed.
He told her then what the depositor had said—high water, fast, once; half a town out on the flats holding small change; the paper on the store door.
She listened with her head a little down, like someone checking a column.
“I know about the water,” she said.
“I’ve heard it practicing. It runs the figures at night, on the shore gravel. It’s been off by the same fraction for three years, and the fraction is me.” She looked toward the town, the few lamps in the rain.
“So don’t let me land on it.”
“Can you slow—”
“No.
Listen.
The water charges more for shallow ground.
Every day I stand in the shallows, the next payment gets bigger.
Delay me a week and there’ll be nothing left of me worth landing.
So you don’t delay me.
You clear the town.
That’s arithmetic.
I’ve had three years of nothing but arithmetic, and I’m good at it now.”
She looked at the cairn a moment, at the stones unmoved and the mud around them combed flat by something patient.
“It comes and stands over these at night.”
“I’ve seen.”
“It’s not after the glove anymore. It’s after its deposit being remembered. The old man lent his grief and the water learned lending off it, and it learned nothing else in a hundred years. That’s your hole in its arithmetic, Eli. It can’t book a gift. It’s never had to price one and it doesn’t know the column. Everything else it can reach. That, it can’t.”
She held out her hand then.
He gave her his right one, the dead one, because it was nearer, and she took it and turned it over in the lantern light like a stock-taker counting into a case.
“That’s your refund,” she said.
“The stock’s going down, so the water’s paying you back in installments. It comes whole the day I land.” She said it plainly, and let the plainness do the work, and he understood that she had just told him his arm would mend on the same day the flood came, and that she had made herself say it without softening.
She had never once in her life softened a figure.
“I’ll take the trade,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“That’s the trouble with you.”
Dawn was a gray easing in the east when she turned to go.
He asked if he could walk her out, and she shook her head.
“The bridge still charges. I’ve paid my footing. You haven’t.” She went down the strand, one boot and one bare foot, prints behind her filling with rain, and at the head of the bridge she stopped and did not turn around.
“Eli.”
“I’m here.”
“The letters got shorter because there was less of me to write them,” she said.
“Not because there was less to say.”
Then she walked into the rain, and the rain closed its accounts behind her, and he stood at the stones until there was nothing on the land bridge but the water standing in her footprints, shining, and going away.
Nora was at the fire when he came up the strand, the ledger on her knees, and she didn’t ask him anything except one thing.
“What did she sound like?”
“Like her letters.”
Nora nodded, and opened the book, and ruled a line clean across both columns, and dated it, and wrote beneath it in her small hard pencil: TWO PAYMENTS.
“Then that’s the runway,” she said.
“Two payments of hers, and a town’s worth of ours.”
That dusk, when the lanterns went out toward the flats the wrong way, Eli carried one the other way, down to the strand, and set it burning on the flat rock beside the row of effects—lit for nobody, priced at nothing, owed to no one—the first entry in a ledger the valley had never once kept in a hundred and six years.
The rain fell on it and the flame stood.
And out on the flats, the dark clerk paused in his receiving, and looked at it across a mile of dark, for a long time.