Chapter Text
The rain came in off the docks before dawn and gave up around five, and left Alden shining. Sodium light went out street by street as the timers caught up with a sky that was the color of dishwater with the sun somewhere behind it, uncommitted to the day. A milk truck took the long bend at Wicken Row with its crates chiming. Twelve stories up, gulls stood in rows like bad decisions above gray stucco, paint peeling off the balcony rails in strips. And on the fourth floor, second window from the drainpipe, a light came on at twenty past six.
Rios let go of the bedside lamp drawstring and his hand fell from it, cracked against the wood of the bedside table, woke him the last of the way up.
He hauled himself upright and took his usual inventory. Ribs, aching from where he'd slept right along the edge of the mattress. Right eye, dry from where his head had slipped from polyester pillow to cotton pajama sleeve that wicked away sweat but also eyewater. Hand, complaining from where it had hit the table.
The radio warbled out the marine forecast on the opposite table. He sat, facing away from it still, listening to the dry formal names and numbers, pocketed his phone from where it was charging under his lamp, drained the bottle of water that he left every night on the bedside table for himself and—
Alden Sound, winds southwest ten to fifteen knots, gusting to twenty by evening.
He looked at the bottle. There was another one on the other table, somewhere behind him, he knew that as gospel, he bought a twenty-four pack on Sundays and set two out every night because the apartment was dry, it was the worst thing about it.
Who was the other one for?
He stood and turned— if he stayed sitting his back wouldn't appreciate twisting like that so early in the day— and—
Marina Sands, wind south five knots, seas one to two feet, holding through the day.
His breath was coming out wrong.
The other half of the bed was empty. The comforter was square, the pillow untouched.
So why had he been sleeping right at the edge?
He'd started eight years ago. He had that much, with the same crystal as when he'd come off his bike at fifteen and hit the ground hard enough to leave a scar on his knee that had lasted until he'd stopped looking for it. Eight years ago, he'd moved into this apartment and started sleeping right against the edge of a double bed.
And there was a bottle of water on the other table, next to a lamp and the radio, red seven-segment at 6:22, still reporting the weather.
Marsh Delta, small craft advisory, southeast fifteen becoming twenty after midnight.
He took himself to the bathroom, and had taken the green toothbrush out of the glass before he'd registered that there was a red one. The bristles on it were splayed out, someone chewed this toothbrush in the mornings, and he considered that as he brushed his teeth.
He put the green toothbrush back when he was done, and watched with something like fascination as his hand did the work, putting it back at an angle so the heads of them didn't touch.
He left the bathroom, and the radio was back on the talk show hosts now, and he switched it off.
His breathing got worse in the kitchen.
There were two mugs on the drying rack. His, a branded mug from a charity he'd interned for, and a second one, brown, shining like a chestnut with wisps of green in the glaze. Two dish towels by the sink. A fruit bowl with two apples, fine, but also with a banana he would never eat and a kiwi which he remembered trying once, perhaps six years ago, and hating. Four boxes of breakfast cereal, all different levels of empty, and only one that he liked.
On the fridge door, under a magnet shaped like a fish, there was a list.
bread (sourdough, NOT sliced) cat food— chicken or beef, no more seafood shits please for the love of god advil tape for R's wrist lightbulb, hall, I mean it this time ...more advil
It wasn't his handwriting. It was cramped and left-slanted and the letters ran together at the end of each word like the writer was always in a hurry to be finished, and he'd never seen it before.
He knew where to get the sourdough, he realized. The store down past the laundromat, where the owner kept a bowl of water in front of a fan behind the counter so the bread stayed soft— until three in the afternoon, anyway, when the crusts turned from bread to leather in ninety seconds flat and then the loaves were only good for soup.
He knew that he was the R. Twenty years in an architect's office will do that to a wrist. He opened the drawer under the sink and there was the roll of athletic tape, almost down to nothing. He knew that the bulb in the hall had been out for almost two weeks, and that the hardware store that sold the cheap bulbs was twenty minutes in the wrong direction, which was why he hadn't managed to make himself make the trip yet.
He got the bag out of the cupboard under the sink without deciding to, and the cat came in off the windowsill at the sound of it like it had for years, and he put the bowl down and stood over it.
He had never wanted a cat. That was one of about four things left in the apartment that he was sure of.
He didn't know where it had come from.
So he surveyed. Properly, like walking any building— start at the envelope, work inward, don't skip a room because you think you already know it.
Windows. Latches. The sash in the back room that had never sat right and never would.
The little brass box on the shelf where he kept the rent money. The money was in there, but the amount was wrong— more than he'd put in. He counted it twice, standing up, and put it back, and couldn't make the number mean anything.
The front door. The chain was off.
He stood for a while. He put the chain on at night. He had done, every night, for eight years.
He left the closet until last, and noticed himself doing it.
Half of it was his— the shove-it-in-somewhere half. The other half was a system. Blouses, then the two jackets, then pants, all facing the same way, the hangers a finger's width apart the whole length of the rail. At the end, a sweater the color of wet sand, folded over its hanger instead of hung, because it was heavy and it would have gone out of shape.
He took the sweater off the rail.
He had it up against his face before he had decided to do anything at all, and his body went off like an alarm— everything in his chest pulled up hard and hot and his eyes stung and his knees went unreliable, and he stood in front of the open closet holding a stranger's sweater and making a small sound he had never heard himself make. It smelled of nothing much. Wool and a soap he didn't own. It smelled of nothing much, and his body knew it in the dark.
He put it back. On the hanger, folded the right way, because otherwise it would have gone out of shape.
At the bottom of the closet there was a shoebox. He sat down on the floor with it in his lap and got the lid off.
Photographs. Loose, hundreds of them, the cheap gloss kind that come out of a machine in a drugstore. He went through them one at a time with thumb and forefinger.
There was a woman in nearly all of them.
Dark hair, going gray early at the one temple. A gap in her front teeth she didn't try to hide when she laughed. He went back, and back.
In one, she was asleep on Rios's sofa with her mouth open. In one, she was up a stepladder in the kitchen— this kitchen— with a paint roller, wearing Rios's bathrobe. In one, taken from behind, she was doing something at the stove and Rios had photographed her for no reason at all.
And the photographs had left this apartment and moved away, and he'd turned through fifty more when her body language changed— he could see the point they had gone from friends to more in reverse, and thirty photos later he found the night they first met because in the next one back he was alone—
He lost his grip on the rest of the photographs, and they spilled out of his hand and off his knee and onto the carpet, and stayed there.
He'd already lost the face. He picked up a scattered handful and leafed through them until he found a recent one— gray hair at the temple, the nick of an old scar through her eyebrow, a paper hat on her head and on Rios's as well, and they were all at a bar that he knew and didn't know all at once— and took it to the dining table before he could drop it again.
Then he got up and went into the hall and took the inventory he'd been putting off since the bathroom.
A coat on the second hook. Good wool, dark red, worn through at the elbow, hanging heavy from a night in the rain.
Boots underneath it, side by side, toes to the wall. Nobody stood boots like that unless they'd been taught to once and never stopped.
A second set of keys on the hook by the door, a green enamel cat and a bottle-opener on the ring.
The cat itself sitting square in front of the door, facing it. It had been there when he came out of the bedroom. He didn't know what it was waiting for.
He went through the coat pockets. The left one had a receipt in it, damp-softened, the ink already going: a drugstore, Tylenol and a bag of mints and something he couldn't read that had cost $4.35, Tuesday, 6:41 PM. The right one had a bus ticket and a chestnut, brown and polished from being carried.
The weight of the chestnut was familiar. He put it, careful, back in the right hand pocket, and double-checked that he'd got it right, because it was, somehow, important that it went back in that pocket.
On the arm of the chair by the window there was a crocheted blanket in nine colors. He'd had it as long as he'd had the apartment. He had no idea who made it.
He sat down under the window with the coat still on its hook in front of him. The light came up over Wicken Row and got as far as his feet and went from gray to weak yellow, and he let it.
After a while he took his phone out. The lock screen was the two of them at a fairground: the woman holding up a toy rifle like a trophy, him hanging on to a stuffed husky the size of a small child, laughing.
He could not remember ever laughing like that. Not once in eight years. But it was right here, his own laugh, looking back at him.
The husky was on the sofa, against the left back corner, half buried under red and gold cushions.
He unlocked his phone and started to type.
Symptoms forgetfulness losing entire relationship he typed, and stared for a few minutes, and didn't hit Search because of what would come back if he did.
He closed the browser and went back to the kitchen table and picked up the photograph.
It was taken in the bar. Someone's birthday, going by the paper hats. The dead neon on the frontage was in the corner of the frame with two letters still lit in it, and Rios was in the middle of the picture with his head back laughing, and there was an arm around his shoulders, and the arm belonged to the dark-haired woman with the gap in her teeth who was not laughing at the camera but at him.
Rios had never been to that bar.
He folded the dark red coat and put it on the kitchen table, and put the photograph on top of it.
Rios had never been to that bar— but he knew where it was, and he knew that the door always opened if you knocked right and needed help, and he knew that it would have answers.
Two knocks, then three, and the door came open under his hand, and the smell of the place hit him— old beer, old wood, floor polish, and something wrought from old glass and dust that had always, always meant trust.
"Bit early for you," said Netty, and then, without looking up from the crate she was breaking down: "Bev, your umbrella's behind the slot machine where you left it Sunday. Mr. Ahmadi, the fish guy hasn't come, it'll be the mackerel Friday."
There were four people in. Two at the bar, one under the window with a paper, Bev in the corner with her tea and her crossword. The lights weren't all on yet.
Rios got to the counter and put the photograph down on it and slid it across, and his hand was steady, which surprised him.
"Who's this, please?"
Netty dried her hands and picked it up. She held it at arm's length, chin down, because Netty had once said she'd die before admitting she needed reading glasses.
"That's Denny's fortieth," she said. "That's Denny behind you with the hat on, and that's his sister on the end, the one who does the flowers, and that's Marcus's elbow. You had the cider and you paid for the last round on the card because Denny had run out." She smiled at it. "You were in a state."
"No, her." Rios put his finger on her— gray hair at the temple, gap in her front teeth. "The one with her arm around me."
Netty looked at the photograph.
She looked at it for a long time, and turned it slightly to the light, and turned it back. She blinked, twice. Her thumb went over the face and away again.
"I don't know," she said.
"You don't know her name."
"I don't know her." She put it down on the bar and took her hands off it. "Rios, I know Marcus's elbow. I know the back of Denny's sister's head from a wedding nine years ago." She was looking at the photograph like you look at a step that isn't where you put your foot. "There's a woman in the middle of my bar with her arm around one of my regulars and I have never seen her before in my life. I can see her." Netty's jaw moved. "I'm looking straight at her. This isn't a trick. Tricks don't work on me. Rios, what—"
Rios picked the photograph back up and carried it over to the corner, and Bev put down her pen, because Bev had been putting down her pen for Rios for two years, since the winter he'd sat with her through the business with the landlord.
"Bev. Who is that?"
Bev held it up. Bev looked at it for about as long as you look at a menu.
"Lovely picture of you," she said, and handed it back, and picked her pen up.
"No— the woman, Bev."
"I don't know her, hon." Kind. Entirely untroubled. Already back down at the crossword, already two clues along, as though it had been a photo of someone else's vacation.
Rios went back to the bar. He got his phone out and his hands weren't steady now, they'd gone somewhere else entirely and he was working them from a distance, and he thumbed past the favorite contacts list— one number at the top, no name, nine calls in the last four days— opened the gallery and didn't have to scroll back far to find the gray temple and a play button on the same tile, and he pressed the play button and put the phone on the counter on speaker.
The speaker clicked and shrilled with scraps of background noise before it resolved on a voice. First Rios: "Happy birthday, Denny!" And then her: "He's only at the other end of the bar, Rio! God you're a dumbass. Fine! Happy birthday, Denny! Which apparently we're saying into a phone from forty feet away instead of coming over to say it to your actual face!"
Nobody in the bar moved.
"Does anybody know that voice," Rios said, to the room. "Anybody. Just the voice."
The man under the window turned a page. Bev looked up with a small apologetic face and looked down.
"Play it again," said Netty, quietly.
Rios played it again. Netty stood with her hands flat on the bar and her head down and listened to fourteen seconds of a stranger, and at the end of it she said, "No," and it came out of her cracked in the middle.
That was when it went.
Rios heard it start somewhere below his ribs like a floor going, and he got both elbows onto the bar and his hands into his hair, and everything he had been carrying since the toothbrush came down on him all at once— the bed he had made room in, the tape for his wrist, the boots toes to the wall, the cat sitting square in front of a door waiting for somebody, the chestnut in the right pocket, the right pocket, how did he know that was important— and he folded up over the counter in the one room in the city that always, always knew who people were, and didn't know the woman with the gray at her temple, and he let it come out of his eyes and his throat because there was nowhere left for it to go.
Somebody's hand arrived flat between his shoulder blades. Somebody said something low and fast at the other end of the bar. Glass went down on wood.
Then a door opened behind the counter— a door in the paneling that Rios had drunk in front of for two years and never once seen— and a voice out of the dark behind it said, neutral, curious, "Bring him down."
The cellar ran cold and it always would, and the amber shell over the strip light made everything in the room the color of a photograph somebody's aunt had kept in a drawer. Catra had the kettle on the lower switch, because Adora had told her that the upper one lied, and she was already hauling the good armchair around to face the stairs when DT brought the man down.
She'd had maybe thirty seconds' warning through the boards— Netty's four knocks, the stool-drag, DT going up at a trot— and she'd spent them on the two things that mattered: the throw off the arm of the waiting chair and shaken out one-handed, and a folded dish towel toed under the second armchair's short leg so it couldn't do its trick and walk left. You get told more in a warm room. That isn't a kindness you do instead of the work; it's the first ten minutes of it.
Adora came off the bottom step behind them with a flashlight in her teeth and the fuse spares in her fist, because she'd been up the corridor doing something about the light out past the tunnel door for an hour and a half and had not been asked to. Her bags were still packed in her corner. Ten days now. Boots toes to the wall against the cold stretch of floor where the lamp gave out, everything squared away like a woman who had been told she was leaving Tuesday and hadn't yet been told which Tuesday.
DT had the keys to her apartment in their coat pocket and had not handed them back. They touched the pocket about four times a day, which they did not know they did, and Catra had decided not to say anything about it yet.
"Catra, Rios," DT said. "Rios, this is Catra. She helps people like us."
The man sat down on the front three inches of the good armchair with a red coat on in a cut that didn't hang right on him. Mid-forties, graying, big raw hands with the nails cut right down. He'd cried out most of it upstairs and was in the flat part after, where the face works but nothing behind it does. Catra put the throw over his knees without asking and got a small nod for it, and then a stop, and then the man looked at the throw for slightly too long and put both hands on it.
"I've got one of these," he said. "At home. On the chair. Different colors. Same pattern."
"Yeah?"
"I don't know who made it."
"All right," Catra said, and sat down on the working stool, which was lower than the armchair. "Start wherever you want. If it's easier to show me than tell me, show me."
Rios started emptying his pockets onto the table.
That was how it came out— not as a story, as an inventory, laid out on the plywood one item at a time in the order he'd found them. A red toothbrush with the bristles splayed. A shopping list off a fridge door, cramped and left-slanted, with a fold across it where he'd carried it in his fist. A drugstore receipt, gone soft. A photograph from Denny's fortieth with the bar's dead neon in the corner of the frame. He put each one down and gave each one a sentence and then took his hand away from it, and by the end there were six things on the table and they made a shape, and the shape should have been a person.
"There's a system in the closet," Rios said. "A finger's width between the hangers. All facing the same way. I don't do that. I've never done that in my life, so somebody did that, and they did it in my apartment, and they did it enough times that it's a system." His voice went up and came back down under control. "The rent money's over. There's more in the box than I put in it. Somebody's been putting money in my rent box and I have gone and taken it out and counted it and put it back in like it was mine."
"When did you last see her?" Catra said.
"Yesterday. I don't think she came home from... I don't know. I guess she had work? I'd left the chain off the door, so I must have gone to bed thinking she'd be coming back late."
"Did she say where she was going?"
"I don't know if she said anything. I don't know if she was there." He put his hand flat on the table beside the toothbrush without touching it. "I've just lost most of the last eight years of my life. There's photos of me and her that I don't remember being taken. I can tell you— god. I can tell you that we should have bought a bigger bed when we moved in together, because I've got eight years of waking up crammed on the six inches at the edge. But I can't remember the person who hogged the comforter."
Catra let that sit until it stopped moving. Then: "I'm going to do a thing. I'll tell you what it is first."
"Okay."
"There's a way of looking at a person from across a table. I don't go in, I don't touch anything, I look at the surface. If somebody's been in your head and moved something, it leaves a mark— same as taking a door off its hinges and hanging it back. You can rehang it perfect and I'll still find the screw holes." She put her hands flat on her own knees, where he could see them. "That's all this is. Looking for screw holes."
"...that sounds familiar," Rios said. "I don't know why that sounds familiar."
Catra put that somewhere behind her face and left it there.
She went in— the shallow read, the one you can do across a table with your hands on your own knees, no touch. She was in there to look for a seam. When somebody's had a lift done on them, there's always a seam: an edit leaves a scar as any joinery does, a socket where something was unseated and the surrounding tissue closed over it wrong. She had spent nine years learning to find those by feel in under a minute.
There was nothing.
She went around again, slower, taking her time over the places people are usually damaged, and what she got back was a man who had not been touched by anybody. No seam. No swelling around a seam. No door hung crooked and no door hung at all. There was no spark in Rios.
Catra sat back on the stool.
"I want to go in properly," she said. "Real telepathy this time. It needs contact, and it needs me to leave a piece of myself in you while I'm doing it. Small. I take it out after. You might get a headache— that's the whole of the bill." She waited. "You can say no. I'll still take the job."
"Real telepathy...?" Rios murmured. "Is that. Is that the sort of thing that could do this?"
"Honestly? I don't know. But I know what it isn't." She counted it off, not unkindly. "Illness takes everything. Slow, and messy, and in the wrong order. A knock on the head can take a career or a whole personality, and your skull isn't freshly broken. Nothing that happens inside a body takes one person clean out of a life and leaves the memory of waking up cramped for eight straight years."
Rios put a hand over his mouth.
"You're not sick, Rios. That's not me being nice to you. That's the diagnosis. Now I want to get the differential."
"...alright," he said.
Catra reached out, and took his wrist, and gave him a part of the thread. Ssh, she sent to Adora, and got back an impression of mild offense.
It was small, and just like when she'd given it to Adora, it didn't take long to seat.
There were gaps. Of course there were— eight years of memory with a whole person gone. She realized that Rios didn't even know why he knew the bar, which meant the woman had been the spark, and had trusted her partner enough to bring him here.
So she checked two things.
There were no other gaps. That was easy— blur the mind's eye, float back, take in the whole of the person and see immediately that the only things missing were the spaces that this one person fit into, and nothing else.
And then she stepped in close to one of the bigger gaps. Two weeks— glimpses of sandstone buildings and sunlight and hotel rooms. They'd been on vacation. She checked the edges.
Nothing torn. Not even a cut.
Nobody had done anything to this man. Something had been done to the world, and Rios was standing in it.
Something in Catra's right wrist woke up as she drew the tiny piece of spark back out of Rios.
It came up like an old break, reporting the weather— an entirely unwelcome interest, three inches above the joint, in a piece of her that was not hers and never had been. She had taken it off somebody. She knew that like her own handwriting: the shape of the work was hers, the seat of it was hers, it had been done well and it had been done by her, and there was no name on it and never had been, and every time she went looking for the session it went smooth under her like a wall with no door in it.
It was interested in this. It had opinions about this.
She put her hands flat on the plywood and left them there. A fragment of telekinesis turned in her wrist, wanted to be used, and she didn't indulge it.
"Do you want her back?" she said. "Whoever this is. If I could find her and it turned out she'd gone somewhere on purpose— do you want her back, or do you want to be able to sleep?"
Rios looked up. "I want to know who I've been feeding."
"Okay," Catra said. "That's the job, then."
Adora had come around the table at some point with the fuse spares still in her hand and had crouched down at the arm of the chair, not saying anything, just there at the right height, and she was the one who said, "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"
Rios opened his mouth and shut it.
"Not there," Adora said.
"It's my apartment."
"Sure. And every room in it's got something in it you don't recognize." She said it gently and she said it flat, and she didn't look away while she said it. "You'll be up all night going through it."
"We've got Marchmont," DT said, from the stairs. "Second floor, front. Empty since June, we know the leasing agent, it's got a bed and a working furnace and nothing in it that belongs to anybody." They came down the last two steps. "Nobody's asking you to give the apartment up. We're giving you the option not to be in if you don't have to be."
"There's a cat," Rios said.
Nobody said anything.
"There's a cat in the apartment and it eats at seven and it's been eating at seven for— years. I don't know how many. And I don't even like cats." His hands came up off the throw and went back down. "I have never once in my life wanted a cat. And I know what it does when the bag comes out of the cupboard. I know its favourite sill. I know the noise it makes."
Adora thought about it. She took her time over it, still crouched at the arm of the chair with the fuse spares in her fist, and Catra watched her go all the way to the end of the arithmetic before she opened her mouth.
"Would you like me to take care of the cat? I don't mind. And right now, it kind of seems like it would mess with you."
Rios looked at her.
"Twice a day," Adora said. "You can come the first time, if you'd rather see where I put the bowl."
It took him a while. Then he got the keys out of the coat pocket— his own set, not the ones off the hook— and put them down on the plywood next to the toothbrush, and it was the only thing he set on that table all morning that he didn't give a sentence to.
Catra didn't say anything about that either.
Rios picked the other things back up, put them back in the coat pocket.
Then he stood up and folded the crocheted throw over the arm of the chair, squared, because that was what you did with a blanket somebody had lent you, and took the photograph and the other things off the plywood and put them in the pockets of the red woolen coat that he had not taken off since he'd got here.
"The apartment would be too much, you're right. But I'm keeping the coat," he said.
"Of course," said Catra.
DT took him up. Catra heard the four of them overhead— the stool, the register, Netty's voice at the shape you can hear through boards but not the words— and then the street door, and then the bar being a bar again.
The drugstore receipt was still on the table. The rest had gone back into the coat pockets when Rios had gone.
A man with his whole attention on everything missing from his life, and he hadn't noticed a thing go missing on the table in front of him.
Catra turned it over to the printed side.
Drugstore header. Date, Tuesday. Time, 6:41 PM. Tylenol, mints, and a $4.35 item the damp had eaten. And along the bottom, in the small gray type nobody reads, the store's own address.
She read it.
Then she was looking at the corkboard with the pin already between her fingers and no idea what she had come across the room to put on it.
She looked down at the receipt in her hand. She read the bottom line again— read it properly, like you read a dosage, mouthing it— and it went into her and out the other side like a hand going through steam.
"Adora."
"Mm."
"Say Seventeenth and Cedar."
Adora said it. Then she stopped, halfway to the fuse box, with the flashlight dying in her hand. "Say what, sorry?"
Catra pinned the receipt to the board at eye level, flush, next to the poster she never had to read. She crossed four steps back to the table, sat down—
and the receipt was still in her hand, and she'd put the pin back with the constellation of unused ones down in the bottom right of the board.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
She looked at it again, and stared until her eyes swam.
Tarragon Pharmacy. Seventeenth and Cedar.