Work Text:
Corwin Morrow had learned to distrust places that appeared too ordinary to deserve attention. A bus stop on the eastern edge of Port Huron was exactly the sort of place that could lull a man into believing there was nothing to do except stamp warmth back into his shoes and watch the dirty snow melt along the gutter. The shelter stood in front of a pharmacy and a narrow insurance office, its scratched glass carrying pale reflections of passing cars, pedestrians, and the broken February sky. Across the road, a diner breathed steam against its windows. A little farther east, beyond the roofs and utility poles, the St. Clair River made itself known mainly through the cold, the air sharper whenever the wind found a clear run up from the water. Corwin had positioned himself where the shelter glass gave him an imperfect second view of the pavement behind him, and he kept his hands in his coat pockets without letting them settle deeply enough to become useless.
He was thirty-two, though there were mornings when the accumulated hotel rooms, early departures, badly timed meals and hours spent studying strangers made him feel considerably older. Nothing about him announced what he was doing there. His dark coat was respectable without being distinguished, his tie had been chosen because nobody would remember it, and the little government credential that could abruptly make him official remained out of sight. The campaign staff knew who he was. A few local policemen did. Most of the volunteers had received some vague explanation that placed him somewhere between Washington and security and had been sensible enough not to pursue it. To everybody else he was another man travelling with Jennifer Fischer-Scott, perhaps an organizer, perhaps an aide, perhaps somebody responsible for luggage. He preferred the uncertainty. People altered themselves when they knew they were being watched.
Jennifer had drifted toward the shelter while an advance man and a county organizer attempted to solve a transportation problem inside the diner. Corwin had stopped caring about the exact nature of campaign transportation problems because they multiplied when named. The bus was somewhere nearby with one wheel or axle or bearing being examined by three men whose confidence varied according to who was asking. A replacement car had been promised. The schedule would be repaired later with apologies and speed. For the moment there was a bus stop, a small collection of local people waiting beneath it, Jennifer in her blue winter coat, and a young mother carrying a baby whose white knitted bonnet made her face appear even rounder than it was.
Corwin noticed the baby because Jennifer noticed her. That had become one of the easier ways of predicting Jennifer's movements. Children exerted a pull on her that campaign discipline rarely overcame. Dogs did much the same thing, as did elderly people who had decided that the few seconds allotted for a handshake were enough time to begin a family history. Corwin had initially considered those habits minor liabilities. They changed the geometry around her. She stopped where another politician might continue walking, turned toward voices outside the expected line, slipped naturally toward people who had not been positioned by an advance team. After a few weeks he had stopped thinking of it as inconvenience and begun incorporating it into his sense of her. Jennifer did not move unpredictably so much as according to priorities nobody had written into the schedule.
The mother was very young, probably no more than twenty-five, with the pinched, wind-reddened look of somebody who had been standing outside longer than she had expected. She knew who Jennifer was but seemed unwilling to disturb her, which gave the encounter its gentleness. There was no sudden recognition, no excited approach, no request for an autograph. The baby was more interested in the loose edge of Jennifer's scarf than in the woman wearing it. Jennifer stood near enough for the child to study her, her gloved hands tucked loosely against herself, and when the baby produced a wavering little sound from somewhere deep in her throat, Jennifer answered it without appearing to decide to do so.
Corwin heard the exchange while watching a sedan move slowly through the intersection. It was nothing more than a handful of notes, if they could even be called notes at first. The baby issued one uncertain vowel and Jennifer returned something shaped around it, so soft that traffic almost erased it. The child stared. Another sound followed, a little higher, and Jennifer met that one as well. Within less than a minute they had stumbled into a peculiar sort of music, the baby discovering that noises could be answered and Jennifer treating every attempt as though it had been worth making.
Corwin kept his gaze on the road, but his attention had already divided.
That division annoyed him because he had spent years teaching himself not to indulge it. There was always something pleasant happening somewhere if a man permitted himself to notice. A shopkeeper could be putting up Christmas lights while he watched a doorway. A couple could be arguing affectionately over groceries while he studied a parked car. A child could be dragging a stick along an iron fence while he evaluated a crowd. The world did not suspend its ordinary tenderness merely because Corwin had been assigned to examine its more dangerous possibilities. He had become good at allowing such things to pass beside him without attaching themselves.
The baby's little trill attached itself almost immediately.
It reminded him of his daughter before it reminded him of music. Laurel was three and had recently become convinced that anything could be sung if enough words were ignored. Breakfast had melodies. Bathwater had melodies. Socks had melodies when she was unwilling to put them on. She sang into cardboard tubes, into the hollow space beneath the kitchen table, into the mouth of a stuffed bear, and most recently into the disconnected telephone receiver she had discovered in a drawer while her mother cleaned the hall cupboard. Corwin had come home the previous week to find her sitting cross-legged on the floor, the black receiver pressed to one ear while she solemnly composed long rising sounds for an imaginary listener. He had not thought much about it then. He had smiled, put down his case, accepted the receiver when she offered it to him, and spent less than a minute making noises back before the ordinary business of arriving home had overtaken him.
Now the memory returned with a completeness that made the cold around him briefly irrelevant.
Jennifer sang another phrase and the baby attempted to follow it. The attempt was terrible in the charming way of babies who had no idea there was anything to get wrong. Jennifer did not correct her. She simply took the sound and gave it back transformed, never far enough from what the child had offered to make the exchange feel like performance. The mother began to sway slightly with the rhythm, smiling in the private, tired way of someone who had spent months discovering that strangers became interesting when they were kind to her child.
Corwin let the scene remain at the edge of his vision. He was more interested in who else had noticed Jennifer. A woman waiting for the bus recognized her and glanced twice before apparently deciding against approaching. An older man with a folded newspaper watched for a moment, then returned to the front page. Across the road, somebody behind the diner window lifted a hand in what might have been greeting or merely a gesture to someone inside. A blue Chevrolet passed more slowly than necessary, but the driver was an elderly man craning toward the pharmacy sign. There was a man sitting in a parked Plymouth farther up the block, newspaper raised close to his face, though Corwin had seen him there before Jennifer came outside and knew enough not to manufacture significance merely because something existed.
The work demanded suspicion but punished imagination. That distinction mattered. A man who saw danger everywhere eventually stopped seeing anything clearly. Corwin had known agents who became so enamoured of possible threats that they treated instinct as evidence and nerves as professionalism. He preferred patterns. People had reasons for being places. Cars had histories visible in snow, mud, heat, condensation, passengers and timing. A coat could hang badly because of a weapon or because the man wearing it had lost weight. Eyes could linger because of hatred, attraction, recognition or nothing more sinister than boredom. Corwin made room for possibilities without marrying himself to them.
Jennifer and the baby remained the least ambiguous thing on the street.
The child had discovered that Jennifer would echo her and began experimenting with greater confidence. A squeal became a tiny descending moan, which Jennifer answered with a playful rise. The baby then attempted the rise herself and produced something so unexpectedly close that the mother laughed. Jennifer's face changed in response, not broadly enough to attract attention from a distance, but Corwin saw the delight reach her eyes. He looked away before it could affect him further.
His daughter had his eyes, people said, though Corwin privately thought the resemblance was mostly an excuse adults used when they did not know what else to say about a child. Laurel's eyes were lighter and much more expressive than his had ever been. She could make indignation visible before she understood half the words required to explain it. Her mother, Marion, sometimes accused Corwin of being helpless against that face. He denied it because husbands were expected to deny such accusations, though both of them knew the truth. Laurel could talk him into carrying her from the sofa to bed simply by becoming very small and very tired at the correct moment.
He had left before dawn three mornings earlier and had not woken her.
That had seemed sensible. There had been no reason to turn departure into an event. She knew he travelled. Marion knew he travelled. Corwin had dressed quietly, placed his shoes on in the kitchen, drunk half a cup of coffee standing beside the sink, then passed Laurel's bedroom on his way out. Her door had been open a few inches. He could remember the warm stripe of night-light across the hallway carpet and the shape of one small hand near the edge of her blanket. He had stopped for perhaps two seconds, perhaps three, before continuing downstairs.
It had not bothered him until Port Huron.
He wished, unexpectedly and with enough force to embarrass him, that he had gone inside.
Jennifer's voice floated through that thought, not performing a recognizable song but circling whatever the baby gave her. Corwin had heard her sing to thousands of people and had rarely been able to give the performance his full attention. His position usually placed him where sightlines mattered more than music. During one hall appearance in Ohio he had spent nearly the entire set watching a man in the sixth row who repeatedly reached inside his jacket and eventually proved to be nervous about lighting a cigarette where smoking was forbidden. Another evening had been consumed by a service door that local staff insisted was secure but that did not latch unless somebody lifted the handle. Corwin knew Jennifer's public voice through walls, curtains, corridors, stairwells and the hollow spaces beneath stages. It carried farther than seemed possible for somebody so small.
The sound at the bus stop had none of that reach. She had reduced herself to the baby's world.
That was what struck him.
A baby could not be impressed by reputation, and Jennifer seemed relieved rather than disappointed by the fact. The little girl had no understanding of primaries, delegates, newspaper endorsements, congressional arithmetic, polling, donor dinners or the sequence of states now dictating where Jennifer slept. She did not know that adults nearby had rearranged their week because Jennifer's appearance was supposed to matter. She saw a face leaning closer and heard a voice willing to answer.
Corwin found himself studying Jennifer differently for several seconds before pulling his mind back to work.
A campaign volunteer emerged from the diner, glanced along the street and disappeared inside again. No signal yet. Corwin checked the intersection, the parked cars and the windows above the insurance office. A curtain shifted in one apartment, revealing an elderly woman moving a plant farther from the glass. The man in the Plymouth lowered his newspaper and rubbed his nose. The woman waiting for the bus looked down the road. Nothing had sharpened. Nothing required intervention.
The absence of trouble gave memory more room.
Laurel had recently begun singing herself awake.
Marion had mentioned it as though Corwin must already know. Apparently their daughter spent several minutes most mornings lying in bed and making little songs before calling for either parent. Corwin had been home for some of those mornings, but his own hours were poor enough that he usually left the bedroom before Laurel stirred. He realized he had never heard it. The knowledge seemed unimportant and then, almost immediately, important enough to hurt.
He disliked sentimentality in himself because he associated it with inattention. There was no practical value in feeling the distance home more acutely. The work existed regardless of how much he missed Laurel. He had chosen it long before she existed, and when she had arrived he had not suddenly become another kind of man. He still liked the exactness of preparation, the quiet satisfaction of noticing what others did not, the anonymity of being useful without being seen as central. He did not resent Jennifer for taking him away from home; that would have been childish, and besides, she had not chosen him. Somebody above Corwin had made a decision about campaign-season protection and Corwin had received an itinerary.
Yet the baby's voice kept worrying at the clean separations he maintained.
She sang again, and Jennifer returned the note with a tiny harmony beneath it. For a second the two sounds fitted together surprisingly well, not because the child understood what she was doing but because Jennifer did. The baby froze, wide-eyed at the sudden fullness, then laughed and attempted it again.
Corwin's throat tightened.
The response was so immediate that he almost resented his own body for betraying him. He looked toward the river end of the street, where a delivery truck was labouring around a turn, and gave himself the ordinary tasks of observation. The truck belonged to a local bakery. The driver had both hands visible. A woman stepped out of the pharmacy carrying a paper bag. Two schoolboys cut across an alley with their collars turned up against the wind. The county patrol car that had passed ten minutes earlier was returning from the opposite direction.
The little harmony remained in him.
Laurel would have loved the baby. She regarded younger children with the solemn pride of somebody who had survived infancy long enough to become an authority. A neighbour had brought over a six-month-old son at Christmas and Laurel had spent almost an hour presenting toys to him one by one, growing increasingly puzzled when he preferred chewing the edge of a blanket. She had eventually accepted this as a personal quirk and sat beside him chewing another corner in solidarity until Marion caught them.
Corwin's mouth softened at the memory before he could prevent it.
He turned the expression into a glance downward and checked his watch.
They were behind schedule but not disastrously so.
Jennifer's timing had its own elasticity during the primaries. Events began when enough people had arrived, ended when she decided she had finished listening, and moved between towns according to a system Corwin suspected only two people on the entire campaign understood. Newspapers described momentum as though it belonged to speeches and vote totals, but from Corwin's position momentum was also tires, motel keys, late lunches, borrowed telephones, coffee in paper cups and somebody discovering at the last moment that the rear entrance to a hall opened into an alley blocked by trash cans.
Jennifer herself seemed less strained by it than many of the people around her. She could become tired, certainly, and sometimes profoundly so, but fatigue did not sour her quickly. It made her quieter. Corwin had seen aides become brittle after fourteen hours, their patience shrinking visibly with every additional hand somebody wanted Jennifer to shake. Jennifer tended to move in the opposite direction. The more depleted she became, the less interested she seemed in keeping anything for herself.
That quality worried Corwin professionally.
At the bus stop it touched him personally.
The baby had finally reached for her. One mittened hand emerged from the blanket and opened toward Jennifer with the clumsy certainty of a child accustomed to having the world move closer when she wanted it. Jennifer offered a finger. The mitten closed badly around it.
Corwin looked toward the opposite pavement because there was something almost indecent about watching.
Not indecent in the act itself. In his own response.
Laurel's hands had once been that size.
He could remember them wrapped around his thumb before he could remember what age she had been. There were photographs somewhere at home that would answer the question. Marion kept them in albums with dates written neatly beneath each one, though Corwin rarely looked through them without somebody else suggesting it. He thought suddenly of how many changes had occurred gradually enough that he had failed to mark their passing. Laurel no longer slept curled entirely against his chest. She no longer needed both hands to hold a cup. Her first pair of walking shoes had disappeared into a box in the attic months ago. There must have been a last time for each of those things, but nobody had recognized it while it happened.
The thought did not arrive as tragedy. That would have been too large. It was quieter than that, and therefore harder to push aside.
Corwin watched Jennifer's finger disappear into the baby's mitten and wondered what he had already failed to notice ending.
A city bus eventually approached from the west, and several people at the shelter rearranged themselves. The baby turned toward the engine noise with fascination, breaking Jennifer's hold. The mother shifted her higher against her chest. Jennifer stepped aside, giving the waiting passengers room, and Corwin instinctively adjusted his own position as the bus obscured half the street.
For a few seconds the world became reflections in long windows. Faces moved behind glass. Doors opened and folded shut. Diesel smoke and heat disturbed the cold air. Corwin watched hands, shoulders, bags and pockets without attaching stories to any of them. The older man with the newspaper boarded. The woman who had been waiting remained, apparently expecting another route. Nobody came off who interested Corwin. The bus moved away and the street reassembled itself exactly as before.
The baby found Jennifer again almost immediately.
There was something comic in the persistence of it. Jennifer had become, for the moment, part of the child's environment in the same category as the blanket and her mother's face. She issued another experimental sound. Jennifer answered without hesitation.
Corwin imagined Laurel hearing it and felt the distance home settle heavily behind his sternum.
He had telephoned the previous night from a motel outside Detroit. Marion had answered first. Laurel had already been in bed but not asleep, and there had been the usual scramble of footsteps after Marion told her who was calling. Corwin had heard the receiver bump against something before Laurel's breathless voice came through. He had asked about her day. She had told him several things at once, none of which he had fully understood. Something had happened with a red crayon. Somebody named Rebecca had cried. Marion had made peas. Laurel had seen a dog from the car and considered this information essential.
Corwin had listened while checking notes for the morning.
That detail returned with uncomfortable precision.
The notes had not been urgent.
He had been turning pages while his daughter spoke because he had believed he could do both things.
He probably had done both things, in the narrowest sense.
Now he could not remember what Laurel had said about the red crayon.
Across the street, a door opened and one of Jennifer's aides appeared. Corwin caught the woman's eye. She gave a small motion indicating that a car was coming and disappeared back into the diner.
A few more minutes.
He looked toward Jennifer again.
The baby's mother had begun saying something to her, though Corwin could not hear it over the traffic and made no attempt to. He avoided listening to private conversation when it had no relevance to security. That boundary mattered to him. Protection created access to moments people did not intend to share, and a man could become ugly inside if he began treating proximity as entitlement. He knew more than most voters ever would about Jennifer's exhaustion, eating habits, silences and moods, but he kept such information filed mentally under usefulness rather than intimacy.
The singing was different because nobody had said anything.
There was nothing to overhear.
Only the baby making sounds and Jennifer giving them shape.
Corwin found himself wondering whether Laurel would remember his voice clearly during long absences. The question was absurd. He was not gone for months. He returned regularly. He telephoned. He sat at the breakfast table and carried her upstairs and complained when toys appeared underfoot. She knew him.
Yet children measured time differently.
Three nights might be nothing to him and enormous to her.
He wished again that he had gone into her room before leaving.
The wish no longer embarrassed him.
Jennifer gave the baby a slow little sequence, three notes falling and then rising at the end. The child listened with unusual concentration. Her mouth opened. What emerged bore little resemblance to the original, but Jennifer's face lit as though she had been answered perfectly. The mother laughed again, quietly this time, and tucked the blanket beneath her daughter's chin.
Corwin thought of Laurel's gap-toothed grin.
That was another thing likely to disappear without his permission. Her baby teeth would begin loosening eventually. The little space between the front two that made her expressions look perpetually conspiratorial would change. He had never considered having an opinion about teeth before fatherhood. Now he felt a ridiculous rush of protectiveness toward a gap no dentist would preserve.
A sedan turned onto the street.
Corwin recognized the driver.
The replacement car slowed near the curb.
The campaign's improvised pause began closing around them. An aide came across from the diner carrying folders. Another appeared behind her fastening his coat. Jennifer noticed the movement but did not immediately step away from the mother and child. Corwin did not hurry her. The car had arrived. Nobody was exposed unnecessarily. A few seconds mattered less than people imagined until they suddenly mattered very much, and these did not.
The baby had become drowsy.
Her earlier enthusiasm softened into little murmurs, her eyelids lowering between sounds. Jennifer continued answering more quietly, allowing the exchange to diminish rather than ending it. Corwin had the strange impression of watching something being put carefully back where it belonged.
His daughter rarely surrendered to sleep gracefully. Laurel fought it with all the conviction of somebody who believed consciousness was a right that adults could revoke. She could insist she was not tired while lying face-down on Corwin's shoulder. Once, after a family dinner, she had continued protesting bedtime after her eyes had closed and the words had dissolved into nonsense.
Corwin had carried her upstairs that night.
He remembered her weight.
The warmth of her cheek against his collar.
One arm hanging loosely down his back.
He could not remember what he had been thinking while he carried her.
That absence troubled him more than it should have.
Perhaps he had been thinking of work.
Perhaps nothing.
He wondered how often the most valuable minutes of his life had passed while his mind occupied itself elsewhere.
Jennifer finally drew back from the baby. There was no ceremony to it. She gave the mother a smile, touched one mitten lightly, and turned toward the waiting car. The little girl watched her go with the solemn betrayal babies reserved for objects that had the audacity to leave their field of vision.
Corwin moved with Jennifer automatically, reclaiming the rhythm that had governed the rest of the morning. His attention expanded outward. The sedan. The driver. The sidewalk. The man still inside the Plymouth. The windows above the shops. The alley beside the pharmacy. The approaching traffic. Jennifer became again the protected figure inside a shifting set of distances.
But the baby had lodged somewhere the job did not reach.
As Jennifer crossed toward the car, the child made one last sound behind them.
It was not especially musical. A small, questioning call, little more than breath shaped by a mouth still learning what mouths could do.
Jennifer answered without turning.
The reply was equally small.
Corwin felt it move through him.
He opened the rear door for Jennifer, waited until she was inside, then circled the vehicle while another agent took position ahead. Nobody watching would have seen anything altered in him. He scanned the street before entering, noted the Plymouth still parked, saw the mother adjusting the baby's bonnet, registered an empty doorway, a delivery truck, two pedestrians and the dull reflection of the sky in the shelter glass.
The sedan pulled away.
Corwin watched the bus stop diminish in the side mirror until the mother and child became indistinct shapes beneath the shelter roof.
Only then did he allow himself to think of Laurel without pushing the thought aside.
She would probably be at home with Marion by the time he next called. There might be another story about Rebecca or a crayon or a dog. Laurel might become distracted halfway through and abandon the telephone for some more immediate interest. She might sing. She might refuse to say anything at all and breathe into the receiver because children sometimes transformed communication into games adults were expected to understand.
Corwin decided he would not look at papers while she spoke.
He did not make the decision solemnly. He did not transform it into a promise about fatherhood or distance or work. Those things were too large, and Corwin distrusted large resolutions made under the pressure of passing emotion. He simply knew that the next time Laurel's voice came through a telephone, his hands would be empty.
The car travelled west beneath a low winter sky while Port Huron thinned into wider roads and scattered buildings. Jennifer sat behind him listening to an aide run through the revised schedule. Corwin gave their words no more attention than necessary. His eyes moved over intersections, cars, overpasses and windows, maintaining the quiet discipline that had become almost physical after years of repetition.
Several miles passed before he heard Jennifer humming.
It was nearly beneath the engine noise, no louder than a person thinking aloud. The melody was not one Corwin recognized, and after a moment he realized it was not really a melody at all. It was the little falling phrase she had offered the baby.
He looked through the windshield and felt himself smile.
This time he did not correct it.
The road ran straight for a while through flat winter country. Bare fields lay under old snow, the edges dark where ploughs had turned frozen earth. Telephone poles marched beside them, each briefly occupying the windshield before passing overhead and behind. The campaign car moved through that landscape with the peculiar anonymity of travel, carrying people toward another hall where strangers were already arranging chairs.
Corwin thought of Laurel waking in the mornings.
He imagined the little room before sunrise, the curtains still dark, her blankets twisted around her legs. He imagined her eyes opening and the first uncertain seconds before memory returned. Then the small voice beginning somewhere beneath the covers, singing whatever private song occurred to her before the day arrived.
He had never heard it.
The fact no longer felt like an accusation. It became instead something waiting for him.
He watched the road and wondered whether, when he returned home, he might wake early enough to stand in the hallway without opening her door.
He could listen from there.
Nothing more than that.
The idea stayed with him as the car continued west, quiet and unexpectedly comforting, while somewhere behind his shoulder Jennifer kept humming the baby's tune.