Page 25 of Buried Accounts

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Claire changed her shirt three times before Lila came, which was a thing she noticed herself doing and couldn't account for, because the shirts were all the same two shirts and it made no difference which one she stood in to receive a woman who'd already seen her at her worst, in a county building, hunted and thin and pretending not to be either.

But she changed it three times anyway, and understood somewhere in the third change that this was what nervousness felt like when it wasn't fear — that she'd forgotten there was a kind of nervous that came from wanting a thing to go well rather than from wanting to survive it. She hadn't been nervous about a person's good opinion in five years. You didn't court the good opinion of people you were about to leave. The flutter under her ribs was a muscle she'd let go slack from disuse, and it ached being used, and the ache wasn't unpleasant, which confused her.

Victor read the whole thing off her without a word, the shirt changing, the flutter and the confusion, and did the kindest possible thing with it, which was to make himself scarce before she had to ask. “I'll be at the monitors,” he said, gathering a legal pad and his cold coffee and moving toward the far end of the room where the desk sat, putting distance between himself and the sitting area on purpose, giving the space to the women who'd be in it. “I'll be working if you need anything. You won't need anything. She's going to walk in that door, and you're going to wonder why you were ever nervous, and then you're going to have a friend, and I'm going to sit over here and pretend I can't hear either of you.”

“You'll hear everything.”

“I'll hear everything and repeat none of it, which is the same as not hearing it, only more useful.” He settled at the desk with his back mostly to the room, a man performing not-listening as a courtesy, and Claire understood that he'd position himself exactly there, close enough that the door was covered and far enough that the room belonged to her, because he'd worked out to the foot how much space a frightened woman needed to have a friend in.

The knock was Lila's own, not the team's two-then-one but a light quick friendly rap, and when Victor worked the latch and the shelving swung and the daylight came in with her, Claire knew her before she was all the way through the door — the dark hair, the open unarmored face, the arms full, so full she came in sideways, a canvas tote on each shoulder and a paper grocery sack hugged to her chest and something square and flat tucked under one arm that turned out later to be a book.

“Oh, don't get up, don't — okay, hi.” Lila got the sacks onto the long table in a controlled avalanche and turned around and looked at Claire, and her whole face did a thing, a softening and a brightening at once, the face of a person seeing someone she'd worried about and finding them better than she'd feared. “Hi. Look at you. You've got — you look like you've slept. And eaten. Oh, I'm so glad. I've been — you have no idea. I've thought about you every day since the county building, that nervous woman looking for seizure filings, and then the men on the square, and I put it together, and I couldn't stop thinking, I hope she's somewhere, I hope somebody's got her, and here you are and somebody's got you.”

It came out of her in a rush, warm and unguarded and entirely without the wariness that had governed every human exchange in Claire's life for five years, and Claire stood there and received it and didn't know what to do with her face, because nobody had been simply, uncomplicatedly glad to see her in longer than she could stand to count.

“You walked me to the board,” Claire said. “You made it sound like you were headed that way.”

“I wasn't headed that way.” Lila smiled, a little caught out. “I never am. It just seems — if a person needs help and you make it a favor they have to accept, they feel like a charity case, and if you make it a thing you were doing anyway, they can just walk along beside you and take it. My mother did it that way. I picked it up from her.”

“I knew,” Claire said. “I knew you weren't headed that way. I've spent five years reading people for exactly that, for the thing under the thing they say, and I read you walking me to that board and what was under it was —” Her voice caught again and she let it, this once, in front of this woman. “It was just kindness. That's all that was under it. Nothing else. And I hadn't seen that in so long I almost didn't recognize it. I never got to say thank you. You were the one safe face in the whole town, and you never knew it and I couldn't tell you, and I've wanted to say thank you for days.”

Lila crossed the room and did what you weren't supposed to be able to do to Claire, which was come inside her distance without permission, and Claire let her, because some part of her had already decided this was allowed, and Lila took both of Claire's hands in both of hers and held them.

“You just did,” she said. “You just said it. And you don't have to thank me for being a normal person to a scared one, that's just — that's just the floor, that's the least. But I'll take it, because I can see it cost you something to say, and things that cost something are worth taking.”

They went through the sacks, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world and Claire had to keep swallowing against how much it wasn't.

Lila had brought clothes — real clothes, a week of them, soft worn things that had clearly been chosen with thought, a sweater the gray of good weather and jeans and shirts and things to sleep in and things to be warm in, and she'd guessed Claire's size almost exactly, she’d guessed it down from what Claire was and up to what Claire would be, and she said, when a few more of Victor's too-big breakfasts had done their work, and she said it lightly, without making the thinness a wound, something a friend can name that a stranger can’t.

“I didn't know your colors, so I stayed quiet — grays and blues and one green because your eyes could take it. If any of it's wrong, we'll fix it, that's what a second visit's for.” She pulled out a pair of thick socks and put them on the top of the pile like a period at the end of a sentence. “And socks, because a person can survive almost anything with warm feet and almost nothing without them; that's a Lila rule. You'll learn my rules.”

A person can survive almost anything with warm feet. Claire looked at the socks, gray wool, thick, the kind of small specific mercy nobody had extended her in five years because you had to know a person a little to know they were cold, and she felt the whole ridiculous weight of being thought about land on her over a pair of socks, and she laughed instead of the other thing, and the laugh surprised them both and pleased them both.

“There she is,” Lila said, delighted. “There's a laugh. Okay. We're going to be fine, you and me.”

It came up over the groceries, of all places, while they were unpacking the paper sack and Lila was explaining that she'd bought the things a person cooks with when they're getting back into cooking, the forgiving things, the things that turn out fine even when you're rusty.

“I'm rusty myself,” Lila said. “I only learned a couple of years ago. I was thirty-one before I made a meal that didn't come out of a box or a window, if you'll believe it, and there's a reason for that, and it's the same reason I recognized you at that board, so I'm going to tell you, if that's all right, because I think you should know we're not as different as you're being careful about.”

Claire went still, the good stillness now, the listening kind. “Tell me.”

“My father died when I was younger. They told me it was his heart.” Lila set a can down on the table and left her hand on it, not for drama, just a hand needing something to rest on. “And I believed it, for a long time — you believe what they tell you because the alternative is unlivable. But it sat wrong. Little things. The timing of it, and some money that moved around it, and the way certain people I'd never met turned up very calm and very helpful right afterward, helping in the specific way that's actually making sure. I didn't have a word for what was wrong. I just knew the story they gave me didn't hold the weight of the man.”

“It didn't hold up,” Claire said, very quietly, the words she'd said about Shira, the words that were the whole architecture of her.

“It didn't hold up.” Lila's eyes came to hers and there was a recognition in them that went all the way down, one person who'd stood in that exact place finding another. “So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was read. I got into his files, his own papers, and then public records, property, filings, the boring paper nobody thinks to hide because it's too boring to hide, and I read for eight months, and I built the thing back up out of its own pieces until it told me the truth. And the truth was that my father was killed. Not by a heart. By people who needed a thing he knew to go away, and made him go away to do it, and smoothed it over so well that his own daughter believed a lie for years. And when I pulled hard enough on who those people were, it went up. And up. Into something bigger than one man's death, with the same fingerprints on everything, the same terrible tidiness.”

The room was quiet. At the far desk, Victor had gone entirely still, the way a man is scrupulous about not turning around.

“The same system,” Claire said.

“A few layers down from what has you running, from what I hear. But the same. The same taste for tidiness. The same not-caring — that's the part I couldn't get past for the longest time, that it wasn't personal, that they didn't hate him, they just needed him gone, and a person being gone was cheaper than a person being managed. It doesn't care, Claire. That's the thing about it: nobody warns you. It's not cruel; cruel would almost be better. Cruel at least sees you. It just doesn't care whether you're a person. My father was a line item. Your friend Shira was a line item.” She'd heard the name from Ronan, then, or Victor; Claire didn't mind that she had. “We're line items. And the only thing that's ever beaten it, in my whole experience of it, is people deciding to care about each other.

Claire sat with that, the cleanest statement of the thing she'd lived inside for five years that she'd ever heard, spoken by a woman who'd lived inside it too and come out the far side into a kitchen she was learning to cook in and a husband who asked strangers' permission to enter his own building and a life with enough room in it to spend an afternoon on a frightened woman she owed nothing.

“You got out,” Claire said. It wasn't quite a question. It was almost a thing she needed confirmed, that the far side existed, that a person could get there.