Epilogue

Vann is glad to see me, and I am glad to be seen, and I've come to think that's most of what a friendship is when you scrape away everything else people say it's supposed to be — two rooms in two lives with a door between them that neither one keeps locked.

The office is a good room. Ninth floor, a corner of it, light coming in soft through blinds turned to catch the morning without letting it glare, and books along one wall that are actually his and actually read, spines cracked the honest way. There's a smell of coffee already made and machine oil under it, faint, the way a workshop smells even after you've cleaned it, and I know the oil before I place it because I've been here enough times now to know the shape of him. He rises when I come in. He always rises. He crosses the carpet with that stoop of his, the tall man forever ducking a doorway that isn't there, and he takes my hand in both of his — small dry hands, cool, careful — and he tells me I look well, and he means it, and I do.

"You've been sleeping," he says, and there's a smile all the way down in the voice, that low warm voice that could talk a frightened animal out of a corner. "I can always tell. There's a face people wear when they've stopped fighting the night, and you're wearing it, Dana. It suits you. It always would have. It just took you the long way around to get here."

I sit where I always sit, in the chair that's become mine by the simple fact of my choosing it twice, and he pours me coffee I don't especially want and I take it anyway, because taking it is the point and the wanting was never really the point of anything between people who like each other. We talk. We talk the way we talk now, easy and unhurried, no agenda I can find and none I'm looking for, and I catch myself thinking, not for the first time, that I spent fifteen years in rooms with men who wanted something from me and could never once put a name to the wanting, and here at last is a man who wants nothing from me but the pleasure of the hour, and how strange that I had to lose so much noise before I could hear a thing that quiet.

The work is going well, and we spend a while on the work. It's a small thing I do for them now, a column here, a few careful paragraphs there, the kind of writing that doesn't argue with a reader; it walks beside him a way and lets him arrive somewhere he'll swear he was always headed. I'm good at it. I was always good at it; I just used to point it the hard direction, uphill, into people, and there's a peace in pointing it downhill at last, with the grain of things instead of against. Hale takes his oath in the winter. Vann doesn't gloat about it — he isn't a man who gloats, it would be like a river gloating — but the fact of it sits in the room with us, warm and settled, a thing we built and can be quiet about together.

He asks after Maya, the way he always asks, gentle and without weight, and I tell him she's well, I think, that we don't speak much, that she keeps her distance and I've made my peace with the distance the way you make your peace with weather. She has her classroom and her students and her closet of little won animals, and she has her own idea of who her sister is. It isn't me anymore, and that's all right. People carry a picture of you from the last time they let themselves look, and then they stop looking, and the picture goes on aging in a drawer while you go on living in the light. I don't blame her for it. I love her the way you love someone across a river you've both stopped trying to swim. Vann nods at all of it, slow, taking it in, and says only that families are the hardest text of all, that we're all of us badly written by the people who loved us first, and that it's a mercy, sometimes, to be allowed to put a chapter down.

Behind him, against the window wall, is the piano.

It's new since last time — new to the room, I mean; the thing itself is a hundred years old if it's a day, an upright with its front panel off and its brass-and-leather insides open to the air like a watch with the back unscrewed. He's in the middle of it. Tools laid out on a cloth, a coil of rubber tubing, and up top, threaded onto its spool and half-unrolled across the tracker bar, one of his paper rolls, the punched kind, a long ribbon of cream paper freckled edge to edge with little rectangular holes.

"You're restoring another one," I say, and I go and look, because I've learned that letting him show me the pianos is a kindness he treasures and asks for from no one.

"I am." He stands beside me, pleased as a boy. "Silent since before either of us was born." He traces the air above the paper roll. "Every note is punched in. Feed it air and it plays, whether anyone sits at the keys or not. The paper remembers."

"And if he got a note wrong?" I ask. "The man who cut it?"

Vann smiles, the private smile he saves for things he loves. "Then it's wrong forever. A wrong note isn't a mark you rub out. It's a hole among ten thousand others. You'd have to burn the roll and cut a new one." He touches the paper's edge. "Mostly you let it play and call the error character."

I laugh, because it's a lovely way to think, and because he's lovely when he's like this, lit from the inside by a thing that has nothing to do with power. I file it — an old reflex, harmless now, a hand reaching for a notebook that isn't there — a wrong note you can't pick out, playing on forever with no one at the keys. It's the kind of line I'd have used, once. I let it go.

We come back to the chairs. The coffee's gone lukewarm and neither of us minds. And there's a small settling in him, a gathering, the way a considerate man gathers himself before he asks the one plain question he's carried into a pleasant morning and been too courteous to spend early.

"I want to ask you something," he says, "and you'll forgive me for it, because it's housekeeping, it's tidiness, it's an old man wanting the drawers to close flush." He turns his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer, that habit of his. "A while back — the winter, before all this, when you and I still had our fences up — you told me you'd built yourself a kind of insurance. A safeguard. An arrangement where, if anything ever happened to you, a great deal of material would find its way out into the world all at once, to a great many people, and there'd be no stopping it." His eyes rest on me, mild and kind. "You were quite proud of it. You had every right to be; it was elegant. We've never gone looking for it, out of respect. But I'd love, if you're willing, just to understand how the thing worked — where it lives, what wakes it, what it would take to let it rest. So we can put the last loose end of a hard season quietly to bed. That's all. Between us."

I wait for it to mean something, and I wait to have an answer, and I find I have neither.

"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't — Lance, I honestly don't know what you mean."

He waits. He's good at waiting. It's the most generous thing he does.

"A safeguard," I say. I reach and find no locked door, no wall, only a smooth place where a memory ought to be. "I don't think that was me. I said a lot of frightened things that winter, but I didn't build anything. I wouldn't know how." I laugh, embarrassed by how certain he sounds. "If I'd hidden something and wound it up to go off, I'd remember. It would matter too much to forget." I wait for a face, a place, another person. Nothing comes. "I'm sorry, Lance. There's nobody I can point you to. No name. No door."

"You'd think," Vann says.

And here it comes, and I catch it only because I've spent a life catching things, and because for one moment I've nothing else to look at but his face.

His hands come apart.

They've been folded the whole hour, still as a pair of gloves on a table, and now the top one lifts an inch off the bottom and stops there in the air, forgotten, and his thumb, which is always moving, slow circles on the back of the other hand, his thumb goes still. The warmth doesn't leave his face. It's under the warmth. A narrowing at the eyes, the smallest tightening, the look of a man who's set his foot on a stair he's climbed a thousand times and felt the step not be there — that half-second lurch before the mind decides whether it's falling. He looks not at me but a little past me, at the window, at the light, at nothing, the way you look at the middle distance when you're doing sudden arithmetic you don't like the answer to. It's there, and then he draws breath, and it's gone, folded back under the calm, and his hands come together again on the desk.

Poor man, I think. He works too hard. I've seen it before in him, that gray flicker of tiredness that crosses a person who carries a great deal and never sets it down where you can see him do it; he takes the long view for everyone, and the long view is a heavy thing to hold up alone, and there are mornings it must simply cost him. I feel a rush of plain fondness for him. I'd carry a corner of it for him if he'd ever let me.

"Never mind it," he says, and the smile comes all the way back, and he lifts his cup to me an inch, a small toast. "Truly. It was a loose thread and it turns out there was never any thread at all — the best kind of loose end, the kind that was only ever in my own head." He sets the cup down and folds his hands again, and there's a new care in the folding, the deliberate gentleness a man uses on a thing he has just decided is more fragile and more precious than he'd understood a minute ago. "Do you know what I've found, at my age? That I've grown unreasonably fond of the plain fact of a person's heart simply going on. Yours especially, Dana. I catch myself wanting a very long life for you — a quiet one, a well-slept one, years and years and years of it, right to the far end." He says it like a benediction, and I take it like one. "Look after yourself. Keep the good habits, keep the good sleep. It would grieve me past saying to lose you early." He tips his head, courteous to the last. "Thank you. You've put an old worrier's mind at rest — nearly."

I tell him it's nothing, because it is nothing, because I've given him the truth and the truth cost me not a thing to give, and there's a clean pleasure in that, in being a person with nothing left to hide, nothing wound up in a dark corner, nothing behind the wall. We say the things you say. He walks me to the door with his hand light at my back, and he tells me to sleep well, which from him is not a small wish but the whole of his good will pressed into three words, and I tell him I always do now, and it's true, and we're both glad of it.

At the door I look back, the way you do, to fix a warm room in your mind before you leave it.

He's gone back to the piano. He's standing over the open works with the paper roll threaded through, one hand resting flat on the top of the case, and his other hand hangs at his side, and as I watch, without his knowing I'm still watching, the two first fingers of it fold slowly one across the other and stay that way — the old sign, the small child's sign, the thing your hand does all on its own when you've done everything a person can do and the rest of it has passed out of your keeping and into the keeping of luck. It's a strange, young gesture on a man like him. It touches me, oddly. I don't know what he's wishing on, standing there over his silent hundred-year-old instrument with its music already punched and waiting, his fingers crossed like a boy's over a machine that will play, someday, exactly what it was set to play. It only wants air. It will wait a hundred years for it, patient as the grave, and it will not care by then who cut the roll or who threaded it or who is left alive in the room to remember it's there — one day the air will move, because the air always moves eventually, and the thing will simply, finally, play itself out to the last note, with no one at all at the keys.

I hope he gets it, whatever it is.

I let myself out into the good morning, and I go home to sleep. My heart keeps its steady count in the dark the way it does now, every night, faithful, asking nothing of me, giving nothing away — going on, and on, for exactly as long as it goes.