Page 54 of Take the Fall
He stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at it like he was glad to be standing in it and wasn’t going to say so.
“Sit down,” I said. “Sit down before you fall down. What do you need. Ice. You need ice, the freezer’s got that bag of peas. Have you eaten? They don’t feed you in those places.”
“Ryan.”
“What did the doctor say. The actual words.”
He almost smiled. It pulled at the split lip and he stopped.
“The actual words,” he said. “Bruising. Nothing broken. Nothing torn. Take it easy a few days. Painkillers if I want them, which I don’t.” He lowered himself onto the kitchen chair like a man twice his age, and the careful way he did it gave the lie to thetake it easy a few daysbeing nothing. “That’s the lot. I’m sore. I’m not hurt.”
“You’re gray.”
“It’s artificial light and a long night. I’ll be gray till I sleep it off.” He set his good hand flat on the table. “I’m fine, Ryan. I promise you I’m fine.”
I got the peas out of the freezer because I needed my hands again. Wrapped them in a tea towel. Set them down by his arm. He looked at the little green bundle and at me and something moved behind his face, there and gone, the thing he did when a kindness landed somewhere it wasn’t braced for.
“What happened,” I said.
And I watched it close.
It was the smallest thing. A man who isn’t trained would have missed it. The eyes went level, the jaw set a half-degree, the whole face composing itself into a surface with nothing on it. I’d seen him do it across a hundred interview tables to people who wanted things from him. I had never once had it done to me.
“Three thugs,” he said. “On the way back. It was over fast.”
“Three of them.”
“It happens. Wrong street, wrong hour.”
“What did they take.”
A beat. Half a second. But I was looking right at it, and I caught the half-second land.
“Does it matter.”
“What did they take, Luke.”
“Nothing worth chasing.”
Which is not an answer, and we both knew it was not an answer, and he let it sit there being not an answer and looked at me steady, daring me, almost, to make it into the thing it was.
“Your wallet,” I said. “Your phone. They’re in your coat. I can see the shape of them from here. Three men put you on the ground and didn’t take your wallet or your phone.”
“Ryan.”
“That’s not a mugging. You know it’s not a mugging. I know it’s not a mugging. Murphy knows it’s not a mugging, which is why Murphy stood in that corridor and lied to me with his mouth shut for forty minutes while you were being treated.” The thing past the edge of my sight slid closer and still wouldn’t come into focus, and the not-knowing was a hand at my throat. “What is this. What is it actually.”
“Leave it,” he said.
Quiet. Final. The door pulled all the way shut.
He got up. Steadied a second on the back of the chair. Then he started for the hall, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, slow, one button at a time with the hand that worked, and I understoodhe was done. The conversation was over because he had decided it was over, the way his bedroom door used to close in the first weeks, no slam and no whisper, a man ending a thing on the far side of it.
“I want a shower,” he said, to the hall, not to me. “I’ve got half the road on me.”
And he just walked away from it.
That was the thing that did it. Not the shutting down. The walking away mid-sentence, mine, like I was weather he could step out of.
