He was quiet for a moment. That's not the same as doing it yourself. No, she agreed. It isn't. She held his eyes.
But it's also not the same as knowing nothing, which is what you're imagining. He looked at his hat, which was in his hands. He had taken it off when he picked up the bucket she noticed and had not put it back on. "I'll check in," he said finally. "Not every day, but if you hang something in the window when you're all right, a cloth, anything, I'll know.
If there's nothing there, I'll stop." She considered this. It was a practical system, unromantic and direct, designed not to impose. She understood that he had thought about it before arriving, which meant he had been thinking about her circumstances more deliberately than she had given him credit for, and that was a piece of information she filed and did not immediately look at. "All right," she said. "I'll hang a cloth." He put his hat back on.
He looked at the furniture visible through the open door, the table, the chairs, the shelf. He had been in the cabin when she had not invited him in, but then she understood the window, the glass window he had sent Tommy to install. He had looked through it when he rode past, and he had seen the table and the chairs and the cradle on the floor, and he had not said anything about it until now. "The furniture looks good," he said. She looked at him.
He looked back without apology. Thank you, she said, because there was nothing else to say. He wrote north. She went inside and hung a blue piece of cloth in the window and stood there looking out at the clearing through the glass he had given her. And behind her on the floor was the cradle, and around her on four sides were the walls she had built, and she was not ready, and she was also completely out of time.
And the two faxs sat beside each other in the room without resolution. The blue cloth was in the window for 11 days. On the morning of the 12th day, Amos was riding the creek line before breakfast, which he had been doing every morning since Clara hung the cloth, telling himself it was because the storm had changed the bank drainage and he needed to monitor it. He had said this to himself enough times that he had almost stopped noticing he was saying it. He looked at the window from the creek line and the cloth was not there.
The window was dark. He sat on the horse for a moment, then he rode up. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, harder, his knuckles sharp against the wood of the door she had built.
Clara. A sound from inside. Not a voice. Something lower, controlled. The kind of sound a person makes when they are past the point of performing composure, but have not yet let go of it entirely.