I Took His Prison Sentence. Now He Begs. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Separate Rooms

In Ben's house over the water, Willa sets her own rules and cannot sleep behind a closed door; Odessa calls with a question that is not meant for her.

Ben's house stood on pilings over the water at the end of a gravel road.

A salvage yard ran along the shore beside it, with rows of buoys and chain.

A crane stood over it with its arm folded down for the night.

"Don't answer her," he said, about the message. "Don't answer anyone you don't know."

"I only know four people now," I said. "One is in prison, one is you."

He almost smiled.

He unlocked a plain wooden door, and I walked into the first house I had stood in for three years.

It smelled of coffee and cedar and old rope.

There was a kitchen with one chair pulled out from the table, and a couch with a blanket thrown over it.

One whole wall was windows, with the harbor lights moving on the water.

"Your room is at the top of the stairs," Ben said. "I put clean sheets on this morning."

He had made the bed before he knew my name.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it.

A bed with a quilt. A lamp. A bolt on the inside of the door, bright brass, new.

"I installed that today," he said behind me. "You turn it, nobody comes in."

"Thank you."

"It's a lock, Willa. You don't thank people for locks."

He said my name carefully.

Then he went downstairs, and I heard the back door open and shut.

I stood in the room and shot the bolt.

It clicked.

It was the best sound I had heard all day.

Then it was the worst one.

For three years a lock had turned every night at nine, from the other side of my door.

My hands would not stop shaking.

I tried the bed. I tried the floor. I lay on my side with my knees pulled up and my eyes on the line of brass.

At two in the morning I drew the bolt back and opened the door.

The hallway was dark and open and nobody was in it.

I breathed.

I went down the stairs in my bare feet and out the back door, and I sat at the end of the dock with my legs hanging over the black water.

The coat was still on. Rain had left the boards cold.

I didn't hear him come.

"Tide's in," Ben said, close behind me. "It'll get colder."

I didn't turn around.

"I can't sleep with the door closed," I said. "It's not you."

He didn't ask why.

Something warm and heavy came down over my shoulders, on top of the coat.

It was his canvas jacket. It smelled of salt and engine oil, and the lining was still warm from him.

His hands rested on my shoulders to settle it.

They stayed there one second too long.

Then he took them away fast, as if I had told him to.

He sat down on the dock a careful arm's length from me.

"New terms," he said, looking out at the water. "The door stays open as long as you want it open. You don't explain."

"All right."

"And I won't ask about the crash."

My whole body went still.

"You won't," I said.

"I won't. I'm not asking for your side."

I waited for what came next.

"Don't ask me about March the nineteenth," he said. "Not where I go, not why."

"That's the night."

"I know what night it is."

His voice was rough and quiet.

I had a hundred questions and I didn't say any of them.

"Deal," I said.

He nodded, still not looking at me.

We sat on the dock until the sky turned gray.

We had been married for one day, and he had touched me once.

When I went in, I kept his jacket.

The phone on the kitchen wall rang at seven.

It was an old landline, the kind with a cord.

Ben crossed the kitchen in three strides and picked it up, and I heard a recorded voice say this was a call from an inmate at Marrow Creek.

Then the line cracked, and I heard her.

I knew that voice. I had heard it call lights out for three years.

It came through the receiver loud enough to fill the room.

"Benny. Did you tell her about the nineteenth?"

Ben turned his back to me.

"No, Ma," he said. "Not yet."

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