She could not sleep that night.
The contract lay folded on the chair beside her bed, its corner lit by the thin bar of light that came through the shutter from the street lamp. She had read it twice more after supper, all four pages, every clause, and the clause about physical aids to perception had not changed. Examination, reproduction, and study at the office’s direction. She lay on her back and felt the graft behind her ear like a coin under the skin, and thought about clerks with scanner cups and wire probes, and a white rod ticking against a locked cabinet, and a director writing five words on a folder.
At some hour past midnight she gave up. She pulled on her coat over her nightshirt and went down the narrow stair in her socks, meaning to get water from the kitchen jug.
There was light under the kitchen door.
It was red, the low unsteady red of an open stove. She stopped on the bottom step and listened and heard the soft tick of the range’s iron, and a sound like paper being unfolded, slowly, the crackle of an old crease opening.
She pushed the door.
Tavin was sitting on the low stool in front of the range with the stove door open and the coals glowing in the box. He was still dressed, his shirt sleeves rolled, his boots on. In his hands he held an envelope.
It was a cheap envelope, buff paper, a little yellowed, the flap torn open long ago. The address on its face was written in ink, in a slanted quick hand, the letters leaning forward as though they were in a hurry to get somewhere. Mara knew the hand. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name. She had seen it every winter of her childhood on the paper labels her mother sewed into her boots and Pell’s: M. VENN — LEFT. M. VENN — RIGHT. The same lean. The same quick tail on the N.
Tavin kept his eyes down. He opened the stove door wider with the poker, and laid the envelope on the coals.
Mara crossed the kitchen in three steps.
She reached for it. She got close enough to see the first word of the address, the start of a line in that slanted hand, the beginning of a salutation, three letters and the stroke of a fourth, and then Tavin’s fingers were over the rest of it, flat, pressing it down into the coals, and she smelled singed skin and paper at once.
“Don’t,” he said.
“That was her hand.”
“Don’t.”
She stopped with her own hand out over the stove. The heat stung her knuckles. Tavin’s fingers lay on the envelope a second longer, then he drew them back and shook them once, hard, and kept his eyes off them.
The paper caught at one corner. A small blue flame ran along the edge, turned yellow, and began to eat inward.
“What did it say?”
“Old tools,” Tavin said.
“Her hand is not a tool.”
He did not answer. He took the tongs from their hook beside the range and reached into the stove and turned the envelope over, gently, the way a cook turns bread, so the coals could take the other side evenly. The ink on the face of it showed for a moment against the red, the slanted letters dark and clear, and then the paper browned around them and the letters began to swim.
Mara stood by the kitchen door with her arms folded tight across her chest and watched it burn.
It went slowly. The paper was thick, old, and it resisted catching all at once. It went brown, then darker, the brown spreading in from the edges like a stain. The envelope curled. Through a gap in the curl she could see that there was a letter inside, folded sheets of thinner paper, also covered in that hand. One line was turned outward toward her. For a second, as the heat lifted the sheet and held it trembling above the coals, she could read it, or almost: a line of quick slanted writing, ending in the word ordinary, or a word that looked like it.
Then the sheet curled in on itself and went black, and lifted off the coals as a thin glowing skin of ash, and broke.
Tavin closed the stove door. He hung the tongs on their hook.
“Go to bed,” he said.
“I’ll go to bed,” Mara said. “After I’ve written down what I saw.”
He did not answer that either. She went to the table and sat in her place and took the notebook out of her coat pocket, where it always was, and the pencil. She opened it to a clean page in the back, not the page with the columns, a new page. Tavin stood by the range with his back to the stove and his hands at his sides and watched her write. He kept his distance. He never asked to read the page.
She wrote three lines.
Envelope, buff, old, torn open long ago. Burned by T. in the range, past midnight.
Address in her hand. Slanted. Quick N.
First word of the salutation: three letters and part of a fourth. Couldn’t finish. Last line of the letter inside ended in “ordinary” (?).
She looked at what she had written. Under it she wrote half read, and underlined it.
Then she looked at it again and crossed it out.
It was a guess. She had not read half of anything. She had read three letters of one word and perhaps one word of another, and the second might not have been that word at all; it might have been orderly or original or something with no meaning to her. If she wrote half read, she would remember the page as half read, and she would begin, without meaning to, to fill in the other half from her own head. That was what the notebook was for: to stop her doing that. To keep what she knew in one column and what she guessed in another. So she crossed it out, two neat lines, and left the three facts standing.
Tavin was still watching. When she closed the book, he turned away and opened the coal bin and began to shovel coal into the range.
He shoveled a great deal. More than the stove needed for the night; more than she had ever seen him put in at once, even in the coldest weeks. The coal went in with a long rattling hiss, shovel after shovel, until the box was packed to the door and the range’s iron began to tick and the kitchen filled with a heavy dry heat that made the air waver over the stove top.
He closed the door and set the damper and hung the shovel on its hook.
“Coal costs,” Mara said.
“I know what coal costs.”
He went past her to the stair. At the bottom step he stopped, with one hand on the rail, his bad leg on the lower tread. He kept his back to her.
“Your mother wrote to me,” he said. “A long time ago. Before the fire. That was one of the letters.”
“Why burn it now?”
He was quiet. In the stove the new coal caught and began to roar softly in the box.
“Because you found the contract today,” he said at last. “And because a man in a grey suit asked you who taught you to hear.” He started up the stair. “Go to bed, Mara.”
She heard his uneven tread on the steps, then on the landing, then the door of his room. Then nothing.
She stayed at the table. The kitchen was hot now, too hot; sweat started under her arms and along her hairline. She held still. She sat with the notebook closed under her hand and stared at the range, at the red glow around its door, at the place on the iron floor of the firebox where the envelope had been.
She thought: he kept the trunk. Everyone says he kept the trunk. He has kept it for three years, and the drawer for three years, and whatever was in that letter for longer than that. He has kept everything. And tonight, the night a director offered to buy my graft, he burned something.
Why tonight? Why that letter? What was in it that he could not keep anymore?
She did not know. She sat in the heat until the clock in the office struck the half hour, then went up to her room and lay down on top of the blankets with her coat still on, and the heat from the kitchen came up through the floorboards all the rest of the night, long after Tavin’s door had closed and the street lamp had gone out. She lay awake in it, turning the three letters of the salutation over and over in her head, and could not make them into a word.