55
Luke
The house is different when you’re alone in it.
I’ve been alone in this house before.I lived in this house.I rebuilt half of it with my hands.I know the way the floorboards creak at 4 a.m.I know which window lets in the draft.I know the sound the pipes make when the water heater kicks on—a low groan, like the house is stretching.
But I was never alone in this house with a man chained to the basement wall.
Marin’s flight left an hour ago.I watched her taillights disappear down the driveway and then I stood in the doorway and listened to the silence the way you listen to a fuse.
The list is on the counter.Marin’s handwriting—sharp, precise, the handwriting of a woman who managed accounts worth millions and now manages a hostage with the same attention to detail.
Ibuprofen: morning and night.Water: every four hours.Food: twice a day.Nothing he has to cut.Don’t engage.Don’t feel sorry for him.If Mrs.Mather comes by: he’s sleeping.Always sleeping.
I fold the list.Put it in my back pocket.
First feeding is at eight.
I go downstairs at eight.Open the basement door.The light from the stairwell cuts across the concrete floor and hits Charles’s legs first.He’s sitting against the wall.Wrists in the cuffs.Eyes open.He’s been awake.I don’t think he’s slept.
I set the plate on the floor.Water.Two ibuprofen.Toast.Scrambled eggs—because the list said nothing he has to cut, which means nothing that requires a knife, which means Marin has thought about Charles getting a knife and decided against it.Smart woman.
Charles looks at the plate.Looks at me.
“Where is she?”he says.
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Out.”
He picks up the toast.Eats it slowly.Watching me the way he watched me the first time I stood in his doorway—cataloging, calculating.But something’s different now.The lazy contempt is gone.What’s in its place is harder to read.Fear, maybe.Or the thing that lives next to fear when a man has heard what Charles heard last night.
“You fucked her,” he says.Matter of fact.Like he’s reading a headline.
I don’t answer.I lean against the doorframe.
“On the table,” he says.“I heard the legs dragging.”
I still don’t answer.
“And then you discussed burying me in the backyard.”
“That was a joke.”
“Was it?”
I look at him.He looks at me.Two men in a basement with scrambled eggs and a question that doesn’t have a safe answer.
“Eat your breakfast, Charles.”
“Was it a joke?”
“Eat your breakfast.”
He eats.I watch.Not because the list says to—because I want to see what’s behind his eyes.Fear is useful.Fear keeps a man in his cuffs.But the thing I’m seeing isn’t fear exactly.It’s recalculation.Charles is running the numbers on a new equation—one where the handyman isn’t just fixing things, one where his girlfriend isn’t just angry, one where the basement might be the last room he ever sees.
