Marisol had made her decision at supper. She would stay the night with Naen in the small bedroom where the one safe heater glowed, and she would not sleep. She said it plainly, the way people say things they have said before. “If anything changes, I’ll know before she does.”
Holly would sleep at Winnie’s. It had been Naen’s idea, and Nadine had held the girl’s face in both hands to explain it. “Just tonight. Mrs. Winnie has the warm bed, and I have Marisol. I’ll be right down the hall. You can knock on the wall if you want. Will you knock back?”
“Every time.”
So, Winnie took Holly down the hall to 3F with a blanket over one arm and a stuffed rabbit under the other. Miles watched the door close. The hallway lights hummed. He was suddenly aware of how long he had been standing and how little he knew what to do next.
Ida found him at the landing. “You ought to go home, Ms. Reyes.”
“I’d rather stay.”
“There’s nothing to fix up here tonight.”
“I know,” he said. “I’d rather stay anyway.”
She studied him, and something in her thin, watchful face gave way a fraction. She went downstairs and came back with a folding chair and a wool blanket that smelled of cedar. She set them on the landing at the far end of the hall where he could see both doors and touch neither. “Chairs from the church basement,” she said. “Don’t complain about it.”
He did not. He sat. The metal was cold through his coat and the button Naen had sewn pressed against his ribs. He put his hands on his knees and did the only thing left to him. He listened.
The building spoke to him now in a language he had spent 40 years failing to learn. A tick from the radiator pipe. The long low sigh of the wind in the air shaft. A door closing somewhere beneath him. Down the hall faintly the concentrator steady and patient and once the low murmur of Marisol’s voice. He could not hear the words. He didn’t need to. It had the sound of someone keeping watch.
He thought of Frankie. He thought about the nights Frankie must have sat in rooms like this one with a flashlight and a notebook listening to buildings that could not thank him. He thought that the man had probably been happier there than anywhere else.
Midnight passed 1:00. The saxophone stopped. At 2, Marisol opened the bedroom door a few inches and looked down the hall. Her face was tired and her eyes were clear. She raised two fingers, holding, then she shut the door again. Miles let out a breath. He realized he had been waiting for that sign the way a man waits on a pier.
