Pebble Fall

Rhonda Brownlow was forty-three years old and she was gripping the seat of a rattly little charter plane like it had personally insulted her, which was ridiculous, because she had flown bigger iron than this for twenty years. But something about coming back to Okhansk made her hands sweat. It wasn't the flying. It was the landing.

"Almost down," the pilot said, like she hadn't already checked his altimeter twice.

"Yep, I see it," she said, and wished she hadn't sounded so sharp. Nerves did that to her. Nerves and one name, six letters, sitting in her chest like a swallowed pebble.

Andrew Anderson was forty-five now. She'd done the math on the whole flight from Moscow, which was stupid, because she'd known the man since she was twenty-four and he was twenty-six, back when they were both broke and loud and in a band that never quite decided what kind of band it wanted to be. Two years of that, plus two years of something quieter and messier on the side, the kind of thing bandmates aren't supposed to do and do anyway. Then the band fell apart at a show in a basement that smelled like wet plaster, and they went their ways without ever actually saying goodbye, and that was fifteen years ago. Fifteen! She'd been married and divorced since. He'd moved out here to the middle of nowhere and built towers and, apparently, shelters in the woods, according to the photos he sent every few months like a man filing reports to a friend he didn't know how to talk to anymore.

The tires hit. She bounced once and laughed out loud, and the tension in her chest loosened maybe one notch.

He was waiting by the fence, and God, she almost didn't recognize him. Grey at the temples now, broader through the shoulders, wearing a canvas jacket that had clearly lost several arguments with the birch trees. But the grin was the same grin, and that did something to her that she decided, firmly, to ignore.

"Rhonda Brownlow," he called. "You actually came!"

"You actually picked me up, so we're even!" She dropped her duffel and hugged him, quick and hard, and stepped back before it could turn into anything her heart could file away for later. "How's the world's most remote tower engineer?"

"Taller every year. You look good. Flying suits you."

"Flying pays me. Let's not flatter the job." She picked the bag back up. "So. Pebble day. I can't believe you still do that."

"It's tradition. Fifteen years running now. You drop a pebble off the carillon, you make a wish, the pebble probably lands on a stump. Very ceremonial." He took her bag without asking and threw it in his battered grey pickup, and she let him, because some things apparently never change.

The drive out was twenty minutes of birch and ruts and him talking about coppicing, which was a word she made him define twice.

"So you cut the trees back to the stump, and they grow again from the stump, and you get straight poles. It's an old way of managing woodland. That's what this whole wood is. Look, see the stumps with the shoots coming off?"

"That's why everything looks like a haircut that grew out weird?"

"That is a deeply unromantic way to put it, but yes."

The carillon showed up through the trees before she expected it, this rusting steel frame with pipes hanging off it, standing in a clearing full of pale stumps. It looked like something a whale would swallow and spit out. She got out of the truck and just stood there a second, remembering the first pebble they'd ever dropped, back when the thing was new and he was explaining it to her with his hands going like windmills.

"Shelter's this way," he said.

The shelter was half-finished, which she'd guessed from the photos, but photos didn't prepare her for how much of it was just him. A timber frame, moss stuffed into the gaps between the poles, a roofline half thatched with what looked like reeds. It was small and low and it looked warm in the way a den looks warm.

"You built all this?"

"Mostly. I run a little course out here sometimes. Bushcraft stuff. People pay me to show them how to do it and then I keep building anyway." He picked up a handful of moss and started pressing it into a gap between two poles, and that was when she noticed his hands.

They were shaking. Not a lot. Just enough that the moss kept slipping.

"Andrew. Your hands."

"Huh? Oh. Cold," he said, which was a lie, because it was a mild afternoon and he'd been out here all day and cold hands steady themselves in about a minute. She'd held those hands. She knew what steady looked like on him.

He kept nailing moss into the gaps anyway, tiny nails, a little hammer, working in the corner of the shelter like he was trying to disappear into the wall of it. She watched him for a while and felt the old worry crawl up her spine, the one from the last show, the night the band ended. She'd stood in that basement with her mic still hot and nobody had said the actual thing out loud. Not about the money. Not about why. And then he'd driven her home and they'd sat in his car outside her building for forty minutes and not said it there either, and then he'd moved across the country, and then across several more borders to this one, and the sentence they'd never said had just gotten heavier every year, like a pebble collecting snow.

"You're mad at me," she said finally. "That's it, isn't it? You invited me out here to be polite and you're actually mad at me and I've been walking around your woods like an idiot."

"I'm not mad." He drove a nail. It went in crooked and he pulled it out. "Rhonda, I'm not mad at you."

"Then what? You've been weird since the airstrip. You barely looked at me in the truck. You're vibrating over there like a struck tuning fork." She stepped into the shelter, ducking under the low lintel, and put her hand on his arm to make him stop. He did stop. The hammer hung in the air.

The workbench along the back wall caught her eye then, mostly because it was the only tidy thing in the whole structure. Tools lined up, a coil of cordage, and one small tin, paint-spattered, with a strip of paper taped to the lid and words scribbled on it in a handwriting she knew better than her own. She stepped over and picked it up before her brain could vote on it.

The label said, in fading blue ballpoint: squid ink. For the bridge song. Don't lose this. A.

Heat went up her neck and into her ears so fast she had to sit down on the bench edge.

"The Bridge Song," she said. Her voice came out strange. "You kept the ink."

He didn't answer. She turned around. He was still standing there with the hammer in his hand, moss dust on his sleeve, looking at the floor of his own shelter like it might offer him a suggestion.

"Andrew. We wrote that in one night. On your kitchen floor. You painted the whole cover with this and we said the bridge was never done." She held the tin up between them. "Why is it here? In Russia? In your wall? What does this mean now?"

"I kept everything," he said quietly. "That's sort of the problem, Rhonda."

He set the hammer down on the bench, very carefully, like it might go off.

"Sit down," he said. "Please. This is gonna take a minute and I can't do it standing."

She sat on the edge of the bench, the tin in her lap. He dragged a stump over and perched on it across from her, knees almost touching hers, and then he took the tin from her hands and pried the lid off with his thumbnail.

It wasn't ink anymore. Or it was, under everything, but on top of it, folded small and small and smaller until they fit inside the tin, were pages. Dozens of them. Some written in blue ballpoint, some in pencil, the oldest ones gone soft and furry at the folds.

"What am I looking at," she said.

"Lyrics."

"For what?"

"For the bridge." He still wasn't looking at her. "The bridge we never finished. I kept working on it. Fifteen years, off and on. Mostly at two in the morning, if I'm honest. Every time I thought I had it, I'd write it out, and then I'd read it the next day and it'd be wrong, so I'd fold it up and put it back in the tin and start again."

She picked up the top sheet. It was dense, crossed out, rewritten in the margins, the words climbing up the sides where he'd run out of room. She recognized a phrase from their old set list in there, one they'd only ever played once.

"Andrew. You've been writing me a bridge for fifteen years?"

"I've been failing to write you a bridge for fifteen years. There's a difference."

"That's the most romantic and most depressing thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Can I?" he asked, nodding at the pages. "There's one more thing and I'd rather just get it over with."

She said yes and he gathered the whole tin, pages and all, and walked out of the shelter into the grey afternoon light. She followed him, ducking under the lintel, and found him crouched at the little fire pit he kept near the shelter, the one with the flat stones and the stack of split birch beside it. He struck a lighter and fed the fire until it took properly, and then he held the tin over it.

"Wait, wait, what are you doing?"

"Letting it go," he said. "Or trying to. I've been trying to do this for about four years and I can't seem to make my hands do it, so I figured I'd do it in front of a witness so I'd be embarrassed into following through."

"You're burning them? Andrew, I haven't read them!"

"You shouldn't. They're bad. They're all about you and they're bad and I wrote some of them while I was supposed to be surveying tower foundations, and my supervisor found one once and asked me if I was okay, and I said yes and then went home and wrote two more." He tipped the tin. The pages slid out, caught, and then went up all at once, a soft orange whoosh, and he watched them with his jaw set the way a man doing his own dental work would. "There. Done. Fifteen years, gone."

The light from the fire moved on his face. He was forty-five years old and there was grey at his temples and his shoulders had gone broad from hauling timber around this wood, but the face was the same one from her late twenties, the one she'd known for two years of band practices and two years after that, and then never again.

"Why couldn't you finish it?" she asked.

"Because every version I wrote was a letter I didn't have the nerve to send. That's what it was, the whole time. It was never a song. It was me trying to say one sentence to you and dressing it up in verses so I could pretend it wasn't."

"What sentence?"

The fire popped. He fed it a stick and didn't answer, and she felt something in her chest go tight and strange.

"You know," she said slowly, "I flew eight hundred miles on a charter plane with a man named Sergei who talked the whole way about his brother's wedding, to come drop pebbles with you. I've been a pilot for twenty years and I still get nervous before landing, and I was more nervous walking up to your truck today than I've been in a cockpit in a decade. And I kept asking myself why. And I think you're about to tell me why."

"Do you remember the carillon?" he said.

"Of course I remember the carillon."

"Do you remember the first time I showed it to you? What I said?"

And she did, suddenly, the whole afternoon of it. She'd been twenty-six and he'd been twenty-eight and the thing had been brand new and rusting already in the way cheap steel does, and he'd stood under it with his hands going like windmills explaining the drop mechanism, the pebble falling through the works and striking each plate on the way down, one note per plate, a different song every time depending on the pebble. And he'd said, offhand, not looking at her, that he liked the idea that something small and ordinary could fall through a big complicated thing and make it sing, and she'd laughed and said that was the most him thing anyone had ever said, and he'd gone red to the ears.

"You said you liked that a small thing could fall through something big and make it sing," she said.

"Yeah." He looked at the fire. "That was the sentence. The whole bridge, all of it, every version, was that sentence in different clothes. You're the small thing. You fell through my life once and it made noise I've been trying to write down ever since, and I bottled it up because I was scared that if I said it plain you'd take the friendship away as well, and I'd rather have