Sparks and Ashes

Caroline Phlox was thirty-four years old, and she had learned the hard way, over the two years since a divorce and one year of a mostly empty apartment, that the cure for a quiet Tuesday was showing up somewhere and putting her hands to work, so that was exactly what she did on the second Tuesday of October, when she carried a cardboard box of donated artifacts up the gravel path to the volunteer fire hall in New Haven and let the door bang shut behind her with the flat, familiar thud of old wood in an old frame.

The fire hall had been a stone barn before the Collapse, and it still had the bones of one, thick walls and a low ceiling and a smell of diesel and dust that Tracie Connors swore by the way other people swore by coffee. Tracie was fifty-two, widowed four years now, chief of the volunteer company, and she was standing at the big sink in the back corner washing turnout glove liners when Caroline came in, and she looked up and said, "There she is. You brought the whole box, huh."

"You said bring everything," Caroline said, setting it down on the meeting room table with a grunt. "I'm cataloging, not curating. There's a difference and the difference is I have no idea what I'm doing."

"Nobody here does, that's the point of a volunteer hall," Tracie said, and she flicked the water off her hands and dried them on a towel that had probably been a towel since before the Collapse, and she came over and peeked into the box the way a woman checks a pie. "We got a lantern, we got a sign-in ledger from the old mill, we got somebody's dentures, don't ask, and we got a fire helmet with the paint burned off, which is the only one I'd actually call an artifact."

Caroline laughed and started unpacking, and Tracie leaned against the table and told her the schedule, because Tracie always told people the schedule whether they needed it or not. "Heads up, we've got a visitor coming this afternoon. Seismologist, name of Kyle Dyer, thirty-six, up from the institute, going to put monitoring gear on the ridge above the east fields. He asked if he could lay his stuff out in the meeting room since the hall's got the only table big enough and the generator's steady. Fair warning, he talks slow and then all at once."

"That sounds like every scientist I've ever met," Caroline said. "I was married to one, so I say that with love and scars."

Tracie gave her a look that was mostly sympathy and partly something else, the look of a woman who had buried a husband and kept her judgments about other people's loneliness folded up in a drawer, and she said, "Well, he seems decent enough," and went back to her gloves, and that ended the review.

Kyle Dyer arrived forty minutes later, and he did not arrive the way a calm man arrives. The outer door opened hard enough to rattle the coat hooks and he came through it with his jacket half off one shoulder and a phone in his hand and the particular expression of somebody who has been negotiating with a roadside all morning.

"Chief Connors?" he called, before he'd even seen who was in the room. "I'm sorry, I know I'm early, I just, my truck's got a flat on the turnout road and the spare's seized to the bracket, the bolt won't budge, and while I was wrestling with it my key fell out of my pocket somewhere and now it's gone. Truck key. Locked everything inside except the cab, thank God, but the key is just, gone."

Tracie set down her gloves. "Slow down, hon. Key's not in the truck?"

"In the cab, hanging in the ignition, which is the one place I can't get to." He ran a hand through his hair and then noticed Caroline standing there with a lantern in one hand and a ledger in the other, and he stopped, and something in his face reset itself, like a man catching himself mid-tantrum in a grocery store. "Sorry. Hi. Kyle Dyer. I'm the one making noise."

"Caroline Phlox," she said. "I'm the one holding dentures. Welcome to New Haven."

He looked at the box, and then at the artifacts laid out on the table in rows, and Caroline watched the seismologist brain kick in behind his eyes, the way he leaned a little toward the burned helmet the same way he'd probably lean toward a fresh trace on a monitor. "That's from the old company?" he asked. "Pre-Collapse?"

"Thirty years before the Collapse, actually," Caroline said, pleased despite herself. "Somebody's grandfather carried it. I'm doing the archive for the settlement, which mostly means I write careful labels and pretend I know what things are."

"And I mostly mean to say my key is somewhere between the truck and this building," Kyle said, and he did sound sorry, and he did sound tired, and Tracie looked at the two of them and then at her gloves and then at the clock and said, well, she had glove liners to finish and a truck engine heater to go check on across the yard, a thing that did not especially need checking, and could somebody holler if the key turned up, and she left through the back door with a speed that was not subtle.

Caroline set the lantern down. "I'll help you look. I know this floor pretty well already, I've been crawling around on it all morning."

"You don't have to."

"I know," she said. "I want to. It's a good excuse to not label dentures."

They started where he'd come in, because that was the sensible way, and retraced his path, and it turned out that retracing a man's steps through a stone barn was a very natural way to have a conversation, because you were both looking at the floor, so your eyes didn't have to do anything awkward. He told her about the fault survey on the way, the borehole sensors and the ridge line and how the east fields sat closer to the old slip plane than the settlement map admitted, and he talked slow the way Tracie had promised, and then all at once, three full sentences tumbling over each other when he got to the part about frequency and soil liquefaction and why he'd volunteered for a posting this far out.

"Why did you?" Caroline asked, kneeling to look under the coat rack. "This far out, I mean."

He was quiet a second, feeling along the baseboard. "I was with someone, a researcher, a few years back. When I took this posting she said, you always choose the places that shake, and I said, well, somebody has to, and she said that wasn't the point, and she was right, and I came anyway." He shrugged, and the shrug carried more weight than it let on. "I'm thirty-six and I'd like to learn to stand still. That's the honest answer."

Caroline nodded at the floor. "I was married six years to a man I met at a conference. Divorced two years ago. I moved out here because New Haven was the only town I found where nobody asked me what I did for a living before they asked if I wanted coffee." She looked up. "I'm thirty-four, and I'd like to learn to stop being alone on purpose. That's mine."

"Well," Kyle said, and cleared his throat, and pointed at the back door. "Your floor's better than mine."

It was Caroline who saw it, near the back door, half under the bench where the hose reels sat, a glint of brass tangled in a coil of old rope, the kind of rope a barn collects for thirty years and nobody ever throws away. She picked it up and the key came with it, snagged through one of the rope loops, warm from her hand, and she held it up between two fingers like a fish.

"Here it is. It must have caught when you shrugged your jacket off in the doorway and dropped when you came back through."

Kyle took it and turned it over and laughed, a short surprised sound. "A whole morning. A whole morning of my life." He looked at the key, and then he didn't leave, which was the thing she noticed, because a man with a working truck and a flat to change had every reason to walk straight out the door and instead he stood there in the back room of a fire hall turning a key over in his fingers like it was the artifact and the helmet was the key.

"You could use a hand with the bolt," Caroline said. "On the spare. Tracie keeps a breaker bar behind the engine bay that'll crack anything."

He looked at her then, and whatever slow-burning thing had started under the floorboards while they crawled around on them got a little more oxygen. "Yeah," he said. "I could use a hand."

They went out through the back door into the yard, where the afternoon had gone soft and gold the way October afternoons do when the light comes in low and sideways, and the air smelled like cold stone and diesel and, faintly, somebody's woodstove a few houses over. Kyle walked her to the truck on the turnout road, and it looked worse than he'd described, the rear tire flat as a dropped pancake and the spare bracket underneath furred with rust that had clearly been there since before the Collapse.

"That's not coming off with a wrench and hope," Caroline said, looking under the chassis with her hands on her hips.

"No, but a breaker bar and stubbornness might do it," Kyle said, and went to get the bar, and came back with it, and lay down on the ground in his good jacket, which she thought was a shame for the jacket, and got to work.

Caroline sat on the bench outside the hall, the one with the missing slat, and watched him work, and after a while the talking started again, the way it does when two people have already said the hard parts and can now say the easy ones.

"Truth is," Kyle said from under the truck, his voice coming out muffled and a little echoed, "I've been lonely out here. Not the dramatic kind. The kind where you eat dinner standing up and realize nobody would know or care if you skipped it."

"I know that kind," Caroline said.

"I bought a slow cooker," he said, and she laughed, an actual laugh, and he rolled out enough to look at her with dirt on his cheek. "That's funny?"

"It's funny because I understand it completely. I have one. I use it for soup for one. There's a whole sad cookbook of that life."

He worked the bar, and the bolt cracked and gave, and he kept going, and the conversation went where conversations go when there's nothing left to prove. She told him about the marriage, not the bitter parts, because there weren't really bitter parts, just the slow quiet realization that she could sit across a table from a man for six years and he would never once ask her a question he didn't already think he knew the answer to. She said she hadn't been unhappy, exactly, she'd been unseen, which was worse and also less dramatic, and that the day she knew was a Tuesday, an ordinary Tuesday, when she told him about something at the archive and he looked up only after she'd finished, and said, sorry, what.

"And you'd already finished," Kyle said.

"I'd already finished."

He came out from under the truck and sat on the bench next to her, leaving a careful hand's width between them, and wiped his hands on a rag that made them dirtier, and looked at the ridge where his sensors would go.

"Can I say something?" he asked.

"You've been saying things this whole time."

"This is a new category of thing." He was quiet a second. "I like you. I noticed it while you were crawling around on the floor with me, which is not a setting I usually associate with noticing, but there it is."

Caroline looked at him, at the honest tired face and the dirt on the cheek, and something in her chest that had been closed for two years shifted its weight. "I like you too," she said. "I noticed it around the dentures."

"Can I ask something else?" he said. "Would you want to help me patch the tire? Not because I need it. I have a kit in the cab. But because I'd like the company, and I'm trying to learn to ask."

The air between them shifted then, the way air does when a question has more in it than the words. "Yes," Caroline said. "I would."

They patched the tire together, kneeling side by side in the last of the light, her holding the rubber cement while he roughed the surface, their hands touching twice by accident and once, near the end, not by accident at all, his fingers resting on hers on the valve stem, neither of them moving for a moment longer than the task required.

The tire held air. He closed the trunk and didn't open the driver's door.

"It's getting cold," he said. "Want to go back inside?"

"Yes," she said again, and they did.

Inside, the hall had gone amber, one high window on the west wall catching the last of the sun and throwing a sliver of light across the meeting room floor, across the box of donated artifacts and the table where the helmet sat. They stood in that sliver, not touching, and Kyle turned to face her.

"I'd like to kiss you," he said. "If you want."

"I want," Caroline said, and he reached up and cupped her jaw with a hand still faintly gritty from the tire, and kissed her, soft and slow, and she kissed him back, and it was unhurried, and it was tender, and it was the kind of kiss that knows it has time. Her hand found the front of his jacket and stayed there. When they finally drew apart, neither of them went far.

"Well," she said. "That was worth all that floor crawling."

"We could call it even for the tire," he said, and she laughed, and he kissed her again.

The loft above the supply room was where the old hay had been stored, back when the building was a barn, and now it held folding chairs and boxes of reflective vests and a stack of borrowed blankets that somebody had washed and folded and never put away properly. There was a bare bulb with a pull chain and a small square window that faced west, and when Kyle pulled the chain the light came up soft and yellow, not much, but enough.

"This is either very romantic or very fire department," Caroline said, looking around at the vests.

"Both. Definitely both." He set his jacket on a folding chair, which was the only furniture with a clear opinion about where things should go, and then he turned to her and stopped, the way a man stops when he wants to be sure of his footing. "I want to be careful here, and not in a cowardly way. I'm asking. Do you want this, with me, up here, tonight?"

"Yes," she said. "I've wanted it since the rope."

"Good. That's good." He crossed to her and put both hands on her shoulders, over her sweater, and rested his forehead against hers for a moment, and they just breathed, two people who had spent a long time breathing alone. Then he kissed her again, and this one had more in it than the ones downstairs, and his hands stayed where they were, patient, letting her set the pace, which she appreciated more than she could have said, because her last years of being touched had all happened at somebody else's pace.

She reached for the hem of his shirt, pausing with her fingers at the edge of it, a question in the gesture, and he said, "Please," and that was all it took. The shirt came up and over and she got her first look at him, thin through the middle the way field researchers get, a pale line across one shoulder where a pack strap had lived for years. She ran her hands up his sides and he shivered, actually shivered, and laughed at himself for it.

"Cold?" she asked.

"No. Not even a little!" He unbuttoned her blouse then, slowly, one button at a time, watching her face between buttons to make sure she was still with him, and she was, more than she'd been with anyone in a long time, and when it hung open he looked at her standing there in her bra in the yellow light and said, quietly, "You're lovely," which was such an unfashionable thing to say that it landed harder than anything clever would have.

"You're easy to please," she said, a little shaky.

"I'm easy to please about the right things."

They got the rest of it done in the unhurried way of people who have decided there is no hurry. His boots, her boots, her jeans stepping out of them and pooling on the concrete floor, his trousers, until there was only skin and the last of the afternoon coming through the little window, and the air in the loft was cool enough that being close to him was also being warm, which felt like a metaphor and she decided not to examine it. He spread two of the borrowed blankets on top of the folded stack, making a passable bed, and then he stood in front of her and said, "I don't have a condom on me. I can look for one, or we can stop here, whatever you want."

"There's a box in the first aid supply cabinet downstairs," she said. "Tracie stocks them. She told me about it my first week, very matter of fact, said the fire company believes in being prepared." He laughed and pulled his trousers back on and went down the stairs barefoot, and she heard the cabinet open and close, and he came back up holding the small square packet like a man carrying something valuable, and took his trousers off again, and she lay down on the blankets and held her arms out to him.

He came to her carefully, lying alongside her first, taking his time, his mouth on her throat and then lower, at her collarbone, and his hand on her hip, and when his fingers moved between her legs she was already wet and he made a low sound of appreciation against her skin. "All right?" he asked, and she said yes, and meant it, and he kept going, unhurried, until her hips were rising off the blankets and her breath was coming short, and then he rolled on the condom and settled between her thighs.

"Tell me if anything's wrong," he said.

"Nothing's going to be wrong. Come here."

He came into her slowly, an inch and then a pause and then the rest, and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him down and they moved together in the small yellow room with the smell of dust and canvas and cold stone around them, and it was good, it was so plainly good, the kind of good that doesn't need to perform anything. She said his name once, without meaning to plan it, and he said hers, and they found a rhythm that belonged to both of them, and when she came it started in her calves and traveled up and she made a sound into his shoulder that she was glad nobody else was around to hear. He followed soon after, his breath catching, his forehead pressed to hers.

Afterward they lay tangled in the borrowed blankets, her head on his chest, his fingers moving slowly through her hair, and the light through the little window had gone from yellow to a deep rose color, and neither of them was in any rush to become a person who had to get dressed. Somewhere below them the old stone walls held the day's warmth like a jar.

"This is going to sound like a line," Kyle said eventually, "but I genuinely can't tell where I end and the blanket starts, and I don't care."

"That's not a line. That's just being comfortable." She traced a circle on his chest. "You're comfortable. Admit it."

"I'm comfortable." He was quiet for a bit, and she could feel his heartbeat slowing under her ear. Then he said, "There's a meteor shower tonight. The Draconids, they peak this week, and the ridge where I'm putting my sensors has a clear eastern horizon and absolutely no light pollution. Would you come look at the stars with me? Later, after I actually do some work?"

Caroline lifted her head and looked at him, this man she'd known for one afternoon, dirt still faintly on his cheek, and thought about how the afternoon had gone, the rope and the tire and the asking, and how easy it would be to say yes to a great many things where he was concerned.

"Yes," she said. "I'll come look at the stars with you. I'll even bring soup, because I have soup, and you have a slow cooker too, so we're basically prequalified for this."

"It's a good system," he said, and kissed her, slow and satisfied, his hand warm on the back of her neck, and she kissed him back and thought that maybe the whole thing, the divorce and the empty apartment and the soup for one, had just been the long way around to a borrowed blanket in a stone barn.

Below them, headlights swept across the lot, and the diesel engine of Tracie Connors's truck coughed to life, and gravel crunched as the truck pulled out of the lot and turned toward the east fields, its taillights shrinking down the turnout road until they were gone, and neither of them moved to look, because there was no need, and the little yellow bulb swung faintly on its cord, and the evening came on.