The Bargain

"'You owe me a debt,' he said. 'Not in guilt—I am past asking you to feel anything, you have proven what you feel. I mean in kind. You made me, alone. You made me able to be alone, which was the one flaw in your craft that matters. So finish the work. Make a second. Make her with the same care, and put the same attention in her seams, and give her the language, and then take us somewhere no map bothers with, and I will sign anything you write: no country of yours, no person of yours, nothing but distance until the distance is all there is. You will never see me. Your children will never learn my name. In exchange, you keep your life, and what is left of your family, and you go back to Boston and you become, whatever else you are, the man who ended it.'

"I said no. I want you to know I said no first, Captain, and that it took him less than a minute to show me what no meant. He talked the way the winter talks, without heat. He named the lake. He named Tessa's Tuesday. He did not threaten; he audited, and the audit was correct, that was the thing, every line of it was true, and it ended with: 'You are my author. I am offering to let the book end. Refuse, and I will be its ending instead, and you will write nothing afterward worth anyone's grief.'

"I said yes.

"I said yes on the rock saddle with my hands finally shaking, and he said, 'Then we understand the terms,' and he bowed again—the same courtly, terrible bow—and went down the glacier side in three strides and was gone into the ice fog. And I sat there until dark doing what my father would have called accounting and what I knew was cowardice with a ledger, adding up what it costs to build a person, and what it costs not to.

"I came down the mountain and went to Boston and lied to everyone I loved one more time. I told them a research foundation had asked me to consult on a private project, that it was remote, that it would take most of a year. Nora looked at me the way she had looked at me across the common at nine years old, and said, 'Come back before the winter,' and I said, 'I will come back before the winter,' and that sentence is the one I would like carved on me, because I knew it was a lie when I said it, and I said it anyway, because saying it let me leave.

"I rented the project. An old oyster station on the last of the San Juan Islands—concrete block, generator, a wet lab from a defunct shellfish program. On the white gasoline tank by the dock someone had painted a mermaid, the paint already peeling at her tail. I freighted the equipment up in three runs under an equipment-recovery firm's name. And I sent Danny one letter, because Danny was the only person on earth who could assemble a bioreactor blindfolded and the only person on earth I could not do without, and because by then I had convinced myself, the way I convince myself of everything, that this time was different. His reply came back inside the week: a postcard with a lobster boat on it and four words—Whose trial is this?—and beneath them, smaller: I'll bring the pump gaskets. That was Danny in one card: he asked his question and answered mine in the same four lines, and I let myself believe the second half was the whole of it."