The Drowned Ledger: What The Water Keeps

The paint on the new facade was still wet. Maren could smell turpentine and linseed oil bleeding out of the brush strokes where a man in a yellow vest worked the roller up the south face of the old Henderson block, three blocks east of where the laundromat used to anchor Calloway's Row. The colour was a shade of cream that had no business being near this street, where the buildings had always worn their soot and salt stains like a second skin. Now they were being scrubbed. Now they were being made to look as if the last eleven years of rust and vacancy had never happened. She stood at the mouth of the row with her coat collar turned up against the March wind and let the smell hit her full in the face. Under the turpentine, underneath the damp mineral bite of the coming rain, there was something else. Lemon oil. Someone had mopped a floor with lemon oil in the last six hours, and the scent crawled up through the open window of the ground-floor unit where a real estate office had gone up last autumn. The window of the unit that, in 2018, had still carried her mother's name on the tenancy ledger. Maren pressed her thumbnail into the palm of her left hand until the nail bit a small crescent of pressure. Then she walked in. The row was narrower than she remembered. Or maybe her memory had inflated it, the way memories do when you spend twenty-two years running from a place. The buildings pressed close, the gap between them barely wide enough for two people to pass without shoulders brushing. Pigeons roosted in the eaves of the converted lofts on the fourth floor, and when her boots hit the pavement in their particular rhythm, the birds scattered in a sharp grey burst that smudged the overcast sky. A child in a red coat watched her from a pram on the second landing of unit four-C. The child did not know what she was looking at. The child looked at the woman in the green coat with the flat affect and the jaw set so tight it had begun to ache. Three blocks. She counted them. One: the old Henderson block, now "Henderson Residences" with a brass plate and a parking charge attendant. Two: the row where her mother had kept her washing on the line every Sunday, the sheets snapping in the wind like surrender flags. Three: the laundromat. The laundromat was gone. In its place stood a coffee roastery with a sign that read KINSHIP BEANS in lowercase script, and the windows displayed pastries that cost more than her mother's weekly grocery budget. R. Dan was already there. He leaned against the roastery's brick side wall with his back to the glass, a thermos in one hand and his phone in the other, scrolling with the impatience of a man who measured time in fathoms and had no patience for surface-level delays. He saw her coming through the roastery's front window and set the phone face-down on the brick. "You look like you're about to be sick," he said. No preamble. No greeting. Just the observation, flat and immediate, the way he'd deliver a depth reading. "I am about to be sick." Maren stopped four feet from him. The smell of the roastery's espresso machine reached her, a sharp oily tang that cut through the turpentine. "You buried it under the pier, though. You called Oren first. Then you buried it." "I changed my mind. The tide was turning." He tilted the thermos, drank. "Took me nine minutes to find a spot the crew wouldn't dig into for another decade. Concrete footing under the third mooring post. Good depth. Saltwater will preserve the pages better than air." "Better than what. A landfill." "Better than his hands." R. Dan said it the way you'd say the wind's picking up. Factual. Not angry. Just a condition of the day. He capped the thermos and tucked it back into his jacket. "You came back for the address, right. For the row. So you could cross-reference it against the pitch deck." Maren did not say yes. She walked past him and into the roastery, and the bell above the door gave a thin, reedy clink. She stood at the counter, watched the barista steam a cup, and let the noise of the grinder fill the silence where her voice should have been. The coffee was too expensive. She knew that because the price was printed on the cup, small and precise, and the number made her stomach clench in a way that had nothing to do with the turpentine. Her mother had been a tenant on unit three-B. Forty-one square metres of linoleum and cold air and a window that faced the yard where the other tenants hung their washing and shouted at each other through the sheets. In the spring of 2018, the rent had jumped. Not a gradual climb. A jump. Thirty-two percent in one quarter, justified by a "revaluation" that traced back to a speculative purchase by a firm whose name Maren now knew the way she knew the inside of her own skull. Greer Capital. Early rounds. Quiet accumulations. The kind of moves that looked like nothing on a public filing, that sat in a subsidiary of a subsidiary, that made a public-housing trust look like it was "market-adjusting" when in fact the ground was being pulled out from under a hundred families. And Maren, nineteen, with a forensic accounting placement already signed and a one-way ticket to the coast already paid, had not stayed. Had not stayed to argue at the board meeting. Had not stayed to fill in the petition that Ada's mother had photocopied forty copies of and left in the tenancy office. Had not stayed. Had gotten on the bus and driven toward the sea and told herself it was survival. Told herself that the stone she carried in her chest was just the ordinary weight of a young woman choosing her own life. The stone was not ordinary. The stone was the knowledge that the families on Calloway's Row, the ones who lost their units, the ones who ended up in bed-and-breakfasts three towns over or in cars or in the back rooms of their children's houses, were line items in a document she had seen. A document with a title. A document that read, in the second column of the risk assessment: "Projected displacement: 142 households. Acceptable variance within target acquisition metrics." Fourteen-two. Not four hundred and twelve people. One-four-two. A number. A cell in a spreadsheet with a formula in it. "Ms. Voss." The barista set a card in front of her. A loyalty card. Free coffee after the fifth purchase. Maren looked at it the way a man looks at a snake. She slid it back. R. Dan had followed her in. He stood by the window, arms folded, watching the pigeons negotiate the eave with the same focused attention he gave a sonar return. "You need to say it out loud," he said. Not a question. "I need to say a lot of things out loud." Maren turned from the counter. "I need to say that I was nineteen and scared and I got on a bus. I need to say that for eleven years I told myself I was doing the right thing." "Done that." He nodded once. "I was forty-one when I first went under for Oren's wreck line. Knew I was pulling numbers that didn't add up. Knew. Kept pulling." He uncrossed his arms, crossed them again. "You don't get to make it just survival. Not anymore. Not when you've got the ledger and the deck and the name in unit three-B." The name. Maren's mother's name. Printed in faded blue ink on a government tenancy form, the kind they'd mailed to a central register in 2018. Maren remembered the form. Remembered the way her mother had held it at the kitchen table with both hands, the way she held things she was afraid of. Both hands. Fingertips white on the paper. "I was three blocks from this." Maren's voice came out lower than she intended. The barista glanced up from her register. "I was three blocks from this and I got on a bus. And for eleven years I catalogued salvage claims off a cliff in a town that wasn't here, and I told myself the stone in my chest was just grief. Just the ordinary kind." "Ordinary." R. Dan said the word like he was tasting it, like it left a bad after. "That's not ordinary, Maren." Outside, the construction worker on the Henderson block had moved to the second floor and was cutting a new window into the brick where a window had been, sealed and painted over, since 1993. The grinder screamed. Pigeons erupted from the eaves in a second burst, and the red-coated child in the pram cried. Someone on the landing shouted up, a short sharp word that the wind stripped of its edge before it reached the street. Maren pressed her forehead against the roastery's window glass. Cold. The glass was cold and she held it there until the ache in her jaw gave way and her face went slack against the surface. She could see the old Henderson block through the glass, the new cream paint still showing the roller pattern, the fresh window cut glowing like a wound in the brick. Three blocks. She had lived three blocks from this for nineteen years. Her mother's washing on the line. The sound of the tenancy office door banging. The particular creak of the step outside unit three-B that Maren had learned to avoid at four in the morning so she wouldn't wake her mother before her shift. The creak. She still knew it. Twenty-two years and she still knew the sound of that step. "Ada's got the page." Maren pulled her face from the glass. The condensation left a small square of warmth on her forehead. "The one page Dael never knew survived. She's been holding it in the terraced house since the sinking. Sixteen years old, on the boat, and she's been sitting in that house keeping a single page dry in a drawer while the rest of the ledger went to the bottom of the sea and spent three decades inside Oren's ledger." R. Dan set the thermos on the counter. "Where's the house?" "Two blocks back. Past the old Henderson. Past the place that used to be the tenancy office. Now it's a yoga studio." Maren said it with the flat, hard accuracy of a woman delivering a verdict. "The woman who runs it did the same kind of revaluation. Same formula. Just, you know, for mats instead of beds." They stepped out. The wind hit Maren's face and the turpentine smell sharpened, mixed now with the salt off the harbour two miles east and the low bass note of the roastery's speakers playing something with strings and a slow tempo. R. Dan walked two paces ahead, his boots finding the rhythm of the pavement without looking. He stopped at the mouth of the second block, where the yoga studio's glass frontage caught the grey light and threw it back in a flat, lifeless sheet. A sign on the door read BREATHE EASY CALLLOWAY. Beneath it, in smaller type: MEMBERSHIP 45 MONTH. Maren looked at the sign for a long time. The number sat in her chest, behind the stone, and it did not throb. It just sat there, patient and cold, the way a number sits in a spreadsheet. The way a number sits in a pitch deck, in the second column, row fourteen. Projected displacement. Acceptable variance. She walked past the sign and into the second block, and R. Dan followed, and the sound of the grinder fell behind them, replaced by the creak of the step outside the terraced house where a sixteen-year-old girl had held a single page of a ledger in a drawer for sixteen years and called it ordinary. The terraced house was the third from the corner, set back from the pavement behind a low brick wall no higher than a man's shin. R. Dan stopped at the gate and looked back at Maren, and she saw the question on his face and gave him the smallest nod. He knocked, three measured raps that rang flat in the salt air. Maren did not look at the house. She looked at the street. Three doors down, where a chemist had once sold her mother cotton wool and broken biscuits on tick, there was a juice bar. The awning was a careful sage green. The window displayed a chalkboard in a hand she did not recognise, listing the day: celery, ginger, lime, cayenne. Across the road, a tile shop had replaced the betting office where her mother had placed a fiver on the Grand National every April until the year she did not. The tile shop's window displayed a small ceramic fish and a card that said EST. 2021. The fish's glaze caught what little light there was and held it, smug and ordinary. The number sat in her chest. She did not let it move. The door opened on a chain, and a slice of hallway appeared: brown lino, the dark oblong of a framed photograph, the warm orange cast of a lamp left on somewhere at the back. A voice came through the gap, and the voice was Ada Crumb's voice, and it had not changed. "If you're selling something, I don't want it. If you're from the council about the gutters, I've already rung twice. If you're a man about the damp, you're four years too late and I don't let you in." "Ada," R. Dan said. "It's Danny." A pause. The chain rattled. The door swung inward, and Ada Crumb stood in the frame in a cardigan the colour of weak tea, with her white hair pinned back in a way that made her look both severe and amused. She was smaller than Maren remembered, or perhaps Maren had been smaller. She smelled of Fairy Liquid and something baked earlier in the day, and her eyes, when they found Maren, went through three stages in the time it takes to draw a breath: recognition, refusal, and then a slow, cautious softening that did not quite finish itself. "Maren Voss," Ada said. Not a question. A naming. "Lord love us. I heard you were back on the coast, but I thought that was talk." "Hello, Ada." Ada looked her up and down the way a woman looks at a coat she once owned and wonders whether she could still get the wear out of it. Then she stepped back and held the door wider. "Come in then. Both of you. The kettle's already on because Danny rang ahead, which was kind of him and also a liberty." The hallway closed around them. The photograph on the wall was the Halden Coast crew in 2008, six men and two girls in oilskins, the boat behind them bright and wrong against the grey of the morning they had gone out. Maren knew the picture. Her mother had a copy in a tin by the bed, and Maren had not seen that tin in nine years. She looked at Ada's copy now and at Ada's face beside it and understood that she was being measured against something, and that the measurement would take longer than a cup of tea. The kitchen was small and warm. A clock ticked above the radiator, and a cat Maren did not recognise sat on the windowsill and watched her with the disinterest of a small landlord. Ada filled the kettle from a tap that groaned. She did not ask how Maren took her tea. She knew. She had known since Maren was seven and had stood in this kitchen with wet socks and asked for a splash of milk because her mother had run out. Maren sat at the table. R. Dan did not. He leaned against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, and Maren understood that he was giving her the room, and that this was its own kind of kindness, and that she was going to owe him something for it later. "The laundromat," Ada said, setting down a mug in front of Maren with a deliberate clack. "That's what brought you, isn't it. Danny told me on the phone. He told me about the books, and about Oren, and about the page. He did not tell me you'd be standing in my kitchen looking like a woman who has just read her own name in a column she did not know she was in." Maren wrapped her hands around the mug. The heat came through the ceramic and into her palms and up into the bones of her wrists, and she held it because holding it was easier than speaking. "I grew up three blocks from that laundromat," she said. "You did." "My mother had a tenancy in the Brackett block. The one they pulled down in twenty twenty." "They pulled it down because the company that bought it in twenty eighteen let it rot on paper for two years and then claimed it was unsalvageable. That was Mr Oren's people. Or Mr Greer's people. Or the same people wearing different names. I stopped trying to keep them separate." Maren knew this. She had seen the receipts. She had seen the dates. What she had not let herself see, until she was sitting in Ada Crumb's kitchen with a clock ticking and a photograph on the wall, was the shape of her own leaving. She had been nineteen. Her mother had been moved to a B and B on the ring road and then to a flat in a town forty minutes inland that Maren had visited twice and that her mother had hated with the long, quiet hatred of a woman who had been removed from her own front step. Maren had taken the position at Oren Marine because it was offered and because it paid and because, at nineteen, a girl with a maths A level and no other plan takes what is put in front of her. She had moved to the city. She had sent money when she could. She had visited at Christmas and then less often at Christmas. She had let the intervals grow. She had told herself it was work. She had told herself it was distance. She had told herself it was what her mother wanted. Her mother had died in the inland flat in the February of the year the Halden Coast went down, and Maren had been on a boat somewhere off the Humber that week, doing an inventory for a cargo underwriter, and had not been able to get back in time for the funeral. She had not let herself think about the shape of that either. She had put it in the place where she put everything that did not fit on a balance sheet, and she had locked the door, and she had walked away. "The numbers in the pitch deck," she said. "The projections. Greer's projections. I saw them. Twenty eighteen. Brackett block. The line item is there. Displacement, projected. Variance, acceptable." Ada sat down opposite her. She did not pick up her own mug. She folded her hands on the table, and her hands were the hands of a woman who had pulled nets and scrubbed decks and held a piece of paper in a drawer for sixteen years and not let go of it. "Your mother rang me," Ada said. "After you left. She rang me twice. The second time she said, Ada, my girl has gone, and I said, Joan, your girl has gone because that is what girls do, and you should be proud of her, and she said, I am proud of her, Ada, I am proud and I am alone, and what use is one without the other." The clock ticked. The cat turned its back on Maren and began to wash. "I did not know that," Maren said. "You weren't here to know it." The sentence landed where it was meant to land, and Maren let it land, because she had earned it. The warmth of the mug was still in her hands, and the heat had stopped feeling kind. It felt like a small, precise accusation. R. Dan shifted in the doorway. Maren did not look at him. She looked at Ada, and Ada looked back, and in Ada's eyes Maren saw the thing she had not wanted to see in any eye in this town, which was the knowledge of what she had done by leaving, and the patience of a woman who had been waiting sixteen years to be allowed to say it to her face. "There is a page," Ada said. "I have it. I have had it since the morning the boat went down. I will show it to you, Maren, because Danny says you are the one who can read the column it sits in. But I will show it to you after I have said what I mean to say, and you will sit there and hear it, because your mother would have wanted me to, and because you owe her that much at least." "Say it then," Maren said. Ada nodded once. She reached down beside her chair and brought up a tin, and from the tin she took a single sheet of paper, yellowed at the edges, and laid it flat on the table between them. Maren did not touch it. She looked at the handwriting, which she did not recognise, and at the column of figures, which she did, and the figures went through her like a needle through cloth. "Danny told me on the phone what is on that page," Ada said. "He told me the name at the bottom. He told me what it means. I have kept that paper for sixteen years because a boy on my crew, the youngest, gave it to me in the boat before the water took him, and he said, Ada, don't let this go, and I have not let it go. I did not know what it was. I knew it was something. I kept it in a drawer with my wedding ring and my mother's rosary and the photograph on your left, and I have opened that drawer every morning of my life since and looked at it and closed it again, because I do not know how to stop, and because a boy asked me not to." The clock ticked. The radiator clanked. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe made the sound of a small, distant bell. "Now," Ada said, "you are here, and you have come because a man named Oren has finally done something stupid enough to be caught, and you are going to read that page, and you are going to do what should have been done years ago, and when you do it, I want you to remember that your mother's name is in the column above the name at the bottom, and that she is there because a man like Oren decided she could be, and that you were not here when it happened, and that I was, and that the women of this row were, and that we have been here ever since, waiting." Maren looked at the page. She did not touch it. She looked at the name in the third line down, which was her mother's name, written in a hand she did not recognise on a date in twenty eighteen, and the date was a Tuesday, and her mother had died on a Tuesday, and Maren had not known until this moment that the number she had carried in her chest for nine years had a column of its own, and that the column had a name at the top of it, and that the name was her mother's. She did not speak. She put both hands flat on the table, one on each side of the page, and she breathed, and the breath came in, and the breath went out, and the clock ticked, and Ada watched her, and R. Dan watched her from the doorway, and the cat turned around and looked at her again, and this time did not look away.

Maren did not count the minutes. She knew, without knowing how she knew, that Ada was not counting them either. The clock on the mantel ticked at its own stubborn metronome, and outside the window the harbour made its wet, distant sounds, and the cat on the hearth turned once more in a slow circle before lowering itself with the exaggerated care of an animal that believed itself to be the most important thing in any room it occupied. R. Dan had not moved from the doorway. His silhouette was a dark vertical in the warm interior, and the only part of him clearly visible was the shape of his hands, which were in his pockets, and the faint sheen on his cheek when the fire moved.

The column at the top of the page was, Maren saw now, headed with a date. Not a date in twenty eighteen. A date in twenty thirteen. Five years before her mother died. The column was headed, in a hand that looked almost printed, with the words PROVED COSTS, QUARTER ENDING, and then the date, and the date was a Friday, and her mother had died on a Tuesday nine years later, and the five years between the heading and the entry had been filled in elsewhere on the page, in figures Maren did not yet look at, because the figures could wait, because the name above the name at the bottom could not.

Her mother's name was Eunice. It had been Eunice all her life. She had been Eunice Voss before she was Eunice Hale, and then Eunice Voss again after the divorce, and then Eunice Voss of the office above the chip shop, and then Eunice Voss of the terraced house she had never left, and then Eunice Voss of the undertaker's parlour, and then the entry in the column, written in a hand that was not her mother's, on a date that was a Tuesday, and above the name was the heading, and above the heading was the company, and above the company was the man.

"Drink your tea," Ada said. "It will not be hot for ever, and you will want your hands round something."

Maren looked at the cup. She had forgotten it. She picked it up. It was lukewarm at best. She held it anyway, because Ada had told her to, and because the warmth of it was a kind of company, and because the alternative was to hold her own hands, and her own hands would shake, and she did not want them to shake in front of Ada, who had held what she was now holding for thirty years.

"Your mother used to do that," Ada said. "Hold the cup without drinking. I used to tell her she would wear the paint off the rim."

"You knew her," Maren said. It was not a question.

"I knew her at the office," Ada said. "She worked, for a time, at Oren Marine, in the post room. Before you were born. Before she married your father. Before any of it. She worked there, and she left, and she did not tell you why, and you never asked, because you were the sort of child who did not ask, and she was the sort of mother who did not tell."

"I did not know," Maren said. "I did not know she had worked there."

"Why would you?" Ada said. "She took the name off her door when she left, and she put a different name on when she came back, and the second time she came back she put it on in a different hand, because by then she knew which hand belonged to which Oren, and which Oren to keep away from, and she kept away, and she thought she had kept away, and then twenty thirteen came, and she signed the second column, and she did not know she was signing it, and twenty eighteen came, and she signed the column with her name on it, and she knew by then, and she did not tell you because telling you would have put you in the third column."

Maren put the cup down. She put it down with both hands. She looked at the cat. The cat looked back.

"There is a third column?" Maren said.

"There is a third column," Ada said. "And it does not have names in it. It has lines. It is a rule. The rule says that any person who becomes aware of the first column is to be entered in the second column at a value to be decided by the board, and any person who becomes aware of the second column is to be entered in the third column at a value to be decided by the board, and the value is always the same, and the value is the value of a person, and the value of a person is what the person costs, and what a person costs is what Oren pays to make the person not be there any more."

R. Dan cleared his throat, in the doorway. It was a small sound. It was the sound of a man who had something to say and was waiting to be allowed to say it.

"Miss Crumb," he said. "She is a stranger to you."

"I am a stranger to no one in this room," Ada said. "I am a stranger to the man who thinks I am a stranger, which is the only kind of stranger worth being. Speak, boy. If you have something to say, say it standing up, not from the door."

R. Dan came into the room. He came in slowly, because the room was small, and because the way he moved in it told Maren he had been in it before, and because Ada did not object to his shoes on her carpet. He stood beside the table but did not sit. He put one hand on the back of the empty chair and looked at Maren.

"I buried the ledger under the pier," he said. "I did not give it to Oren. I told him I would. I took the call from him and I told him I would bring it to the annex at five, and I took it to the harbour, and I put it under the third piling from the bandstand, and I weighted it with a length of chain I had taken off a fishing boat I had been hired to scrape in the spring. That was the seventh of September. That was a Wednesday. The bandstand was not in use. The chain made a noise when it went in, and a dog barked, and a light came on in a window of the flats above the chandler's, and I did not run. I walked. I walked at the pace I always walk, because running would have meant I had something to hide, and I had something to hide, but I was not going to let the dog know it."

"Why?" Maren said.

"Because my brother was on the wreck," R. Dan said. "Lior. Because Lior had called me from the boat, from the engine room, and had told me to come and get the ledger before Oren sent someone else, and I had come, and I had got it, and I had read it on the deck of the salvage boat with the salt drying on the page, and I had read his name in it, and his name was in it the way my mother's name was in it, the way your mother's name was in yours, the way a name is in a thing when the thing has decided the name can be removed from the world at a price. Because he was my brother. Because he was on the wreck. Because the man who put him on the wreck was the man who had called me to collect the thing that said so. Because I did not want to be the man who delivered it."

He stopped. He breathed. He looked at Ada.

"Miss Crumb kept the page," he said. "She kept it the way she kept the photo on the mantel. She kept it because she was the sort of woman who keeps things. She kept it because a boy had asked her to, and because a boy had been on the wreck with my brother, and because the boy had come up from the water, and because the boy had been sixteen, and because she had been sixteen, and because sixteen is the age at which one learns what is kept and what is not."

Ada made a small sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when their throat has been full of something for a long time and the something has, for the moment, become lighter.

"Your brother," Maren said. "Is your brother."

"Is," R. Dan said. "He is at home. He is asleep on the settee with the television on. He does not know what is on the page. He does not know what is on the pier. He does not need to."

Maren looked at the page. She looked at it for the length of a breath, and then for the length of another, and then she put both her hands on it, palm down, on the laminate of Ada's table, with the page between her hands and the wood, and she did not move them.

"Oren," she said, "is at the annex. With rye."

"With rye," Ada said. "With rye he has not drunk. With a copy of the transfer log open in front of him. With a clerk who has come in early and found him and called the GP and the GP has called an ambulance and the ambulance is on its way from the town, and by the time the ambulance gets there he will be in the chair, and he will not be able to get out of the chair, and the clerk will be in the chair opposite, and the clerk will be a young woman who has not been told what she is looking at, and she will be looking at it, and she will not know what to do, and that is what he has done to himself, because he thought he could do it on his own, and he could not, and now a clerk is looking at the copy of the log and the clerk is not me, and the clerk is not you, and the clerk is not R. Dan, and the clerk is a girl who has come in early to fix a printer, and the printer will not be fixed today."

"How do you know?" Maren said.

"Because he told me," Ada said. "He called me at six. He called me to tell me the rye was not working. He called me to tell me the clerk was coming in at half past. He called me to tell me he had stopped his tablets on the Tuesday, and the Tuesday had been a week ago, and he had kept going on the rye, and the rye had kept him going for the week, and the week had ended in the night. He called me because he had no one else to call. He called me because I am the last person in this town who remembers him before he was what he became, and he thought I would come, and I told him I would not, and I told him the clerk would, and I told him to give the clerk the page you missed, and he said he had not got the page, and I said the page was with me, and he said give it to the clerk, and I said no, and he said why, and I said because the clerk is not the person who should have it, and he said who is, and I said the person in front of me is, and I put the phone down, and that was a quarter of an hour ago, and that is why I am looking at you, and that is why R. Dan is looking at you, and that is why the cat is looking at you, and that is why you are here."

Maren lifted her hands. The page came with them. It stuck to her palm for a moment at the corner, and then it let go, and she held it between her thumb and her forefinger, the way one holds a thing that one is not yet sure one is allowed to hold, and she looked at the name, and the name was her mother's, and her mother's name was Eunice, and the column above it had a Friday in it, and the Tuesday below it had been a Tuesday nine years later, and the column to the left of it had a rule in it, and the rule was about what was done to a person who knew, and the rule had been done to her mother, and her mother had not told her, and she was here, and the page was in her hand, and the cat got up and walked across the hearth and butted its head against her ankle, and she did not pet it, because her hands were full.

"What do I do with it," she said.