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Long Odds 01: The Porch Light · Long Odds

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Long Odds.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: Episode 1.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: The Porch Light.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: Part 1.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: The survey kept a station on the ridge above Hancock, Maryland, and it was the kind of building nobody would ever bother to steal from.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: Cinderblock, painted the green of an old army blanket, a radio mast with a bird's nest in it, a chain link fence, a government padlock, and a brass survey disc set into the front step, so that anyone who wandered up the fire road would see a benchmark and a padlock and go back down the hill bored.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: That was the whole idea.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: In nineteen years, the station had been broken into exactly once by a raccoon.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: At twenty minutes to seven on a Tuesday morning in October, Hannah Whitlock stood on that step with a cup of coffee going cold in her hand and watched the fog settle in the valley.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: It filled the river bottom like milk in a bowl.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere under it was the potomac, and the old canal, and the little town strung out along the water, and across the water, West Virginia.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: Behind her, close enough that a good arm could throw a rock into it, was Pennsylvania.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Hancock sat at the narrowest place in Maryland, a little under two miles from one state line to the other, and Hannah had always liked that about it.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: It was a town that knew exactly how much room it had.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Luis Ortega had the van door open and the radio on, and the radio was telling him things that made him happy.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: The White Sox had beaten Cleveland the afternoon before, four to three, and two men on a sports station out of Baltimore were arguing about whether it meant anything.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: Luis was arguing with both of them.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: It means something, he told the dashboard.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: It means everything.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: You know what they did two years ago?
2:01
SPEAKER_01: A hundred and twenty one losses.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: A hundred and twenty one.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: My father stopped wearing the hat.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: He wore a cub's hat to my cousin's wedding.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: That's how low we got.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: And now look at them.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm looking, Hannah said.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: You're not looking.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: You're drinking coffee.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: He turned the radio down a notch, which for Luis was a gesture of enormous respect.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: Next game is tomorrow, at home, on the south side.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: My father has had the same spot on his couch since nineteen eighty three.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow he's going to call me in the third inning like always, and my phone is going to be sitting in a locker in Virginia, and I'm going to be standing in the woods in somebody else's universe.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: You could have traded with somebody.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Who?
2:50
SPEAKER_01: Owen?
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Luis leaned out of the van and raised his voice.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: Hey, Bambi, you want to cross for me tomorrow?
2:59
SPEAKER_01: From behind the station, where the gravel pad was, Owen Tate called back that he was already crossing today.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, and that he would appreciate it if nobody called him Bambi within earshot of the case, because the case had feelings, and he had a reputation to protect.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: It was a terrible joke.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: Owen made terrible jokes the way some people bit their nails, and the closer they got to a crossing, the more of them he made.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: By now he was up to about one a minute.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Luis climbed out and stretched until his back cracked.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: He was forty four and built like a mailbox, and he had been a medic in places he never talked about, and a cook in places he talked about all the time.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: He looked at the fog, and then at Hannah.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: You tell your people you were going somewhere?
3:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't have people who ask.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: Lucky.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: He said it lightly.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: And then he didn't say anything for a second.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: Which for Luis was a long time.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: Marisol asked me last week where I actually go.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Not where am I going?
4:09
SPEAKER_01: Where do I actually go?
4:11
SPEAKER_01: That word.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: Actually.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: I told her West Virginia, field exercise, same as always, and she just said okay.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: He shrugged.
4:20
SPEAKER_01: Didn't argue, didn't even look up from her phone.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: That's how you know it's bad.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: When they stop arguing with you.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Hannah wanted to say something useful, and couldn't think of anything that would be.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: So she handed him the rest of her coffee.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: He drank it and made a face, because it was cold, and then drank the rest of it anyway.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: Inez Carvalho came around the corner of the building with a clipboard under one arm and a smear of grease on her thumb.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: She was the field lead, a major in the army, and she had the most ordinary face in the world, which she claimed was the secret of her entire career.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: She looked like somebody's favorite aunt at a wedding.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: She smiled like one too, right up until something went wrong, and then her face went still, and her voice went quiet, and everyone around her started doing exactly what she said.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: Good news, she said.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: Both cases are happy.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: Owen has checked the straps three times.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: And Luis, if you sing along to that radio during the crossing, I'm leaving you over there.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: Only if they lose.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: What's the number this morning?
5:34
SPEAKER_01: Owen asked.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: He had followed her around the corner, wiping his hands on his jeans.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: He was tall and long armed, and he stood like a heron, as if he were waiting for something to move in the shallows.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: Same as yesterday, Inez said, Femi's tally is one hit in ten tries.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: So ten percent So ten percent, and he would like you to know that he hates rounding.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: Hanna had heard Femi Adiemi explain that number a dozen times, and the version that stuck was the one about the radio.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: Picture a city, he'd said, with a thousand radio stations, all crowded so tight together on the dial that the needle can barely tell one from the next.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: When the team lands somewhere new, the case records exactly where on the dial they landed.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: Later, you can tune the needle back to that exact spot.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: The trouble is that the spot isn't one station.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a crowd of stations, nearly identical, sharing the same sliver of the dial, and you get whichever one comes in strongest that morning.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: One time in ten, it's the station you wanted.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: The other nine times it's a sibling.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: Same river, same streets, same people, more or less.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: And not one of them has ever met you.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: Most mornings the survey didn't even try to go back.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: Most mornings they set the dial to a distance and took whatever came, like a fisherman casting into fog, and the work was finding something worth carrying home from wherever they happened to wash up.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Going back to a particular place on purpose was a different thing.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: It was rare, and it was expensive, and it only happened when Femi needed another mark on his tally.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: Every crossing burned a charge cell, and a charge cell took four months to build.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: A round trip burned two.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: Walt Sobieski, who ran the survey, and who had kept it alive through more budget fights than anybody would ever hear about, liked to say that each trip cost about the same as launching a small satellite, and that Congress had never once been thrilled about satellites.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: Walt called last night, Inez said, as if she had heard Hannah thinking.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: The committee wants something it can hold in its hands.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: His words A test is fine.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: A test that comes home with something is better.
8:08
SPEAKER_01: We could bring them a peach, Owen said.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Hanna looked down into the fog, toward a white house on a side street she couldn't see from here, and didn't say anything.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: World two hundred and eighty seven had been a gentle place.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: That was why Femi had picked it.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Hannah and Ines and Luis had gone there in April, in the rain, on a dial setting of two, which was close enough that the world on the other side looked almost exactly like this one.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: They had come down this same ridge in a downpour, playing a contract crew checking old benchmarks for the state, and found every motel room in town full of cyclists in for a race on the rail trail.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: Luis had twisted a knee on the wet rocks, and a widow named Lorraine Pruitt, who ran a boarding house on a side street off Maine, had looked at three soaked strangers on her porch and said, Well, don't just stand there dripping on my mat, and taken them in for two nights without asking a single question she didn't already suspect the answer to.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: Before they left, Hana had set a brass disc into a rock at the arrival point, stamped with the world's catalog number, the way the survey marked every world it hoped to see again.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: And she had promised Lorraine she would come back in August for the peaches.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: It was October now.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: When Femi had asked for volunteers for a return test, Hannah had raised her hand before he finished the sentence.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Inez had looked at her across the table for a long moment, and then said Fine, Whitlock goes, and that was all anyone had ever said about it.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: Inside the lid of case one, taped where they would see it the moment they opened it, was an index card in Fimi's tidy capital letters.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: It said Bring me a yes, and under that, smaller, the letter F.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: The gravel pad behind the station had a white circle painted on it, about five meters across, faded by the weather, and touched up every spring.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: They stood inside it with their packs on, and the two cases sat in the middle, grey and heavy and the size of footlockers, with recessed handles that always pinched somebody.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: Case one would stay with them the whole time.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: Case two would come along and get hidden near wherever they landed, like a spare tire, in case case one broke or got lost or got stolen.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: If they lost both, the rule was simple, and nobody liked to say it out loud.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: They would be living over there from now on.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: Inez knelt by case one and turned the key.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: Luis watched the needle.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: Hannah watched Owen, who had stopped making jokes, which meant he was genuinely scared.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: The case made a sound when it was tuning, a low hum that you felt in your back teeth more than you heard it.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: The needle swung, wandered, and settled.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: A small round lamp on the panel went from amber to green.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Signature's close, Louise said.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: Close as it gets.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: Everybody in, Inez said.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: They were.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: She pressed the button.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: It took a little over a second.
11:24
SPEAKER_01: It always did.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: There was a pressure in the ears like a plane coming down too fast, and a cold that came up through the soles of the boots, and then the world was simply somewhere else.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: The gravel was gone.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: They were standing in wet leaves in a small clearing among oaks, and the fog was all around them, and the air smelled of rotting apples and wood smoke, and nothing else at all.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: No diesel from the interstate, Hannah noticed, probably just the wind.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: She didn't wait for anybody.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: She walked straight to the edge of the clearing, to the gray rock that shouldered up out of the leaves.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: The one she had knelt beside in the rain six months ago with a hammer and a brass disc, and a tube of epoxy.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: The rock was there.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: The disc was not.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: She ran her fingers over the stone.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: No disc, no drill hole, no crust of old glue.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: Nothing.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Owen came up beside her and crouched.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: Are we sure it's the right rock?
12:32
SPEAKER_01: he said gently.
12:33
SPEAKER_01: Everything looks like everything in this fog.
12:36
SPEAKER_01: It's the right rock, Owen.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: Inez came and stood on her other side, and looked at the rock for a long moment.
12:44
SPEAKER_01: And her face did the thing it did, which was nothing at all.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: Or we're somewhere else, she said.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: Femi's rule is two checks.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: The disc is one.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: I know what the other one is, Hannah said.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I'll know at the door.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Part two.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: They hid case two under a sandstone ledge thirty yards down the slope.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: Luis and Owen slid it in on its side and raked leaves over it, then spread a brown tarp over the leaves and more leaves over the tarp, until it looked like a place a groundhog might live if the groundhog had standards.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: It would sleep there, powered down, with a locator inside that only their own gear knew how to wake.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Luis patted the leaves twice, the way you'd pat a dog you were leaving at the kennel.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: Be good, he told it.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: Don't talk to strangers.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: Case one went on a folding hand truck, strapped down with two bungee cords that Owen checked, and then checked again.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: A survey crew wheeling a heavy grey equipment case down a hill was the most natural thing in the world.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Nobody ever wants to ask a surveyor what's in the box, Inez liked to say, because they're afraid he'll tell them.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: The fire road switched back and forth through oak and hickory, and the fog thinned as they went, until it was only a gauze over the treetops, and then nothing at all.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: Halfway down, Owen stopped so suddenly that Luis nearly ran the hand truck into the backs of his knees.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: Oh, Owen said, in an entirely different voice from the one he used for jokes.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Oh look at you.
14:40
SPEAKER_01: It was a scrubby little tree at the edge of the road, with long drooping leaves, and under the leaves hung clusters of green fruit, the size of potatoes, some of them gone yellow and freckled.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: Owen pressed one gently with his thumb, the way you'd test an avocado, then twisted it free and broke it open with his hands.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: The inside was the color of custard.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: Pawpaw, he said, biggest fruit native to this continent, and almost nobody has ever tasted one.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: Because they bruise if you look at them wrong, and they won't ship.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: You have to know where the trees are.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: He held half of it out to Hannah.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: Spit out the seeds.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: It tasted like a banana and a mango who had gone to the same good school.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: She laughed with her mouth full, surprised, and Owen looked so pleased that she had to look away.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: We are on a schedule, Inez said.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: But she ate the other half.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: Then the trees opened, and the town lay below them in the clean morning light.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: The river ran wide and brown and slow, with the canal beside it like a younger brother.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: A steeple, a water tower, the gray stripe of the interstate, and across the water the hills of West Virginia, going back and back in blue folds.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: From up here it looked exactly like home.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: That was what Dial II meant.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: The differences would be small, and they would be in the places you didn't think to look.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: And finding them was Hannah's job.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: On every crossing she kept a running list in her head of the tells, the little things that said you were somewhere else.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: The list started at the gas station at the bottom of the hill.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: The sign was a brand she had never seen, a red star over the word corsair.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: Diesel was six dollars seventy nine cents a gallon, and Luis whistled through his teeth.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: Same robbery as home, he said.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: Give or take a dime.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Item two was the yard signs.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: It was four weeks to the midterms, and every third yard on the way into town had a sign in it, for county commissioner and state delegate and Congress, and Haina didn't recognize a single name.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: Owen read them aloud as they passed, like a man reading the menu in a restaurant he wasn't sure about.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: Same races as home, different runners.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: It gave her the small cold feeling in the back of the neck, that it always did.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: At the corner of Main Street, Inez stopped them.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: She and Luis and Owen would take the case out to the motel by the interstate and get rooms.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: Then Luis would work the drugstore, and Owen would work the newspaper and the hardware store and anything else that smelled interesting.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: At noon she would send a short report home in the window.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: At six, they would all meet at the diner on the corner.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: And you go knock on a door, she said to Hannah.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: Then, more quietly, whatever's on the other side of it, you're still on the clock.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: You understand me?
18:04
SPEAKER_01: I understand you.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: Inez held her eyes a second longer, then nodded, and the three of them went off down the sidewalk, with the hand truck rattling behind them, and Luis already telling Owen a story about his uncle and a goat.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: Pruitt House was two blocks off Maine, on a side street that ran down toward the canal.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Hannah could have found it with her eyes closed.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: White clapboard, three stories, a deep front porch with a swing at one end and ferns in hanging baskets gone a little brown with the season.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: A hand painted sign by the walk said Pruitt House, rooms by the night or week.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: The porch light was on.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: It was half past nine in the morning, in full daylight, and the porch light was burning in its glass shade beside the door, and Hannah stopped on the sidewalk and felt her whole chest go loose with hope.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: In April, sitting up late in the kitchen, she had asked Lorraine about that light, because she had noticed it still burning at dawn, and Lorraine had told her that she never turned it off.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: Not ever.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: On the porch, an old black lab lifted his grey chin from his paws and thumped his tail on the boards.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: Moose.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: He got up the way old dogs get up, in sections, and came and leaned his whole weight against her knees, and she knelt and put her face in his neck.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: Hey, moose, hey, buddy.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: It didn't mean anything.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: Moose leaned on everybody.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: Moose would lean on a burglar.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: She stood up with her heart going too fast, and went up the steps, and knocked.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: Footsteps inside, heavy ones.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: Not Lorraine's quick little step, but the slow, solid tread of a big man in no hurry.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: The door swung open.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: He was tall and broad through the shoulders, with a white crew cut, and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, suspenders over a flannel shirt, and a dish towel slung over one shoulder.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: He had a face like a friendly potato.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: Hannah knew that face.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: She had looked at it for two nights in April, in a silver frame on the mantle in the front room, a man in a fishing hat holding up a catfish, half as long as he was, grinning like a boy.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: Dale Pruitt, who had gone out to shovel the front walk on a February morning in twenty nineteen, and sat down in the snow, and never got up.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: He smiled at her politely, the way you smile at a stranger on your porch.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: Help you, miss three.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: Afterward, Hannah would remember that her training held, and she would be proud of that, and a little ashamed of being proud of it.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: Her face smiled.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: Her voice came out pleasant and slightly apologetic.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: The voice of a woman who has been up since dawn and would like a hot shower more than anything on earth.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: She heard it say that she was with a survey crew working the ridge for a couple of days, that the rest of the crew was at the motel by the interstate, and that she had heard the Pruits sometimes had a room.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes is the word, Dale said.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Hang on.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: He turned his head and called back into the house, in a voice built for hollering over storms.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: Rainey, got a customer.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: Rainey.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: In April, at two in the morning over a pot of decaf, Lorraine had told her that Dale used to call her Rainey, because Lorraine was too much name for a man in a hurry, and because they'd gotten married in a thunderstorm.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's called me that in seven years, honey, she had said.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: You get used to everything except that.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine came down the hall from the kitchen, wiping flour off her hands.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: She was small and quick and seventy one, with reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: And she was different.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: It took Hanna a second to see how.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: Her hair was longer, pinned up instead of cut short.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: There was more color in her face, but mostly it was the way she carried herself, an ease in the shoulders, the walk of a woman who has never had to learn how to come home to an empty house.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: She looked at Hannah with kind, ordinary interest.
22:45
SPEAKER_01: There was nothing behind it.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Not a flicker.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Well, hello, Lorraine said.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: You look like somebody.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Have we met?
22:55
SPEAKER_01: I get that a lot, Hannah said.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: I've got one of those faces.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: The room was the blue one at the top of the stairs.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: Of course it was.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: The same quilt, a wedding ring pattern in blue and yellow, faded soft, the same window, looking out over the roofs toward the steeple.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: The same crack in the ceiling plaster, shaped a little like Florida.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: When Lorraine had gone back down to her biscuits, Hannah sat on the edge of the bed with her hands flat on the quilt, and breathed slowly.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: The way they taught you, until the room stopped tilting.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: It was amiss.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: That was all.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: She had known it at the rock, really.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: And she had known it for certain the second the door opened.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Femi would get his mark, and the tally would go to one hit in eleven.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: And somewhere on that crowded dial, in a white house two blocks off Maine, a woman named Lorraine Pruitt was still waiting for a girl who had promised to come back for the peaches.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: Not this Lorraine.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: This one had never met her.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine fed her lunch whether she wanted it or not, vegetable soup and biscuits at the kitchen table, under a window full of African violets.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: Dale sat down across from her with a bowl of his own and a second biscuit, which Lorraine regarded the way a game warden regards an out of season deer.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: Dale was a talker, thirty one years a lineman for the power company, out in every kind of weather God ever made.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: The big ice storm in ninety four, when the lines came down faster than they could put them back up, and he didn't sleep in his own bed for nine days.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: And the oil man who had come by on Monday to fill the tank for the winter.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: I about fell off the porch, Dale said.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: Ever since the summer, it's like buying perfume.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: I told him, Rick, I used to keep the lights on in this whole town.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: I ought to get a discount.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: And Rick says, Dale, if I gave a discount to everybody in Hancock who said that, I'd be out of business by Thanksgiving.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: He says that every year, Lorraine said.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: And every year, it's true.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: Dale reached for the butter.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine moved it out of his reach without even looking, the way you'd move a glass away from the edge of a table.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: You know what doctor Amin told you?
25:26
unknown: Dr.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: Amin, Dale told Hannah, with great dignity, said last month that my pipes look like a forty year old man's.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: His exact words.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: He tapped his chest.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: Eleven years on the Halvain.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: Never felt better in my life.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: Since the scare, Lorraine said, more quietly.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: Since the scare.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: Hannah kept her spoon moving.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: She knew about the scare.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: She had heard about it in April, in this kitchen, from this woman.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: twenty fifteen.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: He was up on the ladder cleaning out the gutters, Lorraine had said, and he got a pain in his chest like somebody had set a cinder block on him, and he came down that ladder white as a sheet.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: The doctor in Hagerstown put him on a statin and told him to walk every day, and he did, mostly.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: And then, four winters later, the snow.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: What's Halvain?
26:23
SPEAKER_01: Hannah asked, the way a guest makes conversation.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: Heart pill, Dale said.
26:29
SPEAKER_01: Little white one.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: Doc started me on it right after, and Rainy here told God he could have the rest.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: I did, Lorraine said.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: She laughed, but her eyes went bright for a second.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: I stood right there at that sink and said it out loud.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: You can have the rest, Lord.
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Just give me this one.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: Hannah had never heard the word Halvain in her life, and she had a very good memory for words.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: It was most of her job.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: In the back of her mind, the professional part of her wrote it down in careful block capitals and drew a box around it.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: The rest of her was not doing so well.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: After lunch, Dale stood at the sink drying the dishes, and while he dried them, he hummed.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: It was something that might have been a Patsy Klein song before he got his hands on it.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: He hummed it flat, and then sharp, and then flat again, with complete conviction.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: In April, Lorraine had told her he hummed off key every day for forty four years, honey, and it drove me up the wall, and I would give anything I owned to hear it one more time.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: Hanna said she thought she'd get a little fresh air, and went out to the porch swing and put her face in her hands.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: She had lived in eleven places before she turned fourteen.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: Apartments mostly.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: A trailer for one good year, two motels, one of them with a pool nobody ever filled, a cousin's basement in Dayton, with a dehumidifier that ran all night like a jet engine.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: Her mother was a hopeful woman, always one job or one man away from things finally working out.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: And Hannah had learned early to keep her things in one bag, and her expectations in another, smaller one.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: Nobody in any of those eleven places had ever sat up for her.
28:28
SPEAKER_01: Nobody had ever left a light on.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: And then, at thirty three, soaked to the skin in a world that wasn't even hers, she had knocked on a stranger's door, and the stranger had said Don't just stand there dripping on my mat.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: And the light had been on.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: That was the whole reason she had raised her hand.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: She had never told anyone.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: She suspected Inez knew anyway.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: At noon, the bell in the steeple rang twelve slow strokes over the roofs, and Hannah thought of Inez in a motel room by the interstate, sending the short report home in the ninety seconds the window was open.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: Arrived, probable sibling.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: Proceeding.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: She hoped Inez had written probable.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: She hoped it for no good reason at all.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: Moose came and leaned on her legs.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: Beside the door, the porch light burned on, pale and pointless in the noon sun.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: Part four.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: The diner on the corner of Maine had a long counter with red stools, booths along the front window, and a television up in the corner over the pie case with the sound turned low.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: The television had a ball game on, the Dodgers in Atlanta, and Luis was already in the back booth with his body facing his friends, and his eyes on the game, which was the only way Luis ever sat in a restaurant in October.
30:00
SPEAKER_01: Owen had the County Weekly spread out in front of him, with three different pens.
30:06
SPEAKER_01: Inez had coffee.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: The waitress, a tired, friendly woman whose name tag said Deb, brought Hannah coffee without being asked, and asked if they wanted to hear the specials, and then told them anyway.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: Meatloaf's good, stay away from the fish.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: And if any of you have kids, keep them home, because half the middle school's out with the flu.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: Early this year, my sisters too have both got it.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: When she had gone, Owen looked down at his newspaper for a while without reading it.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: Early this year, he said.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: Owen, Inez said.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying it out loud so it's been said.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: Same week, same county, different flu?
30:52
SPEAKER_01: Maybe a little different, maybe a lot.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: We breathe it, we carry it home in our noses, and Clara does her best with her swabs.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: He folded the paper in half.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: And in half again.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: One of these days we're going to bring home something nobody can cure.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: That's what Clara's for.
31:13
SPEAKER_01: Clara agrees with me, Owen said.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: That's what worries me.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: Hannah slid into the booth, and three faces turned toward her, and she found that she didn't have to say it.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: Her face had already said it.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: She said it anyway, because the job was the job.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: It's not two hundred eighty seven.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: Dale Pruitt is alive.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: He opened the door.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: Luis put a big warm hand on her shoulder briefly and took it away.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: Inez nodded slowly.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: Then it's a miss, she said.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: I'll send it at midnight.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: Confirmed, Miss, Hall in progress.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: She tilted her head.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like you've got something else.
31:55
SPEAKER_01: Hannah told them about lunch, the ice storm, doctor Amin, and the forty year old pipes.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: And the little white pill that Dale had taken for eleven years, ever since a scare on a ladder that, in another world not far from this one, had ended four winters later in the snow.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Halvaine, she said, and spelled it.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Ever heard of it?
32:18
SPEAKER_01: Louise had stopped watching the game.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: Say it again.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: Halvain?
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Peggy said that word.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: He sat back.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Peggy runs the drugstore on Maine.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: Very nice lady, four grandkids, makes her own soap.
32:35
SPEAKER_01: I was in there an hour this afternoon buying cough drops, and behind the counter there's a whole shelf of something called Halvane.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: I figured it was a store brand of something.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: He looked at Hannah.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: You're telling me it's the reason that man is alive.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: I'm telling you that's what his wife thinks.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: Every town has a man who swears his pill is a miracle, Louise said.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Usually it's a statin with a new name, and a daughter who makes him walk every morning.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: But he was frowning now, the frown he got when a patient's numbers didn't add up.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: Peggy says it came out in twenty fourteen, made by a company in Baltimore called Penrose.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: She says everybody's dad is on it.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: I've worked more heart attacks than I can count, and I've read more drug labels than anybody at this table, and I have never heard that name.
33:34
SPEAKER_01: Not once.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: So either it's a statin with a fancy name, Owen said slowly, or it's the biggest thing we've carried home in years.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: And we won't know which until Clara's people take it apart, Inez said.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: Can you get the paperwork?
33:52
SPEAKER_01: Luis nodded.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: Peggy had the long information sheet, he said, the one that comes folded up inside the big stock bottle.
34:01
SPEAKER_01: Tiny print, chemistry, and all.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: He'd told her that his father's doctor in Chicago wanted to put him on Halvain, and that his father was the kind of man who reads every word before he swallows anything, which happened to be true.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: She had laughed and told him to come back in the morning.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: What about a sample?
34:25
SPEAKER_01: Owen said.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Even a few pills.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: The chemists could check the paper against the real thing.
34:31
SPEAKER_01: It would save them months.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: We're not taking that man's heart pills, Hannah said, louder than she meant to.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: Deb looked over from the register.
34:43
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's taking anybody's pills, Inez said evenly.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: Paper only.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: That's final.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: Out the window, Main Street was going blue with dusk.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: Two teenagers went by on the sidewalk, heads down over their phones, and a man at the counter squinted at his at arm's length, the way people do when they've lost their glasses.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: You notice their phones are dumb, Louise said.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: I've been here all day, and I haven't heard one person ask their phone a question.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's phone is talking back, he shrugged.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of nice.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of nice until you need directions, Owen said.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: At the register, Luis bought a postcard from the wire rack, a picture of the canal in autumn with a mule pulling a boat.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: The kind of postcard that hasn't changed since nineteen sixty.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: Nothing written over here would ever reach anyone at home.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: He bought it anyway, and tucked it inside his jacket.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: For Marisol, he said, when he caught Hannah looking.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to sit in quarantine and think about what I'd write on it.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: Maybe by Thursday, I'll know.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: While Owen settled the check, and Luis went to watch the game from closer up, Inez turned her coffee cup slowly on the table.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: Can I ask you something?
36:08
SPEAKER_01: What did it feel like?
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Being a stranger to her.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: Hannah thought about it.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: She owed Inez a real answer.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: Like standing outside the house you grew up in, she said finally.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Except I never had one of those.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: So the house I wish I'd grown up in, and somebody else's family is in there, and they're happy.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: And you're glad.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: You really are.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: And you'd still give anything to be let in.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: Inez nodded, looking down at her cup.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: I've wondered, she said.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: She didn't explain, and Hannah didn't ask.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: But she put it on her list, right next to Halvain.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: Not as a tell, as something to come back to.
36:57
SPEAKER_01: Up on the television, Atlanta scored twice, and a man at the counter whooped, and Luis groaned like he'd been shot, out of pure professional courtesy.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: Hannah walked back to Pruitt House alone in the dark.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: She could see the porch light from the end of the block.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: Part five.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine was on the porch swing in a cardigan, with two mugs on the little table beside her, and Moose asleep across her feet like a draft stopper.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: Sit, she said.
37:33
SPEAKER_01: I made you tea.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: There's a little something in it.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: Dale's gone up.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: He gets up at four to go fishing, and he hasn't caught a thing since August, and every morning he goes anyway.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: She shook her head.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Fifty one years married to an optimist.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: It's exhausting.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: Hannah sat down at the other end of the swing and wrapped her hands around the mug.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: Chamomile, with a good deal more than a little something in it.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: The street was quiet.
38:06
SPEAKER_01: A car went by slowly with its radio playing, and then it was just crickets, the last tired crickets of the year.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: I see somebody come up those steps looking like you looked this morning, Lorraine said, and I just want to feed them.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: How did I look?
38:25
SPEAKER_01: Like somebody who got bad news in the mail, and then had to go to work anyway.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: Hannah laughed, because it was so exactly right, and then had to look down into her tea for a while.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: Where are your people, honey?
38:40
SPEAKER_01: There was a cover answer for that.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: There always was a family in Ohio, a sister, a mother who worried.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: She had told it a hundred times in a dozen worlds, and she opened her mouth to tell it again, and what came out instead was the truth.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't really have any.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: My mom moved us around a lot when I was a kid, eleven places before I was fourteen.
39:07
SPEAKER_01: She's in Arizona now, I think.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: We don't talk much.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: She turned the mug in her hands.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: I don't mind, mostly.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: It's just that there was never anybody waiting up, you know?
39:20
SPEAKER_01: Nobody ever left a light on.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine didn't say she was sorry.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: She reached over and patted Hannah's knee twice, and left her hand there a moment.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, she said.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: There's one on here.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Hannah nodded, because she couldn't do anything else just then.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: You want to know why it's on?
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine said.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: Everybody asks sooner or later.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: Dale was a lineman for thirty one years.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: Every storm that came up this valley, every ice storm and wind storm and hurricane, they'd call him out in the middle of the night, and he'd go.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't sleep until I heard his truck in the drive.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: So I'd turn on the porch light, so he'd see it coming up the street.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: So he'd know somebody was waiting up.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: She smiled.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: He's been retired twelve years, and I still can't turn it off.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: Dale says the power company owes me a plaque.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: In April, in another kitchen in another world, Lorraine had told her the same story, almost word for word, and then she had said, I know he's not coming up that street anymore, honey.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: I know that.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: I just can't be the one to turn it off.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: You watch him, Lorraine said.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: Dale, you watch him like you know him.
40:45
SPEAKER_01: Hannah should have had an answer ready for that.
40:49
SPEAKER_01: She didn't.
40:50
SPEAKER_01: He reminds me of somebody, she said carefully.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: Somebody a friend of mine lost.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: Oh honey.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine was quiet a moment.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: You want to know something silly?
41:04
SPEAKER_01: Some nights I lie awake and practice what this house would be like without him.
41:09
SPEAKER_01: Where I'd sit?
41:11
SPEAKER_01: What I'd do with his side of the closet.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: Like a fire drill.
41:15
SPEAKER_01: I think every wife past seventy does it, whether she says so or not.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: She sipped her tea.
41:23
SPEAKER_01: And then he starts snoring like a chainsaw, and I quit practicing, and I go to sleep.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere on that crowded dial, Hanna thought, there was a Lorraine who didn't have to practice anymore.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: They sat a long time.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Moose snored.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: A moth bumped against the porch light, patient and hopeful over and over.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: In the morning Dale came back from the river at seven with no fish, and enormous good cheer.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: After breakfast, Lorraine cleaned out the medicine cabinet because it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was the day she cleaned something out.
42:04
SPEAKER_01: Dale's refill had come from the drugstore the day before, a fresh bottle, and the old bottle still had a few pills rattling around in the bottom.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine dropped it into a grocery bag, along with a box of expired cough syrup and some ancient aspirin.
42:21
SPEAKER_01: Peggy tells me to bring the old ones back to the store, she said.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: I never do.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that awful?
42:29
SPEAKER_01: I'll take the trash out for you, Hannah heard herself say.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: The cans were in the alley behind the shed.
42:37
SPEAKER_01: Hannah stood beside them in the cool morning with the grocery bag in her hand.
42:42
SPEAKER_01: It was trash.
42:43
SPEAKER_01: That was all it was.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: A few leftover pills bound for a landfill, no use to anybody in this world.
42:51
SPEAKER_01: Dale had a fresh bottle on the counter.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: Nobody would ever miss these.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Nobody would ever know.
42:59
SPEAKER_01: She took out the bottle.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: The label said Halvane, twenty milligrams, take one tablet daily, Penrose Laboratories, Baltimore, Maryland.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Six small white pills.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: She wrapped the bottle in her handkerchief and put the handkerchief in the inside pocket of her jacket, and put the rest of the bag in the can, and put the lid on.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: Her hands were perfectly steady.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: She'd had a lot of practice.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Then she stood in the alley a while longer, feeling like the kind of person who goes through other people's trash, which, as of about thirty seconds ago, she was.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: At the motel, Luis met her in the parking lot holding up a square of folded paper the size of a road map.
43:46
SPEAKER_01: He opened it out on the hood of somebody's pickup.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: Tiny grey print on thin paper, front and back, the sheet that comes folded inside a factory bottle of pills, and that nobody ever reads.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Heads.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Near the top was a drawing.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: Little hexagons, letters, and lines.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: That's the molecule, Luis said almost reverently.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: That's the whole thing.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: A good chemist could cook it from that drawing.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: And how they tested it.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: How many people, for how long, what went wrong?
44:21
SPEAKER_01: It's all here.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Hanna unfolded her handkerchief on the hood beside it.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: Inez looked at the bottle for a long moment.
44:29
SPEAKER_01: And then at Hannah.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: From the trash.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: From the trash.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: Inez held her eyes, and Hannah held them back.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: And at last, Inez nodded once.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: Bag it, she said.
44:43
SPEAKER_01: Owen produced a sample bag from somewhere inside his jacket.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: The way Owen always seemed to have a sample bag, and sealed the bottle inside it, and wrote on it in marker.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: And that was that.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: Part six.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: Lorraine walked her to the steps at noon with a paper sack.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: You missed the peaches, she said.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: By about a month.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: So here's the last of them.
45:12
SPEAKER_01: Inside the sack was a pint jar of peach preserves with a square of gingham tied over the lid, and a label in Lorraine's handwriting that said August.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: Hannah stood on the porch holding the jar, and could not, for a second, say a single word.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: Oh now, Lorraine said, and hugged her, quick and hard, the way small women hug.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: She smelled like flour and lavender soap.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: You come back and see us, you hear?
45:43
SPEAKER_01: I'd like that, Hannah said.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: It was the truest thing she had said in two days, and the most impossible.
45:51
SPEAKER_01: Dale was on the swing with Moose's head in his lap.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: He lifted a hand.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Light's always on, he said.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: Hannah went down the steps and up the street, and did not look back until the corner.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: When she did, the porch light was still burning in the noon sun, pale yellow in its glass shade, the way it had burned through thirty one years of storms, and twelve years after that, for a man who always came home.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: They climbed the fire road in the early afternoon, with the hand truck bumping over the roots.
46:28
SPEAKER_01: The pawpaw tree was still there.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: Owen picked two more for the road and gave one to Luis, who said it tasted like a banana's rich cousin, and ate it in four bites.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: At the ledge they dug case two out from under its tarp and leaves.
46:46
SPEAKER_01: It woke when Luis asked it to, which was always a relief.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: Then Owen took a blank brass disc out of his pack, and Luis took out a punch set, a little roll of steel letters and numbers older than any of them, and they handed both to Hannah without discussing it.
47:05
SPEAKER_01: She set the disc on a flat stone and struck the numbers into it one at a time with the hammer.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: Two, nine, four.
47:14
SPEAKER_01: Each blow rang out across the clearing, clean and small.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: Then a hole in the rock with the hand drill and a dab of epoxy, and the disc pressed into place a few yards from the bare grey rock, where two hundred eighty seven's disc had never been.
47:32
SPEAKER_01: So whoever comes next knows where they are, she said.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: That's a nice thought, Owen said.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: It's procedure.
47:41
SPEAKER_01: It can be both, Inez said.
47:44
SPEAKER_01: The case hummed.
47:45
SPEAKER_01: The needle swung and settled on home, the one station on that whole crowded dial that the cases could always find, every time, without fail.
47:55
SPEAKER_01: Femi said it was the one thing about them he was sure of, and the one thing he couldn't explain.
48:02
SPEAKER_01: The lamp went green.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: They stood in their circle of trampled leaves, and Inez pressed the button.
48:09
SPEAKER_01: Pressure in the ears, cold up through the boots, then gravel underfoot, and the green cinder block station, and the smell of diesel drifting up from the interstate, and a jet drawing a long white line across a sky that, as far as anyone could prove, was their own.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: The quarantine ward was in the basement of a records annex outside Washington, behind a door with a sign that said occupational health.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: They rode there in a sealed van with no windows, and spent the evening being swabbed and sampled and photographed by people in plastic hoods, and ended up in four small rooms side by side, each with a narrow bed and a sink, and a window onto the hall.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: A little after eight, Clara Benning's voice came over the intercom, dry as toast.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: Welcome home.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: Nobody touch your face.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: Hannah, the jar of preserves stays with me for seventy two hours.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: I'll give it back.
49:14
SPEAKER_01: Probably.
49:15
SPEAKER_01: A pause.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: Femi asked me to tell you he got your report.
49:20
SPEAKER_01: He said, and I'm quoting, amiss is data.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: Then he went out to the parking lot and sat in his car for twenty minutes.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: How's the tally?
49:30
SPEAKER_01: Owen asked.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: One hit in eleven, he's recalculating.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: He's very unhappy about the rounding.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: Clara, Louis said.
49:39
SPEAKER_01: Ask somebody how the Dodgers did last night.
49:42
SPEAKER_01: There was a pause while somebody asked somebody.
49:46
SPEAKER_01: They won it in Atlanta, Clara said.
49:48
SPEAKER_01: Three to one.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: Over there the Braves won, Luis said.
49:53
SPEAKER_01: Same game?
49:54
SPEAKER_01: Same game, different ending.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: That's every game, Owen said, through the wall.
50:01
SPEAKER_01: Then Clara was quiet for a moment, and Hannah heard papers rustling.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at your bottle through the bag, Clara said.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: Penrose Laboratories, Baltimore.
50:12
SPEAKER_01: There was a Penrose in Baltimore, you know?
50:15
SPEAKER_01: Small outfit.
50:16
SPEAKER_01: Went under, I want to say twenty thirteen.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: Somebody bought up what was left for parts.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: So it might be here, Owen said.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: The drug in a box somewhere.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: Everything's in a box somewhere, Clara said.
50:32
SPEAKER_01: Go to sleep.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: Hannah lay on the narrow bed with the lights down and listened to the building hum.
50:39
SPEAKER_01: She thought about six white pills in a sealed bag in a refrigerator down the hall.
50:44
SPEAKER_01: She thought about men like Dale all over this world, on ladders, in driveways, with snow shovels in their hands, and what it would mean if Luis was right.
50:55
SPEAKER_01: Old men humming off key in kitchens who would otherwise be quiet.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: She thought about Femi sitting in his car, and Inez saying, I've wondered, and Luis in the next room looking at a postcard he couldn't send.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: And she thought about a white house, two blocks off Maine, on a side street that ran down to the canal, in a world she had found once and might never find again.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: One chance in eleven, Femi would say, and falling.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: A small woman asleep in that house alone, with no snoring to make her stop practicing, and beside the front door, burning all night, a porch light, for a man who wasn't coming home from any storm, and for a girl who had promised to come back for the peaches.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere out on that crowded dial, the light was on for her.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: She just couldn't find the porch.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: She fell asleep before she meant to, and did not dream.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: World two hundred ninety four A close sibling of World two hundred and eighty seven.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: Dial setting two days on the ground.
52:09
SPEAKER_01: Brought home.
52:10
SPEAKER_01: One long pharmacy information sheet, one prescription bottle holding six white pills, a county newspaper, and a pint of peach preserves currently in quarantine.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: Return test A miss.
52:25
SPEAKER_01: Return odds.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: One hit in eleven tries.
52:29
SPEAKER_01: Femi calls it nine percent, and he would like the record to show that he hates rounding.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: You have been listening to Long Odds Episode I The Porch Light.