The faucet

The water still runs.

She turns the handle and watches as the trickle grows into a stream, crashing down into the old soapstone sink. It sputters sometimes. Some mornings it runs brown at first, then it clears. But it comes. She fills a glass and drinks and sets the glass on the counter beside a smaller cup with a bluebird on it. It has some water still. She will clean them both later. She always does.

The house is a split-level on a cul-de-sac with buckled pavement and moss-coated gutters. Weeds peek out of the storm drains in thick clumps. The other houses are empty. She checked them, one by one, in the first month. She entered through unlocked doors and sometimes through windows and she called out and nobody answered. She took what was useful. Canned corn. Beans. Old newspapers. Batteries that turned out to be dead. A quilt left on a bed, smelling like companionship. Coloured markers. She went back for those.

"We're going now, Ruth." She had nodded and watched them depart. A caravan on foot.

Her name is Ruth. She doesn’t say it out loud anymore. There’s no reason to.

The man shows up on a Tuesday. She’s fairly sure it’s a Tuesday. He comes walking up the road with the setting sun at his back. With a pack on his back and a slight hitch in his right leg. Not a limp, more like a thing he’s learned to work around.

He stops at the end of her driveway and looks at the house and she watches him from the kitchen window.

He doesn’t come to the door. He sits down on the curb across the street and opens his pack and eats something out of a pouch. She watches him eat. He chews slowly. The food doesn't taste like much. When he’s done he folds the pouch two times and checks the corners and stows it away and just sits there with his forearms on his knees.

She goes to the front door and opens it.

"You can have water", she says.

He looks up at her.

"I have water", she says. "From the tap."

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he stands and picks up his pack and crosses the street.

His name is James. He tells her this while he drinks his second glass. He holds it with both hands, steadying it the glass, and he drinks in long slow pulls. She watches his throat. He’s younger than her. Maybe thirty. She’s forty-three. She thinks she's forty-three. It's become harder to tell.

"Where are you coming from", she says.

"West", he says.

She nods. She doesn’t ask anything else. He doesn’t offer anything else. This is how things are. You say what’s necessary. You don’t say what isn’t.

"There’s a room", she says. "Down the hall. The bed’s made."

He looks at her.

"I’m not asking for anything", he says.

"I know", she says. "I’m telling you there’s a room."

He stays. The first morning she comes into the kitchen and finds him already up, sitting at the table, and the strange thing isn’t that he’s there. The strange thing is that it isn’t strange. She fills two glasses and sets one in front of him and they drink water and watch the light trickle in through the window over the sink, slow at first, faster later.

On the third day he fixes the gate on the back fence. She didn’t ask him to. She hears it — a hammer striking nails, screws being forced into wood — and goes to the back door and watches. The gate has been hanging from one hinge. She’d stopped seeing it. Now he’s straightening it, holding it level with his shoulder while he fastens it, and something moves in her chest like a drawer sliding open.

She goes back inside.

That evening, he watches her draw simple shapes on soiled paper, dried from having gotten wet. A pack of it, different colours, sits on a counter flanked by a variety of pencils, most of which are worn to within an inch. There is a knife not intended to sharpen pencils. She makes simple shapes on paper. A house, just an outline, two-dimensional. A tree. Blue clouds.

He says nothing as she hangs it on the fridge, over the others.

He fixes other things. A cabinet door in the kitchen. The locks on the front door. He finds a tube of silicone caulk in the garage, among cobwebbed tools she had long forgotten and reseals the window in the hallway where the cold has been getting in. He doesn’t announce what he’s doing. She notices the effects all the same. A handle that turns smoothly. A door that closes without groan.

They eat together in the evenings. Canned soup heated on the camp stove. Sometimes rice. She has a bag of rice she’s been rationing since the onset of winter. They sit at the table and eat and sometimes he says something and sometimes she says something and mostly they don’t.

One evening she says, "My son used to sit there. In that chair."

He stops chewing. He looks at the chair he’s sitting in and then he looks at her.

She picks up her spoon. "It’s fine", she says. "Eat."

He finds the cistern on a Saturday. She’s fairly sure it’s a Saturday. She’s in the kitchen when he comes through the back door with dirt on his hands and his face strange and tight.

"I walked up the hill", he says.

She sets down the pot she’s holding.

"The cistern", he says. "The gravity-fed one. That’s where your water’s coming from. A concrete tank, maybe five hundred gallons originally. There’s a pipe that runs down the hill and feeds into the main line."

She doesn’t say anything.

"It’s almost empty", he says. "I looked through the access hatch. Maybe a foot of water left. Two weeks. Maybe less."

She picks the pot up again. She runs the faucet and fills it. He watches her.

"You knew", he says.

She puts the pot on the stove. She adjusts the flame.

"Ruth", he says.

She looks at him. It’s the first time he’s said her name. She told it to him on the fourth or fifth day and he just nodded and she didn’t think he’d kept it.

"I knew the water wasn’t going to last", she says. "I didn’t know about the tank."

"Same thing", he says.

"No", she says. "It isn’t."

He spends the next couple of days away from the house, leaving early, returning late. The dinners are quieter than before. She sees him staring at the drawings on the stalled refrigerator and eat and leave before dawn again.

She watches as he rummages in the shed, collecting things, wires, tools, a blow torch, a pickaxe, pieces of discarded wood. He carts it up the hill, load by load. As the days pass, he grows quiet.

One day, he does not show up for dinner. She hears him, the rhythm in his steps, as he sneaks in after dark.

"James?", she asks.

He looks at her. His shoulders slump. A broken pickaxe rests against the wall in the hallway. There's blood on the handle. There's blood on his hands. He heads into his bedroom and closes the door and dims the light.

He tells her about the river settlement two days later. They’re sitting on the front porch. It’s late in the afternoon. The light is the color of something left too long in the sun.

"There’s a place east of here", he says. "On the river. I met a man on the road who told me about it. Sixty, seventy people. They have a water source. They grow things."

She watches the street.

He says, "It’s maybe five days’ walk. I know the general direction."

She picks at a thread on the knee of her jeans. The jeans are too big for her now. Everything she wears is too big for her now. She nods and continues to draw.

"You should go", she says.

"You could come", he says.

She doesn’t answer right away. A bird lands on the mailbox across the street. She doesn’t know what kind of bird it is. Her son would have known. He was like that. He knew the names of things.

"This is where Caleb lived", she says.

He doesn’t say anything.

"He was four", she says. "He was four and he knew the names of birds."

She stops talking. The bird leaves the mailbox. She watches the place where it was.

"I can’t explain it", she says.

"You don’t have to", he says.

But he looks at the street when he says it. Not at her.

He leaves on a morning that is pale and quiet. She stands at the door and he stands on the driveway. She hadn't heard him pack. It weighs on him, not like before.

"The settlement", she says. "If you find it."

"Yeah", he says.

"You could come back", she says. "You could come back and tell me about it."

He adjusts a strap on his pack. He looks at the house. He looks at the window over the kitchen sink. He nods but it isn’t a promise and they both know it. A nod is just a nod. She’s learned this.

"Thank you", he says. "For the water."

She almost says something. She can feel it in her mouth, the shape of it, something about how the house will be quieter now or how she’d gotten used to hearing him in the other room at night, the small sounds of another person breathing and turning and being alive in the dark. She doesn’t.

She lifts her hand. He lifts his.

Then he walks down the driveway and turns left and goes up the road and she watches him until he rounds the curve and is gone.

She goes inside and stands in the kitchen. The house is the kind of quiet that settles on things like dust. She looks at the two glasses on the counter. His and hers. She picks up his glass and washes it and dries it and puts it in the cabinet and then she takes it back out and sets it on the counter again.

She turns the faucet on.

The water comes out thin and swells to be thinner than before. She can hear something in the pipes now, a faint hollow sound, air getting in where water used to be. He had told her. She doesn’t fill anything. She doesn’t put her hands under it. She just turns it on and lets it run.

She sits down at the kitchen table. In her chair, not his. The water runs and she listens to it as she draws. A house, two dimensional, just its shape. A tree. Clouds that are blue.

The water crashing on the soapstone sounds like what it is — a thing that won’t last. But right now it’s here. Right now it runs from somewhere up the hill, winding down through the pipes, out through the faucet, and into the basin and down the drain. Going nowhere. Doing nothing. Just the sound of it.

Caleb used to run the faucet when he couldn’t sleep. She’d find him standing on his step stool at the sink at two in the morning, watching the water come out.

"What are you doing", she’d say.

And he’d say, "Listening."

She sits at the table and she listens. Outside, the road is empty. The cul-de-sac is still. The weeds push up through the pavement in their slow green way. Somewhere east of here a man walks toward a river he might not find.

The water runs.

She reaches for a magnet, affixes the drawing to the fridge, and lets it.