Chapter 3: Two Bits
He was gone for eleven days.
You told yourself you didn't count. You counted. You counted the way you count ums in an interview, automatically, a tally running in the back of your head. Day three, you made coffee in the moka pot and added a pinch of salt and hated how good it was. Day five, Mrs. Lebowitz stopped you on the stairs and asked where "the tall one with the hand" had gone, and when you said you didn't know, she patted your arm in a way that made you want to scream. Day seven, the Colonel said DESCALE REQUIRED and you said, out loud, to an appliance, "Not today. We talked about this," and then had to sit down on the kitchen floor for a minute.
Day eight, you watched the news. You never watch the news. There was something in Sokovia, or near it, a facility, a fire, grainy footage of figures moving through smoke. Captain America was on a podium afterward saying the situation had been "contained" and refusing to take questions. He looked tired. Behind him, at the very edge of the frame, there was a man in black tactical gear with a metal arm, standing so still you'd have missed him if you didn't already know how he stood.
You turned it off. You went back to work. Episode 215 was about a man who disappeared from a fishing boat in 1987, and you spent four hours cleaning up a recording of his widow saying, over and over, I just wanted to know he was coming home, and at the end of it you took your headphones off and sat in the dark and called yourself several unkind names.
He's your neighbor, you told yourself. He's a low-stakes social component.
Day eleven, at 2:47 a.m., someone knocked on your door. Two knocks. Polite. Spaced.
You were across the apartment before you were fully awake. You didn't check the peephole. You flung it open and he was standing there, three feet back like always, in a dark jacket zipped to the chin, and he had a cut over his left eyebrow held shut with butterfly strips, and a bruise along his jaw going green at the edges, and he was holding the moka pot.
"Hi," Bucky said. His voice was rough. "Sorry. I know what time it is."
You stared at him.
"Mine broke," he said, holding up the pot, and you saw that one side of it was crushed flat. "It got. There was an incident. I didn't take it with me, it was here, I came home and I set my bag down on it, and I don't know why, I just." He stopped. He looked at the pot. "I wanted coffee. And I wanted to see if you were awake. And those are two separate things and I should've just done the first one in my own kitchen. Sorry. Go back to bed."
He started to turn.
"Get in here," you said.
"It's three in the morning."
"I know what time it is, James. I've known what time it is for eleven days."
That stopped him. He turned back. He looked at you, really looked, the full careful sweep, and whatever he saw in your face made his jaw do something complicated.
He came in.
You made him sit at the table. He didn't argue, which was how you knew he was hurt worse than he looked. When he took off the jacket, his right side was strapped up under his T-shirt and he moved like a man who had been told by a doctor not to move at all.
"Ribs," he said, when he caught you looking. "Three. They heal fast. The serum. It's fine."
"You keep saying 'fine.' Sam said you said an MRE was fine."
"It was fine. It was beef stroganoff. Mostly."
You made the coffee in the Colonel because your hands needed something to do. You didn't do the override; you just pressed the button and let it ask you every one of its stupid questions, and you answered all of them, and you didn't turn around until it was done. When you set the mug in front of him, he wrapped both hands around it, metal and flesh, and didn't drink.
"You were on the news," you said.
He winced. "Was I."
"At the edge. You stand weird. Like you're about to get hit by a bus and you've already accepted it."
"That's a very specific posture."
"I'm a very specific person." You sat down across from him. Your hands were shaking, which was humiliating, so you sat on them. "You could've texted. One word. 'Alive.' Five letters. I would've accepted 'alive.'"
"We were dark. No phones."
"Then you could've told me before. 'Hey, I do a dangerous job sometimes and I disappear and there's fire on the news, see you in a week and a half, don't worry, here's a babka.'"
"I did tell you. I said work."
"Work is what I do, James. Work is me listening to a man named Rupert say 'liminal.' Work is not three ribs."
He was quiet for a long moment. He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table, then another, then another.
"I know," he said finally. "I'm sorry. I'm not used to it."
"Used to what?"
"Somebody waiting." He said it to the coffee. "There hasn't been. In a long time. Sam, but Sam's usually standing next to me, so he doesn't count. I'm not used to there being anybody on the other side of the wall."
Something in your chest went tight and hot. You didn't trust it, so you went for the easier thing. "Dr. Raynor's going to be so mad at you. You broke the low-stakes social component."
That got him. His mouth went crooked, and he finally drank, and when he set the mug down he said, "Yeah. About that."
He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket hanging on the chair and pulled out a small notebook. Black cover, soft with use, elastic band. He held it in his metal hand for a while like he was weighing it.
"I had a list," he said. "When I first got back. Names. People I had to make amends to, things I'd done when I wasn't. When I was the other thing." He didn't look up. "I worked through it. Most of it. Dr. Raynor said when I was done I should start a new one. Not things I owe. Things I want." He set the notebook on the table and slid it across to you. "I'm not good at it. I've been doing it for a year and there's not a lot on there."
You opened it. The handwriting was the same slanted, ruler-taught hand as the index card.
Learn to cook something that isn't eggs. Go to a Dodgers game and boo. (Sam says they're in L.A. now. Don't care. Boo anyway.) Plums. Find out what happened to Becca's family. (Done. They're good. Leave them be.) Sleep through the night. Learn the coffee machine.
And underneath that, in different ink, newer, pressed so hard the pen had almost gone through:
Tell her.
You looked at it for a long time. Long enough that you heard him stop breathing across the table.
"Tell me what?" you said, very carefully.
"You know what," Bucky said.
"I really need you to say it, because I edit audio for a living and I know exactly how much can get lost when people leave things implied."
He laughed, startled and soft, and then he put his face in his hand, the real one, and talked into his palm. "I moved in here because the place was cheap and the walls were thin. That's the truth. Dr. Raynor said I shouldn't live somewhere too quiet, because I go somewhere bad when it's too quiet. I thought, I'll hear the neighbors. That'll be enough. I'll hear people having lives."
He lifted his head.
"And then I heard you. Fighting with your machine. Singing in the shower, badly. You do the harmony and the melody at the same time and you can't do either. Swearing at somebody named Rupert under your breath after you hang up. You talk to yourself when you cook. You say 'okay, buddy' to the onions." His eyes were very blue and very steady. "And I'd lie there and listen, and I'd think, that's what it sounds like. That's what it sounds like when somebody's alive on purpose. I used to know how to do that. And then you knocked on the wall."
You couldn't say anything. Your throat had closed up.
"I spent eleven days in a place I can't tell you about," he said, "and every night I lay on a concrete floor and I put my hand on the wall and I knocked. Shave and a haircut. Nobody answered. I knew nobody would. I did it anyway." He swallowed. "So that's what I'm supposed to tell you. That I came back for the coffee, and that's a lie. That I'm ninety-something years old and I'm bad at this, and I've got a list with about six things on it, and you're the only thing on it I'm scared to cross off."
You got up.
He watched you come around the table and he didn't move, didn't brace, didn't sweep the room. He just watched you, with the cut over his eyebrow and the bruise going green, and you stood in front of his chair and he had to tip his head back to look at you. That had never happened before. He was always the tall one, the one in the doorway.
You put your hand on his jaw. On the good side. His stubble was rough and he was warm and he closed his eyes like the coffee, that first morning, the thing in his face coming unlocked.
"For the record," you said, "I counted. Eleven days. I'm a professional. I don't miscount."
"I know," he said, eyes still closed. "I could hear you through the wall. You said 'okay, buddy' to the Colonel on day seven and then you cried on the kitchen floor."
"That is a gross violation of my privacy."
"Walls are thin," Bucky said, and you kissed him.
It wasn't graceful. You caught the edge of the butterfly strip and he hissed, and you pulled back, and he caught your wrist with his metal hand, so carefully, so gently, the plates whispering, and said, "Don't you dare," and pulled you back down. He kissed you like he'd read about it in a manual and then thrown the manual in the river. Slow, and then not slow at all. His other hand came up and found the back of your neck and stayed there, warm and steady, holding on.
When you broke apart you were both breathing hard and he had his forehead against your sternum. You could feel him smiling. Not almost. Actually.
"Ribs," you said.
"Fine," he said.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it," he said. "First time in a long time."
You ran your fingers through his hair, still too long, still pushed back behind his ears, and you thought about the Smithsonian placard, Lost in 1945, and about how it was wrong. He wasn't lost. He was right here, in your kitchen, at 3:30 in the morning, with a terrible crossword habit and an excellent palate for chicory.
The Colonel beeped behind you. You both looked over.
The screen, lightning-bolt crack and all, had cleared its red warning for the first time since September. It said, in cheerful blue letters, READY.
"Huh," Bucky said. "Would you look at that."
"You descaled it?"
"Before I left. Middle of the night. I didn't want you to have to." He tipped his head back to look at you. "It's on the list."
"That's not on the list."
He reached over, picked up the pen, uncapped it with his teeth, and with great ceremony drew a line through Tell her. Then, under it, in fresh ink, he wrote something and turned the notebook so you could read it.
Take her somewhere that isn't her kitchen.
"Brooklyn's changed," he said. "I don't know where anything is anymore. Everything I remember is a Whole Foods."
"I know a place," you said. "On Court Street. The owner yells at you."
"He gave me a free cannoli."
"He's going to give you a lot more than a cannoli when he sees that face. He'll think I did it."
"Did you?" Bucky said, and pulled you down into his lap, ribs be damned, and you laughed against his mouth, and on the other side of the wall the radiator in 4B clanked once, twice, into the cold dark, and for once neither of you was listening to it.
At 7:00 a.m. there were two knocks on your door.
You both froze. Bucky, still on your couch, sat up so fast he swore at his ribs.
"Barnes," came Sam Wilson's voice through the door, entirely too cheerful. "I went to your place. You weren't there. You want to tell me why I can hear you in hers?"