The Missing Walk

Mira stopped at the first iron ring set into the quay wall. “Here,” she said.

Celia looked down the harbor. The paving fell toward the fish sheds, then rose where the quay met the old steps. Rain had left a narrow line of grit along the gutter. A cart coming up from the sheds would need a sound brake.

“Four inches in twenty feet,” Celia said.

Mira held out the notebook. Celia checked the figures she had written the day before. Four inches in twenty feet.

“That isn’t the part I’m asking about,” Mira said.

“I know.”

Celia put the notebook away without closing it. The paper caught against her thumb, soft at the corners from use. Yesterday’s entry described this ring, the damaged paving beside it, and a walk made with Mira before the short witnessed route had opened. The figures were in her hand. So was a note about the wind blowing spray over the wall.

The wind blew spray over the wall now. It reached her lips with a bitter taste. Nothing in her answered it.

Mira waited while she set the end of her measuring chain against the ring. She had offered to leave the chain behind. Celia had brought it anyway. A walk along a quay could also be a survey, and she needed something she knew how to do.

They moved slowly. Mira kept to the inside edge, clear of a man rolling a barrel toward the sheds. Celia paid out the brass links and took a reading where the gutter bent. Her hands did the work without pause. She could judge the strain in the chain by the pull against her fingers, could allow for the uneven joint between two stones. The calculation came easily.

She had walked this ground yesterday and retained none of it.

At the bend, Mira touched the top of a short mooring post. “You stopped here. You said the stone had dropped since your first survey.”

“It has.” Celia pressed her boot against the edge. The slab rocked a fraction. “The bed beneath it may have washed out.”

“You said that too.”

“Then I was consistent.”

Mira’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “You knocked your knuckle on the post when you put the chain away. You called it a poor place to store a post.”

“That does sound like me.”

“It was you.”

Celia pulled her hand back from the post. A pale mark crossed one knuckle. She remembered finding it while washing that morning and wondering where she had struck herself. Mira had just supplied the answer. The mark offered no help.

Farther on, the quay narrowed beside a flight of steps. Celia counted the risers without meaning to. Seven above the present waterline, with two more dark beneath it. She checked the drop against the harbor wall and wrote a correction to yesterday’s height. The entry beneath her pencil described the same steps. She had stood here. She had bent over this page here. She could read what she had decided about the wall and improve on it.

Mira leaned beside her, careful not to crowd the notebook. “Anything?”

“No.”

“Not even that I argued with you about the steps?”

“You argue with me about many steps.”

“Yesterday I said the third one was loose. You said it was the fourth.”

Celia tested them with her boot. The third shifted under her weight. “You were right.”

“I know. You checked it yesterday.”

Celia lifted her foot. They had come out to retrace the walk, but she had kept treating each stop as a problem that might yield to better work. The stone moved. The chain had its weight. Mira could say what had happened. None of that brought back the small act of being wrong beside these steps.

She shut the notebook against her palm. “We should record that you told me, not that I remember it.”

“Of course.”

“I put the first question in the wrong form,” Celia said. “I asked myself what I knew about the quay.”

Mira looked at her. A little spray clung to the wool at her shoulder.

“I know rather a lot about it,” Celia went on. “That makes it easy to give the wrong answer.”

Mira rubbed a thumb over the wet wool. “Tell me what to ask, then.”

Celia looked back toward the iron ring. They had covered less than half the route. There was time to finish, and no need to pretend the distance mattered. “Ask me what happened yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday, at the ring?”

“I don’t remember.”

“At the post?”

“I don’t remember.”

Mira glanced down at the steps. “Here?”

Celia waited. The scrape of a barrel wheel came from farther along the quay. It would have been pleasant to recall even their argument over the loose stone, to have one useless scrap of it come back while Mira stood beside her.

“I don’t remember walking here,” she said.

They completed the route without further tests. Celia measured one more fall in the paving because the figures in yesterday’s book disagreed with the water stain on the wall. The new reading settled the error. Mira held the chain at the far end, steady even when a gust pushed her coat against it. On the way back they carried the chain between them in loose loops.

At the loft, Celia spread the notebook on the table. Its pages stayed dry beneath her hands. She drew a line below yesterday’s entry and wrote the date. Mira sat opposite, close enough to read but leaving the page to her.

Celia wrote that she could calculate the quay’s gradients and identify the damaged stones. She wrote that the earlier entry was in her own hand, and that Mira had accompanied her on the walk it described. Then she stopped.

“Put the ring in,” Mira said. “And the steps. So we know which walk.”

Celia added both. The pencil point made a small hole when it crossed a rough patch of paper. She eased her grip.

“Does it come back?” Mira asked.

“No.”

Mira folded her hands on the table. “Should we write that it might?”

“We can’t measure a might.”

“No. I meant...” She drew one hand free and flattened the curled corner of the page. “I don’t want you to read this tomorrow and think we gave up on you.”

Celia looked at the hole in the paper. The salt dreams had left her confused before, once for an hour, once until Mira pulled her away from the membrane. She could remember the confusion and the relief afterward. Yesterday’s walk was different. She could work around its absence so neatly that someone might mistake the work for its return.

“Then let us be exact,” she said. “We walked it today. We asked at each place. I have no recollection of walking it yesterday. That is what we know.”

Mira nodded, but kept her hand on the page until Celia had written it.

Celia read the entry aloud. Mira corrected one detail: the wind had carried spray over the wall yesterday, but Celia had not mentioned its taste. Celia crossed that phrase out of yesterday’s note. She had no reason to dispute it, and no right to make the record fuller than it was.

When they were done, Mira gave back the pencil. Celia left room below the entry for another date, then closed the notebook.