Forty-Seven

Martina's parents have been divorced longer than they were married, and they drove her to Brno together on Saturday because his car is bigger and her back is better, which is how most of their arrangements go. I was in the back seat with the lamp and a bin bag full of shoes.

They do not finish each other's sentences. They barely start them. He said the D1 was a disgrace. She said it was a Saturday. The radio talked about a front coming in from the west, and both of them reached to turn it up, and both of them stopped, and neither said anything, and the front came in regardless.

At the new building there was no lift. He took the boxes and she took the lamp, and on the second landing I heard them both, under their breath, a step apart, counting, not these stairs but the old ones on Vodni, the ones they carried her up the night she came home from the hospital: forty-seven, and a window halfway.

Nothing between them would show on any instrument you trust. No warmth you could put a figure to, no wanting, no plan. Twenty years of weather on top of it and the count still comes out whole, because it was never about how much. It was only ever which way.

I don't know if that is what's left or what was holding it all along. Martina thinks it's neither. Martina thinks it's her. She stood at the top with the door open, a little out of breath, and watched the two of them come up the last flight, still counting, and say forty-seven, both of them, at the top of thirty-one stairs.