Chapter 7
Wren
I went back alone on the seventh day.
I didn't tell Ash. I told him I was going for fuel, which was true in the sense that I did, eventually, buy fuel.
Marchand walked me down to the woodlot herself and left us there, which I want to note, because a woman running a scam does not leave you alone with the merchandise in a field.
Kai had a maul. He was actually good with it. He'd never been good with anything.
"You came back," he said.
"I did."
"That's — " he set the maul head-down in the snow " — okay, I'm going to say the thing."
"Say the thing."
"Wren, you have to stop coming."
The pines on the far shore. The line of them. I looked at that.
"That's the rule," I said.
"It's not a rule. It's a thing an eleven-year-old said in a living room."
"It's held for seventeen years."
"I know it's held." And there — finally, seven days in — some heat in him.
"It's held every single time. You came to Bellamy.
You came to the Kirkwoods'. You came to Erie when I was in the drunk tank and you'd worked nineteen hours.
You came when I was in Follansbee with a guy you'd never met and you got out of that truck at four in the morning like it was nothing—"
"It was nothing."
"It was three hundred miles!"
"It was nothing, Kai."
"That's what I mean," he said. "You say it's nothing.
It's never nothing. It's never once been nothing and you've spent seventeen years telling me it's nothing so I wouldn't have to feel it, and I felt it anyway, every time, and I have never in my life had one single day where I wasn't somebody's — "
He stopped.
"Somebody's what," I said.
"Project."
The wind came off the lake and took some snow off the top of the stack and put it in the air.
"You're not a project."
"You have a rule about me," Kai said. "You wrote it on my arm. Wren, I love you more than anybody alive and I want you to hear this the way I mean it, which is kindly: I would like, one time before I'm thirty, to be somewhere that you did not come to."
"Say the rest of it," I said.
"There isn't a rest of it."
"Kai. You've been building this for nineteen days. Say the rest."
He picked the maul back up, and put it back down, and finally he pushed his left sleeve up over the elbow.
The Sharpie was gone. Months gone. But you could still see the ghost of where he'd redone it a hundred times over seventeen years, that faint shine on the inside of the forearm where skin's been written on and washed and written on again.
"When I got here," he said, "the intake nurse saw this and asked what it said. And I told her. And she wrote it down in a file, Wren. It's in a file now. There's a woman with a master's degree in Michigan who has professional notes about the thing you wrote on me in a living room."
"Okay."
"And in group they had a whole — they had a whole thing about it. About attachment, and roles, and how a kid who gets made responsible for another kid never gets to—"
"That's about me, not you."
"It's about both of us! That's what I keep — " He stopped, and got hold of it, and that control was the worst thing I saw that whole week.
He never used to have control. "Wren. I'm not saying you did it wrong.
You did it perfect. Nobody else came. Ever.
In nineteen years, in nine houses, one person came, every single time, and it was a girl with a bike. "
"Then—"
"I'm saying I'm twenty-four and I've never once found out what I'd do if you didn't."
I've had a truck roll on me. Nineteen, on ice, on 79. I know what it is to have the world go over sideways while you're still holding the wheel.
This was worse and it lasted longer.
"You know what this place is," I said.
"I know what you think it is."
"I've got the form, Kai. Thirty-six months. It's a shell inside a shell and the name at the bottom is a man who—"
"I know."
I stopped.
"You know."
"I'm sober, Wren, I'm not stupid," Kai said. "I've read it. I read it in week two. Bea leaves the office unlocked and I read all of it, because I'm my sister's brother and paperwork is the family business." He almost smiled. "I know exactly what I'd be signing."
"Then why—"
"Because it's still the best offer I've ever had," he said.
"That's the part you can't fix. That's the part none of you can fix.
Vane's version of my life is better than everyone else's version of my life, and it's better by a lot, and I've done the math about eleven hundred times and it doesn't come out any other way. "
"I can give you—"
"You can give me a bunk at your apartment and a job strapping cars and a sister who checks on me." His voice was very gentle. "That's not a life. That's a supervision."
"That's love, Kai."
"It's both," he said. "That's what nobody tells you."
I want to write down exactly what I did next, because I've had to say it out loud in three different rooms since and every time it comes out sounding like something I'm proud of, and I'm not.
I said, "Okay."
And I turned around, and I walked up the hill, and I got in my truck, and I drove out down a mile and a half of beautifully plowed driveway, and I did not stop at the top and I did not look at the woodlot in the mirror, because if I'd looked I'd have turned around, and if I'd turned around I'd have taken him, and if I'd taken him I'd have lost him.
I made it to the county road.
Then I pulled Delores over onto a shoulder in nineteen below with a berm on one side and nothing on the other, and I put the flashers on out of pure professional habit, and I sat there and came apart for about forty minutes.
I don't do that. I have never done that. In eleven years of this job I have handed out probably four hundred tissues and taken zero.
There's a pen in the door pocket. Blue ballpoint. Cheap.
I got it out and I sat there with it in my hand and my sleeve pushed up and I did not write anything, and that's the loneliest thing that has ever happened to me.
One more thing happened at the top of the hill and I nearly didn't write it down.
Marchand was on the steps. Coatless, in that gray sweater, arms folded against nineteen degrees like a woman who'd come out for thirty seconds and meant it.
"That looked hard," she said.
"It was."
"May I say one thing, and then I'll go inside and leave you alone?"
"You're going to anyway."
"I am," she agreed. "Ms. Adeyemi — in eleven years I have watched perhaps two hundred people stand where you're standing, and almost every one of them took the man home.
Almost every one. And I have their outcomes, because I keep them, and they are appalling.
" She said it without any warmth at all, which was the first time.
"You did the rarest thing there is. I'd like you to know that somebody saw you do it. "
And I said thank you.
I said thank you to her, standing on those steps, eleven days before I put a binder together that took her life's work apart, and there is no arranging of the facts that makes that anything other than what it is.
Ash was on the phone when I got back to the cabin.
He was standing at the window in the one corner with a bar, and he had his back to the door, and he was saying: "—four years, Roman. Six men. Out of my cut."
I stopped in the doorway with my hand still on it.
He turned around. He saw my face. And I watched a man decide, in real time, that whatever was on my face was going to have to wait ninety seconds, and then turn back to the window and keep going, which is the only correct thing he could have done and I've never quite forgiven him for how easy it looked.
I heard one side.
"Denny. Ross Papic. Bobby Lutz. Marcus Trill. Guy Ferris. Kai." A pause. "Yes. That Marcus Trill." Longer pause. "Because you'd have put it to a vote."
Then a very long pause, and his shoulders went.
"...No," he said. "No, that's not — Roman, I'm not saying you'd have voted it down."
Pause.
"I'm saying I didn't want to find out."
Pause.
"Yes."
Pause.
"Yes. I know."
He listened for a while. Two, three minutes. He didn't say anything at all, and I stood there in the doorway in a wet coat with my keys still in my hand, and I watched the back of a man's head while he got taken apart by somebody four hundred miles away who wasn't even shouting.
"Sunday," Ash said finally. "I'll be there Sunday. Yeah. Both."
He hung up and set the phone on the sill very carefully, like it might go off.
"He's not angry," Ash said.
"No?"
"He said one thing." He was still facing the window. "He said, four years, and you never once thought this table could be trusted with a man who couldn't get clean. Which one of us do you think that's about?"
I put my keys down.
"That's worse than angry," I said.
"Yeah."
"That's — Ash, that's much worse than angry."
"I'm aware." He turned around then. "You went back up there."
"I did."
"And?"
"He asked me to stop coming."
Ash didn't say anything. He crossed the room and I put my hand up flat against his chest to stop him about eight inches out, because I couldn't have taken it, and he stopped, exactly there, and stayed.
"He knows about the form," I said. "He read it in week two. He knows who Keel Ridge is. He's going to sign it anyway because he ran the numbers and it's the best offer he's ever had and he's right, Ash, that's the thing, he did the math and he came out right."
"Then we change the math."
"That's a bumper sticker."
"It's a plan with a bumper sticker on it," he said. "Wren. Look at me. Did you leave him there?"
"Yes."
"On purpose?"
"Yes."
"Because he asked?"
"Because he asked," I said, and my voice went, and that was the end of the sentence and most of the rest of the day.
He didn't say I did the right thing. I want that noted, because everyone else has said it since — Roman said it, Izzy said it, Birdie said it while handing me a plate — and every single time it's felt like being complimented on an amputation.
What Ash said was: "Okay. That's the hardest thing you've ever done and you did it about four hours ago and you're standing up."
"Barely."
"That counts," he said. "That's the only bar there is."
He made me eat something around six. I want that on the record because it's the only thing anybody did for me that day and I was extremely rude about it.
"I'm not hungry."
"I know."
"Then why is there a plate."
"Because you've been up since four, you've driven ninety miles in nineteen below, you had two cups of coffee and a granola bar, and in about forty minutes you're going to start making decisions." He sat down across from me. "So there's a plate."
"That's manipulative."
"It's chili," said Ash.
"It's the same chili."
"It's a different can of the same chili. Culinarily this is a sequel."
I ate about half of it, and he didn't comment on the half, and that's another thing I'd have had trouble explaining to anyone before that week: that the entire quality of a person can show up in what they decline to mention.
Around nine he said, "Do you want to hear the thing I'd say to you if I were a better man?"
"No."
"Okay."
Three minutes.
"Fine," I said. "What."
"That in about a year you're going to be glad." He was looking at the stove, not me. "Not okay. Glad. Because he asked, and you heard him, and that's the first time in his life anybody's done that — and I know that's worthless tonight, and I'd never say it to you tonight if you hadn't asked twice."
"I asked once."
"You asked twice," Ash said. "The first one was three minutes of silence and a face."
We drove home the next morning.
Nine hours. Ten and a half in Delores. Neither of us said much until somewhere south of Toledo, when he said, "The certification."
"What?"
"Lakeview's licensed. State of Michigan. There's a certificate on the wall in the front hall, next to the fire inspection."
"Yeah."
"I've looked at that wall six times in four years and I've never once read it."
I thought about eleven hundred dollars a month of plowing, and thirty-one people on a payroll, and eleven beds, and a woman who has never asked who owns anything.
"She said she lost a contract once," I said. "By asking."
"She did."
"So she knows the machinery works. She knows exactly how a place like hers gets closed, because she's had it done to her.
" I sat with it another four miles. "Ash, she's the only person up there who could tell us how to take it apart and she'd never do it, because it's her life's work and there's a two-year waiting list and she's not wrong about the sixty-eight percent. "
"No."
"So we do it without her."
"To her," Ash said.
"To her," I agreed. "She'll never forgive us."
"No."
"She'll be right not to."
"Probably."
I passed a Kenworth doing fifty-eight uphill and had opinions about it.
"Good," I said. "Then we know what it costs. I hate doing things when I don't know what they cost."