Chapter 5 #3
Clover was propped against the pillow where I had left her. Her head on the linen, her small grey body still in the morning light. The two buttons on her face — the old black one, the new brown one — looked back at me.
Not literally. I am not a woman who believes stuffed animals look.
But in the specific way that a thing you have loved for a long time can seem to be aware of you — in the peripheral, in the weight of it, in the small animal part of the brain that doesn’t know the difference between a toy and a person when the toy has been carrying your fear for you for twenty years.
I felt the hinge in my chest turn another notch.
I looked down at the page.
Across the top, between our names and the first rule, there was a small blank space where I was supposed to sign.
Below the rules, a second blank space where he would sign after.
A pen lay beside the page — his pen, the one he used for the maps, black ink, the cap tucked neatly at the top of the barrel.
I looked at the pen.
I looked at Clover.
I looked at the line that said No shame attached.
***
The pen was surprisingly heavy.
I positioned it over the blank space above my printed name and my hand started to shake.
My knuckles had gone white around the barrel. The nib hovered half an inch above the paper and refused to descend.
His hand came across the table.
He didn’t take the pen from me. He didn’t reach for my wrist or my fingers or any part of the grip. He simply laid his hand over the back of mine. Large, warm, dry. Palm flat across my knuckles, fingers settled along the sides of my hand, his thumb resting on the bone at the base of my own thumb.
He held.
“You aren’t giving anything up,” he said. Quiet. Right over the top of the paper, so close I could feel his breath on my forearm. “You’re choosing something. That’s all. It‘s a choice, Sadie. That‘s the only thing a signature can be.”
My hand was still shaking under his.
I thought of the six-year-old me.
I hadn’t thought of her in years — had not permitted her, had kept her in the shoebox with the photos and the report cards and the button-eyed rabbit.
She surfaced now uninvited. Standing in a doorway somewhere in Pueblo, in a coat that was too big, with Clover in one hand and a grocery bag of her other belongings in the other.
Clover had already been missing the one eye by then.
The rabbit had come to me like that, from somewhere earlier, a place before Pueblo, a place I didn’t have a clean memory for.
The six-year-old had stood in the doorway and a woman she’d never met had crouched in front of her and said something kind and the six-year-old had filed the kindness away and decided, quickly, quietly, without anyone helping her, that the way to stay was to not need anything.
It had been a good decision. The decision had kept her.
It had also kept her alone in every room she had ever been in since.
I pressed the pen to the paper.
My signature came out the way my signature always came out — small, tight, the letters crammed close together. Sadie Voss. The ink was black and the paper was white and the space it filled was exactly the size of the space he’d left for it.
I sat back. My hand was still shaking slightly. He released it.
He took the pen from me. Not quickly. With the same care he had used to hold my hand, he picked it up out of my fingers and rotated the page a quarter turn and signed beneath my name.
Dante Rowe. His signature was larger than mine, more assured, the loops clean and unhurried.
He capped the pen. He set it down. He squared the page on the table with his fingertips, aligning it to the edge of the wood, and then he opened the folder beside him and took out a second copy — identical, already printed, waiting.
He slid it across.
“Yours,” he said.
I took it with both hands.
I folded it once, in half, and then once more, into quarters.
The creases were sharp. My hands had stopped shaking.
I got up from the table — my knees were not entirely cooperative, but they held — and crossed to the corner where my small canvas bag sat against the wall.
I unzipped the front pocket and slid the folded page inside and zipped the pocket closed.
Then I stood.
The cabin was very quiet behind me. I could feel him at the table, still, watching without watching — attention on me but not pressing, not waiting for a next move, not needing me to do anything in particular.
I turned.
The bed was across the room. Four strides. I took them.
Clover was where I had left her against the pillow. I picked her up.
I did not tuck her into my shirt. I did not angle my body to hide her.
I did not carry her down to the bed and wedge her under the covers, and I did not push her back into the shoebox under the frame.
I picked her up and I stood there in the middle of the cabin, in broad daylight, with the morning light coming through the window at an angle, and I held her against my chest.
I looked up.
He was at the table. Hands folded again. Looking at me with the same level attention he had been paying me since the parking lot.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t smile in any way I could measure, didn’t nod, didn’t approve. He simply registered me standing in the middle of his cabin holding a one-pound stuffed rabbit in daylight, and he let the moment be exactly what it was without asking it to be more.
I held Clover for a long time.
Long enough that the muscles in my shoulders began to loosen. Long enough that the breath I hadn’t known I was holding let itself out in a quiet exhalation that I didn’t perform for him or for anyone. Long enough that the hinge in my chest completed one slow quarter-turn more.
I found my voice.
“Do you think it‘s strange?” I asked. “The way I am?”
It came out smaller than I had intended. Smaller than anything I had ever said to him. A voice I had not used in this cabin and maybe not in this decade, a voice that belonged to the six-year-old in the doorway, and I heard it and didn’t correct it.
He took his time before he answered.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s strange.”
I waited.
“I think you’ve been carrying something alone for a very long time,” he said.
“Longer than most people are asked to carry anything. And I think the fact that you‘ve carried it this well is the thing that makes you the person you are. But you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. That’s the only thing that‘s changing. The thing itself — the thing you’ve been holding — it gets to be held for a while. By both of us. Starting now.”
I held Clover tighter.
I didn’t cry. Crying was the thing I had stopped doing at eleven years old and the habit had outlasted every other habit I had tried to break.
My eyes burned and my chest was tight and somewhere behind my sternum, something was unfolding that had been folded for so long that unfolding it hurt in places I hadn’t known could hurt.
But I didn’t cry.
I just stood in the middle of the cabin with my rabbit pressed against my collarbone, in the grey-gold light of a mountain morning after rain, and I let him see me hold her.
He let me be seen.
That was the whole of it. That was the beginning.