Chapter 6 #3
The cabin looked exactly the way I had left it less than an hour ago. The face-down paper on the table. The colouring pencils in their sleeve, arranged warm to cool. The scanner muttering. The bed with its military corners.
I set the shoebox on the table. Harder than I meant to. The cardboard thumped against the wood and the tape on the lid flexed and I adjusted my grip and took my hand off it and stepped back.
The bag came off my shoulder. I dropped it by the chair.
“I’m still leaving.”
The words came out tight and fast, before he had finished taking his jacket off.
I said them to the space between his shoulder and the door, because I couldn’t say them to his face.
My hands were at my sides and I could feel them wanting to fold across my chest, which was a defensive posture, which was a tell, so I kept them down.
“You can drive me back here but you can’t keep me here.
I signed a paper. Papers get unsigned. I‘m twenty-four years old and I can walk out of any door I want to walk out of and you said so yourself, the first night, you said I could leave whenever I liked, and I am exercising that, and the fact that you drove around the mountain to cut me off doesn’t change—“
He hung his jacket on the hook by the door.
“—doesn’t change the substance of it. You said I could leave. I’m leaving.”
He crossed to the wooden chair by the scanner — my chair, the one I had slept in the first night — and sat down.
Slow. His right knee still stiff from the porch steps, though the swelling had gone down over the week.
He settled his weight, put his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers loosely between them, and looked at me.
He didn’t say anything.
“I have a plan.” My voice was louder than I wanted it to be.
“I have a place to sleep tonight. Hector Briggs. I have savings. I have a credit union in Pueblo. I have done this before — moved towns, started over, I have done it so many times it’s routine.
It is a routine. For me. It’s not some big dramatic thing, it’s just what I do when a situation stops working.
The situation here has stopped working.”
He watched me.
“The Diablos are a solvable problem. I‘ll go outside the corridor. I’ll go east. I don’t need — I don’t require — “
I heard my own voice.
It was doing a thing. A thing I had never heard it do before, or had heard it do once, a long time ago, in a room I didn’t have a clean memory for.
It was climbing. The register was wrong.
The sentences were getting shorter and the breath between them shallower, and the argument — the argument I had been rehearsing on the walk down the mountain, the clean practical argument with its clean practical columns — was coming out of my mouth and sounding, in my own ears, like a child reciting something she had memorized and didn’t entirely believe.
I stopped.
The silence came in and sat down beside his silence, and the two silences together were larger than the cabin.
My hands had come up to my chest without my permission. I made them go back down.
“I got scared,” I said.
It came out quieter. Flat. The tone of a person reading a line off a page.
He didn’t move.
“I got scared because — “
The sentence jammed. I had to push through it.
“Because something is happening. In me. That I can’t — I don’t have a handle on it.
I don’t know what it is. It doesn’t have edges I can find.
I had edges. I had a whole — a whole shape of myself, a thing I built, it took me a long time to build it, and in here” — I gestured at the cabin, at the scanner, at the bed, at nothing — “in here it’s getting soft.
The edges. They’re blurring. I can feel them blurring. I drew a picture, Dante.”
He did not ask what picture.
“I drew a picture and I wrote two words underneath it and the words were — “
My throat closed. I swallowed. Opened it again.
“The words were things I have not said to anyone in my life. I wouldn’t have said them to myself.
I wrote them down and then I scribbled them out and then I packed a bag because a woman who writes those words on a piece of paper in a cabin in the mountains is not a woman I recognize and I don’t — I can’t — “
I was crying.
Not the way a person cries. The way a person who has not cried in thirteen years starts to cry — which is not crying at all, which is just eyes going wet without any of the other machinery engaging, a pressure building behind the face that the face didn’t have the rigging to release. I blinked hard. The wetness stayed.
“I left because I was afraid of growing weak.”
I said it to the scanner. To the air between us. To the wooden floor.
“That’s the whole of it. I was afraid of growing weak.
Every day in here I have been becoming something smaller and softer and more dependent and I can watch it happen and I cannot stop it and if I don’t leave now I won’t be able to leave later.
The leaving muscle atrophies. I know it does.
I’ve seen it in other women. I’ve seen it in every woman who stayed somewhere she shouldn’t have stayed.
I’m not — I’m not going to be one of those women.
I am not going to wake up in six months and find out I can’t move. ”
My chest was heaving. I could hear it.
He hadn’t moved.
“Sadie.”
He said my name. Once. Quiet. Not a correction. Not an interruption. Just the name, placed in the air.
My eyes burned.
I looked at him.
He was in the chair. Hands loose between his knees.
Face level, unreadable, giving back the same steady dark attention he had been giving me since the parking lot.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look disappointed.
He looked like a man who had heard what I said and was now, slowly, calibrating what to do with it.
“Come here,” he said.
I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. It came away wet and I stared at the wet on my palm like I didn’t know whose it was.
I stepped forward.
One step. Then another. My boots on the floorboards sounded too loud. I stopped in front of the chair, close enough that I could see the grey at his temples and the weave of his shirt and the small scar on his jaw I hadn’t catalogued yet.
“You’re not leaving,” he said. Still quiet. “You knew that before I got out of the truck. That’s why you stopped in the road.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“We have a contract,” he said. “It has rules in it, Sadie. There are rules for this.”
My eyes burned harder.
“I know,” I whispered.
“Rule nine,” he said.
I didn’t remember a rule nine.
“Consequence structure,” he said. “For broken rules. You signed it.”
My mouth was dry. “I didn’t break a rule.”
“You tried to leave without saying. That’s rule eleven. Tell me when you’re scared. You were scared and you packed a bag instead of telling me, and rule nine says what happens when you don’t tell me.”
He watched me take the sentence apart and find nothing in it to argue with.
“I’m going to put you over my knee,” he said.
The words hit the air between us and stayed there.
I had been threatened with a spanking exactly four times in my life.
Three different foster homes, one group home, the same phrase in four different women’s mouths, and not one of them had ever followed through, because following through required a kind of attention I was never worth, and the threat had always come and gone like weather.
I had gone to bed in each of those houses with my face hot and my chest tight, half terrified of a thing that would never happen and half obscurely bereft that it wouldn’t, though I had not had the language then for the bereavement and would not have named it if I had.
I had never been spanked.
I stood in front of his chair with my eyes wet and my jaw locked and said nothing.
“I need you to say yes or no, Sadie.”
I opened my mouth.
“Yes,” I said, voice cracking.
It came out as a whisper. He nodded. He stood up — slow, the knee — and moved to the bed and sat on the edge of it, feet planted, knees apart. He held out his hand.
I went.
My body went. My brain was several steps behind, still running arguments that had gone slack, still producing the observational phrasing it produced under pressure — his hand is warm, the bed is lower than I remembered, his right knee is still stiff — while the rest of me crossed the three feet of floor and took the hand he offered and let him guide me down.
He did it carefully. He arranged me across his lap with the same precision he brought to everything — my hips over his thigh, my weight balanced, one of his hands flat on the small of my back to anchor me.
I could feel the solid muscle of his leg under my stomach.
I could feel my boots still on, toes just brushing the floor, the absurd practical detail that nobody had taken my boots off.
He unbuttoned my jeans.
His hand was steady. He worked the button one-handed, then the zip, and slid the denim down to the backs of my thighs, and then my underwear with it, and the cool air of the cabin hit my bare skin and I made a small sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
“Breathe,” he said.
I breathed.
His palm settled on my bottom. Not a strike.
Just his hand, resting, warm, the weight of it firm against skin that had never been touched by anyone in this specific way.
He held it there long enough that my breathing slowed.
Long enough that my shoulders came down half an inch from where they had climbed up toward my ears.
Then he lifted his hand and brought it down.
The sound came first. A flat clean clap in the quiet of the cabin. The sting came a half-second after, spreading across the right cheek of my bottom, sharp and hot and more specific than any pain I had catalogued. My hips jerked. His hand on my back steadied me.
“Count for me, sweetheart,” he said.
The endearment landed in the middle of me like a small warm stone.
“One,” I said, finding the act of counting for him oddly reassuring. Counting, for me, was home, after all.
He did it again. Left side this time. Matched. My breath caught.
“Two.”
It was not what I had braced for. There was nothing cruel in it.
Nothing performed, nothing for show. His hand was measured and the strikes were measured and between each one he paused, palm resting, letting me feel it, letting me come back to the breath, and I understood in some wordless animal way that this was not punishment in the sense I had been threatened with as a child.
It was not someone taking something out on me. It was someone putting something in.
I counted to eight.
I don’t remember starting to cry. I had been crying before we began — the eyes wet, the pressure behind the face — and somewhere between four and five it stopped being the not-crying I had done for thirteen years and became something else.
The rigging engaged. The face went, then the chest. A sob broke out of me that I had not authorised and could not take back.
“Good girl,” he said.
That was when I broke.
The word landed and whatever had been holding me together — the wall, the fortress, the twenty-four years of straight backs and tight jaws and asking for nothing — came apart from the inside.
Not a crack. A collapse. I was sobbing before I had decided to sob, my whole body shaking over his lap, and he was already lifting me, already gathering me up, already turning me in his arms and pulling me into his chest, and I went.
I went the way six-year-olds go.
I buried my face against the side of his neck and I cried.
Cried the way I had not cried since a house in Pueblo with a woman whose face I no longer had, cried the way children cry when they have not yet learned that nobody is coming, which is a completeness of crying that adults lose access to.
My fists were in his shirt. His arms were around me.
His hand moved in slow circles between my shoulder blades, firm and steady, a pattern that repeated and repeated and did not stop.
“Sadie,” he said, once, into my hair. “You’re safe. You’re safe and you’re strong.”
I believed him.
That was the thing that did it. That was the thing that made the crying go deeper, down into a place I had not known existed, because I had spent my entire life with the bedrock assumption that the word safe was a lie people told to make children easier to manage.
And here in this cabin with my bottom stinging and my jeans around my thighs and my face wet against a man’s shoulder, I believed him, and the believing was a kind of grief for every time I had not been able to believe it before.
I cried until I was empty.
I cried until there was nothing left to give the crying, and then I stopped, and then I lay against his chest breathing in small uneven breaths while his hand kept circling my back.
My face was wet. My nose was running. I didn’t care.
Somewhere in there he had pulled my underwear and my jeans back up and done up the button, and I hadn’t felt him do it, which told me something about how far I had gone.
I was sideways in his lap. My head on his chest. My legs across his good thigh. I felt like a thing that had been wrung out and hung in the sun.
He was very still.
I felt him go still before I registered why. His hand paused between my shoulder blades. His chin had turned, and his eyes were fixed on something past me. I followed them.
The table.
The face-down paper.
He reached past me, his arm going over my shoulder, and lifted the paper off the table. Turned it over. Set it flat on the bed beside us, where we could both see.
The stickman. The smaller stickman. The lopsided heart.
The dense black smear under the heart, where the two words used to be.
He looked at it for a long time.
I could feel his chest rising and falling under my cheek. Slow. Even.
“You drew this before you ran,” he said.
I nodded against his shirt.
“Which means some part of you already knew.”
I closed my eyes.
His hand came up to the back of my head. Cradled it. Held me against him the way you hold something precious.
“You’re brave, Sadie.” His voice was low, certain, placed in my ear with the same care he placed everything. “You ran and you stopped. That’s the bravest thing I’ve seen in a long time. And you’re close. You‘re so close to being ready for me.”
I pressed my face into his shoulder.
I held on.