Chapter Ten. Rory
Rory
It happened two days later. A bruise-purple sunset, Daye stretched out in her bed, her hand in his. Her chest rising once, twice, the whistle of air past lips, then nothing at all.
Rory closed all the windows. Wrapped Daye in a blanket so that none of her could fall from the bed, and waited.
He felt hollowed out. He knew he should be panicking, crying, doing something, but all he felt was this static, brittle stillness.
It reminded him of that time last winter when a glass shattered in his hand—that suspended moment between solidness and giving way, between cool glass and scalding water.
That second, when his skin was still whole, before everything was glass shards and blood.
He couldn’t bring himself to sleep in the bed next to Daye, not with leaf dust slowly collecting on the sheets, trickling down to the floorboards.
But he couldn’t keep away from her, either.
He kept imagining Mrs. Matthews entering their room to clean, despite her promise not to; throwing the bedding into the laundry with Daye still crumpled inside it while Rory was in the other room, fast asleep.
These images chased Rory out of sleep every time he closed his eyes.
He started sleeping in the hallway, in a nest of blankets, his back to their door. After a few days, he didn’t even notice how hard the floor was.
Wynne came home in the second week of October, ten days after Daye stopped breathing.
Rory was sitting at the bottom of the stairs.
It felt like he had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs all his life.
Like he’d be sitting there forever. Like this was his existence now: waiting for the door to open.
“Oh, Rory. Sweetheart,” Wynne said when she saw his red-rimmed eyes, the blue bruises under them, the hollow way they looked at her. She dropped her bags by the door and gathered him in her arms, flinching when he looked up at her, lips cracked and cheekbones jutting like wings.
“Teach me,” he said, voice rasping after days of disuse. “I need you to teach me how to fix Daye.”
They stared at each other for a minute. Wynne’s gaze seemed to be assessing him, searching his face for something. Rory looked back, not even entertaining the possibility that fixing wasn’t possible.
“All right,” Wynne said, uncharacteristically gentle.
“All right,” Rory echoed. “Okay.”