Chapter 4 #2
I heard the edges of it. I filled in the rest. I had always been good at reading the spaces between words where the real meaning lived.
Pop had taught me that, without meaning to, just by being the kind of man who said exactly what he meant and expected you to hear exactly what was said.
Nana had been different, her words layered with other words, but I had learned her too, the way you learn the people you love, until you can translate them without effort.
The story had settled into the town's permanent landscape.
I could feel it, the way you feel weather coming, a pressure in the air that hasn't yet become rain.
I was no longer Elias Quinn, Pop and Nana's grandson, the quiet Omega who made good bread and had been courted by the Steele Pack.
I was the tragedy people told at dinner parties, the cautionary tale, the damaged goods that even a good pack had declined.
I was the reason other parents gave when they warned their children about the dangers of the road, the example cited when discussing the precariousness of courtships, the sad case that proved the importance of compatibility in all its forms.
I walked through it like I was walking through water.
Everything slower. Everything requiring more effort, more intention, the simple act of buying milk becoming a navigation of eyes and silences and the weight of being seen as something broken.
I came back to Vera's house each evening with cold hands and a face that felt stiff from the wind and the effort of not reacting, of keeping my expression blank, my shoulders down, my pace unhurried.
I went to my room and closed the door and did not come out again until morning, when the cycle started over.
Vera tried. She brought home books from the library she thought I might like, mysteries mostly, stories with solutions that arrived at the end, order restored, everything explained.
She mentioned a support group for Omegas who had experienced loss, once, carefully, her voice pitched to sound casual, and did not mention it again when I didn't respond, just nodded and changed the subject to what she had planned for dinner.
She sat with me in the evenings when Trent was working late, not filling the silence with chatter, just present, her knitting needles clicking in a rhythm that became familiar, almost comforting in its predictability.
It was not enough.
I knew it and she knew it and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
She could not give me back what I had lost. She could not make Maren stop whispering.
She could not make Trent's resentment disappear or my body work the way it was supposed to or the Steele Pack's rejection un-happen.
She could only sit in the same room and knit and occasionally offer me tea, and I could only accept these offerings with gratitude that felt distant and inadequate, and we both pretended this was what recovery looked like.
"You don't have to decide anything yet," she said one night, six weeks after the rejection, the television on without either of us watching it, some drama playing out in colors too bright for the grey mood of the room.
We were on her couch, me at one end, her at the other, a space between us that felt necessary.
"About the house. About school. About anything. You have time."
I was eighteen. I had been eighteen for two months. The age I was supposed to turn with a pack's interest formalized, with a future taking shape, with the first real steps toward the life I had always understood was waiting for me.
Instead I was in my aunt's guest room with a sealed plastic bag in my nightstand and a body that didn't work the way it was supposed to and a town that had already finished discussing me, filed me away under tragedy, moved on to the next story.
"I know," I said, and my voice came out even, controlled, the way I had learned to make it.
But I was counting days.
I had been counting them since the hospital, since the pale cream chair and the word in its box, since the December dark and the sound that had no name.
I knew exactly how long I had been in Maren since the accident.
I knew how long since the rejection. I was marking time toward something I couldn't yet name, only feel as a growing pressure behind my ribs, an insistence that was slowly becoming impossible to ignore.
I could not stay here. That much was clear.
Every day in Vera's house, in this town, I was becoming smaller.
More still. More the story people told than the person living inside it.
I could feel myself fading, the way colors fade in sunlight, gradual enough that you don't notice until you hold something new beside something old and see the difference.
But leaving required something I didn't have yet.
Energy. Direction. A place to go. The house on Carver Road was mine but I couldn't live there, not yet, maybe not ever.
The weight of Pop's tools in the garage and Nana's kitchen filled with memories and the third stair that creaked and the particular way the afternoon light came through the back windows in December, all of it waiting like a held breath I wasn't ready to exhale.
So I waited.
I walked the long routes, the ones that kept me away from the center of town, from Clement Street and the park and all the places where I had been happy in ways I couldn't reclaim.
I kept my face blank and my responses brief and my hands in my pockets against the cold.
I let Maren's gossip flow around me like water, like everything else that was cold and persistent and would eventually pass, would find new subjects, would forget me in the way that towns forget their tragedies once enough time has passed and enough new stories have arrived to replace them.
I told myself I was surviving. It was the only thing I had left to believe.