CHAPTER 15
WREN — Then
Eleven years ago.
I learned what the song meant on a night when I was thirteen, and after that I never again heard music as a harmless thing.
It started as nothing. That’s how the worst things in that house always started, as nothing, as a man being pleasant.
Augustus Frost hummed. He was a hummer the way some men are whistlers, an idle tuneful sound that drifted ahead of him through the cold rooms, and for my first year at Marrowfield it meant nothing to me, was almost a comfort, a way of knowing where in the house he was so I could be somewhere else.
Six notes, always the same six, soft and rocking, the kind of thing you’d sing over a cradle.
Up, and up, and down. I didn’t know yet that Iris had carved those same six notes into the headboard of the bed I slept in.
I’d run my fingers over the little knife-cuts in the dark without understanding them, the way you’d worry a scar that wasn’t yours.
It was another ward who told me. There was a girl that year; I won’t write her name, she’s in Iris’s tin, she’s one of the four, a quiet older girl who’d been in the house longer than me and who caught my wrist one afternoon when Augustus drifted by humming, and held it too tight, and waited until he was gone, and said, very low, not looking at me: “When he hums that one, you bolt your door. You hear it coming up the hall, you put everything you’ve got against the door and you don’t open it for anything.
That’s the deciding song. He only hums it when he’s decided about a girl.
” And then she let go of my wrist and would never speak of it again, and a season later she “left,” the way they all left, the way the whole county let them leave, and she became a name in a dead girl’s pencil, and I understood that she had spent one of her last warnings on me.
The deciding song.
After that I couldn’t un-hear it. The pretty idle tune became the worst sound in the world, because now I knew it wasn’t idle at all, it was a verdict being hummed, a sentence walking around the house on a man’s breath, and the not-knowing-who curdled every note.
He’d hum it over breakfast and four girls’ worth of us would go still at the table, each of us doing the math, is it me, is it her, who did he decide about, while he buttered his toast and smiled his church smile and let us wonder.
That was part of it. He liked the wondering.
A man who collects girls nobody will miss has all the time in the world, and he spent it the way a cat spends a mouse.
The night I was thirteen, the song came up the hall in the dark, and it was slow, and it stopped outside my door.
I have been afraid many times in my life.
I was never, before or since, as afraid as I was lying in Iris’s bed at thirteen with my fingers in her knife-cuts and the deciding song right outside the door, humming, patient, and the bolt, the bolt I’d thrown the way the lost girl taught me, the only thing in the world between me and a man who had decided something.
The notes came through the wood soft as snowfall.
Up, and up, and down. Over and over. He didn’t knock.
He didn’t try the handle. He just stood on the other side of an inch of door and hummed his verdict at me, letting me hear it, letting me understand that he could wait, that he was patient, that the door and the bolt were a courtesy he was extending and could withdraw.
And I did the only thing I had. I turned and I knocked, once, on the wall behind the headboard, on Iris’s carving, into the dark of the next room — he’s here. The song. Make him come through you first.
And three slow knocks came back through the plaster, instant, certain, a boy who didn’t sleep answering before the sound of mine had finished: I’m awake. I’m here. He comes through me.
And then. I’ll never know exactly what Lazarus did, whether he made a sound, whether he simply turned on his lamp so the light showed under the connecting door, whether his father could feel him being awake the way I could, the humming stopped.
The footsteps moved off down the hall. The deciding, that night, got undecided, or postponed, or turned toward an empty room, because there was a sleepless seventeen-year-old on the other side of the wall who would not, would not, would not let the song arrive.
That’s the night I understood the whole architecture of my survival, and the whole architecture of him.
Augustus had a song for deciding. And Lazarus had made himself into the one thing that could interrupt a decision: a witness who never slept.
As long as one Frost son stayed awake against the wall, the other man’s father couldn’t finish a single verdict in the dark, because even Augustus, even that smiling church-cold man, did not want a son to be able to say I heard you in the hall that night.
The monster needed the dark and the quiet and the believing-it-never-happened.
Lazarus took away the quiet. For six years, knock by knock, he took away the quiet.
And in the morning I understood the headboard.
I’d thought Iris carved the song there because she loved it, a little girl’s keepsake of a lullaby.
I lay in her bed in the gray light and I put my fingers in the cuts and I finally understood what they really were.
She hadn’t carved a lullaby. She’d carved the deciding song, the exact notes, in order, where the next girl’s head would lie, so that whoever came after her would have it, would recognize it, would know the sound to be afraid of.
It wasn’t a keepsake. It was a warning, knifed into the wood by a doomed child for a child she’d never meet.
This is the sound. When you hear this, run.
Iris counted the lost girls in a tin and she carved the murder weapon into the bed for the next one, because that’s what she was, the one thing she could be in that house: the witness.
The keeper. The refuser to let it happen quietly.
I traced her warning every night for five more years.
And when it all finally burned, the one thing Lazarus carried out of the fire, the one small thing he saved while a house full of evidence went up, was a little brass music box that played those same six notes, because his father had owned one, because the song lived in a wind-up drum as well as in a man’s throat, and Lazarus could not stand to let the last copy of his sister’s stolen lullaby burn even though it was the worst sound either of us knew.
That’s the box on my coat right now, six years later, as I write this. The deciding song, in brass, that I have learned to wind with my own hand.
I think about that a great deal. About the difference between a song that’s hummed at you and a song you wind yourself.
About the fact that the same six notes that were a man’s verdict over a child can become, if you take the key in your own fingers, just a sound.
Just a sad pretty sound a dead girl loved before she knew to be afraid of it.
I don’t know yet, writing this, whether I’ll ever make it mean the second thing.
But I know I’m done letting it only mean the first.