CHAPTER 18
WREN — Then
Nine years ago.
Between twelve and eighteen there was the wall, and there were the three knocks, and there was the slow education of learning that one person in the world had decided I was worth standing in front of.
I want to put down, before I get to the ignition and the fire and everything that burned, what those years were actually made of, because the court never asked, and the town never knew, and even Lazarus, who lived them on the other side of the plaster, only ever heard his half.
Somebody should keep the record straight.
He kept me alive for six years before he ever touched me.
That’s the part that matters. That’s the part I buried under a grey dress.
The three knocks were our whole language.
We almost never spoke through the wall, speaking left evidence, and Marrowfield had ears, we both knew it had ears though we didn’t yet know how literally, so we built a grammar out of knuckles on plaster.
Three slow knocks from his side: I’m here.
I’m awake. Two quick from mine: I’m all right.
One, alone, late, when the footsteps came up the hall and stopped outside my door and the bolt was the only thing between me and the soft church voice on the other side, one knock from me, and three slow ones back, every time, without fail, for six years: Make him come through me first.
And the footsteps would move on. Always. As long as Lazarus was awake on the other side of the wall, and he was always awake, that was the terrible gift of what was wrong with him, the footsteps moved on.
The night I was fifteen, they didn’t.
It was snowing. It’s always snowing. Augustus had been into the decanter all evening, and there’s a particular quality to a drunk man’s footsteps, a deliberateness, the walk of someone who has decided something and is going to be reasonable about it, and I lay in the dark with my hand flat on the wall and heard them come up the hall and not slow down, not even pretend to pass, come straight to my door and try the handle.
The bolt held. I’d thrown the bolt, the high one, the one he forgot when he was sober and remembered when he wasn’t. I knocked once on the wall, hard.
There were no knocks back.
For the length of one heartbeat the whole world was the bolt rattling and the silence where Lazarus should have answered, and I understood, fifteen years old, in a dead girl’s bed, with the handle turning, that the one rule of my survival had a flaw in it.
He had to be awake. And even a man who doesn’t sleep, sometimes, after years, just for an hour, when his body finally mutinies —
The door across the hall opened.
I heard it the way you hear your own name in a crowd. Lazarus’s bare feet on the cold boards, fast, and then his voice, low and even and absolutely without fear, the voice he’d use six years later over my pulse in the dark: “Father.” Just that. And the handle of my door stopped turning.
I won’t write what happened in the hall.
I didn’t see it; I only heard it, with my back against the bolted door and both hands over my mouth, the low exchange, the sounds, the particular awful music of a large man deciding to spend his violence on the son who’d put himself in the doorway instead of the girl behind it.
It went on a while. Augustus Frost was a coward, but cowards are brave with the things that let them be brave, and a twenty-year-old who won’t raise a hand back is exactly the kind of thing a coward can be brave with.
When it stopped, when the footsteps finally went away down the hall, slower now, sated, a man who’d had his evening.
I unthrew the bolt with shaking hands and I opened my door and Lazarus was sitting on the floor of the hall with his back against the wall and his face wrong in the dark, and he looked up at me and he smiled, he actually smiled, blood on his teeth, and he said the thing I have never told another living soul, the thing that built the next nine years of my life:
“See? Told you. It goes through me first.”
I got him into my room. I bolted the door.
I sat him on the floor of a dead girl’s bedroom and I cleaned his face with the hem of a dead girl’s nightgown and water from the jug, and he let me, this enormous quiet boy who never let anyone do anything for him, he let me hold his ruined face in my hands and tend it, and somewhere in the middle of it the thing between us became the thing it would always be, not romance, not then, we were children and he was careful to the bone, but something underneath romance, something older, the thing that romance is supposed to be built on top of and almost never is.
I will stand in the doorway. You will clean my face.
Neither of us will ever be entirely alone in the dark again.
“Why does he,” I started, and couldn’t finish. “Lazarus. What does he want. With me. Why did he pick a girl who looks like —”
“Don’t.” His hand came up and stopped mine on his cheek, gentle, final.
“Don’t go looking in the east wing for the answer to that.
Some doors, once you open them, you can’t get back to the other side of.
” His eyes in the dark were very old. “He had a daughter. She had your face. She stopped being twelve, and then she stopped being anything, and there have been others, before you, after her, girls who came to this house and then ‘ran away,’ and the running away is the part he likes to be believed.” He pressed my hand flat against his jaw, against the proof of what he’d just taken for me.
“I can’t get you out yet. I’ve tried. There’s nowhere a fifteen-year-old ward of a man like him can go that he can’t reach.
But I can do this. I can be the wall. I can be awake.
And the day you turn eighteen and he can’t hold you as a ward anymore, I am going to take you out of here so fast and so far that this house will be a thing that happened to two other people.
” He almost smiled again, and didn’t, because it hurt.
“Three more years, little lamb. Just survive him three more years, and stand on your side of the wall, and I’ll stand on mine. Can you do three years?”
I did three years.
I did three years of the wall and the bolt and the three knocks, three years of cleaning his face when he wouldn’t let me out of it, three years of watching this boy turn himself, deliberately, into something large enough that a coward eventually stopped being brave around it, by the time I was seventeen the footsteps didn’t come up the hall at all anymore, because Lazarus had made himself into a thing Augustus Frost was, at last, afraid of.
Three years of being kept alive by someone who asked for nothing, wanted nothing, took nothing, who built his whole self into a doorway and stood in it.
And then I turned eighteen, and Augustus stood up at dinner with his white teeth and his soft church voice and announced that now that I was grown, now that I was finished, I’d be moving my things into the east wing —
— and three years of patience and protection and a boy turning himself into a wall came down to one snowing night, and a music box winding itself up in the dark, and the worst and only true choices either of us would ever make.
But that’s the next part. That’s the part everyone thinks they know.
This is the part I needed to set down first: that before there was a monster on a witness stand, there was a boy in a hallway with blood on his teeth, smiling, saying it goes through me first.
I sent that boy to prison.
I’d like the record to show I knew exactly what I was burying.