CHAPTER 19
WREN — Then
Eight years ago.
There was one good day. I should put it down, because it’s the one nobody ever asks about, and because it’s the day I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to get back to, and because if you only ever hear about the wall and the bolt and the blood you’ll think we were only ever survival, and we weren’t.
For one stolen afternoon, when I was sixteen, we were almost something else.
We were almost the people we’d have been in a different house.
Augustus was away. He went away sometimes — “business,” he called it, in the soft church voice, and I learned years too late not to wonder what business a man like that did in other towns, with other files, looking for other girls the right shape, and when he was gone the whole house seemed to exhale, the radiators ticked easier, the shadows lay flatter, and you could walk down the middle of a hallway instead of along the wall.
Silas was off being Silas somewhere, practicing.
And then it snowed, the way it always snows in the parts of my life that matter, and it snowed so hard the power went out and the pass closed, and for one whole day there was no Augustus and no school and no electricity and nowhere in the world anyone could be, and it was just the two of us, sealed into a cold enormous house with the snow coming down past every window like the inside of a globe somebody’d shaken.
We spent it in the kitchen, because the old range ran on gas and it was the only warm room.
Lazarus was twenty-one and he had become, by then, the wall, quiet, watchful, too still, a young man already wearing the weight of a doorway, and I watched the house let go of him too, that day, an hour at a time.
He found candles. He found, in a back pantry nobody used, a windup gramophone that had been his grandmother’s, and a stack of brittle records, and he cranked it by hand because the power was out, and the kitchen filled up with some crackling old song from before either of us was born, and he stood there listening to it with an expression I’d never seen on him, something young, something almost unguarded, and I realized I had never once, in four years, heard music in that house.
“Iris liked this one,” he said. Not sad, exactly.
Just true. He almost never said her name.
“She used to make me dance to it. I was terrible. I’m still terrible.
” And then; I will never forget this, I’ve kept it like a coal in both hands for eight years, this enormous quiet boy who turned aside his father’s violence with his own body, who never asked for a single thing, held out his hand to me across the candlelit kitchen and said, “Come on. She’d be insulted if nobody danced. ”
I didn’t know how. He didn’t either, not really.
We were both terrible. We shuffled around the cold flagstones in our socks, his hand careful at my back like I was something that might break, both of us laughing.
I heard him laugh, that day, an actual laugh, rusty, like a door that hadn’t been opened in years, and the gramophone wound down and he cranked it again and we kept on, and the snow kept falling, and for the length of three brittle songs there was no east wing, no bolt, no lullaby, no measuring buyer’s eyes, no dead girl whose face I wore.
There was just a boy who’d never been allowed to be one, and a girl who’d never been allowed to be safe, dancing badly in a kitchen at the end of the world.
He told me things that day he never told me again.
That he’d wanted, when he was small, before he understood what the house was, to build things, bridges, he said, real ones, he liked how a bridge was just a way of refusing to let a gap win.
That he didn’t sleep because the silence in his own head was too loud and the only thing that ever turned it down was, and he stopped, and looked at me across the candle, and didn’t finish it, and I was sixteen and didn’t understand yet that I was the end of that sentence.
That he had a plan. Two more years, he said.
When I turned eighteen and Augustus couldn’t hold me, he’d take us both somewhere with no snow in it, somewhere warm and loud and full of strangers who didn’t know our names, and he’d build bridges and I could do whatever I wanted, anything, the whole point was that it would be mine to want.
“What would you want?” he asked me. “If you could want anything.”
I’d never been asked. Not once, in sixteen years. I had to think about it so long he laughed again.
“Animals,” I said finally. “Something small and broken that needs me. I think I’d be good at that. Keeping a thing alive that everyone else gave up on.”
He looked at me for a long moment in the candlelight, and something moved behind his face. I know now what it was, I didn’t then, and he said, very quietly, “Yeah. You would. You’re the best I’ve ever seen at it.”
And I didn’t understand that he meant himself.
The power came back at dusk. The lights stuttered on all at once and the gramophone died mid-note and the radiators banged and the house came back to being the house, and through the kitchen window, far down the white pass, two headlights turned in at the bottom of the drive and began, slowly, patiently, to climb.
Augustus, home.
I watched Lazarus change back. I watched the doorway come down over the boy, watched the stillness return, watched him blow out the candles one by one and set the gramophone needle back exactly where it had been so no one would know we’d touched it, erasing the evidence of the one good day the way we erased everything, and by the time the front door opened he was the wall again, and I was the stray in the dead girl’s room, and the borrowed afternoon folded itself up small and went wherever the good things go in houses like that.
But I kept it. I kept it through everything, through eighteen, through the fire, through the grey dress, through six years of a life I built specifically so that it would have a small broken thing in it that needed me.
A sanctuary full of strays. I think I’d be good at that.
I built the wanting he gave me, that day, in a kitchen, by candlelight, and I never once let myself remember where it came from, because remembering where it came from meant remembering him, and remembering him meant the debt, and the debt was the one thing I’d burn the world not to feel.
That’s the day I’ve never told anyone about.
That’s the day I think we were both really fighting for, at eighteen, when the wall finally came down, not the bed, not the want, though those were real. We were trying to get back to a candlelit kitchen and three brittle songs and a future with no snow in it.
We never did get back to it.
But I want it on the record that it existed.
That before he was a monster I built and a wolf they freed and a man with blood on his hands in a burning house, Lazarus Frost was a boy who wanted to build bridges, who cranked a dead woman’s gramophone so a stray girl wouldn’t be alone in the dark, who laughed once, rustily, and held out his hand and said she’d be insulted if nobody danced.
I sent that boy to prison too.
I keep finding new ones to grieve.