Interlude
LAZARUS — Then
Fourteen years ago.
I need to tell you about my sister, because Wren can’t, she never met her, she only ever slept in her bed and wore her face and traced her warnings in the dark, and because if you don’t understand Iris you don’t understand the first thing about why I am the way I am, why I don’t sleep, why I built a whole self out of standing in doorways.
Everyone thinks the wall started with Wren.
It didn’t. The wall started in a room where my sister was dying, and the first knock I ever answered, I answered too late.
Iris was the youngest of us and the only warm thing the house ever made.
Father got me and got Silas and got, I think, exactly the sons he deserved, one who fought him and one who studied him, and then, late, almost as an afterthought, he got a small bright laughing girl who looked at that cold enormous house like it was a place a person could be happy in, and who was, somehow, against all the evidence, happy in it.
She had a gap in her teeth. She collected foreign coins she’d never spend.
She drew horses, and a dog she wasn’t allowed to have.
She called me Laz before anyone else did, when she was three and couldn’t manage the rest of it, and it stuck, and every single time Wren says it now some part of me is fifteen again and being summoned down a cold hall to a little girl’s room to be shown a drawing.
I was fifteen the winter Iris got sick.
It started as nothing, things always start as nothing in that house, a cough, a fever, the doctor up the pass and then the pass closing the way it always closes when it matters most, snow shutting us in with it.
Father did what Father did with anything that became inconvenient or imperfect: he withdrew from it.
He did not sit with her. He hummed in the halls and stayed in his wing and let the fever be the staff’s problem, and then, when the staff couldn’t get back up the mountain through the snow, let it be mine.
I think now he’d already decided she was a loss.
I think he grieved her while she was still warm to the touch, the way you write a thing off before it’s gone so the going can’t take anything you hadn’t already surrendered.
That’s a Frost for you. We surrender the people we love in advance and call it strength.
I didn’t surrender her. I was fifteen and I didn’t know yet that you can’t stand in a doorway and refuse to let a fever pass.
So I tried. I sat with her. I brought her toast she couldn’t eat and water she could.
I read to her. And at night, when Father wanted the house quiet and I wasn’t allowed to stay in her room, I lay in the room next to hers, the room that would one day be Wren’s, with my ear to the wall, and I listened to my little sister breathe, and I made her a promise through the plaster: I’m right here.
I’m awake. Knock if it gets bad and I’ll come through the wall, I’ll come through the floor, I’ll come through Father himself.
And she’d knock, soft, when the fever frightened her, and I’d knock back, three, slow, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, and it would settle her enough to sleep.
That’s where it came from. That’s where all of it came from.
The three knocks were never a code I invented for a girl I loved at twelve.
They were the last thing that ever comforted a girl I loved at fifteen, and I spent the next decade giving them away again because I could not bear that they had only ever worked the once.
Because on the fourth night, I slept.
I want to be precise about this, because it’s the hinge the whole rest of my life turns on.
I hadn’t slept in three days. I was fifteen.
My body simply took it from me, somewhere in the small hours, against my will.
I went under with my ear against the wall and my hand flat on the cold plaster, mid-vigil, like a sentry shot at his post, and while I slept, on the other side of an inch of wall, close enough to touch, my sister’s breathing changed, and slowed, and spaced further and further apart, and stopped.
She didn’t knock. That’s the thing I’ve carried for fourteen years, the thing no confession or fire or prison ever burned out of me.
Maybe she was too weak. Maybe she tried and it was too soft to wake me.
Maybe, and this is the one that lives in me, maybe she knew I was finally, mercifully asleep, and she was the kind of small bright generous creature who’d let herself go quietly rather than wake her exhausted brother for the last thing.
Maybe my sister died being considerate of me.
I will never know. The not-knowing is the exact size and shape of the silence I woke up into.
I woke at dawn with a crick in my neck and my hand still on the wall and the house very, very quiet, and I knew, before I’d even crossed the hall.
I never slept again. Not really. Not for fourteen years.
You can call it insomnia; the doctors did, the ones Father eventually let me see when the not-sleeping started costing him a presentable son.
But it was never a disorder. It was a verdict I passed on myself in a doorway at dawn and have upheld ever since: the one time you let yourself rest, the person on the other side of the wall dies.
So you don’t rest. You stay the wall. You stay awake against the wall for the rest of your natural life, and you listen, and you never, ever let the breathing stop on your watch again.
That’s what was already broken in me, fully formed, the day a social worker drove a twelve-year-old up our mountain in the snow, a girl with a gap-toothed ghost’s face, to sleep in a gap-toothed ghost’s bed, on the dying side of the wall I’d failed at.
You want to know why I looked at Wren Mercer once across a banister and rearranged my entire soul around keeping her alive?
It wasn’t only that she was beautiful, or that I was lonely, or even that Father’s interest in her told me precisely what she was being grown for.
It was that the cold universe I’d stopped believing in had set a living girl down on the dying side of my wall and handed me, cruelly, impossibly, undeservedly, a second vigil.
A chance to keep the promise I’d slept through.
A chance to lie awake against that same plaster for years and not fail this time.
And I didn’t. Six years, I didn’t sleep, and she didn’t stop breathing, and on the nights it got bad and she knocked, I came through the wall, through Father, through the dark, through everything, exactly the way I’d sworn to a dying child I would.
I kept the second girl alive. I lost everything else doing it, my freedom, my name, my brother in the end, but I kept her breathing, and on the worst nights of those six prison years that was the only ledger entry that ever balanced.
Iris, no. Wren, yes. One out of two. Better than the house.
Better than the father. One out of two, and I would burn it all down again for that one.
So when people ask, and at the trial, they asked, why a man would confess to a killing, eat six years, give up his whole life to keep one ward-girl out of the dark, I never had an answer they’d understand, because the true one sounds insane in a courtroom:
I had already lost one girl through that wall while I slept.
I was never, as long as I drew breath, going to lose the second.
And the night Wren finally matched her breathing to mine in the dark of a little house at the bottom of Cradle Hill, six years and a fire and a prison later, and I felt myself going under for the first time since I was fifteen, the first true sleep of my adult life, I understood at last why my body would finally allow it after fourteen years of refusing.
It was because, for the first time, the breathing on the other side of the dark wasn’t going to stop.
It was lying right beside me. And it had chosen to.
Sleep, when it finally came back for me, didn’t feel like rest. It felt like being forgiven by a twelve-year-old I’d slept through. It felt like a knock, answered, at last, in time.