CHAPTER 30
WREN
We don’t speak about the four minutes again, and not speaking about it becomes its own kind of wall, a new one, worse than plaster, built out of the one thing he won’t give me and the one thing I won’t forgive.
He won’t leave. That’s the new shape of the days.
Silas is loose somewhere with a tape and a deadline, so Lazarus has appointed himself the doorway again, the way he was at fifteen, at eighteen, at every hour of my life that mattered, he sleeps on my side of the bed between me and the door, he checks my locks the way I check my locks, he stands at my dark windows reading the hill.
I let him. It serves me. A man who won’t let me out of his sight is a man I have to lull, and lying is the one art the house left me sharper at than surviving, and I have decided to spend that talent on the only person who ever taught me there was anything worth telling the truth to.
So we live in the cold war, and the cold war, being us, finds its way into the only language we ever had that wasn’t a wall.
It starts as a fight. Most things between us start as a fight now. He catches me at the kitchen window after dark with my hand on the glass, looking up the hill, and he reads me, he always reads me, and his voice goes flat and certain: “Whatever you’re planning, Wren. Don’t.”
“You don’t get to don’t me.” I turn on him. “You decided for me from a prison cell. You don’t get to keep doing it from my kitchen.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“You’re trying to keep me small.” It comes out of the padlocked room, all of it.
“You burned my own night out of me because you decided I couldn’t hold it.
You let me believe I was a murderer for six years because you decided the lie was kinder.
You are still doing it, you’re standing in my kitchen deciding what I’m allowed to know and where I’m allowed to go, and you call it love, and it is the exact same hand —”
“Don’t.” Low. Dangerous. “Don’t put me in that hallway with him.”
“Then stop standing in the doorway like you own it!”
And then we’re not talking anymore.
I don’t know which of us crosses the kitchen first. I’ve decided it doesn’t matter; I’ve decided I get to keep that, the not-knowing of who reached, the one merciful blank in a life I’ve spent clawing every other blank out of.
His mouth on mine is angry and his hands are not gentle and that’s the truth of what I want from him in this moment, not the careful reverence of the first night but the fight made flesh, the argument we can’t win with words dragged down into the one place we’ve always understood each other.
He lifts me onto the counter and I pull him in by the shirt and we are not making love, we are arguing, we are each trying to win the thing neither of us will say.
“You think holding me is the same as having me,” I get out against his jaw, and I bite it, and I feel him groan. “It isn’t. You can keep the door. You’ll never keep the choice. I’ll always be the one who decides to climb on.”
“I know.” His hands are everywhere, rough, worshipful, furious.
“God help me, I know, that’s the whole, that’s the thing that’s wrong with me, you’re the one thing I can’t decide, you climbed on at eighteen and ruined me for owning anything that doesn’t choose it —” He pulls back just enough to look at me, wrecked, and the church-cold is gone, there’s nothing left in his face but the boy with blood on his teeth in a hallway.
“So choose. Right now. With the whole truth between us and me deciding nothing. Choose, little lamb, and I’ll give you whatever you choose, even if it’s the door. ”
“I choose this,” I say. “Tonight, I choose this.”
It’s a lie of omission and we both half-know it and we do it anyway.
What happens then is the cold war with the gloves off, him and me and three years of the wall and six years of the cage and two days of a truth we can’t get over, all of it turned into hands and teeth and the counter and then the floor because neither of us makes it anywhere with a bed in it.
He’s not careful this time and I don’t want him careful; I want the fight, I want to feel that I’m winning something, I want him undone enough to forget for one hour that he’s appointed himself my doorway.
And I get it. I get him shaking, get him saying my name like it’s the only word that survived prison, Wren, Wren, choose me, choose me, one hand splayed over my racing heart the way he always reads it, there it is, there’s my girl, still running too fast, and I do choose him, in the moment, with my whole body, because that part has never once been the lie.
The lie is everything I’m not saying. The lie is the storm two days off and the hill and the tape and the thing I’m going to do the second he finally sleeps.
I come apart under the man I’m about to betray, again, saying yes, saying his name, and the yes is true and the betrayal is true and I have made a whole life out of holding two true things in the same cold hand.
After, he gathers me up off the floor and he carries me to bed and he folds the warm enormous cage of himself around me, and I feel the great tension of the day drain out of him, feel him start to go under, because I taught him how, because the one mercy I ever gave him is the one I’m going to use to leave him, and his breath slows against the back of my neck, in, and out, the metronome, the only quiet either of us has ever had.
“We’ll handle Silas together,” he murmurs, already going, believing it, the most honest man I know undone by the one woman who can lie to him. “Thursday. You and me. You won’t be alone in any room ever again. I promise. I’ll never decide for you again, I swear it, just, together. Say together.”
“Together,” I lie, into the dark, and I feel him smile against my neck and let go and sleep.
And I lie awake in the cage of his arms and I do the math I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.
The longest night is Thursday. Two days.
He sleeps deeper each night now, six years of debt setting down its weight, the gift I gave him turning, slowly, into the door I’ll walk out of.
Eli’s heavy flashlight is in my coat by the door.
The music box is on the side table where Silas left it, where I wound it myself, where it sits like a small green witness that finally answers to me.
I’ve looked up what’s left of Marrowfield.
I know the pass. I know how long the plows hold out in a storm.
I know exactly how far a wolf has to walk to follow a woman who’s learned, at last, to leave while the door is sleeping.
He thinks he won the kitchen. He thinks together was true. He thinks the worst thing I’m capable of is being decided-for.
He taught me everything I know about doorways. He never once considered that the student might learn to be the one who walks through.
Two days.
I match my breathing to his in the dark, in, and out, on purpose, the metronome, the lullaby with no notes, and I let the only safe thing I’ve ever known sleep against my spine, and I count down to the night I’m going to spend it to set us both free.
I’m sorry, I tell the dark, where he can’t hear it, where I’ll never have to mean it out loud.
I’d rather lose you to the truth than keep you in a lie.
You taught me that, too.