Chapter 6
Wrenlee
We laid miles six through nine at night, and we did it at night for three reasons.
One, the water stretch runs through Pike land and the ground there is soft enough by noon that a laid band sinks and you lose it.
Two, we were out of days.
Three — and this is the true one and I'll own it — neither of us wanted to be looked at.
Delphine drove out at seven with sandwiches and stayed forty minutes and used every one of them.
"The list."
"Delph."
"I said tomorrow and it's been four tomorrows, so here's an abbreviated version." She held up a finger. "One. You let me carry it for seven years and I have been lonely, Wrenlee. Not angry. Lonely. That's worse and I want you to sit in it."
"I'm sitting in it."
"Two. I told him nothing, which was right, and I have never forgiven myself for it, which is also right." Second finger. "Three. If you go back to Ste. Amélie when this is done I will drive there and put your truck in a canal."
"That's not a three, that's a threat."
"It's an itemized threat."
"Delph."
"What."
"Thank you for the sandwiches."
She stood there for a second with her keys in her hand.
"They're from Duckie," she said. "Don't thank me. Don't thank him either, it encourages him," and she got in the truck and drove off before either of us could say anything else.
We started at eight and by midnight we'd done a mile and a half and my hands had opened up again in the old places, which they always do, which is why the scars are where they are.
"Stop."
"I'm fine."
"Wren."
"Jonah, I have laid this line with worse hands than this."
"That's not the flex you think it is."
He took my wrist and turned it over into the truck light and looked at my palm, and he didn't say anything about it, and then he got the first aid kit out from under the seat and wrapped it. Badly. Enormously. I ended up with a hand like a boxing glove.
"I can't lay with this."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because it stops the bleeding," he said. "You can take it off in ten minutes. I needed it wrapped for ten minutes."
I stood there in the dark on the edge of the marsh holding up my ridiculous hand.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"It's been a week for honest."
We worked through midnight and past it and somewhere around half twelve he started talking, which he does at night and never in daylight, and I have never once pointed it out because I don't want him to stop.
"They want to help."
"Who does."
"The club. All of them. Bear asked me twice."
"They can't."
"I know they can't lay it. That's not what he asked." Bag. Handful. Eight inches forward. "He asked what he could carry."
"That's—" I had to stop for a second. "Jonah, nobody in the history of my family has ever been asked that."
"That's what Preacher said."
"Preacher said what?"
"He said it out loud in church on Monday.
He said, 'Ninety years and we have never once put a man on that road with them, and I'd like somebody to explain to me how we decided that was theirs.
'" He handed the bag down. "Nobody had an answer.
Duckie tried to blame the founders. Preacher said the founders are dead and we're not, and that was the end of that. "
I laid about forty feet without saying anything, because if I'd said anything it would have come out wrong.
"You all right?"
"I'm fine."
"Wrenlee."
"I'm laying salt, Jonah, I don't have a face right now."
"You do, though."
"Well, stop looking at it."
Around one in the morning it started to rain.
Not weather. A wall. It came across the water in the sound before it came in the wet, that hiss you get in this parish, and then it was on us and there was no laying salt in it because salt in rain is just salt in mud.
"Truck," Jonah said.
"Truck's a half mile back at the culvert."
"Then—"
"Shed," I said, and I was already running.
The Pike salt shed sits at the top of the marsh on a cypress-block foundation with sixty feet of boardwalk out to it, and it hasn't stored anything since before I was born.
His people cured salt in it in the forties.
It's a plank building the size of a bedroom with one door and no windows and a tin roof, and it has been slowly, patiently, over eighty years, turning into something else.
Because salt gets into wood.
Every board in that shed is grown through with it. The walls have crusted from the inside out, in ridges and flowers and little sharp ferns, and when we came through the door with the rain screaming on that tin roof, Jonah put his flashlight up and the entire room lit like the inside of a geode.
I heard myself make a noise.
"Yeah," he said.
"You knew?"
"I've known since I was fourteen."
"You knew there was a room like this and you didn't tell me?"
"I brought you here in 2016."
"You did not."
"February. You said it was cold and you wanted to go get a hamburger."
"That was this?"
"You had a flashlight with two dead batteries," he said, "and you didn't look up."
"Jonah Pike, I have been carrying around a memory of a cold shed and a disappointing hamburger for ten years."
"The hamburger was fine."
"The hamburger was gray."
"You ate two."
"I was upset about the shed," I said, and he laughed, and I got to hear what a laugh does in a room made of salt, which is that it comes back at you from all six sides slightly brighter than it left.
We were both soaked through and the rain on that tin was so loud you had to lean in to talk, which is a thing I want noted, because a lot of what happened next happened because of the volume.
"Sit down," he said.
"There's nowhere to sit."
"There's a floor."
"It's dirt."
"Wrenlee, you've had your face eight inches from dirt every day this week."
"That's different, that's professional dirt."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Is this dirt beneath you."
"Jonah."
"Is it common dirt."
"I will walk back out into that rain," I said, and sat down.
So we sat on the floor with our backs against the wall and the flashlight standing on its end in the middle of the room throwing all that light up into the ceiling, and every salt flower on every wall took it and held it, and it was like sitting inside a struck bell.
"I've got about four things to say," I said.
"Say them."
"One. I'm not going to be able to make it up to you."
"I know."
"Two. I'm going to try anyway, and you're going to have to be patient about how badly."
"That's fine."
"Three. When you yelled at me in that truck—"
"I know."
"No, you don't, you've been apologizing for it for two days with your face. When you yelled at me in that truck it was the first time in seven years I felt like a person instead of a story."
He turned his head.
"Everyone in this town has been so careful with me," I said. "They talk around me like a hole in a floor. You're the only one who's gotten mad at me and it was the kindest thing anybody's done since I was twenty-six."
"That's a bad way to be loved, Wren."
"I know. I'm working with what's available." I pulled my knees up. "Four."
"Four."
"I've got nothing for four. I said four because three sounded final."
"You've done that since you were twenty."
"Done what?"
"Given me a list and then run out of list," he said. "You did it the night you asked me out. You said you had three reasons and the third one was 'and also.'"
"'And also' is a reason."
"It is not a reason, Wrenlee."
"It worked."
"It absolutely worked," he said. "That's not the same as being a reason."
He laughed. Out loud, in that shed, and it went up into the crusted ceiling and came back doubled.
I looked at him laughing in a room made of salt with his hair wet and his shirt stuck to him and eleven years of my life in his face.
"Jonah."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to move about eight inches to my left and I want you to know it's on purpose."
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"Wrenlee," he said, "I have been sitting perfectly still for four minutes."
It wasn't fast.
I want to be honest about that, because I'd built it up over seven years into something that would have to be a collision, and it wasn't. It was slow and it was quiet and about a third of it was laughing.
He kissed me like a man putting his hand into water to check the temperature and then like a man who has decided about the water.
And then he stopped and put his forehead against mine.
"Say something," I said.
"You still do the thing."
"What thing."
"With your left hand." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "You put it flat on my chest before you let me any closer. You did it when you were twenty-two."
"That's not a thing."
"It's a thing. You do it every time. You've done it the whole time I've known you and I don't think you know."
I looked down.
My left hand was flat on his chest.
"Oh," I said.
"Yeah."
"How much of this do you remember?"
He didn't answer that with words, and I'm going to be a coward about the next hour and give you only the pieces I can stand to write down.
He remembered that the back of my neck is the whole argument.
He remembered the exact place under my jaw that shuts my brain off.
He remembered that I hate being asked is this okay and love being told what he's about to do, and he did that, low, against my ear, with the rain going on the tin, and I had a moment of real fury at how much of me had been sitting in a drawer in that man's head for seven years, fully catalogued, waiting.
He got my shirt off and put it down flat on the dirt before he'd let me lie on it, which is the single most Jonah Pike act of my entire life, and I laughed into his shoulder and he said "what," and I said "nothing," and he said "you're laughing at the shirt," and I said "I'm laughing at the man," and he stopped what he was doing to look at me for a second with an expression I'll be carrying around until I'm eighty.
Salt light on everything. All those walls holding the flashlight the way ice holds moon.
He went slow on purpose. I know it was on purpose because at one point I told him he was doing it on purpose and he said, "Seven years, Wrenlee," in a voice like a hand closing, and that was more or less the end of my capacity for commentary.
And somewhere in the middle of it — this is the part I didn't expect — I started crying, and didn't stop, and he didn't stop either but he did put his hand flat on the side of my face and hold it there for the rest of it, thumb under my eye, like a man keeping something from going anywhere.
At the end I had salt in my hair, from the walls, and salt on my face, from me, and I couldn't have told you the difference.
Afterward the rain went off, the way it does, all at once, and it was the loudest silence I've ever been in.
I was lying half on him on a dirt floor on somebody's shirt and I could hear the marsh starting back up outside, one frog at a time, working up their nerve.
"Wrenlee."
"Mm."
"We're not back together."
I got up on my elbow so fast I hit my head on nothing.
"Excuse me?"
"You were about to say it," he said, absolutely calm, staring at the ceiling. "You had the whole speech loaded. 'This doesn't mean anything, we've got four miles left, we're two adults.' I've been listening to you draft it for the last ten minutes."
"That's—" I lay back down. "That's outrageous."
"Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong."
"So I'm saying it first."
"That's cheating."
"It is," he said. "I've been an honest man for seven years and it got me nowhere. I'm trying something."
I lay there with my hand on his sternum and felt his heart going about as fast as mine.
"We're not back together," I said.
"No."
"I mean it."
"I know."
"I'm serious, Jonah. I've got two miles and a dead mother and a thing wearing her, and I'm not going to walk you into the middle of that with a ring on it and let this town do 2019 again."
"Agreed."
"Say it back."
"We are not back together," he said, "and I want you at my place tonight, and I've already thought about which drawer's yours."
"Jonah."
"I said agreed."
I put my face in his shoulder. "Neither of us means any of this."
"No," he said. "But we said it out loud, so it counts, and now nobody can accuse us of not being careful."
"Delphine's going to know by breakfast."
"Delphine knew Tuesday."
"There was nothing to know Tuesday."
"Wrenlee," he said, "on Tuesday you handed me a bag of salt and Roach made a noise like a kettle."
"He did not."
"He did, and then Bear elbowed him, and then Duckie said 'what,' loudly, because Duckie has never picked up on anything in his life, and Roach had to explain it to him behind a truck.
" He rubbed his eyes. "There is no version of this where it's private.
This town watched a bell ring itself and spent the week talking about your hair. "
"My hair?"
"There's a faction that thinks you've grown it out."
"I cut it."
"You cut it," he agreed, "and they know you cut it, and it's a faction anyway. That's Marrow Bend."
I lay back down on him.
"Jonah."
"Mm."
"Say the drawer thing again."
"Second one down. It's mostly shirts. I'd have to move the shirts."
"Where would the shirts go?"
"I don't know," he said. "I hadn't thought that far. I got as far as the drawer and had to sit down."
We finished mile nine at dawn.
Somewhere around five he tried to give me his jacket and I said I wasn't cold and he put it on me anyway, and then twenty minutes later he asked me for it back because he was cold, which was an outright lie constructed entirely so I could refuse him, and I refused him, and he looked so pleased with himself that I had to walk ahead for a while.
That's the part I'd forget if I let myself, because it's the part where I was happy — actually happy, hands wrecked, shirt on inside out, laying salt into the pink light coming off the water with a man ten feet away carrying bags and telling me a story about Bear and a vending machine.
I got to the last hundred feet of mile nine and I turned around to look back down the line, the way I always do, because my grandmother said you always look back and count.
The band ran clean and white all the way back into the mist.
And there were footprints in it.
Not beside it. In it — down the center of the salt, single file, coming up behind us out of the fog.
Bare feet. A woman's size.
"Jonah."
"I see it."
I walked back along my own line and he came with me and we followed those prints back and they didn't stop. Mile nine. Mile eight. Mile seven. Mile six, where we'd started at eight the night before.
Four miles.
They were exactly in our footprints. Every one.
Left where I'd put mine down, right where his had gone, matched stride for stride for four miles, so that anybody looking would see two sets of tracks and not three, and I had walked the whole night with something directly behind me putting its feet where my feet had been.
"It followed us," Jonah said.
"No," I said, and my voice came out of somebody else's throat.
I crouched down at the last clear print, and it was pressed into salt I had laid with my own hands three hours before.
"It didn't follow us," I said. "It was learning how to walk it."