CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Leash
"Yes," Rowan said.
That was all Maren let her have. The word went into the room and Rowan opened her mouth to put more after it, to build the yes into a story with a shape Maren could maybe live beside, I was too late, I tried, I swear to you on my own dead that I tried, and Maren lifted one hand off her own chest and stopped her cold.
"No," she said. "Not now. I can't carry it and that, both, in the one morning. I will fall down."
So Rowan closed her mouth on the rest of it, and the three of them stood in the warded dark of the little house with the truth let out and walking around, too big now to be put back.
Vesper had sunk into her chair and gone gray and old and finished, a woman who had spent the last thing she had.
Maren did not say goodbye to her. There were no words in her for a woman who had blessed her and damned her and then, at the very end, handed her the one lamp she had to find a way out by.
She only looked at the dead-blank scar on Vesper's bared arm, the bind torn out half-finished, the proof, and made herself memorize it, and then she walked out into the Holy Cross morning where the light came off the river so bright it hurt.
Rowan drove her back across the canal because there was no other way home from the bottom of the Lower Ninth, and the drive was the worst twenty minutes Maren had spent since the morgue.
Neither of them said one word. The mark lay over her heart the whole way like a stone fresh out of cold water, hard, clenched, turned toward the woman at the wheel, and Maren sat with her arms crossed over it and understood that she could not trust even this.
That the cold she was feeling, the thing she wanted to call Lark recoiling from her killer's witness, might be Lark, and might be the leash, sowing exactly the distrust that would leave her alone and steerable.
She could not tell. That was the whole horror of it now, distilled. She would never again be able to tell.
At the studio she got out and shut the truck door and leaned down to the open window, and Rowan looked at her with that old guilty grief and waited to be told what she was allowed.
"Don't come back," Maren said. "Don't call.
I know there's a rest of it. I know you have a how and a why and a too-late, and I believe you, I do, that's not, I'm not saying you, " and she lost the sentence and let it go.
"I have to be alone with this or it's going to take me apart, and I cannot have you near me while I work out how much of what's on my chest is even her. Go."
And Rowan, who had had three years of practice at being the one who knew the terrible thing and stood off at the edge of it, who had reached the water too late once already and learned what it cost to push when you should wait, took her hands off nothing and put the truck in gear and went.
?
After that there were some days Maren did not keep good count of.
She kept the studio shut and the card turned to the wall and she stayed inside it, in the back, in her own chair, with Lark's chair empty in the front where the morning came in.
She did not call Rowan and Rowan, true to the asking, did not call her, though twice Maren heard the flatbed idle in the street outside for a while and then pull away, and once there was a paper sack left on the step with bread in it and two oranges and a jar of red beans somebody had cooked, no note, and Maren brought it in and ate it standing at the sink and hated how much her body wanted to be looked after, hated the small warmth of being kept track of by the very person she had sent away.
The studio went strange around her in those shut days.
With the card turned to the wall and no work coming in and no Lark in the front chair, it stopped being a place where things were made and became only a place where two people had once been happy, which is another word for a tomb.
She stopped cooking. She stopped, mostly, sleeping, or slept in the chair in ten-minute drops that left her worse than before.
She caught sight of herself once in the dark glass of the front window, between the turned card and the streetlight, and did not at first know the woman looking back, hollow-eyed and gone gray at the edges and somehow lessened, worn thinner than plain grief could account for.
Ridden, was the word that arrived. She looked like someone the water had already started on.
She thought about going to Odette. She thought about it the way you think about a door in a burning house that you already know you are not going to walk through.
Vesper had been plain: the old woman in Tremé held the other half of it, the answering with truth instead of blood, the letting-go that freed the dead one clean.
The way out. But Maren had turned the way out over and over in the long nights and understood what it was, underneath, and it was this: a way to put Lark down.
To free her meant to lose her, by Maren's own choosing, on purpose, with her own two hands, the second death and this one signed.
And so she did not go to Tremé. She told herself she was not ready, that she had to understand the thing fully before she acted, that going to Odette half-broken would waste it.
All of that was true and none of it was the reason.
The reason was that as long as she did not go, she got to keep her.
Even leashed. Even half a lie. She got to keep her.
The leash, she would think later, could not have asked for a better servant than her own grief.
It had been built, a hundred years back, out of the one material that never fails: a person will walk a very long way into the dark after someone they love.
The cult did not need to drag her anywhere.
It only needed her to go on wanting Lark badly enough, and she would do the rest herself.
She had been doing the rest herself, every hour she chose the leash over the door because the leash still felt like a hand.
Because the mark was not resting. In the shut quiet of the studio it grew, if anything, more itself, more vivid, more awake.
The figure in it that was Lark-and-not-Lark moved more than it had ever moved, the small dark birds wheeling and resettling under her shirt when she lay still in the dark, the fine water-lines crawling out over the swell of her left breast and drawing the nipple tight as they passed, so that more than once she woke with her hand pressed to it and her breath gone shallow, unable to say whether grief had surfaced her or something lower that shamed her to feel at all; and the whole of it warmer, more present, more like a held hand, exactly when she was at her lowest, exactly when the missing of Lark came up hardest in her throat.
It comforted her. That was the unbearable part.
It reached for her in the worst hours and it felt like being loved, and she had no way on this earth to know whether it was her wife reaching across the only distance left to them, or the thing that wanted her dead learning, very patiently, which keys to press.
She started talking to it. She knew better and she did it anyway, in the dark, low, the way you talk to a dog or a grave.
Is that you. Tell me that's you. Squeeze my hand if it's you and not them.
And sometimes, God help her, it seemed to answer, a warmth, a settling, a pressure over her heart like a head laid down, and she would lie there crying with relief at a comfort she could not prove and could not trust and could not stop needing.
The nights were the worst of it and the best of it, which had become the same thing.
In daylight she could hold a little distance, could call up Vesper's house and the dead-blank scar and the flat word leash.
But the dark undid her good sense as it always had, and in the dark the mark was most awake and most vivid and most like company, and she lay in Lark's chair in the shut shop and let it be company, because the other thing on offer was a kind of aloneness she did not believe she would come back up from.
She knew she was being managed. She let herself be managed.
A drowning person does not stop to question the hand that holds her head above the water.
?
By the fifth day or the sixth she could not stand it, the waiting, the held breath of the shut shop, and the recklessness came up in her as it always had when grief turned to something with edges.
If she could not go to Odette, and could not go to Rowan, and could not sit one more night being gentled by a thing that might be killing her, then she would go at the cult itself, alone, and make something happen, because something happening was better than this.