Chapter Two
THERE'S A TRICK to living inside the quiet. You let the days run together until they stop being days. You stop counting. Counting is hoping, and hoping is the thing that cuts you, so you let the hours pool into one long gray water and you float on top of it and you don't reach for the edges.
The window helps. I keep my chair turned to it.
Out past the glass there's a parking lot and then the desert and then a line of mountains so far off they look painted on, and I look at that line and I let my eyes go soft and I disappear into it.
The pills make that easy. The pills make everything easy and far away, like watching my own life through water, like my thoughts have to swim a long way up before they break the surface, and most of them give up before they get there.
I'm not gone. That's what they think, the ones in the soft shoes who write things on their clipboards.
They think there's nobody home. But I'm here.
I'm always here. I'm just behind glass, the same as the window, and I learned a long time ago that being behind glass is the safest place a person can be.
I felt them before I heard them.
That happens with the two of them. Some deep part of me wakes up before the rest, lifts its head, smells the change in the air.
Boots in the hallway. Heavy and certain, two sets, walking like they owned the floor under them, which they did, they owned every floor they ever set foot on.
The static in my head dropped a notch. My shoulders came down off my ears by a half inch I didn't tell them to.
Caleb.
My brother came around the chair slow, got himself down low so he wasn't standing over me, and his face did the thing only I get to see it do, came all the way open. "Hey, Bee. It's me. We're here."
I love him so much it has its own weight in my chest, a stone I carry around and don't mind the carrying.
Caleb is every good thing a no-good childhood ever managed to hand me, which wasn't much, and was all him.
Caleb is home because Caleb built home, out of nothing, with his own two hands, so I'd have somewhere to be a kid.
When he looks at me I feel loved, even now, even beat down to this.
Even when I can't give it back in any shape he can hold.
But it's the other one who quiets me.
He came in behind my brother and stopped a few feet off, the way he always stopped, like there was a line on the floor only he could see and he'd die before he stepped over it.
Big. He filled the doorway and then made himself smaller, folded all that down into stillness, and I felt the whole room settle around him like he'd put his hand flat on the surface of the water and held it still.
Eli.
I don't think his name in the hard way the others say it.
To them he's a fist with a road name. To me he's just Eli, the way he was before there was a patch on his back, back when I was something other than this.
Strawberry blond, the color gone darker at the temples now, going coppery where the light caught it through the window.
Brown eyes that didn't miss anything and never gave anything away.
Hands he kept loose in his lap on purpose, always on purpose, like he knew exactly what they were built for and was choosing, every second, not to be that.
Here's the thing nobody knows. The thing I'd buried so deep even I forgot to dig it up most days.
I used to love him. Before. The full-color version of me, the loud one, she loved Eli stupid.
I used to find reasons to be in a room with him.
I used to stand too close and laugh too bright and turn my whole self toward him like a plant toward a window, and every single time he'd ease back.
Half a step. A wall coming up so gentle you couldn't even be angry at it.
He never wanted me. I learned that the slow way, over years, and I packed it down small and told myself it didn't matter, and then the woods came and made it not matter, made everything not matter, and I never had to think about it again.
He came a few times when they first locked me in here, filled the doorway too big for it, said almost nothing, left looking like the room had cost him something, and then he stopped.
For years. The visits just ended, and didn't start again until a month or so ago, and in all that gray in between I'd decided his leaving was only ever Eli being Eli.
One more time he eased back a half step.
One more door shut so soft I couldn't even hate him for it.
He never wanted me; why would he keep driving all this way to sit with the ghost of a girl he never wanted in the first place?
So no. I don't reach for him because he never let me down.
He did. He left me in here. And the part I could never square is that my brother was the one falling apart, and my brother still came, every month, through all of it, while Eli, who doesn't fall apart, who I have never once seen break, was the one who couldn't make himself walk through the door.
None of that is the reason, though. None of it even touches the reason.
Under the love and under the hurt and under all of it, there's one thing about Eli I have always, always known: if something comes for me, if it's in the room, if it's now, he will put his body between me and it, and he will not ask for one thing back.
That, he has never failed. Not once. The world has come for me before.
It's coming again; I can feel it in my teeth.
And when it gets here, I won't need a man to weep over me.
I'll need the wall. Eli has always, always been the wall.
Something was different about him today.
I felt it before I could name it. He looked at me longer than he let himself usually.
There was something in him, held down tight the way he held everything down, but there, humming under the stillness.
Like he'd brought something into the room he didn't have words for. I didn't know what it was.
I wanted to find out. That want was new. That want scared me, because want is just hope wearing a different coat.
Then the door opened again, and it was only the doctor.
Reed, soft-voiced, clipboard against his chest, come to talk to the boots about me like I was weather.
I felt nothing about him at all. I never did, people came and went in that room all day, nurses, orderlies, the soft-shoe crowd with their clipboards, and most of them I felt nothing about, and he was one of the nothing ones.
I caught the shape of what he was saying through the water, distant, unimportant.
A transfer. A program. More intensive. Better suited to where she is.
And then a name. Dr. Sutter's assessment recommends—
Sutter.
The name landed on me like a dropped temperature, and my body went cold from the inside out.
I can't tell you why. That's the part I could never make anyone understand, that I couldn't even make myself understand.
There was no reason for it I could ever find.
But every so often the air in that place would just go wrong, and an alarm would go off in me with no name on it and nowhere to point—get out, get away, not safe, now—every cell screaming the same wordless thing at once.
And when I went looking for what I was supposed to be running from, there was only a wall.
Smooth and high and white. And behind the wall, a dark I would not open, could not open, because some animal part of me knew that whatever lived back there was the thing that had taken my voice in the first place.
I'd felt it before. Once. A whole day of it, ringing and ringing, the day everything happened.
I'd told myself I was being silly. I'd turned it off with both hands.
And I'd been wrong in a way you do not come back from.
So I didn't argue with it anymore when it came.
I just went still, the way you go still when the brush moves and you don't yet know what made it move, and I waited for it to pass, because it always passed, and let me sink back down into the gray.
And now the dark was handing it back to me with a name stuck on it, and the name belonged to the thing that was about to put me in a van.
Then the rest of it reached me through the water. Out past Flagstaff. Three hours on.
Three hours.
Away from the window I knew, the chair I knew, the two sets of boots that came every week.
Somewhere new and locked and far, where there'd be no window I trusted and no boots in any hallway, where I'd be alone with the dark behind the wall and nothing and no one left to stand between me and it when it finally came through.
And some part of me understood, with a certainty I couldn't explain and couldn't doubt, that the move wasn't carrying me away from the danger.
It was carrying me toward it. Get out, the bells said, the way they'd said it once before, a whole day of saying it, the day I didn't listen.
Get out before they move you. Get out now.
My hands had gone to fists in my lap. I made them open. I made one of them move, slow, under the lip of the table where nobody could see, and I caught the edge of Eli's sleeve between two fingers.
That's all I could manage. Two fingers and the worn edge of his cuff. He didn't move. He didn't look down. He just went, if it was possible, even more still, and let me hold on.
Help me, I thought, with everything I had. Hear me. You always hear me.
Caleb's phone buzzed against his thigh. He pulled it out, glanced at it, and something in his face softened—Julia, I thought, or his son—and he murmured that he had to step out a second, just a second, and he squeezed my knee and he was gone down the hall with the phone to his ear and the door easing shut behind him.
And then it was just us. Eli and me and the gray water and the wall with the dark behind it getting closer every day.
He turned his head to look at me. Brown eyes. Steady. Waiting, the way he always waited, never pushing, like he had all the time in the world and would spend every minute of it sitting right here if that's what I needed.
The words had been dead in me for four years. I'd felt them rot. I'd felt the place where they used to live go quiet and cold, and I'd stopped trying, because trying was hoping and hoping is the thing that cuts you.
But Eli was a wall, and behind him I was almost safe, and the transfer was four days out, and I was out of edges left to not reach for.
I curled my fingers all the way around his sleeve.
I leaned in until I could smell road dust and leather and the warm underneath that was only him.
And I went down into the cold dead place where my voice had been rotting four years, and I got both hands around the first words I would choose to say in all that time, and I started hauling them up toward the light.
They weighed more than anything I'd ever lifted.
I lifted them anyway.