Chapter Six
THE BAG WAS what broke me.
It sat on the end of my bed when they brought me back from breakfast, a soft-sided gray thing with a zipper, the kind of bag you'd take on a trip you wanted to come back from.
Somebody had already put things in it. My folded clothes.
The hairbrush. The little zip pouch with my name on a label in someone else's handwriting, Beatrice, like I was a thing that needed labeling so I didn't get lost in the wash.
They were packing me.
It wasn't even Friday. I'd been trying to keep track, and it wasn't Friday yet, and the bag was already there, and that's when I understood the counting had never mattered.
The days were never mine. They'd move me when they decided to move me, and the calendar in my head was just one more thing I'd made up to feel like I had a hand on something.
A nurse came in brisk and kind and started checking off a list. Transport in the morning, she said, maybe tonight if the van came back early. Wasn't that good, getting it over with. A fresh start. She kept saying fresh start like the words could scrub a thing clean.
I sat on the edge of the bed next to the bag with my name on it and I felt the gray water close over my head.
No boots had come.
That was the thing underneath the bag, the real thing.
I'd given Eli my voice and held onto him through nights that didn't end, and I'd told myself he heard me, he always hears me, and the days had gone by and no boots had come down the hall.
And now there was a bag, and a van, and morning, and a hospital waiting at the other end of the road like a spider that didn't even have to move because the web did all the work.
Maybe he hadn't done anything. Maybe three words wasn't enough to move a man across the kind of distance Eli had always kept between us.
Maybe I'd spent my last coin on somebody who set it down and walked away after all, not because he didn't care, but because what could he do, really, I was committed for being a danger to myself, I was a court order, I was a problem with a doctor's signature on it, and you can't punch a signature.
The reasonable voice came back. The one that sounds like mercy.
Stop fighting it. The new place is just a place.
You're good at places. You go small, you go quiet, you find a window, you float.
And God, I wanted to. I was so tired. The kind of tired where surrender looks like a soft bed at the end of a long cold walk.
But I thought about the dark behind the wall, and how at the new place there'd be no one, no one, between me and it. No window I trusted. No two sets of boots that came on the regular even if they came too late. Just the soft sweater and the soft voice and all the time in the world, just us.
And something in me, some last lit thing down at the very bottom, said no.
Not the giving-up no. The other kind. The kind that picks itself up off the floor with its teeth.
If they took me, they'd take me fighting.
I'd find my voice and I'd use it, scream it, throw it at every stranger in that new place until somebody heard, the way I screamed four years ago in a stretch of woods until the dark took my throat.
I wasn't nineteen— I wasn't that girl anymore.
I'd been broken so far down there was nothing left to break, and there's a strange kind of free in that.
You can't threaten a person with the bottom when she's already standing on it.
I left the bag where it was. I sat on the edge of my bed and I made my spine straight and I waited for whatever came, ready to make it work for every inch.
Night came down slow.
They gave me the night pills, two in a little paper cup, the ones that pull you under deep and flat so the morning comes before you've felt the dark pass.
I held them under my tongue the way I'd learned to, took the water, opened wide and dull-eyed for the nurse, and spat them in my palm after she'd gone.
I wanted to be awake. If they were driving me into the ground in the morning, I wasn't going down soft. I'd be awake for all of it.
So I was awake when the quiet changed.
You learn the sounds of a place like that.
The hum of the lights. The squeak of a cart.
The buzz-and-clunk of the doors down the hall doing their locking on a timer you could set a clock by.
After enough nights your body keeps the rhythm without asking, and you feel it in your teeth when the rhythm skips.
It skipped.
A door that should've clunked didn't. A long stretch of nothing where there should've been the nurse's rounds.
And then, closer, the softest sound in the world, the handle of my own door, the one that locked from the outside every night at nine, turning.
Slow. Careful. Like whoever had hold of it knew exactly how much noise it could make and was spending every bit of that knowing to make none.
My heart came up into my throat. Cold all over. The first place my mind went, God help me, was him—the shadow—and the dark behind the wall heaved so hard I almost screamed before the door was even open.
Then it opened, and a shape filled it, and it was the wrong size to be afraid of.
Too big. Far too big. A wall of a man easing sideways through a doorway he barely fit, moving quiet as a held breath, and out in the hall behind him a second shape stood with its back to us, watching the corridor.
The security light over the far exit threw just enough gray into the room for me to see him.
I knew him before I saw him clearly. I knew him the second the static fell out of my head.
Strawberry blond gone to shadow in the half dark, brown eyes already swinging to the bed, to me, finding me awake and sitting up, and something in his whole body changed when he saw it.
Careful to certain. Quiet to here. All that size he spent his life folding down small.
Not folded now. Not careful now. Pointed, every inch of it, at me.
"Bee." Just my name. The way he always gave it to me, like it was the only word he trusted himself with.
He crossed the room and went down on one knee in front of me, close, closer than he'd let himself come since that awful night, near enough I could smell road dust and leather and the warm underneath that was just him, and the static fell out of the whole world.
He held out his hand. Open. Palm up. Not grabbing. Asking.
"You ready to go home?"
The gray water broke. It just broke, like a window, like a held breath, and behind it was a person, was me, was the bright loud trouble-girl I thought the woods had killed, and she looked at his open hand and at his steady eyes and she did the thing I'd dreamed about in a place so deep I'd stopped admitting I dreamed at all.
I put my hand in his.
***
THE SKY WAS the first thing that nearly undid me.
Not because I'd never seen it. They let us out, a courtyard with a fence you couldn't see past, an hour at a time, an aide always twenty feet off, and I'd spent four years beside a window of wired glass watching a square of it go gray and gold and gray again.
I knew the sky. What I'd forgotten was the sky with nothing over it.
No fence. No wall. No glass, no aide, no edge anywhere that somebody had put there to keep me in or keep it out.
Just all of it at once, black and enormous and stabbed full of more stars than I had any way to hold, coming down over me so fast and so wide that my knees went soft.
The ride had been its own kind of undoing, wind I hadn't felt in years, the road pouring away under us, Eli's back the one fixed thing in a world gone to speed and dark, and somewhere in the long cold rush of it I'd stopped being able to tell where the fear ended and the alive began.
Then the bikes came off the road and the engines died, and it was quiet, and it was open, and that was worse.
There was nothing between me and all that dark. After four years of being kept inside walls and fences and somebody's eyeline, the open air didn't feel like freedom. It felt like being uncovered. Like being set out where anything could see me.
And the place around me made it worse before it made it better.
Gravel underfoot and the smell of dust and oil, a row of motorcycles black against blacker dark, a yard, and big rough men moving in it, more men than I'd been near in years, and it was outside, and it was night, and some part of me that never sleeps put all those pieces together too fast.
Open ground. Dark. Men. The smell of the earth.
The wall in me slammed up, white and high, and behind it something heaved, and I shoved it down.
Shoved the whole picture down with both hands, hard, the way I always do, before it could crack the rest of the way open, because if it opens it doesn't close, and I'd learned a long time ago to keep myself on this side of it where I could still breathe.
I must have stopped breathing anyway, because Eli's hand tightened around mine.
"Bee." Low, right beside my ear. "Look at me. Not out there. Here."
I looked at him. Brown eyes in the dark, steady, holding still the way water goes still when a hand lies flat on it.
He didn't tell me I was safe; he never told me things he couldn't promise.
He just gave me his face to hold onto instead of the dark, and I held it, and the picture let go of my throat and sank back down to where I keep it.
"There you go," he murmured. "I got you. Nobody here but us."
Caleb came around fast on my other side and folded himself down into my eyeline. His face was concerned and he wasn't hiding it. "Hey. Hey, Little Bee. You're home. You hear me? You're with us. That's the whole of what's happening tonight, nothing else, nobody else. Just us."