Chapter Eleven
SHE'D TALKED TO Wren.
I told myself that was good. It was good.
I'd have walked into a fire to get that woman to say one true thing to a living soul, and here she'd gone and done it on her own, on a cold porch, to somebody who knew the country she'd been lost in better than I ever could.
A man who loves a woman right is supposed to want her well more than he wants to be the one who does it.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm that good a man. I wanted her well. I also wanted to be the door.
By evening the clubhouse had gone soft and low, most of the brothers scattered out to their own beds or their own trouble, and I found her where I usually found her when the noise died down, folded into the end of the long couch with one of the dog-eared paperbacks off my windowsill open in her lap, not reading it, just holding it.
I sat down on the other end. Left the middle cushion empty, the way I always did, because the space was hers to close or not.
She closed it.
Not all the way. Just enough that her shoulder came to rest against my arm, light as a feather settling, and I went still the way you go still when something wild decides to trust you with its weight.
Four years I'd kept this exact want nailed shut behind my ribs.
Her shoulder against my arm near to took the nails out one-handed.
I didn't move. I let her lean, and I sat there being something solid to lean on, and I thought if I could just be that, just the wall and never the want, I could do this.
I could love her the rest of my life from one cushion over and never once make her carry the weight of being wanted by a man before she was ready to be wanted by anybody.
"You're easy to be next to," she said.
Small. Rough. To me, she gave the words to me, and I'll keep them till I die.
"So are you," I said, which was a lie the size of the room, because being next to her was the hardest easy thing I'd ever done, but it was the kind of lie that's really just a kindness wearing a coat.
We sat that way a while. The dog came and dropped against her feet.
And I felt the moment she gathered herself up to tell me something, felt her go careful and tight against my arm the way she did before she spent words she was afraid of, and I held still and quiet and made all the room in the world for it.
"It's back," she said. "The feeling."
I knew the one. The dread she carried, the nameless thing, the alarm with no fire she could point to. I'd watched it run her at the hospital and I'd watched it go quiet those few good days and I'd hated it like it was a man I could put my hands on.
"It got loud the day the cop came," she said, "and it hasn't gone back down. It's down there now. Ringing." Her fist had come up to her chest, pressed flat over the spot. "I know how it sounds. I know there's nothing there. But I had this feeling once before, Eli, and I—"
"Hey." I turned and got my arm around her, slow, careful, gathered her in against my side the way you'd shelter something from weather, because I couldn't stand the shake that had come into her voice. "Hey. C'mere. I got you."
She let me pull her in. Tucked her face against my chest. And I held her, and I did the thing I'd have sworn on my life was the right thing, the only thing, the thing every cell in me was built to do.
"Listen to me," I said into her hair, using the voice I used to make hard things true.
"There's nothing coming. You hear me? That cop drove off and he's not coming back, and even if he did, he'd go through me and forty guns to get to you, and he is not getting through me.
You're on our ground. You're behind our gate.
Nobody is ever taking you anywhere again as long as I'm breathing.
That feeling's the bad years still rattling around in you, Bee, that's all it is.
It's not real. It's just the past, and the past can't reach you here.
I won't let it. I swear to God I won't let it. "
I felt so sure saying it. I felt like a man doing his whole job at once.
And under my arm I felt her change.
I didn't understand it. I just felt it, the way she'd been spending those words to me, slow and scared and trusting, and the way that stopped.
The way she went, by degrees, from a woman handing me something true to a woman being managed.
Her body stayed against me. But something in her stepped back behind the glass and pulled the door closed, soft, polite, the way she used to in that visiting room.
"You're right," she said. Quiet. Even. "It's just the past."
"That's right," I said, and squeezed her, and felt like I'd fixed it. "That's my girl."
She stayed in the curve of my arm, and I held her, and it took me longer than it should have, it took me a stretch of quiet too long and too still, to notice that she'd gone somewhere I couldn't follow, and that I'd been the one who'd sent her there, with my arm around her and my mouth full of all the right and useless things.
I thought about the porch. About whatever Wren had said to her. I didn't know what it was. But I knew it wasn't there's nothing there, it's not real, hush. Whatever Wren had given her, it had opened a door. Whatever I'd just given her had closed one.
Same girl. Same fear. One of us had reached for it, and one of us had reached to make it stop, and I was only just beginning to feel, way down where I didn't have words for it yet, that those were not the same thing, and that the second one, the one I'd built my whole self around, the protecting, the shielding, the standing-between, might not be the gift I'd always taken it for.
She fell asleep against me. I sat there a long time after, not moving, not waking her, her warm and trusting against my chest and a cold little splinter working its way into me that I couldn't yet name.