Chapter Twenty-Two
HE SETTLED BACK into the chair like a man with all the time in the world, and he began, and while he talked two things started happening that he didn't know about.
The fog was thinning. Whatever Holly had given me had been meant to walk me quiet out a gate, not hold me under for hours, and slow, so slow, the feeling was creeping back into my hands, my feet, the wires reconnecting one at a time.
I kept my eyes half-lidded and my body slack and let him think I was farther gone than I was.
The other thing was lower, under the fog, and it was new: I was getting angry.
I had been afraid for four years. I had not once gotten angry.
It was clean and it was hot and it was the most mine thing I'd felt in a very long time, and I banked it, and I kept it low, and I listened.
"I saw you in a nightclub," he said. "Did you know that?
You were young and vivacious. You were dancing with your friend, and you were laughing, like nothing could touch you.
" He smiled at the memory, fond, fond, God help me.
"I knew inside ten seconds. I have a sense for it, the way some men have a sense for a good horse. The frightened ones hide it well, but I always know. You were perfect. Hiding some deep sadness. Already a little haunted. What would it take to bring all that out?”
"You didn't know me," I said. It came out cracked, barely there, but it came, and I watched it please him, the broken little sound of it. “Why take a chance one me?”
"No," he agreed gently. “I didn’t. And it wasn’t desire, Beatrice, if that's what you're reaching for and I’m positive it is.
I want to be honest with you, you've earned honesty.
I selected you. There's a difference, and it matters, and by the end you'll understand why it's the kinder of the two.
" He folded his hands. "Love is so careless.
Selection is attention. I have given you more pure, patient attention than any man who ever claimed to love you.
Than the one on the motorcycle, even. Especially him. "
The anger banked hotter. I kept my face slack.
"The boyfriend was simple," he went on. "I won't dress it up.
I found a pretty, sadistic, greedy young man and I paid him to be exactly the boy you'd want.
To be patient. To be kind. To never push.
To earn that careful trust of yours one inch at a time, because I knew it couldn't be taken from you, a girl like you, it had to be given.
And you gave it to him." His head tilted.
"That's the part people never believe about my work.
I don't break the lock. I convince you to hand me the key.
The boy was the first key. You walked into those trees on your own two feet, holding the hand of someone you trusted, because I had spent four months making sure you trusted him.
You were never taken, Beatrice. Not really.
You were delivered. You delivered yourself. "
Something in me went white. "He's dead," I said. "Eli and Caleb—"
"I know." For the first time a flicker of something cold crossed the warmth.
"They were very thorough, your two animals.
They got every man who put a hand on you that night.
The boy. The four I hired to help break you.
" He leaned in, and his voice dropped into that low smooth register, the woods register, the one that lived in my nightmares.
"But they never got me, did they. Because I wasn't a hand on you.
I was the voice. I stood forty feet back in the black and I told those men exactly how to hurt you, exactly how to keep you quiet, exactly what we were waiting for, and not one of them ever knew my name or saw my face, so when your brother and your lover tore the truth out of that boy, there was no thread on the other end of it.
They killed my instruments." He sat back, satisfied.
"You can't follow a song back to the man who only ever hummed it. "
I thought of Eli this morning, we got them all, Bee, we got every one, sure of it, sure for four years. And of me telling him, you didn't get the shadow. I'd been right. I was always right. The knowing rose up in me like a tide and I had to hold my face still against it.
"The man on the hill," I made myself say. "The crew. The one I felt. That was you."
And he laughed, a soft, delighted, genuinely amused laugh, the worst sound in the whole room.
"Oh, Beatrice. No." He said it almost tenderly, like I'd done something charming.
"I don't stand on hills. I don't pick up hammers and skulk in the weeds and let cameras hunt for my face.
That's not what I am. That was a man I paid, a good one, careful, the kind who knows how to be no one, and I sent him to sit where your people would be sure to find him, so they'd point all their guns and all their cameras at a hill miles from their gate and feel like they were doing something.
" His eyes glittered. "You felt one of my men, and your body, that magnificent broken instrument of yours, screamed him, him, him, and it was right that there was danger, and wrong about where, and your people spent weeks staring at a decoy.
I have never once had to be in the room, Beatrice.
That's the whole of me. I am never in the room. I am the reason you're in it."
The fog was almost gone now. I could feel my whole right side, my arm, my leg, the cool of the bed rail under my fingers where my hand had drifted. I didn’t move it. I breathed slow and I let him think I was a thing on a table.
"I like to leave my projects alone with the hurt after I break them.
But somehow your brother found you in the woods before I returned to bring you here," he said, and now there was the irritation, the only crack in all that calm, He shook his head, almost rueful.
"Do you want to know the worst of it? The hospital.
Those four years you spent there, thinking you were rotting, I was right there.
I signed the paper that put you there. Did you know that?
My signature. My recommendation. I wrote your cage myself, so that if I couldn't have you in my quiet place yet, at least no one else could have you either, and I could sit across from you in a room any time I liked and watch. "
"The man watching from the door." My voice was steadier now. I made it small on purpose. "That was you.”
"Yes." Warm again, settling, a man getting to the part he loved.
"Some nights I sat with you, just watching, planning on how to get you here, and that, Beatrice, was the most exquisite frustration of my life.
Because your brother and the hospital kept you from me.
Slowly, stupidly, with their groups and their pills and their kindness, they kept knitting you back together, and my work, my real work, needs you the other way.
And then I saw you coming back alive when Eli started showing up and I knew I had to hurry. "
He leaned forward, and the hunger was all the way out now, naked on that tired ordinary face.
"Shall I tell you what I do? What I actually do, that no hospital and no club and no gentle word will ever be able to undo once it's done?
I take a mind. I learn it the way you'd learn a piece of music.
And then I heal it, just enough to be worth something, and I break it, precisely, in exactly the right place, and I heal it, and I break it again, a little deeper, and again, and each time I learn a little more about the one thing I've spent my whole life trying to find.
The exact place a person stops. The precise point past which they do not come back.
" He was almost whispering now, reverent.
"I have brought people very close to it. I have never, not once, been allowed to follow someone all the way there. They keep dying on me.”
He smiled at me, gentle as a bedside.
"But you won’t die on me, I can feel it. There's no hospital here. No gate. No brother. No lover. There's a great deal of time, and a very quiet road, and you, and me, and finally—finally—nothing in the world to stop us finding the bottom of you together."
Behind him, by the door, I heard Holly make a small sound, a wet broken catch of breath.
***
IT WAS LIKE he’d forgotten Holly. He was too deep in the pleasure of being heard. Four years he'd kept all of it locked behind that gentle tired face, and now it was pouring out of him, and a man pouring himself out doesn't watch the room.
Her hand went into her pocket, and she gave me a look that said without words she was getting help. I knew I had to keep him talking.
“People are going to look for me.”
"I have everything worked out," he said, because he wanted to tell me, because the cleverness of it was a thing he'd been dying to show someone.
"It was almost insultingly easy. I am a respected man at Crestwood, Beatrice. Twenty years. My name on a paper makes that paper true; nobody there has ever once thought to check behind me. So I find you wondering around, confused, still not able to talk. I’ll continue the transfer—routine, well-documented, entirely mine.
The trouble with a transfer is that it needs a destination, and a doctor on the other end to receive you, and I could hardly write my own name on the place where you were going to cease to exist."
"Sutter," I whispered.