18. Lost Paths and Longing #2
It's hungrier than the first night and rawer and there's nothing left hidden in either of us to slow it down, and I set the pace and he gives me every inch of what I ask for and watches me take it, and when I line him up myself — my hand, my choice, my door — and pull him into me, he says my name into my throat like it's the only word he's got left and I believe him, because it's the only one I've got left either.
I go over the first time with my nails down his back and his name in my mouth, and he stays with me the whole way, the way nobody stayed with me through anything for ten years, and the second time I take him with me, the both of us coming apart at once in a house ringed with guns and a clock running down, all in, no walls, no tomorrow allowed in the room.
After, he doesn't move off me. He holds his weight on his forearms and puts his forehead down on mine and we breathe, and neither of us says a word, because we're the two people on earth best at letting a silence stand and this is the best silence either of us has had in years.
I sleep. Against him. Past five. The dream doesn't find me.
That's how I know what he is to me now. The dream's followed me every night of my life and tonight it can't get in, because the man it would have to come through is wrapped around me with one arm over the brand on my wrist, keeping the watch even in his sleep.
It's the best night I've had since I was sixteen.
It's the worst possible night to have proof of exactly how much I've got to lose.
St. Brigid's is white clapboard and a steeple that needs paint, sitting alone at the end of a road with nothing on either side of it but stubble fields going gold and the mountains a long blue line behind.
Cole drives. Bo's behind us. The detail's ahead and around, the federal woman somewhere I can't see, a whole apparatus arranged around one barefoot girl who learned a church could be the worst place on earth and is walking into one anyway.
Cole stops at the door. He doesn't come in.
Ruiz's terms, and mine — Hannah meets one person, and the one person is me, and a man who'd take a door I open by accident is not a man who'd follow me through this one uninvited.
He looks at me a long beat in the truck, the man with everything to lose, and he doesn't tell me it'll be all right, because he's the real thing and the real thing doesn't lie to you.
"I'm right here," he says. "You come out that door, I'm the first thing you see."
"I know." I get my hand flat on his chest, over a heart going as hard as mine. "That's why I can go in."
The church is empty and cool and smells of candle wax and old wood, and the morning comes through the glass in pieces of red and blue and lays them down the center aisle, and there in the third pew from the front, small, with her back to me, is a woman with gray already coming into hair that used to be the color of mine.
She turns around.
Ten years has been harder on Hannah than on me, and I knew it would be the second Ruiz said her name, because I got the road at dawn and the bar and the town and a father who came, and Hannah got whatever happened on the far side of a ceremony I ran from.
Her face is older than thirty-one has any right to make a face.
But it's her. It's the girl from the potato table, and when she sees me her whole face breaks open the way a wall breaks, all at once, and she says the only thing either of us has ever needed to say to the other.
"You got out."
"You told me how." My voice is gone. I don't try to fix it. "Thirteen words, Hannah. You gave me thirteen words and a whole life. I have been trying to find a way to pay you back for ten years and there isn't one, there's no amount, I don't?—"
"Stop." She's crossing to me, or I'm crossing to her, I lose track of which, and then we've got each other in the aisle in the colored light and she's shaking and so am I, two women who survived the same man a lifetime and ten years apart, holding on like the floor's gone.
"You don't owe me. You getting out was the payment.
You think I didn't hear about it? A Blessed One went over the east fence and they never got her back.
Ten years, Sister Mary. You were the story we told each other in the dark to remember it could be done. "
Sister Mary. The name lands and I let it, because in her mouth it isn't theirs anymore. It's the name of the girl who got away, the one they couldn't stop telling.
We sit in the third pew. She tells me her version — the years I didn't see, how she got out finally, two springs ago, through a crack I won't put on a page even in my own head because it's hers.
How she went to Boise. How she gave them my name six weeks ago and has hated herself for it every day since, because she knew the second she said it she might be handing me back to them, and she said it anyway because she'd decided some things are worth more than one woman staying hidden, even when the one woman is the one who got away.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I named you and I brought all of this down on you, and I am so?—"
"Don't." I take her hands. The brand on her wrist sits against the brand on mine, the same iron, the same man, the same humming woman.
"You did the same thing in that deposition you did at the potato table.
You spent yourself to bring somebody else out.
I'm not going to sit in a church and let you apologize for being the bravest person I've ever known twice. "
She cries then, quiet, the way you learn to cry in a place where sound gets you caught, and I hold her, and for one impossible minute in the colored light I have the thing I never let myself want — the one I left, back, alive, on my own side of the fence at last.
It lasts a minute.
Then she pulls back and wipes her face with the heel of her hand and looks at me with something that isn't relief anymore, something that drops the temperature in my chest twenty degrees before she's said a word, because I know that look. I wore it the night I found white cotton on my counter.
"Sloane." She's never called me Sloane. In ten years of my head she's only ever called me Sister Mary, and the sound of my real name in her mouth is the most frightened thing I've heard all morning.
"Before I tell anybody anything. Before August. There's something you have to know, and you're not going to be able to do what I think you're going to do with it, so I need you to hear all of it first."
"Hannah."
"They've got Grace."
The church goes very far away and very close at the same time.
"She's not fourteen anymore." Hannah's holding my hands so hard it hurts and I'm grateful for it, it's the only thing keeping me in the pew.
"She's twenty-four. She's a Blessed One now, Sloane.
She has been for years. And with Crane in a cell and the Elders running scared, they've moved her ceremony up.
They're consecrating her before the trial — to him, by proxy, the way they do when he can't be there — because a Blessed One who's been consecrated is a wife, and a wife doesn't testify against her husband.
" Her voice cracks all the way through. "They're going to put the girl you went over the fence for on that table inside the month.
And the only thing in the world that would make me walk into that courtroom in August and say every word I've got — the only thing — is you telling me there's still a way to get her out first."
I sit in a church I'd never have set foot in, holding the hands of the woman who saved me, and I feel the cold flat useful thing come up in me that my father built on Tuesday nights, the thing that came when my hand found white cotton in the dark — and under it, older than the fence, older than the bar, older than Cole, the one instinct I've never killed and never will.
The girl I left at the fence is still at the fence. And there is no version of this where I send a town full of people I love to go over it for me.
This one I do alone.
I tell Hannah I'll find a way. I don't tell her the rest of it.
I walk out of St. Brigid's into the gold morning and Cole is the first thing I see, exactly like he promised, leaning against the truck with his eyes already reading my face from forty feet — and for the first time since I took the wall down, I make myself give him nothing.