29. The Cirque #2
First light at the Cirque is the color of the inside of a shell. I wake the way I always wake when the dark starts to go. Sloane's already awake beside me — she runs at dawn, and her body doesn't know how to do anything else. She puts her hand flat on my chest.
"I'm right here," she says. "Take all the time you want. I'm not going anywhere."
I carry him to the edge of the lake.
The Towers are catching the first sun, going from gray to a gold I'd never call gold in her bar but will call it here, because here it's the right word. The lake's dead still. The whole cirque is in it, upside down and perfect.
And I stand at the edge of the water with what's left of my brother in my two hands, and the line I've held since Kandahar, the I have not cried, the thing I carried up a Wyoming highway and through a kitchen and into a firefight and never once let break — it breaks.
It breaks all the way, here, where it's safe, where he's home.
Fifteen years that man had my six. First through every door, last to complain.
The one who'd haul another man's gear up a ridge line on top of his own and crack a joke at the top.
The one who waved at every truck because somewhere in it was a man who needed to know one other man saw him today.
The one who made me swear on a rooftop and three weeks later didn't make it back.
The one I gave the dose to, who asked me with his last clear breath not to leave him alone in it — and I didn't, I stayed.
And now I'm doing the last thing. I'm leaving him up here, on purpose, where he always wanted to be, and walking back down without him.
I cry the way I haven't cried since I was a boy.
Sloane doesn't reach for me and doesn't shush me and doesn't do the thing people do.
She stands a few feet off with her hands at her sides and lets it be as big and as ugly as it has to be — because she knows, better than anyone alive, the woman who learned that some things you have to let bleed all the way out on your own kitchen floor, that the worst mercy you can do a grieving man is make his grief smaller to spare yourself the size of it.
When I can talk, I talk to him. Out loud, at the edge of the water.
"We're here, brother. Third day, just like you drew it.
Big Sandy, Jackass Pass, the Cirque. You were right.
You're always right and I hate it." A breath that finally, finally goes all the way down.
"Reyes and Hagen couldn't come — Reyes has got his mother and Hagen's got a baby that tripled in size and a wife and the whole life you died so guys like us could have, and they're living it, Holt, they're living it loud.
And before I left them, Reyes told me to tell you something.
" My throat closes and I make it open. "He said, tell him we said the thing.
That's all. We said the thing. Because none of us can ever finish the sentence, you know that, we've never once been able to finish it — every time one of us starts it just stops, tell him I, and there's no end on it that a man like us can say out loud. "
The lake holds the whole sky.
"So I'm going to finish it for all of us, up here, where there's nobody but the mountains to hear me say it like a person and not a SEAL.
The thing is this, brother. We love you.
All of us. I love you. You were the best man I ever knew and the best friend I'll ever have and there's a hole in every one of us shaped exactly like you and there always will be, and we wouldn't trade the hole because the hole is just the love with nowhere left to go.
That's the thing. That's the thing we could never say. We said it. I said it. It's said."
I open him to the wind, and I let him go into the Cirque of the Towers, and the first sun takes him gold over a still lake in the highest quiet there is, and Garrett Holt is finally, exactly, where he spent his whole life wanting to be.
And then a thing happens I don't plan. Sloane comes up beside me, at the edge of the water, and she speaks to a man she never met.
"I didn't know you," she tells the mountain, the wind, the gold.
"But I know what you cost him, and I know you sent him to me without ever meaning to — a dead truck six miles outside my town, a promise that ran through my whole life.
So thank you. For him. He's the best thing that ever broke down on a Wyoming road, and I've got him from here, and I'm going to take care of him, and you can rest." A beat.
Her voice cracks, the steady one, the one that doesn't crack.
"Wave at the trucks, Holt. He told me you waved at every truck.
I'll make sure he keeps doing it. We both will. "
We walk back out the way we came. Jackass Pass, Big Sandy, the trees thickening, the air getting thick and warm again as we drop, the world coming back up to meet us.
I'm lighter coming down. Not the urn — the urn's empty, riding flat in the pack now, a thing I'll keep but not a weight anymore.
Lighter the other way. Fourteen months I carried a man and the manner of his death and the promise I couldn't keep and the fear of the after, and I set all of it down at the edge of a still lake, and the grief didn't go — grief doesn't go, I know that now, the hole is permanent and it's supposed to be — but it stopped being a thing I was drowning under and started being a thing I get to carry, which is the only difference that was ever on offer and turns out to be the whole world.
I came to this state to do one thing and be nobody after. A man with nothing left to lose, who'd lay his brother down and just stop.
I'm walking back down the mountain not alone.
That's the whole of what changed. There's a woman beside me on the trail with a turquoise streak and a runner's stride and a brand on her wrist that says somebody once tried to decide who she belonged to and got told no, and at the bottom of this trail there's a truck, and at the end of that road there's a town that folded me in, and a job under a hood, and a federal courtroom in August where she's going to stand up and bury the man who built her nightmare, and after that there's the rest of it.
The whole rest of it. The thing I didn't believe a man like me got to have.
"No," I tell her, and it's true, and I'm grinning when I say it, the first clean grin in longer than I can say. "But I'm going to be. I've got it on good authority it gets livable. It doesn't heal. It just gets outnumbered."
"Somebody smart tell you that?"
"Best bartender in three counties." I take her hand on the trail. "I'm going to marry her, I think. When we get down. After the trial. I haven't asked her yet."
"Mm." It's Walt's sound, in her mouth, and she does it on purpose, and it's the best sound I've ever heard her steal. "You should probably ask her, then."
"I should probably ask her right."
"Yeah." She looks straight ahead at the trail and doesn't answer for a beat, and that's the whole answer.
"She'd want it done right. She's particular.
" She squeezes my hand and we keep walking down, out of the high quiet, back toward the life, not alone.
"There's no rush, cowboy. We've got the rest of it.
That's the whole point of coming back down. "