Chapter 31
The thing nobody tells you about ending a war is that you have to drive home afterward.
There’s no cut to black. There’s no music.
There’s a hundred and nineteen miles of interstate and county road between Red Hook and the house at the end of the upstate track, and you drive every one of them yourself, in a borrowed car, with your hands at ten and two, the adrenaline draining out of you mile by mile like water out of a cracked tank, and the thing that comes up to fill the space where the adrenaline was is not relief.
I had expected relief. What came instead, somewhere around the Tappan Zee, was grief, arriving on schedule the way it always does, the moment you finally stop running fast enough to outpace it.
Jeff was dead. I let myself have that one fully for the first time, alone in the car with the dashboard lights and the dark river off to the west, because I hadn’t been able to afford it in the Conti building — grief is a thing you cannot do in a room full of wolves who are deciding whether to kill you.Now, there was no one to perform anything for, so I drove north and I grieved my oldest friend, the one who had ruined my first life with a phone call and bought back my second one with a guardrail.
I did not try to make the two facts into one clean feeling, because they would not go, and Antonio had taught me that afternoon what it costs to insist that grief come out clean.
So I let it come out the way it was. Jagged.
Doubled. A man I had every right to hate and could not, finally, manage to, because he had spent the last of himself proving he was more than the worst thing he’d ever done, and that is the only kind of redemption I have ever believed in, the kind that costs the whole person.
And Kerra. I let her come too. For thirty-four years, I had carried her as a wound I kept covered, a thing I took out only in the dark and put away ashamed.
Something had changed in the long room in Red Hook when I said the true thing out loud to her cousin — I never warned her, I was a coward, I have carried both of them every day — and the saying of it had not lightened the weight, exactly, but it had changed its shape.
It had stopped being a secret and started being a fact.
You can set a fact down. A secret you have to keep holding, because the holding is the keeping.
I drove north and I let her be a fact, a girl in a planetarium who had listened to me describe other universes, and chosen, for a while, to live in this one with me.
Who had died because the men who made us could not imagine a world where love was allowed to outweigh business.
I would carry her the rest of my life. But I would carry her in the open now.
That was the only thing the truth had bought me, and it turned out to be enormous.
The wolf rode quiet the whole way. My burned, half-silent, thirty-years-faint wolf, the one that had answered Amy so softly for eleven years that I’d half-convinced myself I imagined it — sat at the bottom of me on that drive and it was not faint.
It was waiting. It knew where we were going.
It knew who was at the end of the road. And the closer I got, the more clearly I could feel it stir, the way an animal stirs when it scents home after a long time lost, and I understood — somewhere past Kingston, with the mountains going from black shapes to gray ones in the first thinning of the dark — that the thing I had spent eleven years disbelieving was going to be waiting for me at that house, fully awake, in both directions, the moment I walked through the door.
The bond hadn’t been faint because it was weak.
It had been faint because I had kept it that way, the way you keep a fire low by refusing to feed it, because I was afraid of what it would mean to let myself have it. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
I rehearsed how to start, and gave up, and rehearsed again.
Sit down, there’s a lot. No. It’s over, you’re safe, I’ll explain everything.
No. There was no good first sentence for I have to tell you who I was before I was yours, and it’s worse than you think, and a man died last night to keep you alive, and I have loved you the whole time even when I couldn’t feel my own wolf say it.
There was no opening line for that. I would have to just walk in and start and trust her to do what she had done in a poisoned room three days ago: meet me where I actually was, instead of where it would have been easier to find me.
The county road came up out of the dark.
The last turn, the one onto the track, was unmarked, except by a leaning mailbox and a maple that Amy had pointed out once, years ago, when this had just been a place we drove past on the way to somewhere lighter.
The sky was going gray-gold at the edge now. I slowed for the turn.
I had figured out how to start a hundred times and discarded all of them.
I made the turn anyway, because the rest of my life was up that track in a house with the lights already on.A man who waits for the right sentence waits forever, and I was finished waiting for things.