17. Wren
WREN
It's never this quiet in the practice. No phones. No barking from the kennel. No Paige narrating her lunch. Just me, the hum of the fluorescents, and the radio turned low on the counter, playing something twangy. I hum along, off-key, pulling supplies for this afternoon.
Today's the last official visit. Day five of five. Peanut's chart closes out, and I won't have an excuse to drive to the carnival during the day anymore. But it's not like I haven't been going there at night as well.
Last night I brought Paige to the show, and she spent two hours swiveling between performers like a lawn sprinkler—the knife guy, no wait, the strongman, oh my GOD the ringmaster—while I watched one man and one man only walk a lion around a ring like they shared a heartbeat.
Afterward, Paige grabbed my arm and said, “Wren, that man looks at you like you invented oxygen,” and I floated home on a cloud of roses.
Nine days left.
But I'm not thinking about that right now. Right now, I'm counting syringes and humming and enjoying being the only human in the building for once.
The front door crashes open hard enough to slam against the wall.
I jump, a box of gauze skittering off the counter. Dr. Vance stands in the doorway, chest heaving, and my first thought is emergency—a downed horse, a dog hit on the highway—because that's the only reason anyone comes through the door like that.
Then his eyes find me, and I stop thinking like a vet.
There's something wrong with his face. His eyes are too wide and moving too fast, sweeping the reception area, the hallway, the empty chairs, like he's confirming something.
Confirming we're alone. His shirt is untucked on one side.
There's a gray shadow of stubble on his jaw, and his hands keep opening and closing at his sides.
Every hair on my body stands up at once.
“Dr. Vance?” My voice comes out smaller than I want. “Is everything—”
“Where is everyone.” Not a question. His voice is flat and strange.
“Paige is off. Everyone else is at the Stilton place, the herd check—” I stop myself, because I'm answering the wrong thing. I'm telling him we're alone. “Did something happen?”
His mouth flattens into that line. The one that means today is about to get worse on principle. He steps inside and lets the door swing shut behind him.
“You went back out there.” He starts toward me. “The carnival. Yesterday. The day before. I checked the mileage log, Wren. The chart closed days ago, and you keep going.”
“The chart closes today, sir. The follow-up protocol—”
“Don't quote protocol at me.” He rounds the end of the counter, and I back up a few steps without deciding to, and now I'm in a room with one exit, and he's in it. “You think I don't know what's out there? You think I don't know why a woman drives twelve miles for a monkey six days running?”
“I'm doing my job—”
“You're spreading your legs for carnival trash.”
The words hit me like a splash of cold water. My back hits the edge of the exam table.
“That's—” My throat has gone dry. “You need to leave. Or I need to leave. This isn't—”
“My wife,” he says, and he keeps coming, close enough now that I can smell stale alcohol on him, “hasn't touched me in two years.
Two years, and I've kept my mouth shut and paid her credit cards, and now she's got a lawyer.” He laughs, and it's the ugliest sound I've ever heard come out of a person.
“But you. Driving out there every day with your hair done, glowing like a bulb. For them.”
“Dr. Vance—”
“A desperate, chubby girl like you.” His eyes crawl down me, and I feel it like something with too many legs.
“You should be grateful any man looks at you at all.
Let alone a successful one. You know that, don't you? Deep down.” He plants a hand on the exam table on either side of me, and the steel edge bites into my lower back, and there is nowhere to go.
“You want it. Girls like you always want it. You just need someone to say it out loud.”
“Get away from me.” I put both hands on his chest and push, and it's like pushing a wall. “Get—away—”
His hand closes around my wrist and wrenches it aside, and pain flares up my forearm, and then his other hand grabs the front of my blouse and pulls.
Buttons pop. Fabric tears. Cold clinic air hits my chest, and I scream.
But there's no one around to hear it.
He doesn't even flinch at the sound. He just drops his mouth to my neck, slobbering, his stubble scraping my collarbone, one hand still crushing my wrist against the table and the other pawing at the torn edge of my blouse.
Though a part of me wants to freeze, an animal in a trap, I'm already patting the exam table behind me with my free hand, because I know this table, I've worked this table for six years. Gauze. The otoscope. The stainless tray I set out this morning—
My fingers close around a scalpel handle.
I don't think. I just drive it into his side.
It goes in easily, and Vance hollers, a high, astonished sound, and lurches back off me with his hand clapped to his side.
I don't wait to see the blood.
I run.
Through the exam room door, down the hall, past reception, my torn blouse flapping, my keys somehow in my fist even though I don't remember grabbing them, and I hit the front door with both hands, and I'm out, into the sun, gravel skidding under my boots.
Behind me, Vance is shouting something, but I'm already in the car, doors locked, engine turning over, and then the practice is shrinking in my rearview, and I'm doing sixty on a road marked forty-five, and my hands are shaking so hard the wheel jitters.
I don't consciously decide where I'm going. My body decides for me, and I know it'll take ten minutes, and somewhere in the middle of them, I start crying. Not gentle tears, ugly ones, hiccuping, my vision smearing so bad I have to blink hard to see the road.
He put his mouth on me. I can still feel it, and I scrub at the spot with the heel of my hand at a stop sign, and it doesn't come off.
I stabbed him.
I stabbed a man. My boss. There's a scalpel in Howard Vance's side, and it's mine, my hand put it there, and some distant filing-cabinet part of my brain is already drafting the incident report while the rest of me shakes.
The carnival rises out of the fields, red and cream stripes against the sky.
I turn onto the access road too fast, gravel spraying, and there he is.
Rowe. Standing at the edge of the lot like he always does, hands in his pockets, waiting for me as if my arrival is the highlight of his day, and the sight of him tears the last stitch holding me together.
I barely get the car in park. My hands won't work the seatbelt on the first try, or the second, and by the third, the door is opening. He's opened my door, he's crouching in the gap, close, closer than he ever comes.
“Wren.”
I turn my face to him, and I see it happen.
I watch him take my measure the way he takes the measure of an animal—fast, complete, missing nothing. My tear-tracked face. The red ring around my wrist where a hand crushed it. My blouse, hanging open, buttons gone, one side of my bra exposed to the afternoon.
His face changes.
I've seen him wary. I've seen him sad, and shy, and burning for me. I have never seen this. Everything human drains out of his expression, and something other makes an appearance, something as animalistic as his menagerie.
“Who.” His voice doesn't sound like his voice.
“I—” My teeth are chattering. In seventy-degree sunshine, my teeth are chattering. “Vance. Dr. Vance, he—he came in, no one was there, he—” The blouse. I grab the torn edges and pull them together, and his jaw goes tight.
“Are you hurt?” he bites out. “Did he—”
“He didn't—I got away. I stabbed him. Rowe, I stabbed him, there was a scalpel and I just—”
“Good.”
The word is flat, and then he's moving. He straightens, and his hand hovers at my shoulder…
and then it settles against my lower back.
His palm. Through the thin fabric of my ruined shirt, warm and broad and steady, and Rowe Holloway, who cannot be touched, who keeps ten inches of air between us like a religion, presses his hand against my back and guides me out of the car.
Some faraway part of me knows that this isn’t easy on him. And on any other day of my life, this touch would rewrite my whole nervous system.
Today, I just shake and let him steer me.
“My trailer,” he says, low, his body angled around mine like a walking shield. “You're safe. Nobody touches you here. Nobody gets near you here.”
We make it maybe forty feet.
A figure cuts across our path from the direction of the Big Top—tall, dark-haired, pale-eyed, moving with an unhurried authority. The Ringmaster. Elias. I've only seen him from the bleachers, spotlit and theatrical, and up close and unlit, he is somehow more, not less.
He takes one look at us. At my face. My wrist. The blouse I'm holding shut with a fist. At Rowe's hand pressed flat against my back.
Elias goes still. When he speaks, the showman's warmth is gone, and what's underneath is quiet and cold and absolute.
“What happened?”