CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cassius
We go north on the Saturday after the court, and I will come back to what happened in that vault on the Friday, because there is an order to these things and I cannot yet write it down.
Four hours of dark ahead of us, which is not enough, and both of us know it.
"Where do you sleep when you're not home?" she asks, forty minutes out.
"Anywhere without a window."
"That's not an answer, that's a poster."
"Basements. Cold stores. There's a motel outside Halloran with an interior room and a manager who's been taking my money since 1998 and has never asked a question.
" I take the exit. "We'll be there by ten.
You'll sleep. I'll sit. We go on to Rimebrook tomorrow at dusk and we're in the house by eight. "
"And in the day you—"
"Sit in the dark in a room with no window," I say, "and think about things."
"That's the most depressing sentence anyone's ever said in a car."
The motel outside Halloran has eleven rooms, a vending machine with a handwritten apology taped to it, and a night manager who takes cash and does not look up. Room 4 is interior, no window, one bed, a chair, and a bathroom with a fan that sounds like a light aircraft.
Wren sits on the end of the bed and eats a bag of crisps from the apologetic vending machine and looks at me in the chair.
"Tell me about your sister," she says.
I go very still.
"Mari says you flinched when I said my grandmother's name, back at the house. Ilse. She noticed. She notices about as much as I do, she's just quieter about it." Wren folds the bag over. "You don't have to."
The fan runs in the bathroom.
"She was seven when I was seventeen," I say.
"Bruges. Our father was a cooper. Ilse had a limp from a fever and she was the funniest person I have ever met, and I include everyone I've met since, and I've met a great many people.
" My hands are on my knees. "I was made in 1626.
I did not choose it and I don't remember most of it. What I remember is that I went home."
Wren doesn't say anything.
"Eleven days after. I went home, because I was nineteen years old and frightened and it was the only place I knew, and I stood in my father's yard, and Ilse came out.
" My voice does something and I let it. "And she was so pleased to see me.
She'd been ill. She thought I'd been away at the coast. She came running across the yard with that limp and she took hold of my hands. "
"Cassius—"
"I didn't kill her." I look up. "I want to be very clear about that, because you've been waiting for the sentence where I did.
I didn't. Aurek was behind me in the lane and he'd made me and he was — he was teaching.
And he said, take her or I will. And I stood in my father's yard for a long time and then I put my sister back inside the door and I shut it and I told her to bar it and never open it to me again, and she screamed at me through the wood for about an hour. "
The vending machine hums through the wall.
"And Aurek?" Wren says.
"Cut my hands off," I say. "At the wrist. Both.
They grow back; it takes about a year and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
He kept them in a box and he carried the box for eleven years and he'd take them out at parties.
" I turn my hands over. "So no. I didn't kill her.
She lived to be sixty-one. She had four children and she never opened a door after dark in her life, and I know that because I stood outside the house every year on her birthday for forty-three years, and she knew I was there, and she never once came out. "
Wren's crossed the room.
She's on her knees in front of the chair before I've finished the sentence, and she takes my hands — both of them, in both of hers, without any ceremony at all — and she holds them.
"Wren—"
"Shut up."
"You should be frightened of me."
"I've been frightened of you," she says. "I did that. It was a Sunday. Now be quiet."
Her hands are warm and small and there's a callus on the inside of each palm from four years of the same handle, and I can smell her four inches away, and I have been holding a wall up for four hundred years and something in it goes.
"I hold on to people's hands," I say. "That's the thing.
That's my whole — it's what I do instead of stopping.
I held Hesper's hand while he killed her.
I held my sister's in the yard. I have never once in four hundred years put myself between a thing and the man doing it, I have just stood there being comforting—"
"You did on Cadger Row," Wren says.
I stop.
"You got there in about four seconds and you took him apart on a wall." Her chin comes up. "You've been carrying two centuries of I stood and watched and then you didn't. For me."
And that's when I kiss her.
Or she kisses me. I've had a long time to think about the sequence and I've never got it straight; there's a version where she comes up off her knees and a version where I come out of the chair and the truth is somewhere in the middle and neither of us was doing anything sensible.
She tastes like salt and vinegar crisps and she's warm all the way through and she makes a small furious sound against my mouth like she's been waiting a month to be annoyed at me properly. Her hands are in my hair. Mine are on her face, and they're cold, and she doesn't care.
And underneath it — always, forever, in the same room as every good thing — the other hunger, patient as a tide.
I pull back first. It costs.
"Wren."
"I know."
"Do you." I've got my forehead against hers. "Because there's a bond between us as of nine-thirty last night and you can feel exactly what's in this room right now, and I'd like you to say out loud what it is."
She's quiet for a second.
"It's the two things at once," she says. "It's you wanting me and it's you wanting it, and they're not in separate rooms, they're the same shape, and you can't get them apart and neither can I."
"Yes."
"Yeah," Wren says. "Welcome to being a person."
◆ ◆ ◆
We come into Rimebrook at half seven the next evening with the last of the light off the water, and she makes me stop at the shop.
"It's open."
"It's a village shop, they close at eight—"
"Wren, there are four vehicles on that road behind us between here and the county line and I have identified three of them—"
"I need to buy bread and milk and I need to talk to whoever's behind that counter," she says, already unbuckling, "and I am going to do the second one whether or not you like it, so you may as well let me do the first one at the same time."
I sit in the car with the engine running for eleven minutes and watch through a window.
The shop is one room with a chest freezer and a rack of newspapers and a woman of about eighty behind the counter, and the woman looks up when Wren comes in, and looks at her, and looks at her again.
And puts her hand over her mouth.
Even through glass, forty feet away, I can hear all of it. That's a thing I could do before Wren and it's a thing I can do now, and it is the only part of what I am that has never once been useful for anything good.
"You're Anne's girl."
"I'm — yes. I'm Wren."
"You've got her whole face." The old woman comes out from behind the counter without hurrying, the way a person does when nothing has happened in a village for eleven years.
"Dorothy Nave. I had the shop when your mother was in school.
You came up here twice, once when you were tiny and once when you were about ten and you were very rude about the lake. "
"I don't remember being rude about the lake."
"You said it smelled like a tin."
"That does sound like me."
Dorothy Nave laughs, and then stops laughing, and says: "Are you at the house?"
"I'm going up tonight."
"Mm." A pause. "Does it still have all the carving on it?"
Everything in me goes very quiet.
"You knew about the carving," Wren says.
"Everybody knew about the carving, love, it's the strangest-looking house in the county.
" Dorothy takes a loaf off the rack without being asked and puts it in a bag.
"Ilse Kelleher lived up that road forty-one years and never came to church and never came to the Christmas fair and never once in her life asked a single one of us for anything.
And every mother in this village sent for her. "
"Sent for her for what?"
"When something wasn't right." Dorothy's face does something complicated.
"That's how it went, and nobody ever put it plainer than that, and I'm not going to start now at eighty-two in my own shop.
A child that wouldn't settle. A house where things went wrong in a particular way.
My sister-in-law had a summer in 1979 where her boy wouldn't sleep and she wouldn't say why, and Ilse Kelleher came down that road on a bicycle with a bag and she was in that house four hours, and afterwards there was carving on the door frames and my sister-in-law painted over it and never spoke of it again. "
Wren has both hands flat on the counter.
"Did she charge?"
"Never took a penny." Dorothy puts the milk in the bag. "Wouldn't take a cup of tea. That's what put people off her, in the end — you can forgive a woman anything except not letting you pay her back." She pushes the bag across. "Two eighty."
Wren pays. She's shaking. I can see it from the car.
"Mrs. Nave—"
"Dorothy."
"Dorothy. Did anybody go up there? After she died?"
The old woman is quiet for a moment.
"There was a man," she says. "Two or three times over the years — before she went and once after.
Very polite. Older sort of gentleman, not from round here, always in the afternoon.
He came in for a paper once and asked me the way to the Kelleher place and I told him, God forgive me, and afterwards I couldn't have said what he looked like.
Not a thing. I stood here after he'd gone and I couldn't tell you if he was tall. "
"When was the last time?"
"Spring," Dorothy says. "This spring. He asked if the house had sold."
◆ ◆ ◆
Wren gets back in the car and puts the bag in the footwell and does not say anything for about a mile and a half.
"Every mother in the village," she says at last.
"Yes."
"Forty-one years of getting on a bicycle at four in the morning for people who wouldn't have her in the church.
" She's looking out of the window. "And she never charged, and she never explained, and she died alone in a house with a birch in the guttering, and the only thing anybody in that village remembers about her is that she was strange. "
"Wren—"
"That's the job, isn't it," she says. "That's the whole job. That's what's in that house. Six generations of women going into places nobody else will go into, and cleaning up something nobody wants to look at, and not being thanked for it, and dying young."
She turns and looks at me, and I have never in four hundred years wanted so much to be able to say something useful.
"Cassius, I've been doing that job since I was twenty-six," she says. "I just didn't know it was hereditary."
End of Act Two.