Chapter 5 #2
Beth is still beside Wyatt. She has stopped speaking.
She is holding his hand. Jo is in the corner of the room, writing in a chart, but the writing is performative; she has nothing left to write that matters.
Two of the patched members are in the waiting area, sitting in silence, two of the older men of the club, men who knew Wyatt and have come because that is what the club does.
I bring Thaddeus into the recovery bay.
Beth looks up.
I see, on her face, the small surprise—Coffin is here, Coffin who does not come until after, Coffin who is for the next part—and then I see her understand.
"Thaddeus," she says.
"Beth."
"Thank you for coming."
"Of course."
He crosses to the bed. He looks at Wyatt for a long moment. He does not, the way doctors look at patients, look at the monitors or the chart or the leg. He looks at the boy. He looks at the boy's face. He reaches out and lays his hand—broad, callused, warm—very lightly on Wyatt's forehead.
I have not seen him do this before.
He stays that way for perhaps thirty seconds. His eyes close. His face does the small thing it does when he is concentrating on a fine carving line.
Then he opens his eyes. He removes his hand. He looks at Beth.
"He knows," Thaddeus says.
Beth makes a small sound.
"He has been waiting for someone to say it," Thaddeus says. "I think he heard you. He is ready. He needs the permission you have already given. He will go soon."
Beth nods. Tears come down her face. She does not move her other hand from her son's. She bends and kisses Wyatt's forehead in the same place Thaddeus's hand has just been, and she whispers something to him in the old language, and then she sits back, and she breathes.
Wyatt dies at six-oh-three in the morning.
It is a quiet death. The breathing slows.
The pauses lengthen. Beth speaks softly to him through every one of them.
I monitor. Jo stands at the foot of the bed with her arms folded, her glasses pushed up into her hair, her face very still.
Thaddeus stands behind Beth with one hand on her shoulder—a small light pressure, not weight, just contact—and when the last breath comes, Beth does not collapse, because she is held.
I do not know I am crying until Thaddeus, without releasing Beth, reaches his free hand to me and brushes a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
I lean into the touch.
He keeps his thumb there for a long moment.
Then he lets me go.
The next hours are work. Preparing Wyatt.
Calling the pack. Bringing the coffin down from the workshop—the pine coffin that Thaddeus has, I understand now, not been failing to start.
He has been waiting. He has been waiting until I asked him.
He has been waiting until the boy had been told.
The wolves on the lid will not be carved tonight.
They will be carved tomorrow. Tonight the coffin is plain.
The vigil is held in the chapter house, not the clinic. The pack moves through it in shifts. Beth does not leave the body. Wyatt's father arrives at noon from his job an hour away and falls apart in a way Beth has not allowed herself to. I sit with him. I hold his shoulder. I do the work.
I do not see Thaddeus for most of the day.
He is at the workshop, carving the wolves.
He works through lunch. He works through the afternoon.
By the time the early dark comes—four-thirty, in November, the early dark that signals winter is no longer pretending—he has finished the lid, and the wolves are perfect, three of them running, and he has brought the coffin down to the chapter house, and the body is in it, and Beth is sitting beside it with her hand on the lid.
The burial is in the morning.
I do not, tonight, go up the hill.
I go to my cottage. I close the door. I sit on the bed in the dark. I do not turn on the lamp. I just sit, with the cherry medallion warm against my breastbone, and I let the day come down on me the way it has needed to come down.
I do not cry. I am too tired to cry.
After a long time—an hour, two, I do not check—there is a soft knock at the door.
I open it.
Thaddeus is there. He is in a clean shirt. His hair is freshly tied back. He has sawdust on his hands, the way he always does, and the sawdust catches the porch light. He has a small bundle in his hand.
"Eat something," he says.
He hands me the bundle. It is wrapped in cloth. Inside are two biscuits with butter and a small jar of stew, still warm. He has brought me dinner.
I look at him.
I do not know what to do with my face. I do not know what to do with my hands.
I am holding the bundle and the bundle is warm and Thaddeus is standing on my doorstep in the dark with sawdust on his hands and a small calm steady look on his face and I am, I realize, falling apart very quietly inside my skin.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Will you come in?"
He comes in.
I do not eat. I set the bundle on the table. I turn back to him. He is in the middle of my small living room, hands at his sides, watching me with the patient attention I have come to associate with him.
I cross to him.
I put my hands on the front of his shirt. I feel his heart under my palm. It is slow and steady and warm.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"I am not going to go up to the cemetery tonight. Will you come back to me in the morning, after?"
"Yes."
"And tonight?"
He looks at me.
"What do you need tonight, Rue?"
"I need you not to leave."
He is quiet for a moment.
"I will not leave."
I do not, that night, kiss him.
I make him tea. He makes me eat the biscuits.
We sit on the small sofa in the cottage in the lamp light and I rest my head against his shoulder and he puts his arm around me and we do not, for a long time, speak.
The stove crackles. The cottage holds the heat.
Outside, the wind picks up over the ridge, and the bare maples scrape against each other, and the cemetery on the hill above us holds, now, a fresh grave waiting to be filled.
At some point I fall asleep against him.
I wake at three in the morning. He is still there. He is awake. He has not moved.
"You did not sleep."
"I did not need to."
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Lie down."
He looks at me.