Chapter 7 #2
The workshop is bright. The lamp is lit even though it is afternoon, because the snow on the skylight is dimming the light.
Thaddeus is at the bench. The coffin is open.
The lid is beside it. He has just finished.
The pine is pale and clean and the cherry inlay glows dark around the edge, and the three carved wolves on the lid are not, the way I had pictured them, fierce.
They are alert. They are alive. They are running together with their heads up and their tails low, and the smallest of the three—Wren's wolf—is in the middle, flanked by the other two.
Thaddeus looks up.
He sees my face.
He sets down the tool. He crosses to me. He does not ask. He just opens his arms.
I do not, in this moment, fall into them.
I sit on the floor.
I have not, in six years, sat on the floor after a death.
I have always managed to stay upright. I have always managed to maintain the small dignity of standing through the worst of it.
But I sit on the floor of Thaddeus Mercer's workshop on a winter afternoon in December, and my legs give out under me, and I sit on the cold pine floor and I do not get up.
He sits down beside me.
He does not, immediately, put his arm around me. He sits in the same way I am sitting—legs bent, back against the side of the workbench, hands open on his knees. He looks at the floor with me. He breathes with me. He waits.
After a long time, I cry.
I cry the way I have not cried since I was twelve.
The cry that comes up out of the chest like something tearing.
The cry that I have, for six years, refused to let come because I was afraid that if I let it come once I would not be able to stop.
The cry for Garrett, who was forty-one and had two daughters and a wife who loved him for twenty years and is now going into the ground.
The cry for Mira, who was holding the weight of a man.
The cry for Wren, who could not even speak.
The cry for Neena, who has been twenty years married and is now alone with two children and a small house and a December that has only just begun.
The cry for Edwin. The cry for Mae, who went last week and went well and whom I have not yet allowed myself to grieve. The cry for Wyatt. The cry for Alma Birch. The cry for two hundred and forty-eight names in a notebook in my cottage.
The cry for my mother.
I have not, in any meaningful way, cried for my mother since I was thirteen.
Thaddeus does not move. He does not try to stop me.
He does not, the way well-meaning people sometimes do, shush me or pat me or say there there.
He sits beside me on the floor of the workshop, and he lets me cry, and at some point his hand finds mine, and his hand stays in mine, and the warmth of him is the only thing keeping me from going somewhere I would not be able to come back from.
I cry for a long time.
When I am done, I am very tired.
He gives me his handkerchief. I take it. I blow my nose. I press it against my eyes.
"I am sorry," I say. "I am sorry, Thaddeus."
"For what."
"For falling apart. For coming up here and falling apart."
"That is what I am here for."
I look at him.
"I hate this," I say.
"I know."
"I love this."
"I know that too."
"How do you hold both?"
He thinks. He does not, the way some people would, give me a fast answer. He thinks for a long moment, the way he thinks before he speaks always, and what he says when he speaks is not what I am expecting.
"You build something beautiful from the grief," he says. "And you give it back to the people who need it. And you keep building. Because the building is what the grief becomes, if you do not let the grief stay grief."
I look at the coffin.
The pine. The cherry. The three running wolves.
"You are talking about coffins," I say.
"I am talking about everything."
I am quiet for a long time.
Then I lean across the small space between us, and I kiss him.
The kiss is not the kiss of three weeks ago in the morning light of the workshop. The kiss is salt and exhaustion and the long shaking aftermath of the cry, and Thaddeus accepts it the way he accepts everything—patient, complete, unhurried—and when I lift my mouth from his he says, "Rue."
"Yes."
"Come home."
"Whose home?"
"Yours. Mine. Either. Whichever is closer."
"The cottage."
"The cottage."
He helps me up. He helps me into my coat. He pulls on his own. We close the workshop. We walk down the hill in the failing winter light, and the cemetery is at our back, and the new grave that will be dug tomorrow is not yet dug, and the pack will gather in the morning, and the body will go down.
But tonight, we are going to my cottage.
We are going to sit by the stove, and we are going to drink tea, and we are going to be two people who have walked a great many people to the door and are still, somehow, still here on the side of it that breathes.
The burial is in the morning. Garrett goes into the ground.
Mira speaks. She is twelve, and she stands at the graveside in her father's flannel coat that is far too big for her, and she reads a poem he loved from a piece of paper held in shaking hands.
Wren cannot speak. Neena cannot speak. The pack carries the rest.
I stand beside Thaddeus.
His hand is in mine.
After the burial, the wake is at the chapter house, and it goes on for three days.
The pack drinks. The pack tells stories.
The pack remembers. Garrett—Beau—gets the funeral the older men get, the long full grief-feast that the pack has been doing since before it was a club, since when it was just wolves in mountains.
Mira gets to hear, for three days, every story anyone has about her father.
Wren falls asleep on Della's lap on the second night and Della carries her home.
Neena does not, on the third night, let go of Beth's hand for an hour—Beth, who lost Wyatt, who knows.
I sit through all of it.
Thaddeus sits with me.
On the third night, when the wake ends, we walk back to my cottage in the deep cold of a December that has, finally, turned all the way into winter. The snow is dry and squeaks under our boots. The stars are out. The smoke from the chapter house chimney rises in a thin straight column.
At the door of the cottage, I turn to him.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Come in."
"Yes."
I take his hand. I lead him inside. I do not, this time, light the lamp. I do not need to. The stove is banked and glowing through the iron grate. The cottage is warm.
"Rue."
"Yes."
"What do you need tonight?"
I look at him.
I have been thinking about the answer to this question for three days.
"You," I say. "I need you. I need to be with you. I need to know that something is still alive, Thaddeus. I have walked three people through the door this month. I need someone to remind me what alive feels like."
He looks at me.
The wolf in him is awake. The man is awake.
He bends. He kisses my forehead. He kisses my temple. He kisses the small soft spot beneath my ear that he has, in three weeks of practice, learned makes me catch my breath.
"All right," he says.
"Slowly."
"Always slowly."
"Like this is the only night we have."
"It is not."
"I know. But like it is."
He lifts me into his arms. He carries me to the small bed in the back of the cottage.
The cherry medallion is at my breastbone where it lives, and the wolf in him is awake, and the man in him is awake, and outside the cottage the snow has started to fall again, and the cemetery on the hill above us holds, now, a grave that has only been a grave for a day.
But the cottage is warm.
And we are alive.
And he carries me to the bed.