Chapter 8
Thaddeus
I have carried her into the bedroom because she asked me to.
This is the second time in my life I have carried a woman across a threshold.
The first was Elena, forty-five years ago in a cabin three hundred yards from this one, and I was thirty-one years old, and I was bone-strong and unafraid and full of a future I did not understand yet.
Rue is light in my arms the way Elena was light, and she is breathing against my shoulder the way Elena breathed against my shoulder, and the cottage is small and warm and dark around us and the stove glows in the front room with the slow even heat of a fire banked for the night.
The two memories should not, by the logic of grief, be able to coexist.
They do.
The wolf in the back of my mind has, in the last month, learned a thing I did not know wolves could learn: he holds two truths at once.
Elena was loved. Rue is loved. These are not, it turns out, the same statement made twice.
They are two different sentences in two different lives, and the man who learned to say the first was, I think, the man who has now earned the right to say the second.
I set Rue down on the bed.
I do not let her go.
I sit on the edge of the bed with her in my lap, the way I have not sat with a woman in fourteen years, and I press my mouth into her hair.
Her hair smells of woodsmoke from the wake and the lavender soap she uses and the faint cold of three days outside in December, and I close my eyes against it and I breathe in slowly and the wolf in me lifts his head and breathes in with me and we are, the wolf and I, both of us steady.
"Thaddeus," she says.
"Yes."
"I am so tired."
"I know."
"I do not want to be tired tonight."
"I know that too."
She lifts her face from my shoulder. Her eyes are red still from the wake.
Her mouth is soft. She is wearing the gray dress Della found for her three days ago, the dress for the funeral, the dress that does not belong to her and that she has not yet had a chance to take off because the wake has consumed every hour since the burial.
I unbutton the gray dress.
I do it slowly. The buttons are small and made of dark horn, and the buttonholes are tight, and my hands, which I have spent forty years training to be precise, are precise now.
I do not hurry. She watches me do it. She does not, the way a woman wanting urgency would, lift her own hands to help.
She lets me undress her. She lets me have the small slow work of the buttons.
The dress opens at the collar. The hollow of her throat. The small dip at her breastbone where the cherry medallion lies, warm against her skin from a day of being held there.
I press my mouth to the cherry medallion.
I press my mouth to her skin beside it.
She makes a small sound. Her hand moves into my hair.
I keep working at the buttons. The third.
The fourth. The fifth. The dress opens to her waist. Beneath it she is wearing a thin slip the color of cream, and her shoulders are pale against the gray wool of the dress, and the lamp—I have not lit the lamp; the only light is from the stove in the front room, slanting through the half-open bedroom door—catches her collarbone and the line of her jaw.
I lift her out of the dress.
I do it carefully. I have, three days ago, helped a man into his coffin.
I have, today, helped a girl carry the small carved wolf I made for her—Wren, the one carved from the cherry inlay, the one Thaddeus thought she should keep—I have today helped Wren and Mira and Neena carry the things they will carry.
My hands have been full of grief for a week.
They are, now, full of Rue. They are, now, lifting the gray funeral dress over her head and folding it carefully and laying it on the chair by the bed because it is borrowed and it does not belong to her and she does not need to be reminded of it.
The slip is the color of cream and the cherry is at her breastbone and her hair has come loose around her shoulders.
I look at her.
"Beautiful," I say.
"You said that the last time."
"I will say it every time. I should have said it for thirty years to a woman I did not say it to enough. I will not make that mistake again."
Her face changes.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Come here."
I come.
I sit her gently back on the bed, and I begin, slowly, to undress myself.
The flannel. The undershirt. The belt. She watches me do it the way she watched me do it the first time, and her watching is no longer the watching of a woman who has just discovered the body of a man she did not yet know.
Her watching is the watching of a woman who has, in three weeks, learned this body.
The scar on the collarbone. The brand at the chest. The white line of an old surgical scar low on the right ribs from a stupid winter when I fell off a roof.
She knows them. She knows where they are.
She watches me as if she is taking attendance.
I lower myself onto the bed beside her.
She turns into me.
Her hand is at my face. Her thumb is at the corner of my mouth, the corner that almost-smiles.
She traces the line of my mouth. The line of my jaw.
The hollow at the base of my throat. The center of my chest where the dark hair, going gray, lies against the skin.
She is, I realize, doing what I have been doing—taking attendance.
Touching the places she knows. Confirming, in the dark, that all of me is where she left me.
I do the same to her.
I trace the line of her cheekbone. The line of her brow.
The bridge of her nose, which is small and slightly turned to one side from a childhood break she has told me about.
The faint silver scar at her hairline from a fall when she was nine.
The corner of her mouth, where her own almost-smile lives, the one I have learned to read.
The line of her jaw. The hollow of her throat.
I am, I realize, memorizing her.
This is not a thing I have done since Elena.
I am memorizing her face the way I would memorize a face for a coffin lid—the proportions, the planes, the small particularities that make her her and not anyone else.
I am memorizing her because she is human, and I am not, and the math of that is something I have refused to do for a month but cannot, in this dark room on this winter night after walking three people to the door in eight weeks, refuse anymore.
She is going to outlive this moment.
She is going to, by simple species arithmetic, outlive me by a margin that depends on which of us turns out to be unluckier with the calendar.
I will probably go first. The wolves age slower than humans, but not infinitely slower.
If I am careful—if I avoid the kind of stupid I avoided successfully for the last twenty years—I will probably make it to ninety.
She will, if her family history holds, probably not.
But I do not get to build her coffin. The math does not work. We will not, either of us, be the one to bury the other in the way I once buried Elena.
I am memorizing her anyway.
This is the secret I have been keeping from her for a week.
This is what I have been doing in the workshop at three in the morning when I could not sleep.
I have been memorizing her face. I have been carving it into pieces of cedar and walnut and the small offcuts of cherry I cannot bring myself to throw away.
I have a small box, in the back of the workshop, of carvings I have not shown her.
They are not good carvings yet. They are practice.
They are me learning a face by hand, the way I once learned a different face by hand, the way I will never not have learned her now.
I do not tell her this.
I will tell her, someday. Tonight is not the night.
Tonight I press my mouth to her temple, and I say her name softly against her skin—Rue—and the saying of her name is, like everything tonight, slow and full and unhurried. She turns her face into mine.
I kiss her mouth.
The kiss is different from the workshop.
The workshop was discovery. This is recognition.
She is mine and I am hers and we know it now, in a way we did not three weeks ago, and the knowing changes the shape of the kiss.
There is no urgency. There is no hurry. There is only the slow careful traveling of a path we have both, in three weeks, mapped.
I draw the slip down off her shoulders.
She lifts up to help me.
The slip falls to her waist. Then to her hips.
Then off. The cherry medallion lies against her bare breastbone, and the firelight from the stove in the front room is a soft warm orange across her skin, and the bedroom is dark enough that I can see her by the warmth of the light alone, the way I would want to see her if I were building her face from memory.
I lower my mouth to her.
I kiss the cherry medallion. I kiss the small warm hollow at the base of her throat.
I kiss the line of her collarbone, the smooth plane above her breast, the soft curve of the breast itself.
She arches into me. Her hand goes into my hair.
I take my time. I take all of the time. I am not, tonight, in any kind of hurry, and she is not, tonight, asking me to hurry.
She is asking, with the slow patient roll of her body against mine and the small soft sounds against my temple, that I take exactly the time I am taking.
I kiss her ribs. The small scar low on her abdomen. (Appendectomy, age sixteen, she told me last week. I asked. I have started asking about every mark.) The faint shadow of her hipbone. The soft inside of her thigh. The place where I have, three weeks running now, learned to find her.
She gasps when I touch her.