Chapter 25 At the Rec Center — Ii
And I made it safe.
I was standing in the back hall afterward with the thing rendered harmless and my heart finally, finally letting me feel how fast it was going, sweat cold down my spine, when the exterior door opened and Wes Calder walked in.
Somebody had called it in. Ashley, maybe, once the stargazing story got thin, or Mrs. Sokol’s second cousin who runs the desk.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Wes came around the corner into that hall in his marshal’s jacket and stopped, and took it all in about a second and a half, because that is his job the way the other was mine, and he looked at what was in front of him, which was a rendered-safe device and a hardware clerk with her sleeves shoved up and her hands not shaking, and then he looked at my face.
And I understood, watching him understand, that I had lost. Not the argument.
The costume. There was no getting it back on, not in that hallway, not with him looking at me like that, not with what was on the floor between us.
I had been seen, both ways, at once, in the one place I’d sworn it would never happen.
The strange thing, the thing I keep coming back to, is what my face was actually doing.
It wasn’t the danger. The danger was over; I’d handled the danger; the danger was, if I’m honest, the easy part, it always was, that’s the sick joke of my whole life.
What was on my face when Wes Calder looked at me was pure animal terror, and it had nothing to do with the object on the floor and everything to do with the twenty-two children I had just been responsible for, the twenty-two little lives that had, for four minutes, hung on whether Roberta Jean Vance still had steady hands.
I had done it. They were out at the fence looking at stars that weren’t there.
And the fact that they’d been mine, that a whole gym of them had depended on me being calm and I had said yes to that without even deciding, had cracked something open in my chest that had been sealed for three years, and it was the sealed thing, not the device, that had me shaking now that the job was done.
“Birdie,” Wes said. Just my name. Gentle. Careful, like I was the thing that might go off.
“There was a smell,” I said, and heard my own voice come out flat, the clean voice, the true one, no flutter left in the building to hide behind.
“I got the kids to the fence. Ashley has them. Twenty-two, I counted twice. Theo’s got the little ones.
” I stopped. I heard what I sounded like.
I tried, weakly, hopelessly, to reach for her, for Birdie, for the flutter and the hand on the chest and the oh-my-gosh, and it wasn’t there, I’d used it all up, there was just me, standing in the wreck of my own disguise with steady hands and a wet face.
“Twenty-two,” Wes repeated, quietly. He didn’t come closer.
He didn’t touch the scene, didn’t touch me.
He just stood there in the hallway and looked at me, at all of me, the way I’d been terrified of being looked at for three years, and what was on his face was not triumph, and it was not suspicion, and it was not even surprise.
It was something a lot worse than any of those. It was tenderness, and it was aimed straight at the part of me I’d worked hardest to bury, and I had never in my life felt more completely, catastrophically found.
“Okay,” he said, soft, like we had all the time in the world, like there wasn’t a made-safe device on the floor and a scared woman coming apart in front of him.
“Okay. You got them out. They’re at the fence.
Nobody’s hurt.” He nodded, once, slow, agreeing with the facts, giving them to me. “You did that.”
I don’t know how long we stood there. Long enough for the blue lights to start turning at the mouth of the parking lot, long enough to hear Pike’s voice out front and a radio crackle and the ordinary machinery of a scene assembling itself around the thing I’d already finished.
All of it too late to matter, all of it arriving to secure a hallway that a scared hardware clerk had already made the safest room in Halford.
And I put my steady, traitor hands over my face, in front of the fire marshal, and cried, not because I was afraid, but because for four minutes I had been exactly who I used to be, and it had been the easiest, truest, most terrible thing, sliding back into it like a key into a lock pretending to be rusted shut.