Chapter 26 You’re Only Scared When Nothing’s Happening
WES got the rec center scene turned over to Pike and the county tech by ten, sent the last parent home with the last kid by ten-thirty, and found Birdie Vance sitting on the tailgate of my truck in the parking lot at eleven because she had nowhere else she was ready to go and, I think, because I was the only person left who already knew.
I brought her a coffee from the machine inside that was terrible and hot, and I handed it up to her and got up on the tailgate beside her, not touching, a careful foot of space, and we sat and looked at the dark ballfield across the road and let the county lights spin blue and quiet over by the door.
She had her sleeves down again. Her hands were around the coffee. Steady.
“You want to hear what I’ve got,” I said, after a while, “or you want me to leave it alone.”
“You’re going to say it either way.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. That’s the point I’m making. Tell me to leave it alone and I leave it alone.”
She looked at me sideways. I let her look. I’ve spent a career getting people to talk by wanting the truth harder than I wanted anything else, and I want to be honest that this was the first time in a long time the wanting wasn’t about the case.
“Say it,” she said.
So I said it, plainly, flat, laying it down between us on the tailgate one piece at a time.
“You were EOD. Or something close enough that it doesn’t matter to me which flavor.
Army, I’d guess, by the way you count heads and move a crowd.
You did it for real, for a while, and you were good at it, better than good, and something happened that made you stop, and you didn’t just stop, you buried it, you built a whole other person on top of it so nobody would ever ask you to do it again.
” I kept my eyes on the ballfield. Easier for both of us.
“You’ve been reading these fires since Larch and Delaney.
You made the box behind Ren’s safe. You made whatever that was in there safe tonight.
You’ve probably kept that block from burning three or four times this month and told exactly nobody.
And the flutter, the whole scared-of-your-mailbox routine, that’s not a lie about being scared, because I think you’re scared plenty.
It’s a lie about being able. You’re not hiding that you’re afraid.
You’re hiding that you’re the most capable person in this county, and you’re hiding it on purpose, and it’s costing you something I can’t see the bottom of. ”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. A truck went by out on the county road. She drank the terrible coffee.
“How long have you known,” she said, finally.
“Known? Tonight. Suspected? Since a responding guy told me you backed a crowd to a hundred and fifty feet before the trucks came and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
” I turned my coffee cup in my hands. “You want to know the thing that actually gave you away, though? It wasn’t the competent stuff.
Anybody can have one lucky competent day.
It was that you’re only scared when nothing’s happening. ”
She went still.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the whole tell.
Real anxious people, the mailbox is worst when the mail’s just sitting there.
The dread’s about the thing that might happen.
You’re the reverse. You flutter at spiders and toasters and my clipboard, all the stuff that can’t hurt anybody.
And then a gym full of kids has a real problem forty feet away, and you go quiet and flat and very calm, right when a normal person falls apart.
That’s backwards, Birdie. Nobody’s frightened backwards.
Unless the fear’s the job and the calm’s the truth. ”
I’d said more words in a row than I usually say in a week. I stopped and let them sit in the parking lot.
She was crying again, quiet this time, not coming apart, just leaking, looking at the ballfield.
“You practiced that,” she said. “The mailbox thing. You’ve been sitting with it.”
“I sit with everything. It’s the only trick I’ve got.” I drank the terrible coffee. “I sat with it because I couldn’t make it mean anything else. I tried. I’d have felt better if I could’ve made you into a lucky bystander. Would’ve been a lot less to carry for both of us.”