Chapter 28 A Little of the Truth
BIRDIE let him drive me home, which I told myself was because my hands were still not entirely mine, and which was actually because I was not ready to stop being seen, now that the worst of it had happened and the sky hadn’t fallen, and that is a dangerous thing to discover about yourself at eleven-forty on a Thursday.
He pulled up in front of the two-flat on Larch and left the engine running, which is the polite thing, the no-pressure thing, and we sat in the cab in the dark with the dashboard lights making everything green, and I looked at my own dark front porch and Ren’s dark upstairs windows, Ren still on shift, Theo sound asleep by now under the care of Mrs. Petrakis two doors down, all of them safe, all of them not knowing, and I felt the size of what I’d been carrying alone and the strange new lightness of one person knowing, and I did a thing I had not planned to do.
“Eight years,” I said, to the windshield. “Army. I did eight years.”
Wes didn’t move. Didn’t turn, didn’t pounce, didn’t do anything but keep his hands loose on the bottom of the wheel and wait, giving me the quiet the way you give a scared animal the far side of a room.
“Sergeant. EOD, you guessed right, it doesn’t matter which flavor.
” A laugh got out of me, a real one, small and cracked.
“You want to hear the funny part? My callsign was Mother. Because I made everybody hydrate and I double-checked everybody’s gear and I brought everybody home.
That was the whole reputation. Mother brings you home.
” My throat did something. “I was scared every single day of all eight years, Wes. Every day. I never once believed the fearless thing the other techs wore. I just showed up scared and did it and everybody thought that made me the brave one, and I let them, because the alternative was explaining that the shaking never stops, you just decide to put the hands in anyway.”
“That’s the truest thing anybody’s ever told me about it,” Wes said, low. “And I’ve read the reports.”
“Don’t make me like you more. I’m at capacity.”
He laughed, quiet, in the dark cab, and it undid me a little more, because I’d never heard him laugh, not really, just the flat exhale he does at his own dry lines, and this was different, this was a man surprised into it. I filed it somewhere I shouldn’t have.
“You want to know the hardest part,” I said, because apparently the seal was broken and everything was going to come out through the crack whether I approved it or not.
“It wasn’t the deployments. It was coming back.
Over there the fear had somewhere to go, it had a job, you put the shaking into the work and the work used it up.
Here there’s no work. So the fear just circles.
It doesn’t know it’s off the clock. So I built it a job.
” I gestured at myself, the whole apparatus, the flutter, the mailbox, Birdie.
“I gave the fear a little theater to run every day so it would leave the rest of me alone. And it worked. That’s the awful thing, Wes.
It worked great. Right up until it didn’t. ”
He smiled at that, I felt it more than saw it, and the green dashboard light and the running engine and the safe dark street all held very still, and I turned my head and he turned his, and the distance we’d kept on the tailgate was suddenly down to inches, and I could see him deciding not to close it, leaving it to me, hands still loose on the wheel, and I understood that if I wanted this I would have to be the one, that he would never take a thing from a woman he’d just watched come apart, and that made me want it so much it frightened me worse than the boiler room had.
I leaned in. He met me halfway, only halfway, the other half left mine to give.
Our foreheads touched first, which nobody warns you about, how much that is, and I could feel his breath and the warmth off him and the two of us hanging in that green light on the last inch, my scared heart and my steady hands and his careful stillness, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world and the most enormous, and I wanted it, God, I wanted it.
And then I thought, clear and cold, the flat voice, the traitor: he sees you now. He’ll always see you now. You will never get to disappear again as long as this man is in your life.
And three years of penance stood up in my chest and yanked me back across the cab like a hand on my collar.