Chapter 38 The Whole Wound — Ii
“I couldn’t be the calm one again,” I said.
“Because being the calm one means somebody’s life is in your hands, and I found out my hands being steady doesn’t save you.
So I came here and I built a woman whose hands nobody would ever put anything in.
If I’m the coward, I’m never the last line between anybody and the worst thing.
The flinching isn’t a lie about how I feel.
I really am scared, all the time, that part’s real.
It’s a lie about what I can do. I made myself useless on purpose.
It’s not a disguise, Wes, or it stopped being one.
It’s penance. Every jump, every apology to a door, every ‘oh I could never’ — I’ve been paying a kid back with my whole life for a leg I couldn’t give him back. ”
I ran out. I sat there emptied out and cold-teaed and waiting for the thing that happens when you show a person the middle of you, the small careful step backward, the reach for the word that lets them out of the room kindly.
Wes didn’t flinch. That was the undoing.
I’d have known what to do with flinching.
I’d braced for all the versions of flinching a person does when you hand them the real weight, and I knew every one, because I’d handed this to exactly one other civilian in three years, a man I’d dated for a month my first winter here, and he’d gone quiet and careful and looked at me afterward like I was a thing that might go off, and I’d ended it and gone back into the drawer for good.
I knew that look. I’d been watching for it since I sat down.
It didn’t come. He sat across my table with his plain steady face and his folded hands and he didn’t reach for a single thing to fix me with, no “it wasn’t your fault,” which I’d have hated, no “you have to forgive yourself,” which I’d have thrown my cold tea at him for.
He just took it. He took the weight of it across the table like a man taking a heavy box you’ve been holding too long, no fuss, no strain shown, and he set it down on his side, and he said, after a while, quietly:
“You’ve been right about a device every single time since I met you.
Larch, the rec center, Ren’s, Ostrander.
Every time. Scared the whole time, right every time.
” He looked at me. “I don’t think your hands are the thing that failed that kid.
I think a man with rank and a bad clock failed him, and you’ve been serving his sentence for him for three years because you were the only one in the room decent enough to volunteer. ”
I did cry then. Not pretty. He didn’t come around the table and he didn’t touch me, which I would learn was the most careful and generous thing he could have done, letting me be a mess in my own chair with my own hands over my own face, not making it a moment he was the hero of.
He got up and put the kettle on. He made fresh tea, two sugars in mine, and set it down where I could reach it when I was ready, and he sat back down, and he stayed, and the not-leaving of it was so loud I could hardly stand it.
He didn’t say the box thing out loud, about taking the weight.
That’s my picture of it, not his. What he actually did, after a while, was ask me the kid’s name, which nobody had ever done, everybody wants the disaster and nobody wants the person, and I told him, and Wes said the name back once, quietly, like he was making room for it in his head next to whoever didn’t come home on Delsuomi Street, and I understood that the two of us kept a small population of people in our heads that we couldn’t set down, and that his had just gotten one bigger, on purpose, to help me carry mine.
I have never in my life been given anything like that.
I didn’t have a word for it then and I don’t now.
“There,” I said finally, wiping my face, going for a joke because I always go for a joke, it’s load-bearing too. “Now you know. The town coward is a fraud and the fraud is a fraud. Very confusing woman. Ten out of ten would not recommend.”
“I’d recommend,” Wes said, plainly, to his tea, and didn’t look up, and my heart went somewhere it had no business going, quietly, while the kettle ticked itself back down to cold.