Chapter 57 In
BIRDIE stopped being two people on the sidewalk on Larch Street, and I would love to tell you it felt like a triumph, brass and a banner, but that is not what it felt like.
It felt like setting down something so heavy I had forgotten it weighed anything, forgotten I was carrying it at all.
The jumpy one and the calm one. The coward and the tech.
The mask and the face underneath it that I’d kept hidden from a whole town of good people who fed me casseroles.
There had only ever been one of me, scared the entire time, from the first day to this one, and I was done spending half my strength holding her split in two down the middle.
I let her be one. And the one that was left had a boy at a window and a job in front of her and a bright wire of terror running her whole length, and she went to work.
The register in my head changed, as it always does, and this time I let Wes see it happen, let all of them see it, Pike and the county and Fran on her porch, because hiding it was over and I didn’t have the strength to spare for it anyway.
The panic didn’t go anywhere. Wes was right about that, right about all of it.
It never leaves. It was there under everything, that bright wire, humming.
It just stopped being the thing holding the wheel.
I’m going to be careful here, because a great deal of what I did next is exactly the kind of thing you never, ever set down where a person could read it and get an idea into their head, and I am not going to.
What matters was never the how. What matters was the order, and the order is the thing that eight years and three deployments carve into you, the thing worth more than nerve and worth more than steady hands: you do the boring things first, and you do them in sequence, one and then the next and then the one after, and you do not, under any circumstances, skip ahead to the brave part, because the brave part is the last part, and if you run to it early out of love or fear you will get somebody killed.
So. First, people. Always, always first, people.
“Pike,” I said, and my voice must have carried the change in it, because she turned all the way around.
“I need this whole block behind the church, not the corner, the church lot, and I needed it two minutes ago. Anybody still in the two-flats either side of Ren’s, out the back, quiet, no crowd on the street.
No lights on this face of the building, kill the flashers on this side.
Wes runs the outside. You keep every single person off these stairs no matter what you hear from up there.
No matter what you hear. If it goes loud you hold your line and you do not send one soul in after me.
That is the deal, and I need you to say it back to me. ”
She said it back. Word for word. She didn’t argue, didn’t so much as blink at taking an order from the hardware clerk she’d spent all summer half-sure was either a suspect or a fainting spell waiting to happen.
That’s when I understood the town had already started to see me, because Lorna Pike looked at my face and just did what I said.
Then I called Cody back.
“I’m coming up,” I told him, soft, level, boring.
“Just me. No boots, no marshal, no county on the stairs. You watch me come up, you watch my hands the whole way, you’ll see I’ve got nothing on me.
I’m the scared lady, remember? I couldn’t hurt a soul if I tried, everybody knows that.
” A little of the old flutter, on purpose, threaded in, a gift to a frightened man who badly needed to feel he was still holding the winning cards.
“I just want to come sit with Ren and Theo a while. I just want everybody to come out of this okay. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Cody, you know that about me. ”
“Just you,” he said. Pitched high, cracking at the edges. “Anybody else sets foot on these stairs —”
“Just me. I’m walking now. I’m going real slow. You’ll hear me the whole way up, I promise, I’ll talk the entire time.”
I looked at Wes. He did not tell me to be careful.
He knew better, and I loved him for it, plainly, out loud in the flat clean part of me that had room now to know things.
He said, “I’ll be right here on the outside.
Go do your work.” Which is the most romantic sentence anyone has said to me in my life, and I have taken it out and looked at it nearly every day since.
I went up the stairs of my own building slow and loud and empty-handed, and I talked the entire climb, easy nothing-talk, the weather turning, whose garden had done what this year, had he eaten today, because a wound-up man in a sealed room needs a voice more than he needs anything else in the world, a steady boring voice is a hand at the back for a person going too high, and I have brought a lot of people down off too-high with nothing in my hands but my voice gone soft and slow and dull as a Sunday.
Boring is a medicine. I dosed him with it the whole flight up.