Chapter 71 I’m Not Going Anywhere
WES had learned a long time ago that you do not put a fire out by yelling at it, and I’d been reminding myself of the same principle about Birdie Vance for a solid ten minutes, standing in her doorway watching her decide whether to disappear on me.
Here is what I knew, and what I’d already decided on the drive over, once Ren had texted me a single word — bag — with a question mark after it.
Ren misses nothing, and she’d heard my step on those stairs enough times that summer to know I was the person to send when the woman downstairs went quiet.
I knew I could talk her into staying. That was the part that scared me, standing in the door.
I’m good with people at the edge of doing something they can’t take back; it’s half the job, the human half, the part they don’t put in the manual.
I could have used Theo. I could have used the town, the block, the warm net of people who’d have shattered if she vanished.
I could have used a lot of true and terrible leverage, and she’d have unpacked the bag and stayed and hated herself, and hated me a little for it, and it would have held maybe a year before it went up.
I’ve watched a hundred fires come roaring back to life because somebody smothered the flame in a hurry and walked off pleased and left all the fuel sitting right there under the ash.
So I’d decided in the truck that I was not going to do that. I was going to do the harder thing, which was to tell her one true thing and then let her choose — even if she chose wrong, even if I had to stand in her driveway and watch the taillights go.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hands out flat on her knees where I could see them, palms down, and they were shaking, and I understood she’d just handed me something she had never handed another living person in this town.
So I came in, and I sat down on the floor with my back against her dresser, below her eye line, small, no threat in it — how you get low with a scared dog, or a kid on a ledge, or anyone whose whole body is telling them to run — and I said, “Okay. Tell me.”
“If I stay, they count on me.” Her voice had gone flat and clean and very far away, the register she drops into over live ordnance, which told me precisely how frightened she was, because she only ever gets that calm when the thing in front of her is something that could kill somebody.
“Fran. The town. Theo. You. And I already know exactly how that ends, because I’ve run the tape.
I was the calm one before, Wes. I was the one they trusted with their lives, and I was careful, I was so careful, I flagged the hazard, I did everything right, and it didn’t matter.
And Ellis has one leg now, and a wife who’s better to me than I deserve, and every day of his life is a receipt.
If I let people count on me again, then someday I’m the last line again.
And someday I’m a half-second too slow, or I read it a degree wrong, and it’s somebody’s kid, and I will not survive doing that a second time.
I know that about myself the way I know my own hands.
So I built somebody nobody could ever hand the fuse to.
And it worked. It worked for three years.
And then you came along and you broke it, and I don’t even think you meant to, and now I don’t have anywhere to hide and I don’t know how to just — stand here. ”
She wasn’t crying. She was past crying, up in the terrible steadiness, which is worse.
I let it sit. You have to let the true thing sit for a second; if you answer it too fast, you tell the person you weren’t really listening, you were just waiting for your turn.
Then I said, “I’m not asking you to.”
She looked up at me.