Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Ienter Red House and turn toward RJ's corridor, not mine.
I hear Sven's sigh and then his footsteps follow without comment — not to stop me, just the sound of him adjusting, settling against the wall at the far end of the corridor where he can see both me and the main hall. Doing his job. Watching without appearing to.
RJ's door is closed.
I sit down against the wall beside it.
The floor is cold through my jeans. The brace presses into my ribs where I'm leaning back and I shift until I find the angle that's tolerable. I don't knock. I don't say anything. I don't need him to open it.
The wanting is there — the monitoring I can't turn off, the pull that's been running since the first morning I sat down on the cold ground at the south fence.
Through it I can feel that he's in there.
He knows I'm out here. That's the whole of it.
I'm not here to make him feel anything or do anything or say anything.
I'm here because Stone told me the alternative isn't available to me and I already knew it and now I'm here.
I sit.
***
The corridor has a particular quality at this hour — not quiet exactly, more like the sound of a building absorbing something. The lockdown has pulled everyone inward. Doors closed. Voices low or absent. The specific held-breath quality of a place waiting to find out what happens next.
I'm not waiting to find out what happens next.
I know what happens next — review, reclassification consideration, Gavin's board, the clock.
What I'm doing here has nothing to do with what happens next.
It has to do with right now, which is: RJ is behind that door and I'm on this side of it, and neither of us is alone.
Forty minutes in, footsteps.
Dalton comes down the corridor with the controlled pace of a man who has assessed the situation from a distance and decided what to do about it.
He clocks me on the floor. Reads everything — the brace visible through my jacket, the position against the wall, the closed door, Sven at the far end.
He reads all of it in one sweep and doesn't comment on any of it.
He sits down against the wall ten feet further along the corridor.
Gets out his notepad. Makes a note. Puts it away.
Sits.
The notepad going away is the thing I notice. He didn't stay to document. He stayed because he's staying, and the notepad is just habit, and the habit got put away.
I look back at the door.
***
Jake comes an hour after that.
He appears at the end of the corridor and stands there for a moment — taking in the configuration, me against the wall by the door, Dalton ten feet down. His eyes move between all of us and then settle on the door.
He walks down.
Sits on the other side of RJ's door from me, back against the wall, arms on his knees, head back. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't say anything. He takes up the position of someone who has arrived and is staying.
Jim I don't see arrive. He's just there at some point — a few feet away from me, back against the opposite wall, quiet in the way that's simply how he is.
Not the quietness of someone holding themselves back.
His natural register, which is unhurried and present and takes up exactly the space it needs.
The four of us in a loose constellation around a closed door.
***
Time moves the way it moves in corridors — slowly, unevenly, marked by small things. Sven shifting his weight at the far end. Dalton turning a page in his notepad and closing it again. Jake's breathing settling into something more even. The building going quieter around us as the evening comes on.
I press my back against the wall and breathe through the ribs and wait.
Two hours in, a sound from inside the room.
Movement. The specific sound of a person shifting position — not pacing. Just moving. Then quiet.
Then RJ's voice, low and roughened by however long he's been not using it:
"You can leave."
I pause.
"I know," I say.
Nothing else from either of us.
But something changes in the corridor — in the air, in the pull between us through the wall. Something that had been braced releases, slightly. Not open. Not resolved. Just — slightly less held than it was before.
I stay.
Behind me Jim is quiet. Down the wall Dalton is quiet. At the far end Sven is the same. We are just people doing the same thing: being here. Not asking for anything. Not needing anything back.
***
I fall asleep against the wall at some point.
I don't plan to. One moment I'm looking at the door and the next I'm coming back from somewhere else, the corridor dim around me, the window at the far end showing the specific grey of evening rather than afternoon.
There's a blanket over my shoulders.
I wasn't cold before. I didn't notice getting cold. Someone noticed for me.
RJ's door is still closed. Dalton is still ten feet down the wall — eyes closed, or nearly, his head back against the plaster, the notepad closed on the floor beside him. Jake is gone. Jim is gone.
The blanket is warm. It smells like the facility linen, which is not a good smell, but it's here and it's warm and someone put it there.
I don't know who.
I decide it doesn't matter.
I pull it tighter and close my eyes and feel the wanting running steady through my wrist like something that has found its rhythm and is going to keep it.
I'm still here.
That's enough for tonight.