Chapter 3 #2
I sit on the steps with my cold coffee and I look at my son and I think: when did you become a person who can hold two things in your hands at once.
When did you become a person who does not need to resolve everything immediately.
I did not raise you to be wise. I raised you to be safe.
How did you become wise without my permission.
I say, "Okay, baby."
He drinks the rest of my coffee. He goes inside to lie down.
I sit on the porch for an hour.
I sit there until the sun starts going down behind the western ridge and the cold starts working its way through my coat and Della comes out and puts a quilt around my shoulders and sits down next to me without saying a word.
After a while she says, "He's good with the boy."
"Yes."
"He's been a different man for four days, Willa. The men are talking about it. He smiled at Toad yesterday."
"I don't know who Toad is."
"You'd know if you saw him. Nobody smiles at Toad."
"Della."
"Yes."
"Where was this man."
She does not say anything.
"Where was this man seventeen years ago, Della. Where was this — this tenderness. This patience. This —" I gesture at the empty path. "Where was this Kael when Ronan needed his brother to fight for him?"
Della takes a long breath. She lets it out.
"You know where he was."
"He was on a dirt road with a gun."
"He was on a dirt road with a gun because his pack told him to be. Don't punish him for being the version of himself you needed him to be back then. He was twenty-two, Willa. He did what they made him do. The man you're watching with your boy is the man who has spent seventeen years paying for it."
"He didn't pay enough."
"Maybe not."
"He didn't pay anything close to enough."
"Then make him pay more. But don't pretend the man who walked up that porch this afternoon isn't trying."
I look at her.
"Della. I have to ask Kael Moran to be a father to Ronan's son.
I have to look at the man who killed my husband across a kitchen table for the rest of Callum's life.
I have to —" My voice cracks and I do not let it.
"I have to find a way to be in the same room with him without coming apart.
And every time he laughs with my son I want to slap him and every time he is patient with my son I want to thank him and every time I look at him I see Ronan on a dirt road and I do not know how to live like that, Della. I do not know how."
Della takes my hand.
"You learn it," she says. "The same way I learned it after my first husband.
The same way every woman in this hollow learns it after one thing or another.
You don't decide. You don't forgive in a single moment.
You just keep walking. You sit on the porch with him and you eat at the table with him and you watch him love your boy, and somewhere down the road — months out, maybe a year out, maybe never — you wake up one morning and you realize you have done it without noticing.
Or you haven't. And whichever one happens, you keep walking. "
I sit with that.
I do not say anything.
Down the path, the clubhouse light is on.
The supper bell rings. Somewhere across the compound men are clattering into the dining hall.
Somewhere in the dining hall, my husband's brother is sitting down to eat with the men who voted to kill him.
Somewhere inside the cabin, my husband's son is asleep with one arm flung over his eyes the way Ronan slept when he was happy.
Somewhere on the mountain my husband is in the ground and the wildflowers I have not planted yet are waiting for spring.
I stand up. I fold the quilt over the porch rail. I take Della's hand and squeeze it.
"I have to go talk to him," I say.
"Tonight?"
"Tonight."
"Willa."
"Don't, Della."
She lets me go.
I walk to the clubhouse. I do not go in. I wait at the back, by the door to his office, until I hear the dining hall empty out and the men go their separate ways for the night. I see the light come on under his door. I count to thirty.
I knock.
He opens the door. He looks at me.
I do not give him time to put the wall back up.
I say, "Come outside. We need to talk."
He steps out. He pulls his coat off the hook by the door. He follows me. We walk the path to my cabin in silence and we sit down on the porch in the cold, two figures on a porch in the dark, and I look out at the woods so I do not have to look at him.
I say, "You're good with him."
He says, "He's pack."
I say, "He's also the son of the man you killed."
The wall comes up. I see it. I see his whole face go to that flat empty place where he keeps everything, and I think: no, not tonight, not tonight you don't.
I say, before he can speak, "Don't go away. Stay here. Stay with me on this porch and stay in your face and look at me, Kael. Look at me."
He looks at me.
I see the man inside the wall. He is right there, behind his eyes, in the small muscle at the hinge of his jaw, in the line of his mouth that has gone tight at the corners. The wall is up but the man is on this side of it and I have him.
"I am not punishing you," I say. "I am — I am asking.
Where was this man, Kael. Where was this version of you when Ronan needed his brother instead of his executioner.
Where were you with this patience when Ronan was twenty-six and gambling his life away and could have been pulled back from it by his brother.
Where was this — this softness — when he was alive. "
I am not crying. I am not going to cry. My voice is steady.
He looks at me for a long time.
He says, "I don't know."
He says, "I think — I think maybe it was always there.
I think maybe I just buried it with him.
I think maybe I have been carrying this softness around in a box inside me for seventeen years and tonight your son's hand was small enough for me to set it down beside him and not be afraid of it.
I don't know, Willa. I don't have the language for this.
I am not a — I am not a man who has language for this.
I have language for collecting debts and language for ending fights and language for keeping my brothers alive, and I do not have language for the way I felt when I picked your son up off a kitchen table four nights ago and I do not have language for the way I feel sitting on this porch with you right now.
I don't know where I was, seventeen years ago.
I don't know who I was. I know who I am tonight and I know I am sorry, Willa.
I am so sorry I cannot — I cannot say it in any way that means anything because there are no words big enough. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry."
He says it three times.
He says it the way a man says the last words he is going to say in his life.
Then the wall comes up — not all the way, only most of the way — and he turns his face toward the woods and waits.
I sit there.
I do not say anything for a long time.
I let the cold come into my coat. I let my breath fog.
I look at the side of his face — at the broken nose Ronan used to tease him about, at the grey at his temple that he did not have when I left, at the new lines at the corner of his eye that have come in over seventeen years of being a man who does not forgive himself — and I think: I came back to ask him to save my son.
I did not come back to forgive him. I am not going to forgive him tonight.
But I am also not going to leave the porch.
That is the thing I sit with. I am not going to leave the porch.
I am going to sit here in the cold with the man who killed my husband and I am going to keep sitting here, and tomorrow I am going to come down to breakfast and he is going to be at the table because Callum will want him at the table, and I am going to eat across from him, and the day after that I am going to do it again, and the day after that.
I say, finally, "I'm not forgiving you tonight."
"I know."
"I might not forgive you ever."
"I know."
"But I'm not — I'm not going inside yet."
He looks at me.
The wall comes down. Just for a second. Just for half a second. Long enough for me to see — under the seventeen years of grudge and guilt and not-grieving — a man who has been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, for someone to stay on the porch with him in the cold.
I do not give him my hand.
I sit beside him.
We watch the woods.
Inside the cabin, my son sleeps the deep sleep of a wolf that has run for the first time and come home. Outside the cabin, two people who do not know how to be in the same room are slowly learning how to be on the same porch. The cold gets colder. Neither of us moves.
Della comes out at one point with two mugs of coffee and sets them on the rail without a word and goes back inside. I take mine. He takes his. We drink them. They go cold. We do not move.
Eventually he says, "I should go."
"Yes."
He stands up. He looks at me one more time. He says, "Thank you for letting me — for letting me sit out here with you."
"I didn't let you do anything. You sat on the porch."
He almost smiles.
It is the second time in one day I have seen him almost smile.
He goes.
I sit on the porch alone until the cold drives me in, and then I lie down on the bed beside my sleeping son and I put my hand on his back and I feel his ribs rise and fall under my palm, and I think — for the first time in seventeen years — that I might survive being back here. Not happily. Not easily. But I might.
And that, tonight, is enough.