Chapter 5
Willa
I do not know exactly when it changes.
It is not a single moment. It is a slow accumulation, the way snow accumulates on a porch rail — flake by flake, with no event large enough to point at, until one morning you wake up and the rail is buried and the world has been quietly remade overnight.
It might be the nightmare.
Callum has a nightmare on the eleventh day.
The first one, the bad one. He wakes up screaming at three in the morning with his hand in his mouth and his eyes still half-gold, and I am at his bedside in seven seconds, and Kael — who has been on the porch again, that night, who had still been on the porch when I went to bed at midnight — is at the bedside in ten.
I do not even hear him come in the door.
He is just there. He is on the opposite side of the bed from me.
He is in jeans and a t-shirt and his hair is mussed and his eyes are still half-asleep and he is looking at my son the way a man looks at a child he has fathered.
We do not say anything to each other.
We just take a hand each.
Callum is shaking. He is sweating through the sheet.
He is saying — my hand, my hand, I can feel it stuck, Mom I can feel it stuck — and the panic is making his wolf surge up under his skin in small, terrified flickers, and Kael says, very low, easy, kid, easy, you're not stuck, you're not stuck, your hand is your hand, and I say, baby, look at me, breathe with me, and the two of us — without consulting each other, without a plan, without ever having done it before — bracket my son with our voices and our hands and we walk him back down out of the dream the way Kael walked his wolf back into his body that first night.
It takes maybe four minutes.
When Callum falls back asleep, his hand is in mine. His other hand is in Kael's. We are both sitting on opposite sides of the bed with our boy's hands in our hands and our heads bowed and neither of us is going to be the first one to let go.
I am the first one to let go.
I let go because I am his mother and he is going to wake up if I keep my hand on him much longer, and I stand up, very quietly, and I walk to the doorway of the bedroom and I look back.
Kael is still beside the bed. He has not moved.
His hand is still around my son's hand. His head is bowed.
He is looking at Callum's face the way a man looks at a thing he was not allowed to want and got anyway, and his eyes are wet.
I had not, until this moment, seen Kael Moran cry.
I leave the room.
I go to the kitchen and I sit at the table and I press both my hands flat against the wood and I breathe for ten minutes.
He stays in there. I can hear him. He does not get up.
He stays at the bedside with my son's hand in his hand and the wolf in him grieving and his face wet, and the wall — the wall is down, the wall has been down since he came through the door — and I am not — I am not equipped, I am not equipped for this, I have spent seventeen years preparing myself to confront the man with the empty face and I have not prepared myself for the man kneeling by my son's bed.
He comes out after twenty minutes.
He stops in the doorway of the bedroom. He looks at me at the table.
He says, "I'll go."
I say, "Stay."
He stays.
He sits down across the kitchen table from me.
He does not say anything. I do not say anything.
We sit there in the half-dark of a kitchen at three thirty in the morning with the woodstove ticking down and the kettle cold on the hob, and we look at each other, and there is — there is no wall.
There is nothing between us tonight. There is just a man and a woman who have just walked a boy back down out of a nightmare together and have nothing left in either of them to fight with.
After a while I get up and I put on the kettle. I make tea. He drinks his. I drink mine. He goes home before dawn.
The next morning I find his coat still on the back of the chair where he left it.
He does not come and get it. I do not give it back.
I hang it on the peg by the door, beside mine, and I leave it there, and somehow over the next four days that becomes the thing — his coat lives at our cabin now, not at the clubhouse, and at some point it has stopped being a thing to mention.
It might be the tracking lesson.
I take Callum a sandwich at the eastern clearing on the fourteenth day.
I do not know why — I am usually at Della's at lunchtime — but the cabin is too quiet and I want to see my son in the sun.
I walk up the path with a paper bag and I get to the edge of the clearing and I stop, because what I see is —
Kael is teaching him to read tracks.
They are both crouched in the snow. Their two heads — Kael's iron grey, Callum's dark — are bent toward the same patch of soft snow at the edge of a deer trail, and Kael is pointing at something — that, see how the front pad's wider here than here?
— and Callum is nodding, and Kael is saying, now look ten feet back, what changed, and Callum is squinting and saying, he stopped.
He stopped and he turned his head. Right there.
And Kael is saying — softly — exactly. Exactly right. You see why?
And my son says, he heard something.
And Kael says, he heard something. That's right. Your father used to read tracks like that. He could tell you what a deer ate for breakfast just by looking at where it slowed down.
It is the first time Kael has said the words your father in front of Callum.
Callum looks up at him.
He says, "Tell me about him."
Kael freezes for a beat. Then he sits down properly in the snow, and he rests his arms on his knees, and he says, "What do you want to know?"
"Anything."
Kael talks for half an hour.
I sit at the edge of the clearing with the sandwich paper bag at my feet and I listen, and he does not see me — or he does, and pretends he does not, which is the same thing — and he tells Callum about Ronan.
Real things. Funny things. Ronan at fourteen breaking his nose on a wood beam he forgot was there.
Ronan at twenty winning a fight against a man twice his size by knocking him into a stock tank.
Ronan tracking the same elk for three days in the rain because he was a stubborn son of a bitch and I loved him for it.
Ronan teaching Kael to drive on a back road at nine years old.
Ronan refusing to eat broccoli his whole life.
Ronan singing — badly, kid, your father sang badly, he sang like a sick raccoon — when he was happy.
Callum laughs. He laughs the way he laughed on the porch with Kael the first day.
He says, that's so weird, I sing too, Mom says I sing like a sick raccoon also, and Kael's face does the thing — the thing that is not quite a smile but is almost a smile — and he says, that's the Moran throat, kid, we got it from our father, sorry.
Kael does not tell him about the last day.
He does not tell him about the dirt road.
He gives Callum the man who lived, in pieces, the way a man dispenses water in a drought.
He gives him enough. Not all of it. Not too little.
He sees, somehow, exactly how much my son can carry today, and he gives him exactly that, and not one ounce more.
I cannot look away.
I sit there for the entire half-hour and I watch the man who killed my husband give my son his father back in small careful spoonfuls, and I cannot look away, and I cannot make my face do what my face is supposed to do, and I realize — sitting in the snow with a sandwich in a paper bag — that I am, in some way I have not given myself permission to acknowledge, in love with him.
Not forgiveness. Not yet.
But love.
The two are not the same thing. I learn that, sitting in the snow.
I have spent seventeen years assuming forgiveness was the door and love was the room behind it, and I learn — watching him put a hand on my son's shoulder and squeeze it once and let go — that they are two separate rooms, with two separate doors, and the love door does not require the forgiveness door to be open first.
The love door has been open for a while. I have only just walked through it.
I do not tell him.
I leave the sandwich at the edge of the clearing, on a stump where they will find it. I walk back to the cabin. I sit on the porch for the rest of the afternoon and I do not get up.
It might be the night his shirt smelled like Maine.
He brings the laundry over on the sixteenth day.
I do not know — I do not know how the laundry became something he brings over.
It just did. He comes into the kitchen with a basket of clothes that he had Della wash because the clubhouse machines run too hot and shrink things, and he says, I had her do yours too.
Hope that's all right, and I look at the basket and there are my flannels in it — three of them, two of mine and one of Callum's — and they smell like Della's lavender soap, and they smell like cedar from the drying line.
But they also smell like him.
I do not know how. I do not know what he has done. I lift one of the flannels — one of mine, the soft one I have had since Maine — and I press it to my face on reflex because that is what I do with clean laundry, and what I smell is —
Lavender. Cedar. The metallic tang of his shop. The leather smell of the cuff he wears at his wrist. Something else under it — something I cannot name, something that is just Kael, that is just the smell of him, the smell I have been pretending not to notice every night on the porch.
It is on my shirt.
I lift my head from the flannel and I look at him across the kitchen, and he is wiping his hands on a dishrag at the sink, and he sees my face and he says, "What?"
I say, "Nothing."
I fold the flannel and I put it on top of the basket and I do not look at it again.
That night I sleep in it.
I do not tell him.