Chapter 7 #2
"And because your uncle isn't the man who killed your father.
He is the man who has been teaching you to be what your father was.
The man who killed your father — that man is gone, Callum.
He has been gone for a long time. He's been gone since the morning he carried it out, and the man who has been sitting at our breakfast table every morning is the man who has been paying for what that other man did.
They are not the same man. I have spent seventeen years trying to decide whether they are the same man and I have decided they are not.
I do not know if you will decide the same thing.
I am not asking you to. I am only telling you what I have decided. "
He looks at me for a long minute.
He looks at Kael.
He says, "Is that true."
He is asking Kael.
Kael is quiet for a beat.
Then he says, "I don't know, kid. I'm not sure I'm the man to ask.
I think — I think your mother is being kinder to me than I deserve.
I think the man who did it and the man sitting here are closer to the same man than she is making us out to be.
I think there is a continuous line between them that goes through me and that I have to keep carrying.
But I will tell you what is true. What is true is that I loved your father.
I loved him every day of my life. I love him still.
I killed him because the club voted unanimously and I was the one who had to do it and because he asked me to be the one.
I have not forgiven myself for it and I am not going to forgive myself for it.
I do not expect you to forgive me. I want you to know exactly what happened.
I want you to know exactly what kind of man I am.
I want you to know your father loved you — he didn't know you were going to be a son, but he knew there was going to be a baby, and his last words were about you.
And I want you to know that I am here, and I am going to be here, and whatever you decide about me, I am going to be the man across the table whether you ever forgive me or not.
I am not going anywhere. I am not asking you for anything. I am telling you what I am."
Callum is quiet.
I have not moved my hand from his back. I keep it there.
He says, "He asked you to do it."
"Yes."
"His last words were about me."
"Yes."
"What were they."
Kael breathes in. He breathes out.
He says, "He said, tell her the baby — I think she's pregnant, she doesn't know yet, but I think she is. Tell her name the kid whatever she wants. Tell her I'm sorry I won't be there. That's what he said."
Callum closes his eyes.
He says, "Mom. Did you know."
"Did I know what."
"That you were pregnant. When he —"
"No, baby. I found out three weeks later. I — I knew I'd been tired. I knew something was off. I didn't know yet. He knew before I did. He always knew things about my body before I did. He was — he was paying attention. He was always paying attention to me."
Callum is crying again. Quieter now.
He says, "I wish I had known him."
I say, "I know, baby. I know."
He says, "Did he deserve it."
He says it to Kael. He says it the way a man asks a question he is not sure he wants the answer to.
Kael looks at him for a long time.
He says, "He betrayed the pack. Pack law is absolute.
The vote was unanimous. He had been feeding our enemies our movements for almost a year and three of our brothers had already gotten killed because of information he passed.
The pack does not survive a betrayal of that scale unanswered.
So by pack law — yes, kid, he had to die.
I will not lie to you and tell you he did not.
By every other measure — by being my brother, by being your father, by being a man who had a gambling problem and got caught in a hole he could not climb out of and made the worst decision of his life trying to climb out of it — no.
He did not deserve it. He was not a bad man.
He was a man who did one very bad thing.
There is a difference and I am not going to pretend there isn't. He was my brother and killing him was the worst thing I have ever done and I have never forgiven myself for it and I am never going to forgive myself for it. Do you understand."
Callum nods. He is looking at the floor.
He says, "I'm not ready to forgive you."
Kael says, "I wouldn't expect you to be."
Callum looks up.
He says, "I'm not leaving."
Kael freezes.
I see it. I see the wall in his face come down — for the second time, in front of my son, and now my son sees it too, and my son is looking at Kael with the gold gone out of his eyes and the human boy back in his face, and my son is — my son is taking the measure of his uncle, the way Ronan used to take the measure of men, and my son is deciding, in real time, that the man on the floor in front of him is not going to be left to the cold.
Callum says, "This is my pack too. He was my father, and you were his brother, and I'm — I'm not going anywhere. I'm not — I'm not okay yet. I'm not going to be okay for a while. But I'm not leaving."
Kael says, very low: "Thank you."
Callum says, "Don't thank me. I'm not doing it for you."
Kael says, "Okay."
Callum says, "I'm doing it because — because Mom says she put it down, and because if she put it down and you have been the man at our breakfast table for a month, then there's something I'm not seeing, and I'd rather stay and see it than leave and never know."
Kael nods.
He says, "That's fair."
Callum stands up. He is unsteady. He is bone-tired the way he was after the first shift.
He puts his hand on the desk to brace himself and his other hand on my shoulder and he steadies himself, and he looks down at the two of us on the floor, and he says, "I'm going to bed.
I'm going to bed for a long time. Mom, can you wake me up for dinner. "
"Yes, baby."
He looks at Kael one more time. He says, "You're bleeding."
Kael says, "It's fine."
"Mom should look at it."
"It's fine, kid. Go sleep."
Callum nods. He walks out of the office. He moves slowly. He shuts the door behind him.
I sit on the floor of the office with Kael for a long minute.
I look at his arm. It is bleeding through his sleeve. The flannel is dark down the forearm. I do not know how deep it is.
I take his hand. I pull his sleeve up. It is — it is not deep. It is three long shallow lines from Callum's half-formed claws. They have stopped bleeding actively. They are going to need cleaning but they are not going to need stitches.
I touch his face.
He closes his eyes.
I say, "Are you all right."
He says, "No."
I say, "Same."
We sit on the floor.
After a while he says, "Did I do it right. With him."
I say, "You did it perfectly."
He says, "I don't know that."
"I know that."
"How."
"Because I am his mother. Because I have known him every day of his life.
Because I have seen him face hard things before and I have watched him be afraid and I have watched him be confused, and I have never — I have never seen him hold himself together the way he just held himself together.
You gave him the truth and you gave him a choice and you did not press him for one direction or the other and you told him you were not going anywhere.
That is — that is exactly what he needed.
He is going to take the truth into his own hands now and walk with it for a while, and he is going to come back to you when he is ready, and the reason he is going to come back is that you let him leave on his own terms. That is — that is what a father does, Kael.
That is what a father does. You did it right. "
Kael breathes in.
I see him take the word father.
I see him take it carefully, the way a man takes a thing offered to him that he does not feel he has the right to.
I see him set it down inside himself somewhere and I see him decide not to argue with me about it, because we have been here too long today already and we have both put down too many heavy things in one room.
He says, "Willa."
I say, "Yes."
He says, "Stay."
I say, "I'm here."
I take his hand. He squeezes mine. We sit on the floor of the office, in the morning light coming through the window, with my husband's son walking back across the compound to sleep through the rest of the day, and we hold each other's hand like two people standing on the edge of a thing that might hold us up and might not, and we do not let go.
After a long time we get up.
I clean his arm at the sink in the corner of his office.
I dab it with the alcohol from the small first-aid kit he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk and he hisses through his teeth and does not say anything.
I bind it with the gauze. I tie it off. I press my mouth against the inside of his wrist before I let his arm go.
He looks at me.
I say, "We are going to be all right."
He says, "How do you know."
I say, "Because we have already been through it twice today and we are still here."
He almost smiles. The half-smile, the one I have started to recognize, the one that lives at one corner of his mouth and does not always make it to the other.
He says, "All right."
We walk back to the cabin together. Della has gone in already and has made tea. Callum is asleep, fully clothed, on top of the quilt, with one arm flung over his eyes.
We sit at the table. We drink the tea. We do not talk much.
We do not have to.