Chapter 26
Lola
The crowd disperses the way it gathered. Without coordination, without announcement, people simply finding their way back to the things they were doing before. The ease of a community that has handled something.
Jenny folds her lawn chair.
Doris Harrow buttons the top button of her good coat and pats my arm once, briefly, and goes.
Elsie walks back to the gas station at her own pace, hands in her pockets, looking satisfied.
I stand on Main Street and watch them go. My heart has swelled so big that I’m surprised it doesn’t shoot out of my chest. The lump in my throat feels permanent. How could all these people care so much about me?
I just stand there and feel all the emotions.
Ryan steers me. His hand at my back, the guiding gesture that I’ve learned over two weeks means this direction, when you’re ready. I’m ready, the direction is the pack house, and we go.
All of us. The walk doesn’t take long.
I sit on the couch. My couch. My corner. Tristan makes tea. I have stopped being surprised by this and started being grateful for it. He brings it and sits beside me, close but not crowding. The tea is the right temperature and I hold it in both hands, breathing in the steam.
Jack sits on the floor. This is Jack, the way he occupies space, always finding the unexpected position. He sits cross-legged at the coffee table and looks up at me with a bright expression on his face.
“You okay?” he asks.
I think about this seriously. “I don’t know yet.”
He nods. “Yeah. That’s all right. You will be.”
Archer is at the worktable. Not working, sitting at it the way he does when he’s thinking rather than doing. He’s turned toward the room rather than away from it, which I’ve learned is the Archer version of being present. He’s looking at me happily.
Ryan is positioned in the window chair. I am so grateful for the way he has accepted me into his pack the way he has. If he hadn’t stopped me at two a.m. I don’t know where I would be by now. Probably at least three counties away.
I let myself feel what I’m feeling.
This is not my standard practice. My standard practice is to feel at a distance, categorized, managed, the emotional equivalent of evidence in a filed report. Useful information. Not something you stand inside of.
I stand inside of it now.
What I’m feeling is relief. Enormously, the kind that comes when something you’ve been bracing against for a long time does not arrive, or arrives and is handled, and the bracing can stop.
It’s a physical relief that I feel in my back and my jaw and the muscles around my eyes that have been doing the work of vigilance.
I’m also feeling gratitude. Complicated and large. For the town. For Scarlet. For the pack, who coordinated a response to my situation without being asked and without conditions.
Something that is not quite grief but lives nearby.
For the weeks before this. For the version of me that drove into this valley with two-fifty in cash and a ‘borrowed’ car and the bone-deep belief that being known was a liability.
For Amber, who is a locked box on a high shelf that I’ve started to forgive.
And underneath all of it is something that is quieter than all of those and yet larger.
Belonging.
I let that word be what it is.
I’ve been holding it at arm’s length for two weeks, circling it, naming it as convenience and strategy and temporary arrangements and anything except what it actually is.
Belonging. The unmistakable feeling of being in the right place with the right people, not because circumstance put you there but because something in you has recognized something.
I recognized it when I entered this valley and the air transformed. I’ve been arguing with the recognition ever since.
I stop arguing.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
It comes out into the room without planning, and I feel four points of attention converge. I look at my tea because looking at any of them right now would be too much. I need to say this to the room.
“For last night,” I continue. “For trying to… I was going to protect you by leaving without telling you. I told myself it was for you and it was partly for you but it was also…” I stop.
Breathe. “I’ve been carrying this alone for a month and before that I carried other things alone and it’s become habit.
The default. And I know the default is wrong here, I’ve known it was wrong for days, I just… ”
I stop again.
“Didn’t know how to put it down?” Tristan asks. Not finishing my sentence, confirming it.
“Yes,” I say.
“You figured it out,” Jack adds.
“Ryan intercepted me along the riverside route in the dead of night.”
“You came back through the door,” Ryan replies. He looks at me with the expression that is patient and present and no longer entirely restrained. “You came back through the door. That was you.”
I hold that. “Okay.”
Jack makes a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a breath. “She keeps saying okay.”
“It’s a good word,” I point out.
“It’s a great word,” he agrees. “We’ve decided we like it.”
I am sitting among them without tension. I notice this with the part of me that has been cataloguing everything about this pack. That part notices the absence of tension the way it would notice the presence of it, as significant data.
I am on the couch with the blanket and the tea. And I am not bracing for anything. I am just here.
Tristan’s hand, at some point, finds mine on the cushion. His fingers over mine, warm and still. I don’t move my hand, and he doesn’t make it a thing.
Jack leans back against the coffee table and tips his face up toward the ceiling with an expression of complete, uncomplicated contentment, which is Jack being Jack. He finds the ease in whatever room he’s in, except this room has me in it and the ease includes me.
Archer glances my way from across the room. He nods. The one that signifies I perceive you distinctly and remain focused. And then, smaller, barely there, something that is almost a smile, which is the rarest thing I have seen in two weeks of watching Archer’s face.
I almost smile back.
I do smile back.
He looks away and doesn’t quite hide the happiness he feels.
Ryan is still in the window chair. The window behind him has the morning light and the carnival roofline still visible. He stares at me across the room with the thing that he’s been looking at me with since the first night. Except now I know what it is.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Ryan says.
“I am too,” I reply.
Tristan’s fingers press mine, once, gently. Jack tips his face back down from the ceiling and finds my eyes. He gives me a bright smile, the one that has nothing to do with the playful surface.
The pack bond reaches me, and I let it. I stop angling away from it and I let it do what it’s been trying to do for weeks, what I’ve been feeling at the edges of my perception and managing and refusing.
It doesn’t overwhelm. It doesn’t crash over me the way it did at the Saturday carnival, the sensory flooding, the almost-too-much. It just settles warmly. The calmness of something finding its level.
This is what it feels like, I think, when it’s yours. The bond reaching. The warmth of it. The steadiness. I belong here. I’ve been trying to argue with that since I drove into this valley and the air changed and some part of me said here before I had any reason to listen to it.
I stop arguing.