Chapter 15 #2
Beau’s hand comes up, slow, the way you move toward a thing you are scared will spook and bolt, and the backs of his fingers brush along my jaw, barely, the once, and the touch goes through the scent-thick dark like a struck bell going through a quiet church, and I lean into it before I can think better of it, my whole body tipping toward the warm bright orange-blossom of him, and behind me Sam’s hand finds my shoulder, careful, shaking, anchoring, clover and chamomile pouring off him, and for one suspended second I am held in the dark between two of my three matches with the rain roaring off the eaves and the honey braided through everything and the door of my whole life standing wide, and it would be the easiest thing a body ever did.
It would be the most natural thing in the world.
To turn, and let the storm have me. To set down the casserole and the clipboard and the bright deflecting laugh and every other thing I have ever held between myself and being wanted, and become, for one time in my life, the woman it happens to instead of the woman who makes it happen for somebody else.
And then I look past Beau, into the far dark corner by the post, at Asa.
Asa has not moved. Asa is pressed back into the dark against the post like a man pinned there, and even in the dark, even in the storm, I can see what is happening to him, because it is happening to all of us and he is the only one fighting it.
He caught me too. The wall he has held against the whole world, against his own grief, against every warm thing since June, the storm broke it for one second the same as it broke everyone’s, and he got a lungful of the match he has been bracing against since the first day in the field, and it is on him, the recognition, the pull, the same lightning, I can see it in the set of his shoulders and the rigid line of him against the post. It hit him hardest. That is the thing I understand, standing there scent-drunk in the dark, the cruelest thing of the whole cruel night: it did not glance off the wall, it went through the wall, the match wants him as badly as it wants any of them and his body knows it and is roaring it at him, and that is precisely why he has gone the color of a man looking down a well.
The others got handed a gift. Asa got handed the proof that the catastrophe he built his entire grief to prevent has already happened, in his own lungs, where he cannot get at it to stop it.
And I watch him do the only math a man like that knows how to do with a thing he cannot control.
He does not come toward me with the others. He goes further back into the dark.
“Asa,” I say. I do not plan to say it. It comes out of me on the wind, his name, reaching, because the match is reaching, because every cell I own is turned toward all three of them and he is one of the three and my body will not let me pretend otherwise.
And Asa Mercer pushes off the post and he says, low and ragged, in a voice with all the flat control torn off it, “No.”
Just that. No. And it lands in the middle of the thick bright air like a stone through a window.
“This is not happening,” he says, and he is not saying it to me, he is saying it to himself, to the storm, to the dead woman he made a promise to, his voice coming apart at the edges.
“I will not. I made a promise,” and he stops, and gets a hand on the porch rail, and his knuckles go white on it, and he hauls himself back from the edge of whatever he was about to fall off, and when he speaks again the control is back, jammed down over the top of the wreck, and it is worse, it is so much worse, because now it is aimed.
“You’re his teacher.” He says it like an accusation, like proof.
“You are that boy’s teacher and you are in my house because of a storm and whatever this is, this, whatever the wind did out there, it does not get to be a thing, because that child upstairs has lost everyone he ever scented and he is not going to lose one more, and a scent-match is not a permission slip, it is a complication, and I am done. I’m done. We are not doing this.”
And he goes back inside. He wrenches the door open and the gold light spills out across the wet boards and across the three of us standing there scent-drunk and stricken, and then it cuts off as the door bangs shut behind him, and the porch goes dark, and the storm roars, and I am standing at the rail with two of my matches and a hole in the air where the third one tore himself out of it.
Beau lets out a breath. Sam makes a small broken sound.
And I stand there in the dark, soaked at the edges, scent-struck, named at last in my own blood, wanted, undeniably wanted, the thing I have hungered for my whole life finally arriving, and in the same breath the biggest of them looked at the most wanted I have ever been and called it a complication and walked away, and oh, there it is, there is the oldest story I own, right on schedule, fitting the new fact perfectly the way it always does: even now, even matched, even with my body lit up like a town at Christmas, I am still, somehow, the one who does not get kept.
“He doesn’t mean it like it landed,” Beau says, low, urgent, reading my face in the dark. “Willa. That’s not, he’s not, that’s the most scared I’ve ever seen him, that’s a drowning man swinging at whatever’s nearest,”
“I know,” I say. And I do know. I am the woman who reads everyone true; I read it as it was happening; I know exactly what happened out there, that a terrified man who will not let himself grieve got the one thing he is most afraid of forced into his lungs by a storm and did the only thing a man like that knows how to do, which is run for the wall and call the wanting a danger so he does not have to call it a wanting.
I know it the way Roz knew my fine was a lie.
And here is the thing that is almost funny, the thing that would be funny if I were not the one standing in it: he and I are the same.
We are the exact same animal. He looked at the realest thing that ever happened to him and called it a complication and ran, and four weeks ago I stood at a sink and looked at the realest thing and called myself the help and ran, and we are both of us out here in the dark of our own separate fields, doing everything correct, wrapping the dying thing against the wind, certain that the wanting is the danger and not the wall.
Knowing all that does not help me one bit.
That is the cruelty I am only now learning, the one Roz has known the whole time, the one I could never quite believe when it was her on the kitchen floor and me with the marbles: you can read a thing perfectly, you can have the whole true shape of it in your hands, and it can still go straight through you and out the other side, because the reading lives up in your head where the words are and the wound lives somewhere underneath the words, in the old animal floor, the same floor the scent-match came up through, and the words have never once been able to get down there to fix anything.
The storm does not let up. None of us can leave, there is no road, the creek is over the bridge, and so we go back inside, eventually, because you cannot stand on a porch all night, and the kitchen has changed, the kitchen will never be the kitchen it was an hour ago, because now we all know, all of us, the thing the wind told.
Beau makes up the couch for me with hands that shake a little, fetching the good quilt and an extra pillow, overdoing it, the way he overdoes everything when he is trying not to cry, and at some point he stops with the pillow in his hands and says, low, not looking at me, “It’s real, though.
Whatever he said out there. I need you to know I know it’s real.
I’ve known since Christmas.” And then he cannot say any more of it and he puts the pillow down too carefully and goes.
Sam cannot meet my eyes at all. He keeps starting sentences in the doorway, “Willa, I,” and “You should know that I,” and not one of them survives past the comma, until finally he just says, “I’m glad you didn’t wash away tonight,” which is the truest and strangest and most Sam thing anyone has ever said to me, and goes up the stairs wrecked.
And then it is only me, on a grieving family’s couch, under a quilt that smells of all of them, of my whole scent-match braided into the cotton, of the place I am homesick for and just got told I cannot have, and I lie in the dark of a house that is not mine and listen to the storm take the county apart, board by board, and I do not sleep.
Above me the floor creaks, once, twice, the long slow pacing of a big man who cannot lie still, and then it stops, and I picture him up there in the dark doing the only thing he knows how to do with a thing he cannot control, which is hold the line, alone, behind a door, wrapping himself tight against a wind that already got all the way in.
The match is real. That is the thing I have to hold all night, turning it over, the enormous terrible gift of it.
It is real, it is not a crush or a curiosity or a helpful neighbor’s confusion, it is the realest thing that has ever happened to me, my body knows the address of home now and it is a sagging white farmhouse out past the county line with four men and a boy and a goat and a dying hive and a chair nobody sits in.
And the man who holds the whole thing together has looked at the realest thing that ever happened to me and called it a complication.
Both. It is going to be both, all night, the way grief is, the way this whole family has taught me a thing can be. The most wanted I have ever been and the most sure I will not be kept, in the same hour, on the same porch, in the same storm.
I always did want a very good seat for the first page of a story.
I did not know it was going to be mine.