Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
ASA
Two days I stood in the far field while the woman I am matched to went through her heat in my own house with my own brothers, and I did not go to her, and I want to tell you it was the strong thing, the disciplined thing, the keeping of a promise.
I want to tell you that because I have to live inside this skull and it is the only story in here that lets me stand up.
But I know what it was. I have known since the second night, on my knees in the wet grass at the end of the row with my whole body screaming her name across a quarter mile of dark, both of us bleeding from the same wound, the strongest match either of us will ever have hauling on the two of us at once, and me holding the fence post with both hands like a man in a current holding a root, not coming, not coming, not coming.
It was not strength. Strength would have been walking through the door.
What I did out there in the field was the most violent act of cowardice of my entire life, and I dressed it up as duty, the way I have dressed up every cowardice I have ever committed since the day they put my wife in the ground and I decided the safest family is a still one.
Nobody tells you the match runs both ways.
They talk about the omega in her heat like she is the only one with a body in the equation, but I was out there too, matched harder to her than to my own name, and a heat does not only call the omega.
It calls everyone it is owed. And I was owed, the deepest of the four, and so I stood in the dark for two days while my own blood tried to crawl me across that field on my hands and knees, and I let it tear me to pieces rather than let it reach her, because reaching her was completing it, and completing it was the one door I had sworn to a dying woman I would never walk through.
I have never hurt like that. I did not know a body could hurt like that and keep standing.
I found out. I stood. And I have nothing to show for the standing but a wound in her chest and a wound in mine and a promise I am not even sure anymore I understood right when I made it.
I come back to the house in the gray morning after, because I cannot not come.
That is the part nobody warns you about a match.
My body drags me to her now whether I will it or not; the bond she could not finish is a hook behind my sternum and the line runs straight to that house, and I tell myself I am going in to end it properly, like a man, to my face, and that is one more lie, I am going in because I physically cannot stay away one more hour, and I hate that, I hate that my own body has a vote now, I who have spent a year making sure nothing in me got a vote but the promise.
She is awake when I come in. Of course she is.
She is in the kitchen in one of Beau’s shirts with her hair down and three bonds on her and a fourth wound in her that I put there, and she looks at me across the room where I have hurt her once already, and her face, her readable terrible beautiful face, does the thing I have come to do the rest of my damage by, which is hope.
After everything. She looks at me and the bottom of her hope is still there, banked, waiting, and I am about to put it out, because I have decided in the long cold madness of the field that the only way left to keep my promise is to make her stop.
So I say it. I say the worst thing I have ever said to a living person and I say it in the flattest voice I own, because if I let one degree of what is under it through I will not get through the sentence.
“You should release them.” The kitchen goes still.
Beau half-rises. I keep going, because stopping is dying.
“The three of them. There’s a process, Pickett has it, a bond can be dissolved inside the first cycle if all parties consent.
You’re young. They’re young. You walk away now, clean, you all find packs that come whole, and this family goes back to the size it can survive being.
I won’t complete it. I will never complete it.
And a pack with a hole where its prime should be is a sick thing, it’ll ache the rest of your life, you’ll spend twenty years reaching for a man who is standing right there refusing you, and I won’t watch that, I won’t do that to my brothers and I won’t do it to you.
So go. While the going’s still clean. That’s the kindest thing anybody in this room can do, and I’m the only one cold enough left to say it. ”
Every word of it is a brick I am laying across my own chest. People think a thing like this comes easy to a hard man.
It does not come easy. It comes like swallowing glass.
I mean the cruelty the way a man means an amputation, as the lesser ruin, and I am saying it in the flattest voice I own precisely because the voice underneath it, the one I will not let up into the light, is on its knees begging me to stop.
But she cannot know that. The whole machine only runs if she believes I am cold.
If she sees for one second that this is costing me everything I have, she will do the thing she does, she will read me, she will find the warm terrified man under the frost, and she will stay, and reach, and ache the rest of her life at a door I have sworn on a grave never to open.
So I lay the bricks. So I hold my face a wall.
So I murder her hope in cold blood with a hot heart, which is the most expensive act of my whole life, and I will be paying for it by the hour until I die, and I do it anyway, because I am Asa Mercer, and doing the unbearable thing alone so that nobody else has to carry it is the only shape of love I have ever learned how to make.
And I watch it land. I watch it go into her one word at a time, release them, sick thing, go, the kindest thing, and I watch the hope I have spent all spring failing to kill finally go out, and her face, which has read every one of us down to the studs all winter, closes.
It just closes. The light goes behind it the way it goes behind a house at the end of a road when the last person leaves.
I have seen that face once before, in a doorway, in January. I built it this time on purpose.
“There it is,” she says. Quiet. “I wondered which one of you it would be. I always know where the exits are. Roz taught me that’s a wound.
I think she was wrong. I think it’s just good information.
” She sets down her cup, careful, the way you set down a thing in a house you are leaving.
“You’re not cold, Asa. I want you to know that before I go, because it’s the one true thing I’ve got and I’m not going to leave it unsaid in this kitchen.
You are the furthest thing from cold I have ever stood next to.
You are so warm you’re terrified of what your own warmth will cost the people you love, so you’ve gone and convinced yourself the loving is the danger.
But the loving was never the danger. The not-loving is the danger.
You’re about to teach that little boy the exact lesson you’ve spent a year killing yourself to keep from him, and you’re going to do it in the name of protecting him, and that, Asa Mercer, is the saddest thing I have witnessed in thirty-three years of watching people. ”
And Jonah stands up.
Jonah, who has not raised his voice in a year, who has carried his sister’s box on the windowsill and her last words in his chest, stands up with the box in his hands and says, “Asa. Sit down. There’s a thing Della said to me that you need to hear, that you’ve needed to hear for a whole year, and I’ve waited and waited for the right time, and there is never going to be one, so,”
“No.”
I do not let him finish. I cannot let him finish.
Because I know, the way you know the shape of the wave that is going to drown you, that whatever is in that box, whatever my wife said to her brother at the end while I was in the next room being strong, is the one thing in this world that could take my legs out from under me, and if my legs go I will complete that bond on the kitchen floor and break the only promise I have left, and I would rather die.
I would genuinely rather die than be unmade in front of everyone by a dead woman’s voice.
“Don’t you dare,” I say to Jonah, and my own voice has gone to something I do not recognize, ragged, splitting, the wall coming down at last and nothing good behind it, just a scared man in a field of his own making.
“Don’t you dare use her to do this. She’s gone.
She doesn’t get a vote anymore. I’m the one who’s still here, I’m the one who has to keep them alive, and I am telling you what keeps them alive, and it is not me.
” I am backing toward the door. The hook behind my sternum is screaming.
“Let her go. All of you. Let her go and be whole, and let me keep the one promise I have managed not to break, and someday you’ll thank me. ”
“Asa,” Sam says, wrecked. “Asa, please.”
But I am already at the screen door, already turning, already doing the thing I swore over Della’s grave I would never let happen to this family, which is being the one who walks out of the warm room, the one who leaves, the man at the door, and the last thing I see before I go is Willa Tate not crying.
Standing straight in my brother’s shirt with her face closed and her exits mapped and not crying, the way a person stands when they have practiced this their whole life, when they always knew, underneath everything, that they were the one who does not get kept.
I put that on her face. After a whole spring of her shining, I am the one who finally taught the sunshine that it was right not to trust the morning.
I get in my truck. The hook in my chest tears the whole way down the drive.
And I drive off the farm my grandmother left me, away from the woman my body is bonded to and the boy who calls me his and the brothers I have loved my whole life, out into the bright cruel spring morning, keeping my promise, keeping my terrible promise, the loneliest right man in the state of Georgia.
And here is the thing I cannot make stop, driving, the thing that is going to ride in this truck with me for as long as I am gone: I keep doing the arithmetic, the way I always do, the lonely arithmetic nobody ever offered to spell me on, and it keeps coming out wrong.
I add it up and the answer is that I have just spent a year promising to keep this family whole, and to keep that promise I have torn a permanent hole in the middle of it.
I swore to a dying woman I would not let anybody be abandoned, and I have made myself the abandoner.
I built the entire wall, every brick of it, for one purpose, to make sure no person in my care ever again had to watch the warm thing walk out the door and not come back.
And I have just walked out the door. In the daylight.
While a boy who calls me his is three miles away at the Pruetts’ waiting to come home to his whole family, and is going to come home instead to a hole shaped like me.
Behind me, in the rearview, the house gets small. The porch light is on. Somebody left it on for me in the daylight, out of habit, out of hope, and I drive away from it, and I tell myself it is mercy, and not one cell in my body believes me.
I have become the thing I built the whole wall to keep out.
I have become the leaving.