CHAPTER 4
WREN — Then
Twelve years ago.
They brought me to Marrowfield in the dark, which I have since decided was the only honest thing that house ever did.
I was twelve. I had a garbage bag with three changes of clothes in it and a paperback with the cover torn off and a social worker named Donna who kept saying you are so lucky in the voice people use when they are trying to convince themselves of something.
The Frosts, she said. Of the Frosts. Old family, old money, the kind of name the town said the way you’d say the name of a church or a graveyard, with a little drop in it, a little hush.
They didn’t have to take a girl like me.
They chose to. Did I understand how rare that was, how generous, did I understand —
I understood that nobody chooses a thing like me unless they want it for something.
The house came up out of the trees at the top of a black hill, and it was enormous and unlit, all wet slate and dead ivy, with a single window burning gold on the third floor like an eye that had been left open.
It had snowed all the way up the pass and the snow lay over everything, perfect and untouched, and I remember thinking that nothing had walked across that lawn in a long, long time.
That whatever lived here didn’t go outside.
Augustus Frost met us in the front hall under a chandelier that had three working bulbs out of forty.
I want to tell you he looked like a monster.
He didn’t. That’s the thing nobody warns you about.
He was beautiful in the way old churches are beautiful, cold and tall and built to make you feel small, every line of him saying be quiet, lower your voice, you are in the presence of something that was here before you and will be here after.
He crouched down to my height, which men like him do to seem kind and never are, and he took my chin in two fingers and turned my face up to the bad light and looked at me for a long time the way you’d look at a horse you were thinking about buying.
“Wren,” he said, tasting it. “Like the bird.” He smiled. His teeth were very white. “The smallest one. The one that hides in the hedge and you never see it, you only ever hear it.” He let go of my chin. “We’ll have to teach you to be seen, won’t we.”
Donna laughed her convince-herself laugh. I didn’t.
They gave me Iris’s room.
Nobody told me whose room it was. I found it out in pieces, the way you find out everything true in that house, from the things people didn’t say.
The fourth door on the third-floor hall, the one with the good light, the one already furnished in a girl’s soft yellows gone grey with dust, a hairbrush still on the dresser with long pale hairs caught in it, a row of dresses in the closet two sizes too big for me and twenty years out of style, a height chart penciled up the doorframe that stopped, abruptly, at four feet eleven, with a date beside the last mark and then nothing.
Just nothing. A girl who’d been getting taller and then, one spring, stopped.
I slept in a dead girl’s bed under a dead girl’s window the first night and I did not cry, because I’d learned a long time before Marrowfield that crying is just telling the house where you are.
I didn’t sleep, either. That was the first night of a habit I’d keep for the rest of my life, lying flat and still in the dark with my eyes open, taking the measure of a new place by ear the way prey learns a new field, where the floor speaks and where it keeps secrets, which way the wind worked the windows, how long the house took to go quiet and whether it ever really did.
It didn’t, that night. Marrowfield never fully went quiet.
There was always something in it that stayed awake.
I’d learn, much later, that there were two of us, on either side of a wall, and that one of us couldn’t sleep for what was wrong in his head and the other couldn’t sleep for what might come up the hall, and that we’d spend six years awake together without a word, listening to each other not-sleep through the plaster like the last two people on a sinking ship.
But that first night I didn’t know any of that yet.
I only knew the dread, the specific animal dread of a small thing in a big cold den, and somewhere in the worst hour of it, the dead hour, three or four, when even the radiators gave up.
I ran my fingers along the underside of the headboard above me, the way a child does, feeling the dark, and I found marks cut into the wood.
Scratched. Deep, and careful, and over and over, by something small and patient with a lot of nights to fill.
Not words. Not at first. It took me weeks of lying there in the dark tracing them to understand they weren’t random at all, that they were notation, crude and homemade, the rise and fall of a tune carved into the wood by a girl who’d had this bed before me and had needed, badly, to keep something of her own where no one could take it.
Six notes. Up, and up, and down.
I didn’t know the tune yet. I’d learn it.
God help me, I’d learn exactly what it meant, and who hummed it, and what it announced, but that came later.
That first night it was just six scratches under my fingers in the dark, the last message of a girl with my exact face, and I lay the rest of those black hours with my hand pressed flat against them, awake, the way I’d later press my hand to a wall, the way I’ve always reached in the dark for the one fragile proof that someone else was here, and survived it, before me.
I met Lazarus on the stairs.
It was the middle of the night. I’d woken with that animal certainty that I was being watched, and the certainty was correct, it usually is, I’ve learned to trust it, it has kept me alive, and I’d crept out to the landing to find the source of it, because not knowing was worse, not knowing has always been worse for me than any true thing.
He was sitting on the top step in the dark with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up, seventeen years old and already too big for the space he took, and he was looking at the wall across from him with an attention so total it scared me more than a knife would have.
He didn’t look surprised to see me. He didn’t look anything.
“You’re in Iris’s room,” he said. Not a question.
“They put me there.”
“I know. I heard.” He tipped his head, and the moonlight off the snow outside found the side of his face, and I saw that he was beautiful too, the same terrible church-beautiful as his father, except where Augustus’s beauty was a thing he used on you, Lazarus’s just sat there, unused, like a knife in a drawer.
“You don’t sleep either,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation.
It was almost, and this is the part I have never been able to explain to anyone, the part that made the next twelve years possible, it was almost grateful.
Like he’d been alone with the not-sleeping his whole life and here, finally, was someone else awake in the dark.
“I sleep,” I lied.
“No, you don’t. I can hear you through the wall.
You breathe like something that’s listening.
” He said it the way you’d note the weather.
Then he turned his head and looked at me, really looked, the first person in that whole frozen house to actually point his eyes at me instead of through me, and something happened behind his face that I was too young to name and too old to mistake for kindness.
He was deciding something. About me. The way his father had turned my face up to the light and appraised it, except this was the opposite of that, this was a boy in a house full of things that broke deciding, very quietly, that this one wasn’t going to.
“Don’t go in the east wing,” he said. “Don’t be alone with him.
When he’s drinking, go up to the nursery and lock it, the bolt’s high, he forgets it’s there.
And if you hear me come down the hall at night, don’t be afraid.
” A pause. The snow ticked against the glass.
“I’m the only one in this house who isn’t going to hurt you. ”
I should have asked about the rest of it.
About him, about the east wing, about the date that stopped on the doorframe, about why a stranger boy was awake at three in the morning watching a wall and warning a girl he’d known for four hours how to survive his own family.
I didn’t. I was twelve and I was a stray and somebody had just handed me the first true map of the new world, and you don’t interrogate the only person who throws you a rope.
“Why are you helping me,” I said instead.
For the first time, he almost smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. Nothing ever reached his eyes; I’d learn that too.
“Because they brought you here for a reason,” he said, “and I don’t like their reasons.
And because.” He stopped. Started again, lower, in a voice I would spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get out from under my skin.
“Because the house has been so loud my whole life. And when you came up the stairs just now, I could hear you breathing, and for about ten seconds it was the quietest it’s ever been. ”
He stood. He was very tall, even then. He looked down at me on the step below him, this skinny stray in a dead girl’s nightgown, and he gave me the name he’d keep me by for the next twelve years, the name he’d say in a warm dark living room six hundred and forty feet from a prison he’d serve for me, the name that would still fit when nothing else did.
“Goodnight, little lamb,” said Lazarus Frost.
And he went down the hall to his room, and I went back to mine, and I lay in a dead girl’s bed and listened to the wall between us, and somewhere on the other side of it, for the first time since they’d dragged me up that black hill, I heard a boy breathe out slow and easy and finally fall asleep.
I didn’t understand, then, what it meant. That I was the only thing in the world that could do that for him. That a starving thing, once it learns what feeds it, will tear down the whole house to get back to the table.
I found out the next morning what Iris Frost looked like.
There was one photograph still on the third-floor landing, in a silver frame turned to face the wall, somebody had turned it, somebody who couldn’t bear to look and couldn’t bear to throw it out, and I turned it back, because I’m a stray and a snoop and I wanted to know whose ghost I was sleeping inside of.
She had my face.
Not similar. Not the same type. My face. The same wren-brown hair, the same too-wide eyes, the same little chin Augustus had turned up to the light and tasted my name over.
And under the photo, in a child’s careful pencil, somebody had written the year she was born, and the year she died.
She was twelve.
The same as me.
That’s the morning I understood that the Frosts hadn’t chosen a stray out of generosity.
They’d chosen one out of measurements. Augustus Frost had gone looking through every file in three counties until he found a girl the exact shape of the daughter he’d lost, and I have spent twelve years and one trial and six years of a man’s life trying not to know what a father wants with a brand-new copy of a dead twelve-year-old girl.
Down the hall, a floorboard creaked.
And from the dark mouth of the east wing, the one Lazarus told me never to enter, in the wing nobody used, in the house where nothing ever walked across the snow. I heard Augustus Frost begin, very softly, to hum.
The same lullaby that was scratched into the headboard of the bed I’d slept in.