CHAPTER 6
WREN
The whole town knows he’s back by the time I have to go into it, because Hartsend is four hundred people and one grocery and a feed store and a diner, and a returned killer is the best thing that’s happened to its conversation in six years.
I’d put it off as long as I could. But the sanctuary doesn’t feed itself, so on the second morning I drive into town for grain and antibiotics and the dozen small necessities of keeping doomed things alive, and I walk into Merle’s with my list and my armor on, and the talking stops the way talking stops, that little airless hitch, and every head turns, and I understand all over again the thing I keep having to relearn: I am not a person in this town.
I’m a chapter. I’m the girl who came out of the Frost house alive, and now the man who put me there is back, and they have been waiting for me to walk through that door so the story could have its next installment.
“Wren.” Merle comes around the counter wiping his hands, his face doing the thing all their faces do, the arranged sympathy, the lean-in, the appetite under the kindness.
“Honey. We heard. You doing all right out there by yourself? You know he’s, they let him out, can you believe it, six years, for what he did —”
“I’m fine, Merle.”
“Because you call Hutch the second he comes near that fence line, you hear me?” This from Carol Petrak by the canned goods, who has never once spoken to me in nine years except to tell me how I should feel.
“Five hundred feet. There’s an order. My sister’s boy’s a deputy, he says if that man so much as —”
“I know about the order.” I keep my voice the soft frightened register they need it to be.
It’s the easiest lie I tell all week and the one that costs me the most, because every time I perform the terrified victim for them I am back on that stand in the grey dress, doing the exact same thing, building the exact same monster, except now the jury is the whole town and the verdict never ends. “Thank you. I’ll be careful.”
And they fold me in it, the warm suffocating quilt of their concern, and not one thread of it is actually about me.
It’s about them, the deliciousness of a monster in their midst, the thrill of the danger, the chance to be good and frightened and righteous all at once.
They’ve spent six years telling each other the story of poor Wren Mercer and the beast on the hill, and they love that story, they have polished it smooth as a river stone, and I am not allowed to be a woman in it. I’m only allowed to be the lamb.
I built that. That’s the part that sits in my chest like a swallowed coal while Merle bags my grain.
I built the beast with my own mouth, under oath, on purpose, and a lie that twelve people believe in a courtroom doesn’t stay in the courtroom.
It gets out. It breeds. It becomes the air four hundred people breathe, becomes Carol Petrak’s righteousness and Merle’s appetite and a deputy’s standing order, becomes a thing so much bigger than me that I couldn’t take it back now even if I stood on Merle’s counter and screamed the truth.
I made him a monster to survive him, and the monster outgrew me, and now I have to feed it every single time I come to town, a little more, he’s dangerous, I’m frightened, thank you for protecting me, because the day I stop feeding it is the day somebody starts wondering why.
“They should’ve kept him in,” says old Pell from the bench by the register, who says it like weather. “Man like that. Killed his own father, burned that house down around, well.” A glance at me, the relish badly hidden. “Around whoever was in it. They should’ve kept him in till he rotted.”
And here is the thing I will never be able to explain to anyone, the thing that makes me the most dangerous kind of liar there is: I stand in Merle’s feed store with a coal in my chest, and I look at Pell’s mean satisfied face, and I want to take the canned goods off Carol Petrak’s shelf and put them through the window.
I want to scream that the man they’re describing spent twelve years being the only wall between a child and the actual monster, that the only thing he ever burned was the evidence of what was being done to girls nobody in this town ever once asked about, that there were names, Pell, there were Annies and Marguerites the whole county filed under runaway without lifting a finger, and you want to talk to me about who should’ve rotted —
I don’t say any of it. I nod. I let Pell be right.
I perform the grateful frightened lamb one more time, because I have a wolf to protect and a secret to keep and a girl out there somewhere whose life depends on this story holding, and I have been swallowing the truth to survive since I was six years old and I am very, very good at it.
“You take care, now,” Merle says, walking me to the door like I might shatter.
“I will.”
Eli’s green Bronco is parked across the street.
He’s leaning on it, not pretending to do anything else, watching the store, and when I come out he straightens, not the appetite of the others, something cleaner and worse, the steady attention of the one person in Hartsend who looks at me like I might be a person and not a chapter.
He lifts two fingers. Doesn’t come over.
Just lets me see that he saw, that he’s there, that whatever the town is doing to me he’s clocking it.
That’s the trouble with Eli Marsh. The town’s pity I can survive, because it asks nothing true of me. It’s the decency that’s going to get someone killed.
I load the grain into the truck under the whole street’s tender, hungry, watching eyes, and I drive back up toward the bottom of Cradle Hill, toward the only creatures in three counties who have never once asked me to be anything but the hand that feeds them, and I think, not for the first time, that the strays are the only honest relationship I have ever been able to keep, because a half-frozen barn cat doesn’t need me to be a victim, and it doesn’t need me to be brave, and it has never, not once, made me lie about who I love.
That afternoon, the second day, Eli’s Bronco comes up my drive at the same time as the wolf comes down to the fence line, and I step out into the slush between the two of them with the town’s whole quilt of pity still itching on my skin, and the day stops being about the town at all.