CHAPTER 9
WREN
I last two more nights before the not-knowing drives me up the hill to him, which I think was always the math, which I think he counted on the way he counts everything.
It’s the name. That’s what I tell myself.
There’s a name behind his teeth — Silas, the one I finally let myself think at the fence and haven’t been able to un-think since, and a sealed name behind a judge’s wax, and I cannot, constitutionally cannot, lie in a dark house with a hole in my knowledge the size of a man who’d arrange a wolf.
I turned a photograph around when I was twelve.
I will always, always rather have the worst true thing.
So the third night, at an hour no decent person is awake, I put on my coat and I walk up Cradle Hill through the snow toward the rented room where I know he doesn’t sleep, and I tell myself it’s for the name.
It is not only for the name. I lie best of all to myself, and I save those ones for the dark.
He’s at the window. Of course he is. I see the shape of him before I see anything else, Mrs. Pruitt’s porch light catching the edge of a man sitting in the dark behind glass, looking down the hill at my house the way I’ve looked up at his, and the second my boot finds the bottom of his walk the shape stands, and the door opens before I knock, and there is exactly the legal distance of cold air between us and not one inch less, because he will not close it.
He has measured it. He stands inside his own threshold and I stand on the path below and the five hundred feet has collapsed to five but the principle of it stands between us like the wall used to, the last wall, the one made of a rule he’s decided to honor because dishonoring it would make him the thing I told the world he was.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. Rough. He hasn’t used his voice tonight. The cold pours off the open door and the warm pours out behind him and I stand in the seam between them, shaking, and not from the weather.
“Neither should you. In this town. In my life.” My breath rags out white.
“I want the name, Lazarus. The one you swallowed at the fence. The ghost. The family thing.” I take a step up.
He doesn’t retreat and he doesn’t reach.
“I am so tired of everyone deciding what I can hold. You looked right at me and you ate the name to protect me and I am done being protected into a fool. Who sent you. Say it.”
For a long moment there’s nothing but the snow ticking down and the two of us breathing in the dark, falling, against my will and his, into the same rhythm, in, and out, in, and out, the metronome, twelve years of it, the body’s memory louder than any rule, and I watch him fight it, watch him fight the thing in him that wants to close the five feet and the thing in him that swore it never would.
“If I say it,” he says, low, “you’ll do something with it.
You’ll go looking. That’s what you are, you can’t leave a sealed door sealed, you never could, it’s the most dangerous and the most beautiful thing about you and it is going to get you killed, and I just got you back.
” His hand comes up, not to touch me, he holds it in the cold air between us, open, trembling, a man showing a wild animal he’s not armed — “Ask me for anything else. Ask me to leave town. Ask me to turn myself in. I’ll do it tonight.
Don’t ask me for the one thing that sends you walking toward him. ”
“Him.” I’m close enough now that the warm of the doorway reaches me.
Close enough to see the six years in his face, the wanting, the restraint that costs him blood.
“So it is a him. So I’m right.” I am so close.
The line is right there, the last wall, five feet of honored rule, and I want to walk through it the way I walked through his bedroom door at eighteen, and I can see in his face that he knows it, that he’s holding still the way you hold still for the thing you want most so you don’t frighten it off. “Lazarus. Tell me the name, or —”
“Or what.” Barely a breath. “You’ll come up here and take it out of me?
You’ll cross the line you drew? You’ll put your hand on my face the way you did on the stairs and make me choose between the order and your mouth?
” His jaw works. “Don’t. Please. Because I’ll choose your mouth, Wren, I’ll choose it every single time, that’s not in question, it’s never been in question, but if I break the line, I become the man you told them I was, and then they’re right, and then everything I’ve held for twelve years was for nothing, and I would rather stand in this doorway and burn alive wanting you than hand the world the proof that you were telling the truth about me.
So you decide.” His open hand, in the cold, an inch from my cheek and not closing it.
“You always decide. That’s the only thing I’ve got left that’s clean.
Come up, or go down. But I’m not crossing it.
Not even for this. Especially not for this. ”
And there it is, the whole unbearable architecture of us, laid bare in five feet of freezing air.
He won’t take. He never takes. He has built his entire self around the refusal to be the hand that reaches, and the cruelty of it is that it leaves every single thing up to me, it makes me the wolf, it always made me the wolf.
I’m the one who climbs on, I’m the one who crosses, I’m the one who turns the photograph around and walks up the hill and stands one inch from the only person who ever loved me and has to decide, alone, in the cold, whether to be saved or to be free.
I want to close the inch.
God, I want to close the inch. My whole body is one long lean toward the warm and the man and the twelve years, and his hand is right there, open, shaking, and all I have to do is tip my face the last inch into his palm and the line comes down and we go down with it.
I take a step back instead.
Down the hill. Into the cold. Away.
Because if I close it tonight, if I cross his line in the dark up here, on his threshold, on his terms even though he swears they’re mine, then it happens his way, in the shadow, a secret, the wolf and the lamb in the dark where no one can see, exactly the way Augustus wanted everything kept.
And I have spent four days learning one new thing about myself in the wreckage of all the old ones:
When I finally go to him, and I’m going to, we both know I’m going to, the only question left in the world is when; I’m going to do it in the light.
In my own house. With my own porch lamp blazing like a struck match for the whole town to see, no secret, no shadow, no shame.
Not because I’m brave. Because the dark is his father’s country, and the dark is where I made him a monster, and the only way I know to un-make it is to choose him somewhere there’s nothing to hide in.
“Goodnight, Lazarus,” I say, from the bottom of his walk, in the snow, five hundred feet reasserting itself between us with every step.
He stands in the lit doorway with his open hand still raised to an empty inch of cold air, and he doesn’t beg, and he doesn’t follow, and he watches me go the way he’s watched me my whole life, like I’m the only thing in the world, and like he’d rather lose me than cage me, both at once, the impossible arithmetic of him.
“Goodnight, little lamb,” he says.
And then, soft, just before I’m out of range, the thing that decides it, the thing that has my hand on the porch switch before I’ve even reached the bottom of the hill:
“Turn the light on whenever you’re ready. I’ll be cold until you do.”