CHAPTER 17
WREN — Then
Across all the years.
There were two mothers who made me and Lazarus, and neither of us ever got to keep ours, and I think in the end that’s the first language we ever spoke to each other, the grammar of the left-behind, long before we had a wall or a knock or a name for it.
Mine I’ve told you. A temperature that went cold. A closed door. A man’s voice saying she was sleeping. Six years old and already learning that the warm thing leaves and doesn’t come back.
His I had to assemble out of the house, the way I assembled everything true in that place, out of the spaces where a person used to be.
There was a woman in the Frost family before I came, before Iris died, before any of it: a mother.
She’d married into that cold enormous house the way women married into money in places like this, and she’d given Augustus three children, and then, somewhere in there, she had understood something about the man she’d married or the house she’d married into, understood something she could not afterward un-understand, and she had left.
Without them. That’s the part that lived in that house like a draft you couldn’t find the source of.
She didn’t take the children. She got herself out, and I’ve thought about it a great deal, in the years since, what it must take, what a woman must have seen to run from a house and leave three children in it with the thing she was running from, and I’ve landed, finally, on not judging her, because I have stood in a burning room and chosen who got carried out and who got left, and I know now that sometimes you only have arms enough for the escape itself.
Maybe Augustus had the money and the lawyers and would have buried her if she’d tried to take them.
Maybe she told herself they’d be fine, that his cruelty would never turn on his own blood, that a mother’s leaving was survivable in a way she herself no longer was.
Maybe she was just a frightened woman who saved the one life she could reach, which was her own.
I don’t know. Nobody ever asked her, either.
She’s another uncounted witness, another person who saw and got out and never said. This whole story is made of them.
But here is the thing that matters, the thing that made the man I love:
Lazarus was old enough to remember her leaving.
He’d have been seven, eight. Old enough to watch a mother choose the door.
Old enough to stand at a window, he was always at a window, at a doorway, at the edge of a leaving, and watch the car go down the black hill in the snow and understand, with a child’s terrible clarity, that the person whose whole job was to keep you had looked at the danger and saved herself and left you inside it.
You want to know where the wall really comes from?
Before the three knocks, before Iris’s fever, before me?
It comes from an eight-year-old boy watching his mother’s taillights go down a mountain.
Because a child learns exactly one lesson from that, and it’s the lesson Lazarus built his entire self around to disprove: the ones who are supposed to save you, leave.
They look at the worst thing and they save themselves.
So if anyone in this house is ever going to be saved, it can’t be by someone who’s allowed to leave.
It has to be by someone who decides, on purpose, never to.
He chose to be the opposite of his mother.
That’s the whole man, right there. She left through a doorway; he made himself into a body that stands in one and does not move.
She saved herself and abandoned the children; he gave up his sleep, his freedom, his name, his whole life, and abandoned no one, not Iris, not me, not even, in the end, his monster of a brother.
The thing the town called dangerous in him, the thing the court called controlling, the immovability, the I will put my body in this door and nothing comes through, that wasn’t his father in him.
Everyone always assumed the darkness in Lazarus was Augustus.
It wasn’t. The darkness in Lazarus was his mother’s taillights, and the vow an abandoned little boy made at a cold window: I will be the one who stays.
I will be the wall the leaving can’t get past. I will never, ever look at someone I love and save myself instead.
And Iris. Poor Iris drew her once. I told you about the notebook, the tin behind the baseboard, a woman drawn from the back, beautiful, in a coat, and from the front just a blank oval, a face with nothing in it.
I thought at first it was a child’s poor drawing.
It wasn’t. Iris was too young when their mother left to have kept the face.
She could draw the leaving, the back of a beautiful woman in a coat, walking away, that she remembered, that’s the pose that burned in, but not the face, because the face never turned around.
That’s the cruelest small thing in that whole cruel house.
A little girl who could draw her mother’s departure in perfect detail and her mother’s face not at all.
So when people ask me, and they will, when all of this is finally a story other people get to tell, why I chose Lazarus Frost, the convicted one, the dark one, the one any sensible woman would run from, I think the truest answer is the one underneath all the others:
Because we were both children of taillights going down a mountain in the snow.
Because we both got taught, before we were old enough to spell it, that the warm thing leaves.
And because we each built an opposite armor out of the same wound.
I built a wall of needing no one, of owing no one, of refusing to be the kind of person whose leaving could hurt anybody; and he built a wall of staying, of standing in every doorway, of being the one who never, ever goes.
Two children of leaving. One who became expert at being left, and one who swore he’d never do the leaving.
Of course I climbed over everyone to get to him.
He was the first person in my whole life who felt like a door that wouldn’t close on its own.
I’d spent my entire existence learning that everyone leaves, and then there was a boy on a staircase whose entire self was a vow that he wouldn’t, and I was a stray, and a stray takes the one door that stays open even when she’s sure it’s a trap, even when she’s been trained her whole life to know the open door is bait.
It wasn’t bait. That’s the thing none of us could believe, him least of all. For once in the whole bought, measured, abandoned history of both our lives —
the door that stayed open was just a door that stayed open.
And the boy standing in it had been practicing, since he was eight years old at a cold window, for someone exactly like me to finally walk through.