CHAPTER 21
WREN — Then
Six years ago.
By the time I was eighteen I had learned the whole grammar of that house.
I knew which stairs spoke and which kept your secrets.
I knew the bolt on the nursery door and the loose pane in the conservatory you could lift out and put back.
I knew that Silas, the younger brother, had grown from a sly boy into a sly man who’d decided early which parent he wanted to be and was practicing, and that there was no help in that direction, only an audience.
I knew that the mother who’d left before I came was never coming back and was, on the whole, the lucky one. And I knew the wall.
God, I knew the wall.
Six years of it. Six years of lying in a dead girl’s bed with my hand flat against the cold plaster, listening to Lazarus not-sleep on the other side, the two of us awake in the dark like the last two people on a sinking ship, never speaking through it, never needing to.
Sometimes when the house got bad, when Augustus’s footsteps came up the hall and stopped, just stopped, outside my door, and the bolt was the only thing in the world; I’d hear three slow knocks from the other side of the wall.
I’m here. I’m awake. Make him come through me first. And the footsteps would move on, because Augustus Frost was a coward the way all monsters are cowards, brave only with small things, and Lazarus had made himself into something that was no longer small.
He never touched me. Not once, in all those years.
I need you to understand that, because of everything that came after, because of the grey dress and the witness stand and the lie, he was seventeen and then twenty and then twenty-three, and I went from a child to a woman in the room next to his, and he held a line so straight and so cruel to himself that I didn’t even understand it was a line until the night he stopped holding it.
I learned a long time ago how to want you and not take.
He told me that, six years later, in the dark of my living room, like it was a sin he was confessing.
It wasn’t a sin. It was the single most decent thing anyone ever did for me, and I repaid it by burying him.
The night it changed, it was snowing.
It’s always snowing in the parts of my life that matter. I’ve stopped pretending that’s a coincidence.
It had been coming for months. I want that understood, it wasn’t a single night, it never is with men like him, it’s a slow turning of the whole house toward you like a flower following a light you’d give anything to be out from under.
Somewhere around my eighteenth birthday Augustus’s attention had changed temperature.
For six years he’d looked at me the way you look at a thing you’re growing, patient, proprietary, waiting; and then, that last winter, he started looking at me the way you look at a thing that’s ready, and the difference was the difference between a man checking on a field and a man sharpening a knife.
The gifts started. Iris’s dresses, the ones that had hung in my closet two sizes too big and twenty years out of style since I was twelve, suddenly fit, and he noticed they fit, and he began, in his soft church voice, to suggest I wear them.
He started calling me by her name and correcting himself with a smile that wasn’t a mistake.
He moved her photograph back to the landing, face out, beside the mirror, so that I’d pass the two of us together a dozen times a day, the dead girl and her living copy, grown at last into the years the first one never got.
I understood, the way prey understands weather, that I had been bought twelve years ago not as a daughter and not as a ward but as a replacement part, kept in a drawer until I’d grown to spec, and that the drawer was finally being opened.
Lazarus knew. Of course he knew; he heard everything in that house.
The three knocks came more often that winter, and stayed longer, and twice I woke to find him sitting against the wall on his side at four in the morning, awake, listening, a man bracing for a thing he could feel coming and couldn’t yet name.
Three more years, he’d promised me when I was fifteen.
We’d run out of years. We were down to weeks, and we both knew it, and neither of us said it, because saying it would make it real and there was still, stupidly, a part of each of us that believed the wall could hold a little longer.
It couldn’t.
I was eighteen and three months and Augustus had announced at dinner, in his soft church voice, with his white teeth, that I would be moving my things into the east wing.
To Iris’s proper rooms, he said. Now that I was grown.
Now that I was finished, he said, looking at me the way he’d looked at me on the first night, the buyer’s look, the look that measured, except there was nothing of a child in his face anymore and nothing of a child left in me for it to land on, and I understood, with the cold total clarity that has saved my life more than once, that the thing he had been waiting twelve years for me to become, I had finally become.
A grown Iris. The one the first one never got to be.
I didn’t go to the east wing.
I went to the wall.
I’d never crossed it before, that was his to cross, in the geography we’d never spoken aloud, his side and my side and the cold plaster between, but that night I got up and I walked out onto the landing in my nightgown with my heart going like a trapped bird and I opened his door without knocking, and Lazarus was sitting up against his headboard in the dark, awake, of course awake, watching the door like he’d been waiting six years for it to open from my side.
“You heard,” I said.
“I hear everything in this house.” His voice was rough. He hadn’t used it much that day. “Wren. Go back to bed.”
“I’m not sleeping in his wing.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to be her.”
“I know.” And then, so low I felt it more than heard it, the way I’d feel it through a wall in a living room six years on: “I won’t let you.”
I crossed the room. The floor was ice under my feet and I didn’t feel it.
I stopped at the edge of his bed and we looked at each other in the snow-light, this boy who’d taught me how to survive the house and never once asked for anything back, and I was eighteen and grown and finished and terrified and I was so tired, so bone-tired, of being a thing that other people decided about.
I wanted, just once, to be the one who decided.
“Then this is mine,” I said. “Not his. Not Iris’s.
Mine.” And I put my hand against his jaw, the first time, in six years, that either of us had touched the other on purpose, with intent, in want, and I felt him go absolutely still under my palm, the way he’d gone still over my pulse, like a man reading something he’d been starving for the answer to.
“Wren.” My name came apart in his mouth.
“If I touch you I’m not going to be able to stop wanting to keep you.
Do you understand what I am? Do you understand what’s wrong with me?
It’s not, it’s not normal, the way I, once I have a thing that’s mine I can’t —” His hand came up and closed around my wrist, not to push me away, to hold on, the grip of a drowning man.
“You’re the only quiet I’ve ever had. If you give me this and then you take it away, I will burn down the world to get it back.
That’s not a feeling. That’s just true. That’s just what I am.
So go back to bed, little lamb. Save yourself from me while there’s still a wall to do it. ”
I have thought about that warning every day for six years.
He told me exactly what he was. He told me the precise shape of the thing I was about to make, and then he handed me the door and begged me to use it.
No one has ever been more honest with me in my life.
And I looked at the only person who had ever chosen me, in a house built to make me disappear, on the night I was supposed to vanish into a dead girl’s rooms, and I made the choice that put both of us where we are now.
I kissed him.
I climbed onto the bed and I took his face in both hands and I kissed Lazarus Frost, and for a moment he held still under it, rigid, fighting it, six years of that brutal restraint locked in his jaw, and then something in him simply broke, quietly, the way ice breaks, all at once and silent, and his arms came around me and pulled me in like he was hauling me out of cold water, and he kissed me back like a man who’d been told he could finally stop holding his breath.
His hands in my hair, on my spine, learning me with a desperate care, like I might be taken away mid-motion.
He made a sound against my mouth that I had no name for then and have every name for now. Mine. Finally. Mine.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel it too. The relief of it. The terrible homecoming. The sense, for the first time in my whole scavenged life, of being something kept instead of something left.
That was the moment. That was the exact hinge of everything. If we’d stopped there, if we’d had even one more hour of just that, of the wall finally come down and nothing on the other side but each other —
But Marrowfield never gave anyone a clean thing.
Because over the slam of my own heart, over the sound of him breathing me in, I heard it start up somewhere down in the dark of the house. Faint. Mechanical. Patient. Six notes, and then six notes again, climbing the cold stairs toward us.
The lullaby.
The little brass music box, the one from Iris’s room, the one I would watch go into the fire and the one that would come back to me on a snowy sidewalk six years later, winding itself up, somewhere below, in the dark.
Lazarus went rigid against me. He pulled back just far enough to look at the door, and in the snow-light his face had changed into something I’d never seen on it, something that made the church-cold of his father look like nothing at all.
“He only plays it,” Lazarus said, very quietly, “when he’s decided.”
“Decided what?”
He was already off the bed, already moving me behind him, already becoming the thing he’d warned me he was.
“Which one of us he’s taking it out on,” he said. “Stay here. Bolt the door.”
And Lazarus Frost walked out of the room toward the sound of the lullaby, toward his father, toward the east wing, toward the last ordinary night either of us would ever have, and the next time I saw his face, there was blood on it, and Augustus Frost was dead, and I was already, in my head, in a grey dress, beginning to build the lie that would save me and bury the only person who ever loved me.