CHAPTER 25
WREN
The music box sits on my kitchen counter all day like a small green heart I cut out of someone.
I try everything. I put it in a drawer; I can hear it not-playing through the wood, the way I used to hear Lazarus not-sleeping through plaster.
I put it in the freezer, which is insane, I’m aware it’s insane, and then I take it out because the cold felt like mercy and I don’t deserve mercy.
I think about putting it back in a fire.
I don’t, because the last time I put it in a fire it came back to me on a snowy sidewalk six years later in the hand of a man I sent to prison, and I’ve learned my lesson about what burns and what doesn’t.
What I want, what I can’t stop wanting, all day, like a tongue going back to the broken tooth, is to wind it.
To hear the whole thing through. Because here is the rot at the center of me, the thing the witness stand never got out of me: I have never been able to bear not knowing.
I would rather have the worst true thing than the kindest empty space where a fact should be.
It’s why I turned Iris’s photograph around when I was twelve.
It’s why I went up the steps into a dark house instead of driving away.
Not-knowing is the only thing on this earth I’m more afraid of than him.
And there is exactly one person alive who can tell me how that music box survived the fire. Who knows what’s left, and what’s gone, and what it would take to put me in a cell beside the one I built for him.
Six hundred and forty feet up the hill, the answer is lying awake, listening for my light.
Eli texts at four. Thinking about you. Locks are a real thing I know about, offer stands, no agenda.
, E. It’s so clean it makes my eyes sting.
A man with no agenda. I didn’t know they still made those.
I text back, I’m fine, please don’t come by, and I delete please don’t come by and retype it twice because I need him to understand it’s not coyness, it’s a quarantine, I am a contaminated thing and the kindest people are exactly the ones I have to keep outside the fence.
I send it. Three dots appear. Disappear.
He’s a good man trying to figure out how to take no for a yes-shaped reason, and I want to scream at the phone, you have no idea, the last good man who got close to me is the one I destroyed.
Night comes early up here in December. By five it’s full dark and the snow has started again, fat and slow, and my hand is on the porch-light switch before I’ve admitted to myself that I walked to it.
Turn it on. I’ll come down.
I tell myself it’s for the truth. The music box, the fire, the exact dimensions of the cage I’m in. I’m going to get my answers and give him nothing, I’m going to be smart, I’m going to be the woman who outmaneuvered twelve jurors and a defense attorney, I am in control of this.
I am the dumbest animal in any story ever told.
Except that isn’t the true thing either, and I promised myself, somewhere on the walk down his hill two nights ago, that I was done telling myself the small clean survivable versions.
So here’s the real one, the one underneath: I am not turning on this light because I’ve surrendered.
I’m turning it on because two nights ago I stood one inch from him in the dark of his own threshold and understood that the dark is where Augustus kept everything, every girl, every secret, every soft terrible thing he wanted believed had run away, and the dark is where I made Lazarus into a monster, on a stand, in a grey dress, with a bruise I gave myself.
The dark is the country we were both born in.
And there is exactly one way I know to un-make a monster I built in the dark, and it is to choose him, on purpose, in the light, with my porch lamp burning down the whole black valley like a struck match for any soul in Hartsend to see.
Not a secret in the shadows. Not the wolf and the lamb where no one’s watching, the way his father would have wanted it kept. A woman turning on a light.
I turn on the light.
It takes him four minutes. I count them.
I stand in my own living room with every lamp blazing this time.
I want the light, I’m done meeting him in the dark, the dark is his country and I won’t visit it again, and at four minutes exactly there are slow boots on the steps and a soft knock, considerate, a man who minds the rules even now, and I open my own door to Lazarus Frost for the first time in the light in six years.
The cold comes off him. Snow in his hair, on the shoulders of a black coat, and underneath it all of him, the whole changed mass of him filling my doorway, and the worst part, the part I will never confess to anyone, is that my body recognizes him before my fear does.
Six years of careful nothing and one look at him on my threshold and everything in me that I drowned comes up gasping.
There. There he is. There’s the wall. There’s home.
“You turned it on,” he says. Quiet. Almost wondering. Like he didn’t fully believe I would.
“For answers. Not for you.” I step back to let him in, which is its own kind of confession, and I hate that he hears it. “How did the music box survive the fire.”
He steps inside. He doesn’t take off the coat.
He looks around my small bright ordinary life, the kettle, the kicked-off boots, the calendar with nothing written on it because I have no one to make plans with, and something moves across his face that’s almost grief, like he’s reading the six years off the walls.
This is what she built without me. This little quiet box. She was always so good at quiet.
“It survived,” he says, “because I took it out before.”
“Before what.”
“Before I lit it.” He says it the way you’d report the time.
“You think the fire was the panic. The cover-up. The thing we did after.” He shakes his head, slow.
“Wren. I was twenty-three years old and there was a dead man on the floor of the east wing and the only person I’d ever loved standing over him with the poker still in her hand, and I had about ninety seconds to decide the rest of both our lives.
The fire wasn’t panic. The fire was the only clear thought I have ever had.
” His eyes find mine and hold. “I took out the one thing I knew you’d want back someday, and I put it in my coat, and then I burned the house down around your story so that there’d be no story left to tell but mine.
So that whatever they pinned on someone, it would be me. ”
The poker still in her hand.
He’s said it out loud. The thing six years of grey-dress lying never made me say.
The poker still in her hand. My hand. I killed Augustus Frost. I have known it every second of every day and I have never once heard another human being say it, and hearing it now, in my own bright kitchen, in his quiet wrecovered voice, my knees actually go, and I catch the counter, and he moves toward me, fast, helpless, six years of make him come through me first hardwired into him, and stops himself a foot away with his hands half-raised, because he is not allowed, because there’s an order, because even now, even here, he holds the line.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t be, don’t be kind. I can survive you being a monster. I built a whole life on you being a monster. I can’t survive —”
“I know.” His hands drop. His jaw works.
We stand a foot apart in the blazing light, both of us shaking, the music box on the counter between us like a witness.
“That’s why you put me away as one, isn’t it.
Not to save yourself from prison. You’d have taken the prison.
” His voice cracks, just once, the only crack I’ll ever see in him.
“You put me away as a monster because you couldn’t bear to owe your whole life to someone you loved.
It’s easier to run from a wolf than from a debt.
I figured that out around year three. It’s the only thing that let me sleep, those nights I slept.
Knowing you didn’t do it because you hated me.
You did it because I was the one thing too big to pay back. ”
I’m crying. I don’t do this. I haven’t done this since the lamb, since before the lamb, since a height chart that stopped at four-eleven. “You took the blame for me.”
“I’d do it again.” A foot away, and the foot might as well be the wall, the whole architecture of restraint that has defined every moment between us for twelve years.
“I told you what I was, that night, and you climbed onto the bed anyway. So I’m going to tell you again, in the light this time, so there’s no mistake.
” He leans in, not touching, never touching, just close enough that I feel the cold and the want and the six years coming off him in waves, and his voice drops to the thing I felt through the wall a thousand nights.
“I didn’t come back for revenge. I don’t want you in a cage.
I came back because I haven’t slept since the door closed, and you are the only quiet I have ever known, and I am done — done, pretending I can live in a world that has you in it and not have you in it.
The confession was never for the law, little lamb.
I already know what you did. I want to hear you say the rest. The part you’ve never said to anyone.
” His mouth, an inch from mine, in the light.
“Say you were mine first. Before the lie. Before the dress. Say it and I’ll never let anything touch you again, I’ll burn down every house in this town one at a time, I’ll —”
And God help me, my mouth is already opening, the truth is already coming up out of the padlocked room, six years of it, I was, I was yours, I was yours the night on the stairs when you said the house went quiet, I have been yours every single day in that cell counting my breaths and I am so tired of pretend—
Headlights swing across the front window.
Tires in fresh snow. An engine I don’t know cutting out in my driveway.
A door. Boots on my steps, heavier than his, less careful, a man who has no idea he should be careful, and a voice, warm and decent and walking straight off the surface of the ordinary world into the bottom of mine, calling through my own front door:
“Wren? It’s Eli. I know you said not to, I just; I saw your porch light on and I got a weird feeling. You okay in there?”
The porch light. Turn it on, I’ll come down. I lit a beacon for a wolf, and a good man saw it and came running.
Lazarus goes very, very still.
He doesn’t move toward the door. He doesn’t have to.
The change in him is the change in a room when the temperature drops ten degrees with the windows shut, interior, total, the church-cold settling over the want like snow over a lawn nothing has walked across in years.
He looks at me, and he is smiling the fond terrible almost-smile, and very softly, so the man on my porch can’t hear, he says the most frightening thing anyone has ever said to me:
“You should let him in. I’d like to meet the under-tens’ coach.”