CHAPTER 27
WREN
He’s exactly where I left him, in the blaze of all my lights, and he watched the whole thing through the front window. I can tell, the snow-melt of him, the stillness, and he knows what I did. He knows I stepped between him and the door. He knows I lied to a cop’s face to keep him out of the dark.
And the thing in him that has held a line for twelve years finally, quietly, lets go.
“You lied for me,” he says. His voice isn’t steady anymore. None of him is steady anymore. “You stood on that porch and you lied to a man who’d have saved you, to keep them from taking me.”
“Don’t.” My back’s against the door. The flashlight’s still in my hand. “Don’t make it mean something. I lied because the truth ruins me too, I lied because —”
And then it doesn’t come out as words. Six years of it doesn’t fit through a sentence.
It comes out as my fists on his chest. I drop the flashlight and I go at him, both hands, hitting that wall of a man with everything I buried under a grey dress, and the words come ragged and ugly between the blows — “Why did you come back. I had a life, do you understand, I built a whole life out of nothing, out of owing no one, out of a quiet I made with my own hands, and you walked down off that mountain and you ruined it, you ruined the quiet, you made me feel it all again —” I hit him and he lets me, he doesn’t catch my wrists, he doesn’t step back, he stands there and takes it the way he took a beating in a hallway when I was fifteen, arms open, face open, absorbing me.
“Six years I made myself hate you, six years, I worked at it, it was the hardest thing I ever did and I was so good at it, and you ruin it in four days, and you won’t even fight, you never fight, you just stand there and let me destroy you, you let me put you on a stand and bury you and you wrote back like it was nothing, you —” My voice breaks in half.
“Why didn’t you hate me. I gave you everything you needed to hate me.
I built you a perfect reason. Why didn’t you take it. ”
“Because it wasn’t true.” Quiet. Unmoved. My blows landing on him like snow on a roof. “And I don’t lie to myself, little lamb. It’s the one thing I never learned how to do. That was always your gift, not mine.”
I hit him once more, and the fight goes out of my hands, and the last blow turns into a fist twisted in his shirt, holding on, and I’m shaking against him, six years of careful hatred coming apart in my chest like rotten thread, and I hate that it’s a relief, I hate that being held up by the thing I tried to bury is the safest I’ve felt since I was eighteen.
“There she is,” he murmurs, into my hair, still not closing his arms, still letting me be the one who decides. “Get it all out. I’ve got nowhere to be. I waited six years. I can wait through this too.”
“I’m not crying because I forgive you,” I say into his chest, furious, wrecked. “I haven’t forgiven you. You don’t get to be forgiven, you arrogant, you decided my whole life for me in ninety seconds and called it love —”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to be the good one. I won’t let you be the good one.”
“I know, Wren.” And there’s the ghost of the almost-smile in it, the terrible gentle patience of him. “You’re still doing it, though.”
I go still. “Doing what.”
“Putting something between us. It was the debt, and then it was the cage, and now it’s the rage, and the rage is true, God knows you’ve earned every swing, but it’s still a wall, little lamb.
You’ll stack anything you can find in the gap between us rather than say the one thing.
” His open hands hover at my back, warm, not landing.
“Six years. Tell me I built you out of a sound through a wall for nothing. Tell me to walk back up that hill and I’ll go, I’ll go right now, I’ll mind the rules, I’ll —”
“Shut up,” I say, and I drop the flashlight, and I kiss him.
It isn’t like the stairs. The stairs were two children deciding to be brave.
This is two ruined adults who have already lost everything they were trying to protect, kissing like it’s the last honest act left to either of us, and he makes that sound again, the one from six years ago, mine, finally, mine, low and broken against my mouth, and his hands are everywhere at once like he can’t decide which six years of starving to feed first. I feel him shaking.
This enormous changed man, shaking, because he’s finally allowed to touch the thing he came back from the dead for.
“Say it,” he breathes, walking me back against the door, his mouth at my jaw, my throat, the wild jump of my pulse. “I don’t want your body, Wren, I can take a body, I want the thing you’ve never given anyone, say you were mine first. Before the lie. Before the dress.”
“I was yours first.” It comes up out of the padlocked room and it’s such a relief to say that my knees go again, and he catches me, he always catches me.
“On the stairs. When you said the house went quiet. I was yours before I knew there was a word for it and I have been yours every single day you were gone, I counted my own breaths so you’d have something to listen f—”
He kisses the rest of it out of my mouth.
What happens then is six years and twelve years and a whole sunk life coming up for air at once.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and I wrap around him and he carries me, not to the bedroom, he doesn’t make it that far, just down to the rug in the blaze of all my lights because neither of us can stand the dark anymore, not with each other, the dark was always the thing that kept us apart.
He undresses me like he’s defusing something, slow and reverent and shaking, pressing his mouth to every inch he uncovers like he’s checking I’m real, like he’s been told too many times in a cell that I wasn’t.
When his hands find the old thin scar on my hip he stops and presses his lips to it and I feel him say something against my skin that isn’t words, that’s just breath, and I understand it anyway, the way I always understood him through plaster: I know.
I know what that’s from. I’m here. He’s gone. I made sure he’s gone.
And when there’s nothing left between us, when I’m bare under him in the light with the snow coming down outside and the whole town asleep and not one living soul who’d believe what we are to each other, he holds himself over me and looks at me like the first night on the stairs, like he’s deciding, and he says, rough, wrecked, half a question: “Mine.”
“Yours,” I say. “I was always yours. Stop asking.”
He stops asking.
He takes me slow, at first, too slow, careful, like he still can’t believe he’s allowed, until I dig my heels into him and tell him I’m not made of glass, I’m made of the same thing that killed his father, and something in him snaps clean and he stops being careful.
He’s everywhere, all of him, the weight and the cold-gone-hot of him, one hand splayed over my racing heart like he’s reading it, there it is, there’s my girl, still running too fast, and he says my name like it’s the only word he kept through six years of silence, over and over, Wren, Wren, little lamb, and I come apart under the man I buried with my own mouth, in the light, saying yes, saying his name, saying the true thing finally with my whole body since I was always too much of a coward to trust it to words.
After, the first time, neither of us speaks.
We lie tangled on the rug in the blaze of all my lights, both of us wrecked, his heart slamming against my back and mine still running too fast under the hand he won’t take off it, and the snow comes down soundless outside and the house ticks as it warms and for one whole minute there is nothing in the world to be afraid of, which is so rare for me that I don’t recognize it at first and mistake it for something wrong.
“Stop bracing,” he murmurs into my hair, reading me the way he reads everything.
“I can feel you waiting for the bad thing. There’s no bad thing tonight, little lamb.
Tonight there’s just this.” His mouth moves to the curve of my shoulder, to the old thin scar, and lingers.
“Six years I built you out of a sound. You’re so much warmer than the version I made.
I keep —” his voice catches, this enormous man, undone — “I keep having to check you’re real. ”
“Check, then,” I say, and I turn over in his arms to face him, and that’s all the invitation either of us needs.
The second time he doesn’t snap and he doesn’t rush.
The frantic is spent; what’s left underneath it is worse, is the thing I have no defense against, slow, and reverent, and devastatingly patient, a man who waited twelve years and has decided to spend the next hour proving he knows how.
He kisses his way down me like he’s reading something he memorized in the dark and is only now seeing in the light, naming each part of me with his mouth, mine, against my throat, mine, against my sternum where my heart is going too fast, mine, lower, until I’ve got two fists in his dark hair and I’ve forgotten there was ever a wall, a court, a grey dress, a single thing in the world that wasn’t this.
He takes me apart slowly and he watches me the whole time, those church-cold eyes gone molten in the lamplight, drinking down every sound I make like he’s been thirsty for six years and I’m the only water left on earth.
When he finally moves over me again, slow, deep, deliberate, his forehead drops to mine and he says it like a vow, like the thing he came back from the dead to say.
“I’m never going to be able to let you go.
You understand that. You’re not a thing I can put down once I’ve held it.
” His hand splays over my heart again, reading, always reading.
“Tell me you understand what you’re keeping.
Tell me, and then I’ll give you everything that’s left of me, for as long as you’ll have it. ”
“I understand,” I breathe. “I always understood. I climbed on anyway. I’ll always climb on anyway.”
And he gives me everything, slow and complete and ruinous, my name in his mouth like a prayer he’s finally allowed back in church for, the two of us moving together in the light like we’ve got all the time in the world and not a single thing climbing toward us through the snow, and when I come apart the second time it’s quieter, deeper, somewhere closer to weeping than to crying out, and he goes with me, breathing my name into my hair, shaking, kept.
After, he doesn’t let go. Of course he doesn’t.
He gathers me up off the rug and carries me to the bed at last and folds the whole huge furnace of himself around me from behind, one arm bolted across me, his face in my hair, his breath slowing against the back of my neck, in, and out, in, and out, the metronome, the wall finally gone and nothing on the other side of it now but him, warm, here, kept.
“Sleep,” he murmurs, already going under, his voice thick with something I’ve never once heard in it. “I’ve got you. Nothing comes through me. Sleep, little lamb.”
And here is the thing I will remember when everything else is ash:
I sleep.
For the first time in six years, for the first time, maybe, since a height chart on a doorframe.
I close my eyes in the dark beside another living thing and I sleep, deep and dreamless and safe, two ruined animals finally quiet, finally each other’s wall, and somewhere in the warm black of it I feel him go under too, feel the great tension drain out of him all at once, the not-sleeping of six years finally setting down its weight, and I think, helpless, falling: oh.
Oh. This is what we cost the world. This.
I don’t know how long we sleep.
I only know what wakes me.
Not a sound, at first, the absence of one.
The way you wake when a room you trusted changes.
Lazarus is dead asleep against my back, heavy and slack, deeper under than I’ve ever felt him, six years of debt collected all at once.
The lights are still on in the front room, throwing a long pale rectangle across the bedroom floor.
The snow has stopped. The house is silent.
And then, from the dark of the front room, soft and patient and mechanical, six notes begin to climb.
And then six notes again.
The lullaby.
The music box is playing.
The music box that needs a hand to wind it. That sat dead on my counter all day. That neither of us has touched since the snow stopped.
Someone is in my house, in the dark, winding it.
And the only two people left alive who know what those six notes mean are both in this bed.