CHAPTER 28
WREN
I wake Lazarus with one hand flat on his chest and the other over his mouth, the way you’d wake a soldier, and his eyes open already awake, there’s no swim in them, no surfacing, he goes from dead-under to lethal in the space of a blink, and I understand that the man who slept beside me for the first time in six years was only ever sleeping the way a loaded thing sleeps.
I don’t have to say it. He hears the lullaby. I watch it land.
The six years drain out of his face and the church-cold comes down over it, the thing from the night on the stairs, the thing that walked toward his father and came back with blood on it.
He puts his lips to my ear, soundless: “Behind me. The flashlight.” And he’s up, and he’s between me and the bedroom door before I’ve found my own feet, this enormous silent shape moving through the pale light from the front room, and I grab Eli’s heavy aluminum flashlight off the floor where I dropped it a lifetime and an hour ago, and I follow the wolf toward the music.
The front room is exactly as we left it. Every lamp burning. The rug still rucked where we, the music box on the counter where it sat dead all day.
Except now there’s a man in my armchair, winding it.
He’s got it open in his lap, the little brass works exposed, and he’s turning the key with the unhurried patience of someone who has all the time in the world and knows it, and when the six notes wind down he simply winds them up again, and he doesn’t look up at us, not right away, he lets us stand there in the doorway in the wreckage of the best hour of my life and listen to the worst sound in it.
“Hello, big brother,” he says to the music box. “Hello, little lamb.”
Little lamb. In Augustus’s voice. In the father’s exact soft church cadence, coming out of a younger mouth, and the years fall away and I’m twelve again on a staircase and I want to be sick.
Silas Frost has grown up beautiful, the way they all are, the family curse.
He’s got the father’s white teeth and the father’s stillness and he’s wearing a good coat and good shoes that have walked through my snow without leaving the kind of mess a frightened man makes, and when he finally lifts his eyes they’re the eyes from dinner twelve years ago, the boy who watched his sister’s chair stay empty and decided early which parent to become and has been practicing ever since.
He looks at his brother. He looks at me, bare-shouldered in Lazarus’s shirt. He smiles like Christmas.
“Don’t,” Silas says mildly, because Lazarus has taken one step.
“Sit down, Laz. You’ll want to hear this before you do the thing you’re built to do.
You always were a doer. I’m a planner. It’s why Father liked me and loved you, you can’t help loving the dog that bites, can you, it’s the only honest thing in the house.
” He sets the music box on the side table, gently, like it’s precious, and folds his hands.
“Sit down. Both of you. I’ve come a very long way to give you the worst night of your lives, and I’d hate to rush it. ”
Lazarus doesn’t sit. Lazarus stands in front of me in the blazing light, and he says, in a voice I’ve never heard, flat and dead and certain: “How did you get out of the order I have on you, Silas? How did you get near her?”
“The order’s on you, brother. Not me. Funny thing about being the respectable one.
” Silas tips his head at me, almost fond.
“And how did I get near her? The same way you did. I waited. We’re a patient family.
Father taught us that, didn’t he, with the box.
” He nods at it. “He only wound it when he’d decided.
You both remember that. I bet you’ll remember it the rest of your lives, every time you hear those six little notes, and you will hear them, I promise you that, I’ll make sure of it. ”
Lazarus takes another step, and the air in the room changes, twelve years of doorway, of make him come through me first, coming online in real time, and Silas watches it happen with the delighted, unhurried attention of a man who has imagined this exact moment in a thousand sleepless nights and is finally, finally getting to live inside it.
“There he is,” Silas breathes. “There’s the dog.
God, I missed you, Laz. Truly. You’re the only person who was ever real in that house, everyone else was performing, Father most of all, but you just were the thing you were, all the way down.
” He studies him, head tilted, cataloguing the six years: the new mass, the stillness that used to be a boy’s and is something else now, the church-cold that out-colds their dead father.
“Prison agreed with you. You went in a thing that bites and came out a thing that waits. We’re more alike than you’d ever let yourself admit.
The only difference between us was always her”, and his eyes flick to me, and the smile sharpens — “and I’ll get to that. ”
“Don’t look at her,” Lazarus says.
“I’ve been looking at her for days, brother.
” And there it is, the first cold finger down my spine, because he says it the way you’d mention the weather, idle and total.
“I watched her bury a lamb. I watched the deputy hand her his flashlight on the porch like a knight in a flannel shirt. I watched her drive up a hill to your rented room two nights ago and stand on your walk at an hour no decent woman keeps, and I watched her come back down alone, restraint, brother, I was almost proud of you.” His gaze drags back to Lazarus and the temperature drops further.
“And tonight I watched the lights stay on in her little house long past the hour they should’ve gone off, and I thought, ah.
There it is. The dog’s finally home.” He smiles like Christmas.
“Did it feel like you remembered? Twelve years of wanting, all that careful not-taking, and then, was it worth the wait? I do hope so. I’d hate for the last good night of your life to have disappointed. ”
Lazarus moves.
It’s not a step this time, it’s the start of the thing he’s built to do, the whole enormous violence of him uncoiling toward the desk, and Silas doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even unfold his hands, and that, the not-flinching, is what stops my brother cold three feet from the man who just narrated our worst week back to us like a bedtime story.
“Sit. Down.” Silas says it gently, almost kindly, the way you’d gentle a horse.
“Use the part of you that isn’t the dog, Laz, just this once.
Ask yourself why a man who came here alone, to a burnt house, on the longest night of the year, to taunt the most dangerous person he’s ever met, isn’t afraid.
” He lets that land. “Ask yourself what I’d have to have arranged, to sit here this calm, with you three feet away and murder in your hands.
And then ask yourself what happens to her if your hands finish the sentence they’re writing.
” His eyes never leave his brother’s. “I have spent six years making sure that the worst thing you could possibly do to me is touch me. Sit down, big brother. If your hands do what they want, you don’t bury me.
You bury her. I’ve made very, very sure of that. ”
And I watch it work. I watch the doer realize, for the first time in his life, that doing is the trap; I watch Lazarus stop, shaking, three feet from his brother, frozen by a thing he can’t see and can’t fight, and I understand that whatever Silas has built, it’s built precisely around the one reflex that has defined every moment of my brother’s life: that he will always, always choose to protect me, even when protecting me means standing perfectly still while a monster talks.
Lazarus steps back. He puts himself in front of me again. His hands are open at his sides, trembling, useless.
For the first time in twelve years, the doorway can’t do anything but stand there.
“What do you want.” My voice comes out steadier than I am. Old practice.
“Smart girl. Straight to terms. Father always said you were wasted on Lazarus.” Silas reaches into the good coat and takes out a small flat thing and sets it on the table beside the music box, and the light catches it, and the whole bottom drops out of the world.
It’s a cassette tape. Old. Labelled in a dead man’s careful hand.
“Father recorded the house,” Silas says, conversational, like he’s discussing the weather on the pass.
“All of it. Especially the east wing. Especially the rooms he kept his copies in, he was a documentarian at heart, our father, he liked a record of his things. There were cameras you never found, little lamb. There was one in Iris’s room the whole time you slept there.
There was one in the east wing the night everything burned.
” He taps the tape with one finger. “Laz got the fire right. He got the body right, what was left of it. He got everything right except the one thing he could never have known, because he wasn’t in the room yet when it started, he came in at the blood, didn’t he.
He came in at the end. He’s been confessing for six years to a thing he only ever saw the back half of. ”
I can’t breathe. Lazarus has gone very still in front of me, and I realize, slowly, horribly, that he’s gone still because this is new to him too.
He doesn’t know what’s on the tape. He took the fall for a thing he walked in on.
The poker still in her hand. He saw the end and built the rest, the way he built me out of a sound through a wall, and he’s never once, in six years, asked me what came before, because he decided he didn’t need to know to die for me.
“You don’t know what you did that night,” Silas says to me, soft, almost tender, the cruelest voice I’ve ever heard.
“You’ve spent six years so sure. I killed him, the poker was in my hand.
You built a whole lie on top of it, you built a whole little life, you sent my brother to rot on the strength of how sure you were.
” He picks up the tape, turns it in the lamplight.
“But you don’t remember the beginning, do you, little lamb.
You never have. There’s a hole in that night the size of about four minutes, right at the start, and you’ve spent six years filling it with the worst thing you could imagine about yourself because that’s what people like you do, you’d rather be the monster than not know.
” His smile widens, and it is Augustus’s smile exactly, the buyer’s smile, the one that measures.
“I have the four minutes, Wren. I have what actually happened in that room before you picked up the poker. And it is so, so much worse than killing him.”
The lullaby has wound all the way down. The room is silent. Outside, the snow has started again, patient, erasing the world.
“The longest night of the year is Thursday,” Silas says, standing, buttoning the good coat, sliding the tape back into his pocket like he’s putting away a heart he cut out of someone.
“Solstice. Father did love a calendar. You’ll come to Marrowfield, what’s left of it, at midnight.
Alone. And you’ll come to me, little lamb, the way you were always meant to, the way he picked you for, or this tape goes to the district attorney and the newspapers and my brother’s parole officer all at once, and this time it isn’t Laz who burns.
It’s you. And then it’s him, for the fire, for the lie, for all of it.
Both of you, in separate cages, forever.
” He pauses at the door. “Or you come home to me. Finish what you were brought here to be. One Frost or another, Wren, you were never going to get out of this family. You’re furniture. Father bought you.”
“I’ll kill you,” Lazarus says, with no more heat than a man stating his name.
“I know,” says Silas pleasantly. “That’s why the tape’s already copied, already with a lawyer, already set to release if my heart so much as skips.
You can’t do the thing you’re built to do, big brother.
Not this time. For once in your life you’re going to have to be a planner, and you’re going to lose, because you’ve never once in your life thought further than the next person you’d die for.
” He opens my front door onto the falling dark.
“Thursday. Midnight. Come alone, little lamb. And in the meantime —” he glances back, and his eyes find mine, and they are the last thing in the world I see before he steps out into the snow — “ask your brother why he’s so sure you’re the one who killed our father.
Ask him what he walked in on. Ask him whose blood was already on the floor before yours ever touched the poker. ”
The door clicks shut. Considerate. A man who minds the rules.
And I turn, very slowly, in the blazing light of my little house, to look at the man who burned down the world to keep me, the man I sent to prison, the man I just fell asleep beside for the first time in six years, the man who has never once, in twelve years, asked me what happened in the four minutes before he walked into that room with blood already on the floor.
“Lazarus,” I whisper. “What did you walk in on?”
And for the first time since I’ve known him, for the first time in twelve years, Lazarus Frost can’t look at me.