CHAPTER 29
WREN
He tells me with his back to me, because he can’t do it to my face, and I let him, because I’m not sure I could survive his face while he does it.
“There was blood before you.” He’s at the window, watching the place in the snow where Silas’s tracks are already filling in.
“When I came up the east wing hall. I’d come down from my room, I’d left you on the bed, I should never have left you, the door was open and the box was playing and I came in and there was already blood on the floor, Wren.
A lot of it. Before you. Before the poker.
” His shoulders are a wall I used to live behind.
“You were standing in the middle of it like you’d just woken up.
You didn’t know where you were. You looked at me like you’d never seen me.
And the poker was in your hand, and Father was, he was already going, he was already most of the way gone, and the wound that was killing him wasn’t the one you gave him.
” A long breath. In, and out. “You finished it. I watched you finish it and I have never in six years been sorry that you did. But you didn’t start it.
And you don’t remember starting it, because there’s a piece of that night that isn’t in you anymore.
It went somewhere. People, when something is too big, sometimes it goes somewhere and the door shuts.
Yours shut. I watched it shut, standing in that room.
I watched you decide, without deciding, to not be there for the worst of it. ”
“What was the worst of it.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Lazarus. What was in that room. What did he —”
“I’m not going to tell you.” He turns around then, finally, and his face is wrecked and certain at once, the face of a man who’d do it all again and knows exactly what it costs.
“I burned it so you’d never have to know.
The cameras, the, the records he kept. The other —” He stops himself, and I see him decide, in real time, how much of the horror to let reach me, and that’s when the thing in my chest goes cold.
“There were things in the east wing that no one should ever have to carry, and you were already going to have to carry killing him, and I made a choice, in ninety seconds, that you’d survive better as a girl who hit a bad man with a poker than as a girl who knew everything he was and everything that happened in there before the door shut in your head.
So I burned it. I took the fall. And I let you believe the smallest, cleanest, most survivable version of that night, because I would rather you hate me as a monster than wake up every morning inside the truth.
” His jaw works. “I’d make the same choice tonight.
I’d make it a thousand times. That’s not love being noble, Wren.
That’s just what I am. I told you what I am. ”
And here is the thing I did not expect: I am not grateful.
I should be. Any sane person would be. He carried the unsurvivable thing so I wouldn’t have to; he gave six years of his one life so I could keep a smaller, kinder lie; he loves me so much he edited the worst night of my existence down to a size I could hold. I know all of that. I feel all of that.
And underneath it, rising, is a rage so old and so total that it scares me more than Silas did.
“You decided.” I’m shaking. “You stood in that room and you decided what I was allowed to know about my own life.”
“To save you —”
“Everyone saves me by deciding for me!” It comes up out of the padlocked room, all of it, twelve years of it.
“Donna decided I was lucky. Augustus decided I was Iris. The court decided I was a victim. You —” my voice breaks — “you decided I was too small to hold my own night. You all keep reaching into me and taking out the parts you think I can’t carry and you call it love and it is the exact same hand, Lazarus, it’s the same hand that turned my chin up to the light when I was twelve, it just strokes instead of grabs!
” I’m crying and I don’t care. “I have spent my entire life being a thing other people are sure they know better than. The one time, the one time. I got to decide something, I climbed onto your bed. And you’ve been editing me ever since.
From a prison cell. You edited me from a cell. ”
He doesn’t argue. That’s the worst of it. He just stands there and takes it, because he knows it’s true, because the most honest man I’ve ever known cannot pretend the cage he built me out of his own body is anything other than a cage, however warm.
“I’m not going to tell you,” he says again, quiet, immovable. “I’d rather lose you than be the one who put it in you.”
“You don’t get to make that trade for me either.”
We stand in the wreck of the best hour of my life, a foot apart, the wall back up between us and built this time out of love instead of plaster, which is so much worse, because you can’t hate love, you can only drown under it.
And somewhere in the cold clear center of me, the part that turned a photograph around at twelve, the part that walked up dark steps, the part that has always, always chosen the worst true thing over the kindest empty space, somewhere in there, I make a decision, and for once in my life it is mine, and I do not say it out loud.
Because here’s what they all got wrong about me, every single one of them, Augustus and the court and Donna and even Lazarus, even the one who loved me down to the bone: they think the not-knowing is what breaks me.
They think if they keep the truth out, they keep me safe.
They have it exactly backwards. The not-knowing is the only thing that has ever been able to kill me.
There is a hole in my own life four minutes wide, and there is a tape that fills it, and there is a man who will hand me that tape at midnight on the longest night of the year, and I would rather walk into that house and learn the unsurvivable thing and die standing inside the truth of my own life than spend one more day being protected into a stranger to myself.
I’m going to Marrowfield Thursday.
Alone. Like Silas said. But not as furniture. Not as a copy, not as a victim, not as anybody’s saved little lamb.
I’m going to get my four minutes back.
“You’re thinking something,” Lazarus says, watching me, because he can read me the way I read him, through any wall ever built. “Wren. Whatever you’re thinking, Thursday, let me. Let me handle Silas. I’ll go. You stay where I know you’re safe and I’ll —”
“Okay,” I lie.
I have lied to twelve jurors and a defense attorney and a kind deputy on a snowy porch. I can lie to the one person who taught me there was ever anything in the world worth telling the truth to.
“Okay,” I say again, softer, and I go to him, and I let him fold the warm enormous cage of himself around me one more time, and I feel him believe me, feel the relief go through him, feel him think he’s won the only argument that matters, and over his shoulder, in the blazing light, I look at the little brass music box sitting on the side table where Silas left it.
I reach out, while Lazarus holds me and thinks I’m finally safe.
And for the first time in my life, I wind it myself.
Six notes. And then six notes again. My hand on the key. My choice. The lullaby that Augustus played when he’d decided, that Silas played to announce the end of us, and now, quiet under the snow, in a house full of light, played by the only person who was ever in the room and lived: me.
I’ve decided too, I tell the dark.
Lazarus goes still against me, listening, not understanding yet.
He will.