CHAPTER 34
WREN
The morning of the longest night, while Lazarus is in the shower, the one window I get, the only time all day he isn’t reading me; I go out to the barn to say goodbye to my strays, because they’re the only goodbye I’m allowed.
I can’t tell Lazarus. If I tell him anything, he’ll feel it; he reads me through walls, through showers, through six years and a fire.
I can’t tell Eli. I burned that bridge on purpose yesterday and I won’t undo my own mercy.
I can’t leave a note, because a note is evidence, a note is a confession of intent, a note is the kind of thing that gets a man up a mountain to die beside me.
So there’s no one in the human world I get to say it to.
But the animals don’t need words, and they don’t keep evidence, and they have never once, in six years, needed me to be anything but the hand that shows up.
So I go out into the cold blue dark before the storm and I do my goodbyes the only way a stray knows how, with feed, with my hands, with showing up one last time.
I top off everything. That’s the practical part, the part the old responsible me does on autopilot while the rest of me comes apart: I fill every trough and hopper to overflowing, three days’ worth, more, because if I don’t come down off that mountain there’s going to be a gap before anyone thinks to check on the strange Mercer woman at the bottom of the hill, and I will not.
I will not, let one more abandoned thing go hungry because the person who promised to show up didn’t.
I check the heat lamps. I break the ice on the water twice over.
I leave the big sliding door rigged so the county vet, when she finally comes, can get in without a key.
I’ve already called her, two days ago, casual as anything, just updating my emergency contact info, just in case, you know how the storms get up here, and she didn’t hear the goodbye in it because I’m the best liar in three counties and I save the very best ones for the people I’m protecting.
And then I stop being practical, and I go down the row, and I say it to each of them.
The bummer lambs first, because they were first, three of them now, fat and ungrateful and shoving at my pockets, and I get down in the straw and let them climb on me the way they do, and I press my face into the lanolin warmth of them and I tell them they were good, they were always good, that being unwanted by the ewe was never anything they did wrong, that I’d have chosen them every time.
I’m crying into a lamb. There are worse ways to spend your last morning.
The chickens somebody dumped in a box at my gate, half-feathered and furious and alive because a man with murderer’s hands breathed them back to warm one night in a storm.
The barn cats, who don’t come when called and never have and are exactly right not to, who trust no one and survive everything, who are the most honest creatures I’ve ever known because they love you only as much as you’ve actually earned, which in my case is a wary distance and a willingness to be fed.
I respect that. I’ve lived that. I leave them an extra week of kibble in a chew-proof bin and I tell the orange one, who hates me least, to look after the others, which he won’t, which is the point.
And last, the goat. The doe and her kid, the kid that came into the lamplight in a rush of impossible alive while a man held his enormous careful hands over my smaller ones and said nothing dies tonight that we can stop from dying.
The one Lazarus saved. The one that shouldn’t have lived and did.
I stand in that pen for a long time with the kid butting at my knees, and I think: that’s the whole thing, isn’t it.
That’s the entire argument of my life in one warm stall.
Everyone I’ve ever known thought the lesson of a place like Marrowfield was nothing survives, everything gets taken, the dark always wins.
And here’s a goat that should be dead, alive and stupid and headbutting my shins, because two people who’d both been told their whole lives that they were monsters knelt in the straw and decided, together, that this one small thing was going to live.
That’s what I’m walking up the mountain to do tonight.
One more time. For the biggest stray of all, a girl I carried out of a fire and told to disappear, who’s out there in the dark right now not knowing that the dark is coming for her, the way it came for all of them, the way it came for me.
Nobody came for me. I had to build my own door out of a sleepless boy. Nobody’s coming for her either.
So I’m going to be the one who comes.
I put my forehead against the doe’s rough warm flank and I let myself, for exactly one minute, grieve the life I’m probably not coming back to, the troughs I might not fill again, the spring lambs I might not pull, the slow safe boring beautiful nothing of a woman alone at the bottom of a hill with a barn full of the saved.
It was a good life. It was the first thing I ever built that was only mine, that I didn’t owe anybody for, and I loved it, and I’m leaving it the way the warm things always leave, except for once — for once.
I’m the one choosing the door, and I’m choosing it to go toward someone instead of away, and that makes it the opposite of every leaving that ever made me.
My mother left to save herself. The Frost mother left to save herself. Everyone in my whole story who ever walked out a door did it to get themselves clear of the danger.
I’m walking into mine.
That’s the difference. That’s the only inheritance I’m taking up that mountain. Not Augustus’s, not the bought-girl’s, not the victim’s, not the liar’s.
Iris’s. The one who stayed to count. The one who refused to let it happen quietly.
I wipe my face on my sleeve. I hear the shower shut off up at the house.
I have about ninety seconds to be soft and saved and lying again, ninety seconds to fold all of this back down into the warm false calm of a woman who’s agreed to handle Silas together, on Thursday, like a partner instead of a sacrifice.
I take one last look down the row of them, the lambs, the cats, the chickens, the goat that lived, every throwaway thing the world gave up on and handed to me to keep, and I say the only prayer I’ve got, which is the same as Lazarus’s, which is just a list of the names of what I love:
Be warm. Be fed. Be here when somebody finally comes. And if it isn’t me, if I don’t come back down this hill, then know that the last thing I did with my hands before I walked into the dark was make sure you’d be all right without me.
Then I turn off the barn light, and I go back up to the house to lie to the man I love for the last day of my life.
It’s the longest night of the year.
I’ve got until midnight.