Interlude
LAZARUS
I wake because the breathing stops.
Not a sound, the absence of one. Six years in a cell taught my body to sleep through anything that isn’t the thing I’m listening for, and three nights in a little house at the bottom of Cradle Hill taught it to listen, again, after all that time, for one specific rhythm: in, and out, slow, against my chest, the metronome, the only quiet I have ever had.
I went under each of those nights deeper than I’ve slept since I was a boy, because she was there, because the wall was finally gone and there was nothing on the other side of it but her, warm, breathing, kept.
And now the breathing’s gone, and I’m awake in the dark with my arm thrown across an empty place in the bed that’s already cold, and I know, before I’m fully up, before thought, the way I knew her footsteps on a staircase when I was seventeen, exactly what she’s done.
She used it.
The sleep. The one mercy I ever got, the thing I came back from the dead for, the proof that the world could hold us both in it and be quiet, she gave it to me on purpose, night after night, matched her breathing to mine and waited for the debt of six years to drag me all the way under, and then she slid out from under my arm and walked out the door while the only thing that’s ever loved me slept like a fed animal.
I should have known. I did know. Some part of me clocked it two days ago in the kitchen, when she said together into the dark and I let myself believe it because I wanted it so badly I’d have believed anything.
She lies better than anyone alive, and I have always known it.
And I, who can read her through any wall ever built, let her lie to me because the lie was the shape of the thing I’ve wanted for twelve years, and that’s the one wall I never learned to listen through: the one made out of my own hope.
The porch light’s off. Her truck’s gone. The music box is gone off the side table. Eli Marsh’s heavy aluminum flashlight is gone from the hook by the door.
And it’s Thursday. The longest night of the year. Midnight in forty minutes.
She’s gone to Marrowfield. Alone. The way Silas told her to. Into the room where the worst night of her life is waiting on a reel of tape, to a man who called her bait to her face and meant it.
Here is where the old Lazarus ends and whatever I’m trying to become begins, and I need her to know this, she’ll read this someday, I intend her to read every word, no editing, that’s the vow, that I stood in that cold bedroom for exactly four seconds and felt the whole twelve years of what I am stand up in me and howl to go override her, to do the thing I’ve always done, to decide for her that she doesn’t get to walk into that house, to be the doorway, the wall, the hand that reaches in and takes out the parts of her life it’s decided she can’t carry.
Four seconds. I’ve started wars in less.
And then I made myself do the hardest thing I have ever done, harder than the trial, harder than the cell, harder than burning my whole inheritance down around her lie:
I let her have the choice.
She chose to go. She chose it the way she chose the stairs at eighteen, the way she chose the porch light, the way she chose to climb on when I begged her to save herself, she is a woman who has spent her whole life being decided-for, and the one thing I swore, the only vow I’ve got left worth a damn, is that I will never be another hand on her chin in a bad light.
So I’m not going to Marrowfield to stop her.
I’m not going to drag her home and lock the door and call it love.
I burned that version of me. He’s ash with the rest of the house.
I’m going because she might need a wall.
That’s different. That’s the whole difference, and it took me twelve years and a prison and losing her twice to learn it.
I will not decide for you. But I will stand in the doorway if you want a doorway.
I will be awake on my side of the wall for the rest of my life.
You choose the room. I’ll choose to be reachable in it.
If she walks into that house and wants to face Silas alone, she can.
But she is not going to face him without knowing that three knocks on any wall in the world still bring me through it.
So I don’t override her.
I follow her.
The truck won’t make the pass and neither will anything else, the plows quit hours ago, but old Mrs. Pruitt’s late husband left a thing in the shed under a tarp that I’ve shoveled around every morning for two weeks, an ancient chained-up plow truck, diesel, stubborn, the kind of machine built by a man who refused to be stopped by weather, and it starts on the fourth try, the way stubborn things do, and I take it up the mountain through a storm that has shut the whole county down, chains biting, the dead beams of my childhood rising black out of the snow ahead, and the whole way up I do the only praying I know how to do, which is her name.
Wren. Wren. Be alive when I get there. Be furious. Be a hundred feet ahead of me with a plan I don’t understand. Just be alive, little lamb, and I’ll spend the rest of my life learning to love you with my hands open.
Marrowfield comes up out of the trees the way it always has, at the top of the black hill, except it’s a ribcage now, burnt and open to the storm, snow sifting down through the rooms that have no ceilings, and there’s a light in the one window that wouldn’t burn.
The east wing. Of course. The worst part always outlasts the rest.
There’s a lantern glow behind that scorched glass, and two shapes inside it, and one of them is hers; I’d know the line of her shoulders through fire, through six years, through any wall ever built, and the other one is sitting at our dead father’s desk like he owns it, because he thinks he does, because we are a patient family and he is the most patient of all of us and he has been waiting six years for exactly this, for both of us in the same burnt room on the longest night of the year.
I kill the engine. The storm rushes in to fill the silence.
I get out into the snow, and I cross the lawn that nothing has walked across in years, leaving the first tracks, breaking every rule I’ve minded for six years, the dog finally off the chain, and I climb through the wreck of my whole childhood toward the one lit window, toward her, toward the brother I am about to have to choose between killing and losing her to.
My boots hit the east wing stairs.
And from inside, soft and patient and mechanical, six notes begin to climb to meet me.
He’s winding the box.
He always did know exactly how to call us both home.