Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Barret
I don’t know when sleep takes me. The plan was simple: trade off at two, wake Eddie, and switch watch. Somewhere between the floor cracking as the temperature went down and his hand still in my hair, the room turns dim and wide, and I drift.
A scream rips me up, though.
I’m on my feet before my name finishes in Eddie’s mouth. He’s already at the doorway, moving—barefoot, fast—his shoulder hitting the wall, he cuts toward her room. I’m right behind, heart pounding, the house long as a runway.
The corridor holds its breath. Nightlight glows along the baseboards, fog smeared across the glass like a thumbprint. The ocean works at the cliff below us. A curtain of cold air sits where the stairwell opens, and I take it in like medicine.
Cleo’s room is lit by the bedside lamp—just enough to find faces.
The turntable is a quiet circle on the console, a stack of vinyl in its sleeves like calm instructions.
On the low table, the tea tray waits, honey spoon stuck in amber.
The bed is a wreck of sheets, and in the middle of it, she’s fighting something I can’t see.
“Cleo,” Eddie says from the threshold, palms up, voice low. “I’m here. Barret’s here. Can we come closer?”
Her eyes are open, but they don’t have this room in them yet.
She makes a sound that isn’t language and scrambles back against the headboard, shoulder hitting the carved wood.
The sweater has slipped; the bruises along her collarbone look old and new at once.
My body wants to lunge, to fix, to hold. I stop myself like I promised.
“Lamp stays,” I say quietly, as much to me as to him. “Window?”
“Permission first,” Eddie murmurs, then, more clearly: “Cleo, can I open the window a crack for air?”
A beat. Her head jerks—yes or reflex, I can’t tell, but Eddie takes the softer risk. He cracks the latch. Fog slips in, a thin line of clean. The room shifts from dream to reality by one inch.
I sink to the rug at the foot of the bed, back to the wall, knees up, the way I’ve learned she can see me without feeling cornered.
“I can go downstairs and turn the kettle on?” Eddie asks. “Fresh hot water.”
Her breath stutters. “Don’t—don’t go.”
“I won’t,” he says, and he doesn’t. He leans into the doorframe and stays in her sightline, every inch of him announced. “May I sit?” He gestures to the upholstered chair by the window.
She shakes her head. “Sit on the bed.”
Slowly, he sits.
“You’re safe,” I say before I can stop myself, then choke on the lie. We can’t protect her from her mind or her memories. “You’re . . . here. You’re here with us.”
She drags in breath like it owes her money. “He—” She stops, swallows hard. “I thought he was—”
“He isn’t,” Eddie says. “It’s me. It’s us.”
“Do you want touch?” I ask. “Elbow. Hand. Nothing else.”
Her jaw works. “No,” she says. “Not yet.”
“Okay.”
“Can I ask a thing?” Eddie says, voice the sound of a warm towel. “Why don’t you come up with a word. A word you say if you need us to stop talking or to change something.”
“A word?”
“We call it an emotional word,” I state.
“Dreams,” she whispers.
“Right,” Eddie says. “Dreams is law.”
The shiver running through her ebbs, then surges. I can hear the tremor in her breath and feel the panic wanting a stage. I don’t give it one. I give us a count.
“In for four?” I offer. “Or two. Or whatever number doesn’t piss you off.”
Her mouth twists. “Three,” she manages.
We do it together. Three in. Hold two. Three out. Eddie matches us silently, chest rising under the cotton of his tight shirt, eyes on her mouth.
“Tell me one thing in this room that’s true,” I say softly.
She scans. “Lamp,” she says finally. “The lamp is on.”
“Good.”
“Cedar,” she adds after a moment, almost defiant. “It smells like cedar.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
“Tea,” Eddie offers. “There could be tea if you want it.”
“Don’t go please,” her voice is so soft almost lost.
“I won’t,” he says. “Just naming it and offering it.”
Her breath starts finding the edges of the numbers. Three, two, three. The terror doesn’t vanish. It steps back far enough to let her sit without shaking herself apart.
“What time is it?” she asks, voice rough.
“Two-forty,” Eddie answers. “You were supposed to get both of us in trouble by sleeping.”
“That was my job,” I say, raising a hand. “I failed. I’ll accept my punishment in the form of cold coffee in the morning.”
A sound escapes her, almost a laugh, almost a sob, and exactly alive. The room stops bracing.
“Water,” she says suddenly. “Please.”
Eddie points to the tray, asking a question.
She nods. He moves slowly, taking one step, then another, pouring without the clink of glass on porcelain.
He sets the tumbler on the nightstand within reach but not so close that it crowds her.
She takes it with her hand, which isn’t choking the pick, and drinks like swallowing, which is work she remembers how to do.
“Want the window another inch?” I ask. “Or is that too much?”
“Another inch,” she says. “No more.”
I crawl to the sill on my knees, telegraphing every move, and lift the latch.
The outside leans in. The ocean’s grind threads itself through the heater’s click.
I sit back on the rug again, farther from the bed than I want.
I want to be the one who keeps the monsters from touching her toes. I settle for helping as best as I can.
“You should go to bed,” she says after a while, eyes on the window. “Both of you. I just . . . surprised myself.”
“You didn’t,” Eddie says. “You woke up from a bad place and got yourself back. We hope we were able to help you doing so.”
She glances at him like the compliment might be a trick, then away. “I think I hate the dark.”
“We can make it less dark,” I tell her. “Lamp on, door open.”
“We’ll have a nightlight tomorrow—or as many as you need,” Eddie offers, then glances at me as if almost asking me, too much.
I shrug because I think that’s just right.
She sits forward, palms flattening on the sheet, then eases back again. Her breathing has length in it now. Her face is a little less haunted, a little more tired. It looks like after, not during.
“Tell me something mundane,” she says suddenly, eyes narrowing on me the way they did this afternoon when I tried to narrate her feelings and she reminded me I wasn’t hired for that job.
“Again?” I ask, grateful. “I have a never-ending catalogue.”
“I’m here to listen to all of them.”
I point at Eddie. “He once paid three hundred dollars for a Japanese kitchen knife because he was bored watching television at fucking three in the morning.”
Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose. “It was a very good knife.”
Cleo blinks, then exhales in a sound that could become a smile tomorrow.
“Do you want music?” Eddie asks carefully. “No lyrics. Just . . . ambient noise. Or the sea.”
“The sea,” she says. “The sea doesn’t ask me to clap for it.”
“I don’t ask you to clap for me when I play,” I feign hurt.
She angles herself into the pillows like she’s negotiating with a stubborn horse. “Will you—” She stops, bites her lip. “Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
We will. We move and take the threshold.
I slide down one side, Eddie the other. The hall light casts a thin band across the floor.
The room holds everything else. Between us, the doorway makes a frame that isn’t a trap.
Cleo lies back, eyes open to the ceiling, then to the window’s pale smear, then to us.
“If I sleep,” she says, “wake me if I—”
“We’ll be here,” I say.
“We’ll wake you,” Eddie assures her.
Her fingers loosen. She turns her head toward the window and lets her eyes fall in a slow, stubborn surrender that looks like trust’s distant cousin.
The house returns to its night sounds. Ocean. Heater. The occasional tick that means wood is deciding how to be wood. Eddie breathes beside me, and even that is a choice—quiet, even, the opposite of a man about to call a pilot.
“Hey,” I murmur across the doorway after a few minutes. “Thank you.”
“For what?” he whispers.
“For waiting for me—for giving her space.”
He nods once, eyes on the ceiling like he’s memorizing it so he doesn’t have to stare at the things that scare him. “Static,” he says under his breath, checking the word in case we need it. We don’t. Not right now.
Cleo slips under, not like falling—more like stepping down into a pool she decided had the right temperature. Every so often, her brow tightens and then eases. When it tightens, I count. When it eases, I breathe.
We’re both awake now, the two of us in a doorway practicing a discipline we’ve never been good at: staying. We sit until the fog thins and turns the window a lighter gray, and the gulls start their vulgar commentary on the morning.
At some point—half an hour, an hour—my head tips back and bumps the jamb. Eddie winces on my behalf. I mouth, I’m fine. We don’t move.
Cleo murmurs something I don’t catch. The ocean keeps doing its one trick a thousand ways. The day is out there making itself. Inside, for now, we keep the lamp on.