Chapter Six
SABLE’S PORCH LIGHT was burning in the middle of the afternoon, the way it always was, and I sat in the car a second and let myself look at it before I went in.
She’d had it on since the day they moved in. I never asked why. I figured if Sable wanted me to know, someday she’d tell me.
Then the front door banged open and a small person shot out onto the porch yelling my name, and I didn’t have time to look at anything, because I was getting tackled around the knees.
“You came!” Zara said into my leg, like she was surprised even though I’d told her three times I was coming. Five years old and she did everything at about a hundred miles an hour now, talking included, and somehow she seemed louder every time I saw her.
“I said I would.” I got down to her level and let her catch me up on everything I’d apparently missed: a scab on her knee, a picture she drew, and the very important news that she could count all the way to twenty now and I needed to listen.
Over her head, Malik stayed back in the doorway like he usually did.
Ten years old and suddenly way too cool to come running over like his sister.
He gave me a casual, “Hey, Amy,” then lasted maybe thirty seconds before coming over to show me the tooth he’d lost. Apparently being too cool for me didn’t include missing teeth.
“She’s been watching for you since lunch,” Sable said from the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. Then she looked at me, and I looked at her, and for a second we both just stood there being weird because apparently neither of us knew what to do when we missed somebody this much.
She looked good. Really good. Like she was sleeping again. “Nope,” she said when my eyes started burning. “Don’t you dare. If you start, I’m starting, and I look terrible when I cry.” She opened her arms. “Get over here.”
I laughed and went, and she wrapped me up in a hug that Zara immediately shoved herself into the middle of, because apparently hugs involving her mom required her personal supervision.
* * *
Inside was warm and a little messy in the way a house with kids in it was supposed to be messy, a fort made out of couch cushions nobody had bothered taking down, a laundry basket that looked like somebody had started folding it hours ago and given up halfway through, crayon on a low stretch of wall that apparently wasn’t worth the fight to scrub off. I loved it so much it almost hurt.
And it wasn’t the mess. The houses I grew up in were messy too.
My father never cared where anything landed or how long it stayed there.
The difference was that Sable’s house was loud.
The kids were allowed to be loud. Zara could come flying through the room yelling about something, knock into a table, send something crashing to the floor, and nobody got scared.
Nobody stopped talking. Somebody laughed, somebody picked it up, and five minutes later everybody had forgotten it happened.
I couldn’t imagine growing up like that.
There hadn’t been other kids in my house.
Just me and him, and I learned pretty early that silence was better.
I knew every floorboard that made noise.
I knew how to get from my room to the back door without him hearing me, and I knew how to stay wherever he wasn’t.
If he was in the living room, I stayed in my room.
If he went to the kitchen, I waited. If he was having a bad day, I made myself as easy to forget about as I could.
By the time I was eleven or twelve, I’d pretty much stopped using the front door of whatever place we were living in.
I went out my bedroom window instead. Every time.
Dropped into the side yard and took off, because getting to the front door meant walking through the house, and walking through the house meant there was a chance I’d run into him.
The window was easier. I could leave for an entire afternoon, come back the same way, and if I did it right, he’d never even know I’d been gone.
I used to be proud of that. How quiet I could be. How easy it was for me to disappear. I thought being good at it meant I was safe.
Took me a long time to understand those weren’t the same thing.
Zara had colored on that wall right out in the open, with a grown man in the house, and nothing had happened to her. She hadn’t hidden the crayons. Hadn’t tried to cover it up. Probably hadn’t even thought about whether Thunder would see it.
* * *
Sable put the kettle on. She’d stopped drinking coffee, she said, because it made the old jumpy feeling worse, and she got down two mugs without asking which one I wanted because she remembered.
“Malik started fifth grade. Reads under the covers with a flashlight like I can’t see the glow.
” She tipped her head toward the fort, where Zara was dragging Malik around by one arm and Malik was letting her do it while acting like he was way too grown-up to be playing with his little sister.
“Zara won’t remember much of the before.
She’s already forgetting some of it. That’s the one thing I wanted, you know?
I didn’t do anything special. I just kept her little and kept her fed and gave it time.
” Her voice caught a little. “Malik remembers. He’s old enough to. But he’s getting there. They both are.”
The back door opened and Thunder came in with road dust on him, dropping his keys into the bowl by the door. He saw me and gave me a nod. “Amy.”
“Hey, Thunder.”
Then Zara scrambled out of the fort and launched herself at him, and I watched this huge biker catch her right out of the air like she weighed nothing and settle her on one arm while she grabbed his face with both hands and started telling him something that seemed to involve a dinosaur.
Thunder listened to every word like whatever she was saying was the most important thing he’d heard all day.
Both kids looked at him like there wasn’t anything in the world to be scared of when he was there.
I had to look at the laundry basket for a second.
Then Thunder told Sable he was heading down and would be under the house until late.
I knew enough by now not to ask what happened underneath the house.
Club stuff happened down there, and that was all I needed to know.
He brushed his hand over the back of Sable’s neck when he passed her, like he didn’t even think about doing it, and she leaned into him for half a second without stopping what she was saying.
I noticed.
Of course I noticed.
I was starting to notice everything in that house, and I really wished I wasn’t.
Sable was one year older than me. Eleven months, actually.
People never believed it because she had two kids, Thunder, this house, and I had purple hair, college classes, and a backpack I kept forgetting to clean old granola-bar wrappers out of, but we’d started in almost the same place.
She wasn’t some grown-up woman who’d figured out a secret I was too young to understand.
She was twenty. That was it. Twenty years old, and somehow she’d gotten all the way here.
Which meant girls like us weren’t automatically disqualified from having this.
Maybe I could have it too.
That was a really inconvenient thing to figure out when I’d spent months convincing myself I didn’t want it.
* * *
She got the kids set up with a show and we took our tea out to the back steps where we could still hear them but they couldn’t hear us, and the yard ran down to a stand of pines going gold at the tips, and for a while we just talked about nothing.
School. The tooth. A woman we both knew who’d done something ridiculous.
It was easy. It had always been easy with her, from the first night, which is a strange thing to say about the person you met on one of the worst nights of your life, but there it is.
Then she bumped my shoulder with hers and said, straight out, the way only she did, “You gonna tell me about him, or are we gonna keep pretending I forgot?”
And there it was.
I looked at my tea. “There’s nothing to tell. It’s done. It’s been done a long time.”
“Mm.” She didn’t push. She just waited, the way she knew how to wait, because she’d been on the receiving end of every kind of pushing there was and swore off ever doing it to another person.
I wanted. That was the trouble. I’d been holding it by myself so long, and this was the one person on earth I’d already handed it to once, and I was so tired.
“I’m not over him,” I said. To the pines. Out loud. First time in months, maybe ever, that clean. “That’s the thing I can’t tell Brenda and can’t tell Sawyer and can’t tell anybody, really. But you.”
“Sawyer.” She said it careful, testing. “That’s… your guy, right? The one everybody says you’re with.” She turned to look at me full on. “Amy, if your heart’s on one man and you’re out with another, that’s a knot, and I know from knots — ”
“Sawyer’s not real.” It came out before I could dress it up, and it felt good to say, one more true thing set down.
“I mean he’s real, he’s my best friend, he’s…
he’s the best person I know outside the club.
But we’re not together. We just let everybody think it.
It works for both of us.” I looked at her, and because it was Sable, because she’d told me the worst of hers on one of the worst nights of mine and never flinched at any of mine since, I gave her the rest of it.
“He’s got his own reasons to want people thinking he’s spoken for.
Reasons that are his to tell, not mine. And I’ve got mine.
A girl with a fake boyfriend doesn’t get circled by the real ones.
Nobody pushes. It’s the safest either of us has ever been.
So no, there’s no knot. There’s just me, not over a man I haven’t spoken more than ten words to in months, playing house with a friend so the world leaves us both be. ”
Sable was quiet a second, working through it, and then something in her face went soft and a little sad. “So your heart’s just… out there. Free.” She said it slow, like it mattered more than it should have. “Nobody’s got it.”
“Nobody’s got it,” I said. “That’s not the flex you’d think.”
“No.” She looked at me a beat too long. “No, I don’t imagine it is.”
Then she came back to the first thing. “So tell me what happened. With him. The real him, not the leaving part. You never did tell me all of it.”
I looked at my tea. And because I was tired, and because the porch light was burning in the daylight, and because if there was one safe place left in the world to set it down it was these back steps, I told her.
“And the stupid part, the part that makes me so mad I could spit, is he’s the one who ended it.
He kissed me, in his cabin, and I thought…
for about two days I thought the world had just turned over and gotten good.
And then he made sure I watched him take one of those club women off to bed.
In front of everybody. Didn’t even say anything, just…
made me watch. Made sure I got the message.
” My throat did something and I pushed through it.
“So I don’t even get to be the one who’s sad about it, you know?
He picked her. He looked right at me and picked somebody else, easy as that, and I’m the idiot still not-looking at a garden months later. ”
And Sable made a sound.
It wasn’t much. A breath, in deep through the nose, the front end of a word that didn’t come.
But I’d spent a lifetime learning to read the small sounds people make right before they say a thing that changes the mood, that skill you build young in a house where the small sounds are the only warning you get, and my head came up and I looked at her.
I stared at her.
“What?”
“You’re being weird.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“Amy.”
“Sable.”
She gave me a look.
I gave it right back.
“I’m fine,” she said finally. “I just hate that he hurt you like that. That’s all.”
I kept looking at her for another second, but she reached over and put her arm around me, pulling me against her side.
“Come here. You’ve been sitting over there with this by yourself for way too long, and you’re not doing that anymore.
You call me. I don’t care what time it is.
I don’t care if all you do is cry or complain about his stupid garden for an hour. You call me.”
“Okay,” I said into her shoulder.
“I mean it, Amy.”
“I know you do.”
I drove home under the first stars feeling lighter than I had when I came. Not fixed. Not magically over Rune. Nothing that dramatic. I still loved him, which was annoying enough now that I’d finally admitted it out loud, and tomorrow I’d probably go right back to pretending his cabin didn’t exist.