Chapter Thirty-Six
TWO DAYS LATER, when the worst of the concussion had lifted and the bruises around my throat had gone from red to a deep ugly purple, I sat up in Rune’s bed in the early evening and said, “I need to talk to you about the thing you know.”
He was at the little table cleaning the same knife he’d already cleaned twice, which was what Rune did when his hands needed a job and the rest of him was somewhere he didn’t want to be. The cloth stopped halfway down the blade.
He set the knife down, didn’t ask what thing, and that was how I knew.
“You know what he did to me,” I said. “All of it. Don’t you.”
“Yeah.”
Just that. No pretending he didn’t understand, no making me drag it out of him.
“Brenda told you.”
“Brenda told me.” He came and sat down. “The day after Sawyer came to me in the parking lot. When we knew there was a man and didn’t yet know who.”
I looked down at my hands.
“She cried through most of it,” he said. “Hated herself for telling me. Kept saying she’d promised you.” He paused. “I don’t want you thinking she handed it over easy, Amy. She didn’t.”
Of course she’d done it that way. Brenda would’ve carried my secret into the ground if keeping it hadn’t started looking more dangerous than breaking her promise. I could still be hurt by it. Maybe I was. But I couldn’t hate her for being more afraid of burying me than of having me angry with her.
But that wasn’t the part that had me.
“You’ve known for weeks,” I said, and my voice went small, and I hated that it went small but I let it.
“You knew the worst thing about me. While I was — while we — ” I pressed my lips together.
“You knew, and you never told me you knew. Every night I lay here, you had it, all this time, and you let me think you didn’t. ”
“No.” He said it hard, and then, gentler, “No. Let me — please. Let me tell you why, and then if it’s still that, if it’s still the same thing, I’ll take it, I’ll deserve it. But let me say it first.”
I nodded.
He looked down at his hands for a long time before he started.
“When Brenda told me, first thing I wanted to do was come find you.”
I hadn’t expected that.
“Wanted to put my hands on you, tell you I knew and tell you none of it was yours to carry anymore. Wanted you to know there wasn’t one thing you could tell me that’d change how I saw you.
” His mouth pulled tight. “Mostly, I wanted to do something with what she’d put in my head, because sitting with it felt about like somebody’d opened me up. ”
“Why didn’t you?”
His eyes came back to mine.
“Because you didn’t tell me.”
I went still.
“Wasn’t my story to bring to you, Amy. Wasn’t Brenda’s either, but by then that part was done. Couldn’t unknow it.” He rubbed his palms once over his jeans. “And I kept thinking about what would happen if I walked into your room and said I know.”
I waited.
“You’d lose the telling.”
Something in my chest moved.
Rune kept his eyes on me. “That’s all I could come up with.
I already had the knowing. Couldn’t give that back to you no matter how bad I wanted to.
But you still had the telling. You still got to decide whether I ever heard those words from you.
Tomorrow, ten years from now, never. That part was still yours. ”
My eyes started burning.
“So I left it yours.”
For a few seconds, I couldn’t say anything.
“You were going to let me tell you someday,” I finally said.
“If you wanted.”
“And pretend you didn’t know?”
“Wasn’t gonna pretend the part mattered more than you did. I’d listen.”
“Like it was the first time.”
His face changed a little. “For me, it would’ve been.”
I frowned.
“Hearing what happened isn’t the same as you trusting me enough to tell me.”
Oh.
That got me.
I looked away because suddenly the cabin had gone blurry, and I wiped under one eye before anything could make it down my face. For weeks I’d thought about the secret sitting between us, especially after our first night together. But he’d been waiting for me.
“You held it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So I could give it to you.”
“If you ever wanted to.”
I looked at him sitting over there instead of beside me, because even now he wasn’t assuming this conversation bought him the right to come closer.
“You could’ve saved yourself a lot of hell by telling me.”
“Probably.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
His eyebrows pulled together like the answer ought to be obvious. “Wasn’t mine.”
That was it. Two words, and I started crying.
Rune moved before he could stop himself, got halfway out of the chair, then caught it and stayed there. Even now. Even with me crying in his bed and him looking like sitting six feet away was killing him, he waited.
God, this man.
“Come here,” I said.
He was beside me before I finished it. I went straight into him, arms around his neck, and Rune gathered me up carefully because everything on me still hurt somewhere.
I pressed my face into the side of his throat and cried for a minute, not hard, nothing like before, just letting it happen while his hand moved slowly over my back.
“I’m mad at you,” I said into his neck.
“I know.”
I pulled back enough to glare at him. “That’s not an apology.”
“I’m not apologizing yet. Still waiting to find out if I did wrong.”
That was so completely Rune that a laugh got mixed up with the crying.
He wiped under my eye with his thumb.
“Are you?” I asked.
“Don’t know.” His expression went serious again. “I’d make the same choice. That’s probably not a point in my favor.”
“No. Probably not.”
“But I’d make it.”
“Why?”
“Because it was yours.”
There it was again. I studied his face for a second, this impossible man who had gotten so much wrong with me and somehow understood this one thing better than I had.
Then another thought came.
“Do you want me to tell you?”
Rune’s thumb stopped against my cheek. “Only if you want to.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He went quiet.
“Do you want to hear it from me?”
His eyes changed. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s you.”
“Wasn’t about easier.” He almost smiled, and it broke my heart. “Not one thing about loving you has been about easier. That’s how I know it’s the real thing. Everything else in my life I did because it was easier.”
* * *
So I gave it to him.
It wasn’t that I decided to, exactly. It just started coming, there in the silence, in the last part of the day, not because he didn’t know, but because I needed to be the one to say it out loud, finally, to a person, with my own mouth, in my own words.
Take the thing that had only ever been done to me and, for once, do something with it myself.
Hand it over on purpose, to the one person who’d earned it, as a gift and not a wound.
I’ll keep most of what I told him to myself.
It’s mine, and I finally, finally know that it’s mine, and I don’t have to give it to anybody I don’t choose.
But I told him. The house. The hallway. The door that didn’t lock and the man who taught me to go small and away.
I told him how it all was, all of it, the long dark of it, and my voice shook and sometimes stopped and he never once rushed me, never filled a silence, never flinched, just sat there and received it like a man being handed something holy, and let it cost him what it cost him.
And when I got to the worst of it, the part where a small girl figures out how to survive a thing a small girl should never have to survive, I stopped.
Because this was the part he didn’t know.
This was the part Brenda couldn’t have told him, because I never told Brenda, I never told anyone, it was the one thing in the world that had only ever been mine.
“There’s a thing I never told you,” I said. “I never told anybody. Not Brenda. Not Sawyer. Not one living soul in nineteen years.” My hand went up to my own hair without me deciding it, to the lavender ends of it. “You asked me once, way back. In the garden. You asked why lilac.”
He went very still.
“When it was happening,” I said, “when I was little, and it was bad, and there was nothing I could do and nowhere I could go. I learned how to leave. Not my body. I couldn’t take my body anywhere.
But I’d close my eyes and I’d go somewhere in my head, every time, the same place, and it got so I could get there fast, get there before the worst of it, and stay there till it was over.
” My eyes were streaming now and my voice was even, which is a strange thing, the two at once.
“It was a field of lilacs. I don’t know where I got it — we never had any, lilacs don’t even grow where I’m from, it’s too hot, they need the cold, they need a real winter — but somewhere I must have seen a picture, and my head grabbed it and made it mine, and that’s where I went.
A field of them, purple as far as I could see, and the smell of them, and the wind in them, and it was mine, it was the one place in the world he couldn’t follow me to, couldn’t touch, couldn’t take.
He had everything else. He never once got the lilacs. ”
Rune had a hand pressed over his mouth. His eyes were wet. He didn’t say anything. He knew not to.
“So when I got away,” I said, “when I ran, and I was building somebody new, somebody he’d never find and never recognize, the first thing I did, the very first thing, before the new name, before any of it, I found a drugstore and I dyed my hair the color of the only place that ever kept me safe.
I put the field on the outside. Where everybody could see it and nobody knew what it was.
” I was almost laughing through the tears now.
“Everyone thinks it’s a fun color. A girl thing.
A phase. And it’s the bravest thing I ever did.
I wore the thing that saved my life on top of my head every single day, right out in the open, and he never knew, nobody ever knew, it was my secret the entire time, it was mine — ”
And I couldn’t finish, because Rune had made a sound I’d never heard him make, and pulled me into him so careful of the bruises, and pressed his face into my lilac hair and held me while I cried out the last of a thing I’d been holding for nineteen years, and I felt him shaking, this enormous man, felt him come apart around the story of a little girl in a field that wasn’t real that saved her life.
“Thank you,” he said into my hair, so low it was barely a voice at all. “Thank you for giving me that. I know what it — I know what it cost. Thank you.”
“Nobody else has it,” I said. “Just you. Only ever you.”
“I’ll keep it my life.”
We sat there a long time in the dark that had come down while I talked. And then he said something into my hair, so quiet I almost missed it, in a voice full of a thing that sounded like a door opening in a man who’d kept it shut a long time.
“You know that garden of mine. How I never grew one thing in it just to be looked at.”
“I know.”
“Not one. Never planted a single thing in that plot that was just for looking at. Everything out there’s got a job.
I told myself that was because everything ought to earn its place.
” His arms tightened around me. “That’s not why.
You knew it wasn’t why the second you saw it.
I’ve been growing penance in that dirt for six years and calling it medicine. ”
“Rune — ”
“I’m going to plant lilacs.” His voice broke clean in half.
“In the spring. A row of them, along the south fence where the light’s best, and I’ll baby them through the heat, and I’ll get them to grow where they’ve got no business growing, because I am the best grower in three counties and I have never once in my life grown a thing for the pure joy of it, and I’m going to start with yours.
I’m going to grow you your field, Amy. Right here.
Where you can see it out the window every morning and know there’s not one soul left in this world who can take it from you. ”
And I put my face in the chest of the man who came through the door, in the dark of a cabin at the corner of a compound full of people who loved me, and I understood that the last thing between us was gone.
He knew all of me now: the worst and the most secret and the most mine.
He’d been handed part of it and refused to use it, and I’d given him the rest with my own two hands.
Every locked room in me stood open, and he’d walked through every one, and not a single one could frighten me now that a man I trusted had stood inside it beside me.
He had all of me. All of it, given on purpose, to the one person who ever earned the giving.
And he was going to grow me a field of the thing that kept me alive.