Chapter 4 #2
Even in the low light, I can see she's had another long day stamped on her somewhere.
"He did it again," she says. "I'm so sorry. I'll fix that fence myself if my father won't."
"Leave it." It comes out before I think about it. "I don't mind him. It’s nice to have the company."
She tilts her head at that, and something in her face eases, and she gestures at the empty chair like it's already got my name on it.
I sit.
"I'm Sophie, by the way," she says, once I'm settled and the dog's collapsed between us. "I realized after you left the other night that I never even told you. I sat here drinking wine with you for an hour and never said my own name. My mother would be mortified."
"Njal."
"Njal." She says it carefully, gets it right the first time, doesn't ask me to spell it, tell me it's unusual, or any of the things people usually do. She just sets it down between us like she's keeping it. "That's a good name."
"It's my grandfather's."
"Norse?"
"Norse."
She nods like that fits, like she'd already guessed I came from somewhere with old names, and she hands me a glass of wine.
Our hands don't touch and I notice, the same as I noticed the dog, the same as I'm noticing everything about this woman I shouldn't be noticing.
I take a small sip and set it on the chair arm and mostly leave it.
She watches me do it. She doesn't say a word about it.
We talk easier than two strangers ought to.
She asks about the club, careful, curious, not afraid the way she's got every reason to be, and I give her the safe pieces—my father, my brother, the work, the way the clubhouse sounds on a Sunday.
I leave out the parts that would send her inside with the deadbolt thrown.
There'll be time for the hard parts or there won't.
And then she goes quiet in a way I recognize, the bracing quiet, and she turns her wine glass in her hands and looks at the fire instead of at me.
"Can I tell you something?" she says. "And you don't have to do anything with it. I just—I don't get to say it out loud much."
"Go ahead."
"I have a sister. Hannah. She's older than me." She keeps her eyes on the fire. "She has bipolar disorder. The intense kind, the kind that put her in the hospital twice before anybody in my family would say the word out loud."
Her jaw works.
"For years, they said it was spiritual. That she needed to pray harder. That her faith was weak, or there was sin she hadn't confessed, or she just needed the right people to lay hands on her."
She turns the glass in her hands.
"Years, Njal. She was sick for years, and the people who were supposed to help her told her to pray about it, like it would make a difference."
I've gone very still.
I keep my face the way you keep a glass of water you don't want to spill, level, careful, nothing moving.
Inside me, something has dropped clean through the floor, because I know exactly the thing she's describing.
I know it from the inside of a locked room.
I know what it is to have your own brain turn into a country nobody can follow you into, and I know what it would have done to me if the people around me had handed me a Bible instead of a doctor.
She watches the fire.
I take a slow sip I don't want and hold it in my mouth a second, buying myself the time to put my face back where it belongs before she looks over.
"That's a hard thing to carry," I say. "For both of you."
She looks up at me then, and something crosses her face—surprise, and behind it a kind of relief so plain it's almost hard to look at.
"Most people say I should be grateful she's alive," she says quietly. "Or they tell me a story about somebody's cousin who got better. You just—said it was hard."
"It is hard."
"Yeah." Her eyes shine in the firelight and she blinks it back, the same as my mother does, the same set to the jaw. "It is."
We sit with it. The fire works at a log. The dog snores between us, oblivious, the only one of the three of us who's exactly where he wants to be.
I walk her to her door when the fire's low, Hoagie winding between us the whole way.
"Thank you," she says. "Again. You're going to think I'm the saddest woman in this town, two for two on dumping my whole heart on you by a fire."
"I don't think that."
"What do you think, then?"
I think she's spent her whole life loving somebody with a broken brain, and I'm a man with a broken brain who came out here to get away from his own, and the odds of the two of us ending up on either side of the same fence are long enough to keep me up tonight.
"I think your dog's got good taste in porches," I say.
She laughs, the real one, the one I heard through the trees before I ever saw her face.
Then she goes in, and the deadbolt turns, and I walk back through the gate into my own yard and stand a while in the dark.
Here's what I know about myself: I don't get to want things.
Wanting is how a man like me ends up in a locked room, or worse.
I gave that up. I made my peace with giving it up.
And then a dog came through a fence.
I take my pills. I lie down. The quiet settles over the house, and for once it doesn't feel like a thing I'm bracing against—it feels like a held breath, like the second before something starts.
I don't sleep for a long time.
I'm in more trouble than I've been in since I was discharged from the hospital.