Chapter Ten
THE CLEARER I got, the worse the nights got.
That's the thing nobody warns you about getting better.
Full of Crestwood's chemistry, the dark behind the wall stayed down deep where it couldn't reach me, we had an arrangement, the dark and the drug.
Now the drug was long gone and the arrangement was broken, and at night, with nothing left to look at but the inside of my own skull, the dark pressed up against the wall and I could feel the shape of it through the plaster.
Not what it was. Just that it was there, and patient, and mine, and it wanted out.
And the bells were back.
For a few days, the best days I'd had since that night, they'd gone quiet.
Then a county cruiser came up our road and sat at the gate with my face on a piece of paper, and the quiet broke and didn't come back.
The alarm started up again, low and faceless and far off, and three days of telling myself the car was gone and I was safe had done nothing to shut it off. If anything it was louder now.
I'd wake gasping with no memory of a dream, heart going like a fist on a door, and I'd lie in Eli's bed in Eli's room and breathe the slow way the old doctor they'd brought in for me had taught me to, and wait for the gray to come into the window so I'd know I'd made it to another morning.
Eli always knew. He slept on the floor outside that door, had since the first night, and however quiet I tried to be he'd hear me wake, and his voice would come low through the gap—I'm here, Bee.
You're alright. I'm right here.—until my breathing came down.
He never came in. He just let me know the wall was holding.
One of those mornings the walls got to be too much and I couldn't lie there waiting for the gray, and I got up and went out. And Eli got up off the floor and came with me, because he wasn't going to let me walk out into the dark alone, and I wasn't going to ask him not to.
The House was dead quiet that early, just the dog and the cold and the sky going black to bruise to gold over a yard full of sleeping bikes.
There was a porch off the side with a couple of beat-up chairs, and I took one and pulled my knees up and made myself small and watched the light start to come.
Eli took the rail a little way off, the way he did, close enough, never crowding, and let the quiet be what it was.
I didn't hear her come out. She was just there, after a while, easing down into the chair on my other side. The quiet one. Dark hair, knees up like mine, a chipped mug held in both hands.
And something passed between her and Eli over the top of my head. I caught the edge of it, a look, a question in it and an answer back. Eli pushed off the rail.
"I'll be just inside," he said, low, to me. And I understood he was handing me something, even if I didn't yet know the shape of it. He went and stood in the doorway, a wide dark shape in the frame, close as he ever was, and he left the two of us the porch.
She didn't say anything for the longest time.
Didn't ask was I okay, didn't tell me it'd get better, didn't do a single one of the things that make you want to crawl out of your own skin.
She just sat, a careful arm's length off, and drank her coffee and watched the same sunrise, like two women being awake too early in the same cold was the most natural thing in the world.
It was the kindest thing anybody had done for me since I got out. She gave me her company and asked nothing back for it. I could've cried, except I don't.
We sat like that a long while. The gold came up over the bikes. The dog gave up on us and went to find a warm spot.
"It doesn't ask permission," she said finally.
Not looking at me. Looking at the light.
Her voice was low and even, worn smooth like something handled a lot.
"The early waking. The not even knowing what you were dreaming.
It just shows up and runs you, and there's nothing you did to call it and nothing you can do to send it off.
" She turned the mug in her hands. "I used to think the morning was the safe part.
Then for a long time the morning was the worst part.
So I started getting up ahead of it. Out here. Beat it to the punch."
I looked at her. Really looked. And I understood what I'd half-seen that first day, the way her eyes had stopped on me and held instead of sliding off polite.
She wasn't being kind at me from the outside like the others, careful and bright and a little scared of me.
She was telling me a map of a country because she'd lived there.
"I'm Wren," she said. "I'm Ashen's. You don't have to say anything back.
" She let that sit a second, her eyes still on the light.
"I didn't. For a long time, I didn't say a word to anybody, couldn't, wouldn't, the difference stopped mattering.
I had my reasons, same as you've got yours, and they were good ones.
" She turned the mug slow in her hands. "Nobody in this house knows what it is to keep that quiet but me.
So I just want you to know there's one person here you don't ever have to do it with. "
And maybe that was why. Because she said you don't have to. Everybody else, even Eli, even my brother, wanted my words so badly I could feel it come off them, and the wanting made the words go and hide. Wren didn't want a thing from me. She held the door open and stepped back from it.
So I walked through.
"It's getting louder," I said.
My voice came out rough and small in the cold, and it was the first thing I'd said to a living soul who wasn't Eli or Caleb, and the sky didn't fall and the porch didn't break.
Wren didn't whip around or make a fuss or call for anybody.
She just nodded, slow, like I'd told her something she already knew, and kept her eyes soft on the yard so I wouldn't feel watched.
"The dark," she said. "Yeah. It gets louder before it gets quieter, when the meds go.
Feels like backwards. It's not." A pause.
"Mine had a face. For me it got easier once it had a face I could set it on, even when the face scared me worse.
The not-knowing was the worst of it, in the end.
But that's mine. Everybody's is their own. "
A face.
Something in me lurched toward that and slammed into the wall so hard I felt it in my teeth, and I must have made a sound, or gone white, because Wren went still and watchful and didn't push, and waited.
And I found that with her I could give a little of it.
Not the wall, not what was behind it, the wall wouldn't move.
But the part out front, the part I did know: the wrongness I'd carried out of that place like a stone in my shoe.
That, I could finally hand to somebody who wouldn't try to fix it before she'd even heard what it was.
"There's a feeling," I said.
The words came slow, dragged up. "I can't put a face on it.
I can't even tell you what it is. But I know it.
" I pressed my fist flat to my chest, over the spot where it lived.
"I had it once before. The day everything happened.
This wrongness, right here, like an alarm going off in a room with no door, something's not right, get out, get away.
I had it the whole day and I told myself I was being silly.
I was happy. I had no reason for it. So I turned it off with both hands.
" My hands had started to shake. "And then it was night, and it was the woods, and the feeling had been right the whole entire time, and I was the one who'd put it to sleep. "
I made myself keep going. "I've got it again, Wren.
Not like that place, there it screamed at me, all day, every day—it's quieter here.
Near my brother, near Eli, most days it almost lets me rest. But it's not gone.
It's down there ringing low, and it got louder the day that car came, and it hasn't stopped since.
And everybody keeps telling me I'm safe now, that it's over, that it's just the bad place still rattling around in my head.
" I shook my head. "Maybe they're right.
But I turned this off one time, when it was trying to save my life, and I will not do it again.
Not even if I can't tell a single living soul what it's warning me about. "
It poured out of me cracked and ugly and too fast, and then it was out, in the cold, between us.
I braced for it. For the thing they all did. For oh sweetheart, you're safe now, it's over, that place can't reach you here, nobody's coming, shh. The soft hands. The patting. The kindness that closes the subject because the kindness can't stand to sit inside the fear with you.
Wren didn't do it.
She set her mug down on the porch boards. She turned in her chair and faced me full on for the first time, and her eyes weren't soft anymore, weren't careful. They'd gone flat and sharp and serious, the eyes of someone who'd been hunted once and never for one day forgot the feel of it.
"Okay," she said. "I believe you."
Just that. I believe you. Two words, and they went down into me deeper than four years of you're safe now ever had.
"A feeling like that isn't nothing," she said.
"I learned that the worst way there is. Everybody wants you to have a reason before they'll let you be afraid, like fear's only allowed once you've filled out the paperwork on it.
But the body keeps a count the head can't read.
You felt this one before it had a single word to it, and it was right the whole way through. "
She didn't reach to smooth it off me the way the men would have.
She picked it up and let it have its weight.
"They love you, so they're holding you instead of hearing you, and I know that hold.
" Her jaw set, and something old and bad moved behind her eyes and got put away.
"I had people sure I was safe once. Holding me, telling me so.
And the whole time it wasn't over, and the only reason I'm sitting on this porch is they worked that out in time.
Barely." She looked at me level. "So no.
I'm not gonna be one more set of hands holding you quiet while you try to tell me something's still out there. "
"You believe me," I said again, stupid with it, because I needed to hear it land twice before I'd trust the floor of it.
"I believe you," Wren said, simple as that.
She picked her mug back up, and her hands were steady, and that steadiness was a thing I wanted to climb inside and live in.
"So here's the deal. You keep telling me.
Every time it rings, every piece that shakes loose, even if it's only a feeling, even if it makes no sense and you can't put one word to it.
You don't have to know what it is for me to take it serious.
You just have to tell me. That's all. Deal? "
I looked at her then, really looked, and saw the thing I most needed and hadn't known to look for.
Steady hands. Coffee going cold in them.
Somebody of her own asleep in the House behind her.
Awake too early, but here—all the way back, talking, wanting, belonging to a life.
I'd thought the silence was a one-way door.
She was the proof it wasn't—that there was a whole self still up ahead of me somewhere, a morning that wasn't a thing to be survived, a road another woman had already walked to the far side of and lived.
The sun was all the way up now. Somewhere inside the House a door banged and the day started moving. The dark behind the wall was still there, it's always still there, but for the first time in four years it wasn't the only thing in the room with me.
And she'd answered me like a woman with something true to say, not a broken thing to be gentled back down to sleep.
"Deal," I said.
And then, because she'd earned it and because I had it in me to give this morning, one more, a different one, just as hard to spend and worth every bit as much: "Thank you."
I looked back toward the door when I'd said it.
Eli was still there in the frame where he'd stood the whole time, close as a held breath, far enough to leave it mine.
He wasn't looking at us. He was looking out at the road, keeping his watch, giving me the one thing it must have cost him something to give, the sight of his girl handing a piece of herself to somebody who wasn't him, and letting her.
I got up and went back to him. Because Wren was a door I'd just learned how to open. But Eli was still the wall I put my back to. And a person coming all the way back to herself, I was starting to understand, was going to need both.