Chapter Fourteen
THE DRUG HAD been a lid, and the lid was gone.
Crestwood had kept me dosed down into a flat world of nothing, and I'd hated it, hated the fog, hated waking already tired, but the fog had been a lid on a pot, and under it the thing I keep behind the wall had stayed down in the dark where it couldn't get its hands on me.
No dreams. Or none I remembered. They'd taken even that from me and I'd thought it was one more cruelty, and it was, but it was also a mercy, and I hadn't known the difference until the dosing stopped and the lid came off and the pot began, night after night, to boil.
The dreams came.
They always start good. That's the cruelty built into them, the trap of it.
They start on a beautiful day, a sunny ordinary afternoon, me younger and lighter and whole, and I'm not alone, there's a hand in mine, a familiar one, a face I trusted, a voice I'd have followed anywhere telling me there's something out here he wants to show me, just a little farther, come on.
And under the happy, faint, there's the feeling.
The alarm with no fire. Something's wrong.
Go back. Don't. And in the dream, like in the life, I hear it and I pat it down and I tell myself I'm being silly, because it's such a pretty day, because the hand in mine belonged to someone I trusted, because why would you be afraid of the person walking you into the trees.
Then the hand lets go.
Then the light goes, and it's the woods, and the dream stops being a memory and becomes the thing itself, and I'm there, I'm in it, the cold and the smell of the ground and the dark coming down through the branches, and the one who brought me has stepped back, stepped aside, and I understand in one falling-through-the-floor instant that he didn't walk me out here to show me anything.
He walked me out here to hand me over. And I'm not alone in the trees, and I never was going to be, because there's more than one of them.
The one I knew, and others I didn't, shapes between the trunks, a voice low to another voice, strangers where no men should be, and the dream me finally understands, way too late, always too late, what the feeling had been screaming the whole gold afternoon: they're here.
They were always going to be here. He brought you right to them.
And the thing that's worse than the hands, worse than the dark, the thing I can never explain to myself when I claw back up out of it, it isn't the hands at all.
The hands grabbed, and grabbing is a simple, ugly thing; a person can almost hold a thing that simple.
It's what stands behind the hands. Because in the dream the men aren't the beginning of it, they're already set when I get there, already placed, like pieces somebody put down on a board before I ever walked out under those trees.
And I can feel him.
Every time.
Off at the edge of it, back where the dream won't let me turn my head and look—someone.
Not reaching, not rushing, not part of the scramble of them at all.
Someone standing still and patient in the dark, apart from all of it, the way a man stands when he's watching a thing he set in motion a long time ago finally come true.
I never see him. No face, no name, nothing my waking mind can carry back out into the light.
Just the unbearable fact of him being there—still, easy, the cold center the whole night turns around, the one who marked the day and the place and only had to send the one I trusted to keep hold of my hand and walk me to the spot.
That's the part I wake up unable to hold.
Not the hands. Him. The watching one. It slips through my fingers the second my eyes open.
The first bad one, I woke up with my own hand jammed against my mouth.
That was the old training. Years of learning that sound brings them, nurses, the dark, him, whoever, years of swallowing every cry, and even tearing up out of the worst dream there is my body kept the rule and clamped my own scream down behind my hand.
I lay there shaking, soaked through, the woods still closer than the room.
"Bee." Eli's voice, low through the gap in the door where he slept. "You're alright. I'm here. You're at the clubhouse. It was a dream." A pause, careful. "Talk to me a second. Tell me you hear me."
"I hear you," I got out, behind my hand.
"There she is. Breathe with me. In through your nose. That's it."
He talked me down through three inches of open door, his voice the rope I climbed back up, and when my breathing finally evened he went quiet again, and I lay in the dark and listened to him settle back against the wall on the floor where he'd slept every night since I came, and I felt safe enough, eventually, to close my eyes.
The next night it came again. And the night after.
The third night was the one that broke the door open.
I don't know what I did, Eli told me later I'd screamed, a real one, the kind that gets past every door, and I came up out of the woods thrashing, fighting hands that weren't there, so deep in it I didn't know the room, didn't know the bed, didn't know anything but they have me, they have me, and the door came open, all the way, and a big shape was in it, and for one white blind second the dream and the room were the same thing and I scrambled back against the headboard with a sound I'd never heard myself make.
"It's me." He didn't come closer. He stopped just inside and put his hands up where I could see them, open, empty, and didn't move another inch. "Bee. It's Eli. It's just Eli. Nobody's got you. Look—look, it's my room, there's your window, there's the lamp. It's me."
The lamp. The window. The dog-eared books. The shape in the door resolving, slow, out of the nightmare and into the only safe face I had. Eli. Not them. Eli.
"Eli," I said, and it broke in half coming out.
"Yeah. Yeah, it's me." Still he didn't come to me.
He waited, hands open, until I was the one who reached, until I put my hand out into the dark toward him, shaking, because I could not be alone with the woods one more second.
Only then did he move, slow, and crossed the room and lowered himself down to sit on the floor right against the side of the bed, close, his back to the mattress, near enough that I could've touched his hair.
I took his hand instead. Two fingers, then his whole hand, then both of mine wrapped around it, and I held on like it was the handrail on a bridge in a high wind.
He didn't get in the bed. He didn't try.
He just sat on the floor beside me in the dark with my hands clamped around his one, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles, and he stayed there the rest of the night, I'd feel him every time I surfaced, still there, still holding on, a man folded up uncomfortable on a hard floor because the only thing that quieted the woods was knowing he was inside arm's reach of them.
"You don't have to tell me what it was," he said, sometime in the smallest hour. "But you can. If it helps to put it out of you. I'll just hold it. I won't do a thing with it but hold it."
And I gave him a piece. Not the worst. I couldn't reach the worst, the wall wouldn't let me, and even what I could reach came out in broken bits with no order to them.
"He walked me out there," I whispered. "It wasn't…
I didn't just end up in those woods. Somebody took me.
Somebody I—" My throat closed and I made it open.
"I trusted him. He had my hand. And there were others I didn't know, waiting, and he knew.
He knew they were there the whole time he was telling me to come a little farther.
" My hands tightened on his. "More than one.
It was never just one bad thing that found me.
It was a plan, and the person I trusted was the front door of it. "
For so long I'd refused to say a word of that to anybody. Letting them think whatever they thought, because saying it out loud meant standing in it, and I couldn't stand in it and keep breathing both. And now it was out, in the dark, in pieces, and the sky didn't fall.
I felt Eli go still around my hands.
“I hear you," he said. Low. Rougher than before, like it cost him to keep it that level. "He walked you into it, and he wasn't alone, and you didn't do one thing wrong but trust somebody you had every right to trust. I hear you, Bee. I've got it. I'm holding it."
There was something he wasn't saying. Even that deep in the woods I could feel the shape of the not saying, a whole dark room of it behind his quiet, a door he held shut with his back.
I didn't have it in me to wonder what was behind it.
I just knew it was there, and that holding it shut was costing him, and that he did it anyway, for me, the way he did everything.
I don't think he knew what the I hear you did to me, that it was a different country than hush, it's not real, the words I'd been starving for while he kept feeding me the other. That night he was too close to the dark himself to do anything but take it straight.
But I knew. I lay in the morning coming up in the window with my hands still locked around his and the woods finally letting go their grip, and I thought: he heard me. This once, he heard me.
I told Wren a piece of it the next afternoon, on the porch, both of us with coffee going cold.
He took me there. There were others. It was a plan.
She didn't flinch and she didn't soothe.
She just nodded, slow, and turned it over in her steady hands the way she turned everything, and said, "That's what we hold…
memories. The person you trusted handed you to people who were waiting.
That's not a nightmare making things up, Bee.
That's the shape of it coming back to you because you're finally strong enough to look.
" She held my eyes. "Bodies don't lie about who walked them into the dark. "
Two people, now, holding the same true ugly piece of me without trying to fix it back into something smaller.
It should have made the nights easier.
It made them worse, because now that somebody would catch the pieces, my body started throwing them faster, and every night Eli was closer, the floor by the bed his now, the dark hours his, my hand in his the bridge I crossed back over before dawn.
We weren't talking about it, what was happening between us in those black hours, the way his thumb learned my knuckles and my breathing learned his.
We didn't have words for it and we didn't reach for them.
It was just growing, in the worst place and the worst hours, the way the toughest green things do, up through a crack, in the dark, because that's where the light finally was.