29. Sloane #2
“Maybe it is.” I don’t flinch. I prepared for this argument.
I just never thought I’d be having it with the person it’s about.
“Maybe I’m exactly what I warned you I was.
That should scare you more, not less. You want to build something with a person who’s already shown you she’ll do this?
I’m doing you the one favor I’ve got. I’m doing it early.
While it’s still small enough to survive. ”
“It doesn’t feel small.”
“It will.”
“Stop telling me how I’m going to feel.” It’s the closest he comes to sharp, and even that he pulls, even that he gentles before it can land on me. He drags a hand down his face. Then he stops arguing the stack. I watch him decide to stop. He goes underneath it instead.
“What did your father do to you?” he asks, voice hoarse.
The question goes in somewhere I didn’t armor.
I prepared the holding cell. I prepared the wreckage and the blood and the door. I did not prepare this, because nobody asks this. People hear alcoholic father and they nod and look at their shoes and let you keep the lid on. That’s the deal. You give them the headline and they leave the box shut.
He’s just standing there holding the box open. Waiting. And his face isn’t horrified, it’s only open, only ready to hold whatever’s in there, and somehow that’s worse than horror.
“You don’t want the answer to that,” I say. Quieter. The volume drops. It always drops when it’s real.
“I do.”
“You really don’t.”
“Sloane.” He doesn’t move. “What did he do?”
So I tell him. Short. Short is the only way it fits through.
“He drank. My whole life. He’s a mean drunk and he was a meaner sober one, because sober he remembered to aim.
He hit. Not every day. Enough of them. And he talked.
” My voice stays level and that’s the obscene part, how level it stays.
“He told me what I was. Over and over, until I had it memorized. Until I could say it before he got to. By the time I was ten I knew the whole script by heart. You asked where I learned to take a thing apart and stay calm doing it. There. I learned it from the man who taught me what I was worth by repetition, in a kitchen, with the door shut.”
Beau has gone very still.
I watch it move through him the way it would move through anyone with two little sisters he’d walk through a wall for.
The hands. The set of the jaw. The careful, deliberate way he’s holding himself still, because the only thing on the other side of still right now is something neither of us wants in this room.
He isn’t looking at me like I’m broken. That’s the thing I braced for, and it doesn’t come.
He’s looking at me like he wants the address.
“Sloane.” A long, slow breath. He sets each word down like it might go off. “Did he ever—”
He can’t finish it. His hands have curled.
“Did he ever touch you,” he says. “Like that. I have to ask you. I’m sorry. I have to ask.”
“No.”
It comes out of me hard and fast, and my head’s already going, too quick, before I’ve decided to move it.
“No. Never. Not that.” My head won’t stop shaking. “He was cruel. He hit, and he drank, and he made me hate the inside of my own skull. He was never that. It wasn’t that. I need you to hear me say it plainly, so you’re not carrying the wrong picture out of this room — it was not that.”
“Okay.” Something goes out of him on the breath. “Okay. I hear you. I’m sorry I asked. I had to know what—” He stops. “I had to know.”
“Now you do.” I make my voice the door again.
“Now you know what’s actually in the box.
That’s what you’d be signing for. Not the girl who hosts the dinner.
The nights I won’t sleep. The way I’ll flinch when a man raises his voice in a room, even you, even though you never would.
The part of me that’s always already half out of every door.
You’d be choosing all of that, on purpose, for good.
And I won’t let you, because you don’t know yet that you shouldn’t, and I have always known. ”
And this is the part of the script I couldn’t write. Because it was never mine.
This is where he fights.
He doesn’t.
He stands in the middle of the warm room with his hands open at his sides and his whole face working, and he goes quiet.
I know this quiet. I’ve watched it come down on him before.
Cash has a name for it. It’s the thing he does when he’s feeling the most, when it’s gone past the place his words live, when the captain takes the wheel and the captain’s only job is to keep the room from seeing the size of it.
He goes still. He goes silent. He holds it in his body so it won’t spill on anyone else.
“I don’t—” he starts, and it dies in his throat.
He tries again. “Sloane, I—” and that one dies too.
I watch the want climb all the way to the surface and stop there, like a word he can see plain on a page and can’t make his mouth release, and I know that look, I’ve watched it cross his face over a textbook, the stranded helplessness of a thing that’s right there and won’t come out.
Except this isn’t a page. This is the one sentence that would keep me.
And he can’t find the shape of it, because no one ever once told him he was allowed to stand in a room and say I want this, it’s mine, don’t take it from me.
So the room just fills with his silence.
And I do the thing I came here to do, the worst thing, the thing I’m good at. I read his silence the way I need to read it. I let it mean what I need it to mean.
He isn’t fighting because he agrees. He’s seen the box now. He’s gone quiet because under the shock he knows I’m right, and somewhere in him the relief is already starting, the slow grateful understanding of the favor I’m doing him.
That’s what I tell myself. I’m very good at telling myself things. It’s the family trade.
And he doesn’t say it.
He doesn’t say I love you. He said it four days ago in his childhood bed, plain, into the dark, like he was naming the color of the sky.
I said it back. Both of them are still in this room.
His and mine, lying right where we set them down.
He could pick mine up. He could hand it back to me right now and it would stop me cold, it would pull the whole stack down in a second, and he knows that, and I know he knows that.
He doesn’t do it.