Chapter Nine #2
A wet warmth rose at the corners of her own eyes. She let it stay. She set her right hand on the small head, slow and careful, and she settled her left hand on the small shoulder.
Lord, she said inwardly, and that was all. The rest of it was beyond her ability to put into language right now.
“Sadie,” Zoe said, low and steady, when the first hard wave of weeping had begun to thin. “I know. I know, my love. I know.”
Sadie’s hands were pressed into the grass, her shoulders working with each breath. She lifted her face, tear-stained and open in the unguarded manner of a child who has nothing left to hold back. She looked at Zoe with her uncle’s pale blue eyes.
“I miss her,” Sadie said in a voice that had gone small and used up. “I miss her every day and nobody ever says so.”
“I know,” Zoe answered, her voice gone gentle at the back of it. “She was your mama, and she was wonderful, and there is nothing in this world that fills that place. Nothing and nobody.”
She set her hand at Sadie’s back, light, between the small shoulder blades.
“She is with the Lord now, sweet girl. She is at His table and at His side. She is not gone from you. She has only stepped through a door we cannot see yet, and she is keeping watch through it. She has been keeping watch since Uncle Wade carried you down the Helena road.”
Sadie’s small face came up from Zoe’s collar bone. Her pale blue eyes were wet at the lashes.
Zoe took her hand off Sadie’s back, settled it at the front of her own chest above her heart, and held it there.
“She is here, too. That is the gift the Lord left us when He took her home. The people we love do not leave us, inside. They make a place there and they keep it. Your mama has been keeping her place in you for three years, and she is going to keep it for the rest of your life.”
Sadie’s lower lip pulled in once.
“How do you know?”
“Because my own mama has been keeping her place in me since I was fifteen years old, sweet girl. The Lord knows what He is doing when He builds that place. I have found Him reliable on the matter.”
Sadie turned her face into Zoe’s side and cried until she had no more crying left.
Zoe held her in the cold grass by the cold creek. The water at the bend went on at its own pace. The first cold breath of evening had begun to come off the upper ridge.
She said nothing more.
The saying of nothing took a careful effort.
Inside her chest was the door she had stood at when her mother died, the kitchen she had crossed when her father followed, the brother who had not come down the porch step the morning she left for Montana.
She held them at the back of her ribs and let Sadie cry softly into her collar bone.
Her mother had taught her, in the kitchen in Albany before everything, that some comfort is made of silence.
She heard the horses before she heard the men.
Two sets of hooves on the slope above the creek, moving fast. The sound of it broke across the afternoon. Sadie must have heard it, too, lifting her wet face.
Wade came over the crest of the slope on foot at a run, with George two paces behind him.
He pulled up at the flat rock. His eyes went to Sadie first, then Zoe, the quick, comprehensive sweep of a man reading a scene. Whatever he read brought his jaw into the set line.
“Sadie,” he said, coming down the slope, his voice pitched low.
“Uncle Wade,” Sadie said, with no energy left to manage anyone’s reaction.
“I heard you from the road,” he said, voice rough, reaching them and crouching in front of his niece with one hand on her shoulder. “I heard you from two miles away. What happened, sweet girl?”
A long pause.
“I was horrible to Auntie Zoe,” Sadie said, very quietly.
George had reached the flat rock. He looked at Zoe with a question in his face. Zoe gave him a small shake of her head. The question withdrew.
“Sadie,” Wade said, still crouched, still level, “look at me.”
Sadie looked at him.
“You will apologize to Zoe,” he said quietly, “and then you will go back to the house, and you will wait for me in the kitchen. I will be twenty minutes.”
“Wade,” Zoe said, her hand still at the small back. She lifted her face to his. “Right now, she needs rest and something warm to eat, not a lecture.”
The muscle in his jaw worked.
He stood.
He turned and looked at her. Zoe had expected the flat, controlled expression she had become used to, the expression she had catalogued as his challenged-on-his-own-ground look.
What she saw instead stopped the breath in her chest.
Wade’s face was not flat. The control was there, the practiced still-water surface of it, but underneath, visible to anyone who looked past the surface, was the face of someone in pain. Not anger. Pain. The specific pain of a father figure who has heard a child say I want my mama.
“Wade,” she said, and her voice came out softer than she intended.
He turned away.
“George,” he said, his voice dropping back into the flat, controlled register, “take Sadie home and put the kettle on.”
“Yes, brother,” George replied quietly, and his hand was already on Sadie’s shoulder, gentle and steady, steering her toward the slope.
Sadie went without argument. She looked back once at Zoe, with her tear-stained face and her pale eyes, and the look held something that was not quite apology and not quite plea, but somewhere in between.
Zoe gave her a small nod. Sadie turned and climbed the slope beside George.
Wade stood at the flat rock with his back to her and his hat in his hands. Zoe watched the line of his shoulders in the cold afternoon light
“She meant none of it as cruelty,” Zoe said, when the silence had gone long enough. “She is eight, and she is exhausted. She has been carrying her mother’s absence in a house where nobody says so.”
“I know,” Wade replied, very quietly, to the creek.
“She has never said it before because there was no one safe enough to say it to.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“And now there is,” he said at last.
“And now there is,” Zoe said gently
The wind moved through the serviceberry bush and set the shirts and aprons swaying. Wade’s mended shirt. Zoe looked at it.
“Wade Collins,” she said, soft but clear.
He turned.
His face was still controlled, mostly, but the feelings underneath the control were still there. His pale blue eyes held hers with a steadiness that must have cost him something.
“Your niece is not broken,” Zoe said. “She is only honest. And today she was honest with me, which means she trusts me, which means something we have been doing is working.” She kept her eyes on his. “I need you to hear that, and hold it.”
He held her gaze for a long, measured moment.
“I hear you,” he said, finally. The same words he had used on the wagon from Bozeman, when her voice had been the only thing filling the silence but the tone was different now.
“Good,” she said simply.
He held her eyes a moment longer, then nodded once and turned toward the slope and was halfway up it before he stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder.
The afternoon light caught the side of his face.
For a moment, he looked very tired and very young.
The next thing he said came out quieter than anything he had said since she arrived.
“Thank you, Zoe,” he said. “For staying with her.”
She opened her mouth.
He was still looking at her. She had the sudden, disorienting sense that he wasn’t merely thanking her for an afternoon at a cold creek. He was thanking her for walking into a house that grief had closed and standing in the middle of it anyway.
She opened her mouth to say You are welcome, Wade Collins.
Somewhere above the slope, in the direction of the house, came George’s voice carrying sharp across the afternoon air. It was a tone that Zoe had not yet heard from him, who was easy and cheerful in all weathers.
He was frightened.
“Wade!” George called. “Wade, come up here!”