CHAPTER 4 #2
But she keeps stepping outside the game I'm playing. She keeps looking at me like the joke isn't the whole of me. And every time she does it I feel a stitch pull somewhere I keep boarded up.
She's pinning the ivory to the form when she nods at my right hand. "That's an old one."
I look down. The knife scar across my palm, white now, a seam through the lifeline. I flip the switchblade in my left hand without deciding to — snick, snick — the way I do when somebody gets too close to something true. "Occupational."
"How."
"How do you think. " I lean on the windowsill.
Out past the glass the grounds go down toward the cliff in their cold November green, the gravel forecourt, the iron gate, and I keep my eyes on it because it's easier than her face.
"Somebody had a knife. It was going somewhere I didn't want it to go.
I put my hand in the way. Hands grow back.
Sort of. " I show her the palm, flat, the way you'd show a card.
"I was nineteen. Caught it for Mateo. Whole thing took about a second. I called it Tuesday and went and got drunk."
I make it small. I always make it small.
Called it Tuesday — that's the whole story dressed up so it can walk past you without anyone seeing what it's carrying.
The truth, which I do not say, is that I remember the exact weight of the blade going through, and that the first thing I felt under the pain was good.
Good, because it meant I was worth something.
The blade meant for the heir went into the spare instead, and that is the entire architecture of me: I'm the one you put between the danger and the thing that matters. I'm the hand you throw, while the thing that matters stays safe behind it.
I expect her to flinch. They flinch, when the violence walks into the room and sits down. Even the ones who like the danger flinch, because the liking and the flinching are the same nerve.
She holds steady, the way the nap holds its lay.
She comes off the dress form and takes my hand — the scarred one, right out of the air like it's hers to take — and turns it palm up under the window light.
Her thumb goes over the scar, slow, the way she went over the cloth's nap, reading it.
Her own hands aren't soft, that's the surprise of them; they're soft to look at and worked to touch, a thin silvered line across her left index finger where a needle got her once, a small kinship of scars.
She looks at the seam in my palm, then up at me, and she says, quiet, no joke in it at all:
"You tell that story so fast nobody can see it hurt."
The switchblade goes still in my other hand.
"You did the same thing just now you've done your whole life," she says.
"Somebody hands you a wound and you hand them a punchline before they can put it down.
You're so quick they never notice you didn't actually answer.
" Her thumb's still on my scar. "You caught a knife for your brother and decided it was the most useful you'd ever be, and you've been trying to be that useful ever since, because useful is the only kind of wanted you trust."
The foghorn comes up off the Sound, long and far, and fills the silence I'm not filling.
I should laugh. There's a laugh right there, I can feel its shape, a good one, easy there, save the surgery for the cloth — and I open my mouth for it and nothing comes.
Because she read me. She read me the way she reads that ivory, found the grain, found where the tension sits, found exactly where I'd tear if you pulled.
And she did it with nothing to gain, no leverage in mind.
That's the part that takes the floor out from under me.
Everyone else who finds your wound does it to get a hand inside it; she found mine and she's just — holding it.
Holding the hand with the wound in it, in the gray morning light, like it's the most natural thing in the world to be gentle with the dangerous one.
"You read people like that often?" My voice isn't right. I hear it not be right.
"It's the job. People are cloth. " She lets my hand go, finally, and the cold air comes back where her thumb was, and I want it back so bad it's humiliating.
"You learn the weave, you know where the seam's going to give.
You" — she steps back, picks her pins up off the table like she's gathering herself, three of them between her lips again, and around them, dry, the kindness tucked back inside the wit where she keeps it safe — "you're a strong cloth.
Strong and cut wrong by somebody who didn't measure twice.
That's all. It's fixable. Most things are, if you stop pretending the tear's a feature. "
She turns back to the form like she didn't just take me apart at the seams and lay the pieces out in order — like she didn't just do, with three sentences, what no fist Lev ever raised at me managed: get all the way in.
I have to leave the room.
I don't decide it so much as discover it — that I'm at the door, that I've crossed the floor without choosing to, that my hand's on the frame again.
Behind me the machine starts up, that needle-chatter, and I hear the cloth move under her hands, the soft drag of it, nap catching the light like skin, and the wanting comes up in me so loud it's almost a sound.
This is the dangerous kind, past the easy want I know how to spend and walk off in the morning — this one has her name on it and a future stapled to it, a want that says stay, that says be in the room where the honest work is, and I do not do staying, I do not do honest, I am the thing in this family that gets sent out so the honest can stay clean.