18. Lost Paths and Longing
LOST PATHS AND LONGING
SLOANE
The feds took my run eight days ago, and this is the morning I need it most and don't have it.
So I stand at my kitchen window in the gray instead, where the road used to take me, and I hold the thing Cole handed me last night the way you hold a coal you can't put down and can't drop. Hannah is alive.
Alive. Two states north of where a deposition said she'd be, surfaced after six days of dark we'd all half-buried her through, asking for me by name.
A woman I have not laid eyes on in ten years, who I have grieved twice now — once when I went over the east fence and left her on the wrong side of it, and once last week when I let myself believe the quiet meant the worst. Both times I was wrong.
She's alive, and she wants me, and I cannot get a full breath around it.
Cole's still asleep down the hall. He kept the watch till four and I made him take the bed at four, and that's a thing we do now — trade the dark between us like a shift neither of us trusts the other to stand alone. I let him sleep. This part isn't his.
This part is a potato table.
I was eighteen. Hannah was nineteen and next up for the dress, and we were peeling a hundred pounds of potatoes for a supper that was somebody's consecration feast, though I didn't know yet that's what those feasts were.
She leaned across the bin, fast, not looking at me, the way you say a thing you've decided to say and are already scared you've said.
When they put you in the dress, Sister Mary, don't drink the tea.
Thirteen words. She had a brand on her wrist, same as the one under my sleeve right now and a ceremony of her own coming and everything in the world to lose, and she spent it on me.
She went through hers. I got out of mine.
That's the whole arithmetic, and I've carried it ten years, and there is no version of it where the books come out even.
My hand's at my wrist. I make it stop. It doesn't stop.
Get it together, Mercer.
I don't.
Ruiz comes through the line at eight, and for once she doesn't make me wait for the hard part.
"She won't come into custody," Ruiz says.
"I've offered her everything I've got and she won't take a foot of it.
She's spent ten years learning that the people who promise to keep you safe are the people who own you, and she's not wrong enough about that for me to argue her out of it.
" A pause. "She'll meet. One person. You.
Somewhere she picks, on her terms, or she goes dark again and this time I don't think she comes back. "
"Then we do it her way."
"It's not safe, Sloane. I want to say that to you in plain words so you can't tell me later I dressed it up.
She picks the ground, which means I can't own the ground.
I can put people around it. I can't promise you the people who ran a woman off a dry road in Billings won't have read the same tells off Hannah that they read off you. "
"You're telling me I'd be walking her bait into a room I can't lock."
"I'm telling you it might be the thing that wins August, and it's the one thing on this earth you'd walk into hell to do, and I'd be a liar and a coward if I let you do it without saying the rest out loud first." She lets it sit.
Twenty-five years of letting the worst part sit where you can see it.
"Your call. It was always going to be your call. "
I look down my own hallway at the door I shut on a sleeping man, the one they've got a photograph of now, the one they've decided is a lever.
"Where," I say.
She gives it to me. A church. A real one — St. Brigid's, a country parish an hour and change north, the kind that's empty on a Wednesday and unlocked on principle, a town so small it's barely a name.
Hannah picked it. Of course she picked a church.
The woman survived a man who turned the word holy into a brand, and when she finally gets to choose her own ground she chooses a sanctuary with real saints in the glass and a door that opens out.
I'd have picked the same. We were both taught the word in the same poisoned room and we both went looking, after, for a clean place to put it.
She found a church. I found a road at dawn.
"Wednesday," Ruiz says. "Eleven. She'll be gone by eleven-twenty whether you've said your piece or not. Bring nobody into the room. You can bring whoever you need to the door."
I already know who I'm bringing to the door.
The prep is the part nobody warns you about.
Two days of it, at my own bar with the CLOSED sign out and a federal lawyer turning my back booth into a deposition room.
They walk me through what testifying is, which turns out to be nothing like telling the truth and everything like surviving a man whose whole job is making twelve strangers doubt you.
They ask me the questions Crane's lawyer will ask.
Isn't it true you left of your own accord?
Isn't it true no one stopped you? Isn't it true, Ms. Mercer, that for four years you called yourself blessed?
I answer them flat the first day and my hands shake under the table the whole time.
I answer them flatter the second day and they don't shake at all, and the federal woman looks at me a beat too long when she notices, the way you look at a thing that's gone from frightened to dangerous while you watched.
"You're good at this," she says, and doesn't mean it kind, means it true.
"I had a good teacher." I don't tell her his name was Walt or that the classroom was a hardware store on Tuesday nights. "I learned a long time ago how to be steady in front of a man who wants me to come apart."
What I don't tell her, what I don't tell anybody, is the thing the prep keeps walking me up to and leaving me at the edge of.
Every question they ask in that booth is a door back into a room I spent ten years bricking shut.
And every night, after, I go home to the one person I ever let walk through the wall on purpose, and he's the only reason the doors don't swallow me.
He's my anchor.
He's also, in a grainy photograph in a federal file, the exact shape of the thing they'll use to drown me.
Both true. I've stopped being able to make one of them cancel the other.
The night before the church, I don't sleep and I don't try to.
Cole does the locks with me — deadbolt, lock, the dowel down in the slider track, the order I've done with my own two hands every night of my life for the past ten years, and now do with four.
He checks the slider. He checks the windows.
He checks the dark out past the blind the way he checks everything, all the way to the end and two seconds past it.
Then he turns to take up the watch at the front of the house, and I catch his hand before he can.
"Not tonight," I say.
He goes still. He knows by now what my voice does when I've decided a thing.
"Tomorrow I walk into a room I can't lock," I tell him, "for a woman I left on the wrong side of a fence.
And it might go fine and it might not, and there's a version of tomorrow where this is the last night I get.
" I get a fist in the front of his shirt, the way I had it the first time, in the doorway, the night I took the wall down myself.
"I'm not spending it on opposite sides of a wall, cowboy.
I've spent enough nights on the wrong side of walls. "
For one breath he holds — the old reflex, the line he swore my father he'd stand. Then the thread lets go, the way it lets go now, the way I've learned it will every time if I'm the one who reaches first.
I take him down the hall.
This time there's no testing him at the door, no last chance to tell me no.
This time I shut the door and I turn around and I don't wait for the light to find me — I cross the room and find him, and he takes what I bring and lets me set every degree of it, the way he always does, the only man alive who learned the shape of my safety before he ever learned the shape of the rest of me.
It's not the first night. The first night I was testing whether I could choose it.
Tonight I'm not testing anything. Tonight I know I can, and I do, with both eyes open, and that's the part that takes the floor out from under me — not the wanting, the certainty.
I run my hands over him in the dark, the scars and the old white line on his hand and the place at his last rib he never explains, and I don't go soft over any of it, I claim all of it, because tomorrow the world gets to want a piece of both of us and tonight there's no world, there's just this room and his mouth at the side of my throat and the low sound he makes that I feel land in my own chest.
When he gets to my wrist he does the thing he did the first night. Turns it up and puts his mouth on the brand, slow, over the circle and the cross some animal cooked into me at nineteen while a woman hummed.
"Not theirs," he says against it. The same words. Like a thing you say over a thing to keep it true. "Anything that happens here, you gave me."
"I know." And I get a hand in his hair and pull him up to me, because I do know, and because for once I don't want gentle, I want all of it, I want to be wanted so loud it drowns out the church and the questions and the thirteen words and the fence — "So take what I'm giving you, Cole.
Tonight you don't have to bring nothing. Tonight you get to bring everything."
And he does.