24. The Rabbit Turns
THE RABBIT TURNS
SLOANE
Icome up out of the chemical the way I came up out of every bad dream for ten years — all at once, eyes already open, heart already slamming — except this time the ceiling I'm staring at isn't my bedroom's.
It's plank and tar paper, low, water-stained, and I know it before I've placed it, the way you know the smell of a house you grew up in.
I'm back. They brought me back. I'm lying on a cot in a cell in the place I bled my feet raw getting out of, and the first full breath I take is the air of it — dust and sage and woodsmoke and underneath all of it the sweet rot of a place that calls itself holy.
I catalog it before I let myself feel one thing about it.
That's the trade my father built into me on Tuesday nights, and it holds now, when I need it most. One room.
No window. A door with a bar on the outside — I can hear the weight of it.
A bucket. A cot. My boots are gone and my jacket's gone and the Glock's a memory in the sage.
My left sleeve's been pushed up; somebody wanted a look at the brand, wanted to be sure of what they'd caught. The brand's still there. So am I.
I count the ways out. There's one, and it's barred from the far side, and that's the whole arithmetic, and ten years ago that arithmetic would have folded me.
It doesn't fold me now. I do the thing I learned to do behind my own bar with sixty people in the room — I find the work that's actually in front of me, and I do that, and I don't waste a breath on the work that isn't.
The work in front of me is staying the woman who got out, and not letting them turn me back into the girl who didn't.
Ready.
I'm together. God help them, I have never once in my life been this together.
Brother Silas comes for me at dusk. I know it's dusk because the light under the door's gone the color of a bruise, and I know it's him before the bar lifts, because I'd know that walk in my grave — slow, even, no motion wasted, the patient walk of a man who's spent forty years certain that whatever he's hunting will tire before he does.
He stoops coming through the door. He's older.
That's the first thing, the thing the dream never let him be — Silas in my nightmares is sixty and eternal and made of shadow, and Silas in this doorway is seventy-something with a stoop and a tremor in one hand and reading glasses pushed up on his head, a man who walks a fence line because it's the only thing he's ever been good at.
He has a flashlight he doesn't need yet and the same patient nothing in his face he's worn my whole memory of him.
"Sister Mary." He says it the way he always said it. Slow. Tasting it. Like he's the one who decides what I'm called.
And here's the thing I drove all night and got run off a road to find out, the thing I couldn't have known until I was standing in front of it:
I'm not afraid of him.
I wait for it — the old animal drop in the gut, the breath gone shallow, the three-oh-seven panic.
It doesn't come. I look at a stooped old man with a flashlight and a tremor, and what comes up instead is the thing that's always been bigger than the fear, the thing that took me over the east fence at twenty and pointed me back over it at thirty. The anger. Cold and total and mine.
"My name is Sloane." I sit up on the cot, unhurried, and I hold his eyes the way I held a stranger's over a bourbon I poured him in another life. "You've been saying it wrong for fourteen years."
Something flickers in his face. He fed on my fear for four years the way a tick feeds, and it isn't there for him anymore, and a man like Silas doesn't have anything underneath the feeding.
The fear was the whole relationship. Without it he's just an old man in a doorway who used to frighten a child.
"You ran," he says. "All those years ago. We never did find you." A pause, and the thing he says next he says like it's a comfort he's bringing me. "But you came back. They always come back. The world out there is hard on a woman alone. You came home."
"I came for Grace." I don't decide to say it.
It comes up out of me the way Sloane came up out of me on a payphone ten years ago — true and whole before I've cleared it.
"And for Hannah. And then I'm leaving again, and this time I'm taking them with me, and you're going to spend whatever's left of your life in a cell exactly like this one, with a bar on the far side of the door, listening to somebody else decide what you're called. "
He doesn't answer that. He's not a man built for answering.
He sets the flashlight down on the floor pointed at the ceiling so the room goes dim and strange, and he tells me, in the flat reciting voice they all have, that there's to be a consecration tonight.
That Pastor Eli, though the world has put him behind walls for a season, has named the next Blessed One, and the rite goes forward in his name by proxy, the way it does, because no jail built by men can break a covenant made before God.
That I'm to be brought to witness it. That seeing it might soften my heart back toward home before they decide what to do with the one who got away.
He says Grace's name like it's a gift he's giving me.
"She's ready," he says. "She's been ready a long time. You'll see how peaceful a willing heart can be."
And under the anger, the fear finds me after all — not for me.
For her. For the fourteen-year-old in the second row of chapel chewing her cuffs, who's twenty-four now and ten years deeper into believing the dress is the holiest thing that'll ever happen to her.
The fear's a clean cold fuel. I let it burn.
They take me through the compound in the last of the light, a Brother on each arm, and I make myself look at all of it, because looking is a thing they can't take and because I'm cataloging — the chapel, the dormitory, the Prayer House with its single lit window, the dirt yard where the Marthas move with their eyes down, the east fence a black line against a sky going out.
Eight years I poured drinks in a warm gold room and told myself this place was a whole world and ten years and a whole other life away.
It was always one dark road south. Their distances are always lies.
They put me in the back of the Prayer House, in a chair, a Brother behind it.
And there, against the wall, in the half dark, is Hannah.
She's hurt — favoring one arm, a split lip gone dark, the particular stillness of a woman who's learned again the hard way that sound gets you caught.
But her eyes find mine and they're not broken, they're furious, the same fury that's burning in me, and when the Brothers aren't looking she mouths two words at me across the room.
Get her.
Not save me. Not help. Get her. Hannah, taken back to the worst place on earth to be made an example of, spending the only thing she's got left — a look across a room — the exact way she spent it at a potato table when we were girls. On somebody else. On Grace.
I give her the smallest nod a body can give. A promise. The second one she's ever pulled out of me without asking.
Then the humming starts.
Sister Agnes is older too, gone gray and soft, and she hums the same hymn she's hummed over every white dress on every table for thirty years, and the sound of it goes through me like a blade through butter, straight back to a sixteen-year-old with a hand on the back of her neck and a name being taken. They bring Grace in.
She's beautiful. That's the obscenity of it.
They've made her beautiful and calm and certain, ten years of it, and she's in the white dress they sew over weeks while the others stitch and Agnes hums, and her face is the peaceful blank of a girl who's been told her whole life that this is the holiest thing she'll ever do and has finally stopped having the strength to doubt it.
There's a table. There's a cup of tea steaming on a stand beside it.
There's an Elder in Eli's place, and the words beginning, the proxy words, in Crane's name, the covenant no jail can break.
And I understand, in the chair, with a Brother's hand on my shoulder, that they've staged this for me as much as for her. The one who got out, made to watch the one she left behind go under. A lesson. A breaking.
Here's what they got wrong.
They think I'm the rabbit. They've always thought I'm the rabbit — the one that panics, the one that runs, the one the world out there grinds down until she comes home grateful for the fence. They think watching Grace will remind me what I am.
It reminds me what I'm not.
I am not the girl who got in the van. I am not the girl who went over the fence and left her behind and spent ten years calling it survival.
I am the woman who built a life out of the ash of this place with her own two hands, who taught a girl named Megan never to let a man get between her and the door, who put one of their professionals down in the sage three hours ago and is sorry only that it was one and not five.
I came back knowing. And knowing is the one thing they never, ever caught me holding.
The Elder lifts the cup of tea toward Grace.
And I turn.
I come up out of that chair and I take the half second the Brother behind me wastes on surprise — they never plan for the woman who moves, my father taught me that, freezing is what they're counting on, kiddo — and I'm across the Prayer House before the cup reaches her mouth, and I knock it out of the Elder's hand, and it shatters on the plank floor and the tea goes dark across the wood, and I put myself between Grace and the table.
The room comes apart in shouting. Hands grab for me. I don't care. I get Grace's face in both my hands and I make her look at me, really look, past the calm they built, down to the fourteen-year-old who chewed her cuffs because some animal part of her always knew.
"Don't drink the tea," I tell her. Four words.
The same words a brave girl handed me across a hundred pounds of potatoes when I was eighteen, the words that bought my whole life.
I give them to Grace the way Hannah gave them to me, fast, certain, with everything I've got, while the Brothers haul at my arms. "Don't drink the tea, Grace.
None of it is holy. The road isn't twenty miles.
It's eight. There are people who will come for you — say no, and hold on, and don't you drink one drop, because I got out and so can you, and I am not leaving here without you this time. "
I don't know if it lands. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is moving and I can't tell if it's prayer or my name or nothing at all.
But for one second, one, something flickers in the peaceful blank of her face — the same flicker I felt the night I picked up a phone I'd known by heart for four years — and a girl who's been certain her whole life looks, for the first time, unsure.
That flicker is everything. That flicker is the fence coming down.
They drag me off her. It takes three of them and I make every one of them work for it, and Silas is shouting something about the cell and Agnes has stopped humming for the first time in my memory of her, and I am not the panicked rabbit, I am the rabbit that turned, that stood, that put her own body between the table and the girl and will not be moved off it without being carried?—
And that's when the night comes apart.
Not gunfire, first. Light. The window of the Prayer House goes white, and then there's a sound I haven't heard in ten years and Cole has heard ten thousand times — the flat crack of a perimeter being breached, close, and then another, and then the dark outside the lit window is full of engines and shouting and the particular chaos of men who walk a fence line for forty years suddenly meeting men who do something else for a living.
Somebody kills the lights. In the half-second of dark before the shouting turns to running, I get Grace's hand and I get Hannah up off the wall with my other arm, and I put us all three in the corner that has two walls at our backs and one way in, because I know three ways into any room and tonight I only need to hold the one.
The freight train's here. I can feel it before I can see it, the way I've felt one thing coming before I could see it since the morning a dead truck crawled up Main Street with a man in the passenger seat who read the town like I read it.
He came. Of course he came. I told him he was a warm wall in a bad month and I made him look down and I handed his own love word back like a coin, and he came anyway, because I was lying and he knew it and he is exactly the kind of man who walks through a lie to get to the truth on the other side.
I get my back to the wall and the girls behind me and my eyes on the only door, and I am done running, I am done walling, I am thirty years old and standing in the belly of the thing that made me and I have never once been less afraid?—
"Cole," I say, to the dark, to the chaos, to the freight train coming down the only track there is.
"I'm here," I say to Grace, to Hannah, to the both of them shaking against my back. "Hold on. He's here. We're getting out. All of us. This time, all of us."