I search her face for something,anything, to tell me she’s lying, to me or to herself.
“Kit, you have to know—”
“No,” she says, an echo of her brother.“I don’t.”
She’s right—she doesn’t have to listen to me, to my explanation about Jasper, about how I’d told him stuff about Singh before I was involved with her, before I knew where this was going. Here, in this place, I doubt she cares, or at least I doubt she can let herself care, not until her father is out of the woods.
“Just let me be here with you. I’m so worried—”
“You know what, Ben? I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry that you’re worried. I know that’s hard. But this isn’t about you. This is something that’s going on with me, and I get to pick who I want to have around. I get to choose. And it’s not you. It’s really, really not.”
“I’ll do anything,” I say.“I’ll wait outside, if you want, or I’ll—what if I check into a hotel? And you can call, if you want to—” It’s me who breaks off here, something cruel twisting in my chest. This is familiar—I have done this before. I have begged this way before, a long time ago, and it was the worst day of my life, worse than the day I got arrested. Half of me doesn’t care—half of me wants to keep going with this until I’ve lost any shred of dignity I have left. But the other half of me? Something ices over, a soft frost, and I feel my spine straighten.
Kit looks at me, hard, a flash of something in those dark eyes. But then she lowers them, shakes her head slowly from side to side.“I’m not going to want to. I don’t think—I’m not going to want to see you again, okay? What happened with Beaumont, and Dr. Singh, that’s really terrible, and I’m going to have to sort through that later, when things are…” She doesn’t finish this thought, and I know why. There’s a sort of superstition that steals over you when you’re in the hospital with someone you love. You’re always looking for wood to knock on, always wanting to saydon’t jinx itto any doctor or nurse who promises recovery. Her chin trembles for a split second, and I reach for her, instinctively, but she turns her body just so. Just so that I can’t get near her.“But I don’t have to sort through much to know that I can’t trust you,” she says.“And right now—all I’ve got energy for is the people I can trust.”
I can feel it, right then, my throat closing up—not for me. It’s for her, for the way she looks so small, and so in pain. I swallow, once, twice, to force the feeling down, and it’s ugly, the feeling that replaces it. That soft frost, it’s hardening into something else, something I don’t want Kit to see. I’m rooted to the spot, though. Looking at her, I can’t bear the thought of walking away and leaving her here.
But I don’t have to.
Because Kit walks away from me.
* * * *
Someone other than me, someone with a bit more optimism, or someone who didn’t actually see that look in Kit’s eyes when she saw me, may have stuck around, waited it out. But not me.
I don’t get a hotel room. I don’t stay overlong at the airport.
I go back home.
It feels like it’s been the longest day, like it should already be tomorrow, but Jasper’s call had come in early this morning, and in the end, I’m off my last flight before midnight. I don’t drive home right away, though. I drive to the salvage yard. At this time of night, it’s as dark and menacing as all the kids used to think it was. I let myself in, disable the alarm, and head straight back to the office, where I’ve been working on the Baltic chandelier. It’s maybe half assembled now, the largest pieces in place so that it can hang straight from the hook I’ve put it on. Every day I’ve been here, I’ve worked a bit on assembling more of it.
What I want to do, what my instinct is: to pick up the baseball bat my dad keeps under his desk—from before he had an alarm for this place—and smash this chandelier to hell. To watch all the pieces shatter, hear the sound they would make, feel the crunch of them under my boots.
What I do instead is take it off its hook, less gingerly than I should, and carry it upstairs to the east wing, the graveyard, where I first found it. I don’t bother rehanging it. I set it on the floor, its layers collapsing into themselves, the prisms tinkling against each other, against the ground. I go back to the office, pick up the tray of spare pieces I have gathered on the workbench, and carry this upstairs too. Again, I resist an urge—to scatter these all over, to make it next to impossible to find all the pieces again in this mess. Instead, I set the tray beside the broken-bodied chandelier. Maybe River will come up here sometime, find it, and start in on it instead of me.
I stand in that room for a long time. And I don’t do anything but live out all my aggression in my head. In here, there’s tons of stuff to destroy, to smash up, to grind into dust. My body is still, but coiled—I can imagine the release I’d feel in picking up those window frames, breaking them over the top of the dresser in the corner. I can hear the wood split, can feel splinters that would go into my hands and arms from the impact. I could tip that dresser right over, and it would make the most satisfyingthudon this floor. It would shake everything in here. It would feel really, really good.
But I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t been that person in years and years.
Still, I can’t shake the sense that what I did with Kit was pretty close to what I’m imagining—I smashed up the room of her, of us. I went in reckless that first time I’d met her, and I’d been reckless about my involvement with her—I waited too long to get myself off her case. I didn’t tell Jasper enough when I finally did. I fell too fast, too hard, told her I loved her too soon. I barreled into that hospital, didn’t have the right things to say. I acted like the brash, feckless kid I’d grown up being, that I’d worked hard to leave behind.
After a while, I go back down the steps, reset the alarm, lock up. I’m so tired that I hardly remember the drive back to my dad’s, but I’m dreading getting into bed, closing my eyes and seeing Kit there. So it’s a minor relief that my dad’s waited up—I may not feel ready for talking, but at least it gives me an excuse to put off the tossing and turning I’m sure to do all night.
He’s in the recliner. He’s got the TV tray of clock pieces pulled up again, but this time, he’s using both hands—the left one’s shaky, pale, a little smaller than the other one, but other than this, Dad looks almost like his old self, as if I’ve never been here at all.
Fitting.
“Up late,” I say.
“That’s my line, kid.”
I sit on the couch across from him, scrape a hand down my face.“I fucked up, Dad.”
“Let’s hear it,” he says, keeping his eyes on his clock pieces, his hands busy.
I give him an abbreviated version—what I’d told Jasper about Kit and Dr. Singh when I’d still been working on her case, what Jasper had done with the information without telling me first, what Kit thinks now about me and her, about why I’ve been with her.“Now her dad’s sick, and today I—I flew all the way there, tried to be with her. I tried to tell her it wasn’t me who did this, with Beaumont, but…”
“She’s probably not in the mood to hear that,” he says, matter-of-fact.“Probably she’s too worried about her dad to hear anything you’ve got to say.”
