“You shouldn’t be here,” he says. Rough. He hasn’t used his voice tonight. The cold pours off the open door and the warm pours out behind him and I stand in the seam between them, shaking, and not from the weather.
“Neither should you. In this town. In my life.” My breath rags out white. “I want the name, Lazarus. The one you swallowed at the fence. The ghost. The family thing.” I take a step up. He doesn’t retreat and he doesn’t reach. “I am so tired of everyone deciding what I can hold. You looked right at me and you ate the name to protect me and I amdonebeing protected into a fool. Who sent you. Say it.”
For a long moment there’s nothing but the snow ticking down and the two of us breathing in the dark, falling, against my will and his, into the same rhythm, in, and out, in, and out, the metronome, twelve years of it, the body’s memory louder than any rule, and I watch him fight it, watch him fight the thing in him that wants to close the five feet and the thing in him that swore it never would.
“If I say it,” he says, low, “you’ll do something with it. You’ll go looking. That’s what you are, you can’t leave a sealed door sealed, you never could, it’s the most dangerous and the most beautiful thing about you and it is going to get you killed, and I just got you back.” His hand comes up, not to touch me, he holdsit in the cold air between us, open, trembling, a man showing a wild animal he’s not armed — “Ask me for anything else. Ask me to leave town. Ask me to turn myself in. I’ll do it tonight. Don’t ask me for the one thing that sends you walking toward him.”
“Him.” I’m close enough now that the warm of the doorway reaches me. Close enough to see the six years in his face, the wanting, the restraint that costs him blood. “So it is a him. So I’m right.” I am so close. The line is right there, the last wall, five feet of honored rule, and I want to walk through it the way I walked through his bedroom door at eighteen, and I can see in his face that he knows it, that he’s holding still the way you hold still for the thing you want most so you don’t frighten it off. “Lazarus. Tell me the name, or —”
“Or what.” Barely a breath. “You’ll come up here and take it out of me? You’ll cross the line you drew? You’ll put your hand on my face the way you did on the stairs and make me choose between the order and your mouth?” His jaw works. “Don’t.Please.Because I’ll choose your mouth, Wren, I’ll choose it every single time, that’s not in question, it’s never been in question, but if I break the line, I become the man you told them I was, and then they’re right, and then everything I’ve held for twelve years was for nothing, and I would rather stand in this doorway and burn alive wanting you than hand the world the proof that you were telling the truth about me. Soyoudecide.” His open hand, in the cold, an inch from my cheek and not closing it. “You always decide. That’s the only thing I’ve got left that’s clean. Come up, or go down. But I’m not crossing it. Not even for this.Especiallynot for this.”
And there it is, the whole unbearable architecture of us, laid bare in five feet of freezing air. He won’t take. He never takes. Hehas built his entire self around the refusal to be the hand that reaches, and the cruelty of it is that it leaves every single thing up to me, it makes me the wolf, it always made me the wolf. I’m the one who climbs on, I’m the one who crosses, I’m the one who turns the photograph around and walks up the hill and stands one inch from the only person who ever loved me and has to decide, alone, in the cold, whether to be saved or to be free.
I want to close the inch.
God, I want to close the inch. My whole body is one long lean toward the warm and the man and the twelve years, and his hand is right there, open, shaking, and all I have to do is tip my face the last inch into his palm and the line comes down and we go down with it.
I take a step back instead.
Down the hill. Into the cold. Away.
Because if I close it tonight, if I cross his line in the dark up here, on his threshold, on his terms even though he swears they’re mine, then it happens his way, in the shadow, a secret, the wolf and the lamb in the dark where no one can see, exactly the way Augustus wanted everything kept. And I have spent four days learning one new thing about myself in the wreckage of all the old ones:
When I finally go to him, and I’m going to, we both know I’m going to, the only question left in the world is when; I’m going to do it in thelight.In my own house. With my own porch lamp blazing like a struck match for the whole town to see, no secret, no shadow, no shame. Not because I’m brave. Because the darkis his father’s country, and the dark is where I made him a monster, and the only way I know to un-make it is to choose him somewhere there’s nothing to hide in.
“Goodnight, Lazarus,” I say, from the bottom of his walk, in the snow, five hundred feet reasserting itself between us with every step.
He stands in the lit doorway with his open hand still raised to an empty inch of cold air, and he doesn’t beg, and he doesn’t follow, and he watches me go the way he’s watched me my whole life, like I’m the only thing in the world, and like he’d rather lose me than cage me, both at once, the impossible arithmetic of him.
“Goodnight, little lamb,” he says.
And then, soft, just before I’m out of range, the thing that decides it, the thing that has my hand on the porch switch before I’ve even reached the bottom of the hill:
“Turn the light on whenever you’re ready. I’ll be cold until you do.”
CHAPTER 10
WREN
There’s an old woman on the way down off Lazarus’s hill, and she’s the reason I learned that there had been witnesses all along, just never the kind anybody asks.
Lazarus rents his room from Pauline Pruitt, who has lived in the squat stone house at the foot of Cradle Hill for longer than I’ve been alive, longer than the Frosts owned the top of it, longer than Hartsend has had a paved road running through it. She’s eighty if she’s a day, built like a fence post, with a face like something carved out of the mountain by weather that gave up trying to wear her down. I’d seen her my whole time in this town, at Merle’s, at the post office, that flinty unbothered presence at the edge of every gathering, and I’d never once spoken to her, because she’s not the sort of woman who invites it, and because I’m not the sort of woman who risks it.
But the night I climbed his hill for the name and came down again with my hand already on a porch switch I hadn’t thrown yet, she was out on her porch in the cold dark in a man’s wool coat, splitting kindling with a hatchet at an hour no eighty-year-old has any business swinging a hatchet, and she looked at me coming down off her own rented hill at midnight, and she said, without stopping the hatchet:
“You’re the Mercer girl. The one from up top.” Athunkinto the block. “The one he came down the mountain for.”
I stopped. The whole town has a way of sayingthe one from up top, the Frost house, the survivor, poor Wren, careful Wren, with that warm suffocating pity. She didn’t say it that way. She said it the way you’d note the weather. A fact about the mountain.
“He pays on time,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “and he carries my wood in, and he shovels out my husband’s old truck every morning like it’s a church chore, and he doesn’t sleep, which I know because I don’t either, and an old woman and a man who can’t sleep get to know each other’s lamps across a yard.”Thunk.“Town thinks I’m a fool for renting to him. Town can mind its own porch.”
“You’re not afraid of him,” I said. It came out before I could stop it.
She straightened up then, slow, both hands on the hatchet handle, and she looked at me with eyes that had been watching that black hill above us for sixty winters, and she said the thing that rearranged my whole understanding of the country I grew up dying in.
“Girl, I watched that family longer than the law ever bothered to. I was down here at the bottom of this hill the whole time they were up at the top of it being whatever they were. And I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of, and it isn’t him.” She set the hatchet down. “I’m afraid of how many girls I watched go up that road over the years and never once watched come down. You understand me? A house like that, on a hill like this, for forty years, you live at the bottom of it long enough, you start counting the cars that go up. The pretty wards. The quiet little visitors.Foster placements,the county called them, when the county called them anything. Up they’d go in the social worker’s sedan, all of them with that same look, and I’d see them at the fence for a season, a year, and then one day the old man’d come down to the post office and mention, real sorrowful, that the girl had run off, ungrateful thing, and nobody —nobody,in fifty years, ever once asked Pauline Pruitt at the bottom of the hill whether she’d seen a child walk down that road. Because a child didn’t. I’d have seen it. I see everything that comes off that mountain.” Her jaw worked. “I counted them going up. I never got to count a one of them coming down. And I told myself it wasn’t my place, and I was a coward, and now I’m old and they’re all gone and the only thing I can do about any of it is rent a warm room to the one Frost who ever tried to get a girldownthat hill instead of keeping her up it.”
I stood in her yard in the cold and I could not breathe, because I was hearing Iris’s tin read back to me in an old woman’s voice.Annie. Marguerite. Sophie. Dorothea.The girls who went up and never came down. Iris counted them from inside the house, in a child’s pencil, in a tin. And Pauline Pruitt counted them from the bottom of the hill, in cars going up that never came down, for fifty years, and the two of them, a doomed child and a flinty old widow, were the only two people in the entire history of that mountain who ever kept the count, and neither of them was ever, once, asked.
