I traced her warning every night for five more years. And when it all finally burned, the one thing Lazarus carried out of the fire, the one small thing he saved while a house full of evidence went up, was a little brass music box that played those same six notes, because his father had owned one, because the song lived in a wind-up drum as well as in a man’s throat, and Lazarus could not stand to let the last copy of his sister’s stolen lullaby burn even though it was the worst sound either of us knew.
That’s the box on my coat right now, six years later, as I write this. The deciding song, in brass, that I have learned to wind with my own hand.
I think about that a great deal. About the difference between a song that’s hummed at you and a song you wind yourself. About the fact that the same six notes that were a man’s verdict over a child can become, if you take the key in your own fingers, just a sound. Just a sad pretty sound a dead girl loved before she knew to be afraid of it.
I don’t know yet, writing this, whether I’ll ever make it mean the second thing.
But I know I’m done letting it only mean the first.
CHAPTER 16
WREN —Then
Eleven years ago.
He took the song back for me one night, years before I learned to wind it myself. He took the name back for me too, and that one I can date exactly, because it’s the night I stopped being a thing in that house and started being a person to one single soul in it.
You have to understand whatlambmeant in that house before Lazarus got to it. Augustus said it. That’s the part I’ve never told anyone, the part that turns my stomach even now. He called us his lambs, all of us, every girl who came up that hill, in the soft church voice, at the dinner table, over our bowed heads like grace.My lambs. My little lambs.He’d rest a hand on the back of a girl’s chair and say it fond, benevolent, the good shepherd surveying his fold, and you’d feel it land in your stomach like a swallowed stone, because we all knew, the way prey knows, that a shepherd doesn’t keep a flock out of love. A shepherd keeps a flock because a flock isforsomething. Lambs aren’t pets. Lambs are inventory. Lambs are the soft, dumb, valuable things you raise gentle and feed well and keep warm right up until the day you’ve decided about them, and then the same soft word that sounded like tenderness turns out to have been a price tag the whole time.Little lamb,in Augustus Frost’s mouth, meantlivestock. Mine. Bought. Bound for the day I choose.It was the buyer’s word. It belonged to the same vocabulary as the lullaby and the measuring look and the cameras nobody found. It wasthe pastoral language of a man who’d turned a house into an abattoir and called himself a shepherd.
So the first time I heard the word, at twelve, at that long cold table, I learned to flinch at it.Little lambwas the sound of being owned. I’d have told you it was the cruelest endearment in the language.
And then, one night when I was thirteen, not long after the deciding-song stopped outside my door, after Lazarus came through the wall, I was crying in the dark of Iris’s room, the helpless airless crying of a child who has finally understood the kind of place she lives in, and I heard the three knocks, soft,I’m awake, are you there,and I knocked back, and a minute later he was sitting on the floor of the hall outside my door, his back against it, the way he did when Father’s rules meant he couldn’t come in but his whole self refused to be anywhere else. Through the wood, low, that hallway voice, he asked me what was wrong, and I told him, all of it, the dinner, the hand on the chair, the word. That his father called us lambs and I finally understood what it meant. That I was livestock. That I’d been bought to be kept warm until somebody decided.
And Lazarus was quiet for a long time on the other side of the door. And then he said the thing that remade the word, and remade me, and that I will hear in his voice until the day I die:
“He doesn’t get the word,” he said. “He thinks because he says a thing, it means what he wants it to mean. He’s wrong. He said it about Iris too, and Iris wasn’t his to name, and neither are you.” A breath, through the wood. “A lamb isn’t livestock, Wren. That’s just the one thing his kind of man can see when he looks at something small. A lamb is the gentlest thing there is. It’sthe thing the whole story is aboutprotecting.When the wolves come, the whole point of everything, the shepherd, the dog, the fire, all of it, the whole point is that thelambgets to live. He’s got it exactly backwards, because men like him always do. He thinks the lamb is the thing you take. The lamb is the thing you’d die before you let anyone take.”
And then, even lower, like he was deciding something, like he was driving a stake into the ground of a house built on rot:
“So you’re not his lamb. You’re notanybody’slamb that way. But if you’ll let me, you can be mine. And mine doesn’t mean bought. Mine means there is going to have to be a wolf and a fire and the whole end of the world before anyone gets past me to you. Mine meanskept safe,notkept.You hear the difference? I’m taking the word off him. He doesn’t get it anymore. From now on when you hearlittle lambin this house it’s going to be in my voice, and it’s going to mean the opposite of everything he ever made it mean.”
I was thirteen. I sat on the floor on my side of the door with my hand flat against the wood where I knew his back was, and I didn’t have words for what he’d just done, and I don’t fully have them now. He’d reached into the worst word in my world, the buyer’s word, the price-tag word, the abattoir word, and he’d turned it inside out like a glove and handed it back to me clean. Same word. Opposite meaning.Little lamb:not the thing that gets taken. The thing that gets defended to the last man standing.
It’s the exact same thing I’d do for myself, years later, with the song: take the six notes off the dead man and learn to wind them with my own hand until they meant something a personcould survive. I learned that from him. I learned it on the floor of a hallway at thirteen. He showed me, before I was old enough to understand it, the one move that would eventually save my life: that the people who think they own you only own thefirstmeaning of a thing. The second meaning is always still available. You just have to be brave enough, or loved enough, to take it.
He called melittle lambfor the next five years through a wall, and it never once meant what his father meant. And he called melittle lambin the dark of my own living room six years after I buried him, the very first thing out of his mouth,Hello, little lamb,and I understood even in my terror that he was telling me something:I still have the word. He never got it back. It still means kept safe. It still means there’ll be a wolf and a fire and the end of the world first. Six years in a cage didn’t make me give it back to him.
That’s the title of my whole life, if my life were a book somebody dared to write.
Not the buyer’s lamb. Not the livestock, not the bought thing, not the soft dumb valuable creature raised warm for the day somebody decided.
His. The other way. The kept-safe way.
The lamb the whole story is about getting out alive.
CHAPTER 17
WREN —Then
Across all the years.
There were two mothers who made me and Lazarus, and neither of us ever got to keep ours, and I think in the end that’s the first language we ever spoke to each other, the grammar of the left-behind, long before we had a wall or a knock or a name for it.
Mine I’ve told you. A temperature that went cold. A closed door. A man’s voice saying she was sleeping. Six years old and already learning that the warm thing leaves and doesn’t come back.
His I had to assemble out of the house, the way I assembled everything true in that place, out of the spaces where a person used to be. There was a woman in the Frost family before I came, before Iris died, before any of it: a mother. She’d married into that cold enormous house the way women married into money in places like this, and she’d given Augustus three children, and then, somewhere in there, she had understood something about the man she’d married or the house she’d married into, understood something she could not afterward un-understand, and she had left.
Without them. That’s the part that lived in that house like a draft you couldn’t find the source of. She didn’t take the children. She got herself out, and I’ve thought about it a great deal, in the years since, what it must take, what a woman must have seen torun from a house and leave three children in it with the thing she was running from, and I’ve landed, finally, on not judging her, because I have stood in a burning room and chosen who got carried out and who got left, and I know now that sometimes you only have arms enough for the escape itself. Maybe Augustus had the money and the lawyers and would have buried her if she’d tried to take them. Maybe she told herself they’d be fine, that his cruelty would never turn on his own blood, that a mother’s leaving was survivable in a way she herself no longer was. Maybe she was just a frightened woman who saved the one life she could reach, which was her own. I don’t know. Nobody ever asked her, either. She’s another uncounted witness, another person who saw and got out and never said. This whole story is made of them.
