But here is the thing that matters, the thing that made the man I love:
Lazarus was old enough to remember her leaving.
He’d have been seven, eight. Old enough to watch a mother choose the door. Old enough to stand at a window, he was always at a window, at a doorway, at the edge of a leaving, and watch the car go down the black hill in the snow and understand, with a child’s terrible clarity, that the person whose whole job was to keep you had looked at the danger and saved herself and left you inside it.
You want to know where the wall really comes from? Before the three knocks, before Iris’s fever, before me? It comes from an eight-year-old boy watching his mother’s taillights go down a mountain. Because a child learns exactly one lesson from that, and it’s the lesson Lazarus built his entire self around todisprove:the ones who are supposed to save you, leave. They look at the worst thing and they save themselves. So if anyone in this house is ever going to be saved, it can’t be by someone who’s allowed to leave. It has to be by someone who decides, on purpose, never to.
He chose to be the opposite of his mother. That’s the whole man, right there. She left through a doorway; he made himself into a body that stands in one and does not move. She saved herself and abandoned the children; he gave up his sleep, his freedom, his name, his whole life, and abandoned no one, not Iris, not me, not even, in the end, his monster of a brother. The thing the town called dangerous in him, the thing the court called controlling, the immovability, theI will put my body in this door and nothing comes through, that wasn’t his father in him. Everyone always assumed the darkness in Lazarus was Augustus. It wasn’t. The darkness in Lazarus was his mother’s taillights, and the vow an abandoned little boy made at a cold window:I will be the one who stays. I will be the wall the leaving can’t get past. I will never, ever look at someone I love and save myself instead.
And Iris. Poor Iris drew her once. I told you about the notebook, the tin behind the baseboard, a woman drawn from the back, beautiful, in a coat, and from the front just a blank oval, a face with nothing in it. I thought at first it was a child’s poor drawing. It wasn’t. Iris was too young when their mother left to have kept the face. She could draw the leaving, the back of a beautiful woman in a coat, walking away, that she remembered, that’s the pose that burned in, but not the face, because the face never turned around. That’s the cruelest small thing in that whole cruel house. A little girl who could draw her mother’s departure in perfect detail and her mother’s face not at all.
So when people ask me, and they will, when all of this is finally a story other people get to tell, why I chose Lazarus Frost, the convicted one, the dark one, the one any sensible woman would run from, I think the truest answer is the one underneath all the others:
Because we were both children of taillights going down a mountain in the snow. Because we both got taught, before we were old enough to spell it, that the warm thing leaves. And because we each built an opposite armor out of the same wound. I built a wall of needing no one, of owing no one, of refusing to be the kind of person whose leaving could hurt anybody; and he built a wall of staying, of standing in every doorway, of being the one who never, ever goes.
Two children of leaving. One who became expert at being left, and one who swore he’d never do the leaving.
Of course I climbed over everyone to get to him. He was the first person in my whole life who felt like a door that wouldn’t close on its own. I’d spent my entire existence learning that everyone leaves, and then there was a boy on a staircase whose entire self was a vow that he wouldn’t, and I was a stray, and a stray takes the one door that stays open even when she’s sure it’s a trap, even when she’s been trained her whole life to know the open door is bait.
It wasn’t bait. That’s the thing none of us could believe, him least of all. For once in the whole bought, measured, abandoned history of both our lives —
the door that stayed open was just a door that stayed open.
And the boy standing in it had been practicing, since he was eight years old at a cold window, for someone exactly like me to finally walk through.
CHAPTER 18
WREN —Then
Nine years ago.
Between twelve and eighteen there was the wall, and there were the three knocks, and there was the slow education of learning that one person in the world had decided I was worth standing in front of.
I want to put down, before I get to the ignition and the fire and everything that burned, what those years were actually made of, because the court never asked, and the town never knew, and even Lazarus, who lived them on the other side of the plaster, only ever heard his half. Somebody should keep the record straight. He kept me alive for six years before he ever touched me. That’s the part that matters. That’s the part I buried under a grey dress.
The three knocks were our whole language. We almost never spoke through the wall, speaking left evidence, and Marrowfield had ears, we both knew it had ears though we didn’t yet know how literally, so we built a grammar out of knuckles on plaster. Three slow knocks from his side:I’m here. I’m awake.Two quick from mine:I’m all right.One, alone, late, when the footsteps came up the hall and stopped outside my door and the bolt was the only thing between me and the soft church voice on the other side, one knock from me, and three slow ones back, every time, without fail, for six years:Make him come through me first.
And the footsteps would move on. Always. As long as Lazarus was awake on the other side of the wall, and he was always awake, that was the terrible gift of what was wrong with him, the footsteps moved on.
The night I was fifteen, they didn’t.
It was snowing. It’s always snowing. Augustus had been into the decanter all evening, and there’s a particular quality to a drunk man’s footsteps, a deliberateness, the walk of someone who has decided something and is going to be reasonable about it, and I lay in the dark with my hand flat on the wall and heard them come up the hall and not slow down, not even pretend to pass, come straight to my door and try the handle. The bolt held. I’d thrown the bolt, the high one, the one he forgot when he was sober and remembered when he wasn’t. I knocked once on the wall, hard.
There were no knocks back.
For the length of one heartbeat the whole world was the bolt rattling and the silence where Lazarus should have answered, and I understood, fifteen years old, in a dead girl’s bed, with the handle turning, that the one rule of my survival had a flaw in it. He had to be awake. And even a man who doesn’t sleep, sometimes, after years, just for an hour, when his body finally mutinies —
The door across the hall opened.
I heard it the way you hear your own name in a crowd. Lazarus’s bare feet on the cold boards, fast, and then his voice, low and even and absolutely without fear, the voice he’d use six yearslater over my pulse in the dark:“Father.”Just that. And the handle of my door stopped turning.
I won’t write what happened in the hall. I didn’t see it; I only heard it, with my back against the bolted door and both hands over my mouth, the low exchange, the sounds, the particular awful music of a large man deciding to spend his violence on the son who’d put himself in the doorway instead of the girl behind it. It went on a while. Augustus Frost was a coward, but cowards are brave with the things that let them be brave, and a twenty-year-old who won’t raise a hand back is exactly the kind of thing a coward can be brave with.
When it stopped, when the footsteps finally went away down the hall, slower now, sated, a man who’d had his evening. I unthrew the bolt with shaking hands and I opened my door and Lazarus was sitting on the floor of the hall with his back against the wall and his face wrong in the dark, and he looked up at me and he smiled, he actually smiled, blood on his teeth, and he said the thing I have never told another living soul, the thing that built the next nine years of my life:
“See? Told you. It goes through me first.”
I got him into my room. I bolted the door. I sat him on the floor of a dead girl’s bedroom and I cleaned his face with the hem of a dead girl’s nightgown and water from the jug, and he let me, this enormous quiet boy who never let anyone do anything for him, he let me hold his ruined face in my hands and tend it, and somewhere in the middle of it the thing between us became the thing it would always be, not romance, not then, we were children and he was careful to the bone, but something underneath romance, something older, the thing that romanceis supposed to be built on top of and almost never is.I will stand in the doorway. You will clean my face. Neither of us will ever be entirely alone in the dark again.
