“Check, then,” I say, and I turn over in his arms to face him, and that’s all the invitation either of us needs.
The second time he doesn’t snap and he doesn’t rush. The frantic is spent; what’s left underneath it is worse, is the thing I have no defense against, slow, and reverent, and devastatingly patient, a man who waited twelve years and has decided to spend the next hour proving he knows how. He kisses his way down me like he’s reading something he memorized in the dark and is only now seeing in the light, naming each part of me with his mouth,mine,against my throat,mine,against my sternum where my heart is going too fast,mine,lower, until I’ve got two fists in his dark hair and I’ve forgotten there was ever a wall, a court, a grey dress, a single thing in the world that wasn’t this. He takes me apart slowly and he watches me the whole time, those church-cold eyes gone molten in the lamplight, drinking down every sound I make like he’s been thirsty for six years and I’m the only water left on earth.
When he finally moves over me again, slow, deep, deliberate, his forehead drops to mine and he says it like a vow, like the thing hecame back from the dead to say. “I’m never going to be able to let you go. You understand that. You’re not a thing I can put down once I’ve held it.” His hand splays over my heart again, reading, always reading. “Tell me you understand what you’re keeping. Tell me, and then I’ll give you everything that’s left of me, for as long as you’ll have it.”
“I understand,” I breathe. “I always understood. I climbed on anyway. I’ll always climb on anyway.”
And he gives me everything, slow and complete and ruinous, my name in his mouth like a prayer he’s finally allowed back in church for, the two of us moving together in the light like we’ve got all the time in the world and not a single thing climbing toward us through the snow, and when I come apart the second time it’s quieter, deeper, somewhere closer to weeping than to crying out, and he goes with me, breathing my name into my hair, shaking,kept.
After, he doesn’t let go. Of course he doesn’t. He gathers me up off the rug and carries me to the bed at last and folds the whole huge furnace of himself around me from behind, one arm bolted across me, his face in my hair, his breath slowing against the back of my neck, in, and out, in, and out, the metronome, the wall finally gone and nothing on the other side of it now but him, warm, here,kept.
“Sleep,” he murmurs, already going under, his voice thick with something I’ve never once heard in it. “I’ve got you. Nothing comes through me. Sleep, little lamb.”
And here is the thing I will remember when everything else is ash:
I sleep.
For the first time in six years, for the first time, maybe, since a height chart on a doorframe. I close my eyes in the dark beside another living thing and Isleep,deep and dreamless and safe, two ruined animals finally quiet, finally each other’s wall, and somewhere in the warm black of it I feel him go under too, feel the great tension drain out of him all at once, the not-sleeping of six years finally setting down its weight, and I think, helpless, falling:oh. Oh. This is what we cost the world. This.
I don’t know how long we sleep.
I only know what wakes me.
Not a sound, at first, the absence of one. The way you wake when a room you trusted changes. Lazarus is dead asleep against my back, heavy and slack, deeper under than I’ve ever felt him, six years of debt collected all at once. The lights are still on in the front room, throwing a long pale rectangle across the bedroom floor. The snow has stopped. The house is silent.
And then, from the dark of the front room, soft and patient and mechanical, six notes begin to climb.
And then six notes again.
The lullaby.
The music box is playing.
The music box that needs a hand to wind it. That sat dead on my counter all day. That neither of us has touched since the snow stopped.
Someone is in my house, in the dark, winding it.
And the only two people left alive who know what those six notes mean are both in this bed.
CHAPTER 28
WREN
I wake Lazarus with one hand flat on his chest and the other over his mouth, the way you’d wake a soldier, and his eyes open already awake, there’s no swim in them, no surfacing, he goes from dead-under to lethal in the space of a blink, and I understand that the man who slept beside me for the first time in six years was only ever sleeping the way a loaded thing sleeps.
I don’t have to say it. He hears the lullaby. I watch it land.
The six years drain out of his face and the church-cold comes down over it, the thing from the night on the stairs, the thing that walked toward his father and came back with blood on it. He puts his lips to my ear, soundless:“Behind me. The flashlight.”And he’s up, and he’s between me and the bedroom door before I’ve found my own feet, this enormous silent shape moving through the pale light from the front room, and I grab Eli’s heavy aluminum flashlight off the floor where I dropped it a lifetime and an hour ago, and I follow the wolf toward the music.
The front room is exactly as we left it. Every lamp burning. The rug still rucked where we, the music box on the counter where it sat dead all day.
Except now there’s a man in my armchair, winding it.
He’s got it open in his lap, the little brass works exposed, and he’s turning the key with the unhurried patience of someone who has all the time in the world and knows it, and when the six notes wind down he simply winds them up again, and he doesn’t look up at us, not right away, he lets us stand there in the doorway in the wreckage of the best hour of my life and listen to the worst sound in it.
“Hello, big brother,” he says to the music box. “Hello, little lamb.”
Little lamb.In Augustus’s voice. In the father’s exact soft church cadence, coming out of a younger mouth, and the years fall away and I’m twelve again on a staircase and I want to be sick.
