The bummer lambs first, because they were first, three of them now, fat and ungrateful and shoving at my pockets, and I get down in the straw and let them climb on me the way they do, and I press my face into the lanolin warmth of them and I tell them they were good, they were always good, that being unwanted by the ewe was never anything they did wrong, that I’d have chosen them every time. I’m crying into a lamb. There are worse ways to spend your last morning.
The chickens somebody dumped in a box at my gate, half-feathered and furious and alive because a man with murderer’s hands breathed them back to warm one night in a storm. The barn cats, who don’t come when called and never have and are exactly right not to, who trust no one and survive everything, who are the most honest creatures I’ve ever known because they love you only as much as you’ve actually earned, which in my case is a wary distance and a willingness to be fed. I respect that. I’ve lived that. I leave them an extra week of kibble in a chew-proof bin and I tell the orange one, who hates me least, to look after the others, which he won’t, which is the point.
And last, the goat. The doe and her kid, the kid that came into the lamplight in a rush of impossible alive while a man held his enormous careful hands over my smaller ones and saidnothing dies tonight that we can stop from dying.The one Lazarus saved. The one that shouldn’t have lived and did. I stand in that pen for a long time with the kid butting at my knees, and I think: that’s the whole thing, isn’t it. That’s the entire argument of my life in one warm stall. Everyone I’ve ever known thought the lesson of a place like Marrowfield wasnothing survives, everything gets taken, the dark always wins.And here’s a goat that should be dead, alive and stupid and headbutting my shins, because two people who’d both been told their whole lives that they were monsters knelt in the straw and decided, together, that this one small thing was going to live.
That’s what I’m walking up the mountain to do tonight. One more time. For the biggest stray of all, a girl I carried out of a fire and told to disappear, who’s out there in the dark right now not knowing that the dark is coming for her, the way it came for all of them, the way it came for me. Nobody came for me. I had to build my own door out of a sleepless boy. Nobody’s coming for her either.
So I’m going to be the one who comes.
I put my forehead against the doe’s rough warm flank and I let myself, for exactly one minute, grieve the life I’m probably not coming back to, the troughs I might not fill again, the spring lambs I might not pull, the slow safe boring beautiful nothing of a woman alone at the bottom of a hill with a barn full of the saved. It was a good life. It was the first thing I ever built that was only mine, that I didn’t owe anybody for, and I lovedit, and I’m leaving it the way the warm things always leave, except for once —for once. I’m the one choosing the door, and I’m choosing it to gotowardsomeone instead of away, and that makes it the opposite of every leaving that ever made me.
My mother left to save herself. The Frost mother left to save herself. Everyone in my whole story who ever walked out a door did it to get themselves clear of the danger.
I’m walking into mine.
That’s the difference. That’s the only inheritance I’m taking up that mountain. Not Augustus’s, not the bought-girl’s, not the victim’s, not the liar’s.
Iris’s. The one who stayed to count. The one who refused to let it happen quietly.
I wipe my face on my sleeve. I hear the shower shut off up at the house. I have about ninety seconds to be soft and saved and lying again, ninety seconds to fold all of this back down into the warm false calm of a woman who’s agreed to handle Silastogether,on Thursday, like a partner instead of a sacrifice.
I take one last look down the row of them, the lambs, the cats, the chickens, the goat that lived, every throwaway thing the world gave up on and handed to me to keep, and I say the only prayer I’ve got, which is the same as Lazarus’s, which is just a list of the names of what I love:
Be warm. Be fed. Be here when somebody finally comes. And if it isn’t me, if I don’t come back down this hill, then know that the last thing I did with my hands before I walked into the dark was make sure you’d be all right without me.
Then I turn off the barn light, and I go back up to the house to lie to the man I love for the last day of my life.
It’s the longest night of the year.
I’ve got until midnight.
CHAPTER 35
WREN
The longest night of the year comes in on a storm.
I’ve had two days to be the best lie of my life, and I’ve spent them well. I’ve been soft. I’ve beensaved.I let Lazarus believe he won the argument in the blazing light; I let him fold himself around me at night and I matched my breathing to his on purpose, in, and out, the metronome, the thing he came back from the dead for, and I felt him go under each night a little easier, a little deeper, six years of debt finally setting down its weight beside me. He sleeps now. That’s the thing I gave him. That’s the thing that’s going to let me leave.
There’s a particular cruelty in it that I’ll carry to my grave: the only reason I can get away from a man who reads me through walls is that I taught him, at last, how to sleep.
By eleven the storm has the whole town shut and white and roaring, and Lazarus is under, deep, slack, his arm a warm bar across me, his breath slow against the back of my neck. I lie awake and listen to it the way he used to listen to mine, and I memorize it, because I know what I’m about to spend, I know exactly what it costs, and I make myself pay it with my eyes open.In. And out.The quietest the world has ever been for either of us.
Then I slide out from under the only safe thing I’ve ever known, and I leave it sleeping, and I go to end this.
I take the music box. I don’t fully know why. It feels like mine now. It feels like the only witness I trust.
The truck won’t make the pass, nothing will, the plows gave up hours ago, so I walk, up Cradle Hill into the teeth of it, the snow sideways and stinging, Eli’s heavy flashlight in my coat and the brass box in my fist, and the cold is enormous and clean and it scours six years of careful nothing out of me with every step. I think about leaving a note. I don’t. A note is just telling the dark where you’re going. I think about Lazarus waking to an empty bed, to the absence of the one sound that ever quieted him, and I understand that the silence will tell him everything a note could and faster, that he’ll come awake into a world gone quiet the wrong way and he’llknow,the way I’d know, and he’ll come. I’m counting on the head start. I’m counting on a storm that even a wolf has to walk through.
Marrowfield is where it has always been: at the top of the black hill, above the town, above the snow line, where nothing ever walked across the lawn.
Except it isn’t a house anymore.
Six years of weather have been into the bones of it. The fire took the roof and most of the upper floors and left a black ribcage open to the storm, beams like burnt fingers against a sky the color of an old bruise, snow sifting down through the gaps into rooms that no longer have ceilings. The grand hall where Augustus crouched to take my chin is a roofless box fullof drifted white. The third-floor landing where I turned a dead girl’s photograph to face the world is gone, just gone, fallen into the dark below. Only the east wing still stands, of course it does, the worst part always outlasts the rest, squat and scorched and stubborn at the end of the ruin, one black window lit from inside with a low amber light, like an eye that’s been left open.
He’s waiting for me in the one room that wouldn’t burn.
I climb through the wreck of my whole adolescence, through the snow and the char, and I push open the warped door of the east wing, and there is Silas Frost, sitting at his dead father’s desk in a circle of lantern light with the cassette tape squared neatly in front of him on the scorched wood, and behind him on the wall. I see it now, I see why this is the room he chose, there is a recorder. An old reel machine, wired to the wall, the kind of thing a documentarian keeps. Salvaged. Cleaned. Waiting.
