“They put me there.”
“I know. I heard.” He tipped his head, and the moonlight off the snow outside found the side of his face, and I saw that he was beautiful too, the same terrible church-beautiful as his father, except where Augustus’s beauty was a thing he used on you, Lazarus’s just sat there, unused, like a knife in a drawer. “You don’t sleep either,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was almost, and this is the part I have never been able to explain to anyone, the part that made the next twelve years possible, it was almostgrateful.Like he’d been alone with the not-sleeping his whole life and here, finally, was someone else awake in the dark.
“I sleep,” I lied.
“No, you don’t. I can hear you through the wall. You breathe like something that’s listening.” He said it the way you’d note the weather. Then he turned his head and looked at me, really looked, the first person in that whole frozen house to actually point his eyes at me instead of through me, and something happened behind his face that I was too young to name and too old to mistake for kindness. He wasdecidingsomething. About me. The way his father had turned my face up to the light and appraised it, except this was the opposite of that, this was a boy in a house full of things that broke deciding, very quietly, that this one wasn’t going to.
“Don’t go in the east wing,” he said. “Don’t be alone with him. When he’s drinking, go up to the nursery and lock it, the bolt’s high, he forgets it’s there. And if you hear me come down the hall at night, don’t be afraid.” A pause. The snow ticked against the glass. “I’m the only one in this house who isn’t going to hurt you.”
I should have asked about the rest of it. Abouthim,about the east wing, about the date that stopped on the doorframe, about why a stranger boy was awake at three in the morning watching a wall and warning a girl he’d known for four hours how to survive his own family. I didn’t. I was twelve and I was a stray and somebody had just handed me the first true map of the new world, and you don’t interrogate the only person who throws you a rope.
“Why are you helping me,” I said instead.
For the first time, he almost smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. Nothing ever reached his eyes; I’d learn that too.
“Because they brought you here for a reason,” he said, “and I don’t like their reasons. And because.” He stopped. Started again, lower, in a voice I would spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get out from under my skin. “Because the house has been so loud my whole life. And when you came up the stairs just now, I could hear you breathing, and for about ten seconds it was the quietest it’s ever been.”
He stood. He was very tall, even then. He looked down at me on the step below him, this skinny stray in a dead girl’s nightgown, and he gave me the name he’d keep me by for the next twelve years, the name he’d say in a warm dark living room six hundred and forty feet from a prison he’d serve for me, the name that would still fit when nothing else did.
“Goodnight, little lamb,” said Lazarus Frost.
And he went down the hall to his room, and I went back to mine, and I lay in a dead girl’s bed and listened to the wall betweenus, and somewhere on the other side of it, for the first time since they’d dragged me up that black hill, I heard a boy breathe out slow and easy and finally fall asleep.
I didn’t understand, then, what it meant. That I was the only thing in the world that could do that for him. That a starving thing, once it learns what feeds it, will tear down the whole house to get back to the table.
I found out the next morning what Iris Frost looked like.
There was one photograph still on the third-floor landing, in a silver frame turned to face the wall, somebody had turned it, somebody who couldn’t bear to look and couldn’t bear to throw it out, and I turned it back, because I’m a stray and a snoop and I wanted to know whose ghost I was sleeping inside of.
She had my face.
Not similar. Not the same type.My face.The same wren-brown hair, the same too-wide eyes, the same little chin Augustus had turned up to the light and tasted my name over.
And under the photo, in a child’s careful pencil, somebody had written the year she was born, and the year she died.
She was twelve.
The same as me.
That’s the morning I understood that the Frosts hadn’t chosen a stray out of generosity. They’d chosen one out ofmeasurements.Augustus Frost had gone looking through every file in three counties until he found a girl the exact shape of the daughterhe’d lost, and I have spent twelve years and one trial and six years of a man’s life trying not to know what a father wants with a brand-new copy of a dead twelve-year-old girl.
Down the hall, a floorboard creaked.
And from the dark mouth of the east wing, the one Lazarus told me never to enter, in the wing nobody used, in the house where nothing ever walked across the snow. I heard Augustus Frost begin, very softly, to hum.
The same lullaby that was scratched into the headboard of the bed I’d slept in.
CHAPTER 5
WREN
I don’t sleep.
This is not new; I am, by long and bitter practice, a woman who does not sleep, but there is a difference between the insomnia of a person who is alone and the insomnia of a person who knows, to the foot, exactly how far away the wolf is lying down. Six hundred and forty. I lie in the dark and I do the math I swore I’d never do again and I listen to the wall the way I trained myself out of listening years ago, and the worst thing, the thing I will take to my grave, is that some animal part of me is doing it on purpose. Reaching. Checking the line. Making sure he’s still there.
He’s still there. I can feel it the way you feel weather coming in your bad knee. Up the hill, in a house I can’t see, a man who hasn’t slept in six years is lying awake listening for my light to go out, and we are both pretending we are not doing the exact same thing.
I get up at five and I go to work in the dark because work is the only place the math doesn’t follow me.
