Page 29 of Run Rabbit Run

I want all of it intact.

Because there's no cruelty in breaking something that was already broken when it got to you. Any brute can do that.

My father was a brute.

He broke anything soft and called it discipline, broke my mother over the course of twenty years the way water breaks stone, so slowly you could tell yourself you were watching love.

I learned two lessons in that house before I was grown.

The first was that the world takes what you let it take.

The second, the one I've never told a living soul, is that my father was a small man doing a small ugly thing badly, and that if you're going to take a person apart, there's a right way and a wrong way, and he never once found the right one.

The cruelty I've made my life's one art of is different from his. It's patient where he was rash, precise where he was drunk.

He wanted to make things smaller than him because he was frightened of his own smallness.

I want the opposite.

I want her whole, unbowed, and more herself than she's ever been, arriving on my mountain certain she's about to win.

Because taking a woman whole and confident like that apart, gently, and being the one she turns to when there's nothing left of the old confidence to hold onto, is as close to worship as I’ve ever come, and I intend to worship her all the way to the bottom of what she is.

I go up the steps and into the cold stone dark of the house that holds what's mine.

Inside, the quiet is overwhelming, the way it's always been.

My footsteps don't echo here. The old rugs and the older stone drink the sound before it can travel.

I climb to the east wing, and I let myself into the room I've had made ready for her.

I stand in it a while, the way a man stands in a room he's been building in his head for a year.

It's a good room. South light in the morning, a deep window seat, a fireplace that draws clean.

A woman could be content here, in another life, in some gentler telling of this where she came willingly.

I've turned that telling over more than once. I'm not sentimental enough to pretend I prefer it.

The willing ones give you nothing to take, and I've never wanted a woman who arrived already surrendered any more than a hunter wants a deer that walks up and lies down at his feet.

Still, I let myself stand in the good south light and picture her here after, when the running's done, and the fight's gone still, and she's learned the last truth there is to learn on this mountain, which is that there was never anywhere to go but to me.

The lock on the outside of the door is new brass, and I had them age it so it wouldn't announce itself, so the first thing she sees when they bring her up here isn't the bright new metal of a cage.

She'll find it soon enough. I'd rather she find it than have it thrown in her face.

A man who wants you to know you're caged is a different creature from a man who simply doesn't intend to lose you, and I mean for her to understand, in time, which one I am.

I cross to the window that looks out over the north woods, and I stand with my hands behind my back.

I look at the treeline going blue and then black as the light goes, all those miles of my own dark forest where soon she'll run herself hollow believing she can beat it.

Somewhere up her own mountain tonight, she's oiling a bowstring and memorizing the flow of my creeks and telling herself she's ready.

Let her tell herself that. I need her to believe it.

Believing is what I'm buying with these ten patient days, because faith is the only thing in a person that breaks loud enough to be worth listening to.