Not Told How Long

Chapter 13:

I didn't sleep. I lay in the narrow bed in the little room behind the curtain and I reached for her, over and over, until my chest hurt.

Dead and rotting. I can smell it from here.

I don't know how many times I did it. Enough that Margaret came to the curtain and said my name, and I stopped, and then I started again when I thought she'd gone back to the chair.

Nothing. Every time, nothing. The room behind my ribs empty and cold and the rope in it broken.

---

We buried the rabbit at first light.

Margaret got the shovel out of the shed and handed it to me without a word. I dug a hole past the garden, out of sight of the path, and I put the rabbit in it and I put the dirt back over it and I stood there with the shovel and my hands blistered and my breath coming out in a cloud.

"Now what," I said.

"Now we wait and see what he does."

"He'll do something."

"He'll do something," Margaret agreed.

We went inside and I put the shovel back and she poured the tea and we sat down across from each other at the table and I looked at her hands and my hands and I said it.

"How long have you lived out here, Margaret?"

She looked up.

"You know how long."

"I want to hear you say it."

She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "Nineteen years."

"Nineteen years exactly?"

"Nineteen years and some months. I didn't keep a calendar." She drank her tea. "I came in the spring. It was cold for spring."

"And in nineteen years you never once went to the village."

"Once. In the third year." Her mouth did something. "To look at a girl who was six years old, walking down a lane holding her mother's hand."

My throat closed.

"I didn't speak to you," she said. "You wouldn't remember it. You were six and I was an old woman in a market and you had a paper bird in your hand and you were showing it to your mother like it was the crown jewels."

"I remember the paper bird," I said.

Margaret's cup came down on the table hard.

"You do?"

"I remember a paper bird. Yellow. It fell apart in the rain and I cried about it for two days." I sat forward. "I don't remember an old woman."

"No. You wouldn't." She looked away. "I came back and I sat in this cottage for a week and I couldn't eat. It was the worst thing I ever did to myself, going down there. Because I saw you, and you were fine, and I had to come back out here and be fine with that."

I sat there.

"How long were you told to wait?"

Margaret's eyes came back to me.

"What?"

"When they told you to come out here. When my mother's letter came and whoever it was told you nineteen years — how long did they tell you to wait for me?"

Margaret sat very still.

"Nothing," she said.

"What?"

"Nothing, Jane. I wasn't told how long." Her voice went flat the way it did when she didn't want it to show. "That's the part I've never said out loud to anybody. They told me there'd be a girl and she'd need a place and I was to be here when she came. And then they said nothing else. Not when. Not how many years. Not whether it was one year or five or forty."

I sat back.

"And you came anyway."

"I came anyway."

"Margaret, you could have been out here thirty years."

"I've had thirty years in my head. Every one of them." She put her cup down. "Do you know what a person does with a thing like that? When you're forty-five and somebody tells you to go sit in a cottage and wait and they don't say for how long? You tell yourself it'll be soon. That's the only way to do it. Every morning you get up and you tell yourself it'll be soon."

"Nineteen years."

"Nineteen years of it'll be soon." Her hands were flat on the table. "I've planted this garden nineteen times. I've had the roof patched twice. I've buried two dogs out there and a cat named Samuel and I've done every one of those things telling myself it'll be soon."

The fire cracked.

"Your mother didn't tell me a number," Margaret said. "She didn't know a number. She knew it was coming and she knew she wouldn't be here for it and that's all she had."

I put my face in my hands.

"Jane."

"Give me a minute."

I sat with my face in my hands and my mother's first page folded in my pocket and a man in the trees who could smell me from the edge of a clearing, and I thought about an old woman at forty-five walking into a forest with a trunk and a shovel and no number.

"Okay," I said, and lifted my head.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'm angry at the wrong people and I know it. Give me a minute and I'll be angry at the right ones."

Margaret's mouth twitched. "You're going to be trouble. I knew that the first night."

---

I went out at midday.

Margaret didn't stop me. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and I walked the whole fence line, both hands on the rails, and I looked into the trees and the trees looked back and nothing moved.

I walked it twice.

Then I stopped at the place where the path came out of the trees and I put my hands on my hips and I looked into the dark under the branches and I said it loud.

"Hey."

Margaret said something behind me. I didn't turn around.

"Hey! Big man with the scar. You want to talk to me, then talk to me. Stop leaving things on steps like a cat."

The trees did nothing.

"You want to point at me through a window and tell me my wolf's dead? Say it to my face!" I was at the gap now, three feet into the path, and I could hear Margaret's boots on the frost behind me. "You've been watching me for two days like a coward in a coat. Come out and say it."

Nothing.

"Jane." Margaret's hand closed on my arm. "Come back."

I stood there.

And then, out of the trees, maybe forty feet in, a voice — low, easy, a man who hadn't moved from where he was standing — said:

"She'll tire herself out."

My whole body went cold.

"The cold does it," the voice said. "Give her another minute."

I pulled against Margaret's hand and she hauled me back.

"Come out here," I shouted.

"Jane." Margaret was dragging me. "Jane. Walk."

I walked. She got me out of the path and across the yard and through the gate and her hand was like a clamp and my heart was going like a rabbit and I was so angry my vision had gone soft at the edges.

She shoved me through the door.

She came in after me and pulled it and dropped the bar with both hands and put her back against it and stood there with her chest going.

"He answered," I said. "Margaret. He answered."

"He answered," she said. "And now he knows what you sound like when you're scared."

I stood there.

"Jane. Hear me." Margaret wiped her mouth. "You don't talk to a wolf like that. Not that one. He's not going to come out of the trees because a girl shouts at him. He's going to stand in there and listen to you shout and learn every single thing about you, and then he's going to use it."

The fire popped.

I sat down on the floor.

I sat down right there on the boards with my back against the leg of the table and my hands in my lap and I didn't cry. I was too tired.

"He said it like I was a kid," I said. "Like I was a kid having a tantrum in the cold."

"He did."

"She'll tire herself out."

"He said it to me." Margaret came and sat down in the chair beside me. "He said it to me, Jane. Not to you. You're not worth talking to yet, in his head. You're a thing he wants. And a thing he wants doesn't get talked to. It gets waited out."

I put my head back against the table leg.

"Margaret."

"Mm."

"What do I do."

Margaret was quiet for a long moment.

"You don't do anything," she said. "You get strong. You eat and you sleep and you stop shouting in the trees. And then we have the conversation I've been putting off, and I give you your mother's letter and you make a decision with a clear head about whether you stay out here with an old woman and a wolf at the gate, or whether you go."

"Go where?"

"Anywhere. That's the whole point of going." She stood up. "Now get up off my floor. I'm making you a proper meal and you're going to eat all of it and then you're going to sleep in that bed if I have to put you in it."

---

I was in the bed when it happened.

Dusk. Margaret had just pulled the curtain back and lit the candle in the little room and I was lying on my side with the first page of my mother's letter on the pillow next to me and my eyes open and the wolf gone and the room behind my ribs empty.

Something hit the door.

Not the fence. The door. Something hit the door hard enough that the dust came off the frame and the bar jumped in its brackets.

I was up.

Margaret was at the hearth and the poker was in her hand before I'd gotten my boots on and she was already moving toward the window.

"Don't open it," I said.

"Not planning to."

Something hit it again. Three times. Slow. Deliberate. Iron on wood.

"Margaret," I said. "Get away from the window."

"Jane," she said, in a voice I hadn't heard from her yet. "Get in the back room. Now. Get in the—"

Then the man on the other side of the door spoke.

Not the low voice from the trees. Not the one that said she'll tire herself out. A different voice, familiar in a way that made my stomach drop out of me before my head caught up, and it said:

"Jane. It's Ray Vaughn. I need you to open this door."

Chapter (13) Ends.