Still Here

Chapter 3:

The house smelled like my mother. I stood in the doorway dripping on the floor and couldn't think of a single thing I owned.

Rain ran off my hem and made a dark ring on the boards. I'd mopped that floor Sunday. It seemed like an insane thing to remember.

I got the bag from under the bed. Canvas, straps, the one I took to the market. I put in the good dress because it was on the hook, and then took it out because it was the good dress. I put in the other dress. I put in the boots and not the shoes, and then I put the shoes in anyway because I was still wearing them.

My hands were doing things without asking me.

Money. I went to the tin on the shelf above the stove and opened it and there was less than I thought and more than nothing. I took all of it. My mother's ring was in there too, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, and I took that, and then I stood holding it and the rain kept hitting the window and I put it in the bag.

I caught myself looking at the second chair.

Nobody was sitting in it. Nobody had sat in it in four and a half years. I turned around and got the coat off the peg and it was her coat, too big in the shoulders, and I put it on over the wet dress and it was warm from the house and it smelled like her, and I stood there in the middle of the floor with my arms out from my sides like a scarecrow and cried for about eight seconds.

Then I stopped. Wiped my face with the heel of my hand. Blew out the lamp.

The knock came when my hand was on the door.

I froze. My whole body went cold and stupid and I stood there with my hand on the latch and my heart going in my ears.

"Jane." A woman's voice. Low. "Jane, it's Mrs. Avery. I know you're in there. Your lamp was lit."

I opened the door.

Mrs. Avery stood on the step with rain running off her hood and a coat over her arm that wasn't hers. She held it out.

"Alpha said get her a coat," she said. "Nobody was getting you a coat. So."

I looked at the coat. Wool. Grey. Too nice for me, which meant it was probably hers.

"I have a coat."

"You have your mother's coat," she said, and her eyes went over my shoulder into the dark house, and I watched her decide not to say anything about it. "Take the coat, Jane."

"Why."

She thought about it. Actually thought about it, standing in the rain, which was more than anybody had done all night. "Because I laughed," she said. "Not at first. Later. I laughed later, when you went down in the mud. And I've been standing in my kitchen since then feeling like something I stepped in."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"I'll take the coat." I took the coat.

She nodded like I'd done her a favor. "Where are you going?"

"Don't know yet."

"That's not a place."

"It's the only one I've got."

She looked down the lane, both ways, like she expected somebody to come up it. "Jane. If you go now, they'll say you ran. You know that. If you stay till morning, they'll say —"

"They'll say it either way."

"They'll say it either way," she agreed. "But they'll say it softer if you're here to hear it."

"I don't want it soft," I said. "I want it over."

She stepped back off the step. "Then go fast," she said. "Before I change my mind and make you stay for tea."

I put the coat on over my mother's coat and I went.

The lane was empty. Rain and mud and the lamps going out one by one down the row, and my boots made a sound I'd never noticed before, and I noticed it now because there was nothing else to listen to. The village ends at the smithy. Past the smithy the road goes flat for half a mile, and then the border road, and then the tree line.

I was past the smithy when the cart came up behind me.

Two lanterns swinging. Wheels on wet stone. A horse that didn't want to be out in it, and two men on the bench, and I knew the cart before I knew the men, because it was Dell Harper's cart and Dell Harper's cart had the crooked wheel that sang.

The cart slowed.

"Well," Dell said. "Look at this."

Ray Vaughn leaned over the side. He had a flask and he was wet through and his face was red with it. "Jane."

I kept walking.

"Jane." He held the flask out. "Come on. Get in out of the rain. It's a long road."

"No thank you."

"It's not a joke," Dell said. "Ray, put the flask down. Jane, it's a long road and it's the middle of the night and there's a whole lot of nothing between here and the next pack. Get in the cart."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're walking out of the territory in your mother's coat with a market bag."

The horse shifted. Ray took a drink and wiped his mouth and looked at Dell and they had one of those conversations with their eyes that men have when they're deciding whether a woman is a problem or a story.

"She'll be back by morning," Ray said, to Dell. "They always come back by morning."

"I'm not asking her to come back," Dell said. "I'm asking her to get in the cart."

"She doesn't want the cart, Dell. Look at her face." Ray gestured at me with the flask, lazy, generous. "She wants to be a legend. Let her walk it off."

The crooked wheel sang as the horse moved.

"Dell," Ray said. "Get the horse going. It's raining."

"Jane," Dell said. "Last time."

"No thank you."

He clicked his tongue and the cart rolled and Ray said something to him and Dell said something back and Ray laughed, and the lanterns got small and swung, and then the road was dark again and it was just me and the rain.

I walked.

The rain went off somewhere past midnight the way it does — all at once, no winding down — and then it was just wet dark and the smell of the ground and the road going pale ahead of me and the tree line standing up at the end of it like a wall.

I stopped at the edge of the trees.

I don't know why I stopped there. There was nothing to stop for. The territory line is a hundred yards further and it's not a fence, it's just the place where the road turns and the smell of the pack thins out, and it's not even a real thing, it's a line on a map nobody can see.

I turned around.

The pack lights were still there. Small, orange, one or two of them, the hall windows and the Avery place and the lamps down the lane, and past them the whole dark shape of the village with my house in it and my mother's chair in it and the second chair nobody sat in.

I could go back. Mrs. Avery would make tea and say something soft, and in the morning everybody would be careful with me, and in a month it would be a story I had to hear at the market for the rest of my life, the night Karl said it in front of the hall.

I put my hand flat on a tree trunk. The bark was wet and cold and rough as a tongue.

Then I said it out loud, to no one, in the dark, on the edge of the territory:

"I am still here."

The trees didn't answer. The road didn't answer. My wolf didn't answer, and I reached for her again the way I'd been reaching all night, and there was still nothing there, still that empty place where the rope used to be, and I didn't know yet that it was going to stay empty. I thought she was scared. I thought she was hiding. I thought she'd come out when she was ready.

I picked up the bag and stepped into the trees.

Three miles away, at a cottage at the other end of a road I hadn't found yet, an old woman set her cup down on the table hard enough to crack the saucer, and it ran through the wood and up her arms and she sat up straight in the chair like the sound had called her name.

Margaret went to the door.

She pulled it open, wide, and the cold came in over the sill, and she stood there with one hand on the frame looking out into the dark and the wet road and the empty, and she did not close it.

Chapter (3) Ends.