The Room Behind the Curtain

Chapter 12:

"Don't touch it."

"I'm not going to touch it, I'm going to throw it—"

"Jane." Margaret's hand closed on my wrist. "If you throw it, he'll know you threw it."

"He should know I threw it."

"Then he'll bring another one."

I stood on the doorstep with the rabbit at my feet and my hand halfway to it and Margaret's grip like iron on my wrist, and the sun was all over the yard, and it was the most normal morning of my life except for the dead thing with its eyes closed.

"What does he want," I said.

"You know what he wants."

"Say it."

"He wants you."

I pulled my wrist free. "I've been in this territory two days."

"He's been watching you for two days."

"So this is — what. This is a gift? A dead rabbit with its throat cut?"

"That's exactly what it is." Margaret crouched down and looked at the rabbit without touching it. "Clean kill. No damage to the pelt. Laid out flat, head to the door. That's a wolf saying I can provide and I can do it neat. It's old, Jane. Older than the pack. Older than the laws. A male doesn't come to the door and ask — not out here, not where there's no Alpha to go through. He leaves food and he waits to see if you take it."

"And if I take it?"

"Then you've said yes to the next thing."

"And if I don't?"

"Then he leaves it and he brings another one and he waits longer." She straightened up. "Or he gets tired of waiting."

I looked down at the rabbit.

"There's no blood on the step."

"No."

"Nothing's on the stone. It's clean."

"He washed it." Margaret's mouth was a flat line. "He washed it before he set it down. That's a wolf who's thought about this."

I went inside.

I sat down in the chair and put my hands in my lap and looked at the fire and Margaret came in behind me and shut the door and put the bar down, and neither of us said anything for a while.

"I got thrown away in front of three hundred people two nights ago," I said.

"I know."

"Two nights." I held up two fingers. "And there's a man in the trees who wants me."

"There is."

"Why?"

Margaret sat down across from me. "You want the true answer or the kind one?"

"I've had about enough of the kind one."

"The true answer's probably that he's got no pack or he's got a bad one, and he's out here on his own, and he's been on his own a long time." She folded her hands. "And a lone wolf sees a woman alone and he thinks: there's nobody to ask. No Alpha, no father, no brothers, no claim on her. He doesn't have to fight anybody for you. He just has to wait."

My stomach turned over.

"So it's not about me at all."

"It's about you being alone." Margaret's voice was gentle and it made it worse. "That's the truth of it. If you had a pack behind you he'd never have set a rabbit on my step."

I sat with that.

Then I stood up and I said, "Where's the shovel."

"Jane—"

"Where's the shovel, Margaret. I'm burying it."

"You can't bury it."

"Why not?"

"Because a returned gift is an insult and an insult is a challenge and I've got a bad hip and no wolf in me and neither do you." She said it flat and fast. "If you bury it, he'll come to the door to ask why. And then there's a man at my door with a reason to be there."

I sat back down.

Margaret got up and put the kettle on and I watched her do it and my hands were cold again and I hated them for it.

"There's a thing I've been meaning to show you," she said, with her back to me.

"What."

"Something I should have shown you the first night and didn't, because you were half dead and I didn't want to watch your face when I did it." She turned around. "Come here."

She walked to the far corner of the cottage.

There was a curtain there. Heavy wool, dyed dark, hanging floor to ceiling on an iron rail. I'd thought it was a cupboard. I'd thought it was where she kept the jars she didn't want in the light.

Margaret took the edge of it and pulled it back.

There was a room.

Not a cupboard. A room — small, narrow, one window, and the window had a shutter and the shutter had a bar. The ceiling sloped with the roof. There was a bed in it.

My feet took me across the floor without asking.

The bed was made. Properly made, corners squared, the way you make a bed you expect somebody to be pleased with. One pillow. One blanket folded at the foot.

There was a chair by the window with a cushion on it.

There was a shelf at the head of the bed and on the shelf there was a candle and a cup and a small green bowl with nothing in it.

There was a chest at the foot of the bed.

I knelt down and opened it.

Clothes.

A dress, dark wool, good quality. Another one under it, blue, plainer. A shirt. Two of them. A coat folded at the bottom, heavy, grey, too big for a child and too small for Margaret.

Boots.

I picked up a boot. It was good leather, worn soft at the ankle, and it had been oiled and it had been kept and it was the size I wear.

I sat down on the floor with the boot in my hands.

"Margaret."

"I bought the cloth in the spring the first year," she said from the doorway. "The dress took me a week. I'm not much of a seamstress and I made it too long the first time and had to take the hem up."

"Margaret."

"Boots I bought off a trader in the fourth year. I had to guess the size, so I guessed a little big. Better big than small. Big you can fill out. Small you can't do anything with."

I looked up at her.

She was standing with her shoulder against the door frame and her arms crossed and her face doing its best to be flat.

"How long," I said.

"Nineteen years. The clothes came along as I could manage it." She nodded at the chest. "Everything in there I got for a girl who was going to walk out of those trees one day. I didn't know when and I didn't know if and I got what I could when I could."

"Nineteen years."

"Yes."

"You bought boots for a girl you'd never met."

"I bought boots for you." Margaret's voice cracked. "Don't you dare make it a kindness. It wasn't a kindness. It was the worst nineteen years of my life, buying boots for a girl who didn't come, and every spring I'd think this is the year and every winter I'd put the boots back in the chest."

I sat on the floor of a room I'd never seen with a boot in my hands.

"The bed," I said.

"What about it."

"One pillow."

"One pillow, yes."

"The other bed out there has two."

Margaret was quiet.

"The second chair and the two pillows and the two blankets," I said. "That's not for me. That's not for a girl who might come. That's a room with two of everything." I looked up. "Who lives here, Margaret?"

She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed.

"Nobody lives here," she said. "It's just me."

"Then why the second chair?"

"Because I'm old and I've been alone nineteen years and sometimes a chair pulled out makes a house feel less like a hole." She pushed off the door frame. "Now get up off that floor. It's cold and your knees aren't what they were three days ago, which is a joke, but it's true."

I didn't get up.

I looked at the clothes. I looked at the coat. I looked at the window with the bar on it and the chair with the cushion and the little green bowl with nothing in it.

"Did you think I'd be younger?" I said.

Margaret stopped.

"When you made the first dress. Nineteen years ago. Did you think I'd be a kid when I came?"

She didn't answer.

"You thought I'd be younger," I said. "Didn't you."

"I thought it would happen sooner." Her voice was very quiet. "I thought it would happen when you were a girl. I thought the pack would turn on you young and you'd come out of those trees at fourteen and I'd have a child on my hands."

"And I'm twenty-two."

"You're twenty-two." She looked at the coat. "I've had that coat seven years. It'll fit you."

I stood up.

I put the boot back in the chest and I closed the lid and I stood in the middle of that little room and looked around it and my chest was so full it hurt.

"I can't stay in here," I said.

"Why not."

"Because it's a room for a girl who doesn't exist yet." My voice did something ugly. "Because you built it before I was thrown away. You built it when I was three. Before Karl was ever anything to me. Before I knew what my own hips were for." I turned around. "She wrote to you when I was three and you built a room."

"Yes."

"That's the worst thing anyone's ever done for me."

Margaret stood very still.

"I know," she said.

"It's the worst."

"I know it is." She pulled the curtain back further. "But you're not sleeping in the yard, and you're not sleeping in the chair, and you've got exactly two days to be somewhere while I feed you, so you're sleeping in here."

---

The knock came at dusk.

Margaret's head came up. I was on the bed — the narrow one, in the little room, with the curtain pulled back so I could see the fire — and I was reading the first page of my mother's letter for the ninth time and I heard the knock and my whole body went cold.

It wasn't a knock on the door.

It was on the fence.

Something hit the fence post three times, slow, deliberate, iron on wood, and then stopped.

Margaret got up.

"Stay," she said.

"Like hell."

"Jane."

I was up off the bed and at her shoulder and she gave me one look and didn't argue and we went to the window together and she put two fingers on the shutter and opened it half an inch.

The gate was open.

He was standing in the yard.

A man, this time. Not a wolf. A man on two legs standing in the middle of the frost with his hands at his sides, and he was big — big through the shoulders, big in the arms, and there was a scar running up the side of his neck I could see even at that distance. His coat was good. His boots were the boots from the frost.

He was looking at the cottage.

Not the window. Not the door. The cottage. The way a man looks at a thing he's decided to have.

Margaret pushed the shutter wider.

"What do you want," she called. Flat. Not afraid. Old woman's voice, hard as the door bar.

The man didn't move.

"Margaret," he said. He knew her name. "I brought you a rabbit."

"Take it back."

"It's for the girl."

"There's no girl here."

The man laughed.

Not a big laugh. A small one, low, in his chest, the sound of a man who's heard something funny and doesn't need anybody else to think it's funny.

"She's been in your yard two days," he said. "I counted the boots."

Margaret's hand tightened on the shutter.

"You want to say something to me," the man said. "Say it to my face. Open the door."

"Go home."

"I don't have one." He shifted his weight. "That's what I'm here about."

My hands were flat on the windowsill and my heart was going in my ears.

"Go back to the trees," Margaret said. "And don't come out of them again."

The man looked at the cottage for a long moment.

Then he lifted one hand — slow, casual — and pointed at the window.

"Tell her something," he said.

"Tell her what."

"Tell her she'll come around." He turned and walked back through the gate, unhurried, and the gate swung and hit the post and did not slam and that was somehow worse, and he was at the treeline before Margaret got the shutter shut.

Then he stopped.

Turned his head. Not all the way. Just enough.

"And tell her," he said, "that her wolf's dead inside her. I can smell it from here. Dead and rotting. So she can stop reaching for it."

He went into the trees.

Margaret dropped the bar on the shutter. Then the door. Then she stood with her back against the wood with her chest going and her face grey, and I stood in the middle of her cottage and my ears were roaring.

"What did he mean," I said.

Margaret didn't answer.

"Margaret. What did he mean, it's dead—"

"I don't know," she said. And then, quieter, and worse: "I don't know if he's lying."

Chapter (12) Ends.