“You used to, when I was softer. I had to be soft—malleable. I was trying to fit into your world, and I’m grateful to you for cushioning me.” I took a breath, and though I wanted to square my shoulders, they slumped. “But I’ll never be that person again. You and I might as well be strangers.”
“If it’s easier to reconcile with yourself that way, then I won’t argue with you,” he said. “But that girl you’re talking about? I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone. And to me, she fit into my world perfectly.”
Of course she did. She’d turned to his every whim, went gladly in any direction he pulled her.
“Do you remember the night in the library?” he asked now.
We had lost track of time, sitting on the floor between the stacks. Not studying, just reading, sharing a book between us. It rested on our touching knees. We used to compete to see who could finish the page first. But then the sconces flickered out all at once, the wooden doors creaked shut as a distant clock tower chimed, and we realized we had been locked in. Thatthe door was charmed and didn’t unlock until morning. We had laughed, sprinted down the aisles, pulled soggy sandwiches from Theo’s bag and eaten them in the elemental science section.
I had read to him a piece of poetry from a moth-eaten anthology, and in the middle of it, he’d kissed me, perhaps more passionately than he ever had. We’d kept our lips locked as we undressed each other, one article at a time, eyes cinched shut, hearts hurtling, and we’d made love for the very first time. Slowly, awkwardly, but beautifully, under a ceiling painted to replicate heaven.
I shook my head at Theo, shook away the image. I could see the memory suspended in his eyes, forever golden, impossibly sweet, made brighter with time. He’d polished the recollection until it gleamed.
“Did you ever think of me?” he asked. “After you left? Did you miss me at all?”
I shunt out the hurt, the loss I’d long ago reconciled with. “Yes. At first,” I whispered, lifting my chin, turning for the door. “Then a little less each day. Then not at all.”
I made to leave the room.
“Can you find it within yourself, at least, to not hate me?” came his voice. It floated over my shoulder, a plea. If shame had a shape, it would look an awful lot like him. “I don’t think I can bear that.”
I sighed, felt my hands tremble just slightly. “I can’t hate you, Theo,” I said. “As much as I might try.”
I escaped to the hallway, my shoes scuffing off the carpet as I hurried away. I reopened the compartment in my chest that I’d saved for Theo and shut him in once more, but resolved that perhaps I didn’t need to treat him quite so coldly after today.
After all, Theodore Shop hated himself more than I ever could.
We went from house to house, finding drawers of thick woolen socks, pillows, blankets. We went back and forth from the factory, emptying the supplies and leaving again, until my feet burned with the cold and I’d lost feeling in my fingers. Theo asked twice if I wanted to retire for the day, but I shook my head and ignored his sighs. It felt better to dosomething,anything. It was when I was still and quiet that my thoughts began to diverge into darker circles.
In a schoolroom I found containers of bandages, a sling, ointment. I pilfered the teacher’s desk and found a half-empty bottle of brandy. I shoved the items into a child’s satchel, still hanging by its hook on the wall. The name above it readBETH.
More evidence of life disrupted: a half-full mug of tea; a word on the chalkboard, three letters short; a small chair overturned, a knitted cardigan still slung on its back.
I felt for a moment as though I was seven years old again in a Scurry schoolroom, paper flowers stuck to the windows in a poor attempt at cheer.
On the far wall was the emblem of Belavere Trench, precisely where it had hung in Scurry. Beneath it were plaques with names, one for every graduating year. And at their center was one that readIN REMEMBRANCE OF THE FOUNDERS OF TRENT.
Here were names I didn’t recognize. Sully, Wynnum, Galileo.
And then, near the bottom, Joan.
My fingers traced over the etching of her name. The wood wasn’t so old; the grain hadn’t discolored, nor had the letter edges dulled.
There it was—that bristle of knowing. Intuition, perhaps. It staked me there.
I took the plaque from the wall and added it to the satchel. I felt the ghosts of the schoolroom shiver in my wake.
I returned near dusk to find John and Patrick hammering nails into a huge mill. John moved the final planks with his mind, sending them careening down the snowy bank and into the water, where they connected lengths of wooden troughs already carved and waiting.
Sweat had broken over Patrick’s neck and back, soaking his shirt through. The sleeves were rolled away from his forearms. He bent over and heaved huge pieces of pipe and whole troughs onto his shoulder, carried them intoplace and dropped them. For a moment, I stayed hidden and watched. I watched the muscles of his back ripple, watched his chest flex as he dropped another piece into the snow. Soon, it seemed the construction was complete.
The river pushed the mill, the water heaped into its troughs and overflowed, fed into the pipework that disappeared over the snow and into the factory.
I left the cover of trees. “Genius,” I called out, and Patrick turned before I’d even finished the word, inexplicably attuned to me.
“It’ll do,” John called from the river, his legs half-submerged in the frigid water. It didn’t seem to bother him.
Patrick wiped his brow as he came up the bank, his suspenders hanging by his hips.
