Page 11 of Sting of Sin

"Don't—" The word snagged on the way up. I made it come anyway. "Don't go far."

Something moved through his face and he put it away before it could land on me. "I won't. Door stays cracked. You'll hear me right out there the whole night. Anything—you say my name, that's all, and I'm through it before you finish saying it."

I believed him. That was the strange thing, the thing I kept bumping into, that I believed him. After four years of learning that nothing said to me was true, that fresh start meant a van and we'll take good care of you meant a soft voice and a locked door, I sat in that room and believed a thing a man told me, all the way down.

Caleb sat with me a while on the edge of the bed before they left me to sleep. He didn't push for words. He just talked, low and easy, filling the quiet so I'd never have to, the dog that hung around the yard, Garrick getting up at night, Julia, ordinary things, a whole ordinary world he laid down in front of me piece by piece like he was showing me there was still one out there to come back to. And when he finally stood to go, I caught the edge of his sleeve between two fingers, the way I'd caught Eli's in that visiting room a lifetime of days ago, and I gave him the thing I'd been holding back from him for four years, the thing he'd begged me for on every one of those drives.

"Caleb."

I watched it hit him. He'd carried me out of woods and out of worse than woods, he'd raised me up out of nothing with his own two hands, and one word laid him flat. He sat right back down and pressed his forehead to the top of my head and shook, silent, and I felt the wet of it sink into my hair. I didn't have anything else to give him. So I gave him the only word I had, again.

"Caleb."

"Yeah." It came out of him in pieces. "Yeah, Bee. I'm here. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

They left the lamp on for me when they went, because I couldn't do the dark, not yet, maybe not ever, and nobody made me explain why. Nobody came with a little paper cup. That absence sat strange in the room with me, no two pills, no thimble of water, no aide standing over me to watch them go down and then go down herself, behind her eyes, knowing she'd thrown the switch on me for the night. Because that was the thing they'd done to me, every night, four years of nights. They hadn't kept me awake. They'd kept me under. Put me down like a light at a wall and brought me up in the morning, and the long dark middle was theirs, not mine, a black nothing somebody else decided the edges of.

I lay there now waiting for the cup the way you wait for a sound you've heard every night of your life, and it didn't come, and slowly I understood it wasn't going to, that the dark in this room was going to be mine to sit inside, awake, for as long as I wanted to sit in it. The drugs were already loosening it’s hold. The world was coming up too sharp at the edges, the gray thinning out of it, and I didn't know yet whether having my own nights back was a mercy or just one more thing without edges to be afraid of.

Because here is the truth I lay there holding, in that soft bed, in that safe room, with the one wall in the whole world settled in against the floor on the other side of a cracked door, the creak of his weight shifting every so often telling me he was exactly where he'd said he'd be:

Safe can be taken in the blink of an eye.

I learned that in a stretch of woods a lifetime ago. I learned it on a good day, a beautiful day, the kind of day you let your guard down and decide the world is something you can trust, and then it isn't, and then it's the worst thing there is, and it's too late, and it was always going to be too late from the second you stopped watching. I would never make that mistake twice. Not even here. Not even now. So I lay in Eli's bed with one hand curled into a fist and one ear on the dark beyond the window, and I let myself believe in the safe only the way you test ice with the toe of your shoe, a little weight, ready to pull back, because the moment you stand on it with your whole self is the moment it gives.

I stayed awake until the window went gray.

And then, listening to Eli breathe slow and even on the other side of the door, close enough to reach if the world came apart again, I let go of just enough of the watching to sleep.

A little. Not deep. But it was the first time in four years the going-under had been mine, the first time I'd slept because I wanted to, and not because somebody made me.

That was something. In that place, on that night, that was a whole entire world of something.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE CALL CAME at twenty to ten the next morning. We'd been waiting on it since the sun came up, all of us, the way you wait on a storm you can already smell.

I hadn't slept. Spent the night on the floor outside my own door with my back to the wall and my boots on, listening to her breathe on the other side of it, getting up every so often to check the gap and find her exactly where I'd left her, small in the middle of my bed under the lamp she couldn't sleep without, one fist curled up by her face like even out cold she was braced for something. Around dawn the breathing finally went deep and even, and I let myself ease back against the wall and just sat there, guarding a sleeping woman I had no right to want, doing the only thing I knew how to do for her, which was be the thing between her and the door.

Then the House woke up and started getting ready to lie.

Warden had everybody briefed by eight. Anybody comes asking, you don't know a thing. We're worried sick. We've been calling that hospital ourselves wondering why nobody'll tell us anything. Keep her out of sight, keep your mouth shut, and let Throttle do the talking when the time comes.

The time came at twenty to ten.

Throttle's phone went off on the bar and the whole common room stopped breathing. He looked at the screen, looked at Warden, and Warden gave him a single nod, and Throttle picked it up and put it to his ear and turned into a different man between one word and the next.

"Yeah, this is Caleb." A pause. I watched his face. "Who is this? ...Okay. Okay, what about her, is she—" Another pause, longer, and I watched it go into him, watched his free hand find the edge of the bar and grip it white. "What do you mean gone."

He was really selling it. Who knew Throttle could act.

"What do you mean she walked out, she can't… she doesn't talk, she hasn't said a word in four years, how does a woman like that walk out of a locked—" His voice cracked straight up the middle and kept climbing. "Where were your people? You had one job. One. You had her behind a locked door and a guard and how many cameras, and you're telling me my sister, my baby sister, the one who can't ask a stranger for help, is out there somewhere, alone, in the dark, and you didn't even know she was gone till breakfast?"

Jewel had her hand over her mouth. Even the men who knew exactly where Bee was, who'd carried her through that gate themselves, even they couldn't look right at it, because it was too close to the real thing, because if it had been real, this was exactly what it would've sounded like.

"No. No, you listen to me." Low now, and somehow worse. "You find her. You call the police, you call them right now, and then you call me back, and you tell me what you're doing to fix this, because if anything, if one thing happens to her out there because you people couldn't keep a door locked—" He stopped. Breathed. Let them fill in the rest, which was worse than anything he could've said. "Just find my sister."

He hung up. Set the phone down very gently on the bar, which was how I knew how bad he wanted to throw it through the wall. His eyes were hard and his jaw was working and when he finally got a breath that held, he said, rough, to all of us.