Page 13 of Sting of Sin

But sometime in that one long night it had dropped, for stretches, from a scream to a murmur, and that was the thing I kept turning over, careful, the way you touch a stone you weren't sure was warm or hot. That alarm had run day and night, and in that place it had screamed, down every hallway, in every soft-lamp room, under every gentle voice, until I'd forgotten there was a me underneath it at all.

Eli was the first thing I saw that morning, the way he'd been the last thing I saw the night before. He'd slept on the floor right outside my door, the whole night, that first night, because I'd asked him not to go far and he'd taken me at my word and made his bed on the hard boards rather than leave me to wake in an empty room. So I didn't have to go wandering that big strange building to find him.

When I came out of the room, he was already up off that floor, falling into step beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world, a man who looked like he'd decided that wherever I was headed, he'd be going a half-step behind. He walked me through to the common room where the coffee was, and he didn't make a thing of any of it, no big greeting, no eyes going soft and pitying. He just tipped his chin at the pot like I was anybody.

"There's coffee if you want it."

I poured a cup and then stood there holding it, because I'd gotten that far on instinct and run out of road.

"I don't know how I take it," I said.

It came out small, but it came out, and Eli went still.

"How you—" He caught up. "Coffee."

"I used to take it some way. I don't remember which." I looked down into the cup, black and steaming and a stranger to me. "I don't remember being a person who took it a way at all."

A lesser man would've made a moment of that, made me watch him feel sorry for me, and I'd have had to go back behind the glass to get away from it. Eli just got up, came around the table—slow, always slow, like he was walking up on something that startled easy, and set the milk and the sugar both down by my cup without a word, like he was handing me back the keys to a thing that was mine.

"Then you get to find out," he said. "Try it three ways. Pick the one you like. Nobody's gonna tell you it's wrong."

I took it with too much milk and a little sugar, in the end. I don't know if it's how I used to. It's how I do now. And it felt like a thing I'd decided, and there hadn't been many of those in a long time.

He stayed while I drank it. That was the part I didn't have words for, the part I kept bumping into all morning, that he just stayed. Didn't fill the quiet, didn't crowd it. Drank his coffee at my elbow and let me sit inside the warm of a room with another person in it and nothing being asked of me. Every time the clubhouse threatened to be too much, a door banging, a voice gone loud, he was right there, a wall I could put my back to without ever having to ask him to be one.

***

CALEB CAME MID-MORNING, and he didn't come alone.

I heard him in the yard first, his voice gone up into a register I'd never heard out of my brother in my life—soft, silly, the voice you only make for something very small, and then he was in the doorway with a diaper bag over one shoulder and a baby on his hip, and a woman beside him with blonde hair and a careful, kind face who hung back a half step, letting him go first.

"Bee." Caleb crossed the room slow, reading me the way he always could, ready to turn right back around if I needed him to. "This is Julia. And this is—" he hitched the baby higher "—this is Garrick. Your nephew."

I didn't speak to Julia. I couldn't, not yet, she wasn't one of my two, and she seemed to know it before anybody told her, because she just smiled at me, warm and easy, and said, "I've heard so much about you. No rush on me, okay? I'm just glad to finally be in a room with you," and then she let me be, went and sat by Eli and started up some low conversation to take her eyes off me and the weight off the moment. I could've loved her for that alone.

But the baby.

Caleb crouched down in front of my chair with him, and Garrick looked at me, and the floor went out from under me, because he had my brother's face. Caleb's face, the one from before, the one that used to lean over my bed when I was small and scared and tell me monsters didn’t exist. The same broad forehead, the same stubborn chin, the same blue in the eyes. A whole little unguarded copy of the only safe face I'd ever had as a kid, sitting on my brother's knee, looking at me with not one ounce of the careful pity grown people couldn't keep off their faces. He didn't know I was broken. He didn't know there was a way I was supposed to be handled. He just saw a person, and he reached for me, both fat hands out, the way toddlers reach—certain, unafraid, like of course I'd want him, like there was nothing in the world to be scared of.

"You wanna hold him?" Caleb asked, soft. "You don't have to."

I held out my arms. I hadn't decided to. They just went.

And Caleb set that warm heavy little weight into them, and Garrick grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked and laughed about it, and something behind the wall in me that had been clenched, let go. Not the wall itself. The wall held. But some smaller thing behind it, some muscle I'd been holding so long I'd forgotten it was mine to unclench, came loose all at once, and my eyes filled, and I didn't fight it, because there's no glass thick enough to keep you safe from a baby with your brother's face fisting your hair and grinning like he's done something clever.

"Hi," I whispered to him. To him. And he didn't know it was the first word I'd given anybody outside my two in four years, didn't know it was a miracle, just blew a spit bubble at me and patted my mouth with a wet hand, and I laughed, I laughed, cracked and rusty and out loud, and I felt my brother go still, and across the room Eli went still, the both of them careful not to look right at it for fear of ending it.

I held that baby until he fell asleep on me, heavy as a sandbag, his face mashed into my chest. Nobody made me give him back. Caleb sat on the floor by my chair the whole time with his hand on my knee, and Julia talked low with Eli, and the clubhouse moved soft around us, and Eli never went more than an arm's reach off.

***

THERE WAS A moment, later, when I looked up from the sleeping baby and caught a woman across the room watching me.

Not Julia. Another one, by the bar, pretty, with eyes that didn't go soft and careful the way everyone else's did when they landed on me. She watched me, and then she watched Eli where he sat near me, and then she watched me again, and her mouth did something small and cold before she turned away. I marked it the way I mark everything, in my body before my head, her, careful, and then Garrick sighed against me in his sleep and I let her go, because a sleeping baby with my brother's face was a better thing to hold than a stranger's cold eyes.

And once, gathering up the diaper bag, Julia passed near a dark-haired woman tucked quiet into the corner of a couch, knees up, making herself small the way I knew how to make myself small. That one wasn't cold at all. When her eyes found mine they stopped, and held, one breath, with something in them I hadn't seen looking back at me in years, not pity, not careful kindness. Like she'd been where I'd been and come back and knew the look of someone still under. She didn't come over. She didn't smile. She just held it that one beat, and then let me go, gentle, like she knew better than anyone that being looked at too long was its own kind of cage.

I didn't speak to either of them. I wasn't ready. But the room had people in it now, real ones, with faces, and I'd sat in the middle of it the whole morning and not once had to run.