Shane was out on the porch later, rubbing and rubbing and rubbing at his shorn head. The tenseness in his shoulders spoke more than he could articulate, so Grace took half a chance and parked on the rail in front of him.
He looked up. Apology, anger, fear, leave-me-be, i-can't-say-it.
She offered him the thermos and he seemed like he'd forgotten how to move.
It took him a while to figure out how to decline it. "Thankee," he almost whispered.
She placed it on the railing beside her. They were silent and the crickets called, oblivious. After a bit, she took half a breath on a false start, and then began in earnest.
"You know," she leaned forward. "You know you don't have to carry it by yourself."
He sneered. "And who's gonna carry it for me, huh?"
She leaned back against the rail and unscrewed the cap on the thermos and he smelled something entirely OTHER than coffee.
"Sure you don't want some?" He practically snatched it—and then paused before handing it back.
"You're right," she said softly. "Sometimes it doesn't always help." She took a swig and grimaced.
He watched her, then proffered his hand. Whatever it was had some kind of lemony whang to it. The stuff was about as strong as he had ever tasted, and it set his head reeling. He took another hard pull.
Something made him feel like he had to move. So he got up and took the thermos with him and she followed it. Out across the yard and into the moonlight on the gravel road they walked. For the longest time, neither one of them said anything and then she made that false start again and he couldn't tell if it was a gasp at the dampness of the night air.
"Otis didn't cover you." She was caustic, and he just about froze to the dirt road ahead of her.
"W…what do you mean?" His eyes went wide, his hand up and over the patch of still burning scalp. He still hadn't turned to face her yet.
"Otis had that single shot rifle and a wheel gun that only held nine rounds, is what he had. You were better armed. And if YOU come back from that limping, I would imagine Otis was in worse shape."
She walked up beside him, face blank, the lack of judgment just as chilling as her perception. "You know it's just a matter of time before Herschel does the math."
Surreally, he didn't feel the need to do anything just yet. They kept walking. "You mean he hasn't already? Or ain't you told him?"
"Did you shoot him?"
Shane was blunt. "Yes."
"Kill shot." She stated it.
"No."
She took pause at that, and measured him again. He had been recalculating on Grace in the last fifteen minutes himself.
"Why not?"
The answer, savage as it was, could not have been beyond her. She waited, cocked a dark brow at him in the gloam and he realized she wanted him to say it out loud.
So…so he did. "They come to moving targets quicker than they do ones that ain't."
She said nothing. He needed to fill the space.
"You said-you said back there I didn't have to carry it alone."
"Uh-huh."
He took his turn at the waiting.
She sighed, made her half-start. Made another. She coughed, and he realized, suddenly, just how far out from the house they were getting.
"Sorry, I don't breathe very well. Inhaled some chemical compounds a while back that I shouldn't'a."
He offered the lemon whatever-it-was, and she took two pulls.
"My tongue has to be loose for this," she explained.
He waited. She started clear this time, and once the woman began to roll, he was almost afraid to address her.
"I was twenty-three when this…." she motioned in the silver of the moon. "When this all started. I was living in Atlanta. I had the most beautiful four year old in the world and a debt of around eighty grand on a drug addiction that I no longer carry, thank GOD. I busted my butt, took care of my baby girl, and was chipping at my debt. There's only so much you can do with numbers like that when you're in the shape that I was in, and I knew it wasn't going to last, but I was…I was better. I was stronger." She curled her fist in, and he believed her.
"And then when it all went out from under us, I grabbed my daughter and a rucksack and I ran. I followed the highway out of town because I didn't know any better, and we kept going. She never complained. She never whimpered. Always…always so happy." Grace smiled, that pull of the mouth almost as hollow as her eyes.
"And then I fell. Was jumping up a bank and lost my balance and landed funny coming back down. My leg snapped just below the knee and kind of flopped around. And she…. It was "Mommy are you alright?"
And I said, "No baby, Mommy can't walk."
"I carry you, Mommy. I can carry you."
And of course she couldn't, but we made me a splint and a crutch and we got mobile again. I moved what we had left of the food to her pack, and carried the water in mine. She walked. All that way. And then…." She pulled the damp air deep into her lungs and barreled on and Shane wanted her to stop. "And then there was that herd and she fell and hit her head and all I could hear was her hollerin' for me and…."
"Stop…" he whispered. "Stop."
"And she said 'Mommy it hurts!' and I….she'd hit it so hard she was bleeding out her ears…"
The worst past was that she wasn't crying. She should have been crying. In the mind of Shane Walsh, when a woman was about to tell him that she'd left her child for walkers she should be howling with anguish.
And Grace, well, she just stood there, her mobile face tightening and loosening as she confessed her crime. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes were wide, the ripped soul evident, the fact that either they both would have died or her child would have died from the brain damage after far beyond her-and what right did Shane have to think that way, to offer comfort. What right? Huh? What the hell kinda right did he have?
"And you know what the worst part is?"
He held up a hand. You've said enough. I know now.
She stared at him.
Maybe he didn't.
"Carry that, Shane," she whispered. "If I'd'a had any kind of courage I'd have cut my arteries and died standin' over her."
He had forgotten how to move his body again. He didn't know what to do with his hands or his face or anything.
"She had green eyes. And black hair. Her name was Clara. And she could already read." Grace was shuddering. She set the thermos down in the middle of the road and dug around in her pocket. She surfaced with a Zippo lighter and picked up the thermos.
Shane took her wrist, gentle. Horrified, but still, he tried to fix it. "It ain't gonna bring her back."
"What? Me dyin'?
"Yeah."
"My child is a walker, if her autonomic nervous system held out. MY child."
"Your child is dead, Grace. Dead as Otis. Dead as you or me."
She took a longish breath. "And me drunk with the most flammable liquid known to hillbillies and a lighter. Seems like a good end, don't it?"
"No. But the gettin' drunk does." He liberated the thermos and took a pull. "You can't carry what you been carryin' like this any more. You ever tol' anybody?"
"No."
"You can't carry it by yourself."
"Well neither can you. There's been worse done than what you done in the name of survival. But I don't think I have 'nough lead in my britches to bear you up should you get to staggerin' on me. I'd rather get stupid drunk sittin' down, wouldn't you?"
0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000
And so the next morning they were out on the porch, curled up on each other on the porch swing. Shane was horrifically sore. His ankle felt puffy, even before he moved it, and Grace was spraddled across him like a teenager. Hershel walked past them on his way out to the barn before full daylight, saw them, and made no mention of it at breakfast. Both their heads were pounding. There was not a smile exchanged. There was not a grip of the hands over anything. There was much pain.
Maggie handed them each a cup of coffee as they entered the house, scowling. "You two better be on your game," she said low. Savage.
Grace snarled back. "Pragmatic of ya, Maggie. And real quick to assume, too, I might add."
There wasn't any time to say 'sorry' after that because they were looking for the little girl and Shane was in and around his people and Grace couldn't help but wonder if there was something between him and the Sheriff's woman and still she liked her. Lori hung by her son's side until she was nearly as gray as her husband, and then Grace brought her a sandwich.
"You need to eat."
Lori smiled like a mother who'd had her child returned to her. "You're too kind, Grace."
"No I'm not." She laughed. "There's a couple of cups of coffee left in yonder in the kitchen and it seems senseless to waste'em."
Lori was still smiling at her child whenever Grace came back with the cups. "You strike me as the sort that takes it black, Miss Lori."
"As the ace of spades." The bone-clean woman took the offered mug and pulled the scent of the Colombian roast into her being. Carl stirred, smiled in his sleep and fell slack again. Lori beamed.
Grace and she sat in silence as they nursed their coffee mugs and Lori finished her sandwich. Rick was exhausted. Shane was haunted, and Lori…Grace had to stop herself from rhyming.
Lori put the coffee mug on the empty saucer, set it on the floor. "Thank you, Grace."
Grace smiled behind her coffee mug. "It's the least I could do."
"No…..for Shane."
Grace sat up, looked the woman in the face, unsure.
"He wouldn't be standing this morning if you hadn't hauled him out of that chair last night."
Grace's mouth took a twist, and Lori wondered at that. "He's made of solid stuff."
"But he's too quick to carry everybody else's burden. I know. He carried mine for a while."
Grace raised a brow at that, and chalked another one up.
"He carried all of us there for a while." Lori half smiled. "I don't know what you told him last night, or what you poured down his throat, but it's built him up. And he needs that."
Grace half smiled. She meant well. There was this thing about knowing that made the world feel different. And if Lori knew what the two of them had discussed…..still. What she said was probably true.
Grace moved back and forth between Lori and Patricia all day, just making sure. She cooked enough to feed a threshing crew in the interim. Herschel needed to get out of the house as much as the rest of them did, but Patricia was just about catatonic and there's only so much you can do with that before you start getting drug down yourself.
0ooooooo00000000ooooo0000
They all came back in that night and Maggie went straight to the whip-cord Asian kid and Shane came, after a while, to check on her.
"How's Patricia?"
"Unresponsive."
He flinched at that, flatfooted.
"She'll make do, though. She's strong."
Shane just shook his head, lost again, and Grace sighed. "How are you doing?"
"Found sign to the east."
Grace smiled. "That's good. That's really good."
"It wasn't hers. Other people."
"Oh." Her breath caught in her throat then, and she gasped at the night. Shane cocked his head, a quirk in his brow.
"Breathin'?"
"Uh-huh." She huffed it out, and he shooed her inside.
"You caught a cat-nap since we left this morning?" The foyer was dark. Rick and Lori were stretched out on either side of Carl. Herschel and Maggie and the Asian kid were already moving up the stairs.
She shook her head.
"It's close to midnight. Come on."
"I can take myself to my own bed, Shane." She huffed at him, and a wry light, mixed with the bitter taste at the back of his throat, came into being in his eyes.
He took her elbow nonetheless and guided her up the stairs.
"I need to check on Patricia," she half whispered, and he moved down the hall toward the bathroom.
Maggie was just coming out of Patricia's room, and her face went cautious when Grace came by her. "She's not any changed…"
"Her color's a little better," Grace kept to the half whisper. "She was leukemia white this morning. Does she seem like she's actually resting?"
"Kind of."
"Good." Grace leaned in the door. Patricia was face-up in the bed, covers pulled all the way up to her chin. Her breathing was steady, and that was all you could really ask of her right at this moment. "Herschel been up to see her?"
"Yeah. He stuck his head in the door before he went to bed. She still isn't talking."
Maggie's mouth was screwed up as Grace pulled away from the door. "You…."
"I been bouncin' between her and Lori. And your colt's right foreleg ain't so hot as it was yesterday. I checked him at noon."
"And you aren't lettin' me finish."
Grace shrugged. "Well?"
"You butterin' up the deputy?"
"The deputy's carrying something I know a little bit about, Maggie. I wouldn't call that buttering up."
"You didn't sleep with him then."
"Would you be mad if I did?"
"It…it just doesn't seem like the right thing to do."
"He's just looking for a way to make it okay, Maggie. Just like you. Just like me. Nothin' new."
"I'll be glad when they move on."
Grace didn't say anything. She wasn't sure how to read Maggie, even after all this time. The girl sometimes didn't say what she thought so much as what she didn't WANT to think, like she was facing it in advance. For practice.
Grace went to her bed that night, crawled into the twin bed, pulled the quilt around her shoulders. And still she shivered. In the hot Georgia air she shivered with the self loathing she'd unearthed. She looked at it all over again. She imagined what it would be like if she had done like she told Shane she wished she'd done. She imagined her four year old daughter dying in her arms instead of fifty yards away from her on the highway. She imagined Clara….
"Mommy we gonna die?"
"Yes baby. We are going to die."
She shoved down the 'Not yet!' with all her might. She pushed it away. She was going to die. If she was going to relive that moment she was going to relive it the way SHE wanted to relive it, dammit. She'd kill herself, back there. She'd curl around her child and her swelling brain and her broken leg and she'd scream as loud as she pleased because nobody was going to hear her. Nobody COULD save Clara, and nobody was GOING to save her. They were alone.
She felt the walkers tearing into her living body. Felt the trapezius muscles go, and all the blood from those heavy muscles drench her body. Felt her scalp lifted from her skull, ears ripped off, eyes dug into, spurting clear and blood. Curled tighter around Clara and then felt her spine give. Felt herself opened like a clam and her intestines breached. Felt her systems failing, breathing stop, rattling stop, oxygen go, hissing outward and legs broken off-walkers had tremendous strength, it felt like, and the tendons severed.
But she could still hear. Why could she still hear? Why was she still existing if she were being eaten? She was dead! Her heart had stopped beating! Why was she still HERE? WHY?
She woke in a scream and clapped her hand over her mouth. She caught her breath, staring out at the dirt road and the still almost full moon. Why was it so pretty?
She pushed herself to her feet, jumped into her blue jeans, and padded down the hall to check on Patricia. Still drawing air, but that was about all.
She padded back to the stairwell and was halfway down when she heard a door creaking open. She turned, listened to a hesitant tread. They made a habit of leaving the bathroom door open at night so the light from the window could fall on the stairs and nobody'd kill themselves should they need to move quickly in the dark. He was standing at the top of the stairs now.
"Grace?"
"Come on, Shane."
He met her down the stairs, and they crept out onto the porch and to the swing. She curled up in a corner of it, and he took the other half. Both of them knew why. Both of them tasted the same bitter gall. Both of them had told the same lie. For the same reason. She started to shiver and he dropped a heavy arm around her shoulders and dragged her close.
"How do you go from here?" he asked.
"You walk. You lie. You keep drawing air."
"Why'd you?"
"I shouldn't'a."
"Yeah but you did. Why?"
"You're a cop right?"
"Yeah….."
"Next to politicians, who're the most selfish people you've ever met?"
He turned this over. "You blaming your addiction?"
"No. But it takes an awfully selfish person to do that kind of thing to your body in the first place."
He absorbed.
"You ever been addicted to anything, Shane?"
He nodded, slow. "Alcohol got a pretty good hold on me when I was in school."
"I was a cocaine addict."
"Why'd you get clean?"
"I didn't want to."
"I didn't either. But…I…they say you never really recover from it. You just figure out what's important."
"I thought…..I thought I got clean because of Clara."
"You probably did. Were you with her daddy when she was born?"
"No. He beat the hell out of me. Pimped me. Sodomized me. You name it. And I found out about Clara and cut myself off cold turkey. He knew something was up. Knew there was something going on and there's no better way to manage your stable than to keep it dependent. He tried to shoot me up. And I got mad and shot him full of holes and they found me curled up in a corner screaming my head off and let me off with accidental man-slaughter and court mandatory re-hab."
Shane shook his head, strangely level. He thought about the last woman that had been in his arms. "Lori's a lot calmer than you."
"Lori has reason to be. I like her."
"You don't seem all that surprised by that…"
"I watched y'all yesterday morning."
He shook his head quietly.
"You're going to need to sleep, you know that?"
"I don't want to."
She shook her head against his chest. "I keep trying to make myself dream that the walkers got me when I left Clara. And sometimes I get it done. But it gets down to the end of it all and I can still hear everything. Can still see, even when they pull my eyes out. Like 'ha ha you're still here you can see it all' and…
"And that's what you were dreamin' when you woke me up."
"Yeah. Are you dreaming about Otis yet?"
"Yes."
"Maggie thinks I'm sleeping with you."
He shook his head again. "She's got the hots for Glenn, don't she?"
Grace half-nodded.
0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000
They didn't say much more, and for the second morning, they came awake on the porch swing. Not so tangled, but definitely better rested. Herschel walked out on the porch, took them in, shook his head, and made no comment until after breakfast when Rick and Shane had taken to the ridges.
Grace had a tradition after breakfast. She took care of the dishes, kicked the dishwasher just for the sake thereof, and poured herself about half a cup of what was left in the pot. Herschel strolled through, motioned her out the back door to the stoop. Grace followed, hesitant. When he'd told Rick he didn't ordinarily take in strangers, he hadn't bothered to mention Grace as the exception.
He eased himself down and she plopped down a step above and behind him. "You would probably sleep better, dear, if you and he shared a bed."
Grace took it in, knowing what had been said. She took a sip of the coffee and measured her speech carefully. "Are you asking me to leave, Herschel?"
He turned a little to look back at her. "I am asking you to get a full night's sleep, little sister. However you have to get it."
She half chuckled. "Is that tacit approval to begin a relationship there, Dad?"
He shook his head at her. "Someone should get something out of these people being here. And you are sensible."
She almost didn't know what to say. So she didn't for a good while, because Herschel didn't bother to move or extrapolate on his initial statement. And then;
"Well so is Maggie, wouldn't you say?"
"Maggie is young."
"Maggie is steadier than me, too."
He sighed. "This would be difficult for me were things the way they're supposed to be, let alone NOW."
Grace laughed. "You mean were things such that people rise from their graves runnin' on a hijacked nervous system and try to eat the rest of us?"
There was a solemn smile. "Something like that, yes."
She squeezed his shoulder and went back up the steps. Fondness was a strange thing to allow yourself after digging into your horrors, and it wasn't fitting well. But she carried a fondness for Herschel, and he for her.
When somebody feeds you and bandages you and cleans infection from your body after you've…..well, those kinds of things tend to happen.
Funny how little habit things like that still lived on.
The word 'stygian' came to mind and Grace couldn't put her finger on the reason why.