Chapter 48: I pull up to the front of your driveway with magic soaking my spine

He doesn't get a lot of sleep that night. But the next day he's at the farm almost at dawn.

He doesn't wake up and go straight there. He's up when it's still dark, only about three hours of real rest under his belt - and vivid, hallucinatory dreams, nothing frightening or unsettling but ecstatic, like flying, maybe even literally flying, and he heard once that when you dream about flying you're actually dreaming about having sex, but he really thinks this was just about actually and for-real flying.

Wings at his back. Stars above, fields below. Heading straight for the moon, and not alone.

Plunging back down, her skin warm in the grass, slipping inside her and worshipping her with himself. With every part of him. Her saying his name like a prayer. Like she does know what one is. Like they both do.

He opens his eyes and turned onto his side, drops a hand between his legs, goes to the shower and he's still half dozing when he lets everything go with a deep, shuddering sigh.

He used to think of sex like the plot of a story - which, though he never got as far as his sophomore year in high school, he does understand. You start, you build and rise, there's a climax, and then it's all just a slide back downhill into a flat denouement. But with Beth it's not like that. Not anymore. You rise - long and slow - and then you ride wave after wave, and it's not minutes or even hours but days. Weeks. It's a state in which you exist. He wants her all the time. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it's all the fucking time, and while he's not sure how long it can continue like this, he doesn't see any way in which it might stop.

Well. He sees a couple of ways. But he's not going to entertain them.

Dressing, still in the dark, and walking out the door into the cool air, which isn't so much a breeze as a gentle shifting, how a body of water behaves in the mornings and evenings. It isn't yet cold, though it will be. Last day of the first week of October, and if before every day felt like a step toward something unknown, now it feels like he's walking faster and faster. He really should be terrified. He keeps telling himself that, like he needs reminding. Like he needs to keep a kind of perspective, even if he's not sure what purpose that would serve.

He gets into the truck, rumbles and rattles the engine to life, and drives. Drives all over, down empty silent streets, past windows dimly lit by other early risers, small tacky houses and larger, more stately ones, flat streets with patchy lawns and others with green hedges beyond sidewalks lined with spreading oaks. People living lives not unlike what he's used to - all he knew - and people living lives that used to make him hate them. But those other, better lives were never actually real to him, back when the world was small. None of it was. Sure, he was looking at apartments, but while he was audacious enough to be hopeful and he was doing math in his head and he was hiding money away, he now understands that he never really imagined it as a real possibility. He could dream, but that was really all he could do.

It wasn't for him. It was never for him. He could be here, he could go to the farm, eat with Beth's family, work alongside her father and brother, wander into that world for a while, but never stay.

Except yesterday he fell down into the grass with her, and it was like the water. He didn't realize it until later, but he came up changed.

He's not going back. Not now.

Merle. Merle with him. He never really imagined that either.

Maybe he should have had more faith.

He drives back to the main road, past a tiny auto dealership, past the low, blocky high school with its track and its football practice field, past the corner where he picked her up, out of town and out toward the farm. By now it's getting light, though the sun hasn't touched the horizon, and the last stars are going out. Those autumn constellations: every one of them is also an old story. The sky is full of them and they never had to end.

He drives down long country roads with all the windows down and the radio blasting, and though the wind is forcing itself into his lungs it's difficult to breathe.

could you whisper in my ear
the things you want to feel
I'd give you anything
to feel it coming

Apropos of nothing apparent, he remembers that bike. That fucking long-lost bike, riding for the first time, roaring over the road like a demon. There was never anything else quite like that, after.

The sun is up by the time he goes to the farm itself, though only just, and Hershel is waiting for him. Better to begin things as soon as it's light now, and he knows Hershel was up a while ago. Farm workdays start early, especially when the days themselves are getting shorter. As has become the usual order of business he gets coffee, a few minutes to sit, open up to the day, and he gets to see the school bus pull up at the bottom of the drive and Beth come out the front door with her hair pulled back into a rough ponytail, blue peasant blouse off one shoulder, tight jeans that show off her ass - yes, he can notice that now and not feel creepy about it - backpack, those boots, and a tiny smile tossed over her shoulder, quick and subtle so no one sees but him.

She didn't know what she was. She is.

what you feel is what you are and what you are is beautiful

He works all day, works himself hard, works himself into sweating under a sun bright and warm enough to still be summer, and it feels so good.

She comes home. Disappears for a while. Comes downstairs for dinner - honey-glazed pork chops, Jesus God. And like the morning, he gets to sit outside for a while with a cigarette, watch the last of the sun vanish and listen to the birds in full evening swing. Tonight, quite out of nowhere, he remembers being little - not even sure how little, but way earlier than from when he usually remembers things - and his mother on the porch, watching him play, that porch and that mother which years later burned together, and of course she was sitting with her own cigarette and her wine, and she was talking to him. Sort of to him. Also to herself. He was playing with some flimsy plastic dinosaurs - a T-Rex and one of those things with the duck bills that Merle hadn't broken - and he remembers his mother's voice, meditative and soft and more than half drunk.

Never shut up, do they? Like they don't know how. Like they can't no more. Christ, what a racket.

Ash tumbles onto the steps.

"Hi."

He glances behind him; it couldn't be anyone other than her, standing there with a book in her hand, silhouetted in the light through the screen door. She gives him another one of those tiny smiles and turns, heading for the porch swing a few feet away.

It's just light enough to read, he supposes. And there's some glow through the living room window.

He gives her a little nod and nothing more. No one else is out here, but still.

"Still warm," she murmurs as she sits, book held against her chest, and his little nod transforms itself into a little smile. They've reached some kind of apex of intentionally bland conversation: they're now discussing the weather.

But she's right. It's warm.

"Ain't gonna last."

She cocks her head, her smile turning a touch sardonic. "It's October, Daryl."

"Don't get fresh, girl."

"Or what?" Suddenly not bland at all, and he fights back a slight shiver. He's meeting her later tonight and he doesn't for a moment expect the meeting is going to be innocuous in nature; he's not sure whether or not it's a good deal to be thinking explicitly along these lines right here and now. Though it's not like he pretty much wasn't already.

He could pinch the fuck out of her. He could do a lot of other things.

So instead he just shrugs and smokes at her.

"Whatcha readin'?"

"Poetry."

"Homework?"

"No. Wanted to." And he knows what poet it is - the identity, though he never caught the name on the book. It had to be; maybe he's moving inexorably forward, but there's also a cyclical quality to everything that's happening now. Not a spiral anymore but a Möbius strip. Around and around and looping over. "I was just... I was thinkin' about it. Wanted to go back to it a little."

"Anythin' in particular?"

"Want me to read you somethin'?"

Answering a question with a question, not completely connected. But it is. He remembers when she last read poetry to him, how it was so much like her singing - clear and musical. Reaching in and touching something deep.

He nods. She opens the book, thumbs through the pages, stops at one and takes a breath and speaks with that same rhythm and cadence, like it's a song but not exactly. Which - he supposes, not that he's an expert or anything - is what poetry is.

Just before dawn
three deer
came walking
down the hill

as if the moment were nothing different
from eternity
as lightly as that
they nibbled

the leaves,
they drank
from the pond,
their pretty mouths

sucking the loose silver,
their heavy eyes
shining.
Listen,

I did not really see them.
I came later and saw their tracks
on empty sand.
But I don't believe

only to the edge
of what my eyes actually see
in the kindness of the morning,
do you?

And my life,
which is my body surely,
is also something more
isn't yours?

I suppose the deer waited
to see the sun lift itself up,
filling the hills with light and shadows
they were leaping

back into the rough, uncharted pinewoods
where I have lived so much of my life,
where everything is so quick and uncertain,
so glancing, so improbable, so real.

She falls silent, and the silence stretches out as the dark creeps closer. The last of the cigarette is a little red light, like the top of a radio tower. Even the birds are quieting down and settling themselves.

He might almost say it. Because she's lowered the book into her lap and she's just sitting, not looking at him, her face thrown into half-light and slightly raised, knees drawn together and her hair tossed over one shoulder, the cut on her cheek a thin dark line that accents her cheekbone, and she looks so young and so beautiful, and he might almost say it. Here, where someone might be by the open window or at the door and might hear him and know everything. And she would too. Which he's not afraid of. He's not afraid of that.

It's just that no one ever taught him how.

"So you never really read poetry?"

He laughs quietly - not annoyed. "You know me, you think I been readin' a lotta fuckin' poetry?" He exhales smoke and it fades into the dusk. "Told you I didn't know any."

"Not like in school or anythin'?"

This, he didn't really tell her. Not with any specificity. "Never really did a whole lotta school."

"Oh." But she doesn't sound surprised. Sensible girl, insightful, she could connect the dots, but he also understands that she didn't want to insult him by assuming. And instead of getting angry about it, being reminded of something he frankly regrets now and would be embarrassed by in certain company, he just appreciates the thought. Appreciates it a lot.

"Do you like it?" she asks then, her voice low.

He told her he did in her bedroom, but they both know that was something particular and special, isolated from a lot of other things, connected but self-contained. And she was talking about that specific poem, and she was talking about the part of herself she opened up to him that night. And the night in the water.

Not about this. Not in general.

"Yeah," he says, unhesitating. He doesn't need to hesitate, doesn't need to think about it. He likes her singing. He likes the music she makes of herself. He likes this too.

"Good," she says, and her tone is all slow smile.

They're quiet for a while, and like always it's gentle and comfortable, and he leans into it like it's her, like it's her shoulder against his. Her head against his back.

But when she speaks again, she breaks it.

"Are you alright?"

The question comes out of nowhere, out of the dark, and suddenly she's looking directly at him. It's so abrupt that he nearly jumps. "What?"

"Are you alright?"

"Like..." He frowns. "Right now?"

"Like... At all. I just wanna know. Are you?"

It's a very simple question, and he has no idea how to answer it.

He told her, is the thing. He told her, that night in her room after she came home from the hospital, how not all right he is, how he hasn't been all right basically ever. How he doesn't even know what all right means, what it feels like. How he doesn't know how people get to be that way, what it's like to walk around without so many scars. And now she's asking, and he thinks he knows exactly how and why she's asking it, and it shakes him.

Is he?

"I dunno."

She nods, apparently satisfied with the answer. "Okay." She pauses, looking down. "How are things? With... with your brother?"

They're talking kind of a lot. She was already taking a risk with the poetry. He should cut this off and go. But instead he's answering, and as he does he realizes he wanted to tell her, was even excited to tell her. Because what she saw was horrible, and he doesn't want her to think that's all there is. Even if he's pretty sure she already knows.

"Why you care?" Teasing. But when she answers she sounds very serious, and she's not following their little script.

"Because I care."

Well.

"They're alright." He looks down at the cigarette, stubs it out in the grass. "He's... We're gonna get a new place."

"Where?" Little smile in her voice and he gets warm all over.

"Dunno yet. Gotta look around, see what we can do."

"That's good. I'm glad." She laughs. "That place was gross."

"Yeah, it wasn't no good." He's quiet for a moment, looking down the drive at nothing in particular, then, very softly, "I think things are gettin' better."

She'll know. She'll know what that means.

"Okay," she murmurs, and she doesn't say anything else, and he doesn't either.

It's officially dark. It'll be another couple of hours before the moon starts to rise. Tonight it's going to be full.

"I should head out."

"Yeah."

He gets up, and he's about to walk to the truck, pull down the drive, go to wherever he's going to go and do whatever he's going to do before midnight, but on impulse he turns back to her, and what he sees on her shadowed face...

She's frightened. A little. Just a little. Not like something horrible might happen. But like she's going to do something and she's not sure about it. Not that she doesn't want to, but that...

After, there's no going back.

He has no idea how he can tell the difference between these things, but he can.

Her lips move. She might be about to say something else. But she keeps that silence, and he doesn't pierce it. He gives her a nod, and he walks away.

The moon is high and bright enough to throw sharp shadows behind and over everything when he pulls up to the tree and stops, leans over and opens the door for her. Even with the headlights it's hard to see her clearly, but when she hops in and turns to him she's flushed, her eyes wide and bright, a smile playing around the edges of her mouth.

She's carrying a bundle of blankets in her arms.

"Let's go."

He just looks at her, bemused. Fluttering like a little bird, deep inside. "Where?"

"Guess."

He pulls back onto the road and turns them, glances at her once more, and takes them to the ruins.

Note: song is "Slide" by the Goo Goo Dolls, poem is "The Pine Woods" by Mary Oliver.