Chapter 70: there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in

Sun wakes him again - not direct, most of it seems to come streaming into the place in the afternoons - but bright, bouncing all over the walls, nudging at his eyelids. He mutters, turns his face into the pillow, burrows a little.

Pillow. Bed. He feels it then, really feels it - the soft give of the mattress under him, no hard floor or broken springs digging into his back. Stomach; he's not lying on his back, and in fact his back is gently burning on one side, steady and weirdly soothing. Lying there, eyes closed in the deep blue night he made to sleep in, he thinks how familiar it is, that pain, and then he remembers why and a fine little shiver makes its way down his spinal column.

He feels almost hungover. But he knows he wasn't drinking last night. When he went to bed, except for the endorphins drifting through him, he was stone cold sober. Tired, hurting - but in the world. Not hiding from anything.

Now he's waking up in this big empty place - less empty, actually - and he's not so frightened of it. Could be it's just that he's not yet fully awake, but he's not frightened at all.

No, it's not home. Not yet. But it's closer.

He has to take a piss, and he shouldn't take a shower yet but he should at least pull off the bandage, clean what's under it, splash some water on his face. He wants to eat something. He wants to sit for a while and just think, and then maybe not think at all.

He does these things. Cold leftover ribs make a better breakfast than most people would assume. Done, he sits on the floor beside the bed - unsupported and shirtless, back exposed to the air - and reads some more.

In every heart there is a god of flowers
just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.

His head is full of words, swirling around and dancing and spinning into tiny tornadoes, crashing into each other and passing through and rearranging like colliding galaxies. He closes his eyes, the open book in his lap, and soaks in the indirect sunshine.

He misses her voice. He misses it on the other end of the phone, he misses holding her close and feeling it vibrate out of her, sound as waves rolling through her body - waves like light. He misses her whispering in his ear, mouthing words against his throat. He misses her singing and he misses how she reads to him, how she makes music of words entirely devoid of any real tune. Because they aren't devoid of one at all; there's music in words when they're carefully arranged. Music doesn't even have to be intentional to be there. In the woods, tracking, it was all around him, because everything has a rhythm and a cadence all its own. There are the calls of birds, but there's also wind in the trees and the grass, and water, and the crunch of twigs and dry leaves. Everything is a song, absolutely everything, and he sensed it but never knew. He never heard it.

The signs were all there, spread out around him like sheet music. He just didn't know how to read them.

He didn't know how to pay attention.

He did, once - because now he thinks everyone starts out already knowing how. But he forgot. Was made to forget. It was taken away from him.

He misses her voice, but he's not afraid that he won't hear it again.

He puts the book down and crawls back into bed, curls up and thinks about one of the things she sang to him - he doesn't remember when, but he does remember the song.

it's so hard to dance that way
when it's cold and there's no music
your old hometown's so far away
but inside your head there's a record playing

a song called hold on

Sleep is like her hands stroking through his hair and it holds him until the afternoon.

Still no shower. With the others he had done he wouldn't have given - and in fact didn't give - much of a fuck, wouldn't have wanted to preserve it as well as he could, keep it as intact as possible in these first important forty-eight hours, because the things themselves weren't all that important. They were basically impulse buys as well, but not like this. No vision, no real inspiration. No deeply seated conviction that this is what he has to do.

The only possible exception to this is the pair of battling demon-angels, and he's not sure he's entirely comfortable with what was going through his head when he thought of that one. He doesn't totally remember it - wasn't sober - but he does remember that.

But this.

He washes his hair in the kitchen sink - done that shit plenty of times - and makes himself a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly is never a bad choice for children and adults alike, and as he takes it over by the bed and the central big window and eats it standing up and looking outside at the late sunlight moving across the lawn and street, he realizes that he's not sure which he is.

He never explicitly thought about himself as one or the other, but that's something else that's changed. That she changed. Who he is.

Who he might be.

I'm not a virgin, Daryl. I dunno what I am.

Me neither.

You just are.

As the sun is setting, he wanders out onto the landing outside the front door - short sleeves but it's not quite as cold today, and he's in the lee of the house and sheltered from what breeze there is - and sits down and has a smoke and watches the light start to die. The trees are barer than they were yesterday. They always have been, but it seems like it's moving faster now, and he doesn't think it's his imagination. They've reached a tipping point, crossed some kind of event horizon. That's another thing that would have frightened him before - the brutal fact of No Going Back Now - but it doesn't anymore. There never was any going back; he understands that. It didn't begin with her or with this town, and he understands that too. From the moment he was born there was never any going back. There was and is only forward, and the only thing he has any control over isn't what forward is but instead what forward means.

And that counts for a lot.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do?

He doesn't know, and he thinks that might be all right. That might be the woman's point. That he might not need a plan, per se. That the very idea of a plan is rank, arrogant foolishness. His mother died when he was young but he remembers a surprising amount about her, and one of the things he remembers is that she hauled around a lot of sayings. A lot of aphorisms. She would get them wrong, get them jumbled up - especially when she was drunk, which was most of the time - and the majority of them struck him as kind of stupid, but there were a few that stuck.

He doesn't believe in God, but: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Regardless of whether or not God is a thing, Daryl thinks it probably holds up.

The point of this isn't to have a plan and it never was. The point of this is to be here, watching smoke curl lazily into the calm air, listen to the distant hum of traffic and the occasional soft exhalation of a car going by, watch all the lights come on, listen to the mockingbirds organize their setlists of covers and feel the air getting cooler and cooler on his bare skin and just be in the world.

Live in it, sure. But living is a process. It's constant and ongoing. It's temporal. It has a past, a present, and a future. It has a beginning. And it has an end.

Being is being. It's timeless, atemporal. You just are.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

And then there's the first part - because what he discovered last night is that Beth never read him the whole thing. She only ever gave him the second half. It wasn't neglect on her part, he's sure of that; she sensed what was important - what was most important to her - and she gave it to him, yet another piece of herself.

The first part, the first line.

Who made the world?

Not God, no. There is no God. He's almost certain. Maybe something else, maybe some kind of ineffable and incomprehensible intent.

But it doesn't matter. We don't have to know that.

All we have to do is be.

He drinks some. Not a lot. He bought some glasses and he pours himself whiskey, enough to make him feel warm and sleepy, and he lies back down with the book and lets his attention drift - idle - across the pages and the uneven lines of words.

Thanks to her he's listened to poetry, a fuck of a lot of it, but this the first time he's ever really looked at it, its extremely odd structure, and he doesn't entirely know how to make sense of it. But this also doesn't feel necessary; he intuits that this isn't something he should make sense of so much as feel. Feel the rhythm and the flow of the words just like anything else alive.

You don't make sense of the grass. You don't make sense of a tree. You don't make sense of a bird or a deer or wind, or the sun or moon, or water. Rain.

You don't make sense of a girl's body. Her hands. Her hair, her voice, her laugh. You don't make sense of the swell of her breasts or hips, the graceful, delicate lines of her neck and collarbones and spine. You don't make sense of her mouth. You don't make sense of her legs, the way they spread for you, the slick heat of her cunt and the way it tastes. You don't make sense of how she welcomes you into herself, how she makes a home for you there - even for just a little while. You don't make sense of how she sighs, moans; you don't make sense of the way she moves in crashing waves when she comes. You don't make sense of her bones, or the songs that hide deep inside them.

You just feel these things.

They just are.

Crow is crow, you say.
What else is there to say?
Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane
across the world, leave
your old life behind,

die and be born again—
wherever you arrive
they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world.

He strips off his clothes, falls into sleep again and stays down there until morning.

For a while after he wakes up he simply lies on his side with his eyes closed against the dim, indirect sunlight, sheets tangled around his waist and legs.

The bed is getting softer. He's getting softer. Not in the sense of weaker, not in the sense of losing himself or slipping away from something. He lies with his hands nested together, palm curved over palm, and he thinks about moths emerging from cocoons, how at first their wings are too soft and damp to use. How they have to rest where they are and dry out, solidify. Become more real.

A moth has to struggle to emerge, and the struggle itself is necessary. If they don't struggle, if someone cuts them out - does the job for them - their wings never spread at all.

They never fly.

He feels ready for this much, anyway.

He turns on the shower - barely warm. Anything more would be too much. He lets some of it fall into his cupped hand; it's difficult to be certain but it feels to him like the perfect temperature of summer rain.

Before he gets in he stops, turns, looks at himself in the mirror. It's a bigger mirror than in the old place, and when he cranes his head a little he can see almost his entire back. Battling demon-angels on one side. His right side.

A single wing on his left.

Not quite finished. It was too much to do all in one sitting. But it's over halfway there, the outlines and some of the shading. It's scabbed, soon it'll start peeling, and the lines look rough. But they won't be when it's done.

When it's done becoming.

He smiles and turns, steps under the spray.

And he thinks about her. Really thinks. Since he asked her to leave him he's thought of her only in fragments, only in partial terms, because it was all he could take, but now he thinks about all of her. He thinks about her with him right now, stepping close and tipping her head up, gliding her mouth along his jaw. Down to his throat, kissing. Sucking at him, tongue swiping over his skin. Her breasts pressing against his chest, hands resting against his hips as she rolls herself forward - his cock trapped between them as he curls his fingers around his hard shaft and braces his other hand against the tile. Stroking himself the way she would, slow, easy, idle. Perfect. Drawing his pleasure out of him, her hand and her belly and the rise of her mound, what he knows is waiting for him between her thighs, parting them so he can touch her - how wet she is, soaked even in the water. But even though he's circling her clit and slipping a finger into her and catching her breath in the curved ceilings of her lungs, this is all about what she's doing to him.

Stroking him faster, thumb against the base of his head - whispering to him as she jerks him off, her soft lips grazing his ear. That it's all right, he can want this, he always could, he can have it, he'll be good enough and she loves him and doesn't this feel amazing, his cock and her hand, and there's so much more, a great big world out there he can live in, but she has him now and she's going to make him feel so good, going to make him come, make him go out of his mind-

Fucking her fist, fucking his own, tight moans twisting out of him, her name, her fucking name, because it's a prayer as pure as anything. Beth. Beth, oh my God, please. Please.

Daryl, come. Come now. Come for me.

He does and it's like cracking and breaking open, sobbing into the streams of water, into the rain, spilling warm into it and running away. His back wrenched and that wing bursting free of his skin.

He's starting to think of this as Day Two. That's suggestive of how this might go. He's not sure what it's suggesting, but he feels it all the same.

Day Two. Of? No idea how many. But of that, what he felt before, coming back into himself. The wing on his back is healing, the ink setting into his skin. He's still not exactly sure what made him settle on one wing only, but he's not going to question something that felt so right. He didn't at the time, won't start doing it now.

He wonders what Beth is going to think when she sees it. What she's going to say.

He's not worried. He thinks she might like it. He knows she'll look at it and she'll get it, and she'll get it even more if he can tell her the story of what he thinks these days will turn out to be. However many of them there are in the end.

He got enough food that he won't have to go out again for a while, so he doesn't. He just sits. He sits on the floor, on the bed, in the sun. Dozes a little. Holds the wolf in his hands, traces its lines and curves. Passes his fingertip over its pricked ears. Stares into its blue eyes. It feels like it's staring back at him. He wonders what it sees.

It occurs to him that he might be going very slightly crazy.

It occurs to him that he already was.

He was never well, he thinks. He opens the window in the late afternoon - there's still sun but clouds are creeping in and he wants to take the last of it while it's here - and he swings his legs out and sits on the wide sill, bare feet dangling above the roof of the porch, and smokes. He was never well. He wasn't born sick, but he got sick pretty quickly and he's been sick since then. Broken inside. But that doesn't mean he's ruined, and it doesn't mean he ruins things.

And anyway, he's been in ruins and he's seen how alive they can be. How beautiful.

He'll always have scars. He'll always be broken, a little. But he doesn't have to be sick. He can get better. He can get well.

That's what this is. Some people go to a hospital to get well; he's come into a house of light.

And this isn't about being good enough for her. He's starting to understand that too. He wants to be good for her, he wants to be worthy of her, but that's not why he needs to do this. That's not why he needs to get well. He would be that, need that, deserve that, without her.

He doesn't need her to be a reason for him. Not anymore. He's his own reason. And that's plenty.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.

Day Three. He washes, covers the tattoo with lotion, puts his last clean shirt on over it and resigns himself to the fact that he has to do laundry. He's sharing a washer and dryer in the basement, to which there's an external entrance - the other key he was given. He shoves what he has into his pack and heads down there.

Outside it's cloudy and the wind is picking up. No rain - doesn't feel like it, the air doesn't have that unmistakable rain-smell - but the clouds are low and a little threatening all the same.

As he slides the key into the lock and steps down into the dim, slightly humid mustiness of an old cellar, he finds himself entertaining the idea of snow.

Early yet. Too early. But eventually it could happen.

The light is on. Carol is here too - he sees her as he makes his way through a maze of shelves covered in cardboard boxes and bags and plastic containers, all unmarked and unlabeled, all mysterious and therefore kind of intriguing. What would Cathy keep down here? Somehow he doesn't think she would necessarily keep the same kinds of things that anyone else would.

As if there might be some kind of magic down here. Enchanted things.

Hey, why not. Wouldn't be a whole lot weirder than anything else that's happening to him right now.

Carol looks up as he approaches. She's emptying powdered detergent into the washer, and when she lifts her head there's no trace of alarm in her eyes. She probably heard him come down, so she wasn't startled, but also maybe... Maybe she would be less alarmed anyway. She's been here for a while now, same as him.

It wouldn't surprise him very much if he's not the only one this place is reaching into. Rearranging.

"Hi." She looks him over - quick, and he can tell it's involuntary. "Are you doing okay up there? Barely even heard you since the other day."

He shrugs. Yes, he's doing okay, but okay also doesn't even begin to capture it. A shrug feels best. "Still gettin'... settled, I guess. I dunno."

She goes back to the detergent. "You actually get some furniture?"

"Yeah. I mean... Some." He's not sure he wants to tell her details, because he's not sure he feels like explaining why he's stopped where he has - because how could he? It doesn't make complete sense even to him. And he does think she would probably ask, in her way.

"All right, well... You let me know if you need anything." She glances back, flicks her gaze down to the pack hanging from his hand by one strap. "You want to toss your stuff in? I don't have a lot, I don't think there's any point in you waiting."

He looks down, considers for a few seconds... And yeah, she's right. There's no point. He hands the pack over with a single quick nod.

She adds his clothes, shuts the lid, leaves the pack on top, and turns to him, regarding him thoughtfully. He looks back, unperturbed. He's not sure what could perturb him right now. He feels remarkably unbothered by everything.

Finally she shifts her stance a little and jerks her head in the direction of the other flight of steps, the other door. "You want to come in for some coffee?"

Sure.

The coffee is good. There are little flaky pastry things and they're good too. Like when they shared the lasagna, there isn't much conversation, and also like then, there's nothing particularly uncomfortable about that. Daryl is gathering the impression that - like him - she's perfectly happy to be in someone's company without any real need to interact with them in a direct way. That's very promising. He could be into a neighbor like that.

Maybe not just a neighbor. On his second pastry he allows himself to consider that possibility.

"What do you do?"

The question startles him mildly, but there's no reason to withhold an answer. He shrugs again.

"Work on a farm."

"Outside town?"

He nods.

"Just for the season?"

"Was. Seems like maybe longer now. Probably." He pauses, and without meaning to he shifts his gaze to the windows. The gray light. Still light, even gray. Still bright. "Ain't got nowhere else to go."

"Is that bad?"

Once it would have been. It would have been bad because everything was bad, everything about where he could go or be, because all of them amounted to a big fat nowhere. But that's not what it feels like anymore. He has nowhere else to go, and that feels good. He doesn't have to worry about where else to go. He can just be here.

"No." He swings his gaze back to her. "What about you?"

"What do you mean?"

"What d'you do? Did you do?" He's not sure the adjustment is necessary, but it seems like a safe enough assumption, and when her mouth twists - more than a little pained - he knows he was right.

"I was... a housewife." It's not exactly scorn, but it's in the general vicinity. "Ed wanted me to stay home, take care of things. Take care of Sophia. Seemed like a good idea at first. I wasn't going to argue. Obviously I wouldn't have argued anyway, but..." She sighs, gives him her own half shrug and a very rueful smile. "If it was just Sophia... I did love taking care of her. I loved being with her all the time. She was... She was this one good thing."

"But she still is, though. Right?" Gentle. There's no way to be certain what she needs to hear right now - if anything - but when she talks about Sophia it's like light breaks through into her face, still faint and gray as the light outside but there nonetheless. "You're gonna see her again."

"I don't know when. Not until I'm sure it's safe."

"You think he might come after you? Her?"

"Her..." Carol shakes her head. "He might come after her to get to me. He'll be... He'd come after me, yes, I think he would. I don't know if he will, but I can see him trying."

And he's not stupid enough to ask any questions about police or about having Ed arrested. He's seen too much. He knows better.

The law doesn't tend to stop men like it seems Ed must be. Not effectively. Something else has to.

"But you're safe here?"

"Safe enough. He doesn't even know where this place is. I haven't..." Her mouth twists again. "I didn't talk to Cathy for a long time. Any of my family. He made that as hard as he could."

Of course he did.

"Where you gonna go?" He's asking an unusual number of questions. But he's very interested in the answers. They feel important. It feels important that he knows these things. Her safety is a no-brainer, but there's other stuff. "You gonna stay here? You gonna go to Indiana?"

"I don't know." She looks down at her hands wrapped around her mug - soft hands, he notes. Almost delicate. But there's also somehow a hardness about them. They're necessary hands. They're hands that have become accustomed to doing what they have to do without hesitation, and they've had a great deal to do. They've worked. They're tired.

He has no idea how he knows all of this, how he can see it, but he can.

"I think..." She laughs quietly, shakes her head again, doesn't look up. "I'm not even remotely ready to answer that question."

"Don't answer it, then. Wait 'til you're ready."

She finally looks up at him, brow slightly arched. "That simple?"

"That simple."

"There's something about this place," she murmurs after a few moments of silence, looking up and around at the room. Dark wood, and light. Age but not death. Nothing at all like death.

Yes, she feels it too. It's working on her, the same as it is on him.

"Yeah," he whispers. "There is."

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazed over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.

Day Four. He realizes, lying half on his side and half on his back and listening to morning rain drum gently on the glass, that it's Sunday. Sunday, and raining, and of course it is, because that's perfect. And he knows without having to go out into it that it's cold rain, fall rain, but in here he's warm, surrounded by softness, and there's nowhere he has to be. He doesn't have to get up. He doesn't have to go anywhere. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do. Later he should probably call the farm, update them on his entirely fictional condition if nothing else - and God, he'll actually lie to them, just straight up lie, and he's done it already and it wasn't that difficult - but for right now...

Nothing.

He closes his eyes and the sound of the rain sweeps over him, settles against him like a blanket. He finds himself thinking about her again, her here with him, lying against his side with her head on his shoulder and the sweet, fresh smell of her hair filling him up. And moving, pushing herself over him, so easy and smooth, maybe not even entirely awake herself. But knowing what she wants, sliding a leg across him and straddling him, taking his cock in her hand and sinking down onto him. Not even moving after; just resting there on top of him, feeling him inside her, her head fallen back and her eyes closed.

Lowering herself. Lying against his chest, head tucked under his chin, hands on his biceps, rolling her hips only slightly. This is not about fucking. This is not about coming. Her cunt is so warm and wet around him and her small body fits so perfectly into his arms; wrapping her up in them, sheathed in her, it feels like home.

This feels like home.

He's so hard. But he doesn't release it.

He burns.

He calls the farm. It's a short conversation, but like before, it's not a difficult one. It's becoming clear to him that he's earned himself a fair amount of credit with them - being reliable, making no trouble about anything, doing his work well. They assume this is legitimate. They believe what he's telling them about being sick. They trust him.

That might not last for too terribly much longer, but they do.

And he doesn't feel guilty. Not about this. Because it's not even really a lie. He was sick. He is getting better. Someone might see that as an excuse, but it doesn't feel like one. It feels like a truth embedded in him, inextricable.

He's getting better. And he thinks it's going faster now.

Later - much later, around nine, sitting with his back against the wall and the lamp between his knees, he calls Beth.

He's not afraid of doing it. He doesn't even have to think about it. He simply knows he's ready for it and he does it. Her number: it rings, and while he waits her for to pick up - or not, whatever she ends up doing - he moves his fingers slowly over the open top of the lamp and watches the shadows on the ceiling shift and dance.

He's had a bit to drink. Not much. For the taste as much as it makes him feel, and that's something else new: he likes the way whiskey tastes.

He never really tasted it before. Just never paid attention. It never mattered.

It picks up after three rings. Her voice, soft - she's keeping it down, but not to the extent that he thinks she's with other people.

"Daryl?"

He closes his eyes briefly, hand going still. God, her voice. It's like he couldn't quite breathe before and now suddenly he can - a full inhalation. "Hey."

"Hi. I... It's good to hear you."

He takes the words and turns each one over in his mind, careful, thorough. Examining. She's surprised. She's a little breathless. There are other things - uncertainty. Apprehension, even - a current of tightness under everything. She's not sure what she's going to get here.

She doesn't sound impatient. She doesn't sound angry. Small wonders, but wonders nonetheless.

"Yeah. You too." He pauses, but it's not because he's working up any courage. He doesn't need courage for this. He can tell her what he's feeling. "I miss you so fuckin' much, Beth."

"Oh." Not surprise this time - except maybe a little. Maybe she wasn't expecting to hear that, so suddenly and so soon. And no hesitation. He just said it. "I miss you too. I've been..." She swallows. "I know you said you were alright, but I've been worryin'. Kinda. I didn't wanna call you, not yet, I figured..."

She trails off, but she doesn't need to finish the sentence. His heart pounds against his ribs, knocking like it wants him to open up and let it loose. Kind girl. More merciful than he'll ever deserve, no matter what else happens to or inside him.

"I... Thanks. Thank you."

Silence. Once more, he senses that she might not have been expecting that. That specific response, that sentiment.

"Are you? Alright?"

"Yeah." Another thing he doesn't have to think about - it just comes from him, slips right out. Flows. Easy. He is. He is all right. "I am. I'm doin'..." He breathes a laugh, tilts his head back, and moves his hand. Dappled light on the ceiling. His fingers are branches nodding in the breeze. "Think I'm doin' really good."

She releases her own breath, gentle and slow, and he can see her. He can see her so clearly. Her surroundings are unclear, but the rest of her is as vivid as if she was right in front of him. Hair lying over one shoulder, face soft, big blue doe-eyes shining. Cheeks just a little flushed. Fingers against her lips, maybe. Those small, full lips.

So beautiful.

"Can I see you yet?"

"Not yet." It hurts to say, but not so much. Because yet is no longer so indefinite. He still doesn't know how close it is, but it doesn't feel so distant anymore. "Soon. I think. Probably soon."

Fingers moving in slow waves.

"You get it, right? You know why."

"Know why what?" And he can almost hear a smile.

"Why I'm doin' this."

She doesn't answer for a long moment. He lets his eyes fall closed again, his fingers dangling. The breeze has died down. He doesn't know what she's going to say, but he's more than happy to wait. She's waited through his own silences, his own periods where he struggled to gather himself, struggled to find the right words for her. Sometimes failed. She's always given him space for things like that, and that's what makes it easier for the words to come. Or did, in the end.

And she does answer, finally. A murmur so low it's almost a whisper.

"After I cut my wrist, I... I was in the hospital a day. Just while they sorted some things out. They didn't leave me alone that whole time. Someone was always with me. Like they thought I'd try somethin' again, y'know?"

He makes a small affirmative sound. So she'll know he's listening, and also because he does know, or he can sort of imagine. But he's understanding that just as she'll never truly know the horror that gave him his scars, he'll never be able to be with her in that moment when she tried to make herself die. It's not a question of will, or desire, or love. It's simply that he isn't her. She isn't him. He wants to be with her, wants to be with her more than he'll ever want anything, but all he can be is himself.

All he needs to be is himself.

"And I mean... I got it, but I was already sure I wasn't gonna. I didn't want to. Not anymore. But they drove me crazy, hangin' around me like that. Mama and Shawn and Maggie... And Daddy, Daddy was the worst." She's definitely smiling now, smiling and it's bleeding into him, pulling at the corners of his mouth. Fond, amused, a little bittersweet and a little sad, and here her smile cracks and all he wants to do is hold her. "He was so scared. I didn't know how to tell him I was sorry. I tried, but he... And you know, the really bad part was I knew he would've helped me if he could. He would've done anythin'. But he didn't know how. And I didn't know how to help him help me. Any of 'em. It wasn't that they didn't love me. Wasn't that I didn't love them. We just didn't know how."

He's silent. Letting her go, letting her say it how she needs to say it. And it's so much more than enough to sit and listen to her voice, so close, right there with him. Musical, like singing even when she's telling him about this, even when she's opening her own box of darkness and letting him look inside.

So much like singing. Because she needs to. She can't not.

"After they got me home, it was pretty much the same. They never left me alone. Not once. Maggie always in my room, or Mama - Daddy and Shawn not so much but they were still there - and the thing was... They hadn't really started me on the medication yet, and I wasn't talkin' to a doctor, but I could already feel it... goin' away. It was. Not a lot, but it was like... There was this crack in me, and the light was gettin' in. And all I wanted to do was be there and feel it, and I couldn't do that with them all over me.

"So soon as I could, soon as I had a chance at all, I got outta there. I got outta the house. I got outside. It was spring, early, and everythin' was just startin' to really get green, and that's... I knew the mill was there, the ruins, but that was when I started really spendin' time in them. Just... Goin' there. Bein' by myself. Thinkin'."

She pauses, a long pause, breathing slow and deep, and that's when he feels the tears on his face, and he doesn't try to stop them.

My girl, you're so blessed.

"When I started talkin' to my doctor, she said I should keep doin' it. Said it was good for me. And she... She gave me the book."

She stops again and her breath is shaking a little, and he knows it's her too, her tears, them together, and it makes no difference that he can't touch her or see her, because she's with him in every way that matters.

"She said... People love you. You need them. You can't live without them. They help you. But in the end the only person who can make you well is you."

He waits until he's sure she's done speaking. Waits longer. Gives her words a chance to sink into him, takes them in and folds himself around them. He had no way of knowing that she would say this. Except he did. He completely did. Wiping at his face, pulling in his own shuddering breaths, he knows he knew. Knows he was ready to hear it.

That's why he called. That's why he reached for her.

"Beth," he whispers. "Listen."

It's not in the book. He wouldn't need the book even if it was. He remembers every word.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Days Five. Six. The same. The sun comes back out, patchy through the clouds. He looks at it, watches it move and feels things moving inside himself - that slow process of rearranging. Reorganization. He's drying in the light, waiting to extend. Waiting to spread.

He's not fool enough to think that this will be over when he calls her again. When he emerges. Something like this goes on for a long time after it starts. It might go on for a lifetime. Like what happened to her - she said it came back sometimes, maybe not as bad but there. People change, get better, but people also relapse. Happens all the time.

But if it does, it doesn't mean anything is ruined.

He rests in the sun. On the landing outside, slowly working through the last of his cigarettes. He looks around the room and he begins - tentatively, vaguely - to imagine what else he might do with it. What else might be here someday. Being here long enough for there to be a someday. Wanting to be. It's not about having nowhere else to go; he doesn't want to go anywhere else. Right here is the only place he can imagine wanting to be.

He doesn't see Carol again but he knows she's down there, and the knowing is pleasant. Grounding. It helps anchor him to everything.

He watches the last of the leaves starting to turn. By the second week of November they'll all be gone.

On the night of Day Six he sees Merle.

Allows himself to see Merle. He sits on the bed, propped up with pillows, and sees Merle standing in front of him, middle of the floor, wearing that awful orange prison jumpsuit. Standing there and looking at Daryl with his tired old eyes.

Merle doesn't offer any excuses. Doesn't berate him. Doesn't say anything. Neither does Daryl. They just look at each other across an expanse of floor, Merle a ghost there and Daryl more and more solid here all the time.

Maybe this could have gone another way. Maybe there was no other way it could have gone. The speculation is pointless; it did go that way, and there's no going back now.

After a while, Merle fades away and disappears. He leaves no trace behind. Daryl watches this happen, and as it does something in him - already broken open - widens. Expands. Spreads itself and flexes and discovers that it can be strong.

It hurts. But it's good.

I was thinking:

So this is how you swim inward,
So this is how you flow outward,
So this is how you pray.

Day Seven. Sun, thin and idle. He calls her that night, standing in the center of the room – exactly where Merle was - looking at the bed he made. For her. For them.

Beth. A single breath. He didn't know how he would know, but he had faith. And it didn't kill him.

I'm ready.

Note: poem snippets are, in order:

The Kookaburras
The Summer Day
Crows
The Ponds
The Buddha's Last Instruction
Wild Geese
Five A.M. in the Pinewoods