Not a whole lot to say. Just another thank you. As I write this I'm approaching the final chapter, and it feels good. It feels like I'm exactly where I need to be.

Almost done.

Chapter 90: the freezing sky with its depths of light

The cold doesn't go anywhere. So neither does the snow.

Life goes on mostly as normal - as much as it can. The roads are fully clear by Monday, albeit still icy in patches. Daryl has seen places thrown into wild panic by a couple of inches of snow, but this town seems considerably calmer, as if somehow they've all had more chance to get used to it. Or possibly the floods of summer were toughening enough that none of them are fazed now by a little extra unexpected precipitation, in whatever form.

Regardless.

Maggie and Glenn go in the early evening, a bit after dinner. Their leavetaking is very emotional. This is because, fifteen minutes before they were scheduled to walk out the door, Glenn seized his moment - nothing particularly extraordinary, no grand gesture, maybe simply the moment he finally screwed up his courage and wasn't going to waste it - got down on one knee right there in the parlor, right on the threadbare oriental rug, and produced the ring and asked his question.

Daryl wasn't there. He had gone home. He heard all about it later. He can imagine - Maggie kissing Glenn, hugging him, crying, laughing, Annette doing the same, Beth smiling wide as she ever has, Shawn shaking Glenn's hand, Glenn's dazed grin and Hershel looking, if not outright pleased, at least content with the situation.

He imagines it. It's very clear. He imagines it and he sets it into a tableau, circles slowly it in his mind and takes it in and studies every part of it. It's very sweet. It's very pretty. It's very nice.

It's very not him.

This is something else Thanksgiving made clear to him, if it hadn't been clear before - and it had been, pretty much. For a while he thought maybe he could stop being such a tourist in that world, make a place for himself in it and be there. Perhaps not a real full-time residence, but a vacation house. Something. And regarding some parts of it, that may actually be true. There are parts now in which he doesn't feel a stranger, even if he does feel somewhat strange. But there are other parts he simply won't ever share in, and it has nothing to do with not being welcomed or wanted, or not trying hard enough. He was welcomed. He was wanted. It was real, and they were happy to have him there. It's not that there's no place for him at all.

That's just not who he is.

And that's okay. He doesn't have to be anyone other than who he is. He shouldn't make the attempt. Every day he feels more and more himself. He suspects a great deal of what's made his life miserable up until these last few months has been rooted in trying to be something he's not. Thinking he's something he's not.

Life is too short to fuck yourself up that way.

"Gonna have a brother-in-law," Beth says musingly. "Feels weird."

"Why?"

"I dunno. It just does. It's like..." She trails off into a thoughtful pause. "It's like that part of life is real now. Like... It's one thing when it's other people gettin' married. Havin' families. But this is Maggie." She laughs quietly. "I dunno, maybe I'm not makin' sense."

He rolls onto his back, his hand over the lamp making slow, fluttering shapes on the ceiling. Birds bleeding into other birds - crows, mockingbirds, juncos, starlings. Wild geese. "Do you ever?"

"Jerk."

"Not a creep, though?"

"No," she says, very soft, and there's something bittersweet in her voice that he can't name and can't explain. Except he feels it. He feels it as if it had its source in him, curled into his throat, resting in the cage of his ribs. "I should go."

"Alright." He's tired. It's been a long day.

But he's not sure how well he'll sleep. He's been restless.

"Love you."

"Love you, girl."

He knows some people say that reflexively. Like goodnight or goodbye. Not that they don't mean it, but it's something they say without really thinking. But he says it and every time he remembers the first time. Lying on blankets in the grass, moonlight drenching it and them and the broken towers of stone, the rustle of mockingbird wings - lifting her head from his chest and looking down at him, her eyes huge and deep, whispering.

I'm ready.

Tugging her hair free, letting it spill over his hands like that light. How easy it suddenly was. How effortless. Opening to her, like she was opening herself to him.

I love you.

Many things since then have been hard. But that hasn't been one of them.

It never will be.

Snow here hardly ever sticks around for long. Everyone is expecting it to be gone any day - really any hour. But it doesn't go, and it doesn't go, and the end of Tuesday comes and if anything it seems to be settling in, a thin crust of ice across its surface having far less to do with any melting and far more to do with the stuff erecting defenses and signaling that it intends to stay for a bit.

It's pretty. It's also weird. But hey - weird doesn't mean what it used to. Daryl isn't bothered. Most of the big pre-winter work is done anyway. He can roll with it, especially if Hershel can. And Hershel can.

Tuesday is nothing. Tuesday is bright and quiet and taking care of the cattle, assisting Shawn with the milking, taking the horses to the paddock for exercise. They like the snow; they trot and gambol and play with each other in the way horses do. He watches them for a while, and Nellie comes over and nudges him. He strokes her velvety nose and murmurs something to her that even he isn't sure he understands.

It's been months now, helping to take care of her along with the others; he supposes they're actually kind of friends at this point. He's never ridden her, though. He can ride but it's been a long time. Suddenly he imagines taking her out on open ground and letting her go, letting her run as fast as she wants, flying with her like that bike. He doesn't think she would be afraid.

Maybe Hershel will let him do it. Sometime.

Short conversation that night. Has to be. They're still being careful, still not taking any unreasonable chances; the risks inherent in talking on the phone late at night are better understood now, and there's less worrying, but even so.

So not much. No song, no poetry. Little in the way of words. But before she lets him go, she catches him in the middle of a short span of quiet and murmurs, "I know why you gave me the knife."

"Yeah?" He's mildly surprised. He doesn't actually know, or at last he's not sure; he has some half formed ideas, some scraps of directed intuition. But he doesn't know, and if she does he's interested to find out. "Why?"

"It's kinda hard to say. I mean..." She hesitates, clearly still working through it, at least as far as the words go. "Like when you took me out trackin'. Showed me how to use the bow. Like what I told you after, the night they arrested Carol's husband. Someone looks at me... You know what they see." She laughs, wry. "Even now that I have the scar. Just this... little girl. But you don't see that. You see me."

She's quiet for a moment, and so is he. What she's telling him... Yes, of course that's right. That's exactly it. And not just that. Not just in general but in specific. She told him, he understood. He wanted her to know that he did.

As usual, what he did was show her.

"I love it," she says softly. "I love everythin' you ever gave me."

But he doesn't have anything to give her.

Except maybe that's not true. Maybe that's not true at all.

On Wednesday afternoon the clouds begin rolling in.

They aren't heavy. They're high and flat, moving slow. They aren't snowclouds, nor are they the clouds of oncoming storms; those storms are long done with and won't be back until spring. So there's no threat there. But they leach the color out of everything and turn the world into an old movie, all white and black and shades of gray. Even Beth's hair is touched by it, gone paler than cornsilk. It's not like what the moon does to her, though he supposes it might be its own kind of pretty.

He's not sure what would make her unpretty. He's not sure what could happen to her to prevent her from being the most beautiful thing he'll ever see.

Their hands don't find each other under the table anymore. But passing her the peas at dinner, his fingertips meet hers. There's no spark. There's no explosion in his nerve endings. There's just her and warm skin - a preview of when he'll see her again.

Friday, she tells him that night. She sounds excited. Not a sleepover - can't make that work this time and anyway they probably shouldn't push their luck - but they've shifted open mic nights at the coffee shop to Fridays, and he should come hear her sing. After, she'll be going to friend of a friend's let's-try-to-cope-with-imminent-finals party, and it'll be both big and some considerable distance from home. Not a ridiculous distance, but some way. Between forty and forty-five minutes. Different district. It won't be attended by very many people from her school. There will be a lot going on. It'll be sort of chaotic. He can pick her up without being noticed. Drive her most of the way back. They won't have much time, but they can park somewhere in the dark and fuck hard and fast in the front seat, her straddling him with her dress rucked up around her waist and her lip gloss smeared shining across her face, windows fogging and the air thick with their gasping as she bounces in his lap and laughs all wild against his mouth and shoots them both over the edge like twin bolts at the sky.

She doesn't exactly say that last. But it's in the sudden huskiness of her voice, an exhale that's almost a sigh, how he can practically hear the wet sheen on her lips as she licks them.

And she does say fuck. You can fuck me. God, Daryl, I want you to fuck me.

He moans softly and she giggles with equal softness and something close to glee.

Girl.

"It's kinda funny," she says before they say goodnight. "It actually seems like they're fine with me not bein' home so much. Bein' out more. Mama was talkin' the other night about how I'm the last one growin' up. How I should be... I should be spreadin' my wings."

She sounds meditative. Faintly pleased. He closes his eyes and imagines her with birds in flight inked across her skin. Murmurations. Exaltations.

"You are."

"Yeah," she whispers. "With you."

He has no idea what to say to that. So he says nothing. She's never made him feel like he had to say anything anyway. All she ever wanted from him was to try. To be there. To be present.

Occupying roughly the same space.

Thursday the clouds remain, darker. Still not very low and still not rapid and still not ominous, but the world appears more colorless than ever. To Daryl it looks like some kind of photograph, something you see in coffee table books and calendars. Picturesque is the term, he supposes, because it has all the qualities of a picture. Something composed, something so general and so vague that it might be anywhere at any time, and might appeal to anyone for any reason.

He's not sure he likes how it feels.

But it's beautiful. He stands on the side of the porch and smokes and leans on the railing, looks out at the horses in the paddock cloaked in their heavy winter blankets, their breath great clouds of steam dissipating into the air. Beyond them the fields roll out white into the dark fences of the trees. The road stretches past far to his right, long and lonely. Everything is very still except for in the distance across the field beyond the road, where a deep gray cloud rises, spreads and warps, comes together and falls back into the treetops. Starlings, murmuring.

Tell me what you see.

Lines. Angles. Planes. I see seasonal geometry. I see how clean and simple it looks and I'm not fooled, but it is simple, isn't it? It's very simple. The world is covered over. The world is stripped bare. There's sun but who the hell knows where in the sky it is now. Who the hell knows where it's going.

Close your eyes. What d'you hear?

Wind. A creaking board. The horses - hooves, nickers. Muffled. Whisper of the trees in the yard. The strange absence of birds.

What about what you smell?

Smoke. Snow. Cold. Sharp and thin.

What d'you feel?

He doesn't want to leave.

He would do almost anything to be able to stay.

That night he dreams about a distant red light pulsing in the dark. He tries to follow it, because it's the only light he can see, but he never gets closer. It's always out of reach.

Then it all bursts in on him, the entire universe exploding into all-color light, light like a fist slamming directly into his brain. Light like a punch in the eyes. He should be in pain but he isn't. He should fall back and cower, should be afraid, but he's not.

He stands there inside it and he feels like he's home.

Very far away, he can hear someone singing.

so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

She says he should come hear her sing.

Yes is the only answer there could ever be.

Note: Poem is Mary Oliver's "White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field".