Home

The house in Ottley smelled the way it always had: stale beer, fried onions, and under it, faint and sour, the old copper smell of blood that no bleach had ever quite reached.

He knew the smell with his whole body. It reached into the back of his throat the moment his father opened the door, and his legs went weak with a hatred so pure and so familiar that it felt almost like homesickness.

"Home sweet home," Edward said.

The kitchen was clean.

That was the first wrong thing. The broken dishes were gone, the floor scrubbed, the whiskey bottles cleared from the counters. A Bible lay open on the table beside a half-finished cup of coffee. The wall phone hung in its cradle. The clock above the stove ticked in the quiet.

Cassian stood in the doorway with his canvas bag, looking at the foot of the stairs.

"Nobody's going to hurt you," said Edward, behind him, pleasantly. "Go on. Up to your room."

His room had been changed.

The bed was made. The window had been nailed shut, with long iron nails driven in at the corners, new, shining. The door had a hasp on the outside. The telephone jack by the closet had been ripped out of the wall.

He heard the hasp slide.

"Dinner at six," Edward called through the wood. "We'll say grace."

…

For three days his father did not drink.

It was unnerving. Edward Hale in a stranger's skin: clear-eyed, calm, soft-spoken. At six each evening he unlocked the door and walked Cassian down to the kitchen, where they ate a dinner of boiled potatoes and ham at opposite ends of the table. Edward said grace. He asked politely about school. He did not raise his voice. He did not raise his hand.

On the second night he said, apropos of nothing, "A boy should honor his father."

"Yes, sir."

"Even when his father's made mistakes."

"Yes, sir."

"I've made a lot of mistakes." Edward cut a potato in half and examined it. "But I'm doing better. I've got help. People who show me how things ought to be done." His gray eyes lifted. "You'd be surprised, boy, how many people care about this family."

Cassian said nothing. He looked at the knife in his father's hand.

On the third night, the knife was gone from the table.

He noticed it as he sat down. The place by his plate was bare. Edward saw him notice, and smiled his glassy smile, and said, "Can't be too careful," and poured himself a glass of water.

He's afraid of me.

It was a calm, startling thought. For the first time in his life, Edward was afraid. Not of the boy sitting across from him, the skinny kid in a borrowed shirt. Of something else. Of whatever had happened at the gate of that school, of a rumor that had gone up the valley by telephone and reached Edward's ears: the boy touched the Guest and it bowed. A man who had beaten his son without compunction for fifteen years now removed the knife from the table.

But he did not let him out of the room.

…

On Sunday night, the bottle came back.

Cassian heard it from his bed. The clink, the gurgle, the creak of the chair. He lay on the straw-stuffed mattress that smelled of his own childhood and listened to his father sit alone in the kitchen below, and drink, and drink. At half past ten the phone rang. Edward picked up. A long silence. A low murmur of a voice that Cassian knew and could not place.

"Yes," Edward said, thickly. "Yes, sir. I understand. He's still... no. No. Not yet." A pause. "Of course. Whatever you think best."

The receiver clunked down.

The stairs creaked.

Cassian was off the bed and standing in the middle of the room before he knew he had moved. The hasp rattled. The door swung back on its hinge, and Edward stood in the opening with the hall light behind him, huge, unsteady, his shirt buttoned wrong.

His eyes were red again.

"Told you," Edward whispered. "Told you not to embarrass me."

"Dad—"

"They called. You hear that? The Rector called me. Personally. At my own house." His voice cracked upward, high and wounded, a boy's voice in a man's chest. "Do you know what he said? He said it was a shame. He said I should've raised you better. He said it was too bad you couldn't be trusted to know your place."

"I didn't—"

"You were chosen!" He screamed it. "They picked you! Out of the whole goddamn country, you, my son, mine! I sold my own—I gave—and you spit on it! You spit on it all, you ungrateful little bastard—"

The fist came out of nowhere.

It was a big, slow, clumsy swing, the kind Cassian had been dodging since he was five. His body knew exactly what to do. He ducked, and the knuckles whistled over his scalp and cracked against the doorframe. Edward howled. Whiskey and spit sprayed across the room.

And Cassian, who for fifteen years had only taken it, who had curled up against the wall and covered his head and waited for it to stop, who had stood at the top of the stairs and watched his mother fall, lifted his own fist and hit his father in the mouth.

It was the best feeling of his life.

He felt the lip split under his knuckles. He felt the teeth. He heard the grunt of astonishment and saw Edward's head snap back, the red eyes going round. For one blazing second he thought, I did it. I'm out. It's over.

Then his father's hand closed around his throat.

…

It wasn't a fight. It had never been a fight. A grown man in a drunken rage against a hundred-and-thirty-pound boy: there is no contest in that arithmetic. He remembered the floor coming up. He remembered the weight on his chest, knees pinning his arms, the hot stinking breath. He remembered the sound his own head made against the baseboard, a hollow, wet crack, like a melon dropped on a kitchen floor.

He remembered thinking, quite clearly, this is the one.

This is the one he doesn't stop.

His vision narrowed to a pinprick. His father's face hung over him, wet with sweat and tears, distorted, the mouth open and shouting something he could no longer hear. The gray light from the hall flickered. The warm thing in his palm, the one that had risen at the touch of the Guest, had gone out, smothered. He couldn't find it. He reached for it with everything he had, and found only cold.

Mom, he thought.

And from very far away, from somewhere beyond the end of the world, there was the sound of breaking glass.

…

He woke to beeping.

Slow, steady, patient. Beep. Beep. Beep. It was a sound he knew. He had heard it through glass, in a waiting room that smelled of bleach and death. He lay with his eyes closed, thinking: I'm in the ICU. I'm back with Mom.

Then: No. That's wrong.

He opened his eyes.

White ceiling. A harsh light. A tube taped to the back of his hand, and a clamp on his finger, and his head wrapped in so much gauze that he felt like a mummy. Everything hurt. It hurt to breathe, to blink. He turned his head a quarter inch on the pillow, and the whole room tilted.

"Don't move, baby."

He knew that voice.

He knew it the way you know your own heartbeat. It came from the left, low and cracked and warm, and the sound of it went through him like a current. He turned his head, slowly, and there, beside the bed, in a wheelchair with a thin hospital blanket over her knees, sat his mother.

She was so small.

Her hair had been cut short. Her face was gaunt and sallow, with deep hollows under the cheekbones. A line of stitches ran along her temple. But her eyes were open, and clear, and wet, and fixed on him with a ferocity that made his own throat close.

"Mom."

"I'm here." Her fingers wrapped around his. They were thin as twigs, and so cold, and they gripped him as though she would never let go. "I'm here, Cassian. I'm here. I've got you."

"You're—you're out."

"Daniel got me out." She laughed, a wet, ragged sound, and the tears spilled over. "That crazy, crazy man. He and Dana. They took me out of that place in the back of a repair truck at two in the morning, under a pile of tarps. Dana wheeled me in the service door of Mercy and put me in a bed under somebody else's name." Her voice broke. "Oh, baby. I thought I was going to lose you."

Behind her, a tall man in a wrinkled flannel shirt stood very still. He was in his fifties, with gray at his temples and grease permanently ground into the creases of his hands. He didn't speak. He held his cap in both fists and stared at Cassian with an expression of such stricken tenderness that Cassian had to look away.

Daniel.

"He found you," his mother said. "He drove to Ottley that night to have it out with your father. He kicked the kitchen door in. Cassian, Edward had you on the floor—" She stopped. She pressed her hand to her mouth. "He had a tire iron. Daniel. He nearly... but your father just stood there. He stood there with his hands open and he said, 'Take him, then. It's done.' He let him carry you out."

"It's done," Cassian repeated. His tongue felt thick.

"Whatever that means."

It meant something. He lay with his eyes on the ceiling and felt it turn over in his mind, a heavy, cold, many-sided stone. It's done. A job finished. A debt paid. Edward Hale, drunk and weeping with the tire iron at his throat, had not been defending his son, or his rights, or his pride. He had been a man with a message to deliver, who had delivered it.

I gave— he'd screamed. I sold my own—

At the door, a figure moved. Dana. In her blue scrubs, with her dark hair coming down out of its clip, a paper cup of coffee forgotten in her hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She gave him a trembling, crooked smile, and put one hand against her chest.

He tried to smile back.

He did not feel what he had expected to feel. He felt warm, and alive, and wrapped in the hands of people who loved him, and under the warmth, a cold, small, quiet thing that wouldn't go away. A thing that had been left unfinished. A door that had closed, and was still, somehow, ajar.

"Cassian?" Daniel's voice was low and rough. "Anything you need. Anything. You tell me."

"Water," he whispered.

Daniel went at once. Dana moved. His mother's hand tightened in his, and she laid her forehead against the edge of the mattress and began to cry in earnest, helpless and relieved.

He lay still. His eyes drifted to the window.

It was dusk. The sky above the parking lot was the color of a fresh bruise. Rows of cars gleamed under the sodium lamps, and in the far corner, near the dumpsters, where nobody parked, sat a single black pickup truck with its engine off and its headlights dark.

A man sat behind the wheel, quite still. He wore a quilted hunting jacket. As Cassian watched, a thin curl of smoke rose from the window of the cab, spiraling slowly up into the cold.

No one else in the room had noticed. No one else knew what it meant.

Cassian had refused to choose a side, and life had chosen for him.

THE END. If you want to choose a side yourself, turn back to Chapter 21 and choose again.