Page 93 of Across His Line

The drive goes up a hill through trees that are lit from below, every single one, so their bare branches glow gold against the black. It goes on long enough that I lose track of the road behind us. There’s a stone fountain in a circle of gravel, turned off for the season. And at the top of the hill is the house, but it isn’t just a house; it’s three of them stuck together. Gray stone and tall white windows, a roofline with more angles than I can count, wings coming off the sides like arms. Every window is lit. Every single one. It looks like a ship at night.

I think about my grandma’s refrigerator. The sad carton of milk and half a stick of butter on a saucer. A jar of peanut butter scraped almost to the bottom. A twenty-dollar bill tucked back into a wallet and handed to Dylan an hour later for an energy drink.

And then this.

It makes me feel sick. Not at Rafe. I don’t know if it’s at anything. It’s just that the space between where I was an hour ago and where I am now is suddenly something I can see, and it’s fifteen minutes long, and it’s also the whole world.

Rafe stops at the top of the drive, in front of a set of stone steps going up to a front door the size of a garage. He sits there with the engine running. He looks at the door. Through the tall windows on either side, I can see a chandelier and people moving around and holding glasses.

Then he puts the car back in drive and drives around the side of the house. We go down a narrower drive, past a row of garage doors, five of them, to a paved courtyard at the back with a single light over a plain wooden door.

He’s hiding me.

My stomach pulls, making my ribs ache more. Of course he is. Look at me. Look at what I’m wearing. I haven’t even thought of what my hair looks like. I’d hide me, too.

I look at him. His lip is split and swelling. There’s blood dried at the corner of his mouth, and more on his collar, and his white shirt is torn at the neck and spotted dark down the front. His right hand on the wheel is open and wet. There’s a red mark coming up on his cheekbone.

He isn’t just hiding me. He’s hiding himself.

He’s going around the back of his own house because his parents are on the other side of that front door, and he doesn’t want them to see him like this.

That makes the knot in my stomach loosen just a little. I don’t know why it changes it. It just does.

But there’s a man in the courtyard. He’s standing by one of the garage doors in a dark wool coat with his hands folded in front of him, and I recognize him. The steps of Corvin. A black car with the engine running. A man who opened the back door and didn’t say a word.

He sees us pull in, so he walks toward the car, and then he stops.

I watch him see Rafe through the windshield. His face doesn’t change much. It’s the kind of face that’s been trained not to. But something goes across it, quick, and his hands come apart.

Rafe gets out. He leaves the engine running.

“Mr. Waleska—”

“Don’t,” Rafe says.

The man stops. And then his eyes go past Rafe, to me, through the passenger window. He doesn’t stare. He just looks, for about a second, and I can feel him take in my neck, my hair, the way I’m sitting. Then he looks back at Rafe, and his face goes back to nothing.

“Nobody saw us come in, Martin,” Rafe says. Quiet. “Okay? Nobody.”

“Of course,” the man says easily, like he’s used to this kind of thing.

I look at him and wonder what it’s like to be him. He doesn’t look at me again, and I respect him for not judging my worst hour.

I’ve been so out of my own body that I hadn’t realized I called Rafe to help me. I watch him. He comes around and opens my door. The car door which I could have opened myself. He doesn’t reach for me. He just stands there with his hand on the top of the door and waits for me to get out on my own, and when I do, he gets my duffel out of the back and doesn’t ask if he can carry it, he just does.

We look at each other for a long moment.

And when I see his face under the light, I feel like I did this to him.

His eyes take in my face, and then he walks towards the back door. My chest caves as I follow behind him like it’s high school all over again. I know the shape of his shoulders when he’s angry. I know he won’t turn around to check if I’m following; he knows I already am.

Then he stops when he reaches the door. He opens it for me and lets me walk in first. My curious eyes don’t look into the room first. I look at him to see what he’s thinking. He stares back.

Still angry.

I step inside. The room is bigger than my grandma’s kitchen. I don’t know what you’d call it. A mudroom, maybe, except nobody’s ever had mud in here. The floor is gray stone, and it’s warm under my shoes, actually warm. There are built-in cabinets along one wall, white, with brass handles, and a long wooden bench under a row of hooks hung with coats. A second refrigerator. A sink. A basket of folded towels on a shelf that look like nobody’s ever used them.

I look down at my shoes because it feels like I need to take them off. They’re also the only thing in this room that’s ever been anywhere.