Page 76 of The Puppet Master
My mouth shuts, lips thinning.
“See?” she yells, voice booming, disrupting the children’s play. “You won’t tell meanything.”
“Lower your voice, for God’s sake.”
“Or what?” she barks—half amusement, half pissed. “What more pain could you possibly cause me?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, won’t you?”
Her face freezes, head rearing back slightly. With a hand over her mouth, she turns away. A curtain of hair veils her face as she hunches forward. Time stretches while I watch her sadness slowly unfold. She starts to cry—soft whimpers blooming to sharp gasps.
If we were in the training room, I don’t think it would bother me. But here, in the sunlight, I feel my face fall.
Fuck.
I look down at the girls, still hard at play. A Keeper’s head is tilted up, like he’s watching Luna and me, but no one moves toward the treehouse. Part of me wishes they would. If only so we could go back to the training room and pretend this walk never happened.
I would go easy on her, I think. Though I know I shouldn’t.
Every defiant word is an indicator that she needs more conditioning. Needs to be pushed harder. Longer. With fewer breaks.
We only have a week left, and she isn’t close to ready. Giving her mercy now would be setting her up to fail later.
But…
Minutes linger while Luna continues to cry. I just listen. Wait for it to stop.
Think.
Debate.
Argue with myself.
Then finally…
I wrap my hand around the back of my neck, my heart pounding pathetically hard, my palms pathetically damp. “I have anxiety.”
Her cries fade. The curtain of hair shifts.
“The school nurse sort of diagnosed me with it as a kid. I used to get horrible panic attacks and chomp my teeth so hard, they’d chip. It was a problem, but uh…” I wave a hand like I don’t know what to say. “I had this thing that I did to relieve racing thoughts.”
Luna’s eyes peek at me as she gently pulls back her hair, her spine lengthening. She drags her leg onto the platform as she faces me.
Again, I shrug, which is too many times now. “I just … counted shit. Like how many steps it took to get from my front door to my bedroom or how many bottles of beer were on thecoffee table. The more random shit I catalogued in my head, the more in control I felt. And the teeth thing…” I point to my mouth as if she needed the clarification. “It’s just leftover from that.”
Luna nods more times than necessary. Her lips are pursed like she’s skeptical, but her eyes are kind. Far kinder than I deserve.
“It doesn’t sound that random,” she says.
I smile as if amused and have a blow-off remark on my tongue, but I don’t release it. Not for her.
I don’t know that her father was an alcoholic like mine, but I do see parallels. I see fear. Abuse. A little girl who learned to scan for danger. How to lie for survival. A girldesperatefor control—raw knuckles from overwashing, a bed made too perfect for the military.
I gesture at the kids. “My childhood didn’t look like that.”
She follows my gaze. “Mine either.”
I pat her thigh and leave my hand there as I stare out at all the green. The Northwest has always been too cold for me, but I can see why people love the trees.
