Page 3 of The Beast
The certainty that her daughters were cared for.
The full house she had once imagined.
I had been building toward that house my entire life, and the building had been so gradual and so natural-feeling that I had not stopped to notice, until quite recently, that I had never once asked myself whether I wanted to live in it.
The organ shifted outside into something I recognized—the processional beginning its slow, inevitable build—and I heard my mother's voice on the other side of the door, the murmur of a woman managing a thousand details at once.
I understood that we were almost out of time.
Colleen stood. Found her shoes. Crossed to me and took both my hands in hers. She looked at me with the expression that meant she was giving me something real.
"Whatever you're thinking," she said, "you can tell me. Now or later or whenever it is." Her voice was steady and even. Underneath it was something that asked nothing of me. "I mean that."
I looked at my sister and thought about all the things we had never said to each other, and all the ways we had each, in our own fashion, been very good at standing still and letting the moment pass.
"I know," I said.
She pressed a kiss to my cheek, careful of the makeup, and stepped back. Then the door was opening and my father was there in his morning coat, eyes going immediately bright when they found me—the brightness of a man who loved his daughter and believed completely that he was watching her happiness arrive.
I took his arm.
The light inside the nave was doing what it always did in late afternoon—red and gold through the stained glass, pooling on the stone floors in long burning shapes, the whole church drenched in it.
I knew this light. I had always found it beautiful in a way that felt, if not quite religious, then close enough—that sensation of being inside something vast and old that had held a great many human moments and would hold a great many more.
My father's arm was solid beneath my hand. My bouquet was cool and fragrant against my wrist. Daniel was at the end of the aisle with his kind face and his good life and the whole future we had planned together arranged behind him like a room I had already decorated in my mind.
Ahead of me, barely audible beneath the music, I heard Colleen exhale.
Two hundred and twelve people rose as one.
The thought arrived the way forbidden things did—quietly, and with complete conviction:I could run.
2
BROCK
One Day Earlier
The sun came up over West Texas the way it had for ten thousand years before anyone was around to call it beautiful, and it didn't much care that I was watching.
It started as a line. A thin seam of color along the eastern flat, where the land ran out and the sky took over. For a while, that was all it was—a crack in the dark, pale and cold. The air had teeth this early. It came off the flat carrying dust and the dry green smell of mesquite, found the gaps in my coat, and reminded me I was still made of skin.
Then, the seam widened. Bled. Went from gray to the color of a struck match, and the scrub came up out of the night, one shape at a time. Mesquite. Ocotillo. The long bones of a fence that hadn't held anything in years. The light moved toward me, slow and certain, like water finding the low places. When it reached the three stones at my feet, it laid down gold across the granite and made them look like something worth keeping.
They weren't.
This was the back corner of the Valentine cemetery, the part nobody put on the church bulletin. The good ground was up the rise—families, flowers, the little flags the VFW set out every May, names you'd know if you'd ever bought feed in this town or buried someone of your own.
Down here was different. No shade. No path. The dirt was harder, and the markers were the kind the county laid when nobody else would, flat and cheap and going to seed.
Some places called it a beggar's plot. Fancier places would've had a prettier word. Valentine just didn't think about it, which was the whole point of the place. It was where you put the ones nobody wanted to remember—the drifters, the dead-of-winter unknowns, the men who'd come through once and done something the town spent a long time afterward pretending it hadn't.
Three of them lay shoulder to shoulder under me. No names. The county never had any to carve, and I'd never offered the ones I knew.
I came out here every time I was back in Valentine, which wasn't often. Once a year, maybe less. I told myself it wasn't penance, and that much was true. I didn't kneel, didn't pray, didn't bring anything to leave behind. I wasn't sorry.
I stood over these three because it reminded me.
