Tell the Wind and Fire (18 page)

“I understand. Your dad needs you. And I understand that you have been trying really hard to help me, with these meetings, with everything,” Ethan said. “I need you too.”

What I had been doing at the meetings was not so difficult—be silent, smile. It was sickening to do and sickening to be complimented for. There would be another meeting early tomorrow morning, and I would give them all the smiles and silence they wanted.

“I’ve made so many mistakes. I feel so guilty. I don’t believe I could have survived these last weeks without you,” Ethan continued. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“You could have survived alone,” I said at last. “But I didn’t want you to be alone.”

Ethan let go of my hand so he could put an arm around me and draw me in close. The sun was sinking in the sky, but it was just low enough for light to catch the windows of the buildings it was sinking behind. It was as if the sun wanted to be close to the earth, as if the sun was in love too.

The whole city seemed so beautiful suddenly, like a glass filled not with liquid but with light, a crystal glass on the very edge of a table, tipped just a hair too far. Sunbeams quivered over glass, tossed ribbons of light over and around buildings. It was like seeing the trembling instant before the glass fell.

All the more beautiful because it was fragile. Never more beautiful than at the instant before it was destroyed.

The next morning, Ethan found me outside the meeting room in Stryker Tower, in the long hall with its glinting tapestry that had light woven into the fabric to look like electric gold. He was pale, and he reached for my hands as if I was in danger of falling off a cliff and he had to save me, and I knew that Jarvis was dead.

“He’s not dead” was the first thing out of Ethan’s mouth, but I did not feel relieved.

My father had not been killed either. And my mother had vanished and we had never seen her body. Worse could happen to you than a clean death, down in the Dark.

“What’s happened to him, then?”

My voice sounded tight and closed off. I stepped back, away from his offered hands and comfort. What I wanted was to be so strong that nobody would be able to touch me. All I would take from him in that moment was information.

“He was reported missing from his home in the Dark city,” said Ethan. “There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry. He has been gone for less than twenty-four hours. He may have gone somewhere of his own accord. He might be back at any moment.”

I laughed, and he jolted at the sound. “Come on, Ethan. You don’t believe that.”

He stopped trying to reach for me.

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. But I don’t know what else I can say to comfort you.”

“You could start by not lying to me, or yourself. I don’t want comfort.”

“You comforted me,” said Ethan. “You supported me at every turn, and you made it look easy. Let me try and do the same for you. Let me just try.”

My father thought I was able to care for him, carry both his and my weight in Penelope’s home, be a daughter, a student, a famous victim, girlfriend to a celebrity, and as good as a mother. He thought because I smiled and pretended like it was no trouble—because smiling was one of the things I was expected to do—that the weight of expectations was not absolutely crushing.

So many expectations weighed down on me. I felt as if I was in a story I had heard once, of a man who had stone after stone pressed to a board over his chest. As long as he had had breath, he had asked for more, and I understood why he had asked. After a certain point the idea of a world where you were not under pressure seemed like a dream, and all you could imagine was more weight being added until you broke, and sometimes you wanted the relief of breaking sooner.

I broke then.

“You can’t comfort me,” I said. “Especially not when you say stupid things like this. You think it’s easy? To be everything to him, to you, to the council, to be so much and never be anything objectionable? You think it’s effortless because it’s supposed to be effortless—”

“I never said that,” Ethan protested. “I never said anything like that. I said you made it look . . . I know how hard you try.”

That didn’t make it any better. I wanted how hard I tried to be invisible but appreciated all at once: I wanted what I could not have and I wanted Jarvis to be safe and I did not know how to stop being angry.

“And it suits you for me to try, when you need me to be strong. But not when you want to feel better about yourself and what you did—who you sent to his death. When you want to feel like a big strong man consoling a weak, weeping woman, things are different. Then you act as if I am something to be protected, like I’m a piece of china to be kept in a glass case. Maybe you want me to be breakable, so you can shield me. But I’m not. How can I be fragile and do everything I have to do?”

Ethan’s hands clenched into fists when I said “death.” He did not interrupt me, but with every word his face grew paler and paler. We stood as far apart as that richly decorated corridor would allow us to stand, and I wished we could be even farther.

“You’re the one who always tries to protect me,” said Ethan, and he was shouting suddenly back at me, as he’d never shouted before. “As if I’m the fragile one, as if I can’t understand anything. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to love someone who will not let you help them?”

“I treat you as if you can’t understand anything because you
can’t understand anything.
You’ve lived your whole life in the Light. You’ve never been hungry or cold or left bleeding in the Dark. You think I’m wrong? You think you do understand? Tell me, Ethan Stryker,” I said, and I wielded the name as if it was a blade, and saw him flinch as if it had been one. “How can you?”

“Just because we’ve had different lives doesn’t mean we can’t try to understand each other,” Ethan said. “Just because I’ve lived a life of privilege doesn’t mean that I can’t sympathize, that I don’t have a heart to feel or a mind to know that what you suffered and what other people are still suffering is terribly wrong. The laws against the Dark are disgusting and cruel, and the whole system needs to change.”

I felt myself tense all over, and I looked toward the door behind which Mark Stryker and his council sat. When I looked back at Ethan, he was still watching me. It did not even occur to him what danger could be coming.

“It is a privilege to say—to even think—that the system is cruel,” I said in a low, furious voice. “What you are doing is talking treason, and you could be killed for it.”

“So what’s the alternative, Lucie?” Ethan demanded. “Do nothing, because someone hurt you once? Let other people be hurt and killed, let the cities burn, and keep smiling and doing absolutely nothing?”

“What’s your suggestion?” I asked. “Send someone else to do something? And when that someone you sent is killed, you will do what? Oh, that’s right. You do absolutely nothing except talk. You couldn’t make yourself shut up at the council meeting, you talked on the television, and you accomplished nothing. Don’t tell me about what I’ve done and what you’ve done. I saved a man. You sent one to die.”

Ethan was white as paper.

It had always been understood between us that we did not hurt each other. It had been like a treaty written and signed by both of us, the agreement that let us be able to love and able to live with each other despite our differences. Only now we had spoken the forbidden words. I felt as if I had taken our agreement and burned it before his eyes.

I was terrified suddenly, as scared as I was angry and sick over Jarvis. I remembered how I had felt in the days before I met Ethan, how I had not felt that I could ever leave the darkness behind. I had felt like I was made of opaque black stone, not able to let in light. Until he had come, and I had learned to let his light in.

The whole city of dazzling lights had not been enough to make me feel alive, but he had.

“I thought I understood,” Ethan said in a distant voice. “When you hid how you felt or what you had been through from me. I hid things from you as well, anything that I thought would scare or hurt you. I thought . . . that this world is terrible sometimes, and we were both trying to protect each other. But if the truth is that you despise me . . .”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, sometimes. And if you’re hiding things from me, you despise me, too.”

I had not thought about it as despising him before, but what else was hiding the truth from someone because you thought they were too weak to deal with life as it really was? It was a statement that you could not trust them, that they were not worthy of trust.

He did not think I was worthy of trust either.

If he had been hiding things from me, how weak did he think I was? How weak had he always believed I was?

Maybe he was right. I had not spoken up for Jarvis. I had let him be sent away. I had been a coward again, deserting him as I had deserted my mother. I hated myself, and it almost made me hate Ethan.

Fear, grief, and sickness all seemed to twist in me, burning and alchemizing. I thought of my Aunt Leila, years ago: she had never hesitated and never, ever wept. She had been angry, and she had acted. She had known what to do, and what I should do. I wanted to be just like her. All I wanted to feel was fury.

“I don’t despise you,” Ethan protested. “I love you.”

I thought of my father, my poor father, and all the secret resentment and weariness I felt when he suffered.

I turned my face away from Ethan. “If you think loving me means you can’t despise me,” I said, “you’re a child.”

“What if I told you everything that I’ve been hiding from you?” Ethan asked, and his voice was soft now, imploring. “What if you told me all you ever felt, all you ever did and felt you could not tell me? What if we loved each other and we trusted each other? What if we discovered each other, right now?”

His caressing, convincing voice did its work. I wanted to turn around and look at him, then cry and fall into his arms and whisper promises of love and trust. And I never wanted to be that weak. I could not bear to tell him what he wanted to hear.

I did turn. I did look at him. I did not cry.

“You bring Jarvis back,” I snarled. “You go and get him, save him, return him alive to his family. Then I will listen to whatever you have to say. Until then, it doesn’t matter what you say. All that matters is what you did, and that means I don’t want to talk to you or see you, ever again.”

I walked away from him. My cheap shoes made muted, dull thuds on the marble floor as I went.

When I returned to midtown and the Lorry home, I pushed open the door gently in case my father was resting. It swung silently and slowly to reveal Penelope on the sofa, home during a workday for the first time since I had known her. She sat with her face in her hands, and I stood staring at her, paralyzed with guilt and trying to nerve myself for the inevitable onslaught. She had let me and my father in from the dark and the cold, she had shared her home with us, and I had destroyed her family. In her place, I would have wanted to kill me. She would have had every right.

Penelope lifted her head and stared at me. Her big dark eyes were glittering with tears, like lakes with treasure lying in the bottom, drowned and lost. She looked as young as her own daughter.

“Oh, Ladybird,” she said, her pet name for me almost swallowed by a gulping sob. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

I ran stumbling across the floor, to the sofa, and into her arms.

Penelope stroked my hair and murmured to me, words of love and gratitude that I had come to her, words of misery she assumed was shared. She spoke to me as if I was part of her family and not the agent of its destruction. Her tears fell into my hair, and I hung around her neck and tried to say all the right things back to her, tried to offer her what little comfort I could. I did not say that I’d agreed to Jarvis being sent because I was too much of a coward to stand up to Mark Stryker. I did not say that Jarvis was lost because of me.

I still could not cry.

When Marie came home and my father woke, we had to tell them. Penelope did it holding tightly to my hand, as if we were in it together, as if we were allies. We were able to reassure them both, make them believe that something bad had happened but we would all be spared from the ultimate horror of losing Jarvis.

Later that night, I lay in bed and thought of Jarvis, and of Ethan.

Ethan had not wanted any of this to happen. I did not want to turn away from him and be alone in my misery. I did not want him to be alone either.

He had sent Jarvis to the Dark city to save lives, to help people. I had wanted someone to go and try to protect my Aunt Leila, to protect what used to be my home. I had wanted someone to be sent, but I had not been able to choose someone or been able to truly hope for change. Ethan had.

He had not been brought up to fear, and he had refused to learn how to hate. Even now that his father had been killed, he wanted peace.

And he had not been wrong about our relationship, and how it worked. Neither of us had been truly willing to tell the other about our families, about our beliefs, even that we could both sword fight. I knew fear and hate, and I did not know how to tell him about either. He had asked for the truth, and I had not felt able to give it to him.

Just because I had failed to trust him did not mean that he was unworthy of trust.

I loved him and I did not want to be without him. Jarvis was gone, but perhaps we could find him. I had saved somebody from the Dark city once before, and with Ethan to help me—Ethan and all his resources—maybe I could do it again.

If I could not, I did not want to lose anybody else.

Of course, what I wanted was not the only thing that mattered, I thought, and lay curled on my side with my hands curled too. Both the curl of my body and the curl of my hands hid emptiness.

I had never understood why Ethan loved me, why he had wanted me or chosen me. But I had always tried to be good to him, not to show too much of my damage or my ugliness to him, and now I had spilled the bitterness of years all over his wounds. He had just lost his father.