Chapter 18: Silent Deliberations
Pete's truck had been gone for a full minute before Kaelen moved. He stood in the middle of the kitchen with his bandaged hands hanging at his sides, listening to the engine thin out along the track, then to nothing at all but the wind working the eaves. The cabin still held the shape of the visit: a mug on the table, gone cold, and the faint smell of diesel and tobacco that never quite belonged indoors.
The pouch under his tongue flexed, an uneasy swallow of pressure. Liam's weight shifted there, small and warm and very still, waiting.
Kaelen turned his head and opened the pouch deliberately, tipping his chin down toward his palm. Liam slid out into it, damp at the shoulders, hair plastered flat, and sat up without shaking himself off. He looked up, and his face was doing that careful thing it did when he was reading Kaelen rather than listening to him.
"You okay?" Liam said.
"Fine."
"You're not."
"I heard him." Kaelen set his brother down on the table beside the cold mug. He pulled out a chair and sat, which was answer enough, since he had not sat down at any point while Pete was in the house. "Three days. Nine o'clock. Signed clearance."
"That's just paperwork," Liam said. "Doctor clears you, you take the paper in, you're back on light duty Monday."
"It's not paperwork. They want me in the office, not the yard. They want me answering questions in a room."
Liam was quiet for a moment. Then he climbed down off the table by way of the chair leg, went to the stove, and dragged the kettle across the iron by its handle with both arms, a ridiculous performance that Kaelen knew was for his benefit and did not have the heart to stop. Liam got the lid off, got water in it, got it back on the ring with a grunt of effort, and stood there with his hands on his hips like a man who had completed a day's labour.
"There," he said. "Tea. You'll feel better."
"Liam."
"Or I could put the kettle on three more times. I can do that. I have all day."
Kaelen's mouth moved at one corner, which was as close to a smile as he had in him. He reached over, and Liam climbed up onto his wrist without being asked, settling in the cup of his palm. Kaelen brought him up to his chest. Liam put an ear flat against him, listening, and did not say anything about what he heard there.
The kettle took a long time. Kaelen drank the tea because Liam had made it, and answered when Liam talked, and at some point he realized he had answered three questions in a row without hearing any of them. Liam had noticed too, because he had stopped asking.
By mid-morning the light had changed, thin and pale, and Kaelen went out the back door.
The porch was weathered planks gone soft at the edges, grey as old bone, and it faced the long roll of the highlands with nothing between the rail and the horizon but grass moving in slow waves. He lowered himself onto the top step. His wings settled against his back, one a fraction stiffer than the other, and his bandaged hands rested on his knees like two foreign objects he had been asked to keep possession of.
He had taken this job seven years ago. Eighteen years old, and a house falling down around two boys who had nobody left to sign for them. Their parents had been thirteen years dead by then and the cabin had been going the way old roofs go in that country: a leak that becomes a stain that becomes a soft patch that becomes a hole you can put a fist through. The mortgage had been the mountain. Renovations had been the second mountain standing behind it, and he had climbed both with a chainsaw and a rising at four in the morning and a body built to do what other men's bodies could not.
And then there had been Liam. Books, fees, a computer built out of salvaged parts twice over, a degree earned at a desk three inches tall while Kaelen was out felling on the far slopes. And his own, bankrolled a course at a time between shifts, because he had wanted the certificate on the wall even if he never used it, because his mother had once said something about him finishing things.
He looked out at the grass and did the arithmetic he had not let himself do in years, the way you don't press on a bruise until you're ready.
The house was paid off. Done, four years ago, the last payment pushed through a winter he preferred not to remember. The roof was slate now, the walls insulated, the windows double-glazed, the porch he was sitting on rebuilt with his own hands. It was, by any measure he could think of, better than the house they had lived in before their parents died. Liam's student debt was settled. His own was settled. There was money in the account that was not going anywhere. There was no hole to fill. There had not been a hole to fill for a while, and he had simply kept shovelling out of habit, because stopping had never once seemed like something a person in his position was permitted to do.
So what, exactly, was he holding onto?
He turned it over. The job had given him a paycheque and a purpose and a place to put his hands. It had also given him a torn wing, a log that came loose off a slope, a foreman who had to stand in his kitchen and tell him the company wanted to look at him in a room. It had given him Drew, whose account was already on the record, phrased so that Kaelen was the one standing under the log and the cable had simply run. Pete had told him to have an answer ready for that. Pete had also told him the story had spread, that he had gone from liability to specialist, and Kaelen was not sure those two words were as far apart as Pete thought. A specialist was just a liability a company had decided to keep.
He flexed his hands in the gauze and felt the blisters pull.
The screen door creaked. Liam came out along the planks, small and deliberate, and climbed the step up to Kaelen's knee, then higher, up the long slope of his thigh, and stopped at the fold of his shirt where it met his waist. He sat down there like it was a bench built for him and looked out at the same grass Kaelen was looking at.
"You've been out here a while," Liam said.
"Mm."
"Tea's gone cold again."
"Mm."
Liam let that sit. Out on the hills a pair of birds crossed low, following the line of a burn Kaelen couldn't see from here but knew was there, cutting down toward the treeline. The wind came up and moved through the grass in long strokes, and then fell off again.
"You don't have to go back," Liam said, quietly, not looking at him.
Kaelen did not answer right away. That was the thing, he thought. He hadn't said a word out loud about any of it. He had been sitting here for two hours and had not spoken, and Liam had come out and set the whole of it down in front of him like a card he had been holding.
"No," Kaelen said at last. "I don't."
He felt Liam's hand press flat against his shirt, right over the beat, and stay there. Neither of them filled the silence in. The grass kept moving. The light stayed thin. Three days was not very long, and the answer he would have to give in that room was not the answer he had been rehearsing, and he had not yet decided what to do about that.
Liam felt the decision sitting behind his brother's ribs like something swallowed whole, and he did not like the shape of it. He had spent twenty years reading Kaelen's silences, and this one had a different grain than the ones that came before a shift or after a hard felling. This one had gone quiet in a way that reminded him of the first winter after their parents died, when Kaelen had stopped eating at the table because he was busy counting what was left.
He lifted his hand off the shirt and stood up on the fold of fabric.
"Down," he said.
Kaelen's head turned a fraction. "What?"
"Down. On your front. In the grass." Liam pointed at the slope beyond the porch steps, where the ground went soft and grey-green and the grass stood high enough to hide a man's elbows. "Now, Kae."
There was a beat where Kaelen looked at him the way he looked at a scale ticket he disagreed with. Then he got up off the step, which took longer than it should have, because his hands were wrapped and he would not use his wings for balance the way he normally did. He went down the three steps sideways and crossed ten yards of grass, and when he lowered himself onto the ground it was careful, the way a big animal lies down when it has been hurt and doesn't want to admit it.
Liam rode the whole way on his brother's waistband, one hand hooked into the shirt hem, the wind pulling at him hard enough to lean him back. Then they were down and the grass closed over them, and the noise of the world dropped to a hiss.
Kaelen lay face down with his arms folded under his head and his wings spread loose across the ground on both sides, the membranes tented up off the grass. From four inches tall it looked like a field of leather and bone, and Liam had crossed it before, more times than he could count, but he never stopped knowing exactly how much of his brother's body was wing.
He walked up the spine first, the way he always did. Vertebra by vertebra, testing with his palms rather than his fingers, because the flats of his hands felt more than his fingertips did. Between the shoulder blades: locked. He leaned his weight into the muscle and Kaelen grunted, a low sound that came up through the ground.
"You're carrying all of it here," Liam said.
"All of what."
"Everything you haven't said since Pete left."
No answer. Liam moved out onto the left wing, which was the one that had torn, and which had been the stiff one since. He walked the leading edge first, hand over hand along the thin forearm that held the membrane, and he found the joint where the wing met the back and pressed both thumbs into it until Kaelen's whole frame shifted under him.
"Tell me the seven-year story again," Liam said. "The short version. You were eighteen."
"That's not a story, that's just the year I started."
"Start with the year and stop when you get to this morning."
Kaelen breathed out into the grass. The purr was not running yet, so Liam kept working, walking the membrane out toward the tip and back, smoothing the place where the tear had closed into a scar with a ridge along it like a seam in fabric.
"I needed a wage," Kaelen said finally. "The bank was four months out from taking the house. You were seven. Dad's pension paperwork had gone to a solicitor who died, and nobody would tell me where it went. I walked into the yard in boots two sizes too big and asked Pete for a job, and he looked at me for about ten seconds and handed me a chokeboy's belt."
"And you said yes before he finished the sentence."
"I said yes before he started it."
Liam found the sprained attachment near the shoulder, the same one he had released weeks ago in the meadow, and it had gone tight again. He set the heel of his hand against it and leaned in slow, a fraction at a time, watching Kaelen's ear for the flush that meant it hurt and he was refusing to say so.
"And now?" Liam said.
"Now the house is done. Roof's slate. Windows are double. Liam." Kaelen's voice changed on his name in a way that made Liam stop pressing. "You finished paying your loans in the spring."
"I know when I finished paying my loans."
"So there's no reason left that I can find."
There it was. Liam let the knot go and sat back on the wing joint, looking down the long line of his brother's back toward the nape and the black hair spread out over the grass like something spilled. He had known the arithmetic, of course. He had watched the last payment go out and had his own private feeling about what it meant, which was that Kaelen would not know what to do with himself once the ledger was clean. He had known it for at least a year and had not said so, partly because it sounded like an accusation and partly because it was one.
"There doesn't have to be a reason," he said.
"There was always a reason."
"Twelve years there was always a reason. Before that there was Dad, and after that there was the roof, and every year there was something with a date on it. That's not the same as a reason to stay."
Kaelen said nothing. Liam found the second knot, further out, along the radial where the membrane stretched thin toward the trailing edge, and worked it loose with both hands until he felt it give.
Then something happened that Liam did not expect, which was that Kaelen started talking again without being prompted.
"Pete's with the company," Kaelen said. "Pete's fine. Pete's better than fine. But Pete's the one they send into my kitchen, and the one they'd send in again. And the board is the board, and Drew's account is Drew's account, and none of that changes if I'm careful on a slope for another seven years." He turned his head to the side and his voice flattened out. "I did the thing right. The wing is the proof of it. And I get a room and a table and a man I've never met asking me why I was standing where I was standing."
Liam walked up his brother's back to the nape, which took a while, and curled down there against the warm smell of him, and pressed both palms flat to the skin on either side of the spine.
"Then maybe the room is the last thing," he said. "And after the room, you decide."
"Decide what."
Liam thought about it. His tail wound itself around a strand of Kaelen's hair, and the wind came over the top of the grass and bent it down in a long stroke, and somewhere off toward the treeline a bird called twice and stopped.
"Whether you go back to their yard," Liam said, "or somebody else's. Or nobody's. That's three things, Kae. That's more than you had at eighteen."
Kaelen lay still under him for a long moment. Then the purr came up through his ribs, low and slow, not the easy one, the tired one, and Liam took it. He stayed where he was, spread out over the nape with his hands on his brother's spine, and let the grass hide the both of them from the horizon, and did not say anything else, because this was the part that Kaelen had to do.
The purr went on under his hands, slow and rough, and Liam stayed spread across the nape and let it run. He knew this purr the way he knew the sound of the kettle in the next room. It was not contentment. It was a door being held shut, and the only thing it meant was that Kaelen was still in the same room as him and had not got up.
So he waited, and he did the work while he waited. He walked the length of the left wing again, from the shoulder joint out to the thin forearm, testing the scar tissue with his palms, and he found the ridge along the trailing edge still raised and warm, so he worked it with the heels of both hands in long strokes until the membrane lay flat and the warmth evened out. Kaelen's breathing changed under him, from the shallow held thing it had been on the porch to something slower.
Then he said it. Not into the grass. Not into the back of his brother's head. Normally these things came out easiest when Kaelen could not be looked at, but this one came out flat and level, the way he might read a line off a screen.
"I don't want you to go back there. Not there, specifically."
The purr stopped. Liam felt the exact moment it stopped, because the ribs under his knees went still.
"I mean it," Liam said. "You can hear me breathing. I know you can. Turn it over for a second."
"It's a job."
"It's a yard with Pete in it and a slope with Drew on it and a room with a table in it, and you've just spent two hours on the back step not saying one word about any of them, which is about as much as you've ever said about anything." Liam pushed himself up so he was sitting on the small of Kaelen's back rather than lying on it, which put him further from the ear and made his voice carry less. "So no. It's not just a job. It's the job, and I've watched you carry it for seven years, and I think you're allowed to put it down."
Kaelen's hands, under his head, moved. The gauze made a dry sound against the grass.
"Put it down and what."
"I don't know. Put it down and be a man in a house for a week without counting what's left." Liam stood up and walked down the length of the spine, past the fold of the shoulders, and stopped at the ridge of the right wing where it lay splayed in the grass, so that he was standing on his brother's wing rather than his back. "You've got a certificate in the mending drawer that you've never once used, and I've seen you read a tree from twenty yards out faster than Pete's whole crew put together, and you rebuilt a porch and a roof and a roof under a roof with your own hands, and the garden's only been yours since spring and it's already giving up rows of anything you put in it."
"That's not a living."
"It's four things, which is more than we had at eighteen. That's all I'm saying."
The grass bent over them in a long wave and stood back up. Kaelen was quiet for so long that Liam started walking again, out along the wing, over the seam of the scar, toward the tip where the membrane went thin as a leaf. He could hear his brother breathing and he could hear the wind, and underneath both of them something else, the low churn of a man thinking in circles.
"I don't know what I'd do," Kaelen said at last.
"That's fine."
"It's not fine. I'm twenty-five. You don't get to twenty-five with a mortgage paid off and say you don't know what you'd do."
"I got to twenty with two degrees and no idea what I'd do on Monday, and you didn't once tell me it wasn't fine." Liam reached the tip of the wing and turned around on it and looked back down the whole spread of his brother, black hair and grey gauze and leather, all of it lying in the grass as if the ground had grown him. "You said finish the thing you started. So I finished it. Now I'm saying it back."
Kaelen raised his head off his folded arms. The motion lifted the front of the wing and tipped Liam back a step, and Liam caught himself on the leading edge and sat down cross-legged there, which he had done a hundred times before in better weather.
"Three days," Kaelen said again.
"Three days," Liam agreed.
"If I don't go, they'll have a report with my name on it and no answer in it."
"Then we write the answer first." Liam looked out from the wing at the dark line of the treeline, where the light was going gold and low, and something in his chest settled because his brother had said we. "You don't have to know what comes after this week to know what you say in that room. You say the truth. The cable ran, the log came loose, you were on the slope doing a job you were sent to do, and Drew's account leaves out where Drew's feet were, which is the one thing he should be explaining and isn't. You say that, and you sign the clearance, and if they want to keep you they keep you. Then you come home and we decide the other thing with food on the table instead of on a step."
Kaelen turned his head and looked at him along the length of his own wing, and there was something in his face Liam did not see often, which was his brother being seen back. It was not comfortable for either of them. Liam held it anyway.
"You're a bossy little thing," Kaelen said.
"I'm four inches tall. I have to be."
The purr came back then, not the tired one, and not the easy one either, something in between, and Kaelen dropped his head back down into his arms and let the grass take the rest of him. Liam walked back up the wing and along the spine and sat down on the nape, where the hair was warm, and untangled his tail from a strand of it.
They stayed out until the light thinned to nothing and the first midges started coming up off the burn. Then Kaelen got to his feet in stages, brushing grass off his knees, and held his palm flat on the step, and Liam climbed into it, and they went back inside. The cold mug was still on the table. The kettle was still warm on the ring.
Liam sat on the lip of his brother's glass while Kaelen refilled it, and watched him move around the kitchen, and thought about three days, and about everything that had no date on it anymore, and decided that was a problem he was willing to have.