Chapter 169: The Night Before

Chapter 169: The Night Before
Del woke at four and couldn't get back under.
She lay still for a while, listening. Oliver was in the chair—she could hear his breathing. Outside the shed, the property was quiet; the only sound was the dry Texas wind moving through the scrubby fence-line trees.
She sat up.
"Can't sleep," Oliver said.
"I slept some."
"An hour."
He shifted in the chair. She could see his outline in the dark — the shape of him. He looked tired. The last few days had cost something even from him.
"Oliver."
"Yeah."
"Do you ever think about stopping?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Stopping what specifically?"
"All of it." Del pulled the blanket around her shoulders and sat on the edge of the cot. "Running..." she paused. "The other thing."
"The other thing," he repeated.
"You know what I mean."
He was quiet again, longer this time. She'd learned that he thought in longer stretches than most people, and rushing him produced a version of the answer that was more rehearsed than honest. She wanted the honest one.
"I've thought about what stopping would look like," he said finally. "I don’t really think about it a lot. But yeah."
"And?"
"And it doesn't look like anything workable." He shifted his weight in the chair. "It's not like I have a version of a normal life sitting somewhere waiting. I've been doing this for too long."
"How long?"
He thought about it. "Long enough." He exhaled slowly. "There wasn't a decision point exactly. It was more like I started and then kept going, and now it's what I am."
Del looked at the dark outline of the high window. No moonlight now—clouds had come in sometime in the last hour and covered everything. "What was the first one like?"
Oliver was quiet.
"You don't have to answer," Del said.
"No, I —" He stopped. Started again. "It was bad. Not him. What I did. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew it needed to happen, and I made it happen, and the how of it was—I didn't know the how yet."
Del sat with that. The image of a younger Oliver who had decided something needed to happen and had made it happen without knowing the mechanics of it. She thought about what Oliver had said about his father once—the way punishment worked in that house. She thought about a boy who had grown up being taught to find what was wrong with the world and fix it by a man who was himself the thing that was wrong.
"Your father," she said.
Oliver went very still.
Del waited.
"I haven't told you about that," he said.
"You've told me pieces. Enough to make a shape."
"He had his own list," Oliver said. "Of people who weren't good enough. Things that needed fixing. He was very certain about it. He was certain about everything."
"Like you," Del said.
"Yes," he said it without flinching. "Like me. I learned from him. How to find what's rotten. How to act on it."
The shed was very quiet.
Del thought about what it meant to be taught a way of seeing the world. To absorb the logic of it completely and then turn it outward, toward people who actually warranted it.
"Did it feel like justice?" she asked. "At the time."
"It felt necessary," Oliver said. "Justice is a word other people use. It felt like something that had to happen and finally did. After, I felt—lighter isn't the right word. More like the pressure equalized, like something that had been leaning on me for a long time was gone."
Del thought about that. The specific relief of a thing that had been true for a long time finally became finished.
"Is that what it always feels like?" she said. "After?"
Oliver thought about it honestly. "Less each time. The first was significant. After that, it felt more like completing a task than anything else."
"Does that bother you?"
"Yes." He considered it. "Sometimes. It means either I've gotten better at it or I've gotten more used to it. I can't always tell which."
Del looked at the dark window. "Is there a difference?"
"Probably." He shifted in the chair. "I don't examine it as much as I should."
Del pulled the blanket tighter. The shed was cool now, the night air coming in under the door.
"Del," Oliver said.
"Yeah."
"What you said earlier. That you're trying to understand me. Is that actually true?"
She looked at him in the dark.
"Both," she said. "I'm trying to understand you," she said. "And I'm doing it for reasons. Is that okay?"
"Yes," he said.
Del didn't say anything to that. She lay back on the cot, pulled the blanket up, and stared at the ceiling. She couldn't see in the dark.
They stayed like that for a while. The wind outside, the property settling into the deep part of the night.
"Oliver," Del said.
"Yeah."
"Tell me something that's actually true. Not about any of this. Just something real about you."
He was quiet for a moment. She heard him shift in the chair.
"I used to draw," he said. "When I was a kid. Before everything. I was actually decent at it. I stopped when I was about twelve. My father said it was a waste of time." He paused. "I've thought about it since, whether I'd still be any good."
Del thought about that. A twelve-year-old putting down a pencil because a certain kind of man had a certain kind of opinion about it. She thought about her own sketchbooks. The ones she'd left behind when all of this started.
"You probably would be," she said. "Still good. It doesn't go away completely."
Oliver said nothing for a moment.
"Okay," he said.
Del closed her eyes.
Somewhere out there, across the dry property, Mara was sleeping or not sleeping in her little building with its padlock and its window and its view of the flat Texas dark.
Tomorrow they'd go to her. And after that, something would happen that Del wasn't going to stop. She'd made her peace with that somewhere between the barn and the shed tonight.
She was still herself. She kept saying that. She was still herself, and the line was still there, and she could still find it when she looked.