Chapter 10: Ten

He calls his mother on Saturday.

Jana Ramsey answers on the second ring with the voice of someone who has just finished a double shift and is eating something out of a takeout container with her shoes still on. He can tell by the particular tired that is different from her regular tired.

"Baby," she says. "Everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," he says. "Daisy's good. The job's good."

"And Wren?"

He pauses for exactly one second. "She's good too."

His mother makes a sound he can't interpret. "I like her," Jana says. "I've only spoken to her twice but I like her. She has a way of she makes things feel manageable. Does that make sense?"

"Yes," he says. It makes complete sense.

"Cole." His mother's voice shifts the double shift exhaustion falling away into something underneath it. "Are you okay? Not fine. Okay."

He sits at the kitchen table. The window is dark. Daisy is asleep.

He thinks about his answer.

Usually he says fine and means functional and they both accept the translation and move on. It is a language they developed after his father left efficient, protective, kind in the way that avoidance is sometimes kind.

"I think so," he says. "Actually think so. Not just "

"Not just performing it," his mother says.

"Yeah."

She is quiet for a moment. "Something changed," she says.

"A few things."

"Good things?"

He looks at the table. At the ring from the mug he has never sanded out.

"I think so," he says. "Still figuring out."

His mother is quiet again. Then: "Cole. I've been thinking about telling Daisy. Properly. When she's older. The real version what you did, why you did it. So she understands." A pause. "I want her to know what her brother did for her."

Cole looks at the window.

"She already knows," he says quietly. "Some of it. She told Wren on the first day."

His mother exhales.

"Of course she did," Jana says. And then, softer: "How did Wren "

"She didn't say anything. Kept it. Didn't use it." He pauses. "She's " He stops. Starts again. "She's good at keeping things that aren't hers."

His mother is very quiet on the other end of the line.

"Cole," she says finally. "Don't let that girl go to waste."

"Mom "

"I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying." A pause. "Water the plant."

"What?"

"You know what I mean. Goodnight, baby."

She hangs up.

Cole sits at the kitchen table with his phone in his hand and the dark window in front of him and his mother's voice still in the room.

Water the plant.

He looks at the table.

He looks at the chair across from him where Wren sits.

He puts his phone down.

He goes to bed and for the first time in four years he does not sit in the dark kitchen and count to sixty and he does not call a number that will not answer.

He just sleeps.

Monday arrives the way Mondays arrive ordinary on the surface, everything underneath it shifted slightly from the week before.

Cole gets to school early. He is at his locker when he sees her.

Wren comes through the main entrance and she passes Ms. Collins and she

Doesn't smile.

She doesn't stop. She doesn't perform. She glances at Ms. Collins the way you glance at any teacher in any corridor and she keeps walking and her face shows nothing because there is nothing to show anymore.

Cole watches this from forty feet away.

Wren rounds the corner toward her locker. She hasn't seen him.

He closes his locker. Picks up his bag.

He goes the long way to first period past the library, past the water fountain, past the corridor that is technically out of his way. He is not entirely sure why until he comes around the corner and finds Wren at her locker and the reason becomes very clear.

He wanted to see her face.

Not managed. Not performing. Just hers.

She looks up and sees him and something happens in her expression a small, surprised openness. She wasn't expecting him on this corridor.

"You're in the wrong hallway," she says.

"I know," he says.

He stops beside her. She closes her locker. They stand in the corridor with the morning noise around them and he is very aware of the fact that this is the first time they have been in this hallway together her hallway, the one with her locker, the one where Jade and Madison and two years of things happened and he is standing in it and neither of them is performing anything.

"How was your weekend?" he asks.

She looks at him. "I told my mom."

"How did she take it?"

"She said it was hers to carry not mine." Wren pauses. "She was right."

He nods.

"Madison texted me," she says. "She's not going to say anything. About either of us."

He absorbs this. "What did you say to her at the bleachers?"

"I asked her who she was actually angry at."

He looks at her.

"She was angry at you," Wren says. "For letting her go. And she was turning it into all of this." She tilts her head at the corridor, at the lockers, at the invisible architecture of the past two years. "It was always about you. I was just the available target."

Cole is quiet.

"Does that make you angry?" he asks.

She considers it seriously. "It did," she says. "For a long time." A pause. "Now it just makes me tired."

The bell rings.

Neither of them moves immediately.

"Wren," he says.

She looks at him.

He has been thinking about this since Saturday night. About his mother saying water the plant and about the ring on the kitchen table and about a girl who kept his secret without being asked and told her own after one hundred and sixty-six mornings of not telling it and walked away from the bleachers looking lighter.

He has been thinking about what a start means. What comes after a start.

"After school," he says. "I'm coming home on time. Daisy wants to take Gerald to the park. I thought " He stops. Recalibrates. Does not look at the wall. Looks at her. "I thought you might want to come."

She looks at him.

A park. Cole and Daisy and Gerald and Wren, on Clover Drive on a Monday afternoon, which is nothing and completely ordinary and also not nothing and not ordinary at all.

"Gerald needs the fresh air," she says.

"He really does."

The corner of her mouth moves. Not a full smile. The beginning of one.

"Okay," she says.

She goes left. He goes right.

He gets to first period thirty seconds after the bell.

Mr. Patterson gives him a look.

Cole sits down and opens his book and does not bother to explain.

The park is small one of those neighborhood ones with a squeaky roundabout and a sandpit that is mostly just sand and one bench that has been there long enough to have its own weather. Daisy runs ahead with Gerald held at arm's length, conducting some kind of expedition that does not require adult input.

Cole and Wren walk behind her.

They are not walking close. There are approximately twelve inches between them. Wren has her hands in her jacket pockets and Cole has his bag slung over one shoulder and they are both watching Daisy operate and it is completely ordinary.

It is also the least ordinary thing Cole has done in four years.

"Gerald seems well," Wren says.

"His therapist said the fresh air would help."

"Gerald has a therapist?"

"Daisy decided." He pauses. "It's me. I'm the therapist. I have to listen to Gerald's problems every Sunday."

Wren looks at him.

He keeps his face completely straight.

She makes a sound short, surprised and looks away, but he catches the smile before she can put it away and it is the first full one he has seen and it is devastating in the most specific way.

Ahead of them Daisy has found a stick and is using it to explain something to Gerald at length.

"She's going to be extraordinary," Wren says quietly.

"She already is," Cole says.

They walk.

After a moment Wren takes her hand out of her pocket and lets it swing at her side and Cole's hand is also at his side and there are approximately twelve inches between them and then approximately eight and then

Daisy turns around and shouts "COLE GERALD FOUND SOMETHING" and runs back toward them and the eight inches becomes twelve again and they both look at Daisy and whatever was building dissipates into the ordinary air of a Monday afternoon park.

But Cole looks down once. At the space between their hands. At the eight inches that was briefly four.

He looks up.

Wren is watching Daisy examine the thing Gerald found, which appears to be a very interesting rock. Her expression is open in the way it is when she thinks no one is watching no door, no management, just her face doing what it does.

She is, Cole thinks with the quiet certainty of someone who has arrived somewhere without noticing the journey, the most real person he has encountered in as long as he can remember.

He looks at the space between them.

Four inches, briefly.

He is going to get back there.

He is in no hurry.

But he is going to get back there.