Movement Eight — What He Did the Following Week

I want to tell you one more small thing before I let this account close, because I think it matters more than its size would suggest.

Eremos went to see Selwyn the following week. It was not a scheduled visit — there is no schedule for her, not really, only the accumulating, guilty gaps between one appearance and the next, gaps that had grown wider over the years for exactly the reason I gave you at the very start of this account, and exactly the reason I told you was not the whole truth. He went down into the crystal halls beneath the castle carrying a small carved bird, the kind of gift he always brings her, and found her exactly where she always is, narrating her own captivity to herself in that dry, unbroken voice of hers, the voice that has never once, in all her years down there, fully curdled into bitterness.

"You look tired," she told him, through the bars, studying his face with the particular sharp, unflinching attention she brings to everything, the attention of a woman who has had a very long time to learn how to read the smallest details of anyone who bothers to visit her. "Tired in a new way. Not the usual tired. Something happened."

He did not tell her what. I do not think he will ever tell her what, not fully, not the way he let the household hear it — some griefs, he has decided, are not hers to carry, not on top of everything else this world has already asked her to carry without her consent. But he sat with her a long while that evening, longer than he had in longer than either of them wanted to count, and when he finally rose to leave, he told her, plainly, that he intended to come more often from now on. Not because of guilt, though I think some of it was that too. Because he had spent an evening being reminded, by the whole of his family at once, that hiding his own difficult weight from the people who love him had never actually protected any of them from it — only delayed the moment they'd have to help him carry it, and made that moment heavier when it finally came.

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"I'll hold you to that," Selwyn said, with the dry, unbeaten humor that has kept her whole across years no one should have had to survive. "I've heard that particular promise before, you know. From you and from everyone else who's ever stood on that side of the bars."

"I know," he said. "I intend to keep it anyway."

She studied him a while longer, the particular sharp, appraising look she gives everyone who visits her, the look of someone who has learned to read faces the way other souls read books, because faces have been, for longer than she'd like to admit, the only reading material her world has ever offered her. "You'll tell me eventually," she said, not quite a question. "Whatever it was. I don't need it tonight. I'm not asking for it tonight. But you'll tell me eventually, the way you tell me most things, once enough time has passed that the telling doesn't cost you anything anymore."

"Maybe," he said, honest in the particular way he's always honest with her, never softening a maybe into a yes simply because a yes would be kinder to hear. "Some things I don't think I'll ever tell anyone the whole of. Not because I don't trust the people I'd be telling. Because some weights get lighter by being carried alone, oddly enough. I've learned that much about myself, over the years."

"That sounds like something a very tired man tells himself to justify not asking for help," Selwyn said, not unkindly, the particular blunt affection she reserves only for him, earned across years of visits neither of them has ever fully explained to anyone else.

He almost smiled at that — the ghost of the easy, unguarded laugh the rest of the household knows so well, thinner here, in this narrow stone corridor, but real all the same. "Maybe," he said again. "I'm working on it."

I do not know, telling you this, whether he will manage it — whether the accumulating weight of everyone else who needs him will once again, slowly, over the months and years ahead, pull his visits back into the same widening gaps they occupied before. I would like to believe otherwise. I think, having watched this family choose, once again, to hold something difficult together rather than let it sit in silence, that this particular promise has a better chance than most of actually being kept.