Truly (New York 1)

No wonder Ben hated himself.

Atticus sniffled and shifted in his seat. Marnie put her hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder. Her wide-set gray eyes met Ben’s.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to see the farm.”

“Take a look around,” she said quietly. “We’ll be going to church before too long. But I think when we get back …”

“I’ll be sure to be gone by then.”

“Thank you.”

Ben finished his eggs and toast. He put his plate by the sink and went outside, clinging to the door handle until it came to rest soundlessly against the jamb.

He walked straight to the chicken house.

The building sat on a slope, the back side set into the rise of the land so that a relatively nimble boy could easily climb the bricks and onto the roof. The mortar felt crumbly beneath his fingers. Deteriorating, like the rest of the place.

His father would have made him patch the mortar.

He hauled himself up and breathed in the view. Coming off the lake, the air had a bite. He tightened his abs to lock down a cough that wanted to come.

This had been his place once—this vista out over the farm, the hives to his right at the margin of the patch of woods where they cleared brush, chopped firewood, and found a Christmas tree every December. The neat rows of the berry plants over the rise to the left, put to bed until spring. And far off in front of him, Lake Superior, its vastness answering a yearning inside him for something bigger than himself and this farm. Something so huge as to appear endless.

When he’d felt too much as a boy—when he’d needed it—he would come here and be diminished, the riot of confusion in his head and the pounding in his blood reduced to a minor human storm in a world built on an inhuman scale.

The cold of the roof soaked through his jeans, and Ben wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his chin on his folded hands. He let the water absorb all his roiling, all his turmoil, and turn him flat and calm again. Small enough to disappear.

When he was ready, he looked at himself.

Thirty-two years old. A giant, compared to those boys. Trained as a chef, he’d become a beekeeper and a farmer, like his father.

Like his father, he spent too much time angry, and he unleashed it on the wrong people.

Ben couldn’t know what his father felt about that, but he knew that he hated it, and he wanted it to stop.

“I’m not him,” he said aloud.

He didn’t want to be him—not now, not twenty years from now. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life cynical and simmering with suppressed rage.

He didn’t want to hide inside his own head, either, pressing down on his feelings like those boys, with their cereal and their church shoes and their fear. He could almost taste their fear, that flood of salt-copper that came before bile, before pain.

He could see, from up here, that he’d never really been all right on this farm.

That he’d done what he was told and kept himself quiet and small, tamping his feelings tighter and tighter into the pocket he’d made for them.

That he’d left them there, sweating. Unstable. Primed to explode.

He was tired of exploding.

So obvious, but he’d never seen it. Maybe he’d had to feel his own blood beating inside those boys to understand it. To climb onto the chicken house and look at the lake in order to click all the pieces of himself back into place again.

He wasn’t some fucked-up golf swing. He was just a boy who’d left this farm utterly ill-equipped for life. A man who’d spent most of the years since trying to figure out how to survive.

And now … now he wanted more than to survive. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to be happy.

He wanted to be with May.

Ben took one last look at the lake and swung his legs over the side of the roof. A minute later, he knocked on the screen door again, and Marnie let him in. He could hear the boys upstairs and water running in the bathroom. A toilet flushed.