Caleb took the opportunity to disappear for the weekend, giving up his scheduled time with the children for once in favor of saving his own skin, even though if you want to be bitterly technical, I can't prove he is responsible for any of this. I should have known better but I am distracted in my nostalgia and still ridiculously under the weather with this endless sore throat and the full complement of habitual sleep deprivation that functions as my shadow.
Ben took us out and made sure we all did things. He bought me some watercolor paint supplies and fresh sharpies and a new phone (Nexus S! I am no longer a Blackberry girl and everyone is thrilled). He found Thai food and rainy-day drives. At night he closed and locked the door behind all three of us, keeping the nightmares at bay, holding the world, bathed in shades of red and gold, tightly in his arms and eventually Lochlan came around, the disappointment waning.
If there was one thing we would have known, it would be this. The timing was close enough but Ruth does not fit the mold of the circus man, she only consciously chooses to blend her logic with unexpected, impulsive silliness on rare occasions, just like he does. It's nurture, not nature that makes her this way and life will go on, like it always does. On the bumpiest, most-rutted, barely-passable, overgrown and fully trampled trail that passes for a road that I have ever seen. Caleb may not lose, but he's not going to win, either.
I am taking recommendations for new, uncorrupted lawyers, doctors, therapists, ex-brother-in-laws and grocers, as now everyone is regarded with a suspicion that should have been in place from the very beginning and instead I find myself trusting people who don't have a good grasp of precisely how evil evil can be. Bridget gets burned when she touches the fire and so she snatches her hands back and steps out of the heat and into the cool shade of doubt, where the surroundings are familiar and the hours go by so much more slowly.
At one point yesterday Ben reached out and put his hand on the back of Lochlan's neck and he told him that it would be okay, that nothing has changed, that everything is going to be fine. That we've been through worse and we will stick together. And I sank into a chair on the other side of the door, grateful for these two men in a way that leaves me breathless and determined. Lochlan nodded. He knows better than anyone else the difference between how nature can produce psychopathy the same way nurture can instill the will to survive it.
He knows.
