Chapter 4: The Ones Who Hide

# The Ones Who Hide

The car pulled up to the house and stopped, and then it wasn’t a car anymore.

Rennie felt the shape of it go all at once — the seat under her, the strap across her chest, the roof over her head — and then her mother was lifting her out and carrying her up the walk. Something warm and round came scrambling up the front of Rennie’s coat, over the collar, and Rennie got an arm around it before it could slide back down.

“You got fat,” Rennie said.

“I did not,” said Puff, into her collar.

Puff had spent a whole summer learning to be things with wheels and had come home able to do a car, a wagon, and — on the days it wanted credit — a bicycle. It would not shut up about which one was hardest. It had also come back rounder in the middle, and Rennie was the only person in the family who ever mentioned that, and she mentioned it most days.

Her mother set her down inside the door. Rennie took off her shoes without being asked, hung her backpack on its hook, and spun the little snowman on the zipper once, with one finger.

The house was quiet. The television was off.

She got up on her cushion by the window without being told, sat up straight, and started in on the breathing.

“I want to do five today,” she said.

“Four,” said her mother from the couch. “We’ll see about five.”

What Rennie wanted was to get strong, fast — fast enough that her mother would let her stand at the bench and learn the real work. That was the whole plan.

The way you were supposed to get strong, first, was to earn your first ring: you worked at it, and something broke through in you, and the ring was there, and after that there was another one to work for. Rennie had been born with hers already on. Everybody had explained to her how lucky that was. They had explained it many times.

The part they explained second was that she couldn’t use it. It was too much for a baby. It was too much for anything that small. So instead of holding it and using it the way you were supposed to, it sat in her and pushed. Her dad had put a lid on it. Not gone. Not off. Locked.

So she started at the bottom like everybody else, and earned it back a breath at a time, and every grown-up who heard about it said what a patient kid she was.

One of the house’s old ones — one of the born-of-the-green — had told her once that if she picked up a little goodwill, she’d get her hands on it sooner. She had asked him what goodwill was. He had talked for a while. She had not understood any of it, and she was not going to ask again, because asking twice was the same as not having listened the first time.

Wren didn’t have to do any of this. Nobody had ever put a lid on Wren, and Wren was the other kid in this house, and Rennie had decided not to think about it, because thinking about it made her rounds go bad.

In two years she’d be allowed to try a binding — if they found her something to bind to. Her mother had said both parts, reading them off a piece of paper she’d brought home.

What Rennie heard was two years.

So: in through the nose. Out through the mouth, slow. One.

The green was thin this close to the house. Down at the shop, where things grew in trays and the air sat heavier, it came easier. On the tenth breath she caught a thread of it, thin and cold, and held on, and went straight into the next round without stopping. She wasn’t going to come out of it a breath early, in case her mother was still on the couch.

Wick came down the hall at the height of the picture rail, which was the only height in this house where a thing like Wick got any peace. Nobody walked at that height. Nobody looked up at it either.

It checked the front room on the way past.

Rennie was on her cushion with her back straight, breathing in for four and out for four, getting it right. Wick had watched her get it right for most of a year, and she was going to be a long time at it, and not one person in this house minded that. Wick had raised the subject once, and had been told — the way this house told things — that it would be later.

Vesper was on the couch with the phone face down on her knee, six feet behind her daughter, watching the back of her daughter’s head. Wick had never once seen her stop.

The shop didn’t close until six. Until six, the house held this much: the girl on the cushion, the woman on the couch, the fire up on the rail, and two pieces of furniture that weren’t. The television cabinet had clicked once, when the stone lion rolled in and pulled the door to behind itself, and it hadn’t made a sound since.

Neither of them had done a useful thing all afternoon, and Wick, which had spent the same afternoon doing nothing at all, was in a position to judge. It knew where both of them were, on the balcony and in the cabinet, and it could have said so at any point in the last hour, and it had chosen not to, and the two of them could spend the rest of the evening wondering whether it would.

At the end of the hall there was a shelf, and on the shelf a tablet, and on the tablet a game, and in that game there was exactly one other person.

Wick had never met this person. Never seen a picture, never heard a voice. As far as that person was concerned, Wick was a handle, a score, and a habit of showing up after dark. That was all of it, and it was Wick’s, and it didn’t need anybody’s permission.

It turned the sound all the way down, because in the front room the girl was counting, and started a new game, and won it.

Out on the balcony, in a row of eight pots, the fourth one from the left held itself better than any pot in that row had ever held itself. Eleven minutes now.

Holding still was the one thing it had ever been good at. It had been a lump of mud for a long time before anybody noticed it, and mud held still for a living, and it had never lost the habit.

It had come out here fast, on its own little mud feet, and gone straight into the row, and pulled the feet up inside itself, and now it looked exactly like the other seven, which it was privately very proud of.

It wasn’t about the girl. It liked the girl. Everybody liked the girl.

It ran because she was five.

She’d grow up knowing all about born-of-the-green. It wasn’t a secret; nobody in this house was going to keep it from her. But five was five. A five-year-old came around a corner and there was a pot with feet, and the pot said hello, and then it turned into a boy her size — two hours at a stretch, that was what it could do — and she screamed, and then the whole evening was about that.

So the television went off, and the feet went in, and the pot waited on the balcony with the other pots. Nobody had written the rule down. Everybody kept it.

Behind it, in the same pot, something stretched.

The plant did that. It slept most of the day and came up when there was something to say.

“You saw her in there.”

“Going at it,” said the pot. “Very dedicated.”

“Does that make you want to be better?”

“Absolutely.”

“Really.”

“Absolutely.”

The pot did not add anything, because there was nothing to add.

“You know what you were before somebody dug you up?”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“A lump. You were a lump of dirt for years, and you slept through the whole thing, and then somebody dug you up and put you in a fire, and that is the only reason you’re awake.”

“I liked the ground.”

“You didn’t notice the ground.”

“I liked it anyway.”

“So reflect.”

“I reflected.”

“On what.”

“Everything. I did a long one. Earlier.”

The plant drew back a leaf.

“Don’t,” said the pot.

Whap.

The pot went around on its base so fast it sounded like a coin on a table.

Why, it thought, going around. It had reflected. It had said the word out loud and everything.

It slowed down, and wobbled, and got itself straight in the row again, fourth from the left, because a pot had one job.

Why, it thought again, in case somebody was listening.
Everyone in this chapter is hiding something small and kind, and the pot on the balcony is my favorite of them. It isn’t hiding because it’s scared of Rennie — it likes Rennie. It’s hiding because she’s five, and nobody wants to spend the evening explaining a screaming kid. Nobody wrote that rule down. They all just keep it.

Have you ever kept a rule that nobody actually made you keep?

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