Cedar-Home

The shop was old, but not in the way of buildings that had been standing for a long time. Its ‘oldness’ was different, historical, layered.  It held the quality of a space that had taken in a great deal across its duration and retained it. The objects on the shelves were not only antique. They were present in a way she couldn’t describe. Some of the objects were more present than others, and some of them barely registered, but one of them, and she turned her head slightly toward the middle of the room without intending to, pulled at her attention in a way she recognized, but also couldn’t name.  She shook her head. She wouldn’t pursue it, not right now. She was there for a different reason.

Beside her, Granny took in the shop in the way that someone would who had been expecting something, and found their expectations met.

“Hmm,” Granny said. Which, in Granny’s vocabulary, covered a quite significant range of possibilities.

Footsteps from the back room, the tap and the step, drew Ruby’s attention. Belle had told her about the cane when she had described the shop in considerable detail, and though Ruby already knew about it, she had filed it to add to what she already knew. Hearing it like this was different from simply knowing.

Gold appeared in the doorway between the back room and the shop.

He looked at Ruby.

Ruby looked at him.

Then, she did what she always did when she looked at people who mattered and regarded him with the kind of seeing that happened beneath normal observation. She received, in the first five seconds of looking at Mister Gold, more information than most people received in hours.

She received something very old. Not the way Jefferson was old. Jefferson’s oldness had the quality of someone reorganized by long, difficult work. Gold’s oldness was different, deeper. It was historical in a way that made the word feel insufficient. Gold had the quality of someone who had been in the world for long enough that the world had shaped itself around them in certain respects, rather than the other way around.

She received something held. Not carried the way Jefferson carried things. Jefferson’s carrying was active, something that was managed daily. Gold’s was structural. It was something that had been held for so long it was no longer distinguishable from the very architecture of his being.

She felt that he, in turn, was watching her  as if he knew what he were going to find, and was finding it anyway, because knowing and finding were different things, and Gold, she understood immediately, never confused them.

She held his gaze.

He held hers.

“Miss Lucas,” he said.

“Mister Gold,” Ruby said.

Then Gold looked at Granny.

Something passed between them in that look. The kind of look that passes between two people who have had an arrangement for a long time and who both knew that arrangement was about to change.

“Lucas,” Gold said.

“Gold,” Granny said with the economy of someone who had been on name-without-titles terms with this man for long time, and was not going to pretend otherwise for Ruby’s benefit.

Ruby looked at her grandmother, then at Gold, taking in the exchange without commenting on it.  There would be time for that later.

“Come through,” Gold said.

Ruby took in the back room, lit by the lamp that stood on the table beside three chairs that were drawn out. Ruby noted this, the three chair, prepared for their meeting Gold had shaped in advance. The chairs were arranged, not in the configuration of someone behind and desk with others across from it, but as three points of a rough triangle. There was no hierarchy implied by the geometry.  Ruby noted this too.

She sat. Granny sat, and then Gold sat, and the lamp cast its amber light across all three of them equally.

Ruby looked across to Gold.

“You’ve known about me for a long time,” she said.

“Yes,” Gold answered.

“How long?”

“Since before you were born,” Gold said.  “I knew about your mother.  I knew what she carried.  I knew, when she was gone, that it would pass to you.”

Ruby frowned. “You knew before I did.”

“Yes.”

“You knew when I was fourteen,” she said. “When things started.”

“Yes.”

“And you left me alone.”

“Yes.”

Ruby held his gaze steadily. “Why?”

“Because knowing, and being ready are different things,” he said. “You weren’t ready at fourteen. The information without the readiness does more harm than the carrying alone.”

“That sounds like something someone says to justify a decision they made on someone else’s behalf.” Ruby accused.

“Yes, it does.” Gold said, then paused. “It’s also what I believe to be true.”

“What you believe,” Ruby said, folding her arms. “But not what I would have chosen.”

“No,” Gold said, “Not what you would have chosen. You didn’t have the choice.”  He said it without deflection or apology. He was not dismissive either. He simply gave her an accurate statement of what had happened.  She hadn’t been consulted. He had made a decision about her life based on his assessment of what was best for her. He was obviously not going to pretend otherwise.

Ruby realized she had expected one of two things: either the defensive justification of someone who knew they had overstepped and was managing it, or the complete absence of acknowledgment from someone who didn’t believe they had anything to answer for.  That Gold was doing neither, but was sitting with the accurate statement of what had happened and offering it to her without dressing it up, did not resolve the question of whether he had been right. It did change Ruby’s assessment of the conversation though.

“Granny knew,” Ruby said.

“Yes.”

“You told her.”

Gold shook his head. “She told me. She told me about your mother. I already knew, in the general sense, the Order’s awareness of what your family carried. She told me the specifics. We made an arrangement.”

Ruby looked at Granny.

Granny met the look with the composure of someone who had been preparing for this moment for over twenty years and still felt that was not long enough.

“The arrangement,” Ruby said, still looking at Granny.

“I would tell him enough,” Granny said, “to know how to protect you. To keep certain… interested parties from taking an interest in you before you were ready. He would leave the rest to me.”

“The rest being everything I didn’t know.” Ruby said.

Granny nodded. “Yes.”

The kitchen, Monday night, Ruby thought.  Jefferson had talked about someone whose situation the Order was aware of and had decided to leave undisturbed. She had understood, even then, that the ‘leaving-undisturbed’ was a choice made by other people about her life.  She had accepted Jefferson’s deflection because it was late, and she was processing other things, and because Jefferson had struck her as someone she was going to need to sit with rather than argue with.

She had not accepted it. She had deferred it.  She was not deferring now.

“Granny,” she said.

“Ruby.”

“I’m not angry,” Ruby said. “I want you to know that I’m not angry with you.”

“I know,” Granny said and the weight of those two words came from knowing Ruby her entire life.

“But I need to hear it. All of it.” Ruby said, “From you, not… not from him. From you. Later.”

“Yes,” Granny agreed. “Later.”

Ruby turned back to Gold then.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me what I am.”

He did.

He told her in the way he always told things, in the careful, framework-building way of someone who understood that information without architecture was less useful than a smaller amount of information properly placed. He began with what Ruby already knew: The instincts, the perception, the capability that exceeded what she had been told was possible, and built outwards from there.

He looked at her for a moment, and Ruby wondered if he was selecting the correct starting point for something that had several, and for which the correct one mattered.

“Your family,” he said, “has been known to the Order for a long time. Not your immediate family, further back than that. Several generations further.”

Ruby said nothing. She was listening in the way she did to things that mattered and required all the attention she had.

Gold continued. “What you carry is not random. It is not illness, nor, as I suspect you have sometimes wondered, is anything wrong with you.”

Ruby stiffened.

“It is an inheritance. Something specific and old that has been passing through your family line for longer than the Order’s records go back. We have documentation of it in your great-grandmother’s generation. We believe it predates that considerably.”

“What is it,” Ruby asked, “specifically.”

“The perception: the instinct that arrives before the reasoning. The capability that exceeds what normal human parameters allow.” He paused. “In your great-grandmother’s case, it manifested primarily as the perception. She was, by all accounts, extraordinarily difficult to deceive, and extraordinarily accurate in her assessments of people and situations.”

“Granny.” Ruby said quietly.

“Yes,” Gold confirmed. “In a different way. Less acute than yours, or less fully developed, or both.”

“And my mother?”

Gold paused. “In your mother’s case, the physical dimension was more prominent. The capability that exceeds normal human parameters - what you experience as the healing, the strength, the speed.”

Ruby looked at her hands, looking in the way that said she had been not looking at for a long time.

“I’ve been healing faster than I should since I was sixteen,” she said. “I had a bad fall at work.  It should have… the doctor said it should have taken weeks to heal. It was three days.”

“Yes,” Gold said, nodding. “We have records of similar incidents in your mother’s history.”

Ruby looked up sharply. “You have records.”

“The Order maintains records of the families it monitors,” Gold said. “Yours is one of them.”

“Monitors,” Ruby echoed flatly.

“Watches over,” Gold said. “From a distance, without intervention.”

“Is there a difference?”

“There is,” he said. “Though I understand why it might not feel like one.”

Ruby looked at him steadily. He did not look away.

“The physical capability,” she said. “The healing. The… other things.” She paused. “I’ve been careful, my whole life, not to— There have been situations where I could have done something I didn’t do because I didn’t know how to account for it afterwards.”

“Yes, I know.”

“The bar fight two years ago,” Ruby continued. “Three men. I was on my own.”

“Yes.”

“I could have—” She stopped. “I walked away.”

“Yes,” Gold said. “You made the correct assessment.”

“I made the only assessment that didn’t end with me trying to explain something I couldn’t explain.” Ruby corrected him. Even to herself she though she sounded as though there was something in her voice. Not bitterness exactly, but the kind of exhaustion someone held who has been making that calculation for a very long time. “That’s not the same as the correct one.”

Gold looked at her for a moment, taking her in. “No. It isn’t.”

His acknowledgment landed simply. Ruby received it without commenting on it.  Instead she said, “The instinct. The knowing before I should know.” She paused. “Is that the same thing? The same inheritance?”

“Related,” Gold said. “The Order’s understanding is that what your family carries has several… expressions. The physical capability is one; the perceptual capability is another. In some generations one is more prominent. In others, in yours—”

“Both,” Ruby said.

“Both,” Gold confirmed. “Which is not unprecedented in the Order’s records, but uncommon.”

Ruby tried to absorb that, “Why uncommon.”

“The two capabilities are demanding individually. Together, they require a significant management overhead.”

“Is that what I’ve been doing,” Ruby asked. “Managing overhead.”

“Yes. For sixteen years with considerable skill given the absence of any framework or support.”

Ruby looked at him. She found not condescension, not the performed admiration of someone that was trying to flatter her into compliance, but simply the accurate assessment of someone who had been watching from a distance for many years and had a genuinely informed view.

“My mother,” she began, “did she manage it?”

“For a time.” Gold said carefully. “The circumstances of her situation were more difficult than yours. She was younger when the physical dimension manifested. The perceptual capability arrived simultaneously rather than sequentially, and she didn’t have—” He paused, and seemed to be choosing his next words precisely. “She didn’t have someone beside her who knew.”

“The way Granny was beside me.”

“Yes.”

“Granny knew about my mother before it—”

“Yes,” Gold said. “She knew.”

“And she couldn’t—”

“She did everything that was possible,” Gold said. “The rest was beyond what was possible.” He paused again. “This is part of the conversation that belongs to your grandmother, not to me.”

Ruby nodded, understanding that he was not deflecting. He was drawing a line that was about what was his to give and what wasn’t, the same line he drew about the inscription and Belle. She understood this because she had, in the last week, become familiar with lines being drawn.

“All right,” she said, then was silent for a long time before she spoke again.

“The thing in the bar,” she said. “Friday night, the girls night out.  The man at the back.”

“Yes?”

“I felt something. I couldn’t identify it. I didn’t tell Belle.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Was it—” She stopped, then began again, “Was it connected to this? To what I carry? Or was it just—?”

“It was connected,” Gold said. “The perceptual capability responds to… certain kinds of presences. Certain qualities in people or situations that register below what people normally perceive.” He paused. “What was in the bar that night registered as a threat. Your instinct was correct.”

“It was theirs,” Ruby said. “The other organization.”

“Yes.”

Ruby considered that for a moment. All her years of instincts she had been careful to follow without being able to explain why.  The bar. Edinburgh from a single breath of Jefferson across her kitchen table. The something in the man that was watching her in turn. She thought about all the times she had made the correct assessment and called it something else because she had no other name for it.

“You said,” she told Gold, “that acknowledging what I carry makes it more useful than managing it.”

“Yes.”

“For the situation.”

“For the situation,” Gold said, “and for you. The two aren’t in opposition.”

Ruby tipped her head as she looked at him. “Most people who tell me something is for my benefit are usually not telling me it’s for theirs.”

“Yes they are,” Gold agreed. “In this case both things are true.”

“Both things can be true,” Ruby said.

Something Ruby saw in Gold’s expression, brief, like someone hearing a phrase they associated with a particular person in a specific context and finding it came unexpectedly from someone else.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Both things can be true.”

Ruby held his gaze for a moment longer, then she nodded, receiving what was given, and ready to take it away and sit with it to see what she made of it in her own time.

“Belle will tell me the rest,” she said.

“When she’s ready,” Gold said, “yes.”

“Soon.”

“I’ll speak with her.”

“Good.” Ruby said.  She frowned then, as if a thought had just occurred to her. Gold waited.

“Was it,” Ruby asked. “In my mother’s case, if someone had told her - given her the framework, would it have—”

“I don’t know,” Gold said. Those three words, different from the deflections she had been receiving her whole life, someone saying I don’t know as the honest answer to a question they had asked themselves many times, without being able to answer, moved Ruby to a level of understanding more acute than before.

“That’s the thing you find most difficult,” she said, “isn’t it.  Not knowing whether it would have made a difference.”

Something moved in Gold’s expression. Quickly, gone almost before she could fully read it, but present.

“Yes,” he answered quietly.

She took in his acknowledgment - small, controlled and real, and let it sit in the room between them.  She admitted to herself that she had not expected Gold to be capable of being so honest, and she revised her assessment of him considerably.

“Granny,” she said,  “Give us a minute.”

Granny looked at her. She could tell that she was trying to figure out if it was a good idea.

Then Granny stood, with unhurried dignity, the way Granny did everything, and said to Gold, “I’ll be in the front.”

“Of course,” Gold answered.

Granny left, and the back room settled into the atmosphere of two people, meeting alone in it for the first time and the two looked at each other.

“Jefferson told me that you protect what the Keeping requires.”

“Jefferson told you correctly.”

“And that sometimes that means leaving things undisturbed.”

“Yes.”

“He made it sound principled,” Ruby said. “I told him it also sounded convenient.”

“Yes, he mentioned that.”

Something in their exchanged, their shared awareness of the Jefferson-mediated conversation at the kitchen table, adjusted the atmosphere between them, not to warmth exactly, but the beginning of a working understanding.

“I’m not joining The Order,” Ruby told him and Gold looked up at her. “I want to be clear about that,” she continued. “Whatever you’re about to ask me, I’m not joining. I don’t take oaths to organizations I wasn’t consulted about before my birth.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Gold said.

“Then what are you asking?”

Gold was quiet for a moment. He reached out to the table and picked up the pen that was resting there, beside some photographs and papers.  He held it, rather than used it, before he set it down again.

“The situation requites three Keepings to assemble. The inscription’s operational instructions are explicit on that point. Belle has read them and will tell you more about the specific theology than I will, because it belongs to her domain, and I won’t preempt it.” He paused. “What I’m asking is not for your allegiance. I’m asking whether you’re willing to be present for what’s coming. For Belle. For what the inscription says needs to happen.”

“For Belle,” Ruby said. “I’m already present for Belle. I don’t need the inscription to tell me that.”

“No.” Gold almost smiled. “You don’t.”

“Then what do you need from me that you don’t already have?”

Gold looked at her steadily before he began to speak.

“Your acknowledgment of what you are. Not to me. I know what you are. To yourself.” He paused again. “You have been managing and minimizing what you carry for sixteen year, perhaps longer. I’m asking you to stop. Not for the Order’s benefit, but for yours.”

Ruby looked at him.

“Because,” he continued, “what you carry is not a liability to be managed. It is a capability that the situation  requires, and capabilities that are managed and minimized are considerably less useful than capabilities that are… acknowledged.”

“You’re asking me to stop hiding,” Ruby translated.

“I’m asking you to stop pretending that what you are is something other than what you are,” he corrected.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ruby accused. “You’ve had—” She paused. “You’ve had long enough to make your peace with what you are.”

“Yes, I have,”  Gold agreed. “It took longer than it should have.”

The fact of his admission, offered without being asked for, brought its own piece of gravitas to their honest exchange. She looked at him for a long moment.

“Sixteen years is a long time to carry something alone,” she said.

“It is.”

“Jefferson said something similar,” Ruby said, “about eight years.”

Gold sighed, and something in his expression told her that this was not new information to him, and that the four years had its own weight in this room that she was not going to press on. Not at that moment.

“That not-being-alone,” Ruby said. “Is that what you’re offering? A community of— whatever we are?”

“A framework,” Gold said. “For understanding what you are. A context. People who know what you carry and don’t require you to minimize or explain it.” He paused. “Whether that constitutes community I will leave to your assessment.”

Ruby looked around the back room, at the lamp, the shelves, the documents on the table. She knew the place had absorbed a great deal across its duration, and it made her think about the sixteen years, the dry cleaner named without being able to explain why; about quite a lot said to Jefferson across her kitchen table at midnight and the way it was received without performance. 

She thought about Belle, who had said nothing about this changed anything that matters with the completeness of someone who meant every word, standing in the street at dusk.

She thought about her mother.

She thought about the knowing, and the being-ready are different things and whether she was ready, and whether she had any choice about being ready regardless.

“All right,” she said.

Gold looked at her.

“Not all right to The Order,” she said. “All right to the framework. All right to the acknowledging.” She held his gaze. “All right to being present for what is coming.”

“Yes,” Gold said. “That’s what I was asking.”

“And the other thing,” Ruby said. “The thing Belle will tell me. Whatever the inscription says about what I carry.”

“When she’s ready to tell you,” Gold said, “Yes.”

Ruby nodded, closing one chapter and opening the next.  She did not have the resolution of everything, nor the end of her questions, but the acknowledgment that the next thing was beginning - that she had.

She stood.

“I want you to know that I’m going to be difficult,” she said.

Gold looked up at her. Something in his expression was the closest she had yet seen him come to something that was not composed management.

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“Jefferson warned you.”

“Jefferson has a gift for accurate assessment,” Gold said.

Ruby looked at him for a moment, and raised an eyebrow. “Was that a compliment?”

“It was an observation,” Gold said. “Whether it constitutes a compliment depends on your assessment of the value of accurate assessment.”

Ruby considered that. “I’ll take it as one,” she said.

“As you wish,” Gold said.

Ruby moved toward the door. She paused at the threshold between the back room and the shop. In the doorway, the place where Gold delivered most significant things - she knew this somehow - and turned back.

“The arrangement with Granny,” she said.

“Yes?”

“It’s still in effect?”

“A revised version,” Gold said, “would seem appropriate given the changed circumstances.”

“I’d like to know the terms,” Ruby said. “Whatever the arrangement is, going forward, I’d like to know what’s been agreed about me.”

“That’s fair,” Gold said.

“All of it,” Ruby insisted. “Not just the parts you decide are relevant to me. All of it.”

Gold held her gaze for a moment, then gave the slightest inclination of his head. Belle had described to her the way the concession cost something and was therefore worth more than a large gesture would have been.

“All of it,” he said at last.

“Good,” she said, and left the back room.

She went through the shop, but paused, without fully stopping, beside a shelf where a cup sat. She looked at it for a fraction of a second. It was not long enough to constitute a stop, but long enough to register a strangeness in it, the pull of it and the feeling it produced in her that she did not yet have the language for.

She kept walking to where Granny was waiting with the composure of someone who had been in difficult rooms for a long time and had made her peace with the waiting.

“Ready?” Granny asked.

“No,” Ruby said. “But we’re going anyway.”

 Granny looked at Ruby with the expression that many years of managing that attitude had not made simpler.

“Later,” Ruby said, “When we get home, you’re going to tell me everything.”

“Yes,” Granny said. “I am.”

She opened the door and ushered Ruby away.

Gold remained still, long after the bell above the door announced their departure.

He sat within reach of the table, and the lamp, and the pen he had picked up and set down once during the conversation and thought about everything Ruby had said that had been meant neither as comfort, nor challenge, but as a statement of fact about herself that also happened to be a statement of fact about him. She had offered it without performance or projection.

He wondered about the eight years, and what Ruby knew about them, and how she had know it - what it meant that she had offered it in this room without being asked.

He thought about the significance of her saying I’ll take it as one regarding the compliment that was not, technically, a compliment, and the dry precision of the exchange.

And he thought about the cup, that he knew Ruby had paused beside without stopping fully.  Just a fraction of a second… and the recognition in it.

He reached out and picked up the pen.

He did not write anything, but he held it for a long time as he thought, It might be different now.