But Franklin wasn’t angry at her. He had a sense of the power of the shadow she called Sir from his own encounter with it at Franky’s deathbed. How could a being like that be shaken if it was decided in its interests? He didn’t blame Jane for keeping it a secret from him, because he kept what he’d seen a secret from her now. He told himself he was doing it to protect her from knowledge that could only cause pain. The same reason, she’d tried to convince herself, justified her deception of him.
As for her calling Bennie up out of the soil—he couldn’t fault her for that either. He felt it too. The longing so deep it would do anything, break any law, for the briefest reunion with the lost. The way the heart could be fooled by a likeness. The closeness of the thing that hid somewhere in the White House to the child he had loved so dearly it was enough for two lives, a thousand.
“It can’t be real,” he said. “That child—it is a treachery.”
“Forgive me.”
“I do. You only wanted the same thing I have wanted.”
“I went further than that.”
“You brought something into this house that has no right to it.”
“Yes.”
“I forgive you that too. Because I’ve come to suspect I have little right to be in this office myself.”
“Why do you say that? You’ve committed no fraud.”
“Not by intention. But I wasn’t called to be here by purpose, Jeannie. Just like that boy who looks like our Bennie. I’m more puppet than president.”
Jane’s reflex was to defend her husband from this attack against himself. Yet she said nothing. Because Franklin was right, in a way she hadn’t grasped before. She had been too occupied in aiding Sir, keeping Sir a secret, waiting for Sir to give her what she ached for, that she’d failed to see how she had used Franklin the whole time. Her willing marionette. Just as she had been Sir’s.
“You say you weren’t called by purpose,” she said. “Even if that’s so, could you not find it now?”
“Oh, Jane. This again?”
She circled her hand over the bedsheets next to her, asking him to sit close. It was a struggle for him to slide along the few inches of the mattress’ edge to her hip.
“For a moment, don’t see me as the tricksome wife,” she said.
“How should I see you?”
“As the one who knows you to be good.”
Franklin almost yielded, if not to her argument than to her body, his head leaning closer to her shoulder in the yearning to be held, to rest. But his eyes found hers first and he saw in them the shards of the secret that still lived in her. He sat straight.
“Tell me this,” he said. “The one you call Sir and the Fox girls called Splitfoot—what are his designs? To haunt us? To drive us to madness?”
“He’s likely already succeeded on both counts.”
“So it is only that?”
She removed the black shawl she wore and let it fall behind her. The simplest of gestures, yet they both saw it for what it was. A removal of armor.
“I’m not certain of his plans,” she said. “But I believe he seeks to bring about destruction through us.”
“By wrongful actions.”
“By taking no actions at all. By plaguing you or whatever man is elected to replace you so that he can only see these rooms and the shadows that darken them, and not the people and truths outside the walls.”
“He means to blind me to the world.”
She remembered how Sir put it. I can break the world by breaking the mind of the man with power over it. Jane looked at her husband, gaunt and with a twitching blink she’d never noticed before, and saw how it was almost done. You break his heart.
“He means to turn you inward,” she said. “To see only the self. And through you, he hopes the country will do the same. Twenty million souls suffering alone.”
As had been the case on the occasions she’d been on her own too long, the speaking of her thought allowed her to see its meaning. Splitfoot could achieve little by himself. His power came through the division of man from neighbor, sister from brother, husband from wife. She had only to see what was left of her own family, her own marriage, for evidence.
“This matter we face—it’s personal,” Franklin said. “The nation doesn’t see what’s afflicted us here.”
“But it feels it. Are we not the First Family? Or what’s left of it.”
“Are you saying he means to hurt many by hurting us?”
“Many were already hurting. Bringing you low is meant to let the wounds fester.” Her voice quieted as it grew in intensity. “The newspapers confirm it. Every story tells a different version of the same condition. State against state. The rights of one race against another. The free and the enslaved. All of it as far from God’s kingdom as he can drag it.”
“But there’s still further he can disassemble the union,” Franklin said, and Jane understood what he referred to. The taking up of arms. The spread of bloodshed beyond Kansas and the western frontier. Civil war.
“Yes,” she said.
Franklin looked down at his spotted hands laid unmoving on his lap. “How to divert him?”
“Do what you can. Call upon your goodness instead of compromise,” she said. “That’s how Sir can be confronted.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure that the time for evading choice is over.”
Even in the candlelight they could hardly see each other. It drew them closer still. Jane pulled her dress from her shoulders, and Franklin put his hands on their pale corners, guiding his head to hers, his lips.
Both of them expected the other to pause, or speak, but neither did. There was enough warmth under the covers that let them undress without shivering. Their skin brought a new kind of heat.
Afterward, they lay on their backs, legs entwined. There was a quiet between them that was partly the calm that followed lovemaking, partly the strain to hear something in the darkness they felt was there.
When they finally heard it, their bodies went stiff. The heat drawn away from the points where they touched.
Something moved between the walls. Heavy and slow, yet never struggling to find its way. Every unremarkable thing it might be was eliminated from their minds. Mouse, squirrel, bird, bat.
It sounded less like a rodent than a snake, one of a length that could wrap itself around the entire room, its tail curling up into the ceiling, its head bumping and sliding under the boards beneath their bed.
“It’s him,” Jane whispered.
How did he know whom she meant? Because he was the boy’s father, just as she was his mother. The two of them could recognize the sound of Bennie’s step without seeing him.
They would have held each other closer if they didn’t worry that the movement of their bodies would alert the thing in the walls to where they lay.
But of course it knew. It’s why it came to this room rather than the hundred others in the house. Why it kept moving around them through the night, denying them sleep. Why at one point, minutes before the dawn when it could see that its prowling had left them as solitary and wrecked as they had been the evening before, it uttered a new sound.
From behind the plaster, muffled as a voice within a pine box, Bennie laughed.