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“Peter?”
Peter looked away from the sky. Leo and Gloria Matienne both looked at him with something he couldn’t identify. The not-knowing scared him a little. What did they want to say to him?
He wondered if they were mad that he’d dragged them with him to free the Elephant, if all they were going to do was send it back to where it came rather than make wishes with it. He hadn’t thought either of them were that hooked on the wishes, but he couldn’t be sure. What if they decided they were? What if, now that the Elephant had gone, the Matiennes realized they wanted to make a wish after all and they were angry that Peter had ripped that away from them?
He had seen more irrational things happen before. He’d been locked in the attic for less—for things that he hadn’t thought mattered until suddenly he was being told his rations were being cut and he wouldn’t be let out until he earned it.
So he braced himself, focusing on the feeling of Adele’s hand in his. He didn’t speak. Just cocked his head to the side, his eyes on Leo to show he was listening.
Leo was taken slightly aback by Peter’s silence—even Peter was aware that it was a bit odd, considering he’d rallied the majority of Baltese a short while ago—but he didn’t comment on it. Instead he said, “Gloria and I were…we were just thinking. About you and Adele.”
Adele, previously craning her neck up to watch the snow falling with a mesmerized look in her eyes, heard her name and found the Matiennes. She glanced up at Peter’s face, likely in the hopes that he would catch her up on what Leo had been saying, but Peter continued to quietly take in the Matiennes.
When there was no response, Gloria elaborated: “How would you feel about staying with us?”
The way she said staying didn’t sound like the kind of staying that was only for a little while. It suggested that the staying would be longer, more permanent, but it was also delivered with a hesitance that said it didn’t have to be if they didn’t want that.
Peter’s first question ahead of everything else was, “Why?”
His voice was a little hoarse. It sounded wrong to his ears.
Gloria’s brow furrowed. She looked hurt. Not at the question, but at what was underneath it. Peter felt like she knew a lot about him that he hadn’t intended for anyone to know, that she was able to see through him—through the front he was presenting for Adele’s sake. He had to be a good brother for her now. He had to protect her. And what kind of brother couldn’t do that on their own?
“We’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Leo said. He was explaining everything slowly, not because he thought Peter couldn’t understand it, but because he seemed to know Peter was afraid to. “Between the both of us, we’re able to provide for you.”
“For Adele?” asked Peter.
Because he wasn’t sure he wanted to go with the Matiennes just yet, but if Adele could have food and a bed while he worked things out, that would be enough. He didn’t need to have this, but he wanted Adele to get it.
Gloria made a small sound in her throat. When she spoke, her voice was hushed with astonishment. “And for you too, Peter.”
“Vilna Lutz always says that you mustn’t take something freely without paying it back,” said Peter. “He says that it’s never good to be in debt.”
“You aren’t in debt, Peter,” Leo told him.
“It’s a gift,” Gloria added.
Peter knew what a gift was, as a general concept. He knew that Vilna Lutz didn’t approve of them. There was always something to be said about earning your own keep, he often told Peter. Gifts were not very good.
“A gift,” Peter repeated. It came out as a question.
Gloria frowned and exchanged a glance with Leo. “Peter,” she said, her voice strange, “you don’t need to pay us back for us taking you or Adele in.”
His eyes widened. “But Vilna Lutz—”
“Enough about that Lutz, Peter,” Leo interrupted, a bit snappish. At Peter’s flinch, he softened his tone. “It’s a gift, and we hope you’ll accept it.”
Peter felt Adele’s grip around his hand tighten. She was a lot more open to going with the Matiennes, but she seemed to be attempting to match Peter, looking up at him hesitantly and hanging back rather than rushing forward the way she wanted to. She bounced on the balls of her feet and waited for Peter’s answer.
He hadn’t done right by her before. He would give her what he could this time. He would make up for it.
He would keep this promise, at least. Fix what he’d broken.
It was for Adele that Peter finally nodded and said, his voice quieter than he meant it, “Okay, Monsieur Matienne.”
He didn’t often call him that. He wanted to air on the side of caution, to assure the Matiennes that he would be well-mannered and worthy of their offer.
Instead he got that same look from the couple, the look he didn’t understand.
“Leo,” came Leo’s response, with an odd sadness Peter decided to ignore.
Peter watched with the careful, deliberate observation of someone who’d had to learn to be that way as Leo debated saying more and then chose to close his mouth and push the words aside.
“What would you say to some more of that stew?” Gloria proposed while Leo remained silent.
She did that often—pressed into the space that Leo left empty, covered for him when she felt it was needed. It went both ways, with Leo doing the same for Gloria. They worked as a unit and followed a rhythm they’d built naturally over the years. It was nice of them to offer their home to Adele and Peter, and he wouldn’t take back his acceptance of that offer—he was never supposed to go back on his word—but he felt like he was intruding on something. That he was out of place.
Adele appeared not to hold the same reservations. As soon as she learned that Peter had agreed to stay with the Matiennes, and that they were offering a warm meal, she leapt forward. She wrapped her arms around Leo’s midsection in a manner that hinted she was desperate to make a family already, making up for lost time. Convincing the unsure part of herself, however small and however buried underneath the near-unshakeable confidence she possessed, that this was something real and safe.
Leo laughed in surprise and glanced over at Gloria, and they shared a look that was almost wild with shock and delight.
And Peter hung back. Waited and watched and stood straight and tall with his mouth shut.
Then all at once, he was against Gloria’s side. She pulled him up with the rest of them like it was as simple as breathing, and he stood there stiffly for a long while before allowing himself to relax a little into her touch.
“Let’s go home,” she sighed. It was quiet enough that Peter guessed it was mostly meant for him.
Home.
Gloria rubbed her hand up and down his arm. Adele positioned herself in between Peter and Leo, fitting into the hole as if she was always meant to be there, and they walked like that all the way back to the Matiennes’.
Sometimes, Peter would forget.
As much as someone who’d been trained by an old soldier for over half their life could forget. Not forever, not entirely, but enough.
Adele had a way of making you forget things. It wasn’t something she tried to do consciously. She was just the type of person who barreled past everything that she deemed unimportant and went straight for what mattered with the quick precision of a child who knew what they wanted. To her, in those weeks, that was having a brother. A family.
So it became easy, almost, to let her tug on his sleeve and demand a piggyback ride or fight back when she sprayed him with water from the watering can while they were gardening.
To forget that he was supposed to stand with his back straight, with his eyes forward, with his mouth tightly shut. With the correct posture, silent until someone acknowledged him.
It wasn’t that he wanted to continue with that. It wasn’t something he enjoyed, even though he kept most of the mantras and teachings with him. He’d stopped taking as much pride in the physical aspects—the marching, the standing at attention, the refusal to acknowledge anything other than the task at hand. But his body kept doing it out of tired obligation before the part of his brain that had decided that life wasn’t for him could catch up and stop it.
For a while, sitting next to Adele underneath the tree in front of the Matienne house, reading to her and sighing in mock-annoyance as she continuously interrupted him with streams of questions, Peter’s shoulders would drop. He would let himself look up and watch the sky as Adele talked, because he knew that she knew he was listening. He would laugh and forget to tone it down and make sure it wasn’t too loud or echoing too much.
Then Gloria would open the front door to peek out at them. Leo would return from work and announce his arrival. The sound of a door opening, the fence gate creaking, made Peter’s body remember—and he was on his feet, back straight, eyes ahead.
Part of him let it continue even after he became aware he was doing it—even after he knew that he wasn’t going to be a soldier. That part wondered whether the Matiennes wanted the child that was well-behaved and polite and quiet, and not the one that got caught up in dreams and wandered and laughed too loudly.
Surely they didn’t want someone unruly. So Peter decided very early on that he wouldn’t be unruly.
Vilna Lutz had been wrong about some things, but he’d told Peter that respect was a virtue. And Peter had discarded some of his teachings, but the ones such as those remained with him. There had to be truth to some of them, because surely a man like Vilna Lutz couldn’t be lying about everything.
Adele didn’t understand it the way Gloria and Leo seemed to. While the couple watched it happen each time with a kind of sadness that made his cheeks burn, Adele would look up at him with more bewilderment than anything.
“You do that a lot,” she mused one day when they were working on the garden. Gloria had been with them, but she’d gone inside to search for something and told them to keep up with weeding until she came back.
Adele had watched as Peter relaxed millimeter by millimeter. She continued to talk as it happened, endless chatter that Peter didn’t always give the appearance of listening to but heard and filed away all the same, and her words came so quickly after her last story that it took Peter a moment to realize she was talking about him.
“Do what?” he asked, a beat too late.
“Get all…” Adele paused the weeding, lifting her hands to gesture around her, which didn’t illustrate her point much at all. “Stiff.”
Peter just looked at her for a long moment.
Adele frowned and stood, not bothering to brush off the dirt on the knees of her trousers before she snapped into an almost-perfect imitation of—
“You’re pulling your shoulders too far back,” Peter said automatically. “They should be right past your hips, not tipping you backward…”
He trailed off as his sister fixed him with an odd look. Like she was still puzzled, but trying her hardest to piece things together.
“Why do you do it?” she asked, when she’d spent a while deliberating and seemingly felt like she was missing something that would help everything make sense. She often dealt in absolutes like that—believed that there was simply one step between the not-knowing and the knowing, and not thousands. That an extra leap would force everything to fall into place, leaving nothing in shadow.
It reminded Peter of himself, a bit. That brand of black-and-white.
Peter shrugged and answered, “Because it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Adele just blinked at him.
She was waiting for something more. Something that would truly explain. But he realized, sitting in the dirt and searching for the words as his little sister stared down at him, that he didn’t know if he could give her a better explanation. This was something that he’d been taught so early that it had become second-nature. There wasn’t time to think about why he did it or what it meant. He simply did it, because that’s what Vilna Lutz had beaten into him—follow orders as quickly as you can. Prove you’re capable.
The front door swung open, Gloria humming a tune under her breath and carrying extra gardening tools in her arms.
Immediately, Peter’s shoulders were back, his gaze fixed on the task in front of him.
Gloria’s humming stuttered, and Peter felt Adele settle next to him in the overturned soil and nudge him with her arm, but he ignored all of it.
“How has it been going out here?” Gloria asked with a lightness that sounded a little performed.
“I think the weeds are almost gone, Madame Matienne,” answered Peter.
Silence followed his words. They often did now, whenever he used titles for the Matiennes rather than calling them by names. He tried to remember to call them Gloria and Leo whenever he had to say their names, but they stuck in his throat.
He hadn’t had the most trouble calling Leo just Leo before. He wasn’t sure what had changed now. Why it felt like the next slip would be the last. Why it felt like if he didn’t do what he was told and treat the Matiennes with the respect he’d been taught to give anyone above his rank, they would realize they didn’t want him anymore.
“Well,” Gloria said after the moment passed, “I did find some seeds, so why don’t we get to work on planting those?”
Peter held back the natural response by biting into his cheek, drawing blood.
She doesn’t like being called Madame Matienne. You must not call her Madame Matienne.
Or else you might—
Gloria ruffled his hair like she knew he was getting lost, and Peter shut down the train of thought. Her eyes asked silently if he was alright. He just nodded and tasted the blood in his mouth to keep the reminder at the front of his mind, and he waited without a word as Gloria handed him tools and showed him and Adele how to plant the seeds.
Vilna Lutz always told Peter that it wasn’t honorable to rest when there was still work to be done.
Which was why he was still awake long after the rest of the house had gone to sleep, dusting the tops of the cabinets and polishing glasses and putting away what remained of the clean dishes.
Perhaps part of the reason why he was up and cleaning was to avoid the bed the Matiennes had given him along with the room and the warm food. But he wouldn’t say that. After all, it would be rude to refuse the room or the bed. And he wasn’t refusing them, exactly. He would still use them.
When the work was done.
(The work was never done. As if he continued to look for it after he finished.)
He thought he was being quiet. He’d learned to be quiet after six years with a soldier who had his unsavory moods as much as he had his good ones. His footsteps were as silent as he could make them. He lifted a chair to reach the sink so it wouldn’t scrape against the floor and alert the house.
But then a light flicked on, and he blinked at the sudden brightness in confusion.
“Peter,” said a voice from the hallway at his back.
Gloria.
He didn’t turn, but he sensed her step forward and stand just behind him.
“What are you doing up?” she asked.
There was a moment in which Peter didn’t know how to answer her. The same situation had come about more than once in the time that he and Adele had been staying with the Matiennes, where he was asked a question and each time he never quite knew what to say.
He settled for the truth.
“I’m supposed to make sure it’s right before I go to bed,” he said.
He felt Gloria’s eyes on him, searing holes into the skin of his back.
“Make sure what’s right?” she asked him. “You should be sleeping, Peter. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not worth your sleep.”
Something in her tone made him freeze.
She was disappointed. In him.
Gloria reached forward and rested a hand gently on his shoulder, and he jolted away from it. “Sorry,” he mumbled quickly, ducking his head. “I’m sorry, Madame Matienne, I’ll go to bed, I’m sorry—”
Resting without finishing a job was bad. Disappointing someone who trusted you was even worse.
Vilna Lutz had been often disappointed when it came to Peter. It wasn’t that Peter tried for it, but there was always something that was wrong. He’d discovered over the years that the best thing to do was apologize and stand as tall as he could for what came next if apologizing didn’t work the way it should have.
Gloria took his other shoulder with her free hand and turned him to face her, and that forced him to see her expression. Her brow was curved with concern, her mouth quirking downward. Her eyes glowed with alarm.
“Peter, no, it’s alright, it’s just—Why are you awake?” she asked again, her voice soft. It was strained around the edges with the sort of forced calm people had when they knew a situation was not as it should be but were trying their best to make it that way, handling metaphorical shards of glass carefully in their hands.
Peter averted his gaze, staring hard at the floorboards. At the bottom of Gloria’s nightgown and her well-loved slippers.
“Cleaning,” Peter said after a long time. He wasn’t sure how to go any further.
Gloria just looked at him for a while. Enough that he began to squirm.
“…You don’t have to do that, baby,” Gloria said quietly. She sounded sad in a way that implied she was making several connections all at once and didn’t like the picture they were presenting. “Not right now. I can clean during the day—you can help, if you want.”
Want was not a word that usually pertained to Peter. He knew it, of course, and he had wants, but they hadn’t been handed to him like this before. He had to sit with the information for a minute or two before he could speak again.
“I don’t have to,” he repeated after Gloria.
“No, honey,” Gloria affirmed. It was the second time she’d called him something like that—something like baby or honey—and Peter noticed it, past his thinking about wants and cleaning and Gloria’s hand on his shoulder, her thumb moving back and forth in soothing motions. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called honey. When he’d been referred to as anything other than Private Duchene or just Peter.
He didn’t know how exactly he felt about it. He didn’t know how to assign the feeling a name. But it was warm and light and made him feel a little bit nauseous.
“Do you want to go to bed?” asked Gloria.
“…Yes.” It took his voice a while to work, and then he had to speak past the feeling burning throughout his body screaming that this was wrong, in some capacity, to be going to bed when there was clearly a task he needed to finish.
But Gloria didn’t seem to mind the dishes left by the sink or the dust on the top of the cabinets or the clutter on the dining table. So that must have meant something, shouldn’t it?
And he realized, slowly and a bit numbly, that he was tired. The kind of tired that came after too many long nights and too many days trying for something close to perfect, a tired that seeped into bone and made the edges of your vision hazy and undefined.
Gloria guided him up the stairs and to his room. Just before she finished pulling the blankets over him she dropped a quick, almost tentative kiss at his temple.
She was closing the door before he could fully process what happened.
Once he did, finally registering the warmth that was left behind and the knowledge that she’d given such a thing to him even after he’d surely disappointed her, he held onto the feeling that knowledge left in his chest until he fell asleep.