John’s head moved almost in a circle at first, then it evened out to resemble a shake. A shake. Was he shaking his head to my question or shaking his head in the way a person did before delivering a blow followed by an apology?
“John?” My voice filled the void of the empty room.
“It’s . . . Conn.”
The words came out so slowly, almost silently, I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right.
John moved his head, seeming to try to stretch his neck, and opened his mouth again. “Conn’s your . . . brother . . . by blood.” With each couple of syllables, John gasped for breath, his hand wringing mine.
“Conn.” That was all I could say. That was all I could think.
Of the three Armstrong brothers, I would have rated Conn as the least likely to be my half brother. We looked nothing alike, we acted nothing alike, we were nothing alike . . . except we shared the same mother. Following that thought, another word slipped from my mouth, but it wasn’t a name.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what I should be thinking. Relief seemed to be at the front of the line since it wasn’t Chance. Unparalleled happiness followed next, for the same reason. But then a few other emotions trickled through me—feelings like disbelief, shock, sadness, and guilt. I’d pursued Conn for all those years, and the whole time he’d been my mother’s first child. The one she’d never mentioned and had sent off to be raised by another family—the same family she’d listed as my next of kin in the event of her death. My next of kin . . . really, looking back, it should have been more obvious. I should have realized that she’d sent me to Red Mountain because she and John were more than just old friends.
“I’m sorry.” John’s hand at last squeezed mine in a way that was familiar. One lone tear leaked from the corner of his eye. “Tell Conn . . . I’m sorry . . .” His face broke into a grimace as if something was ripping him apart from the inside. “Tell him . . . I love . . . him.”
His hand went slack in mine. The monitor beeped as he fell into what I guessed was an exhausted sleep. I warned myself, as John’s eyes closed, that that was the last time I’d see them with a light still burning within. I told myself that I’d just felt the last squeeze of my hand. John had said his good-bye too, and it was the best good-bye he could have given me.
The man I loved was not the one I prayed he wasn’t. John had given me the name of my half brother—Conn. The last family I had. Other than myself, he was all that was left of my mother, and for some reason, my need to find him became so urgent that I shoved out of my seat so abruptly it banged into the wall and made a not-so-quiet thunk.
I wasn’t sure what I’d say to Conn. Maybe I’d come right out and tell him or attempt to ease him into the truth, but I had to find him first. Then find Chance. Now that I knew the truth, I couldn’t wait to have that conversation he’d been so adamant about having. Rushing for the door, I saw two solemn figures drift inside. The I.C.U. only allowed one visitor per room at a time, so if Chance and Chase had both just showed up inside John’s room, that must mean . . .
They weren’t there to visit him. They were there to see me. From the way neither could meet my eyes, I knew something bad had happened. Something terrible.
Chance was the first to look up, and when he did, he looked more distraught than I’d ever seen him. His eyes were red, his whole face creased with pain. Chase’s hands were back around his head, and a sniffle was the only sign that he was conscious.
“Where’s Conn?” I asked, unable to take another step. My feet had frozen in place. “I need to find him. Now.”
Chance’s eyes closed. He took in a breath before his eyes lifted toward the ceiling. “Conn’s gone, Scout.” His voice broke in the middle of his whisper.
“Gone where?” I lifted my arm, bracing myself against the wall.
Chance’s face broke. Again. I started to hyperventilate.
“There was an accident . . .” Each word was a fight, but he kept going. “He’d been drinking. A lot. Then he got in his car and . . .” Chance walked up to the wall, pulled his hat off his head, let it fall to the floor, and dropped his forehead into the wall. He seemed unable to hold himself up anymore. “He crashed. He flipped the car, and it rolled . . . a long ways.”
Chase shook his head at the floor, pacing in front of the door with that lost look on his face again.
“Where is he?” I swallowed, refusing to hear what he was saying without actually saying it. “Where’s my brother?”
That word barely seemed to reach whatever place Chance had retreated to. All he was capable of focusing on was his brother, the one he’d grown up calling that, the same one I’d only had the right to call brother for less than two minutes.
“He’s gone.” Chance’s voice broke. “He’s gone.”
This couldn’t be happening. I couldn’t be losing Conn after just finding out who he was to me. He couldn’t be gone before I’d had a chance to tell him . . . before I’d had a chance to tell him what John had asked me to tell him—that he was sorry, and that he loved him. I knew how long Conn had waited to hear those two things from his father, and now I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t make sure Conn knew before . . .
“Where is he?” I teetered into the wall, struggling to move forward when everything seemed to hold me back. My own body wanted to hold me back. “I want to see him. I want to see his body.”
I kept moving toward the door at a slow, laborious pace. I felt like I was walking through quicksand, each step trying to draw me under. My hand was about to curl around the handle when Chase broke out of whatever trance he’d fallen back into. His hand snapped out for mine, keeping me in place. Chance was still facing that wall, his arms flat against it, as lost as Chase had been.
“Let me go. I need to see him. I want to see my brother’s body.” I tried to shake off Chase’s hand, but with his mental fortitude, his strength had also returned.
“There’s nothing left to see.” The words fell from his lips as if he couldn’t get them out fast enough.
“What do you mean?” That was when I started fighting, trying to rip off the door handle if that was what it took to get out of that room and find Conn. “Let me go! I need to go find him. I need to tell him. Let me go!”
The harder I fought, the tighter Chase’s grip became until I yelped in pain.
Out of nowhere, Chance was beside us, carefully wrestling Chase’s hand off mine before replacing it with his. Chance gently slid my hand from the handle and drew me close, letting go of my hand to wind his arm around my back. “There’s nothing left of him, Scout. After the accident . . . after he flipped and rolled the car . . . it started burning. By the time anyone noticed his car at the bottom of the hill, there was nothing left to retrieve from it.”
His words were strong, tempered by the gentleness of his touch, but I knew it wasn’t because Chance felt strong—he wanted to be strong for me. I guessed he would have rather let the sorrow and shock and rage have its way with him, but he held it back, controlling it so he could be there for me when I needed his strength most.
“He’s gone. Our brother’s gone,” Chance said.
Those words incited a series of sobs that rocked my body so intensely I felt like they might break me in half. Chance held me up, supported me when I would have fallen to the floor.
“He’s gone.” He just kept repeating those words, gently shushing me as the sobs ripped through me.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Chase moved up beside us and dropped an arm around each of us as he let his head fall against ours. Apparently he couldn’t hold himself up any better than I could.
“I want to see him.” I sobbed, knowing I never would again. “I want to see my brother. I need to find him.”
I felt Chance’s body rock, and I realized his sobs had joined mine . . . had joined Chase’s. That was the way we were, arms tangled together, leaning on the each other for support, when the beeping gave out behind us, morphing into a high-pitched siren that announced a
life had gone.
Death hadn’t settled for one Armstrong. Death had required two.
I wasn’t sure who fell first, but eventually, all three of us hit the floor on our knees, a broken tangle of limbs and shattered souls. Death seemed to circle us like it wouldn’t be sated until every last one of us were rotting in our tombs.
I WASN’T SURE if death could ever be satisfied, if satisfaction was in its nature. I did know it was one greedy, malicious son of a bitch that had claimed far too many Armstrongs before their time. But at least for the moment, death seemed to have moved on. It was a small blessing I didn’t take lightly.
If it skulked around the people I loved again before they’d reached the ripe old age of ninety, I would fight it tooth and nail to keep the few people still left in my life that I cared about. Chase and Chance—they were all I had left. They were the only ones who had been spared from the all-sweeping blow of death’s sickle. I tried not to think about what it would be like to lose them too—to be utterly alone in the world—but the image had crossed my mind more often than I would have liked.
Conn was out of my life. Forever. At the start of the summer, that had been my wish. Halfway through, it had become true in the most awful way imaginable, and toward the end of summer, I’d almost come to peace with it. Almost. I knew I’d never have that last degree of absolution I needed to find total peace.
As I hovered between his gravestone and John’s, two Armstrongs laid to rest in the ground in front of me, and the last two Armstrongs positioned like book ends on either side of me, I felt the wind coming up the side of the mountain. It crushed across me with such force I almost thought it was trying to topple me down the back side of Red Mountain.
As I studied the gravestones of the handful of women who had died before their times, with the latest addition of one man who had died before his and a man who had died in a prolonged, debilitating way that robbed him of all his pride, I understood why the brothers believed in a curse. Burying a body has a way of making a person reflect. Burying bodies has a way of making a person want to blame fate or God or some ancient legend.
I didn’t fault Chance and Chase for believing in the curse—I wanted something to believe in too so I could explain how I’d lost my brother and the closest thing I’d ever had to a father in the same day. I wanted to know why Conn had died before I could tell him everything John had told me. I wanted to know why he’d died at all. I wanted to know why my brother would never know he had a real sister, not just a sister of sorts.
We didn’t have anything left of Conn to bury, so we’d collected photos and keepsakes and things that were special to Conn and reminded us of him. We’d stuffed them all in a large container, and that was what we laid to rest beneath his fresh headstone.
We’d placed John beside him. That might have seemed an odd choice given the two of them had been so against each other in life, but they’d been together on one thing, and that was their deaths. Both graves were new, Chance and Chase’s bootprints still fresh on the compacted soil around them. I’d planted a variety of bulbs in hopes they’d always have something in bloom from spring to fall.
I’d also planted bulbs around the two newest gravesites before John and Conn’s. Chase had helped me plant them around Jenny’s, but I’d wanted to do the other on my own. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had been buried on Red Mountain. A handful of others and I had attended her funeral after her death, but I’d been told that she would be cremated and laid to rest in a state-provided crypt since my mom hadn’t left behind any money for a proper burial.
I’d never be able to ask how it had all happened, but somehow John had worked out a way to get her remains out here so she could rest in peace at eight thousand feet above sea level with the rest of the women who’d died young. At first, I hadn’t understood why John would lay his mistress to rest in the same place as his wife, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what he had been thinking.
He’d cared for my mom. He’d loved her. To John, her death was no mere coincidence or senseless tragedy. To John, the curse had extended to more than just wives but all the women once loved by an Armstrong man. That was why he’d had her buried here—because he felt responsible for her death. I guessed it was also why he’d taken me in and been so good to me all of those years.
Of course, that realization was something I kept to myself. I couldn’t mention to Chance why John had buried my mom here, because he was already nervous for me. He tried to pretend he wasn’t—he tried so hard—but I sensed it. I felt it when his hand tightened ever so slightly around mine as we stepped into a street to cross it. Or how his breath caught for the shortest second when I told him I was going out on Dark Horse. Or how when I’d told him yesterday that I needed to go on a hike to deal with everything that had happened that summer, he’d had to force himself to stay and not follow me. Chance felt like he was fighting a game of tug-of-war with destiny, but as far as fighting off fate, I knew that if anyone could, he’d come out the winner.
I didn’t know how long we’d been standing in front of Conn’s and John’s graves, but it felt like a long time. I also felt like I couldn’t just turn and walk away. That would be like saying a final good-bye, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that yet.
“Do you think we should have made their funerals a public thing? Invited their friends and acquaintances?” I asked, staring at the freshly cut crimson roses I’d laid beside Conn’s grave.
Only the three of us had been at John’s and Conn’s funeral. The three of us dressed in black, making our way up the mountain on horseback, not a line of memorized scripture between any of us . . . that was the way we’d decided to say good-bye to two men we’d cared about. At the time, it had seemed like the right decision, but now, I wasn’t so sure.
Chase’s hands were clasped in front of him, his head bowed. “How many of those friends and acquaintances came to see Dad his last few months? None, that’s how many. They wanted to remember John Armstrong the way we would have liked to but didn’t get the choice. They didn’t want to see what killed him, so they don’t get to see the funeral.”
I nodded. John had known just about everyone in the community. He couldn’t walk down a sidewalk without being stopped for a handshake, but Chase was right—none of those old friends had stopped by to say hi or catch up in his last days. People didn’t like being reminded of their own mortality, and a person couldn’t sit in front of John for long without thinking about it.
“And Conn wouldn’t have even wanted us to show up at his funeral, let alone a bunch of ‘fake friends and posers’ as he probably would have called them,” Chase continued, lifting his chin at Conn’s grave. “I think this was just right. Just the way both of them would have wanted it.”
The ranch had been flooded with sympathy cards and phone calls and flowers and casseroles. Almost as many people had expressed their sympathy for Conn’s loss as they had for John’s. Conn had been friendless because of his high walls, but plenty of people had seen past them long enough to catch a glimpse of the man I’d seen, and it was that man they were honoring in death.
My gaze ran over all of the headstones, some so old they were showing wear and others still new enough that they looked shiny and pristine. “We just buried the first men ever on this mountain. Over a hundred fifty years of this being a place for wives and women, and we buried two men. I’m not sure it’s what either of them would have wanted.”
“It is,” Chance replied, his voice almost hoarse from his prolonged silence. “We all want our final resting place to be beside the people we loved in life and the ones we hope to find in death.” Chance studied his father’s and brother’s graves, nodding. “This is where they belong.”
I wove my arm through his and dropped my head against his shoulder. The only thing that had been easy in the weeks since John and Conn died was Chance and me. Our relationship was effortless, our love easy. In a life boiling over with hardship and toil, being with Chance was like finding my o
wn sliver of happiness in the universe. He was what kept me getting up in the morning when I wanted to throw the sheet over my head and what helped soothe me to sleep when restlessness came knocking. He was everything good about life rolled into one being, and he’d been my anchor in the choppy waters following John’s and Conn’s deaths.
“If you guys will excuse me, there’s someone else I want to say hi to.” Chase gave me quick squeeze before giving his brother one then he weaved through the graves to his wife’s.
He still wore his wedding ring, and I guessed that he always would. He’d be buried beside her one day with that ring still firmly affixed. I saw so much beauty in that kind of love that I almost forgot I was attending a double funeral.
Chase’s constant shadow loped after him. Wolf never left Chase’s side unless he had to, then he stayed by Chance or me. He’d made it clear that we were his pack, and like we’d do for our own, he’d fight fang and claw to protect us. So Chance wasn’t the only good thing to come out of the summer.
Saving that animal’s life hadn’t been a mistake. There were so few lives a person could save, and when the chance arose to save one, it shouldn’t be shrugged off. I could have let nature run its course and claim Wolf, but I hadn’t. I’d reacted. I’d saved a life. I’d have done it again. I would do anything and everything I could to even the balance in the fight between life and death because, quite frankly, I felt like my life had been filled with more of one than the other. I hoped that was about to change.
I studied Conn’s grave, realizing that, for the first time, he was at peace. “I always knew there was this connection between us. I could never explain it and obviously misread what that connection was, but I felt it. I just needed that one piece of information to decipher it.”
Chance’s hand wove through mine. His injured arm had healed, and most of his bruises were gone, replaced by the scars of losing his father and brother in the same day. “I know you did.” He squinted at his brother’s grave through the glare of the sun setting in front of us. “He didn’t like to show it—he did everything he could to repress it—but I know he felt the same connection . . . and just as conflicted by it.”
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