I pulled his head against me and rocked him, there in the hay with the remains of our play still stuck in our hair. That was how Frankie found us.
Busted.
I hadn’t heard from the Nudnik in days, but it didn’t surprise me that she spoke up then. She was always there when the guilt kicked in.
Andy sat up but he didn’t move away from me. Frankie perched on a nearby bale and surveyed us with her brown eyes.
Maybe not busted but definitely about to get a sermonette.
“We’re all adults,” Frankie said. “So I think it’s time we were honest with each other.”
“Me first.” Andy’s voice still shook a little but his grin was strong. “I care about Kirsten,” he said. “I care about her too much to hurt her.”
Frankie pulled in her chin. “I would never suggest that you would, son.”
“What you see here is her helping me deal with some memories I’ve been having that I can’t quite wrap my mind around.”
There’s the kiss of death right there. “Why didn’t you come to me, Andy?”
But Frankie didn’t say anything. She nodded and turned to me. Even the Nudnik fell silent.
“I care about Andy too,” I said. “He’s good and he’s honest . . .”
“Well, don’t stop now,” Andy said. “You’re on a roll.”
Frankie closed her eyes and smiled.
What does that look mean? C’mon, what does that mean?
“I don’t doubt for a minute that you two care about each other,” she said. “I saw the potential for that the first time you met, right on this spot. And even if I had thought it wasn’t a good idea for you to explore a relationship, it wouldn’t be my place to try to stop you.”
Andy grinned. “You’d give your input though.”
“Only because I care about both of you. And that’s why I’m going to give it now.” She leaned over and put a hand on each of ours. “Please take your time. If this is of God, it will stand that test.”
“I’ll take that input,” Andy said. He looked at me. “You, Bo?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re more than welcome.” Frankie stood up and seemed about to go, and then she turned back to us. “By the way, you don’t have to sneak behind the bum pen to kiss her, Andy.”
“I know that,” he said. “It’s just more fun that way.”
“Incorrigible,” she said. “Completely incorrigible.”
Andy still waited until she was gone to kiss me, and the sigh I hugged out of him was long and real. But Frankie’s words had thrown me off balance again. “If this is of God . . .”
I’d never thought of anything I did as being of God. This . . . the this we’d danced around for weeks . . . could this be so real that it was of God? Meant to be? For me?
The next afternoon during the free time I’d fallen into the habit of spending with Andy, I went to the Cloister instead and among the art supplies I found a sketch pad and a fine-tipped black marker. I tucked the pad under my arm and the pen over my ear and went out to the side porch.
Neither Emma nor I ever spent much time there because it looked out on nothing but high bushes that were several years past their trimming date; they reached over the roofline like neglected children allowed to run amuck. Seeing the bunkhouse and beyond wasn’t my goal. I wanted to be outside and not be seen, and this was the perfect place.
I opened the sketchbook to its first white, pristine page and smoothed my hand over it. I was no stranger to such pads; I’d roughed out many a design in them, filling up several every semester from sophomore year on. I waited for a minute to see if any waves of regret or longing would wash over me, but I felt only the Nudnik saying, Oh, for Pete’s sake get on with it.
I uncapped the pen and let it write across the top of the page . . .
Lara
What I was going to do after that, I had no idea. So I wrote BAT KOL, hoping an echo would tell me what to do. Then I wrote, OF GOD. And THE LORD BE WITH YOU. And LET US PRAY.
And then I wrote, LARA, WHY DID YOU LISTEN TO ME THAT NIGHT?
The pen stopped. My mind didn’t.
So many times I’d nagged her, pleaded with her, begged her not to go. Not to sneak out. Not to pour vodka into that soda can. She had always tossed her silken head and laughed her elfin laugh and said, “You won’t tell. You’ll cover for me.”
Why that night did she change her mind and do what I told her to do?
You’re not ready for this yet.
I looked down at the paper. LARA was dripping down the page, racing after my tears.
“What do you mean, memories?”
The voice was so close I looked to see if Joseph had joined me on the porch, but I was still alone.
“He said he was having memories he couldn’t wrap his mind around and Kirsten was helping him.”
That was Frankie’s voice. They had to be standing more than thirty feet from the Cloister, but the breeze blew their words up to the porch.
“You think he’s remembering . . .”
“What else could it be?” Frankie said.
Two things became crystalline in my mind. This conversation was not meant for me to hear. And if I got up and went into the house, they would know I had heard. The floorboards would creak and the back door would groan like an arthritic old woman. I sat still and squeezed my eyes shut.
Like that’s gonna keep you from eavesdropping.
“I can’t help thinking we made a mistake by not telling him, Joseph. But he never asked.”
“Probably afraid of the answer.”
“Aren’t we all afraid of the truth sometimes?”
“Look, Frank, it is what it is,” Joseph said. “Whatever he remembers, whatever we end up telling him, it was all for him. He’ll see that.”
“Unless he saw Ronnie that day and that’s what he’s blocking out.”
“What?”
“I’ve just always wondered, Joseph, what if he saw her?”
“There’s no way he could have seen her. She was under my truck.”
The breeze blew a pause across the hillside. Then Joseph said, “Trust me on that, Frank, because I have no trouble remembering that day.”
I let Frankie’s reply fly past me as I held on to Andy’s words. “Something was under—I can’t see.” Was that something under Joseph’s truck? Ronnie? Who was Ronnie?
“You going to tell him now?” Joseph said.
“Not unless I have to,” Frankie said. “I have to believe this is all coming to him as he’s ready. The question is, are you?”
“I guess I’ll have to be, won’t I?” I could imagine Joseph pushing up the brim of his hat with two fingers. “You still want to ride up to Five with Emma and me?”
“Yeah. We need to clear our heads.”
I waited until I could no longer hear Joseph and Frankie murmuring to each other before I started to tangle with any of that. Even then I got up and peered through the bushes first to make sure they were saddling up with Emma outside the bunkhouse.
Joseph had told me twice to my face, “This has nothing to do with you.” But there was no erasing it now. Andy, my Andy, was about to remember something that had been hidden from him his whole life, and in a way even Sister Frankie now doubted was the way it should have been done.
I didn’t want him to remember it alone.
Andy was standing at the bum lamb pen, leaning over to pet Petey, when I got to the barn. He looked up at me as if he knew I’d be coming. His face was flooded with something just realized.
“I was three years old,” he said.
I went to him and he folded me against him. My chest threatened to split in half, just like his.
“A few minutes ago I overheard something I wasn’t supposed to hear and I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe it will help you. Only . . . I don’t know, Andy, maybe you should ask Joseph. He’ll tell you so you can—”
Andy pulled me in tighter. “No. I’d rather hear i
t from you.”
“Wrong,” someone said. “You’re going to hear it from me.”
I wrenched my neck to look behind us. The voice belonged to my father.
He was like a snapshot standing there, as if he’d posed for the moment. He’d made no attempt to look Western this time. The knife-pleated jeans had been replaced by dress slacks, the shiny boots by wingtips. Even his face was on the Corporate Setting: eyes in charge, brow confidently smooth, mouth ready to do business. For the first time since I was seventeen years old I didn’t feel an expectant rush because my father had arrived on his white horse.
All I felt were his last words snapping in my mind like alarmed fingers: “I’m not done with this.”
“Dad,” I said, “what . . . what are you doing here?”
“I came to get you out of this place,” he said. “And I’m not leaving without you this time.”
My face was already immobile but somehow I shook my head. “I’m not going, Dad. I’m sorry you came all the way out here, but I told you—”
“And now I’m telling you.”
It wasn’t so much what he said that stunned me, but the way he delivered it. Without anger. Without urgency. Without any emotion at all.
Unless you count smug as an emotion.
That was it. And it stood up like nettles on the back of my neck.
“I’ve done some research on this place,” he said. “It’s been crawling with loonies since day one.”
Until then Andy had remained shocked-still, and why wouldn’t he? He’d just been knocked from one disturbing dimension into another. But now he let go of me and stepped forward.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Petersen,” he said, “but you don’t get to walk in here and insult my family.”
“I’m thinking about my family, son,” Dad said.
How are you not throwing up right now?
“My daughter has spent, what is it now, six weeks, on a ranch that’s been run by . . .” He counted on his fingers. “Two hippies with arrest records—that’s the good Sister Frankie’s parents . . . Frankie’s wacko twin sister, Ronnie—that’s your mother, Andrew, who ran off and married a guy with a boatload of money and then ran away from him and for all practical purposes kidnapped her unborn kid—that’s you—and hid him here thinking she could pretend none of it ever happened.”
“Dad, stop,” I said.
“I’m just getting started, Kirsten. Do you want to know why Joseph Maxwell went to prison?”
“Let Joseph Maxwell tell him.”
How Frankie and Joseph got to the barn’s main gate without us hearing them I couldn’t begin to know. But they were there now, both of them gray shadows of the people I’d seen galloping off less than thirty minutes before. Frankie’s eyes were large and stark, not moving from my father as she let herself and Joseph through the gate.
“Sister,” my father said, as if she’d just joined us at a table at Ted’s Montana Grill. His insensitivity rattled in the barn.
“This is not your story to tell, Mr. Petersen,” Frankie said.
“Fine,” my father said. “Let’s hear his version.”
“No,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
I marched to him and motioned to the gate Joseph had just closed behind them, all without looking at my father.
“You’re right, kiddo,” he said. “This is a family affair.”
He looked at the gate latch as if he expected me to open it. I climbed over the bars and waited, arms folded, on the other side. My pulse pounded in my neck.
My father fumbled over the latch until, with a muttered epithet, he gave up and climbed without grace over the gate. The sole of his wingtip slipped on the last rung and he stumbled forward almost into my arms. I stepped aside.
“Don’t pull an attitude with me, Kirsten—”
“Bo! Please . . . I need you here.”
I turned to look at Andy. He was still rooted to his spot by the bum pen, his face the color of Petey’s wool. Nothing on him moved except his mouth, begging me not to make him do this alone.
I looked at Frankie but her eyes were closed.
It’s on you.
I climbed back over the fence. Without turning around I said, “Dad. You can go wherever. I’m staying here.”
“Kirsten—”
“Go, okay?”
He swore. The desecrating words hung in the air as his footsteps popped across the rocks and disappeared.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But no one seemed to hear. Frankie and Andy watched only Joseph, and now as I returned to my place beside Andy, so did I. I could feel Andy’s agony seething from his skin. I could see Frankie’s in her eyes. But it was Joseph whose very being seemed to suffer as he began to tell the story that had buried itself in Andy’s memory.
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Chapter
EIGHTEEN
It was actually Andy who started. With his gaze slanted to the ground he said, “I was three years old. You and I, Joseph . . . we were coming back from the processor. It was good. It was a good moment, and then it turned bad.”
He gave Joseph an imploring look that tore through me. It seemed to have that same effect on Joseph.
“I’ll tell you why, son,” Joseph said. “But you need to know that once I do, you’re going to have some demons to wrestle with.”
I watched Andy swallow as if it hurt. As if everything hurt. “I’m already there,” he said. “I need to hear.”
Joseph took one more reluctant breath. “Ronnie was out there in the driveway. But you weren’t excited to see her like you usually were. You knew as soon as I did that something wasn’t right with your mama.”
Andy nodded. “She was arguing with somebody.”
“Right. Gabe DeLuca. I’d never seen him before but I knew the minute I looked at him he was your father. The only thing we had going for us was that he didn’t know he was your father.”
“He didn’t know I existed,” Andy said.
“That’s right.”
“Your mother wanted it that way, Andy,” Frankie said. “She was afraid of him.”
“And from what I was seeing, she had every right to be.” Joseph shook his head. “He had her backed up against the side of his Porsche and he was backhanding her across the face. Bad choice to make in front of me.”
Even now anger seared through Joseph’s eyes. I didn’t want to hear the rest of this story, but Andy found my hand and clung to it with icy fingers.
“I told you to get down on the floorboard,” Joseph said. “I didn’t want him seeing you, because one look would tell him you were his kid. Same hair. Same stocky body. Same everything except the soul that had been taken over by the devil.”
“I didn’t do it, though,” Andy said. “I got out of the car and ran to her.”
“Are you remembering, Andy?” Frankie said.
I knew the answer. I could feel the memory clenched in his fingers.
“She smelled like cinnamon.”
“Yes, she did,” Frankie said.
“And he knew who I was.”
“He did,” Joseph said. “Knocked the sass right out of him. That gave Ronnie a chance to motion for me to take you inside the house, and I did.” Joseph’s voice caught. “And I will regret that until the day I die.”
If you want to get out of hearing where this goes, now could be your last chance.
Want to? Every cell cried out, “No! You can’t hear this!” But do it? With Andy’s courage breaking down in the palm of my hand?
I put my other hand over his.
“I took you inside,” Joseph said, “and I tried to calm you down, but you were crying for your mama like you’d never done before. And then we heard other screams.”
“Hers,” Andy said.
“You got away from me and bolted out the door—”
“He had his hands around her neck . . . he was shaking her
. . . and shaking her.”
“Son—”
“And then he dropped her and kicked her under your truck . . . like she was a dead dog . . .”
Frankie let out a cry. With both hands pressed to her mouth she said, “Oh, Andy—oh baby, you saw. I didn’t know you saw.”
Andy didn’t seem to be able to say any more. What was there to say after that? What more horror could there be? I wanted to pull him into my arms, but I was afraid if I did he would crack into tiny pieces that could never be put back together again.
“Should I go on, Frankie?” Joseph said.
It was Andy who nodded. I bit my lip to keep from screaming, No! No more!
“Before I could get out there, DeLuca grabbed you and went for his car.”
“He didn’t know how to hold me right,” Andy had said that day in our hay pile. “I was screaming, ‘Let me go!’”
“I shouted for him to stop,” Joseph said. “And I went after him. But he had you in one arm and he used the other one to pull out a forty-five. I knew from the look in his eye he’d shoot me if I so much as blinked, and I’d be no good to you dead, Andy. You know that, right?”
Andy managed to nod.
“He peeled out of there with you in the car, and I was banking on him not being able to take the dirt roads in that Porsche like I could in the truck. My gun was hanging behind the seat and I jumped in to take off after him . . .” Joseph’s voice weakened. “And then I remembered Ronnie was under it. I knew she was . . . I knew she was gone, but I couldn’t run over her body.” The sinewy shoulders sagged as if he were carrying a burden he could never put down. “By the time I moved her, DeLuca was long gone with you. Took me hours to find him, holed up in Choteau in a motel that doesn’t exist anymore. They tore it down after that night.”
“I was still screaming,” Andy said. “I never stopped screaming.”
“And I thank God for that every day. When the guy who managed the motel told me DeLuca was there, I was going to get the police and come back. But when I heard you screaming, all the way out to the office . . . and I heard DeLuca telling you to shut your mouth . . .”
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