by Deborah Reed
She felt Wink rise from his chair. “Don’t,” Vivvie said, her insides shattering, sharp and loud as glass. “Please. Just leave me be.”
He was next to her now, touching her shoulder. She jerked away. But a wail sprung, a series of retched cries broke free. Make it stop, she thought, make it stop. Stop. Stop. But it would not. It gained in strength, a torrent of sobs drowning out the room. This was not about what she’d done to Jackson, not about being sorry for that. This was grief, plain and simple, long in the coming, a greedy, wretched sorrow laying her to waste. Vivvie wailed, recalling a sympathy card like it was yesterday: A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. But it was from years ago, when a coworker’s son died in a car accident, and someone had printed that verse right on the front, and here and now Vivvie wailed, thinking of how they had passed those cards out at the door, the cruelty of it, a grieving mother reading that merciless truth, passed around again and again in the light of day for all the world to see.
When she began to calm, Wink touched her and this time she didn’t move. He sat beside her, laid his arm full across her shoulders.
“No,” she cried, shaking her head. “Go away.” The thought came to her that maybe she could reverse what had happened, that there was still a window of opportunity to shift time and place, say or do the right thing. She had not done the right thing, but maybe now she would, even as she did not know what it was, even as her mind was telling her that these thoughts made no sense, the same mind that carried through with the hope, the belief that she could overthrow what had happened, and put it in reverse.
“Vivvie. If you didn’t want me to leave last night you sure as hell don’t want me to leave now.”
“Yes, I do,” she said.
Wink pulled slightly away. “Come on, now,” he said. “She’s a poet. That’s just a figure of speech.”
Vivvie wailed again. It took her breath. She shook her head repeatedly, until finally, sucking at the air, she muttered, “No. No. No. No. No.”
Wink rubbed her back. “But you’re not saying… Are you saying?”
Vivvie began to nod.
“No. You’re not saying… Wait a minute.” His hand was gone from her now. “Did you really kill their father?”
Vivvie sat upright, gripped her hair at the roots, and squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes.” She opened her eyes, felt the dullness of her stare, her reptile face.
Wink appeared confused, as if still trying to gauge the truth of her answer. “That can’t be right.”
“But it is.”
“You shot him?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“With a rifle?”
“Yes.”
“And killed him?”
Vivvie tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and dropped her arms with a sigh.
“All right then,” Wink said. “All right. Well. We’re just going to, you know, I don’t know what to say.”
“I told you to leave.”
“I know you did.”
Vivvie opened her eyes, turned, and glanced at the notebook.
“This is bad, Vivvie. I mean, you, the way you’re feeling right now. I think I should call someone. I don’t think you’re going to be all right.”
She laughed and wiped her cheeks. “Who are you going to call? The game warden?”
It wasn’t funny. But in the silence that followed Vivvie began to feel light-headed, as if a ten-pound tumor had been cut from her skull.
“Can I ask you something?” Wink said.
She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no.
“Why did you do it?”
“I loved him.”
Wink was silent.
“He was suffering,” she said, and Wink nodded once.
“It was passed down. That’s what happened here. What’s taken half of my family.”
“Oh, Lord. Vivvie.”
“His was much worse. It was so quick.”
The phone rang but Vivvie didn’t look up.
Wink stroked her back, the only sound in the room her muffled, sporadic sobs. “I don’t know that it helps you to hear this,” Wink said. “But my wife was in a world of pain, and then completely lost to a morphine drip before the cancer finally took her.”
Vivvie stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” His wife died shortly after Wink moved with her next door. The first time Vivvie had a full conversation with Wink was when she brought him a macaroni casserole and cornbread and asked if there was anything she could do. He’d told her no, and they talked about the yard, how he would like to care for all of it, his and hers.
“Can I ask you another question?” Wink said.
“That’s already a question,” Vivvie said.
He smiled sadly, and then his face turned hard and serious. “How come you never got caught?”
Vivvie wiped her nose on the back of her hand, thought of Quincy, and fell into a mix of laughter and tears. Wink handed her a paper towel from the sink. “It looked like a hunting accident,” she said.
Wink glanced around the room, for what, Vivvie couldn’t tell. The gun? A witness? The door? “And they never suspected you?”
“Maybe. Nothing ever came of it if they did.”
“But your daughters knew. Kate knew.”
“Elin knew. She must have told Kate.”
“Did Elin see it happen?”
Vivvie shook her head. “No. But she knew.”
Wink was quiet for too long.
“Are you going to the police with this?” Vivvie asked. “Because if you are I’ve got to say I don’t care anymore.”
Wink reached for her hand, and she let him have it, hers as hot and damp as his. He leaned forward and held her shoulder, pulling her close.
“No, Vivvie. I’m not going to tell another living soul.”
She nodded, her lips twisting against her will, his kindness causing more stinging in her chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve had to carry this, all of this, by yourself. Lord, what you’re made of, Vivvie.” He gathered her to his shoulder and held her there until she stopped crying, until the light had shifted significantly, and the day felt like a different day from the one they’d began. A hazy, dreamy day where nothing else was expected of them, and she said, “All right now. That’s enough. My ass is falling asleep.”
THIRTY-NINE
ELIN HAD CARRIED HER LAPTOP out to the porch with the intention of getting caught up on emails, of seeing what and how she might reshape, might feasibly reassemble, however small, a working life, any life.
Neal and the girls were still inside eating strawberry ice cream, courtesy of Shug. When Quincy dribbled half a spoonful down her chin, Neal had dabbed it with a napkin, and Elin pushed her chair from the table. “I’ll be out front if anyone needs me,” she said, but no one gave a sign that they might.
Thirty minutes later Neal sat next to her on the bench. He looked off into the yard, and then the grove next door as if he didn’t know her, as if they were strangers in a park.
“Where are the girls?” Elin asked.
“Inside, with Shug. I told them I needed to talk to you alone.”
“Oh. This should be interesting.”
Neal didn’t smile.
“Kate told them you were mountain climbing all these years,” Elin said. “What was that all about?”
“They asked me about it, too. I just made something up on the spot. I don’t know what Kate was thinking. I never knew what she’d told them. Maybe it was the best explanation she could think of.”
“And what’s yours? I mean, the real reason you left your kids behind?”
Neal rested his elbows onto the back of the bench. It brought him closer. He smelled of citrusy cologne. “You mean what did I tell myself in order to sleep at night?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Isn’t it?”
Elin r
aised an eyebrow. “Actually it is What the fuck, Neal.”
“You have no idea how complicated this whole thing is.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I mean before. Everything from years before.”
“You got me there.” Elin crossed her arms. “And to be honest, I don’t want to know.”
“Kate could be very convincing.”
Elin held up her palm. “I don’t want to hear the details of your relationship with my sister.”
“That’s not what I’m getting at.”
“I don’t want to hear you blaming her for the fact that you left either.”
“That’s not what I’m doing, Elin, but it sure is nice to see you defending her. My how times have changed.”
Elin slowly shook her head. “Nice shot.”
“Look. You asked me a question. I’m doing my best to answer.”
“Well, clearly you’ve got a long way to go.”
Neal stood. “Maybe this isn’t a good time.”
“It’s as good as any. Please. Sit down. I’ll let you finish. I’d just as soon get it over with.”
He lowered himself to the bench, and a minute later, said, “You never knew, I don’t think you ever saw, this way Kate had—just hear me out. You never saw that part of her in the same way she never saw it in you. The two of you were so much alike.”
Elin tossed her head back on the verge of laughter.
“I’m serious. I should know. Don’t you think if anyone would know how alike you are it’d be me?”
“Nice how we were so interchangeable for you, Neal. Were you always this crass?”
“That is not what I meant. I’m not trying to be crass. It’s the truth about her, and you, whether you care to see it or not.”
“What is your point?”
“I trusted her in the same way I trusted you.”
“Oh. Don’t turn this on me. You were telling me about abandoning your children, remember?”
Neal pulled in a long breath. “Yes. I was. I am. And you’re part of it, Elin. You’re part of the whole goddamn thing.”
“And how is that?”
“What I’m saying is Kate convinced me that I didn’t deserve to have Averlee and Quincy in my life. She had me believing—well, keep in mind that I was willing to believe and I’ll get to that in a minute—but what she claimed was that my presence demeaned her. That I was robbing her of the ability to be a good mother, and in turn robbing the girls of the happy, healthy mother they deserved. She was adamant about not being the kind of mother your own mother was. And it made sense to me. At the time it did.”
“How did you demean her?”
Neal glanced at the porch and shook his head. “You need to understand I’ve spent my whole adult life trained to be aware of my surroundings, to know where I am, and avoid hazards at all costs.”
“Are you comparing Kate to a burning house?”
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t get it. Was she making something up just to get rid of you? Or was whatever you did really that bad?”
“The whole thing was bad. Start to finish. An IDLS situation if there ever was one.” This had been a running joke between them, an acronym used at the fire department for an “immediately dangerous to life or health” situation. “I see now what it really was, knowing what I know about her illness.”
The trees gave them both something to look at. Neal’s hands curled into fists near his knees. He continued. “But I had no idea back then that she clearly wanted the kids to herself. She didn’t want me coming around on weekends and taking them away, not with so little time left in her life. And she had to have been afraid that I would take them completely away from her as soon as she was too sick to care for them. That I would insist on it and no court in the world would deny me. It was so damn selfish of her, and yet, I can’t blame her, not now. How can I blame her? I’m here, and our daughters have got their whole lives ahead of them. And—”
Our daughters Elin flinched. “What does any of this have to do with me? Why did you say I was part of it?”
“I never stopped loving you.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“You asked.”
“Yeah, but come on. That’s not even true.”
Neal didn’t look at her now.
“It’s not,” she said.
“Don’t you ever get tired of hurting me?” he asked.
“No.”
He met her eyes and Elin bit her lip to keep from laughing at her own cruelty, but it was too late. Neal laughed, too, shook his head at her. At them, it seemed.
“After that last time on the phone, when you said you were seeing her, I started thinking that you’d always looked at Kate with a certain something. I shouldn’t have been surprised when you ended up together.”
“Whatever you saw, it wasn’t what you thought.”
“Facts are facts,” she said.
“I was probably seeing a flash of you in her.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Facts are facts,” he said.
“We are nothing alike. Nothing.”
“You are. You were.”
“You just told me how she was so convincing that you left your children behind at her request. And I couldn’t even convince you to come with me out west when you had nothing to lose but me if you stayed.”
Neal dropped his head, gave a single nod. “That was a mistake.”
“I don’t want to get into it,” Elin said.
“One would think that you taking off the way you did would have put out the fire. That, plus all the years, and everything that filled those years in between. But Kate knew. She knew me better than anyone. Even you.”
Elin looked at him. “Don’t.”
“You’d think it would have been extinguished. Had enough bitterness thrown over it to dry the whole thing out.”
“I need to get inside,” Elin said.
“Well. It did, for a time. Simmered it, I guess. But all it takes is one swift fan of seeing you on the porch and up it goes again, proving her right.”
Whatever fates they were tempting caught in her throat.
“You were cruel to stay with her,” she said.
“I was.”
“Even crueler to have kids with her.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“Stop being so agreeable.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I am That’s all I’m trying to do. There were three people in my marriage. Living a lie so huge was ruining both of us. The suffering in that house was unbearable. I started drinking. I never drank—surely you knew that about me. Other than a few beers here and there, I never did, and then one day a bloody mary at some firefighter brunch and I started asking myself why I didn’t do that more often. Then I started doing it more often, which should have been a clue as to why it wasn’t a great idea in the first place, but the thing is, it was a great idea. The days started to feel a little easier for me in equal proportion to that much harder for her.”
“Jesus.”
“Obviously, you can’t raise two kids like that. You can’t keep a job, or a wife you don’t love, especially not when you’re in love with her sister instead.”
Elin’s heel bounced beneath the bench. She chewed the side of a cuticle, caught herself, and stopped.
“I was a disaster, Elin. A first-class wrecking ball of a husband, father, and human being. When Kate lined up all my failures they were like tin soldiers on a coffee table, a whole army’s worth staring me down. I did not stand a chance against my little flimsy self. I could not deny just how bad it was. And how perfect she appeared in the face of it. I asked her to forgive me, but then, how could she? Knowing that I wished the kids were ours, yours and mine—”
“Oh, God.” Elin covered her eyes. “Stop. Please.”
“And that doesn’t even bring into account Averlee looking just like you. You
r face in our house every damn day. Every day Kate saw me looking, remembering, wishing things were different, and yet, it was unbelievable how she loved that child, regardless.”
Elin’s eyes burned. She swallowed, released a long breath.
“What could I do? You understand? I loved those girls more than anything. I was willing to give up being their father if it meant they would have a better life. I was convinced that if I stayed I would ruin us all. So I moved out when she asked me to but that wasn’t enough. Within weeks she came to my pathetic little apartment and begged me not to see them anymore. She said hearing about their visits with me was too hard on her. And she was beside herself when she said it, her face filled with such heartache, such devastation, which I know now may have had little, if anything, to do with me, and everything to do with her diagnosis, but in that moment I believed her, Elin. I cared about her, no matter how it might have seemed, then, or now, and I didn’t want to hurt her, not anymore, not ever again. It wasn’t hard to convince me. I’d nearly lost my job more than once. If it hadn’t been for the guys at the firehouse covering for me I would have. I hated myself enough to buy into what she was saying. I believed that not everyone should be a parent. Certainly not me.”
She couldn’t fault him that, as much as she would like to, no, she could not fault him that.
“So I left.”
“I hated you, too,” Elin said. “Especially when I heard you’d gone.”
“I didn’t think so highly of you. Love, hate. It’s a thin line.”
“What did she tell you about me when I left? What did she say to lure you in?”
“Nothing. What do you mean?”
“What did she tell you that made it so easy for you to be with her?”
“She never said anything, not a bad word about you. It wasn’t about that.”
“Oh, please. I know you’re lying, Neal. There’s no way—”
“I was using her. That’s what I was trying to explain.”
“That’s not the whole story. Not about my sister.”
“You have no idea how busted up I was. If I could take it all back now I would. But then there’s Averlee and Quincy—”