A Light at Winter’s End

by Julia London

  Adelita had not seemed particularly sad about it, either.

  There hadn’t been anyone since Adelita. He’d spent the last eighteen months living alone. But then he’d met Holly, and she’d caught his attention not just with her looks but in unusual ways. The music coming from her house. Her playful nature. Her ease with him. Her cookies. Mason. Telling tales about musicians he really admired without the slightest bit of pretense in her.

  Yeah, he liked her. He liked her so much he hadn’t even thought of her property today.

  He popped the plastic top off the fruit-and-cheese tray, grabbed the beers, and went back outside.

  “Great!” Holly said. “I’m starving.” She helped herself to some apple slices.

  The day was turning cooler, and Wyatt decided to fire up the chiminea for its inaugural run. They sat in the rusty chairs, sipping beer and munching on the fruit-and-cheese tray, and Wyatt felt more relaxed, more content, than he had in a very long time.

  “This looks new,” Holly said, pointing at the pergola.

  He looked up. “Yep. Put it in this week.”

  Holly gasped. “You put it in?”

  Wyatt laughed. “Don’t look so shocked. I can be kind of handy.”

  “I’m not surprised, I’m impressed! What else are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Redo the kitchen, definitely. The bathrooms. After that, I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “Why don’t you know?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if I am staying here.”

  She paused in her examination of the cheese cubes to look at him. “Really? You’d leave that view?”

  He looked at the view before them. Would he? “I don’t know if I belong here,” he said, and was a little surprised he’d actually said that out loud.

  But Holly didn’t look surprised. She nodded. “That’s really important, isn’t it? If you don’t know where you belong, you don’t feel settled.”

  An understatement if ever he’d heard one. “Do you know where you belong?”

  She smiled. “I do—I belong in the moment,” she said with a wink, and laughed.

  He gazed at her face and smiled. Yeah, he liked this girl.

  “Hey, I was in Cedar Springs at Daisy’s Saddle-brew Coffee Shop, right?” she said. “And I saw a flyer for a holiday carnival next month. Do you know anything about it? Do you think it would be something Mason and Grace would like?”

  The mention of Cedar Springs flattened Wyatt’s fizzy feelings. If they went to Cedar Springs, how long would it be before someone told her? And then how long would it be before he saw in her eyes what he saw every time he was in town? Poor Wyatt Clark to be caught in that love triangle. How sad that he’d lost the love of his life when the love of Macy’s life was returned to her.

  “Dunno,” he said.

  “Sounds like fun,” she said.

  There wasn’t anyone in Cedar Springs who wouldn’t bring it up at the first mention of his name. Where are you living, Holly? Out on Deadeye Road? You must know Wyatt Clark, that poor, pitiful man.

  “Maybe we could take them,” she said.

  He could just picture the two of them walking down Main Street during the carnival. The tongues would be wagging, wouldn’t they? Who’s that with Wyatt Clark? Oh, I hope he found someone … “Maybe we could,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry?” Holly glanced down. “Well, let’s see. I’ve eaten about a dozen cookies, a brick of cheese, and about three apple slices. Yep. I’m hungry.”

  He laughed. “I like the way you think. I’ve got some steaks that have been waiting for an audience.” He stood up. “And it beats the hell out of peanut butter.”

  Holly stood up too. There wasn’t room between the two chairs; they were standing only inches apart and he could see the tiny flecks of dark gray in eyes that were shimmering up at him. This was dangerous territory—he could feel a little army of Wyatts lining up haphazardly, ready and eager to conquer if called upon.

  “Don’t knock peanut butter,” she said softly, her gaze on his mouth. “It’s gotten me through some very tough times, right out of the jar.”

  His rusty, unused engine was coughing to a start. His gaze drifted over her face, lingering on her mouth. He didn’t think much when he put his hand on her cheek and bent his head to touch his lips to hers. All those little Wyatts, starved for sex and a woman’s touch, took the proverbial bull by the horns. The softness of her lips stirred his blood, the feel of her cheek beneath his fingers stoked fire into him.

  The sensation—primal and deep—startled him almost as much as it surely startled her. Wyatt lifted his head and stepped back. What had possessed him? “Holly, I’m—”

  Holly didn’t let him finish. She went up on her toes and kissed him back. He felt her hands go around his neck, her fingers tangling in his hair, the warmth of her body seeping into his. He felt the Wyatts cheer, felt himself turn hot and fluid, desire sluicing through him like a flash flood.

  Then she faded away from him. When he could focus again, she was smiling. “Curiously, I am starving now.” She started for the house.

  Curiously, hell. As he watched her go inside, Wyatt figured Holly Fisher had no idea what starving really meant.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hannah received her four-week sobriety pen in a group meeting. She accepted it with a smile, thanked her sponsor and the others in her group, and resumed her seat. She kept smiling, but inside she was dying.

  Four weeks sober meant nothing to her but that she could call Mason. Four weeks meant four weeks she’d not been his mother, had not smelled his skin, had not seen his smile, had not fed him or bathed him or changed his diaper. Four weeks of not holding him or knowing if he was walking, or talking, or even if he was okay. Was he okay?

  Francine Goldberg had the floor. “Hi. My name is Francine, and I’m an addict,” she said into the microphone.

  “Hi, Francine!”

  Hannah didn’t care if Francine was the president of the United States. Francine, who liked a lot of attention, was one of the inmates here—Hannah couldn’t look at them in any other way, as all of them had come here by court order or family order or the order of God. Francine had something to say at every meeting. “Didn’t you think about your baby?” She’d asked Hannah that question in group one day. This, from a woman who drove a car through the plate-glass window of a neighborhood grocery and seriously injured an elderly man waiting for his blood pressure medicine.

  Yes, Hannah had thought of what she was doing to Mason. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She now knew that avoiding withdrawal by feeding her addiction had been more important than her own son.

  Hannah had had the opportunity to call him at two weeks, after detox, but she’d been such an emotional wreck, she couldn’t face Holly. She’d felt like she was drifting in and out of sanity as it was. A mother cannot walk away from her baby and expect to stay sane.

  Dr. Bonifield, her shrink, had helped Hannah set a new goal for calling Mason: her four-week sobriety checkpoint.

  That was today. She was sick with nerves, ashamed of what had happened, lacking confidence to speak to her sister. Sick.

  Dick, the group leader, was talking to her, Hannah realized. “Do you have anything you want to say about your journey thus far?” he asked, and nodded toward the new guy. Jeff something. Meth. They were the worst, Hannah thought. The craziest. She looked at Jeff, who stared at her with hollow eyes, daring her to hand him some hackneyed message of hope.

  But Hannah stared at him blankly. She felt wrung out. Emotionally and physically spent. She had nothing, nothing to offer this man. “No,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Okay,” Dick said, nodding nervously. He didn’t like it when people didn’t share. “Okay. Rayshon? How about you?”

  “Why me?” Rayshon asked. “She’s been here longer than me.”

  Rayshon was a drinker, and Hannah had heard detox wasn’t as hard for them as it
was for OxyContin or meth or heroin. Detox had been very painful for her, that was certain. Thankfully, she didn’t remember that much about it. She’d come to the center after a weekend spent drinking and drugging in a Hilton Garden Inn hotel room, where she’d waged an ugly battle with herself to actually go through with the treatment. It had seemed so impossible at the time.

  Rob Tucker had arranged it all for her. After the worst day of her life—the day Hannah had skipped work and called Brian, the mysterious college kid Brian—she’d actually driven with Mason to a dilapidated apartment complex off Rundburg Lane in Austin. But Brian wasn’t a college kid. Brian was a fat man with a missing tooth. He’d sold her thirty OxyContins from the trunk of a banged-up Lincoln. The whole thing had scared Hannah so badly that she’d called Rob Tucker and asked him to meet her at a Starbucks near the office.

  While Mason had tried to push a chair around, Hannah had told Rob the truth. She didn’t know why she told him, or why she felt compelled to unload everything on him. It seemed as if once she had started talking, the floodgates had opened and it all had come tumbling out. She’d told Rob about Loren and the affairs, and her mother, and the homestead, and how she had been taking the pills just to cope. She’d even told Rob how she had gone to meet this guy Brian. Rob had looked shocked, but he hadn’t said a word.

  When she’d finished—when her body had been completely drained of words—Rob had picked Mason up and set him in his lap, then reached across the table and put his hand on Hannah’s and squeezed it tightly.

  “We’re going to fix this, Hannah,” he had promised her.

  He’d meant it too. Rob had sprung into action after that afternoon. He was the one who had called the Watershed Addiction Treatment Program in Palm Beach, Florida, and set up Hannah’s admittance. He was the one who had figured out how to make Loren pay for it too. He’d arranged for her leave of absence, and he’d suggested she find a safe place for Mason to reside while she was away. Hannah had lost all her friends, but it didn’t matter. The only person she could even think of taking Mason to was her sister Holly.

  Hannah didn’t remember most of detox, other than they’d taken all her things, and found the pills in her luggage and her emergency stash in her lipstick tube. She remembered that she had been so sick, and her whole body had raged with such pain, and she’d wanted to die. But every time she’d opened her eyes, she had seen the picture of Mason she’d put at her bedside, and she’d gritted her teeth and told herself just to make it to the end of the day. To the end of just one day.

  She’d done it. She was still getting the massive withdrawal headaches, but she’d done it, she’d detoxed, and had made it a whole month now without a single pill, without a drink. She’d gained seven pounds, and she’d actually been hungry this week. And she’d earned her call to Mason, if she didn’t disintegrate with nerves first.

  “Is there anything you can offer Jeff, Rayshon?” Dick asked.

  “Oh, I got plenty to say,” Rayshon said, and began to talk.

  Hannah didn’t think she was like the others in her group. She couldn’t relate to their tales of mean streets and abusive homes. She didn’t feel as if anyone understood the sort of stressors she’d been under, either.

  At least Dr. Bonifield understood Hannah. She’d told Hannah on the very first day of detox, when Hannah had felt so sick and had hurt so bad from withdrawal, that this was the most important thing she’d ever done for her son. “I know it is hard,” she’d said as Hannah retched into the toilet, “but spending a few weeks away from Mason to get yourself well will give Mason his mommy back to him. If you’d kept going down the path you’ve been on, Mason wouldn’t have a mommy at all. Think of that, Hannah. Think of what it would be like to grow up without a mother. What you did by coming here is not only the hardest thing a person can do in his or her life, it is the bravest thing you can do.”

  Dr. Bonifield was right about that. Nothing was harder. Not detox, not facing her demons, not reliving, in excruciating therapy sessions, how her mother had been a head case and Loren was a shit bag. All of that paled in comparison to having abandoned her son.

  Hannah looked at her watch again. In fifteen minutes she would walk down to Dr. Bonifield’s office, and Dr. Bonifield would be waiting with her graying blond hair and her reading glasses perched on top her head, and Hannah would call Mason.

  God, she hoped Holly answered. If Holly didn’t answer, Hannah didn’t know if she could go the rest of the day.

  Rayshon stopped talking. Garret, a heroin addict, talked next. Dick said something, Blah, blah, blah-di-blah, then said they were through and everyone applauded. This was it. This was the day she’d speak to her son. Hannah stood. She smiled and nodded as group members congratulated her on her four-week sobriety pin, but she was moving, because if she didn’t move, she’d lose her nerve.

  She walked past the dining hall with its industrial tables and weighted chairs that could not be picked up and thrown, past the classrooms where clients were expected to figure out all the reasons they were addicts in sixty to ninety days, and then past the admin offices. Dr. Bonifield’s was at the end of the hall. The door was closed; Hannah knocked.

  The door swung open, and Dr. Bonifield stood there, a full head shorter than Hannah’s respectable five feet seven inches, smiling up at her. “I figured you’d be here right away.”

  Or lose her nerve. “May I call him now?” Hannah asked.

  “Yes. Come in,” Dr. Bonifield invited her. She waited until Hannah was seated on the couch, then picked up the handset. “Remember what we talked about, Hannah. Holly wouldn’t be human if she didn’t have some anger. Just be honest with her.”

  Holly. For some reason, when Hannah thought of her lately, she thought of the chubby freckle-faced kid with the bouncy golden hair. That Holly had worshipped her. “Right,” Hannah said.

  “Good luck,” Dr. Bonifield said kindly, and handed Hannah the handset. “I’ll be back in half an hour.” She touched Hannah’s cheek in a maternal manner that her own mother had never possessed, and walked out of the room, leaving Hannah on the couch with the phone in her hand.

  Hannah’s belly churned. Thinking of Holly—the pretty grown woman with the cute, shaggy haircut and the warm smile—made her nervous. Holly probably despised Hannah now, and who could blame her? But Holly had Hannah’s son, and although her heart was starting to beat like a kettledrum—big, reverberating thumps—Hannah dialed Holly’s cell phone number.

  It rang once. Twice. Hannah’s heart went from thumping to racing. Third ring. Hannah could feel a hole opening in her, a big black hole where Mason should have been, where emotional shit went in and nothing came out.

  Holly wasn’t there.

  Or wasn’t answering, which was a distinct possibility. The phone rang a fourth time, and Hannah’s eyes began to fill with tears of disappointment. She’d waited so long, and she needed this so badly—

  “Hey!” Holly said into the phone. She sounded happy and out of breath.

  Hannah gulped. “Ah … Holly, it’s me,” Hannah said. Her voice was shaking. “It’s Hannah.” That was met with a hard silence. Hannah waited a moment, then asked, “How is Mason?”

  Still, Holly didn’t speak right away. When she did speak, her voice was low and dark. “Where are you?”

  “How is he, Holly?” Hannah asked, her voice pleading. “Is he okay?” Tears were falling, she was falling. She hadn’t even said hello and she was already falling apart.

  “Are you kidding me?” Holly snapped. “You don’t ask questions this time, Hannah. You do the answering! You’ve been gone, what, a month now, and this is the first you are calling? You don’t care how Mason is!”

  Holly’s words were knives plunging into Hannah’s heart.

  “Where the hell are you? Are you really in rehab?”

  Holly said it as if she were asking if Hannah were really lying in a gutter. “I …” Hannah wiped the tears from one cheek. “Yes. I’m in rehab. In Palm Beach, Flor
ida,” she added.

  “Why?” Holly cried. “Rehab for what?”

  Dr. Bonifield had warned Hannah of this. She’d said that Hannah could not rid Holly of her anger—only time and Holly could do that—but Hannah could be truthful and attempt to explain that what she’d done had been the best for her at the time. “Vital,” Dr. Bonifield had reminded her. “You might possibly be dead today had you not taken these very important steps.”

  “I’ve, ah …” Hannah faltered and pushed her hair back from her face as she searched her pickled brain for the right words. “I’ve had a … a problem for a while, I guess.” She herself hadn’t realized just how long until she’d begun intensive cognitive therapy. “And it got way out of hand when Mom died, and … here I am.”

  “For wine?” Holly asked, sounding confused. “All those wine bottles in the porch closet at Mom’s house were yours, right? You’re in rehab for wine?”

  Hannah squeezed her eyes shut. She’d forgotten about the accumulation of wine bottles through the last couple of years of Mom’s illness. And after. “Ummm … yeah, those were mine. I do drink. A lot,” she added self-consciously. “But my addiction is mainly pills.”

  “Pills,” Holly repeated disbelievingly. “What pills?”

  Hannah drew a breath. “OxyContin. Vicodin. Ambien. Xanax.” She drew another breath. “There are others, but those are the main culprits.”