Campbell

by C. S. Starr

  The two exchanged a look that confused Tal. “Why did Zoey—”

  “She wasn’t needed here,” Cara replied in a way that left her meaning curiously open for interpretation. “Bull opted not to tell Lucy about what you’d discovered until you had more proof, but I thought that was a mistake.”

  “So if I tell her, it’ll put me at odds with Bull.”

  “If Lucy had less on her mind, and you hadn’t ended up in the mix, she would have figured it out.” She moved aside and let them in. “I’m making pie. There’s roast in the oven.”

  Otis responded with a nod and a grin. “Things are looking up then.”

  Cara stopped Tal as they walked into the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you go see her,” she said gently. “I think she just needs something else to think about for a while. Tell her about your problems. Make her feel important.”

  “I’m not sure why you think—”

  She cut him off with a shake of her head. “I don’t think anything. I feel like we’re running out of options.”

  “She’s—”

  “In her room.”

  Tal reached for his bag. “Where’s that?”

  Cara chuckled, either at his eagerness or his lack of knowledge, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her. “Upstairs, third door on the left.”

  The staircase creaked, and as Tal walked down the hallway, he peered into a door that was open a crack. He knew in a second that it was Cole’s, because there was something about it that looked like Lucy. The organized piles, the crisp blue he’d chosen to paint the walls. He continued on, paused, and counted the doors to make sure he had the third door, and before he gave a gentle knock.

  There was no reply.

  He eased it open, hoping she didn’t have a knife or a gun, or a gun with a knife attached to it, hidden in her bed.

  “Lucy?” he said carefully, looking around the large bedroom before his eyes settled on the blanketed lump in the bed. “It’s Tal. From West.”

  Still nothing.

  He eased around the bed carefully, after deciding she was facing right. When he knelt down beside where he hoped her face was, he noticed the piles of hair around her bed, long and dark.

  “Lucy,” he whispered, as her sad eyes came into view. “Hey.”

  Her long hair was gone, replaced with a patchy cut cropped close to her head, and her lips were cracked and chapped. She looked eerily like her brother. Tal wondered if that was what she was going for, or if she’d cut her hair at some breaking point.

  “I don’t know why you came,” she muttered, rolling away from him.

  Tal found himself angry with Bull for not telling her about his suspicions involving Connor, but as he stood there, he wasn’t sure that was on top of the priority list, given what happened. It was just a theory; their war with East was very real.

  “East is sponsoring Old Nevada in a war against West. Connor’s fighting with them over Old Arizona right now. They armed their border.”

  She rolled onto her back. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Tal muttered. “I’m sorry about your brother, but—”

  “I’m done. I’m done with all of this.” She rolled back on her side away from him so he couldn’t see her face.

  “So he died for nothing then. Great.” Tal shook his head impatiently. “Have a nice life, Lucy Campbell,” he grumbled as he slammed her door.

  He stopped at the door to Cole’s room and pushed it open. The bed was unmade. A picture that sat on the dresser of the two of them from when they were maybe four or five caught Tal’s attention, and he examined it. Cole’s arm was around Lucy and she was grinning up at him, her front teeth missing. If it hadn’t been for the pink and blue t-shirts, it would have been very hard to tell them apart.

  Maybe he’d hardened up, the older he got. Maybe desperate times called for putting reason and emotion aside for a while. Maybe he was mad at himself for seeing Lucy as someone worth aspiring to be like when really, she was no stronger than him. Regardless, she’d encouraged Tal to move on a plan that had been a far off dream wasting away in the back of his mind for almost ten years.

  He wasn’t ready to stop believing in her yet.

  When he walked back into her room, she’d returned to her fetal position, facing away from the door. All his anger at Connor’s betrayal and at her inactivity floated to the surface, and he let her have it.

  “You’re going to let more people die because you’re done. Good to see you’re no better than my friend who you were so quick to write off as a dictator. At least he’s not laying around in bed while everything goes to—”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like to be responsible—” A haggard sob escaped her throat.

  Tal shook his head. “I know exactly what it’s like to be responsible. You have your minutes, days of wallowing in the shit you made, and then you move on, because people need you.”

  “Nobody—”

  “I need you. Everyone needs you. Now you can be this mess of a person you seem to need to be when you close your door at night, but your actions are affecting others and you are more than your mistakes.”

  She sat up and looked at him curiously. “You think you can come in here and talk to me like that?”

  “Talk to who? You said you’re done. You’re just some bitch who had a good idea once.”

  She blinked at him, and made a sound that could have been laughing or crying.

  “You’re mean when you want to be,” she chortled. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “And I didn’t think you had this in you.” He nodded at the bed. “Lucy—”

  “I know, I know,” she muttered, pulling the blankets around her. “I just…I need a little time.”

  “You don’t have a little time,” Tal said, more gently than before. “It doesn’t work like that sometimes.”

  “Why did you come here?” she looked at him, her grey eyes boring into his.

  “Because I wanted to try and affect you in a fraction of the way you’ve affected me.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “I need some time,” she mumbled.

  “You don’t have—”

  She put her hand up and shushed him in a very real Lucy kind of way. “Tomorrow. I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

  “I can’t stay long. You better,” Tal said with a half grin, as he headed to the door. “You look like shit.”

  “I don’t think I’ve looked not like shit since we met, have I?”

  Tal shook his head thoughtfully. “You looked fine the first time.”

  After Cara made sure he and Otis were fed well enough that they weren’t going anywhere, even if they’d wanted to, Tal settled into the basement room he’d slept in when he’d been there a couple of weeks earlier. Cara had taken Lucy’s dinner up to her and stayed there for a while, reappearing to give sleeping designations. Because Otis was with Tal, he was allowed to sleep in the house, on the fold-out couch in the basement. Tal hadn’t put two and two together before but that night he realized that you had to be in the good books in Campbell to stay inside.

  He’d just turned off the lamp when the door to his room opened and Cara let herself in.

  “She says you can sleep in Cole’s room if you want. Give your pilot this bed.”

  “I don’t know….”

  “It’s clean. I just made it up with new sheets. If she’s offering I think you should take it.”

  “Where’s Paul?” Tal thought to ask.

  “He’s in Montana taking care of the kids. We couldn’t both get away.” She sat on the edge of his bed. “I knew someone else had to step in. We’re all hurting over Cole, and it’s hard for any of us to tell it like it is.”

  “I just told her about Vegas and East. Not the rest.”

  “You will though. And then you and her will figure out what to do about it. Go upstairs.” She stood up. “Consider it a very high compliment.”
r />   Tal grabbed his shirt and his bag, and after giving Otis the good news that he’d been upgraded to a real bed, he followed Cara upstairs, and she ducked into what he assumed was her regular room, across the hall from Lucy. He wondered what the hierarchy was with sleeping arrangements, or if there even was one.

  He was shocked when Lucy, hair damp, in a very heavy pair of flannel pyjamas crawled in beside him a few hours after he’d fallen asleep.

  Questions swirled in his mind about her sleepwalking, and even went so far as to question if she’d lost her mind and if he wasn’t the only one that had had the poor judgment to keep it in the family. She didn’t touch him though, instead wrapping her arms around an extra pillow as she curled up facing away from him.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “What I’ve been fighting with myself about doing since I heard you come up the stairs a few hours ago. Just go back to sleep.”

  “I’m not your brother, and I don’t want to be—”

  “My brother never would have talked to me the way you did.” She flicked on the lamp and her grey eyes searched his face. “Maybe he should have.”

  His arm moved almost of its own accord and settled on her waist as she pushed closer to him.

  “I have so much to tell you,” he whispered, thinking of all the things that happened since they’d parted.

  She shook her head. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I want to pretend it was a skiing accident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s three weeks after your oldest brother’s wedding, and Cole…” She reached over and turned off the lamp as her voice cracked. “It was a ski accident. At Whistler.”

  Tal’s mouth twitched in the dark and his mind raced as he started to understand what Lucy saw in him.

  Something apart from everything else.

  Chapter 21

  January 2003

  Campbell

  “We can’t keep them all,” Andrew said, surveying the herd. “And we need meat.”

  “They’re so small,” Cole whined. “And look, they’re still with their mothers.”

  “Small cows make veal,” he replied, rolling his eyes at his brother. “And we can’t just keep them all.”

  “You said that already,” Lucy snipped. “Just fucking pick one, Andrew. Cole, we’re going inside.” She tugged at her brother’s hand.

  “Don’t pick any of the small ones,” Cole insisted. “Pick one that’s lived for a while.”

  “Come on,” Lucy said, shaking her head at him. “We don’t have to do this. He’ll do this.”

  “We don’t have to do that,” Cole replied, standing firm on his spot. “We don’t need the meat. We can buy it from somewhere else.”

  “We have these cows so we don’t have to.”

  “We own these cows because we want to,” Cole shouted. “Because they need us, and we can help them.”

  “Cole,” Lucy said carefully, in the hopes of avoiding Andrew kicking Cole’s ass like he did sometimes. He was rough on his younger brother, more lately than ever before, especially since Cole had sprouted up to match him in height. “It can’t just be all about the cows. We…there’s an order to things. It’s what they’re here for.”

  Lucy tugged her twin inside and sat him down at the kitchen table of their new house. It was larger than they needed, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms, but it was new, and the heating worked well, and there was nothing in it that reminded Lucy of her grandfather. Everything felt fresh, even when the boy sludge her brothers and everyone else that seemed to visit left behind, started building up.

  “You need to not challenge him so much. You know how he is,” she told him firmly. “Sometimes, could you just let him do his thing, if he thinks he needs to do it.”

  “Even if his thing involves slaughtering innocent cows?”

  “Better the cows than some kid that looks at him the wrong way, or some less-useful animal. He’s…” She leaned in. “There’s something wrong with him. You know that, Mom knew that. We need to keep him under control.”

  “He’s a dick,” Cole muttered. He cocked his head at Lucy. “You could stop him, you know. He’d listen to you if you talked to him the way you do sometimes.”

  Lucy swallowed, her heart aching for her younger brother. He was so good, so naive sometimes. “Cole,” she said carefully, “We need to kill those cows. We need the meat—“

  “We don’t—“

  “What does it look like if we can’t even kill a cow? Kids look up to us. We’ve got to be tough. You’ve…you need to try and be tougher.”

  “You’re heartless, you and him,” Cole replied coldly. “We watched those cows come into this world.”

  “They’re just cows, Cole,” Lucy said softly, pulling him onto the blue velvet couch she’d begged Bull to bring her from Calgary the week before. “They’re not you and me, or Andrew, or Bull. We have to take care of our own first, and the cows have to go. We can’t be starving—“

  “We’re not starving though. That’s the point.”

  “That’s because we’re lucky, and smart, and because we’re good at making decisions.” Her eyes met his and she raised her eyebrows. “We’re not starving because we kill the cows we need to. We’re Campbells because we do what needs to be done.”

  November 2012

  Campbell

  When Lucy woke beside Tal the next morning, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time.

  Contented.

  She lay there, watching him sleep, sprawled out on his back as she’d decided was his norm. He was still hairy and bulgy like he’d been the first time they’d shared a bed, but it was different now. She wasn’t exactly embracing it, but she accepted it.

  When they’d first spent time together, she found herself comparing him to her brother, but now she saw it all clearly. It wasn’t that he was like Cole. Where Cole had stood by her side and followed her, Tal was in front of her. He forced her to examine herself. He had been since they met. He didn’t blindly support her, embrace her. If he liked her, it was for who she was now and the things she’d done, not simply because he’d always known her.

  Since she was little, she’d always looked for people that made her feel the way Cole did. Safe. Secure. Accepted. Tal had played along with her for at least two hours the night before, until they’d both succumbed to exhaustion. They’d drawn out a new, ridiculous life that would never exist together, where they traveled and had all the time in the world. He’d helped her escape, if only for a little while into a place that didn’t hurt so much. When she’d been ready to return, he’d held her while she cried and said all the right things, all the while stroking her terrible haircut, and giving her exactly what she needed. Simple acknowledgement of her loss.

  Lucy didn’t feel better. She felt like she would feel better eventually though, and that was more than she’d felt a couple of days earlier.

  He stretched out and curled up into a ball, tugging the blankets around him. Lucy closed her eyes and enjoyed the heat of his body next to hers, combined with the sun streaming in the bedroom window. She’d never slept in Cole’s room while he was alive. Not in the ten years they’d been in the house. The eastern exposure in the morning was too hot for her liking she decided, but for that morning, it was perfect. She wondered if they could somehow just not talk about what was going on between them. If they could avoid it for a while, leave the labels off and see what happened. Her comfort level with him was unexpected. Not undesirable, but unexpected.

  Lucy blushed at the way he looked at her when he finally opened his eyes.

  “Since it’s morning, I’ll ask. Why did you cut your hair?”

  “I don’t remember cutting my hair,” she murmured, changing the subject. “When are you leaving?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, with a half smile. “I have to get back for Bull’s visit on Friday.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Tuesday,” he whispered. “But there is a lot going
on in West I should be there for.”

  “But you’re here.”

  His hand wrapped around hers under the covers. “I am. And I guess you’re allowed to talk to me now.”

  She frowned. “Come on. Don’t pretend you don’t get it.”

  “What happens when she finds out I was here?” He leaned in tentatively and his lips brushed her neck. “Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said simply as she rolled away and tucked her body against his. “I don’t know about anything.”

  “There are more important things,” Tal said decisively. “I wish there weren’t.”

  Lucy concurred. “Who’s here? At my house?”

  “I think just Cara and my pilot, and your guys outside.”

  She smiled to herself. “Good.”

  “Good?”

  Lucy nodded. “We should actually be able to get somewhere.”

  An hour later, after they’d eaten the bacon and eggs Cara had left in the kitchen before making herself scarce, Lucy and Tal settled into the office, big mugs of steamy coffee in hand.

  “So start from the beginning,” she said from her desk chair, cradling the cup in her hands.

  “There’s something else, first,” Tal said hesitatingly, clearing his throat. “I think it was Connor that tried to have you killed. I don’t think his intention was to kill me.”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes and felt her face go hot as she realized that thought should have crossed her mind weeks ago. She’d been roughed up. Tal hadn’t. They told Tal they were from East. “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t have any proof, but when you think about it—”

  “It does make a lot of sense,” Lucy admitted. “But we need to know for sure, because that changes a lot.”

  “I know,” he nodded. “The thing is, if he is responsible, it means he also killed Juan. The pilot. I…his wife and I have been working together since we thought of it. She’s ridiculously smart.”

  Lucy found herself oddly jealous of the way he spoke about the pilot’s wife, whose name he hadn’t even mentioned.

  “Oh,” she replied, trying not to let her moment of vulnerability show, before remembering that she’d snot sobbed into his t-shirt for most of the night. “That’s nice, that you have someone. To work with. That’s important.”