by Nicole Baart
I never did learn to appreciate a good surprise, and when I saw her standing in a square of dingy light from the picture window in my living room, it was all I could do not to slam the door in her face.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped.
Samantha Linden rocked back on her heels, eyes flashing as if she expected a fight. “I’ve come a long way,” she said. “I really don’t need you all up in my face right now.”
I swallowed hard and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to get a grip on myself. “I’m sorry,” I forced myself to say. “I’m just surprised to see you here. No,” I amended, “I’m shocked to see you here. I don’t understand.”
Her dark eyes were haggard and rimmed with blue, and Sam seemed poised on the edge of flight. She glanced at me and then stole a quick peek over her shoulder at the rental car that I realized was parked, running, in my driveway. It seemed to me that she regarded it longingly. Somewhere deep in my mind I registered the thought that I should be more welcoming, that she had indeed come a very long way. But it was so surreal to find her standing on my porch that I simply couldn’t gather myself. I stood gaping at her, and she fidgeted closer and closer to the stairs, a bird that was about to dart out of my life and leave me without an answer to why she had alighted in my forgotten corner of creation.
I didn’t even realize that I had taken a step closer to her until she put up her hand as if to ward me off. I stopped. We stared for a few moments, silent, scrutinizing each other with a thinly veiled and obviously mutual distrust. And then the reality of her presence on my porch hit me with a final, staggering force.
“Ell,” I whispered. “You know something about Ell! Did they find him? Did they find his plane? Is he—”
“No,” Sam said, bringing me up short. “There’s no news about his plane. Nobody has found anything.”
I didn’t know whether I should feel relief or despair. But I did know that I was rapidly losing patience with the intolerable woman across from me. Confusion made me blunt. “Then why are you here? I don’t even know you. We’ve met once and it was pretty obvious there was no love lost between us.”
Instead of answering my questions, Sam looked toward the house. “You having a party?”
“Excuse me?” I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t really see how that’s any of your business.”
Something menacing darted across her face, and in the blink of an eye, Sam had skipped down the porch steps, her feet hardly making a sound on the aged wood. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said over her shoulder. I barely caught the words.
“Wait!” I hit only two of the five stairs, and caught hold of her arm before I could think better of it. Sam shrugged me off angrily. We stood panting, glaring at each other in the dim light that poured through every window in my small house, at a loss for where to go and how to get there.
“Let’s start over,” I finally said. I really didn’t want her anywhere near me, but I also couldn’t let her leave without hearing some explanation of why she had come. Alaska was a world away from Iowa, a place that seemed relegated to a dark and shadowy past that I wanted nothing more than to forget. But for some reason Samantha was standing before me, a flesh-and-blood reminder that Etsell was gone and that for a brief time I had feared he had left me in more ways than one.
I put my hand to my forehead and rubbed hard. “Look, why don’t you come in. You must be exhausted.” I waited for her to acquiesce, but she soundlessly stood her ground. “Have you been traveling all day?” I asked, fumbling. “Maybe some water?”
“Who’s in there?” Sam asked, and it felt to me that there was something akin to fear in her voice.
“Uh . . .” for some reason it was hard for me to think back to the minutes before I found her standing outside my door, to the time that I had spent around the table forgetting—even if only for a moment—that my life as I knew it was over. “My mom,” I eventually managed. “My sisters. My neighbor. Hazel.”
“Hazel? The woman who was with you in Alaska?”
“Yeah.” I squinted at her, trying to make out Sam’s expression in the dark. It struck me that she tensed at the mention of Hazel.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to come in. I just want a quiet place to talk to you.”
“We could sit on the porch,” I offered. “Or in the backyard? I have some chairs out there.”
Sam seemed ready to follow me somewhere, and I nursed a tenuous hope that I would finally get to the bottom of her alarming appearance on my doorstep. “Why don’t you shut off your car and head around back?” I said. “I’ll get us each a glass of water. Something stronger?”
She shook her head.
“Water then. Can you manage?” I asked, pointing toward the side of the house.
Sam nodded and took off in the dark. I watched her for a few seconds, and when her small form blended with the shadows, I ran back up the porch steps.
“What’s going on?” Natalie asked when I burst into the kitchen.
“Nothing,” I said, my voice so tight it sounded cold.
“Is someone at the door?” Hazel was out of her seat, on her way into the living room, when I stopped her with an iron grip just above her elbow.
“There’s something I have to take care of.”
The room went almost icy in the wake of my words. Char laid her cards down. Kat was uncharacteristically speechless. Even Natalie didn’t know how to respond to my abrupt change of mood. It was Benjamin who quietly slipped out of his chair and touched my arm in an act of brief comfort. His hand was gone before I could even register that his warm fingertips had rested against my skin.
“Is there something I can do?” he asked.
“No.” I took two glasses down from the cupboard and began to fill them from the tap in the sink. No time for the filtered stuff; I could hardly stand watching the seconds tick away as a thin stream trickled into each glass. I tried to paste on a smile but it wouldn’t stick. “I’m fine. Really.”
“Who’s here?” Kat asked.
“No one.”
She nodded at the two glasses in my hand.
“Oh.” I gave my head a little shake as if to clear it. “No one you know.”
“You’re acting really strange,” Char said, finally pushing herself up from the table. She moved toward me, her bare feet slapping lightly on the wavy hardwood floor, but she ran out of steam long before she made it to me. She stalled in the middle of the kitchen, looking every bit as disoriented and helpless as I felt.
“I’m fine,” I said. This time I made my lips hold a placating smile. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Continue your game. Please. Someone else can play my hand.”
I made myself walk out of the kitchen without a backward glance, praying that no one would try to follow me, because I was certain I didn’t have the strength to stop them. But everyone stayed exactly where they were; I could feel their eyes boring into my back as I swung through the salon door and disappeared into the living room.
I padded quickly across the carpet and used my hip to open the screen. I had told Sam to go around back, but I didn’t want to slip out the kitchen door and alert everyone to where I was headed. My plan was to duck around the house and then lead Samantha away from the back patio—I hadn’t been thinking when I encouraged her to go there. It was too close to the kitchen. Too close to prying eyes. To ears that would likely strain to catch every whispered word.
But I never made it past the front sidewalk.
Just as I turned toward the side of the house, the sound of a car door slamming spun me around. Sam was illuminated for a split second in the interior light of her car, then she threw the transmission in reverse and the bulb blinked out. She started to back down the driveway.
“Wait!” I screamed. The glasses fell from my hands. One landed on the grass; the other shattered on the sidewalk into bits of sparkling diamond at my feet. “Wait!”
I ran across the lawn, sliding on the late-night dew that was already leaving
droplets on the grass. Sam’s gaze was glued to the rearview mirror, but in the glow of the dashboard lights, I could see her eyes dart to me. I ran faster.
“Stop,” I wheezed, slamming into the side of the car. Her window was open and I reached for the steering wheel. “You have to stop!”
“You’re insane!” Sam screeched. She stomped on the brakes and I nearly tripped, banging my head on the roof of the car. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted back. “You can’t just show up here and then leave without any explanation. What are you trying to do to me?” I was trembling, I could see the frantic dance of my hand as it tried to gain purchase on her steering wheel. It was so disconcerting to see myself so far out of control that I shoved away from the car and stood in the middle of the road, gasping.
“I shouldn’t have come,” Sam said. She seemed to be talking to herself.
I wasn’t even sure if she was aware of my presence anymore—she seemed lost in her own private thoughts—but I didn’t care about whatever personal demon had taken up residence beside her. I had to ask the question one more time. “What are you doing here?” I struggled to make my voice flinty, demanding, and I could see the effect it had on her by the way she suppressed a shudder.
Samantha lifted her head as if coming out of a trance, and fixed me with a look so hard and unreadable, I recoiled. Her mouth was a violent slash in the pale skin of her drawn face. It hardly moved when she said, “I’m pregnant.”
13
Forgive Me
For just a moment, everything stopped. The breeze paused in a suspended waltz, the leaves on a hundred trees pressed cheek-to-cheek. And the night sounds stilled, if only for a second, while a fine tear rent the fabric of Danica’s life and tore it end to end. The destruction was so sudden and so complete, that at first she stood there in the middle of the road and wondered what had happened. Why the world was so quiet and heavy. Why her heart was arrested in her chest.
Then Sam put the car in drive and eased away, disappearing down the street toward town while Dani just watched her go.
There should have been more, and Dani leaned toward the taillights of the unfamiliar car as if drawn to a magnet, but it was too late. Sam was gone, and there was no way to know if she would ever bring herself to tell more of the story that had brought her to Blackhawk in the first place. But for once, Dani didn’t care. She was numb from head to toe, temporarily anesthetized against the full meaning of what Sam had come to say, until the shrill cry of a distant train split the night, and the fine web of incredulity that had held the truth suspended far above her shattered.
It fell on her hard, the implication of Sam’s claim. And yet Dani didn’t question it—didn’t even think to dispute the veracity of the two words that made her life seem little more than a pathetic parody, a sad and sorry tale that left her bereft of every promise, every hope she had clung to and claimed. Why would Samantha make something like that up? Why would she fly across the world to destroy Dani unless there was an indisputable truth in the telling?
If Samantha was pregnant, Etsell was the father.
Etsell was the father.
The rush of the train as it sped down winding tracks matched the growing thrum in Dani’s head. Suddenly she felt everything—the pain of Samantha’s words like a razor on her skin, the warm lick of a night wind that seemed sinister—and she longed for nothing more complicated than the ability to crawl outside of her own skin.
When she hit the river path she was blind and running, stumbling through the dark by memory alone. There were brambles off the narrow track, poison ivy and stinging nettle and a host of other nuisances that lay in wait like dirty little secrets. But Dani didn’t care. In fact, she welcomed the burn of torn skin, the thin lines where leaves sliced shallow paths along her legs. It was a definable pain, something she could focus on. Something she could soothe with cool water and salve from her medicine cabinet. Nothing like the pain that Samantha had inflicted.
Dani lost all semblance of time as she made her way to the river, but at some point her shin banged against the springy bark of a fallen log. It was the same decaying tree where she and Etsell had often sat, and where she had cut Kat’s hair and watched her sister throw the severed ponytail into the water like a sacrifice to the gods. She sank onto the log, pulling her feet up beneath her and resting her chin on her trembling knees. Dani hadn’t realized it as she ran, but her whole body was shaking; her teeth were chattering as if she was in danger of hypothermia in spite of the humid summer night.
She could have sat there all night and long into the days that were to come. Dani felt as if she could stay there forever, petrify slowly beneath the canopy of intertwining branches and remain as a warning for generations to come. A prophecy to dissect and examine, a reminder that bore a specific poignancy for each individual observer. She was betrayed. She lost someone. She lost herself.
All of the above.
But there were voices in the trees, whispers of a word that slipped between the leaves and hung from crooked boughs like wisps of mist. It took Dani a long time to realize that the word was her name and that the voice that spoke it was only steps away.
“Danica?” Benjamin was fumbling through the undergrowth and making so much noise, it was startling that Dani hadn’t heard him well before he was twenty feet from her hiding spot. “Danica? Is that you? I can hardly see you. You’re nothing but a shadow.”
She lifted her head and saw the outline of her neighbor as he approached the river, arms outstretched. Even if she could have summoned the will to speak, it would have been unnecessary for her to call out because just then a cloud trailed across the sky, and Benjamin and Dani found themselves staring at each other in the otherworldly light of a gibbous moon.
“Beautiful night,” Benjamin said, stopping a few feet away from the spot where she huddled on the fallen log. He put his hands in his pockets and gave her a soft smile, as if to prove that he meant her no harm—that he had no intention of interrogating her about her sudden disappearance.
They stayed like that for a few minutes, Dani incapable of speech, and Benjamin holding his peace because he apparently didn’t know how to proceed. But they couldn’t remain frozen like that forever, and Benjamin finally held out his arms as if to encompass the warm air, the scent of damp earth, Dani. He seemed poised for an embrace, but then he shrugged a little and let his hands drop awkwardly to his sides of their own accord. “Everyone is looking for you,” he said. “When you didn’t come back we all split up. Guess I found you.”
Dani didn’t want to be found. Or maybe she did. It was impossible to pin down even her own motivations in escaping to the bank of the river. She felt like a child who had tried to run away, only to make it to the edge of her world and discover that she couldn’t bring herself to cross that invisible line into the unknown. So she bunkered down where it was familiar, half hiding, half yearning for the moment when she would be retrieved.
She didn’t expect Benjamin to be the one to lead her home. Dani waited warily for him to say something stupid. To ask her if she was okay or if there was anything that he could do for her—to startle her with the gross insufficiency of his sympathy, or worse, his blatant pity. But Benjamin didn’t say much of anything. He simply remained across from her, patient and calm, emanating the sort of quiet comfort that eventually made her let go of the death grip she had on her legs and slide to the ground.
“Do you take the trail much?” Benjamin asked, turning to lead her back the way they had come.
When Dani didn’t answer, he filled the space between them with small talk, innocuous chatter that she expected to find annoying. But it was a distraction, something that Dani could focus on to keep her mind off of what Samantha had told her.
“You know the old train bridge?” Benjamin continued, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “If you cross it and take a sharp left on the far side of the river, about fifty feet down you’ll find a
deer trail that will take you straight into the state park. It makes for really good snowshoeing in the winter. I’ve even thought it would be fun to try cross-country skiing.”
Benjamin glanced back at Dani, but her lips were pressed tight, her eyes determinedly fixed on the ground at her feet.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when I get to the top of the ridge, I wonder what it would feel like to just keep walking. To put one foot in front of the other until I couldn’t do it anymore. Sometimes I think it would be really great to do something totally out of character. To just let go.”
In spite of herself, Dani wondered what the mysterious Benjamin Miller wanted to let go of. She didn’t ask.
“But you know what?” he continued. “I’m not nearly brave enough.”
Dani nodded once, even though his back was turned and he would never see her assent. It didn’t matter. She knew exactly what he meant. She wasn’t brave enough either.
When Danica got home she went straight to her room and locked the door behind her. There was a hum of voices coming from the living room, punctuated by louder exclamations as everyone grilled Benjamin about her whereabouts and why she had disappeared in the first place. She could just imagine the conversation—Char’s confusion, Natalie’s self-righteous indignation, Kat’s fierce protective streak that would undoubtedly be stoked to life—and she wanted nothing to do with it. She feared, briefly, that Hazel had seen Samantha and would somehow discern what had happened by patching together the few fragments of what she knew about the girl and her relationship with Ell.
The thought made Dani sick.
More than anything she wanted to pretend that Sam had never rung her doorbell. She stood numbly in the middle of the bedroom, unable to sit on the bed she had shared with Etsell, and clutched her arms against her chest as if she couldn’t get warm. Dani made a desperate attempt to erase the truth from her mind. It was easy enough—to make herself go blank—but there was a problem in the cavity of her chest. Her heart was gasping, given to fits and starts that assured her the wound could not be ignored.