by Nicole Baart
The voices gradually faded from the living room, each withdrawal punctuated by the slap of the screen door. It was nearly midnight by the time the house was quiet, and Dani was surprised to find herself still standing in the very middle of the dark bedroom. Her lower back ached for some reason, and she was suddenly so parched that she felt sure she was in danger of dehydration. She knew that Kat was lurking somewhere in the recesses of her home, but her longing for water outweighed her desire to avoid her sister.
Kat was leaning against the counter when Danica stumbled into the bright light of the kitchen. The cards were abandoned on the table, three neat rows of matching denominations marking the place where each set of partners had raced to make books. Dani and Benjamin had been winning; they were only a couple of cards away from declaring canasta. But the game felt like it had happened in another life. The interlude of her evening was less than a memory—it was as if it had never happened. The cards, the conversation, the brief respite of the night was a scene in a story that she could only vaguely remember reading.
“What the hell was that all about?” Kat demanded as Dani blinked in the brightness. “What are you? Twelve? You can’t just run away like that.”
Dani looked at her sister out of the corner of her eye. Kat’s words were harsh, but her face bore the unmistakable signs of worry. Her skin was drawn and pale, and her forehead was creased with anxiety and more than a little frustration. Dani wanted to say something that would erase the ugly lines from her sister’s beautiful mouth, but her tongue felt leaden. Immobile.
Without a word, Dani carefully took a glass from the cabinet beside the sink. She had a vague recollection of performing the exact same action not long before. Had it been only a couple of hours ago? But she couldn’t think about that. She remembered instead the smash of glass on concrete and hoped that no one had cut their feet as they left.
“There’s glass on the sidewalk,” Dani said, her voice less than a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I need to sweep it up.”
“Ben did it.”
“Ben?”
“Benjamin. Your neighbor?”
Dani nodded. “Okay.”
Kat snatched the glass out of Dani’s hand and slammed it on the counter behind her. “Don’t play all zombie with me. Do you have any idea how terrified we were? Damn it, Danica. We thought you had done something stupid.”
“What?” Dani shook her head, trying to understand what her sister was saying.
“Do I have to spell it out for you? We’ve all been watching you. You know, for signs that you might want to hurt yourself or something.”
Danica laughed, but there was no humor in the harsh sound. “You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.” Kat sighed, and as the breath eased from her chest she seemed to deflate. The glittering girl faded, the sparkle in her eyes dulled in a single blink. “You lost your husband, Dani. Something like that can really mess a person up.”
It should have been a blow for Dani to hear Kat talk about Ell that way, as if the only thing that mattered anymore was how his absence affected everyone else. But her mind flashed to her late father-in-law, and she realized that Kat’s words were true. Sometimes people tripped off an invisible ledge and fell headlong, clutching at air and broken promises as they waited to hit bottom. Is that what she was doing? Waiting for impact?
“I’m not going to hurt myself,” Dani said finally. “It’s not my style.”
“I know.” Kat picked up the glass of water that she had taken from Dani and handed it to her. “But you can’t just slip away like that. It’s not fair.”
“I’m sorry,” Dani said.
Kat nodded, then she turned on her heel and shuffled out of the room, her shoulders rounded and her steps heavy. Just before she disappeared through the salon door, she paused, back rigid, head bent. “We love you, you know.”
“What?”
“We all do, Dani. In different ways and for different reasons. But we all miss you. We want you back. You probably don’t want to hear that right now, but I thought you should know.”
Dani didn’t sleep at all that night, and when the sun rose over Blackhawk she was waiting on the porch for it. It was a vermilion dawn, the sort of morning that heralded thunderstorms and wind. The air was moist and thick with warning, but Dani welcomed it. When a warm gust lifted the dust at her feet and spun it in a brief and crazy dance, it seemed an act of sympathy—a moment of consolation that echoed every bit of the confusion she felt.
The last thing Dani wanted to do was the only option available to her. Though she realized it was probably too late, as the night wore on she couldn’t stand the thought of letting Sam vanish without an explanation. In the long, pink shadows of a new day it was almost possible to believe that she had imagined the whole thing. That Sam’s appearance and the two words of her barbed confession were nothing more than fragments of a quickly fading nightmare. But something inside Dani felt broken beyond repair, and she knew deep down that even the most cunning bad dream could never touch the certainty with which she had clung to Etsell’s love. Surely there was proof of this betrayal. And maybe she was still lingering in Blackhawk.
There was a motel at the edge of town, a dilapidated little motor inn that had preened in chartreuse glory in the seventies. But nobody had touched it since, and in the intervening years the shag carpet and burnt orange bedspreads had seen too much life to be considered anything less than mildly repulsive. An aura of neglect clutched at the lopsided shutters, and even the trees that had been planted to shade a small picnic area just beyond the parking lot looked glum, their heavy heads hanging aslant over peeling-paint tables.
It was as good a place as any to look for Sam, and even before she pulled into the parking lot, Dani knew that she had found what she was looking for. There was one car at the forgotten motel, and it had rental plates. Dani hadn’t paid any attention to what Sam was driving, but the car in question was straddling two parking spaces, tires crooked and opaque windows reflecting light as if they had much to hide.
Dani parked a few spaces down and wondered which door she should knock on. There were two rooms directly in front of the rental car, one marked with a drooping 2 and the other conspicuously blank. But as she considered the possibilities, one of the doors swung open and Samantha Linden stepped out into the hostile day. She glanced at the sky and ducked her head against a growing wind, then hurried to her car, popped open the trunk, and threw a backpack into the dark recesses.
In the light of morning, Dani could see that Samantha had changed much since they had first met. The woman seemed diminished somehow. Her cheeks had been hollowed, the fine bones of her face protruding in angles that rendered her features stern and uncompromising. Even her arms looked severe, like sharp-cornered borders that moved in unconscious formation to protect the slight curve of her narrow abdomen. And it was there, an almost imperceptible softening at her center, a hint of evidence that what she had told Dani was true.
“Stop,” Dani said, getting out of her car. She hadn’t known if she would be able to go through with it, but her door was open and she was already standing on the cracked pavement before she had time to consider what she was doing.
Sam whirled around, the shock of seeing Dani again evident in the wide disbelief of her eyes. But she laid a hand against the roof of her car, collected herself. “I’m flying standby,” she said. “I need to get to the airport.”
Dani ignored her. Forced herself to cross the space between them and put both of her palms on the opposite side of Sam’s car as if she could hold it in place with her fingers. With her will. “Is it true?” she asked.
Sam didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. “Look.” she sighed. “I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I did.”
“It’s too late for that now. I know. And I think you owe me an explanation. It’s why you came, isn’t it?” Dani didn’t even bother to mask the bitterness in her voice. It fell from her lips thic
k and vicious, a toxic scent that poisoned the air between them.
Anyone else would have cowered beneath the weight of Dani’s fury. But Sam merely nodded once and drew herself up, straightening her back as if it would take every ounce of her strength to survive what was to come. She didn’t shirk away from it; she seemed to welcome it. “I have a few minutes,” she said.
“How far along are you?”
“Fifteen weeks.”
“How long have you known?”
Sam’s lip pulled up in a parody of a smile. “Fifteen weeks,” she said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Dani spat out, unaccountably furious.
“It was a mistake.” Sam spoke words of admission, but she jutted her chin in defiance. “Mistakes of that magnitude can only come with consequences to match. I knew we’d pay for it.”
It. Dani’s mind flashed through sickening scenarios—her husband tracing his lips against the jawline of the woman before her, his hands spanning her tiny waist, worse. She shivered violently and was mortified to feel herself choke on an unexpected sob. “I hate you,” she whispered. “I hate you.”
“I know.”
“Why are you here?” Dani begged. “Why did you do this to me? I would have never known . . .”
Sam squeezed her eyes shut as if she wished herself away. Her forehead pleated along agonized lines, her shoulders tensed, her head bowed. When she looked up, there was something infinitely sad in her face. But she fought it and came up swinging. Ignoring Dani’s question, she said coldly, “He was really upset. I figured we could pretend it never happened, but he wanted to tell you.”
It was so hard for Dani to think of Etsell in those terms. To imagine her husband, little more than a stranger, arguing with a woman Dani hadn’t even known to fear. Was there guilt? Regret? Could he begin to foresee how something like this would forever alter the course of their lives? A part of her loathed him for wanting to inflict the sort of damage that knowledge would impart. And yet she knew that if he had returned—this sin a land mine between them—things would never have been the same anyway. Dani felt sure she would have seen his betrayal written on the page of his skin, felt it in the marred intimacy of his touch.
“We fought,” Sam continued, her emotionless narrative blunt and unvarnished. “And he left.”
She didn’t have to explain what she meant. They fought, and Etsell flew off the face of the earth. Crashed in the mountains. Sank in the sea. Offered himself up as a sacrifice to primitive gods that still haunted corners of the North no human eye had ever seen. There was someone to blame: Samantha. But there was more to it, and even as Dani longed to pin everything on the adulteress across from her, she had to admit that Etsell was culpable too. And as her mind flitted to the moments before he left for Alaska, her own betrayals and insufficiencies, she realized that there was more than enough blame to go around.
“You left too,” Dani said, remembering Sam’s own disappearance.
Samantha lifted one shoulder, nodded. “I know you think I’m the devil incarnate, and frankly, if I were you I’d probably claw my eyes out. But it wasn’t easy for me either. It isn’t easy.”
Dani made an angry, guttural sound in the back of her throat. “You expect me to feel sorry for you?”
They stood there for a long minute, glaring at each other as thunder began to roll in the distance and the earth exhaled a hot, pent-up breath.
Finally, Sam threw up her hands in surrender, and said, “I’m sorry.” The words came out wooden. Rehearsed. Dani had the fleeting suspicion that Samantha Linden had not apologized for much in her life. But even that hard-won proclamation did nothing to soften the impact of all she had just heard.
“That’s not enough,” Dani hissed. “That will never be enough.”
Sam shrugged a little, and moved to get in the rental car. A handful of dissatisfying phrases—tidbits that left Dani wanting alternately more and less—and she was ready to leave.
“Wait!” Dani lunged across the hood, reaching for her in an act of desperation. “You didn’t tell me why you came.”
For just a moment Sam’s eyes betrayed a hint of vulnerability. Of something that looked like carefully veiled torment—an expression as out of place in her unforgiving face as the thickening around her middle seemed incongruous against the lines of her narrow body. “I can’t keep this baby,” she said when Dani had given up hope that she’d speak at all. “And I wanted to . . . before . . .”
“What?” Dani exhaled.
Sam stalled, swallowed hard. “It’s Etsell’s baby too.”
Danica
“Etsell’s gone.” For a second I wondered who had spoken, but I was alone with Sam in the parking lot. I had said it. And in the hollow that those words created, I heard the echo of my own assent. My husband wasn’t coming back. If I longed for rescue, for the moment when he would step from the shadows to assure me that Samantha Linden was a liar and reclaim all that we had lost, those final clinging hopes were dashed against the strident angles of the woman before me. It was over. All of it. Finally and simply and with all the sad inelegance of a parking lot confession, a morning heavy with the promise of rain.
Samantha nodded once, a quick, perfunctory gesture that seemed to sever any remaining sense of obligation she felt. In one jarring movement she swung herself into the car and started the engine. What else was there to say?
I backed away from the vehicle, almost frantic to watch her go, to assure myself that once she drove out of my life she would stay out of it forever. The implications of her sudden arrival and all she had to confess were already beginning to bind me, to weave themselves around my life with a tenacity that would make all that had happened difficult to extract. Impossible to forget. But before I could face any of that, I needed to be alone.
Alone. The finality of that word was enough to make me light-headed, and I reached for the car to steady myself. My hand grazed the passenger window, and as my fingertips touched glass, the pane began to sink into the door.
“Here,” Sam said through the open window. She thrust a piece of paper at me, a wrinkled square of lined looseleaf that bore the signs of much abuse. It was reflex to take it, to open my palm to her offering, but once I held the mysterious note, I found I wanted nothing to do with it. I tried to hand it back to her, but the car was already past me. I watched as Sam put it in drive and faded from sight beyond the row of trees that blocked the motel from the open road.
I wondered where she was going. Decided I didn’t care.
The first drop of rain hit me at the same moment the sun vanished behind a bank of dark clouds. It had been bright and otherworldly only a heartbeat before, but when the angry, orange rays of light were swallowed by the sleight of some unseen magician’s hand, the morning was recast in green and blue. Everything turned hazy and indistinct, an underwater landscape, and even before the sky unleashed a summer deluge, I felt like I was drowning.
The rain poured down the windshield of my car, obscuring everything but the quicksilver pattern of water on glass. I sat there for a very long time, breathing in the damp air and turning Sam’s piece of paper over and over between my trembling fingers. There was writing all over it—I could feel the etched pattern of words written in a heavy hand, the raised letters traced in reverse like the scrawled code to some forgotten language.
But it was nothing as mysterious as all that, and in the end I carefully unfolded the paper and spread it flat against the steering wheel.
I wasn’t prepared for the familiar script, for my own name scrawled like an invocation across the top. Dani, he had written, the final letter topped with a hurried slash that leaned toward a future we would never know. He always wrote my name like that, and it seemed such a hopeful rendering to me, an implicit wish for all that was to come. But it hurt to see the desperation in the slant of his letters, the messy scribble of the two words that covered the page from top to bottom: Forgive me.
Over and over again—forgive me, forgive
me, forgive me—as if it was as simple as that. As if I could say, I forgive you, and erase everything that had happened. There was nowhere to start fresh. There was no one left to forgive. Etsell was gone and I had been abandoned to a life of dealing with the consequences of actions I didn’t take.
I couldn’t forget. And I couldn’t walk forward from this day without making a choice. Samantha had made sure of that.
At the very bottom of the paper, there was a string of numbers written in the thick line of a permanent marker. They obscured Etsell’s never-ending plea, and shot off the page as if demanding to know what I intended to do about them. There was no explanation, no identifying information at all. Just the ten digits and the instant knowledge that Sam had left me a bridge in the form of her telephone number.
Etsell once told me that the few memories he had of his mother were little more than fading snapshots, moments frozen in time that offered up scenes and emotions in flat, uncompromising color just a shade or two shy of reality. He admitted that he often didn’t know what he remembered and what he had constructed from borrowed memories, events that people recalled for his benefit and that he unknowingly folded between the pages of his own history. She had left him too soon, and his eight-year-old self hadn’t been preoccupied with preserving the scent of her perfume or the way her hair fell against her cheek. It wasn’t until after she was gone that he longed for those things. But by then it was too late.
Though he regretted the insouciance of his early years, the nonchalant way he let her slip through his fingers, there was one experience that Etsell could replay with crystal clarity. That day remained in his mind as fresh and unspoiled as the first few flakes of snow in the palm of his own cold hand: six-spired and sharp, with lines so clean and new it almost hurt to look at their carefully carved perfection.
He didn’t share the memory with me until the day he told me that he wanted to be a dad, and I didn’t understand it. Didn’t really even try to. But for some reason, as I wasted half the morning in the prison of my own car, I thought about Ell’s mother and the story he clutched like a diamond in his fist.