by Nicole Baart
I started to close the box, ready to release it back to the ground from which it came. But the air around me seemed to hum with displeasure. I couldn’t take the ring without leaving something else in its place. It felt wrong. Like I was looting a grave. Taking something that didn’t belong to me. Not anymore.
Touching my neck, my wrists, my hands, I searched for a sacrifice that I was willing to make. But my skin was bare save my wedding ring and the ransom I had taken from the dark corner of the box. There was only one offering I could give.
I set the coffer on the ground so that I could reach into my pockets, to dig up scant handfuls of my most recent attempt at communication. Scraps that told bits and pieces of my story, fragments that fell from my fingers and caught the light like the tiny foil hearts that had glittered from our wedding table. That held all the things I couldn’t bring myself to say. I stuffed them in the box, whispering the jagged slips down to settle into all the empty places.
To scatter their message over our shared history.
To rewrite it.
15
In Empty Places
A month had passed since Samantha’s unexpected journey to Blackhawk, and still Dani made no attempt to acknowledge what had happened. The only things that marked the dissolution of Dani’s world was a ring on her finger that hadn’t been there before—a dull, grimy knot of rusting wire that rubbed her skin raw—and a creased note that she transferred from pocket to pocket. The paper was soft as fabric from being folded and unfolded, pressed flat and then crumpled up. But although she tried to throw it away on a dozen different occasions, Dani couldn’t bring herself to do it. She kept digging the letter out of the garbage can, smoothing out the wrinkles with the heel of her hand, caressing the quick lines of his plea with her fingertips and avoiding the numbers that were inscribed at the bottom.
One day Kat came home with the metal frame of a twin bed in the trunk of her car. She hadn’t asked Dani if she could move in, but it seemed so natural, Dani didn’t think to question it. It hardly seemed like her decision to make. Instead of discussing it, the sisters carried the unwieldy rails into the spare room and set up the bed in the corner underneath the window. Dani made up the bed with sheets from her childhood, cotton so thin it felt like satin, printed with faded flowers the size of dinner plates.
“I remember those.” Kat smiled. She was reclining in the office chair, cupped in the luxury of the deep seat with her legs thrown over one sturdy, leather arm and crossed neatly at the ankles. “How’d you end up with my old sheets?”
“These are my old sheets,” Dani said.
“No, they’re not. I distinctly remember sleeping on them.”
Dani just shrugged, wondering if Kat would think of the nights they spent curled up together. If they were as important to Kat as they were to her.
“Either way, those froufrou sheets don’t exactly match the decor.” Kat swiveled her head to survey her surroundings. “I need a cigar. A cigar and one of those gangster suits with the pinstripes. No—a linen suit and a Tommy Bahama hat. The cigar works either way.”
“I designed this room for Ell,” Dani said, snapping the spare coverlet across the taut sheets with a flick of her wrists.
His name lingered in the air for a moment, a fine tremor between them. Dani didn’t talk about Etsell often these days, and everyone else followed her lead. There were so many questions, so many things left unanswered, but after the night she left the house and drifted like a lost soul toward the river, it seemed best to let her set the pace. Hazel stopped pestering her about the trestle table. Her sisters tried to keep things buoyant, on the surface. And though Benjamin continued to take care of her lawn, he didn’t knock on the door anymore. He didn’t invite her to join him in the labor of digging dirt and planting, of forgetting. Sometimes the grass was freshly cut when she came home from work. And sometimes he worked in the evening and she watched him through the window above the sink and wondered if she should bring him a drink. Say thank you at least. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to.
“I thought maybe if Ell had a room that made him feel like a world traveler, he wouldn’t be so anxious to become one.” Dani’s voice was clear and strong, but her hand skidded off the end of the bed as she made the final tuck.
“Did it work?” Kat asked, studying the tip of a manicured fingernail.
Dani gave her a harsh look. “What do you think?”
“Well”—Kat swung her legs off the arm of the chair and stood with a flourish—“I think it’s perfect. I feel like I’m checking into some exotic getaway—a Caribbean plantation. I can almost smell the frangipani.”
“As if you know what frangipani smells like.”
“I do!” Kat gasped. “I have a perfume that contains undertones of plumeria. Same thing, right?”
Dani shrugged. “How in the world would I know? I defer to your tropical flower expertise.” She put her hands on her hips and made a show of studying her sister’s new bedroom. The desk had been set askew in the very middle of the original hardwood floor, but they moved it to one wall to make space for the bed. Beyond that, it wasn’t much changed, and yet just the knowledge that Kat was a more permanent fixture made everything feel downright foreign. The sheeted bed sent a little tremor through Dani, a shiver that acknowledged nothing would ever be the same.
Kat must have seen the transformation, because she stepped toward her sister, laid a hand against her pale cheek for the span of a heartbeat. “Just for a while,” she said. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be . . .”
“I don’t,” Dani choked. “It’s just . . . I feel trapped. I don’t know what to do.” She considered telling Kat everything, about Sam and Etsell’s secret and the baby that should have never been. That probably never would be. It had been four weeks since Sam left Blackhawk. For all Dani knew, she had aborted the baby.
The sudden idea stabbed through her like a knife. She tried to skirt around thoughts of what Etsell had done and the consequences that he had left her to deal with. But whether she liked to acknowledge it or not, she knew without pause that Sam was nineteen weeks along. That she was due at the end of January or maybe the beginning of February. A winter baby.
Dani knew Kat couldn’t begin to suspect what was going on in her mind. That her sister would be horrified if she knew. Furious. For a minute she indulged an impossible daydream, one in which Kat met Sam and learned of what the vile woman had done. Dani had longed to slap Samantha, but she knew her sister would have no qualms about actually doing it. A faint smile creased Dani’s lips.
Kat’s eyes widened a bit. Seemingly encouraged by Dani’s smile, she gave her a quick, hard hug and pulled back to hold her at arm’s length. “Don’t hate me,” Kat said in a rush, “But I think I know one thing you should do.”
“You do?”
“How long has Ell been gone?” Kat asked the question gently, but it still fell like a gauntlet.
“Four and a half months. Eighteen weeks.”
“That long? Has it been that long already?” Kat looked genuinely distraught. She shook her head as if to clear it. “Dani, I want to remember him,” she said, squeezing her sister’s arms, pleading. “I know we can’t have a funeral, not really, but don’t you want to honor him anyway? To talk about his life and who he was and how much we loved him? It might help. It might be good for all of us. You know, help us—help you—move on.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Dani said.
“Why not? You could ask Benjamin. He’d do it for you.”
“I know, but—”
“He loves you, you know,” Kat cut in. “Benjamin, I mean. I don’t know if he’s in love with you, but all you have to do is see the way he looks at you to know that—”
“What?” Dani choked out, her voice so ragged it stopped her sister cold.
“Well, don’t make a big deal out of it. I was just saying.”
Dani lifted her shoulders a little, one arched higher than the other, as if to
mirror the confusion she felt. “My life is a mess. I don’t want to hear that right now.”
“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Ben. I want to talk about a memorial for Ell. Don’t you want that?”
“I don’t know what I want,” Dani said helplessly.
“Maybe it’s not about what you want. It’s about what you need.”
“And you know what I need? I have no idea where I’m going. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get there from here.”
“That’s the problem.” Kat pressed her lips together in frustration and let her arms drop to her sides. “There’s no map for this sort of thing, Dani. You act like there should be a handbook. Like if you search hard enough you’ll discover a Twelve-step program. But it doesn’t work like that. You fumble through the only way you know how. It’s not a matter of doing it right or getting it wrong. It’s a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, even when you don’t want to.”
“Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?” Dani made a noise of indignation in the back of her throat and snatched a pillow from the floor. Stuffing it into a flowered pillowcase with more force than necessary, she said, “I have done everything in my power to pick up the pieces. I know I moped in the beginning, but I got over that. I’m putting in crazy hours at the salon, I’ve spent days on Hazel’s table, I even help Benjamin with the yard work. What more do you want from me?”
“I want you to be more than a paper doll.”
“What in the world is that supposed to mean?” Dani growled.
“It means you should stop using the salon and the table and yard work”—Kat grabbed the pillow from Dani—“and pillows as an excuse. That’s not life. That’s a to-do list.”
Dani glared at her sister for a moment, then she spun on her heel and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. It felt so good, she wrenched open the door and did it again, smashing the heavy, single pane of warped wood closed with all her might. The frame shook. Her hands trembled. But she felt strangely satisfied. Exhilarated.
It had been days—weeks?—since Dani had touched the trestle table, but after her fight with Kat, all she wanted to do was hide in the garage. The sun was setting and the air was cool when Dani stepped from the house, but she zipped up her fleece in one determined movement and jogged across the front yard. She slipped through the side door, feeling for the light switches and flicking them all on. When the fluorescent bulbs were humming in the dimness, she slammed the door behind her for good measure. Then she locked it, struggling with the rusty dead bolt for a few seconds before the heavy latch finally gave and slid home.
Dani heaved a weighted sigh and closed her eyes, taking in the silence, the cold nip of the evening air. She counted her heartbeats, lost track, and started again. Mostly she tried to forget what Kat had said. Words laden with all the things she should do. All the things she couldn’t.
When she could breathe again, Dani put her hands on her hips and considered the table before her. It was stripped completely bare, the wood vulnerable to the elements, as naked and fragile as her own soft skin. She had bought a can of honey stain, a warm, soothing color that she had matched perfectly to the original finish. It was going to be a gorgeous table, a golden goddess spread out in invitation to come, to sit, to rest.
But for some reason, as Dani reached for the can of creamy stain, she paused. It felt wrong somehow to try to restore the table to what it had been. After all the antique trestle had been through—the life it had seen, the road it had traveled—a redemption in replica seemed like a cheap cop-out. It would never be what it had been. It couldn’t. And as she ran her hand over the pocked surface, Dani realized that she didn’t want it to be.
Tucked on the bottom shelf behind Etsell’s metal toolbox, Dani found an old can of wiping stain in russet cherry. She gave the can a few hard shakes, then popped the top off with a screwdriver. It wasn’t as old as she had imagined; hardly any separation had taken place. Certainly nothing a good stir wouldn’t fix.
In a matter of minutes she was poised over the table, frayed rag clutched in hand, the flushed stain soaking the cloth like melted rubies, like the last fringe of sunset, like blood. Her own blood was pumping hot and fast, and her palms were clammy at the prospect of smudging the wood with the dark stain. Everything in her rebelled against the idea of ruining the heirloom before her. To mar it with anything other than the original color was nothing less than an act of destruction—she was no better than the misguided soul who had painted it blue.
As Dani stared at the soft pattern of the wood grain, she realized that she didn’t care. It would be red. Spilled wine. An offering.
The first few strokes were shocking. The dark stain bled into the old wood, seeping into invisible crevices and ensuring that whoever inherited Dani’s table would work their hands to the bone erasing the damage she had done. But she thought it was beautiful. Beautiful and terrible all at once—irreversible.
Forever changed.
Danica
It took two weeks for me to finish the table. Two weeks of spending every spare minute holed up in the cold garage with a rag clutched in one hand and a can of stain at my side. I could have done it much faster with a paintbrush, but I wanted to feel the wood beneath my fingertips, to smooth the color on in patterns that only my hands could expose. It was a labor of love, I suppose, but there was a bitter edge to my work—the understanding that I was taking something of great value and selfishly, greedily making it mine.
When the last corner of the farthest leg had been varnished and sealed, I let the table set for three straight days. I didn’t peek at it once, didn’t admire my handiwork in the uncompromising sheen of autumn daylight, even though I longed to. Instead, I locked the garage doors as if ashamed of what I had done. I hid from my own creation. And then, when I couldn’t stand it another second, I called Hazel.
“I want to show you something,” I said.
She didn’t question me. She just came.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the sky was so blue, I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. White clouds dotted the garage windows in an imperfect reflection, a work of art in white, and the sun so brilliant and bright, I had to squint. Hazel was wearing sunglasses, and I could see myself in them: my own wide, unblinking gaze, the slight part in my lips, as if life had taken me by complete surprise. I closed my mouth, erasing the evidence of my shock. Cleared my throat.
“I finished the table,” I said without preamble.
Hazel’s eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses, but her mouth tightened, a look that I had come to learn was her personal version of a half smile. “Took you long enough.”
Rather than defend myself, I pushed the button on the garage door. The small motor choked to life, dragging the heavy panels up with a sort of feeble drama. I would have laughed but for the wind—it swept around the corner of the house and lifted my hair, breathed a hint of winter down my neck.
I had pulled the table into the very middle of the garage, and it seemed to take up the entire space. It shone in the sudden sunlight that poured through the open door, sleek and larger than life, glowing red as the ring of a distant harvest moon.
“I thought you were going to restore it—stain it gold. Puritan pine or something like that.” Hazel walked into the garage and peeled off her sunglasses. She raised a hand above the top of the table as if she was going to lay her palm against the surface. Changed her mind. Put a fist on her hip instead.
“I decided I liked this better.”
She gave a jagged nod, the sort of gesture that could have been interpreted a dozen different ways from appreciation to disapproval. “It’s dramatic,” she said.
I shrugged.
For all I knew she was disappointed in me. Maybe she had wanted me to restore the table and sell it, use the money to do something special in honor of Etsell. Erect a statue at the airport, a pilot fashioned from bronze with an epitaph that people would ignore. Or maybe she just disliked my bold act
of defiance, of the way that I defaced something as stunning as the antique trestle table.
“I love it,” I said, more to myself than to her.
“I do too.”
She sounded sincere, but when I caught her eye, she looked so serious, I took a tiny step back.
“Look, Dani, I know who came to your house that night.”
I didn’t have to ask her what she meant, there were only two nights that seemed to matter in my life: the night I got the call from Alaska, and the night that Alaska came to me. “How?” I asked.
“Who else could make you look like that? Like you had come face-to-face with a ghost.” Hazel sighed and hooked the arm of her sunglasses through her belt loop, where they dangled like a pair of discarded eyes. I had the impression that she wanted to see me from a different perspective. “I think I knew in Alaska. Or, at least, I guessed.”
“You did?” I was too stunned to be upset.
“It was in the way that girl looked at you.”
“Hatred?” I guessed.
“More like jealousy. Fear.”
“Jealousy?”
Hazel brought her hand to her forehead and rubbed her temples between her thumb and forefinger. “Fill in the blanks for me,” she said. “He had some sort of a fling with her and hated himself for it. Am I right so far?”
It took all my willpower to force one tiny nod.
“Was it . . . did he . . . ?” She made an effort to collect herself. “Did Etsell go missing on purpose?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he was angry. Distraught.”
“Accidents happen,” Hazel said, so softly I had to strain to catch it. She exhaled hard and then raised her head to pierce me with a pointed gaze. “I’m guessing Sam didn’t come all the way to Iowa to break your heart.”
“She’s pregnant.” I watched the effect those words had on Hazel, the way they made her eyes go flat, and took a small measure of consolation from the fact that I could tell, beneath her stony expression, she was livid.