In Autumn's Wake

by Maguire, Megan

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Departure

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Note

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Return

  Twenty-nine

  Excerpt: The Release of Secrets

  About Megan Maguire

  In Autumn’s Wake: The Northland Girl

  Text copyright © 2018 Megan Maguire

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Miranda & Maxwell Books 2018

  Edited by Jenny Whelan-Hayes

  Cover design: Emily Ruth Hutchison

  Cover photograph: ben. / photocase.com

  Interior fading tree: PanicAttack Shutterstock.com

  Interior maple leaf: Vamosstock/Shutterstock.com

  authormeganmaguire@gmail.com

  IN AUTUMN’S WAKE

  Megan Maguire

  “What is life? A madness.

  What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story.

  And the greatest good is little enough:

  for all life is a dream,

  and dreams themselves are only dreams.”

  -Pedro Calderón de la Barca

  Departure

  Utter panic is falling through ice on a dead-cold night. I look up for Jake but see only the moon shrinking to a small white dot in my central vision. This is how it begins before everything turns dark. Before the strong pull of the river’s current consumes me faster than my terror, and I accept death.

  This is how it always begins.

  Disoriented, my arms and legs whip side to side like a child’s doll tossed about by a greedy dog.

  “Dylan!”

  The rough stretch of ice overhead deadens Jake’s frantic voice.

  “Fight it, Dylan! Fight it!”

  My lungs burn for air. My muscles constrict and shake. A vacant stare before a silent swallow of gelid water closes my throat. I smile knowing it’s easier this way, a better ending to the story. No reason to fight it. Better me than him.

  Jake lives.

  I die.

  Lights out.

  1

  My heart thrashed even after the river killed me. It squeezed partway through my ribcage before I woke and clutched at my heaving chest to push it back inside.

  This dream comes too often. Sometimes I pound the ice to break free, other times I hide my face in my hands and laugh with delight that it’s finally over. Either way, I don’t know what it’s like to drown. I wasn’t the one in the water that night. But I imagine some of my dreams are similar to what my brother experienced—the dreams when I panic and scream for help—not the ones like tonight when I relax after hearing Jake’s voice and allow the water to keep me.

  The only way to deal after I open my eyes is to kick off the covers and drive to the river. It’s where I end up at least once a week, here, on the riverbank, beer in hand to ease the heartache, tears frozen on my cheeks.

  What Jake saw, what he felt, what he heard … he must’ve been terrified.

  The river should’ve snatched me, not him. But there is no option for a do-over. And moving forward in a dead city like Northland seems impossible. My goal tonight is to stand on the river’s edge long enough to die of exposure. Either that, or “accidentally” find a weak spot on the ice, close my eyes, and make a wish for it to take me. After a harrowing year, tonight may be the night of my final sleep. My friends are tired of me carrying on like a miserable prick anyway.

  I fling an empty beer bottle onto the ice just as headlights catch the landscape and ignite the breaking glass.

  “Typical,” I whisper, pulling my fleece hat down over my ears.

  Sean—my best friend, roommate, and loyal sidekick—revs his car engine in the parking lot behind me. In a stony mood, I raise my middle finger at him to get lost. His car door swings open, only for a sappy song that follows me everywhere to be heard playing on his stereo. “A Long December.” Music of my parents’ generation, not mine. I should remind him it’s February. December feels like ages ago.

  “You’re not a Gen-Xer, Sean,” I call out to him. “Turn it off.”

  He curses at me on his way to the riverbank; coat zipped up tight under his neck, boots cutting into the crusty snow.

  “Here to make sure I don’t do anything stupid, like tempt fate by jumping up and down on the ice a few times?” My voice is dry and sedate like I’m half-asleep.

  He takes a beer from my six-pack and walks over to the bank, his gaze shifting between the ice and me. He raises the bottle toward the mouth of the river, about to speak or point something out, but then stuffs one hand in his coat pocket and drinks instead.

  The winter chill gets to him, gets to most Northlanders, regardless of growing up with biting temps seven months of the year, regardless of the lake-effect snow and lack of sunlight. Regardless. With the city located on the eastern shore of Lake Chert, and Canada bordering us to the north, we should be hardened by it by now. Still, it gets to us.

  Sean turns, his brown eyes tracking a cop’s SUV passing the parking lot. He hides the beer behind his back. “That better be Eddie, otherwise—”

  “Otherwise, nothing.” I pull out my cigarettes and smack the bottom of the pack. “Whoever it is, they’re not gonna see us this far down from the lot.”

  “How about our tire tracks? My car? Your truck? They’ll see us, Dylan.” Sean pulls his shoulders close to his body and clenches his coat collar tight. It’s a self-protective shift that starts whenever he sees an unfamiliar cop. “How long you gonna keep torturing yourself by coming down here?”

  I wait for the SUV to pass before flicking my lighter. “Damn thing.” I shake it and try again. “You should smoke, it’ll take the edge off.”

  “I’m not uptight; I’m freezing my nads.” He crosses his arms.

  The cold’s not bothering me like it is him. It’s easier to shake than the image of Jake out on the ice, easier to shake than the sound of ice cracking under his boots. I hear it now, gnawing at my eardrum. It’s the same nuisance an older man suffering from tinnitus endures, same aggravation that comes from flicking my lighter.

  I finally get a flame and take a drag of my smoke. “You don’t always have to save me.” I wave my cigarette at him.

  “Yeah, I do.” He roughs out a half-circle in the crisp snow with his boot. “Checked Heather’s first, just in case. Knew you’d be one place or the other.”

  Her name latches onto my tongue like a blood-sucking leech drawing its dinner, making it impossible to string words together. A once favorite name has become a nightmare, just as the drowning dreams an
d my hypersensitivity to specific repetitive sounds.

  I release a long trail of smoke toward the night sky with the hope that Heather’s face fades away with it. If it’s not Jake in my head, it’s her. If not her, it’s Jake. One fretful night. Two dead.

  I walk closer to the river. The ice is chunky, unlike the black ice that was here the night Jake died. Black ice is a rare occurrence in Northland, dangerous because it’s thin. Lake Chert is where it usually forms, but only when the prevailing westerlies sleep and the whitecaps settle. The glassy appearance summons kids to skate, even if the dark color warns of the depth of the water. River ice is different, opaque. It’s hard to know where a person is when swept underneath, and on the surface, jagged peaks form from fast currents, hauntingly reminiscent of broken gravestones.

  Hauntingly reminiscent.

  “I’m not leaving you here alone.” Sean takes out his cell. “I’ll call Riley to meet us at the bar. She can bring a friend.”

  “Nah, I’m good. You go.”

  “Did you hear me?” He looks up. “I said I’m not leaving you alone. Pull yourself together and let’s go to the bar.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Dylan,” he insists. “I’ll buy tonight.” A smugness falls over him. We have a running joke of who’ll pick up the tab at Marzniak’s Bar. Family-owned since the ’60s, now run by my dad, Sean and I will never have to pay for a drink.

  I tap my cigarette and watch the ashes die out in the snow. “My dreams have kept me awake for a year. Wretched things. I need to get some sleep.”

  “Dylan, you’ve been asleep for a year. Time to wake up, man.” Sean picks up the six-pack and power walks to his car. “You want Riley to bring a friend, or not?” he calls back.

  “Nope.”

  “Suit yourself.” He uses his key fob to unlock his car but then stops next to the door to stalk me. I hold up my smoke to let him know I’ll follow when I’m finished, and as predictable as Sean is, he leans against the door and waits.

  “Go.” I wave him on.

  “Dylan, get away from the river.”

  “No, you go on without me.”

  Day after day I feel like I’ve fallen into a bottomless lake, forever sinking, smothered by the pressure of the water. I see shapes and shadows, but no distinct faces other than Heather and Jake’s. Reality is gone.

  My brother was eighteen when he died, just a kid. My parents tell people that his death was a tragic accident, that we were being typical boys out on the ice and got into trouble. “An accident,” they say. They emphasize it wasn’t my fault; that I did everything I could to save Jake. “It wasn’t Dylan’s fault,” they say.

  I wish that were true.

  Jake shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have been at that party that night, and he shouldn’t have followed Sean and me out back with those men.

  Then.

  I shouldn’t have taken him to the river.

  One second he was with me on the ice, helping clean up the mess, apologizing for the trouble he’d caused. The next second, he was gone. Two seconds is all I needed to change the outcome and save his life. Two seconds to turn and grab his hand. Two seconds wasted lighting a cigarette.

  Two seconds.

  One puff.

  Gone.

  What I told my parents about that night was a lie. They’d be devastated if they found out the truth, more so than the night we lost him. I was the reason Jake was on the ice. It was my fault.

  I flick my cigarette onto the wicked river before marching to my truck, my head down, hands balled in my pockets.

  Jake’s not my only burden.

  Heather is still a mystery, her death a crushing blow that left me staggered. A junior in college, my first long-term girlfriend, my first love.

  She died the same night as Jake, but she wasn’t with us at the river. She didn’t know he fell through. She wasn’t part of any of it. All that remains of her is a suicide note her parents won’t let me read. She left it on their kitchen counter before she hanged herself from the old maple tree in the front yard of their luxury Roosevelt Park home, next to her dad’s shiny new Lexus, straight above her mom’s Valentine’s Day laser projector that cast red and white sparkling hearts onto her lifeless body. Not a note for her weedy, spineless father. Or a note for her gold-ringed, snobbish mother who won’t let me read it. She wrote it to me, not them.

  One night.

  Two dead.

  I’m the only one who knows what happened to Jake, and the only one kept in the dark about Heather.

  “Finally.” Sean blows into his cupped hands. “You numb yet?” he asks.

  “Just a little.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Whatever.”

  I glance at him while unlocking my truck. He thinks I need to wake up, that I’ve been asleep for a year. What he doesn’t get is that my darkest nightmares, darker than my dreams of drowning, begin the moment I wake.

  2

  Marzniak’s Bar is dark and hushed like a theater, the perfect place for my massive headache to settle. My dad keeps the lights down low so customers can’t see the grimy floor I often forget to mop when it’s my night to close. And although the darkness doesn’t keep boots from sticking to the tacky residue, the dim light does soften flawed faces—a common trait of Northlanders due to all the assaults and violence in the city. Everyone has a mark. Everyone has a story. Like the scar above my left eyebrow—a pipe fight over a stolen dirt bike when I was a kid. And the mark on Sean’s chin from a steel-tipped umbrella—a one-sided attack after he tried to pick up a woman’s wallet that fell from her pocket. She thought he was filching it. He thought he was helping her out. Go figure.

  “A pitcher and two mugs,” Sean calls out to our bartender, Tim. He holds up two fingers, then remembers Riley’s coming and adds a third. “I almost forgot about her,” he says.

  He removes his gray trapper hat, patting his short hair into place, a reminder of last weekend’s shenanigans when we went on an afternoon drinking binge and decided to get matching cuts. An idea that sounds good only when drunk. We both have black hair, but he wears the style better. The short sides disappear into his carob-colored skin and emphasize his boyish face. My thick, straight hair looks sinister by comparison. Set against my pale skin, prominent brow, and square face, I appear slightly vampirish when it’s slicked back after I shower. It’s best to wear it in a messy fringe over my forehead to hide my widow’s peak.

  “Not too crowded yet,” Sean says.

  I nod and look around. Our bar is small, in a corner building that used to be a neighborhood grocery back when Mom & Pop stores ruled, when the steel plant was open, and when people in this city made a decent living and didn’t always want for more. My granddad opened the bar with money he’d saved from working as a foreman at the plant, a significant investment for an uneducated Polish man, something to be proud of. I’m next in line to take over the business, co-owner for now, working under my dad and doing whatever he asks. Like tending bar, placing orders, training staff, even cleaning up urine and vomit in the bathrooms. Lowly jobs I’d never complain about. Not when the liquor is free and working nights has kept me out of trouble mostly.

  Sean taps the table to get my attention and nods toward a college-aged girl walking in. She kicks the front door closed and quickly claims a stool at the bar. Glancing back, she checks out the room before ordering a drink.

  “Drop-dead gorgeous.” Sean’s amped-up voice is level for once. “Go talk to her.”

  “She just walked in. How eager do you want me to look?”

  “Pitcher’s up.” Tim raps the bar for us to claim it.

  Sean stands, sharing a mischievous wink.

  “Don’t. Sean, I’m warning you. Don’t say anything to her.”

  “Sorry, I can’t hear you.” He puts his hands over his ears and heads for the bar. My rock this year, he insists I keep my eyes open for a new girl, claiming that sleeping around is the cure for the
blues.

  I’ve tried it, and he’s wrong.

  Since I got back in the game, women have done nothing but cause me to resent them for putting out so easily. Finding someone even remotely exciting and respectable seems unlikely, especially after Heather. She was a good girl. Good in the sense that it was a week before our lips met. Another before I could touch her small breasts. And a month before my hand had permission to unzip her jeans. She made me wait months to feel her body in rhythm with mine. It was better that way. When we finally fucked, we were in love.

  Makes me wonder if good girls are anomalies, women at the bar and the ones Sean hooks me up with are all misses and no hits. Shallow and dull.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Sean sets the pitcher and mugs on the table. “Mulling over the past shouldn’t stop you from talking to her.” He tips a mug toward the bar before he pours himself a drink. “I didn’t say a word to her. She’s all yours.”

  I look up and see the girl’s face reflected in the mirror behind the bar. Alabaster skin, as ghost white as my own, is accentuated by copper penny highlights in her medium brown hair, hanging straight and long down her back. Her lips are slightly open in a sensual way, the top one thin, the bottom full and pouty, grabbing my attention.

  “All right.” I check my watch. “Three minutes have passed, long enough not to seem too desperate.” I take off my hat and finger-comb my hair forward. Sean reaches across the table to muss it up. “Knock it off.” I slap his hand away.

  He smiles. “You did want a girl tonight.”

  “No, not one of Riley’s friends. They show up here and want to go straight to my bed.”

  “Tough problem to have, Dylan.” He takes a swig of beer and leans back in his chair. “Star quarterback in high school, devoted to working out every afternoon, no beer gut, got your own house … soon-to-be owner of this place.” He gives me the once-over. “Tall, dark, muscular.”

  “Handsome,” I add, rubbing my scar. “Kind of.”