“And what the hell am I supposed to say in court?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you could say that Gentry is a really kind, decent person, who was trying to help somebody. Look, I gotta go.”
“Wow, it’s true what they say. Redheads really don’t have souls. I cannot believe—”
She hung up on me.
I worried about it for nothing, because a couple weeks after Gentry’s lawyer called me, I read in the news that Gentry had taken a plea deal. There wasn’t going to be a trial.
CHAPTER 54
Zee
I should have said no. I didn’t owe LaReigne any goddamn favors. After what she’d done, I didn’t owe her anything, but I tried to remember that not everything is about what you owe or what you pay. If nothing else, that was the lesson I should’ve learned from Gentry.
So I took the envelope and I carried it around in my purse for two months, waiting for the trial to start. Every once in a while I’d take it out and look at it. Tague. Sometimes I thought about opening it and reading the letter. A few times, I thought about throwing it away.
The first two days of Tague’s trial, I had to work.
The third day, I stayed in bed with Leon and a pile of books.
I made myself read farther into Yvain. A noble lady found him wandering in the woods and helped him get better. For a second I thought he was going to cheat on his wife, but no, he just helped the noble lady and went on his way. Then halfway through the story, the lion finally showed up! Reading that, I understood what Gentry meant about being worthy of a dog’s devotion, because Yvain’s lion was so loyal that he went into battle with him. When he thought Yvain had died, the lion tried to kill himself.
Yvain was trying to get home, but on the way he volunteered to be a champion for a woman who was getting screwed by her sister over some land. Next thing I knew, Yvain and Gawain were planning to joust to settle the argument between the two sisters. They were best friends, but they were really going to fight each other to the death. I wonder how a Love so great can coexist with mortal Hate? That was how I felt about LaReigne. As much as I loved her, I hated her that much, too.
The fourth day of Tague’s trial, I had to go, or admit I wasn’t going. Honestly, I’d hoped it would be over on the third day. They had surveillance footage of him murdering a corrections officer, and Kansas doesn’t even have the death penalty. How hard could it be to send him back to prison for the rest of his life?
I went, and I spent the morning watching the back of Tague’s head. Every once in a while he would turn to look at his lawyer, but he didn’t take notes, because he couldn’t. That was part of the defense’s argument: he wasn’t a threat to society anymore. They had medical testimony about exactly where his spine had been severed by Gentry’s sword, but the end result was that he was paralyzed from the chest down.
The closer we got to lunch, the more nervous I got. I’d decided that at the recess, I would get up, walk to the railing behind the defense table, and hand LaReigne’s letter to one of Tague’s lawyers.
By the time the judge called the recess, my foot was asleep and my hip was locked up. When I stood up, I could barely walk. I shuffled out into the aisle, but before I could take two steps, I saw her.
Rosalinda.
She was wearing a baggy blue sweater, a long denim skirt, and tennis shoes. Instead of a medieval head scarf, she had her hair pulled back into a braid. Her eyes were red from crying. I turned around, I hoped, before she saw me. Using the rows of benches for support, I limped out of the courtroom and pushed through the crowd outside.
Down the hall on the left was the bathroom. I went into the first stall and pulled the letter out of my purse. Whenever I’d thought about getting rid of it, I’d imagined I would read it first, to see if there was some truth in it that LaReigne was keeping from me, but I didn’t. I left it in the envelope when I tore it up. Half and half and half and half until I had a stack of torn squares too small to tear again. I dropped them into the toilet and flushed.
After a couple of minutes, I pulled off a piece of toilet paper to blow my nose. I flushed that, too, sending LaReigne’s letter a little further on its journey to the sewer. Right as I stepped out of the stall, the bathroom door opened and Rosalinda walked in.
CHAPTER 55
Rosalinda
I wondered if Zee thought I followed her to the restroom to fight her. I’d never so much as slapped someone, and I definitely couldn’t imagine doing it to her. She was a foot taller than me and she looked like a girl who knew how to fight. Except when I walked into the restroom, she looked scared.
“I didn’t think I would see you here,” she said.
“He’s the only one who’s going to stand trial. He and your sister.”
In some ways that was the hardest part. The man who killed Edrard was dead. Edrard had killed him, but I still had an empty place in my soul. I’d convinced myself that seeing Tague Barnwell’s trial would fill it up, which wasn’t very Christian of me.
Another woman came into the restroom, and I had to step aside to let her in, but after she went into a stall, I stepped back to make sure Zee didn’t escape.
“I’m sorry. When they went, I didn’t know what—I should have stopped them.” Zee put her hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“I bet you are, since your sister’s going to prison,” I said. Whenever I thought about it, I got angry. I knew I needed to forgive, but no matter how much my father prayed over me, I couldn’t let go of it. I didn’t know how to let go.
“She sent me here today. To pass him a note. But I couldn’t do it.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? That your conscience is bothering you? Because it doesn’t. It doesn’t do me any good for you to feel guilty.”
Zee nodded.
Other women went in and out of stalls, flushing, and washing their hands, while Zee stared at my feet. Almost like Gentry, except it was shame that kept her from looking at me.
“I need you to take me out to Bryn Carreg. Gentry’s place,” I said. “I need someone to take me, and I don’t have a car.”
“Do you—like right now? You want to go right now?”
“No. I have to go back in when the recess ends.”
“When do you want to go?” she said.
“I’ll call you.”
When I handed my prayer journal to Zee, she stared at it like she didn’t know what to do.
“Just write your number down,” I said. “I don’t have a cellphone.”
Finally, she scrawled her number in the middle of a random calendar page and handed the journal back to me. I let her go. After the recess I didn’t see her in the courtroom.
At almost three o’clock that afternoon, the defense rested, and the judge sent the jury to deliberate. Most of the spectators left then, but my brother wasn’t coming to pick me up until six, so I stayed and worked on my weaving.
The bailiff came back at four o’clock. Then two lawyers came scurrying in. The jury had a verdict. There was a half-hour crush of lawyers and reporters hurrying to get set up. Finally, the deputies wheeled Tague Barnwell back into the courtroom, and the jury filed in.
I wanted to feel free, but when the jury foreman said, “We find the defendant guilty,” I didn’t feel anything. Six times the foreman said, “We find the defendant guilty,” and none of them made me feel any differently.
When my brother picked me up, he didn’t even ask how I was, so I said, “It’s over.”
“Yeah? What’s the verdict?” He didn’t care, though. Like my father, he thought I was a fallen woman, because I’d run away from home and lived with Edrard without being married. They thought this was my punishment.
“Guilty,” I said. I might as well have been talking about myself.
“Good. Because you need to get this out of your system and do something us
eful. Mom and Abby need your help at home.”
“Okay.”
I was obedient and contrite, because that was the price of coming home. I bowed my head at dinner, while Dad prayed over me. When he said, “Lift up Becky and come back into her heart. Forgive her for her sins,” he meant my whole life was a sin that I needed to atone for.
If I had obeyed Dad, I would have gotten married right after high school and had kids, like my sisters did. Instead, I’d gone into strangers’ homes to babysit to pay for three semesters of college. Because I wouldn’t, my father had picked the man he thought I should marry, and invited him to dinner. Week after week, for two years, while the sand ran out in the hourglass of my father’s patience.
Then a girl in my theater class invited me to the Renaissance Festival in Bonner Springs. After I saw the ladies in their tippet sleeves, and the knights in their armor, I never wanted to go back to my old life. I didn’t want to wear modest clothes or get married or have four kids.
The night of Tague Barnwell’s verdict, while my nieces got ready for bed, I read my Bible like a good aunt. After the lights were out, I waited until they were asleep before I cried. For Edrard. Not for me. Because even though I hadn’t done what I was supposed to do, it was what I’d wanted. It was what I still wanted.
After everyone was asleep I took my prayer journal into the kitchen. Zee had the handwriting of a third grader. Big sloppy sixes and scribbled twos. I picked up the phone and dialed, liking the idea of bolting Zee out of bed in the middle of the night. A sliver of terror cutting through her sleep. Except she answered after two rings and she sounded awake.
“I just got home from work,” she said, when I asked if she’d been asleep.
“Where do you work?”
“At a bar.” That was all she said, and I remembered I hadn’t exactly treated her like a friend when I saw her at the courthouse.
“Can you go this Saturday? Out to Bryn Carreg.”
“We’d have to go early, because I work in the afternoon.” Then like she was talking to someone else in the room, she said, “Yeah, I know, Leon. We’re gonna go here in a minute.”
I gave her my folks’ address, and then we hung up. I sat holding the phone, trying to imagine where she was, who was with her, but all I knew was that she wasn’t alone. Not the way I was, awake in a house full of good Christians sleeping the sleep of the innocent and the righteous.
CHAPTER 56
Zee
When I went to pick Rosalinda up on Saturday, she walked around to the passenger side of my car, staring into the back seat the whole way.
“Is the dog coming with us?” she said.
“This is Leon. I didn’t want to leave him cooped up at home.”
“This is the Leon you were talking to the other night?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t remember that. I’d been pretty high when she called. “I know he looks scary, but he’s safe. If it’s a problem—”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, but when she got in the car, she kept looking over her shoulder at Leon like she thought he was going to come over the center console and eat her.
After we got on the highway, he laid down and went to sleep. Rosalinda opened her bag and took out a long roll of what looked like belt webbing, with a pattern in it. It reminded me of the trim on the dress Gentry had given me. The dress that was somewhere with his camping stuff in his truck.
“I’m going to work on my weaving, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m trying to get a bunch of things ready for the holiday season for my Etsy shop.”
“You have a shop on Etsy?”
“I used to make decent money, but it’s been harder since . . . because I have to borrow my brother’s phone to upload pictures and stuff, and I can’t always get to the post office.”
“You really don’t have a cellphone?”
“It’s money we don’t have. Besides, I’m always at home,” she said. “I didn’t finish college, so I can’t get a regular job. The weaving and some babysitting are the only jobs I’ve ever had.”
“I didn’t go to college.” I didn’t know why she was telling me that stuff, but I thought we could try to have a conversation. “You could always wait tables.”
“I don’t think my dad would like that.”
I was going to ask how old she was, but I didn’t want it to sound like a smart-ass remark. Still, I figured she was old enough to get a job her father didn’t approve of.
We didn’t talk after that, until I saw a red-tailed hawk perched up in the top branches of a pine tree.
“There’s a hawk,” I said to make her look up from her weaving.
“Oh.” That was all she said, but a few miles further, there was one on a road sign past Udall. She pointed and said, “There’s another one.”
That fast we saw another, up on an electrical line, twisting his head around, looking in the grass for something to eat.
“That’s three,” I said.
She folded her weaving up in her lap, and from there on, that was all we said to each other. Four, five, six, seven. To keep track of how many hawks. By the time we reached the pull off for Bryn Carreg, we were up to thirteen, plus three turkey buzzards and a bald eagle fighting over a deer carcass.
In six months, the weeds had grown up around the carport, so the only place to park was the shoulder. We were far enough out in the country I didn’t bother with Leon’s leash. I just opened the back door and let him out. I put my purse in the trunk, and I offered to put Rosalinda’s in, too, but she clutched it to her chest and shook her head.
As I came around the other side of the car, I saw a metal sign half hidden by the weeds. It had a real estate company name and phone number on it. FOR SALE in big red letters. 84 Acres, Pond was painted underneath that.
It made everything worse. Five years Gentry had worked on his castle, and I destroyed it all in a week. Following Rosalinda up the path to Mud Manor, I thought about Gentry carrying the tent ahead of me, inviting me into his life. Look what he got for it.
I’d worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with Rosalinda, but she had to stop a few times to catch her breath. Leon ran ahead of us, chasing things.
“I don’t miss this hill,” Rosalinda said, panting as we came up the last stretch. The weeds hadn’t taken over Mud Manor, because there was too much shade, but a bunch of vines were climbing up the side of the house. “I still don’t know how Gentry hauled all the construction materials up here.”
“Did he build this, too?”
“Oh, he built this first, so I wouldn’t have to camp out. I mean, Edrard helped, but Gentry did most of the work.”
“That’s nice.”
“It really was. I’m sure it doesn’t look like much to you, but this is my real home,” she said. I thought about Rhys telling me she had a crush on Gentry. I wondered if that was true, or if it was homesickness. Either way, I felt bad for her.
I assumed she’d come to get her things from the house, but she walked around the fire ring and started up the path to the hill of good cell reception. I whistled for Leon and we followed her.
It had been so beautiful in the spring, all green and shimmery. Now the valley was hazy from range burning, and the trees were starting to look bare, but a few still had bright orange leaves. For maybe ten minutes, Rosalinda and I stood on the hill looking down on all those long stretches of brown grass. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic bag full of gray powder.
“He always said he wanted his heart buried on this hill. His parents acted like I made that up, but his father finally agreed to give me some of his ashes. Maybe part of his heart is in here. Or for all I know, his father gave me a handful of ashes out of their fireplace.”
“How come they decide whether you get his ashes?” I said.
“Oh, we weren’t married. We were only handfas
ted.”
“I think that counts.” I didn’t actually have an opinion about marriage, but my opinion about Edrard’s parents was they’d acted like assholes to Rosalinda.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “The only prayers I know are a bunch of Old Testament stuff Edrard wouldn’t appreciate.”
“You could sing something.”
I was sorry I’d suggested it, because she picked this song that was so fucking sad, she only got partway through it before she cried. After she gave up singing, I helped her untie the knot in the plastic bag. She tested for the wind direction, tipped the bag over, and the breeze scattered the ashes down the side of the hill. Then Leon hiked his leg to the limestone outcropping behind us. Amen.
“I’m going up to the castle, if you want some time to yourself,” I said.
She nodded.
On the way up, I heard something flapping in the wind. The edge of one of the tarps had come loose, so it popped back and forth at the top of the east tower like a blue flag. Someone had cleared out Gentry’s stuff. The only things left were some scaffolding, tumbleweeds, and the bones of a little critter. Leon sniffed it over and hiked his leg to the doorway.
“Quit pissing on everything,” I said, but he gave me the look that was basically a dog shrug. When I went up the steps, the big goof came after me, his claws scrabbling on the stones. About halfway up, he changed his mind and went back down.
At the top of the tower, I had to lean way out to grab the edge of the tarp. Down below me was the whole state of Kansas again. All winter brown, except for those splotches of fire orange. It made my throat tight knowing Gentry might never get to see that view again. I let go of the tarp and took out my phone. Stretching my arm out as far as I could, I took a panoramic picture of as much of the horizon as would fit.
I took one last look for myself, long enough to see Leon trotting down the hill toward the ponds. I called for him and, for the first time, he turned at the sound of his name. I didn’t know anything about tying knots, but I managed to get the tarp fastened. Whether that did any good, I didn’t know, but at least it was done.
The Reckless Oath We Made Page 34