by Sam Logue
“You would want that?”
“It’s what I need you to do.” After a moment Victoria said, “For now,” because she did always like having a backup plan.
“I should go?” Sam said. “I mean, I … I didn’t mean to imply you should go. What I meant was, you want me to leave right now? Can’t we talk about it first?” He pressed his lips together, his face crumbling. He put his hands to his eyes. The last time Victoria had seen him cry was right after Paul went missing.
“We can have a trial separation. You can …” She stopped short. Even now she wanted to comfort him. Did this mean she still cared for him? There had to be a consequence for his betrayal. That’s just how it should be. Even after everything they had shared, everything they had been through. “Get out,” she said, and it sounded more like a growl than she intended.
Victoria started to call him back but reminded herself Nat and Katie were grown with their own families now, and Sam and she needed to make their lives work on their own.
Still, his absence hit her hard when his blue pickup truck was no longer in the driveway late that night.
Over the next few days they spoke on the phone and decided Victoria would live in the house – without Sam. She didn’t want to know where he was staying or if he was staying somewhere with Allison, so she didn’t ask. For the first time in her life she wouldn’t expect anyone to come home to her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It had been four years since Sam moved out, but neither of them had suggested a divorce. Victoria had heard from Nat and Katie that Sam was renting a small apartment above the village sweet shop, and he must have woken up each morning to the smell of tempering chocolate. Perhaps he woke up next to Allison. Victoria didn’t want to think about him in bed with her. Sometimes she thought about dating again, even casually. After all, she assumed he was. She didn’t want her inquiries about Sam to get back to him, but she had asked Nat about him anyway. It was through Nat that she had discovered he’d taken up needlepoint to pass the time at night while he watched television. Victoria tried to visualise his large gardener’s hands holding a delicate needle but couldn’t.
One night, she missed Sam more than she had in the last four years. She got up, took sheets, a blanket and a pillowslip out of the linen closet in the hall and went into Katie’s old bedroom. The bed was smaller in there and made Sam’s absence less conspicuous.
In her dream she was staring out through a window at Paul, who was sitting on a thick, smooth tree branch, swinging his legs. She shouted for him to be careful. He couldn’t hear her through the glass and fell down.
Victoria woke up, her hands shaking. “Be careful …” she started to say, confused and groggy.
The curtain rustled like leaves in the wind, only she hadn’t left the window open. Someone had opened it.
She flung the blanket off and called, “Hello?” from the bed as she got up, trying to sound calm. Was someone attempting to break into the house?
Victoria edged toward the window. From behind the lacelike curtain she could see the faint outline of the back of someone wearing a blue coat with the hood up, climbing to the ground using a big tree bough for support. The figure turned, and a boy, surrounded by a frosty mist, stared right at her. A boy with Nat’s younger face and a red-tipped white rose in one of his hands.
“Paul,” she howled, like it was the last chance she would have to save him. “Wait!” He had left the window open for her. She would go to him. Now. Victoria looked down but he had disappeared. “Don’t run,” she shouted down to the darkness.
Victoria swung her knees over the windowsill and grabbed on to the swinging bough. It was higher than she had thought, and her body jerked backward when she landed on her feet.
The sound of police sirens came closer and a light was shining up at her face before she neared the driveway. A car stopped, and a man spoke into a two-way radio then asked her, “Are you okay?” The man, a blue-uniformed cop, put his hand over the gun at his side as if he was afraid she might attack him, as if she was crazy. The brim of his cap darkened his face, and she couldn’t see his eyes.
“I’m not going to do anything.” Victoria put her hands up. Her head throbbed, and her knees hurt like hell.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, gesturing to her raised hands. “The lady who lives down the street from you called us when she saw you climb out the window.”
“What’s she doing up at this hour?”
“It’s almost morning, ma’am. She was jogging by your house,” the cop said.
Victoria was barefoot and in her pyjamas. She glanced around and could see the colours of every leaf on every tree in the dim light. It was dawn.
The policeman made sure Victoria got back into the house properly, through the front door. She called in sick at work and spent the rest of the early morning resting on the couch in the living room. She had made a fool of herself to everyone. The island was small. It wouldn’t be long before the kids and Sam found out. She rubbed her fingernails, the bright red nail polish from the manicure she had gotten a few days ago. Why had she even bothered? The risky colour seemed to appear ridiculous on her now. Turning her back on Paul at the playground had been a risk too. Taking risks had never turned out well for her.
She searched for the right thing to hurl. Sam’s rocking chair. He had left it when he moved out, as though he hadn’t taken the separation seriously and thought she would change her mind eventually and invite him to move back in.
Victoria tried picking it up, but it was heavy and she wouldn’t be able to fling it far. The picture window was right there. She opened the curtains. She strained as she heaved the rocker at Sam’s garden behind the large window. Her strength surprised her. The old wooden rocker made contact with the glass with an ear-splitting noise.
Her big toe stung. Victoria tiptoed around glass shards and sat on the couch. She shouldn’t have broken the window when she was barefoot. A splinter of glass was wedged under her toenail. She flinched and plucked out the clear splinter.
The morning’s cool air fanned over her. It was refreshing. But she would need to call a repairman soon because she remembered the forecast for that evening called for rain. Sam’s rocking chair was on its side on the lawn. One armrest was broken and dangled by a splinter. Victoria put on her shoes, went outside and dragged the chair back into the house. She used a dustpan to sweep up the glass pieces in the living room.
Victoria went into the kitchen and took the apples and farm-fresh eggs she’d bought the other day out of the fridge. She found the apple peeler and strainer in a drawer. The smell of freshly sliced apples had always lingered in her nostrils for days after she baked. But then she put everything away. Baking a pie wouldn’t change how empty the house was, no matter how delicious it smelled.
****
Sam called Victoria just before dinnertime. He wanted to stop by the old place and talk with her in person but was doubtful she would answer the door once she saw it was him. She picked up on the fourth ring. He heard a door shut, like she had come in from somewhere. He wondered if she was seeing anyone and listened for someone else’s voice in the background.
“Hello?” she said. It was good to hear her soft, intelligent voice again. He stayed quiet and listened to her breathing at the other end.
She raised her voice. “Hello?”
“I left her,” Sam said.
“Who is this?”
How could she not know his voice? She was bluffing. “It’s Sam.”
“I shouldn’t have picked up. I’m trying to finish up the gardening while it’s still light out.”
“You’ve kept up with the gardening?”
“Certainly. Wouldn’t want the place to look from the outside like it’s being inhabited by a neglectful old woman.”
Sam chuckled then didn’t know if she would approve, so he quickly cleared his throat. “I guess you’re getting along fine without me. I’ve got to say
it’s kind of hard for me to hear that.”
“Sam?”
“Yes?” he said. For a second her voice encouraged him to consider that maybe she had decided to rethink the separation, too.
“I would like to return to my gardening. What do you want?”
“I’m not seeing her anymore.”
“You told me that.”
“What exactly are we doing here, Victoria? It’s been quite a while. We’ve never talked about what we should do next—”
She cut him off. “Do you want a divorce?”
Sam sighed. “Do you?” He touched the wedding ring he’d never removed because he didn’t want to lose all of what he and Victoria had shared.
“I need to get back to the garden. It’s getting dark, and I haven’t finished watering the roses near where James is buried.”
That caused him to pause. It felt like it was so long ago when the dog had passed on. “I’ll let you go,” he said, even though he didn’t want to.
****
Victoria drove past the Willoughbys’ house the day after Sam called. She had just left work for the day and was supposed to go to Katie’s house later and have supper with her and Molly.
Allison was practicing her serve on a mown field. She wore a white tennis skirt and still had spectacularly shaped legs. The ball machine ejected yellow tennis balls, which dotted the lawn. Her ponytail bounced cheerfully below her tennis visor as she smacked most of the balls forcefully across the grass with a racket. Allison stopped and waved the racket. The closest Victoria would ever get to Allison’s kind of world was as a member of the catering staff again, dishing out oysters to her black-tie guests. Victoria didn’t acknowledge Allison. Even if Sam had said he’d stopped seeing Allison, Victoria wasn’t going to pretend she liked her. After Victoria had broken the window in her house, she’d made a decision that she was going to live her life the way she wanted.
Victoria exited off the main road, driving onto the smaller, rural one for a change of scenery, and switched on the radio, humming along with a singer she wasn’t familiar with.
A dishevelled man ran in front of the car.
“Is he crazy?” Victoria muttered. Before she could look again, she hit the brakes and they squealed. She squinted through the filmy windshield at the tall man with the tangled dark hair and fine, soft-looking beard. He had blue eyes. Clothed in faded jeans too short for his legs, his toes peeking out of sandals, he wore a T-shirt mottled with grey stains under an old sport coat with patched elbows. His hair may have been knotted, but his skin was rosy and unlined. Living on the streets was new to him. Or maybe he wasn’t homeless.
Victoria rolled down the window. “Wait.”
The young man fled to the other side of the road, sneaking one more peek at her then stepping into the forest, which was at the other end of Katie and Julian’s street. Victoria parked close to some trees. Branches covered with wet leaves flattened against the windows on one side of the car. She put the brake on and left it running.
Victoria opened the car door and dragonflies calmly hovered above a pool of rainwater on the road she bounded across. The black forest and the world of the tree beasts, a world she was unsure of, waited for her on the other side. Victoria followed the man into the forest without hesitation. The trees thickened until it was dark and branches caught on her clothing. She ran, searching for him, farther and farther into the woods. Night began to fall.
When the trees thinned out, Victoria slowed her stride, trying to walk calmly and quietly to the waterfall in front of her. Her neck warmed and her pulse wouldn’t stop beating fast. The man was kneeling and washing his face, the water glowing in the quickly fading sun. He cupped his hands to drink.
“Hello,” she said.
The man stopped drinking and glanced over at her. He sprang up, ran and although she tried to track his path, she lost sight of him. The tree beasts, massive hunched-over figures, moved in the distance. Were they really moving or was it the wind?
“Stay back,” a woman’s voice called from behind Victoria.
She turned around and couldn’t see in the darkness. “Hello?”
No one answered. It could have been some teenagers playing a game, or maybe she had imagined everything from the start – the shabbily dressed man and now the strange woman’s demand.
Still, she had to search. She could hardly see in front of her. The small growths on the trees were like hundreds of yellow eyes, watching from far away. Victoria grabbed on to the low limbs and tree trunks with oddly squishy bark, soft like flesh, as she walked, trying to keep some sense of where she was moving toward. She clung to a branch too hard and it broke and hung loosely.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said. A whooshing sound came from above where she stopped and she jumped out of the way and landed on a bed of pine needles. A tree limb came crashing down from the sky, missing her head by only an inch or so. Victoria stared up. It wasn’t windy, but the entire tree was shaking violently. She let out a scream. The tree became still and she smelled something strong. Flowers. Roses.
“Are you all right?” a woman asked in the same voice that had spoken a few moments ago.
“Yes. Who are you?” Victoria said, the tremor in her voice giving her away.
“You should go now.”
“Please, tell me who you are.” Victoria repeated, “Hello,” when no one had replied.
She checked again to see if she could find the bedraggled man or the woman she had heard, but there was no one near her. And when she called again, no one answered. She remembered the car. She had left it parked and running on the side of the road and hadn’t put on the flashers. It was dark and someone could drive right into it and get hurt. And she was supposed to be at Katie’s by now.
If she walked farther into the woods, farther into this unfathomable place, and sought out the unknown voice, there was a chance she would never get out. She turned back and walked slowly, reluctantly, to the safety of her car on the side of the road.
Victoria had enough gas in the car to make it to Katie’s house then back home. She peered into the rear-view mirror while she drove, the headlights on, seeing pine needles stuck in her hair and picking them out.
All her life, her mind had acted as her lodestar. In theory it was ridiculous, but what if Paul hadn’t ever really left them and was still on the island, the boy she had clothed and cared for dressed in rags? She looked away from the mirror and back at the road in front of her. Something was out of place. Victoria tightened her grip on the steering wheel when the car that was heading straight toward her flashed its high beams at her, forcing her back into her lane.
It was half past six. Two of Blackthorn’s glowing deer waited on the side to cross the road. Victoria slowed down and let them dash. Like the neon deer, she, too, stood out on the island, marked as a mother who had lost her son. And she could run away like a deer because no one would know she had left, at least not for a while.
She could disappear. Just like Paul. It would take her just over forty-five minutes to make it to the city. Or she could drive off the side of the old drawbridge on the way across to the mainland. She could run through a red traffic light right where she was or swerve into the guardrail along the main road’s shoulder. Maybe suicide happened because you just were too tired to go on and even sleep couldn’t cure you. And she was so tired.
Sam could surely identify with her long, drawn-out grief. But she might be extending Nat’s and Katie’s – Paul’s? – pain as well. Although Sam had hurt her more than she liked to admit, he had gone through the ordeal of losing Paul with her and knew something about hurting too. Certainly he would understand why she wanted to cut her life short. But Nat’s and Katie’s pain, like the lash of a willow switch, was her ache too.
Enough was enough.
Victoria pulled off the road and turned around, heading back. If Paul was the man in rags, she would bring him home.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Have you heard fro
m mum?” Katie asked.
Sam managed to reach the phone, half through the door to his apartment, with his arms full of groceries. “I’ve only called her a few times since I moved out. She doesn’t really call me.”
Katie breathed out. “Julian’s working late, and I invited mum to have dinner with Molly and me. She said she would come, but she hasn’t shown up.”
“When was this?”
“She’s over an hour late. There’s no answer at the house, and she’s not picking up her cell phone. It’s not like her, you know?”
“It sure isn’t,” Sam said.
“Are you sure she hasn’t called you?”
“I called her yesterday, but she didn’t want to talk.”
“I don’t want to scare you, but should we call the police?” Katie asked. “Do you think that would be too much?”
“First I’ll swing by some of the main routes. If I don’t see her, then I’ll call them.” Sam hung up, shoved the groceries inside and grabbed his cell phone before heading out to his pickup truck.
He turned onto the same roads he had searched years back with a couple of local men piled into his truck, anticipating a sighting of Paul on the beach, near the woods or at the side of the road.
Sam slowed down next to a group of joggers and rolled down his window. The island was so small, he could ask, “Have you seen a woman driving an orange car?” and when a jogger in a baseball cap said, “I’d remember a car that colour. The two cars I’ve seen tonight are a red one and your pickup,” Sam believed him.
He waved the joggers on, passed ahead of them and sped up.
The night Sam went searching for Paul, he had hidden his disappointment from the other guys when they hadn’t seen a glimpse of him. He had no one to hide his fear from when it was clear Victoria was missing too.