“You saw Garrett?”
“He went back for his truck,” Daniela said. “Where’s Sal?”
“She’s safe. I sent her through the path to your house. To the water. She’s getting the canoe ready. There’s a small fire ahead. We need to hurry so we can get around it.”
If the gap between the small fires she had started merged, they wouldn’t be able to break through to the creek, to Sal.
Half running, half walking, Daniela led them toward the creek.
Cadie ached to swirl her arms and conjure the wind as Garrett once had from the end of his pier. She closed her eyes and imagined sucking the breath out of the fire, saving them the way the wind had carried the cyclone of dust and leaves to save Cadie when Clyde cornered her behind the library.
A loud pop erupted as vaporized water cracked a tree in the distance. Five hundred and seventy-two degrees—the flashpoint at which wood bursts into flames. If she could hear the fire, it was near her cottage, maybe beyond it. She swallowed and tried to focus. Did Garrett make it to his truck? Would he be able to get out of her driveway to the main road?
So much had transpired in that patch of forest which, by morning, would likely be char and ash. A new beginning. Or another attempt to erase the past.
Dolores touched Cadie’s arm in silent acknowledgment that both of them were thinking about the last time they had been together in the woods. The anger Cadie had felt toward Garrett minutes earlier now turned on Dolores. Anger felt better than the storm of betrayal tearing at her insides. She pulled her arm away from Dolores.
“I had no right to put you in that position,” Dolores whispered so Daniela couldn’t hear her. “You were a child.”
“Don’t. Not now.” Cadie wiped her face and headed toward the back burn. Find Sal. Find Sal, she repeated over and over in her mind.
“We need to go downstream to get around the other fire.” Cadie walked faster to catch up to Daniela. “Why are you and your mom out here? I thought you were going to the rec center.”
“We tracked Sal’s cell with an app on her phone,” Daniela said as they navigated the rocky forest floor. “I tried to call you, but we lost our cell signal. We knew she was out here, this side of the creek, but we didn’t know where. Garrett heard us shouting for Sal and told us where you were.”
They ran downstream to evade the back burn and broke into the clearing to find Sal still standing in the opening to the pathway toward the Garcias’ house on the opposite bank.
“Mom!” Sal shouted.
“Why didn’t you go to the beach like I told you?” Cadie yelled.
“I knew you’d come back. You’re Cadie Braidy.”
Sal and Daniela ran toward each other, meeting in the middle of the creek. Daniela pulled Sal close and rocked her against her chest.
“I couldn’t leave without you,” Sal said.
“It’s okay. I’m here.” Daniela cupped Sal’s face in her hands, kissed her daughter’s forehead, and fingered the sweaty hair framing her face.
The creeping fire was gaining momentum more quickly than Cadie had expected. The back burn raged with purpose as it scrambled to engage the bigger fire. Flames consumed the flash fuels of moss and leaves and twigs. Tongues hissed and writhed with hunger for the trees Cadie used to climb as a little girl. Her fort in the holly trees. The hammock where she and her father used to practice bird calls.
Upstream, Cadie noticed the rusty remnants of the barbed-wire fence crawling across the water. Dead vines, leaves, and debris wound around the metal, creating a flammable bridge over the creek to the Garcias’ property.
Flames slithered less than thirty yards from the fence.
Cadie had effectively lit a fuse that would set the Garcias’ home on fire.
Cadie ran toward the fence. She tugged at the wires, trying to break them loose from the posts, but they wouldn’t give.
“What did I do?” she said under her breath.
“It’s going to jump the creek across the fence,” Cadie yelled as she tore at the vines, gnawed them with her teeth. A barb pierced her palm. She pulled harder. Sal stepped in behind her and did the same.
“Don’t let the rusty metal cut you,” Cadie said.
Sal rolled her eyes.
Daniela and Dolores splashed through the water and began yanking on the vines. Cold water swirled around their legs. Smoke thickened the air.
“We got this, Cadie Braidy.” Daniela smiled at her.
Cadie’s body pulsed with power. All the fear that had coiled up inside her, protecting her from memories she wanted to forget, exploded with purpose. She wiped the blood from cuts on her palm against her thighs and dug her heels against the slippery rocks. She let the barbs tear into the flesh as she squeezed the wire. With a snap, she fell backward. The rusted wire broke free from a staple binding it to the post, unfurling on top of Cadie. A jagged wire sliced into her calf, splaying her skin open.
“You did it!” Sal’s dirt-smeared, tear-stained cheeks glowed. Dolores and Daniela unwound the tangle of wire and vines from on top of Cadie and piled it on the Garcias’ side of the creek.
Dolores looked like she could be thirty years old. Only a quarter mile up that creek, on the other side of that fence, lay the grave they had dug together. Her hands bled as they had bled all those years ago. But this day, she and Dolores fought to save something. Dolores put a hand on Cadie’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Your leg.” Sal knelt in the water next to Cadie. The cut was long and open. But it had missed the major blood vessels.
“Yeah. We’re all going to need tetanus shots.” Cadie took Sal’s hand and examined the cuts on her palms.
Daniela pulled Cadie up from the water and together they walked toward the Garcias’ side. Cadie mounted the incline on the bank and rooted her feet into the soil.
Motionless clouds hovered next to the slip of a moon.
The fire would not cross this creek.
Across the water, sparks danced like notes in a symphony, layers and colors, harmony and melody thrashing with unrestrained grace. Embers shot up like the fireworks she and her parents used to watch lying on their backs on the beach in front of the cottage.
A flutter in the low bushes, a rustle in the leaves, caught Cadie’s attention. Something lingered in the clearing, formed out of dust and time, held together by shame. A memory so heavy that gravity lent it shape and dimension. Cadie—young Cadie—lingered in those woods, her arm still itching from bug bites. The little girl who believed in magic and adventure. She had stayed in those woods with Juan Hernández.
Cadie wanted to run back across the creek to rescue her younger self. She longed to rub the young girl’s back as she pushed the fear of Clyde into that dark place in her gut every night while she lay awake in bed. She wanted to whisper in her ear, It was never Clyde you needed to be afraid of.
The back burn inhaled Cadie’s breath and roared, leaving her empty and small in the night. Smoke draped over the woods like a tattered shawl.
A loon called out, guiding them toward the lake.
“Let’s go,” Dolores said. She held up the light of her cell phone as they ran through the forest toward the Garcias’ beach. Sal leapt like a deer from rock to rock. Cadie tried to keep up, but the gash in her leg burned with every step. Lockjaw, she thought, mocking the fears she’d clung to as a girl.
Daniela slipped her arm around Cadie’s waist to support her limp. Daniela’s arm pressed against the gun on Cadie’s hip.
“Is that—?” Daniela pulled her arm back.
“Sal had it. She’s had it the whole time.”
“Jesus, what did we do?” Daniela said.
Cadie wasn’t ready to tell Daniela that Sal had fired the gun at Garrett. If Sal had killed him, would Cadie have covered it up to protect Sal the way Clyde had for Garrett? How close had they come to repeating history?
Sal reached the house first and stopped abruptly as she stepped out of the woods. The house stood intact. Silhouetted aga
inst the purple sky, Sal raised both arms up overhead and howled a long “Yes!” into the night.
Water lapped against the pylons with the hush of delicate breaking glass, beckoning Cadie to be the mermaid she once believed herself to be.
Her calf throbbed. Blood soaked her sock and shoe.
Dolores ducked inside the shed and pulled down a curtain. She tore the fabric with her teeth and ripped it into strips.
Sal watched the orange swell above the trees in the distance. “The fire could still get across the creek, couldn’t it?” she said.
“It’s possible. But nothing inside that house matters,” Dolores said. She knelt next to Cadie and bound the strips around Cadie’s wound so tightly it took Cadie’s breath.
Daniela slipped into the captain’s seat in the rear of the canoe. Sal and Dolores huddled in the middle. Cadie lowered herself to her knees in the front of the canoe with slow, fluid motions so the gun didn’t jab into her hip. She pulled her shirt down to keep the weapon out of sight.
Maybe none of it had been real. She had not set a fire. She had never helped bury Juan Hernández. If she could close her eyes, none of it would have happened.
But she couldn’t close her eyes.
The lake shimmered like an expanse of fluttering silk covered in sequins. Cadie dragged her hand through the water to soothe the cuts on her fingers and palm from the barbed wire. The lake felt like a cup of tea left to sit too long, barely warmer than the air, yet still comforting.
The songs of frogs and crickets Cadie heard through her bedroom window traveled from across the water. Bats skimmed the surface of the lake, feasting on the night bugs skittering across it.
As they rounded the Hook toward Cadie’s cottage, a torch rose from her wood-shingled roof. Cadie’s childhood painted the sky the way a sunset ignites the horizon with its remorseful palette. The glaze on her mother’s ceramics and her father’s oil paintings peeled away. The embers of A Wrinkle in Time and Tuck Everlasting burst up into the sky alongside Garrett’s furtive, adolescent love notes.
The cottage, with all its dark places and painful memories, had always held that point of center in her heart, even when she didn’t want it to. Boston had never been home, as she and her parents moved from apartment to apartment until she graduated high school. College in Vermont, a stint in Colorado, and more recently, the tiny apartment in Concord, none of which had ever become home.
She had spent so much energy distancing herself from Maple Crest, yet she always relied on the tug that pulled her back like an anchor.
She thought of Sal’s note. Go Home.
If this place no longer claimed her, where was home?
The main fire and the back burn had already merged, consuming everything in the space between. Swooning flames stretched up, flicking embers skyward, where Cadie lost them among the stars. She stopped paddling and let the boat drift. They were nowhere. Sound could barely find them. Maybe time would not stomp forward if they just drifted, drifted, drifted, and hid. She rubbed the blister the match had left on the tip of her thumb.
This open water had been the backdrop for all the secrets that haunted her. But it had also been her playground, like Tom and Huck’s Mississippi, the Swiss Family Robinson’s island. She wanted to love the lake again.
As they passed Garrett’s pier, Cadie could almost make out the profile of the Summer Kid in his slung-back lawn chair, sitting among the shadows. The specter nodded at Cadie, but she turned away. Her belief that she had saved Garrett had been her armor. Stripped of that mythology, her story had no hero, no quest, no righteous sacrifice, no happily ever after.
36
PRESENT DAY
The four women walked from the marina to town against the backdrop of a stubbled cornfield. They could have been anywhere. No features defined the lonely strip except the company with whom they walked. If they looked straight ahead, the fires and secrets remained behind them.
Cadie tried to suppress the pain throbbing up her leg, through her chest, and pounding in her skull. Walk. Don’t think. Just walk. She allowed the rhythm to lull her into a trance.
Daniela slowed her pace to wait for Cadie. Dolores and Sal, about twenty yards ahead of them, looked over their shoulders, each of them wondering if Cadie would keep their secrets, Cadie imagined.
“I need to tell you something. Actually, there’s a lot I need to tell you,” Cadie said to Daniela. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat of ash. She tasted the truth before she spoke it. The words coated her tongue like warm maple syrup. “I knew where to find the grave that day because I was there the whole time.”
Daniela stopped walking, but did not look at Cadie.
“After I left your house, after your mom got that emergency phone call and rushed out, I ran into the woods like I told you. I heard something, so I hid. But I didn’t really run away. I stayed.”
“You watched? You saw them bury Juan?” Daniela’s voice softened. She put her hand on Cadie’s forearm. “Shit. You lived with that image in your head all this time?”
“I wish that was it.” If she said it out loud she could never take it back. Ahead of them, Dolores and Sal kept walking. “I didn’t watch. I helped them bury Juan.”
“What? Did Clyde force you to do it? Did he threaten you?”
“Clyde wasn’t there.”
“So, wait, you and Garrett buried him alone? You and your Summer Kid are keeping this quiet to cover your own asses?”
“I helped Garrett—and your mother. Your mom, Garrett, and I buried Juan together.”
“What are you talking about? She wasn’t there.”
“She was. And what your mom did that day is considered being an accessory after the fact to a murder. She was an adult and there’s no statute of limitations. It can carry the same sentence as actually committing a murder. That’s what Garrett was trying to explain to me when we were in his office the other day.”
Daniela refused to look at Cadie.
“The reason Garrett and I didn’t want to come forward with the truth to protect your dad is that it would put your mom at risk. Raúl didn’t do anything. There’s no evidence, no witnesses that can put him at the scene. It would be awful for your dad to go through, but in the end, he wouldn’t get convicted, or even charged.” Cadie left out her new fear of what awaited Raúl if he were deported back to El Salvador.
“But my mom,” Daniela whispered.
“That call your mom got, that emergency at the store? That was Clyde calling for your dad. He freaked out about what happened to Juan. He called your dad for help, but your mom answered. Your mom didn’t go to the store. She went to Clyde’s house.”
“How could you keep that from me?”
“I was afraid to tell you. It was my fault she went to Clyde’s in the first place. When he called, Clyde was ranting about needing to keep Garrett safe. And I had just told your mother that a kid named Garrett was in trouble. How many Garretts do you know in Maple Crest? That’s why she went. Because I broke our promise.”
“So, you and Garrett decided amongst yourselves to keep this from me and come up with a plan that impacts my family without telling me any of this?”
“I wanted to tell you. Your mom’s the one who made us promise not to tell anyone, including you. I kept the secret for her. Not for Garrett.”
“You should have told me. You were my best friend.”
“Your mom made us swear to never speak of that day again. Not to each other, my parents, you, or even Raúl. If no one talked about it, it never happened. No one else could ever find out.”
“You really buried him?” Daniela whispered.
“The three of us dragged him through the woods. I helped dig the grave and bury him.” Cadie pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes to push out the images in her mind. The misaligned buttons, the sliver of white between his eyelids. “I wanted to make all of that go away. I didn’t want to think about it ever again.”
“God, Cadie.” Daniela’s eyes
filled with tears. “You never told anyone, ever? Not your park ranger or your parents?”
“It never happened. I locked it away and tried to forget. Until I got your text message the other day. Now it’s the only thing I can think about.” The feel of his flesh as she gripped him under his arm. The crack of his skull hitting the rock when Dolores lost her grip and dropped him.
Daniela pulled Cadie’s hands away from her face and wrapped her arms around her friend. Daniela’s breath stuttered as she held back a sob.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone,” Cadie whispered.
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Then what?”
“My God. You carried that alone? All these years?”
Chush, thud. Chush, thud. Ever since she had received Daniela’s message at the top of the mountain, the past had been pressing closer and closer, surrounding her. Chush, thud. Chush, thud.
“You kept that secret to protect my family.”
Cadie couldn’t speak.
“It must have been killing you.”
Cadie buried her face in Daniela’s hair and tried to calm her breath. Slow and even. In, out. In, out. His soft face, floppy hair. He could have been sleeping.
“Are you okay?” Daniela pulled back and tucked Cadie’s hair behind her ear.
“I will be. But right now, that’s not what we need to focus on. We need to protect your parents.”
Cadie felt dizzy and hot. The road seemed to sway like a mirage ahead of her. She needed to tell Daniela about Sal pulling the gun on Garrett and Garrett aiming his gun at Sal. That Garrett was the one who killed Juan, not Clyde. But it all felt too big to give words to yet. Every step sent pain shooting up her leg, which felt almost too heavy to drag. Just walk.
Daniela slipped an arm around Cadie’s waist to take some pressure off her injured leg. Daniela’s hair smelled of smoke and a trace of floral perfume that reminded her of Daniela’s childhood room.
“Sal found The Poachers’ Code and the map. That’s how she ended up with the gun,” Cadie said.
“The Poachers’ Code.” Daniela looked up at the sky as they walked. “We were such goddamn idiots.”
Waiting for the Night Song Page 29