by Deborah Reed
Her mother looked at Annie and her mouth fell open as if Annie were the one who’d said it. As if Annie were the one who should apologize. Then she laced her fingers across her face and her back shook and Annie didn’t know if she was laughing or crying. Either way was bad. Her words were muffled when she said, “You know what I’m talking about, Calder. You nearly got both of you killed by that Pinckney boy.”
Now they were getting somewhere.
Her mother threw her arms out at her sides. “I could have lost every single one of you that day.” She wiped her face and stumbled in a circle, seeming to consider this. “Hey!” she suddenly barked, like the drunks downtown near the train station. “Hey. I’m lucky,” she said. “We’re all lucky. We’re the lucky ones here.”
“What happened, Calder?” Annie asked.
He scrunched his eyes and bobbed up and down on his heels.
“Stand still and tell me!” She took a step toward him.
“Tell her.” Her mother tottered away and flung an arm into the air behind her as if to ward off a bird. “About the day your father went into the hospital and never came out. That day.” She pointed at her head with her finger, pecking her skull the way people do when they’ve got a bright idea. Only it wasn’t a bright idea she was referring to. It was the tumor in her father’s head.
Annie jammed her fists onto her hips and glared at Calder. Her dress pulled and the threads gave one last time until it finally fit comfortably across her chest.
He cleared his throat and blinked.
“Stop it!” she screamed.
His mouth jerked sideways. “I thought he was trying to hurt you. He had a hold of your hand and was spitting. I didn’t know what he was doing. You were laying there like you were dead and I heard him spitting and I ran as fast as I could.”
“What do you mean?”
“I jumped on his back to get him to stop.”
“He was spitting on me?”
“No. I thought he was hurting you.”
She looked to her mother for an answer.
“He was saving your life, sweetheart.” She rubbed her eyes like she was only tired now. Tired from making such a big meal on Thanksgiving. “He scraped the stinger out and spit in the dirt to make mud. He was trying to pack it on the sting to draw the venom out. His mother’s allergic just like you.”
“I didn’t know!” Calder said. “You were on the ground and he had a hold of your hand.”
Annie couldn’t speak.
Calder held still.
“That’s where your bruises came from?” she finally said. “You never fell through the tree like you said?”
“No.”
“He was trying to save me?”
Calder blinked and cleared his throat.
Her mother drew in a long breath and sighed. “That Pinckney boy laid him out flat.” Her face twisted to the side and her eyes were wet in the sunlight and Annie knew she didn’t want to think about that day for another second. But she went on. “It’s a good thing,” she said and Annie looked at her, really looked at her for the first time in months. The ends of her hair were dull and frayed. Her dress hung off her shoulder and a bony knot popped out where her round shoulder used to be. Her collarbone scooped beneath her skinny throat.
Fresh sweat rolled down Annie’s sides. She glanced at Calder but couldn’t stand to see the humiliation in his face. It took a lot to humiliate Calder. But even as a part of her wanted to hold him, to mess up his already messy hair and give his shoulder a shove and forget any of this ever happened, another part of her had already walked away and left him standing there alone. All this time he’d lied. She understood he’d tried to do the right thing, but he’d lied to her and if that wasn’t bad enough he’d nearly gotten her killed.
She closed her eyes and imagined what it would have been like had she vanished from the world with her father that day. It felt like spring, blossoms and seventy degrees, like funny stories around a Sunday table, like birdhouses and cuss words and her father’s aftershave and wearing a blue dress with white stitching. She could have stayed there, easily, tucked inside that small opening forever. But she opened her eyes and pushed back into the heat, back to her mother and brother in the yard when she realized that no matter how long she lived, every day of her life would be a day for which she had Josh Pinckney to thank.
NINETEEN
The Miata ran out of gas and shut off sometime in the night, and Owen has never felt the kind of cold he feels when early morning seeps in and he peels himself away from the steering wheel he’s been sleeping against. Fingers, knees ache deep inside the bones. His dry lips pull apart when he coughs, and his breath comes out in great white puffs. His watch says five minutes to six. A varnish of condensation coats the windows. Beyond them, a blinding white light.
Owen moves to open the door, and he’s stiff from his head to the base of his back. He coughs as he rises from the car and shivers profoundly when the air touches his neck.
He stops. Something creaks beneath his shoe. Flakes the size of down feathers, trees covered in crystalline white, branches of glass along the field. Snow. It’s snowing. Must be an inch on the ground. “Christ Almighty,” he says and coughs until he catches his breath.
The air smells faintly of burning gas and chimney smoke. Owen scoops the snow into his hands. Enough to pack a snowball, and his fingers burn with cold as he presses it into shape. Annie’s green Land Cruiser pops through all the white. It’s parked beside the house. She must have driven past him in the night while he slept. He tosses the snowball back to the ground and it falls apart.
The black Suburban with the two guards from last night has been replaced by a white Suburban with silver pin striping. A young man sits behind the wheel snapping photos of the snow with his cell phone.
Owen pulls his own phone from his pocket. The battery has gone dead. He steps through the snow and knocks on the window of the Suburban. His socks are already wet at the ankles.
“My phone is dead,” he says as the window comes down.
“What’s that?” The man is blond and pimply and can’t be more than eighteen years old.
“I need to use your phone. Mine’s dead. And I ran out of gas.”
The young man shakes his head at the snow. “Can you believe this?”
The wind sends an icy chill up the back of Owen’s jacket and he coughs again, deeper than the last.
Maybe the man is taken by the snow, or just naive when it comes to matters of security. He hands his phone over without a word.
Owen pecks in Annie’s cell number with a stiff finger. It rings and rings and he wonders if she’s watching through her father’s old binoculars, laughing, letting it ring some more.
“Yes?” she answers like a blow to the head. His knees bow beneath him.
“Babe,” he says before remembering he shouldn’t call her that. “Tell him to open the gate. Please.” His hand shakes when he hands the open phone back.
“Ms. Walsh?” the young man says. “OK…No, he doesn’t.”
No, he doesn’t what?
The man climbs out of the Suburban and unlocks the gate.
The driveway looks as if it just got longer. The man doesn’t offer a ride. Owen wouldn’t take it if he did. He needs to work his legs. He needs to think.
He buttons his jacket and begins the trek toward her. A crow flies overhead like a tiny black cutout in a giant poster of white. Flakes fall onto his face and burn like pieces of white ash. He feels faint and nauseous, coughing with every few breaths. His head has the funny, faraway feel of fever.
He pictures himself inside the warm house with its soft chairs and plush rugs, the round angles of tables and instruments, the smooth round angles of Annie. He feels warmer now, even as the snow flips and melts inside his shoes. He thinks of the August when the air-conditioning broke in the middle of the night and he and Annie barely slept from the heat. They were sticky and bad-tempered when they finally quit trying at dawn. It was already
pushing eighty degrees, and Annie had the idea of driving out to Cypress Springs before the park opened. The thought of a cold spring made them giddy and silly, and they rushed from the house laughing, each with a towel in hand. When they reached the spring an orange and pink sunrise was ringing the tops of the Cypress trees and reflecting off the icy blue water. It reflected the lush palmettos and oaks, and they could see the swarms of mosquitoes in the surrounding woods where it was warmer. Nothing seemed real, everything burst with color, and the golden glow of the morning sun illuminated the air as if it, too, were rising up from the ground like the spring. Detour jumped out of the car, scrambled under the gate, and barreled into the water. He swam back and forth as if practicing for a race. Owen and Annie ran around the locked gate and left their clothes on a picnic table and jumped naked into the spring that was so clear and blue they could have been jumping into the sky. They screamed at the cold and laughed and splashed like children, and when they looked down they could see yards past their feet all the way to the limestone.
Cold burns the moisture running from Owen’s nose. He swipes it with the back of his sleeve. Even now in the snow and freezing temperature he can still see Annie’s tanned face, the white lines across her shoulders where her bathing suit would have been, her round breasts, the whole of her naked body beneath the clear water. She was happy, and so much of that happiness had been due to him. He’d pulled her against him in the water and she closed her legs around his waist and gave out a small, sweet-sounding sigh and they kissed on the mouth and the sides of each other’s necks and she told him that she loved him in a playful voice and he was about to tell her the same, except right then his love felt a lot more serious than hers. He’d wanted her to know that, to understand just how deep it ran, how heavy it sometimes felt to love her, but he never got the chance because Detour barked and leapt onto the shore toward the park ranger’s truck pulling in.
They’d scrambled from the water and back into their clothes while the ranger waited, shaking his head behind the wheel. Once they were dressed the ranger got out with his hands on his hips and came toward them in his stiff brown uniform, still shaking his head. “I won’t write the two of you a fine if you promise this is the last I’ll see of your bare asses in my spring.”
Owen apologized for both of them, and the ranger saluted as they hurried for the car and drove away. They laughed the better part of the way home. But Owen had always felt that something had been lost that day. Something he never quite got back.
He walks in the snow and thinks of the aquifers below him, so pure and cold beneath the whole of Florida. They spring so easily to the surface, no effort at all, just knowing where to go and when. He imagines the blue water bubbling up and out onto the white snow like a blue Sno-Cone. He knows this is not how it would be, but he imagines it this way, blue instead of white as if the sky has switched with the ground. He’s warm now, hot even, sweating beneath his coat, pores like aquifers releasing all that’s inside him, and he thinks that what he feels is happiness, seeing himself closed up inside the house, hearing his own voice whisper into Annie’s ear. It has never run so deep.
When Annie got home from dinner with Sidsel it was past eleven and the only cars at her gate were the guard’s white Suburban and a bluish Miata she didn’t recognize. The news van had finally gone home and the other stragglers, amateur reporters in small sedans, had apparently given up and gone, too. She stopped for the guard to let her in and he came to the window and told her there was only the one guy left. He pointed to the Miata whose windows were full of moisture. “He must be about frozen to death in there,” he said. “The car stopped running a while ago but he refused to leave.”
Annie could see the shape of a figure in a tan jacket sleeping against the steering wheel. “Knock on the window again,” she said. “Remind him of his wife and kids. It’s Christmas, for heaven’s sake.”
She hadn’t planned to be gone so long, and when she opened the front door it was so dark she could barely see in front of her. She hadn’t left any lights on for Detour. It was quiet. Too quiet. Not even a bark at the creak of the door.
She called out. The furnace was running and she could hear the brass vent with the loose screws rattling in the bedroom. “Here, buddy,” she said, feeling the dread crawling up her neck.
Her boots squeaked in the dark as she moved through the living room, kitchen, and bathroom, flipping on lights the way her mother had done when she’d wake from a dream of Annie’s father, sure he was only hiding, playing a trick, a harmless, great big joke. “Detour?” Annie shouted. “Detour, come!”
From the bedroom doorway she saw the outline of his body on the braided rug near the bed. The room smelled sharply of urine. It smelled of sickness. She turned on the bedside lamp.
He blinked at the light in his eyes. A dark wet circle soaked the rug beneath him. He’d lost control of his bladder, and from the looks of it, his eyes seemed to be the only part of him he could move.
Annie dropped to the floor and lifted his head into her lap. His rib cage barely rose with each breath. She stroked his long ear, and his eyes rolled up to look at her with that same guilty look he’d had as a puppy when he chewed her leather sandal, when he scratched a hole in the upholstery of the bedroom chair, trying to reach his ball between the cushions. He felt bad about wetting the rug. She was sure he was feeling bad about what was coming, too.
It didn’t seem like eleven years could have passed since Calder had brought him to her. But the gum maple Calder had planted in front of the guide-dog school was now huge, throwing shade across the yellow-spotted lawn. He’d gone in after seeing a sign about puppies who’d failed their training, and the next thing Annie knew he was in her driveway holding a gangly golden creature with a knot of bone on his head. Her first thought was that the puppy didn’t look right. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked. His ears were long for a Retriever’s, his jawline slightly large. Maybe there was hound in the line, or maybe he was simply malformed. He’d walked over as if he were already old and laid his big head down across her foot and fell asleep. “They named him Detour at the school,” Calder had said. “How were they supposed to know that this was where he was headed?”
“You’re a good boy,” Annie told him on the rug, stroking his ear.
He didn’t wag his tail. He’d never failed to wag his tail when she spoke these words.
A sudden convulsion of tears took her breath. His eyes were fixed on hers and she had to turn away. She recalled how frightened he’d been when the hail came crashing down on her birthday. She squeezed his neck and buried her face behind his ear. His breathing came in uneven puffs and she wanted to comfort him with words, but tears got the best of her voice and she wailed in a way she’d only done a few times in her life when she couldn’t catch a breath, and the bellowing she made seemed to come from an animal in the woods. It took a while before she could make herself stop. She pulled in long breaths of air, and when the anguish slowly turned to calm she leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Let’s hope there’s a guy named Kearney who’ll throw sticks in the water for you.”
If Calder were there he’d tell her how corny she was, but it wouldn’t be what he meant and they’d both know it. She could practically hear his voice, and it threw her into another round of tears she had to work her way out of.
She stroked Detour’s head and his eyes closed and it didn’t take more than a moment for him to slip through an opening and go wherever he was going because all of a sudden his fur felt like nothing more than an empty coat in her hands.
She wakes to find herself on the floor in her heavy jacket and boots, Detour’s body lying next to her. The phone rings in her pocket. She sits up in the strange white light of the room. It’s morning but she can’t tell what time it is. Early, she’s sure of that. She brings the phone to her ear, more out of habit, less out of understanding what is happening. Detour has gone completely stiff against her, his tongue pressed into his teeth. The sight jerks
her fully awake.
“Yes?” she says, though this is never how she answers the phone.
“Babe,” a voice says. Annie looks around the room for someone or something help her understand. Owen’s voice is in her ear. Owen is asking her to open the gate.
And then suddenly the security guard is on the line. “Ms. Walsh?”
“How are you?” she asks, as if on autopilot. There is something carnival-like in the way her head is going round and round.
“OK,” he says.
“Does he have anyone with him?” A strange question, perhaps from the back of her mind? Is she wondering if he’s brought his wife?
“No. He doesn’t.”
Owen expects to find her waiting at the door but instead the door is ajar and snow has lined the open space on the floor. He quickly shuts the door behind him and pounds his feet into the floor mat. “Annie?” The house smells like raw wood. He removes his shoes and looks around the living room. The furniture has been stripped. The mantel, too. The heat and smell of resin throw him into a coughing fit. He braces himself on the arm of the leather sofa and remembers the day he and Annie toted it in from the back of his truck. She’d cut her hand on a loose tack underneath and he fetched her a Band-Aid and kissed her temple and told her to be careful. “Careful, careful,” he now mouths the words.
It’s possible his fever is quite high. He left this house with a fever, and he’s returned with one, but that’s the least of what makes him feel like no time at all has passed since he called this place his home.
“Annie?” He finds her in the bedroom. It smells like urine and the cold that blew through the open front door. She’s on the floor in her coat, her back against the bed, her scarf in a pile next to her. She’s looking down at Detour’s head in her lap. His eyes are closed and his front legs jut straight out as if he’s stretching. It’s clear he’s not.