by Deborah Reed
TWENTY-ONE
Owen snores softly in Annie’s bed. She’s turned up the heat, and the moisture on the windows begins to drip. Streams of clear glass reveal slivers of snow, a collage of winter plastered around the room. Annie pulls a duvet from the pine armoire, and the smell of sawdust lifts into the air when she opens it across Owen’s body. He doesn’t stir, not even when the magnifying glass clangs against his phone in her pocket. The bedroom door closes with a small click behind her.
It can’t be as simple as this. She blows dust off the neck of her guitar in the living room. It can’t be as simple as him walking through the door. She plucks the low E-string, the sound so foreign, so familiar that even the furniture seems to take note.
She needs new strings.
But first things first. Dr. Collins lives nearby on several acres that Calder maintains. He’s been the Walshes’ family doctor for as long as Annie can remember, and she thinks nothing of asking him to check on Owen. “I can be there in an hour,” he tells her on the phone. He even sounds a little eager. He’s always had a crush on Annie’s mother and maybe he thinks she’s there. “No less than two,” he says.
Within seconds she’s out the door and in the car, driving cautiously to get a feel for the grip of the tires beneath her. But by the time she passes the security guard it’s clear that the Land Cruiser is more than capable of trekking through snow.
Fifteen minutes later she’s standing in front of the shellacked pine counter in Willy’s Guitar Shop and Willy’s asking bronze or coated, light gauge or medium. Her nearly colorless reflection appears in the long mirror behind him. Her eyes feel bulbous and dry, her teeth unclean. She’s wearing yesterday’s clothes.
“Coated. Medium,” she says, and takes a mint from the bowl on the counter, rolls it around her tongue, and crunches loudly, echoing the lively pulse beneath her skin.
“Good to see you,” Willie says, and they both know what it is they’re not saying and that’s just fine. Willy is an old-fashioned Southern gentleman. He won’t be asking questions. He won’t be handing out advice.
Back home she peers through the crack in her bedroom door. Owen is right where she left him—snoring, arms thrown to his sides.
Light floods the large window in the living room, so still and tempered by the porch, silver and blue from the snow. Annie lifts her guitar by the neck and with a snap of her wrist spins the first peg to loosen the string. She clips it near the top with wire cutters, and the string launches wildly into the air from the release of so much pressure.
She remembers how the threading of metal on metal, like nails on a chalkboard, always made Owen’s teeth ache. She zips the string through the eye without care, winds it around the twisting peg, and moves on to the next.
When she’s finished tuning the new strings she lifts the curvy underside of the guitar into her lap. There’s no question that she’s missed its rich palette of sound, the color and fullness, the emotion that lasts long after words have inevitably failed. But she’s also missed the weight of it, the smell of wood and sweat and metal on her fingers. So much like a lover, she’s missed the feel of it in her arms.
A knock at the door jolts her back into the room. She places the guitar on the stand.
Dr. Collins enters in a flurry of cheer. He immediately wraps her against his overcoat. “Where’s the patient, Annie Lou?” Her middle name is Louise, and he’s called her Annie Lou for as long as she can remember. The familiar rasp of his voice, the smell of his aftershave reminds her of childhood fevers, of tonsillitis, the bee sting in the grove.
She shows him to the bedroom and sits opposite on the bed as he opens Owen’s jacket and shirt. He places a stethoscope to his chest. Owen wakes with a groggy hello. He even smiles and pats Annie’s hand before drifting away again. They roll him onto his side facing Annie so Dr. Collins can listen to his back. Owen’s shirt falls all the way open and Annie is shocked at just how thin he’s become.
“He’s likely got walking pneumonia,” Dr. Collins says, listening to points on his back. “Can you take a deep breath for me, Owen?”
Owen opens his eyes and draws in a breath that makes him cough.
“Again.”
Another cough and more listening to points on his back, and Dr. Collins finally draws the stethoscope from his ears. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, but he ought to get an x-ray if he doesn’t start improving with antibiotics.” Owen helps to button his own shirt and there’s a quick moment of recognition of his wedding band. The doctor’s eyes lock onto Annie’s. She glances down and rubs her empty finger before catching herself.
He digs through his bag on the floor and then hands her a bottle of pills. “I figured he might need these. Make sure he takes every last one. It doesn’t look like he’s been taking care of himself.”
Dr. Collins gathers his things and they meet at the front door. “I think the man’s exhausted more than anything,” he says.
He’s lost sleep over what he’s done, Annie thinks. Lost his appetite, maybe even a little of his mind. This whole time she’s imagined him healthy and happy. Tanned and carefree. And all this time he’s been nothing more than a rope fraying through his young wife’s hands.
“Can I get you something? Some coffee? Tea?”
“No, thank you. I’ve got some last-minute shopping to do.”
“Thank you so much for doing this.”
“It’s the least I could do.” He buttons his jacket. “Well. Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room here, Annie Lou. How the hell did Calder get mixed up with that murder?”
She can still see Calder as a seven-year-old boy, sitting on the table in Dr. Collins’s office. Along his jaw, a giant knot with a one-inch gash. A batter lost his grip on the bat while Calder was playing catcher. Doctor Collins leaned in to take a closer look. “How the hell did you get mixed up in something like this?” he asked.
“Well,” Calder said in all seriousness, “people don’t always have good sense.”
Annie explains as best she can that it’s true what the papers are saying. Calder was in fact seeing the man’s wife. “So in answer to your question—apparently love is how he got mixed up in this.”
“That boy could no more harm a flea on a pig than kill a man.”
“And they’ll see that. It’ll all be over soon,” she says, and maybe it’s the fact that he’s a doctor, a man who shows up to fix them when they’re broken, or the fact that Owen is right there on the other side of the wall and he’s going to be fine, or the simple fact that her guitar has new strings. Whatever the reason, she feels a wave of reassurance for the first time since Calder’s arrest.
“How about your mother?” he asks. “How’s she holding up?”
“You sure I can’t get you some tea?”
“No, thank you ma’am. I’ve got to get going.” He rests his hand on the doorknob.
“She’s fine, I guess. She’s stronger than she used to be.”
He nods several times, pulls in a deep breath, and Annie can practically see the sticky details of her family’s past spinning through his head. He glances around the room. “Where’s Detour?”
No sooner does she tell him than his arms are wrapped around her again. She gives him one final squeeze and their conversation comes to an end with hopes of a Merry Christmas anyway. “At least we have the snow,” she says before remembering the acres of orange and lemon trees Calder planted on his land.
She watches the falling snow as he drives away, and then she closes the door and stands listening to the silence. Even after Owen left her there’d still been the jangle of Detour’s tags when he scratched his ears, his claws clicking across the wood floors, the old moans of his dreams.
TWENTY-TWO
Six months after Annie saw Joshua in Lukeman’s he appeared on her front porch. In place of the gallon of milk was a poinsettia. It was two days before Christmas. Annie had just turned sixteen.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
He wore
a jean jacket and his hair was slightly longer than the time before. His freckles were pale without the summer sun. He was taller and smelled even better than fabric softener. She imagined his aunt giving him the early gift of aftershave to cancel out the odor of the other Pinckneys in the room.
He thrust the poinsettia into her arms. She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t think. The red cellophane embarrassed her when it filled the silence with a crunch.
His aunt waited in the car in the driveway. She wore a red scarf and looked even more like Sabrina Duncan. Charlie’s Angel. Ready at the wheel. She waved against the windshield. Annie waved back. The Beatles played loudly on the stereo inside the car.
“Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Annie said.
“She loves the Beatles.”
“Not a bad thing.”
“No.” He smiled. “You listen to a lot of music?”
“All the time.”
“You play anything?”
“Guitar.”
He looked surprised. Maybe he was expecting her to say the flute. “Electric?” he asked.
She laughed. “Acoustic. I don’t think I could even write a song for an electric guitar.”
“You write songs, too?”
“A little.” Though the truth was she hardly did much else.
Calder suddenly towered at her shoulder. This time of year the postman knocked on the door and handed them gifts from their mother’s relatives up north. Nail kits and bubble baths for Annie, money clips and pocket flashlights for Calder. He’d been expecting another Christmas box of things they’d never use, and here was a teenage boy, and Annie, holding a poinsettia.
Joshua took a step back and nodded a small greeting toward Calder. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
Annie looked down at the velvety red leaves. Heat swelled beneath her skin. “You remember Josh Pinckney?” she said, breaking into a sweat. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “He goes by Joshua now.” The recognition slowly spread across Calder’s face, and she could tell he was trying to keep still.
Calder was taller than Joshua but nearly the same size across the chest, which didn’t say a whole lot for either one of them.
“Oh,” Calder said. “Nice.” He looked at Joshua’s aunt in the car, and then he turned for the kitchen and Annie knew it was so he could blink his eyes in private.
Joshua glanced at the yard while his aunt busied herself digging in her purse on the dash. Annie didn’t know what was expected of her. She didn’t understand why he was there.
She studied her own yard, overgrown and littered with tree debris. She gazed at the woods beyond and cleared her throat. Joshua did the same. The sky felt high and empty. Cold and clear and blue.
“So. How’s it going?” she finally asked.
“Good. I was just, we stopped on the way and picked up a few of these.” He motioned to the poinsettia. “I thought I’d just drop one by.” He nodded continuously and she nodded with him.
He glanced at his aunt, and she gave him an apologetic smile and tapped her watch.
“I can’t stay.” He leaned into her ear. For a second she thought he was going to kiss her. She had never been kissed. She froze with fear. “There’s a number tucked inside the cellophane,” he whispered, and put his hand across hers on the poinsettia. He left it there long enough for her to consider when the last time was that someone had touched her. It must have been years but it seemed like never since she’d felt something so tender. He drew his hand away, and cold air swept against the shape where it’d been. He straightened up and said, “I’ll be a senior in the fall.”
“Nice. You’re almost done then.”
“I got into a private school upstate. That’s where I’ll be going,” he said, and it suddenly felt as if she’d been waiting all this time for him to show up here, although she hadn’t really thought of him much at all; but just then it seemed as if she’d been thinking on him every day, and now that he was finally here he’d only come to tell her he was going away. “Anyway. I thought maybe we could talk sometime on the phone. If you want.” She squeezed the poinsettia against her chest and thought of how ugly he’d once been. She thought of how it would really be something if they could all transform themselves the way he had.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So you’ll call?”
“OK.”
She waited for the car to disappear before she shut the door and set the plant on the kitchen table. Then she reached inside the cellophane and found the small fold of paper.
“What the hell was he doing here?” Calder asked as he walked into the room.
She squeezed the paper inside her fist. “I don’t know.”
“How’d you even know it was him? He looks completely different. He looks normal.”
“I saw him last summer at Lukeman’s. His folks have visitation rights and want to see him every other weekend.” Those were Joshua’s words from six months ago, and she felt a small thrill at having them inside her mouth.
“How come you never said anything?”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“You didn’t want me to know.”
“Don’t be silly. Why wouldn’t I want you to know?”
“I saw the way you two were looking at each other, Annie. For God’s sake, he’s still Josh Pinckney no matter what he looks like or what he calls himself or who he’s living with. Did you forget all the hell he put us through?”
For all the kindness Calder had once shown the Pinckneys in the face of their cruelty, he now showed an equal amount of disdain toward kindness.
But no one could have been more shocked than Annie at what was happening. A warm excitement still thrashed inside her body at his presence on the porch, at having had him so close to the place she ate and slept and played music. “Did you forget that he saved my life?”
Calder tightened his jaw. “Did you forget that you tried to kill him?”
She snatched up the poinsettia and took it to her room and set it on her dresser where she could see it from her bed. She wanted so badly in that moment to have her mother back. To tell her how Joshua had changed. How he’d touched her hand and ever since her stomach wouldn’t stop twisting. The heat in her face seemed as if it’d never cool.
She pushed back against her pillows and took a deep breath and opened the piece of paper to find the moisture in the cellophane had smeared the ink and the last two numbers had disappeared.
TWENTY-THREE
Annie doesn’t sleep with him. It doesn’t seem right. He’s hardly been awake in all the hours he’s been here, and she feels it would be taking advantage just to crawl in next to him, if only to watch him sleep. Instead she lies awake most of the night in the guest room listening to him snore and cough in her bed down the hall. She gets up several times to help him drink water and broth and take another pill, and then she parts the curtains in the guest room and watches the snow fall in the dark. Each time she looks for Detour on the floor, and each time she remembers why he’s not there, and that Owen is here instead, and it’s through this revolving door that she swings until the sun rises behind another front of snow clouds.
It’s Christmas Eve. She leaves the house before Owen wakes, to buy a small balsam fir, no taller than herself, from John Smiley, whose lot is next to his house with a year-round sign that reads, Smiley’s Tree Lot, Come Get It. The streets are mostly deserted. It snowed all night and there must be four inches on the ground. She doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t want to listen to all the talk on the radio about the damage and loss of the crops.
She lugs the tree inside and wrestles it into the stand in the corner near the window where she hides its lopsided gap against the wall. She lights a fire, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and brings in the decorations from the garage. She is nearly done decorating the tree when she hears him stirring in the bedroom.
“How are you feeling?” she asks from the bedroom doorway. He’s a stranger, and yet m
ore familiar than anyone she knows.
The room smells stale from his coughs, his clothes. He sits on the side of the bed rubbing his bloodshot eyes, and then he looks at her with a seriousness that causes the huge smile on her face to shrink.
“Better. I think. What time is it?”
“Almost noon.”
“Shit. I need to make a call.” He doesn’t need to say to whom.
“Well. You know where the phone is,” she says, feeling unsteady, feeling the need to run into the living room and pick up her guitar and hold it against her like a child caught in a custody fight. “There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she says.
In the living room she snatches up the last few ornaments, places them on the tree without care, and drags the empty box to the front porch. The sight of snow loosens her shoulders and she steps back inside to the smell of pine and burning maple logs and fresh coffee. She plugs in the white tree lights, and they reflect the silvery cast of the needles and it feels like Christmas. She pours herself another coffee and sits on the floor in front of the fire. She brushes her hand back and forth through Detour’s loose fur in the rug.
Then she hears Owen yelling on the phone. She can’t make out what he says, only coughing and a muffled yes and so do I, yes, yes, yes.
He hangs up and goes into the bathroom and she hears the shower run and his bare feet skid against the tub when he turns around in there; and after a while the water shuts off and the medicine cabinet opens and he must have found the packet of new toothbrushes because there’s the familiar sound of him brushing his teeth. He taps it on the side of the porcelain when he’s finished and she hears it land in the holder on the sink. The medicine cabinet opens again, and next she hears him gargle and cough and spit and the water running and then it’s off again.