1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Nine

by Carrie Ann Ryan

  “You think I would have called you if I hated you? I’m having a breakdown here.”

  “You’re not having a breakdown. You’re having a break…in. Wait. That didn’t come out right. What I’m trying to say is—”

  “Just stop trying to say stuff and listen, Danny.”

  “Oh. I get to listen now. Does that mean you’re actually going to talk about what’s really going on with you?”

  “In a minute. What did Annabelle tell you?”

  “That you two were made for each other. That you were practically in love by the night your parents died and when Abel adopted you, it screwed you both up.”

  “Screwed us both up? Is that what she really said? If Abel hadn’t adopted me, I woulda been homeless. Or living with my aunt in Oklahoma City while she turned tricks right in front of me in her trailer.”

  “So, homeless, basically,” Danny says.

  “Yeah,” Caleb answers.

  “But still.”

  “Still what?”

  “I’m just repeating what Annabelle said!”

  “Okay. Fine. What else did she say?”

  “She said she’d call and give you updates on the bar ’cause they wanted you to come back. That they knew Amber’s husband was a piece of dog shit, and she only married him so she wouldn’t have to deal with how she felt about you.”

  “Annabelle said all this?”

  “Yes, Caleb. Apparently you’re the only one who had a hard time figuring any of this out.”

  “I didn’t say I hadn’t figured it out. I just don’t know how to fix any of it.”

  “Same thing. Anyway. She also said there’s only one thing keeping you apart.”

  “Yeah. She’s my sister.”

  “No, Abel. She says both of you are in a boxing match with his ghost. Her words. Not mine. Says you both think if you got together you’d be crapping on his memory.”

  These words hit him like a sucker punch, and that’s a good thing. A sucker punch is exactly what he needs to wake up.

  “Wish I could say out of the mouths of babes, but these are her words, right?”

  “Yeah, also, I’m, like, four years younger than you, dude.”

  Danny smiles.

  “You’re a good guy, you know that, Patterson?” he hears himself say. The words come out of him before he can measure them, but it’s the night for following his instincts, apparently, and saying them out loud makes him feel good. “I give you a lot of grief, but you’re a good guy.”

  “Aw, shut it.”

  “Seriously. I was a dick to you today at the bar, and here you are taking time out from your friends to listen to me whine.”

  “Listening to you whine ages me,” Danny says with a broad grin. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Well, now you know why I’ve been such a loner.”

  Danny spits up beer. It takes Caleb a second to realize the guy’s laughing at him.

  Once he finishes coughing, Danny says, “Dude, you were never a loner. You were always having the other hands at Proby over for cookouts at your cabin. You’d organize all the trips into town. Second an injury looked like it was infected, you were on the phone to Thomas MacKenzie. The reason I went to see you today is ’cause pretty much everyone you met back in Montana wants to know how you’re doing.

  “You’re not a loner, Caleb. A wanderer, maybe. But not a loner. Just ’cause you’ve been running from one woman your whole life doesn’t mean you’re not a people person. You’re one of the biggest people people…or persons… Oh, hell, I don’t know how to say it. But you know what I mean. You love people, is what I’m trying to say. That’s why you’re not going to be able to run from her for very much longer.”

  “Maybe it’s not her I’m running from,” he says.

  “What’s that mean?” Danny asks.

  Even though it’s not his intention, Caleb finds himself looking from happy couple to happy couple. Some of them are leaning in to each other, so close it looks like their eyeballs are about to touch. Whenever he’s in a crowded place, his attention seems to go right to the nearest happy couple, and no matter how hard he fights the urge, his gaze lingers on them while the Goddess of Envy places her cold, invisible hands around his throat.

  There were moments with Theresa. Moments when it seemed like maybe the two of them could pretend their way into being in love. Moments when, if you didn’t know any better and you saw them together in a bar, you might have thought they were as happy and contended as most of the couples in the Hyatt’s atrium bar looked to Caleb right now.

  But for the most part, they were just lonely. Like him, Theresa had convinced herself that true love, the kind you saw in movies and read about in romance novels, was something the universe only offered to other people. People who had their shit together. People who didn’t have so many wounds.

  And that’s what had held them together for a while. A shared belief that the right one, the one for them, had been placed permanently off limits, so why not make a go of the one who was in front of you? That, and their matching wounds.

  Back then, if you’d asked Caleb why he couldn’t be the one Amber loved, he would have told you it was her decision, her choice. After all, she’s the one who’d gone and married someone else. What more proof did you need? Now he knew that was a lie, a lie he’d told himself so he could get comfortable with his decision to run.

  Now he’d seen her desire for him, seen it right where it had been lying just beneath the surface for going on twelve years.

  She wasn’t the one standing in his way.

  Abel was.

  And therein lay the unavoidable contradiction that had defined Caleb’s life—the man who had saved his life was also the one who had shamed him out of pursuing his heart’s desire.

  “Caleb,” Danny says softly. “You still here, man?”

  “The night my parents died, we’d just kissed. For the first time.”

  “You and Amber?”

  “We’d been building toward it all summer. She was… When I’d look at her that summer, something would happen to me. It was like everything about her was more vivid. More there. And when she’d look at me, something would happen to me too. I could feel it in my chest.”

  “You were falling in love with her,” Danny says

  “I was fifteen.”

  “Yeah, you were fifteen and falling in love with her.”

  “But…”

  “But, what?”

  “I took her down to the boat dock with me so I could show her the moon. ’Cause I’d told her how beautiful it looked over the lake at night and she said she wanted me to show her. And ’cause…”

  Motherfuck, he thinks as his vision blurs. Goddamn motherfuck shit. Crying right here in the middle of the bar.

  “I knew my father was gonna die. And so did she. And she knew I couldn’t sleep and she didn’t want me to be alone when I was lying there awake in the other room, so I took her down to the boat dock and when I kissed her it was like… When I kissed her, it was like there’d never been a thing called pain. Like I didn’t even know what the word meant. It was like… It was like she was the only thing that existed.”

  “She still exists, Caleb. And she’s getting divorced.”

  “I’m not finished,” he says, hating the gruff sound of his voice. But if he stops to apologize, he knows he’ll lose his nerve. Knows he won’t finish the story. And if he can’t do anything else right tonight, at least he can do that, finish the damn story for the first time.

  “Few minutes later, Abel got the call about my parents and he came and got us. I don’t remember much after we got back to the house. Except her holding me. I remember that. I remember lying on the bed crying my eyes out. I remember her reaching up and taking my hand. I squeezed it, I think. I squeezed it ’cause even then I wanted her to know that she still existed for me. That she would always exist for me. And then…”

  One time he was horseback riding in the mountains near Proby outside Surre
nder. His mind had wandered as he took in the gorgeous view. At the last possible second, he’d seen the horse’s hooves perched at the edge of a hundred-foot drop. For a few minutes, he hadn’t been able to do anything except quiver and stare into those aspen-fringed jaws of death. That’s how he feels now.

  “Next thing I remember, I was in the car. Abel was driving. But Amber wasn’t there. He said he was driving me to the airport. That a friend of his had a plane and was going to fly us back to Dallas. And all I could say was, Where’s Amber? I remember saying it over and over again. At first, he didn’t say anything. Then he just pulled the car over, got out, and pulled me out of the passenger seat. We were in the middle of this dark stretch of woods where there wasn’t anything for miles and he was just shaking me, shaking me and saying all kinds of angry things. He was so mad I couldn’t tell at first that they were questions he was asking me.

  “Did I want a real family or did I want to end up drunken white trash, dead on the side of the road like my father? Did I want to listen to my dick the way my father had listened to the bottle? ’Cause that’s what it would mean to be with Amber. Amber was going to be my sister and if I fucked that up, I wouldn’t have nothing, he said. No family, no home. Nothing.”

  Danny curses under his breath. Is he trying to contain his reaction because he doesn’t want Caleb to stop telling his story? Caleb's not sure, so he keeps talking.

  “And I just kept yelling at him over and over again, no matter what he said. Where’s Amber? Where’s Amber? And he drew back like he was going to hit me.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. He drove off and left me there instead.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have a watch on me. I thought I could find my way back to the lake house, but I was wrong and I ended up in the woods. Sun was rising by the time he found me. He was half out of his mind by then. Sobbing and crazy and begging for my forgiveness. And what choice did I have? Only other option was my aunt, and she probably would have left me on the side of the road and never come back. Or sold me to some freak for meth.”

  “Jesus, Caleb.”

  “He wasn’t a bad man, Danny. He lost one of his best friends that night.”

  “Still.”

  “He worked so hard to try to keep his men together after they came back from Iraq. But my dad, he was the one Abel couldn’t fix. It’s not like he took his hand to me. My real dad did that plenty.”

  “He left you in the woods, man.”

  “He came back.”

  “After he scared the living shit out of you.”

  “I wasn’t scared. I was something else.”

  “What?”

  “Lost.”

  “And then you were what…found?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Bullshit. He created the situation just so he could fix it. You wouldn’t have been lost if he hadn’t thrown you out of the car.”

  “He wasn’t thinking like that. He was upset.”

  “You’re talking like him because you’re thinking like him, and if you’re thinking like him it means there’s a part of you that still believes what he said to you that night. You think if you go after Amber, you’re going to end up a drunk like your father, dead on the side of the road. You really believe that, Caleb? You really think everything you want is dangerous just ’cause your dad was an alcoholic?”

  He can’t answer.

  “How many things in life have you wanted and not gone for because of what Abel said to you that night?”

  “Sometimes you decide that something else is more important.”

  “Like what? Moving? Again?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Are you a drunk, Caleb? Do you wake up without knowing where you are? Do you lose track of your truck? Do you get in fights you can’t remember starting? Wake up counting the minutes until your next beer?”

  “No,” Caleb whispers.

  “Then you’re not your father.”

  “Still…”

  “Still, what? You’re not your father, Caleb. And Amber isn’t booze. Abel was wrong. He was wrong that night. Hell, lot of people would say what he did to you was downright abusive, but I’ll leave that for you to decide. Point is, he didn’t understand what a drunk really was, and he sure as hell didn’t understand you.”

  “He was a good man who made a mistake,” Caleb says. “And God knows, he made up for it later.”

  “Yeah, okay. I never met him so I can’t say. But if twelve years later, you’re not going after the love of your life because you’re still buying into the bullshit he said to you that night, then the one making the mistake is you, buddy.”

  Caleb wishes he had something in front of him. If not a beer bottle, at least a glass or a bowl of chips. Something he could grip. Something that would make it easier to resist the urge to punch Danny in the face.

  Danny stares right back at him. Baby-faced, for sure, but also cool as a cucumber under the pressure of Caleb’s furious, unrelenting glare. The kid’s not backing down. And so Caleb breathes through it. The anger, the desire to argue with his words and his fists. The desire to turn over the table.

  Because Danny’s right.

  Abel’s not standing in his way.

  Amber’s not standing in his way.

  He’s standing in his own way.

  “It’s almost one in the morning. My room’s got two beds. You want to crash here tonight?”

  “I’d like to drown you in that fountain is what I’d like to do.”

  “Good. That means you know I’m telling the truth.”

  Chapter 8

  Amber wakes from a dream of kissing Caleb to find her mouth full of bedsheets.

  Her bedroom is dark save for the alarm clock, which tells her it’s only three thirty in the morning.

  This was the best she could do? Two hours of fevered dreaming that left her feeling jittery and wired, as if she hadn’t slept at all and didn’t really need to?

  A text or call from either Caleb or her mother would have lit up her cell phone’s display. Even though it’s a dark patch on her nightstand, she grabs for it anyway, unlocks it just to be sure.

  Nothing.

  Well, if I can’t sleep!

  She dials her mother’s home number.

  How many voicemails has she left for the woman already?

  Shouldn’t she start the clock over now that she’s had somewhat of a night’s sleep, however terrible? Fifteen unreturned voicemails the night before, which would make this current call the first official call of—

  “For the love of the baby Jesus, Amber, it’s three thirty! Go to bed! You can yell at me in the morning!”

  “It is morning!”

  “Sunup, then!”

  “How dare you rat me out to—”

  Click.

  Enraged, Amber throws the phone across the room.

  For a terrifying instant, she’s afraid it’s going to smash into the opposite wall and break into several pieces. Instead, it lands on the foot of her bed with a weak thump, a reminder of why she never played softball.

  All hopes of sleep dashed and the source of her current troubles unwilling to remain on the phone with her for longer than ten seconds, Amber sees only one option.

  A brief, frenzied shower and two Diet Cokes later, she grabs the weekend bag she packed the night before and heads to her Sentra. She’s got the driver’s side door half open when she shuts it suddenly, heads back inside the house, grabs four Diet Cokes out of the fridge, gets back in her Sentra and speeds off in the direction of the freeway.

  If she manages to drive straight through to Chapel Springs, she might catch her mother before her first cup of coffee. She speeds up, hoping to get there sooner. Too bad she didn’t bring a pair of cymbals with her. Maybe she can stop and pick one up along the way.

  An hour south of Dallas, her eyelids start to get heavy.

  Are you kidding me? Now? Now I’m tired?


  It’s still dark out, which is why she doesn’t notice the approaching thunderstorm until lightning forks on the horizon. Lightning. Her least favorite thing next to menstrual cramps and snakes.

  Also, I’m tired. Really tried. And getting more tired. And even though this fact seems dramatically unfair, saying so over and over again to herself isn’t making her any less tired.

  A few minutes later, sheeting rain washes the windshield. The taillights in front of her become vague, bleeding suggestions. She’s got another two and a half hours to Chapel Springs. Maybe three, if this weather keeps up.

  If I were home in bed, I’d be wide awake and staring at the ceiling. But now I’m getting sleepy. So very, very sleepy.

  Traffic slows to a crawl. Traffic! At four in the morning.

  Unfair. All of it. So unfair. She just wants to get to her mother, that’s all. All she wants to do is rant and yell and scream at her mother for breaking her confidence, thereby blowing the lid off a potful of feelings she’s tried to keep at a low simmer for twelve years.

  She’s going to get herself killed if she doesn’t pull over.

  The motel she pulls into is the kind of place where people go to have one-night stands with men who love face masks and recreational chainsaws.

  “Can I get a room until this storm lets up?” she asks when she goes into the front office.

  The kid behind the front desk looks like a twelve-year-old playing a game of Let’s Be A Motel Clerk. He’s even slicked his hair into a perfect side part.

  “We’re not that kind of place,” he says.

  “Not what kind of place? Aren’t you a motel?”

  “Yes, but are you in some kind of trouble? Is somebody following you?”

  “What are you? Twelve years old? I just want a room. I don’t do lighting all that well, okay?” And then she catches sight of herself in the reflective glass behind the clerk and realizes she looks like she’s been struck by it.

  No wonder the kid seems terrified. Apparently she started thinking about something else when she was in the middle of drying her hair after her frenzied shower, because even after getting rained on, it still looks wild and teased, like she’s a backup singer out of an 80’s music video who’s been run over by a car. Only now does she remember that she actually started to put makeup on before thinking I don’t need to be wearing makeup to strangle my mother. Problem is, she didn’t bother to take off any of the makeup she applied before changing her mind, and now half of her face is running with it, making her look a little like that dog that used to sell beer when she was a girl.