by Karen Swan
‘Meg hasn’t said anything.’ He glanced across at her, apology in his eyes, and Meg felt the fibres in her muscles stiffen. She had never seen Jonas like this before. Up till now, his calmness, his intellect, had been passive, tolerant and wise, but here in this moment, it felt menacing, like having a shark swim beneath them. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know. But your greatest mistake is in front of all of us, there for anyone to see. I saw it for myself just now.’
Meg watched as Lucy’s high colour drained away, and she suddenly appeared to be on the back foot.
‘Saw what, Jonas?’ Dolores asked.
Jonas didn’t take his gaze off Lucy. ‘The resemblance.’
‘What?’ Barbara whispered. ‘What resemblance? Who . . . ?’
The baby began to cry again, disturbed no doubt by their raised voices, the tension in the bungalow making the air crackle and split. Jonas turned his head in the direction of the baby’s cries before looking back at them all, his eyes coming to rest sadly on Meg.
Her lips parted as she realized, her hands flying to her mouth. ‘No—’
In that moment when the film had stopped on the frame of Mitch’s face, his goggles off at last, he had seen the likeness so clearly he’d been astounded no one else had. He’d seen the baby in the square only for a few minutes that first night, but even then it had struck him – a brown-eyed baby born to two blue-eyed parents. Of course it was possible. They might both be carriers of the recessive blue allele, and eye colour could change over time. But the baby’s name, Lucy’s dominance, her jealousy of Meg, Tuck’s faltering swagger . . . ? Even without the baby, he’d drawn a worrying conclusion about the friendship dynamic. There was a certain logic to what was going on.
Barbara folded over, dissolving into tears, and Dolores rushed across to put an arm round her. Jonas wasn’t sure Meg had heard, or understood. She hadn’t moved at all – not an expression had flitted over her face, not a finger had twitched, not a foot stepped back; she even appeared to be holding her breath . . . Jonas went over to her, half expecting her to pass out.
‘Meg,’ he murmured, as from the corner of his eye he saw Tuck sink to the ground, as felled and deathly pale as if he’d been struck with an axe; it was another question answered. On the way over here, as he had turned the discovery over in his mind, he had wondered whether Tuck had – on some level – known the truth. That day they’d done the film workshop together and had lunch, he’d seemed like a man looking for a new purpose – desperately applying himself to the tough business of adventure film-making – his friendly smile overwriting a palpable desperation. He wasn’t yet thirty and yet his prime had already been and gone – a handsome guy whose looks were beginning to fade, drinking too much and finding reasons not to go home. On some molecular level, had he known he was raising another man’s child? His best friend’s? But now, as he watched Tuck’s shoulders begin to heave, his face hidden in his hands, Jonas could see in the starkest of terms that he hadn’t.
But it was another moment before he realized Tuck wasn’t crying. He peered closer, just as Tuck dropped his hands away and unfurled like a bud, throwing his head back as he laughed.
Everyone stilled as Tuck grew in the room, lifting first one leg and planting the foot flat on the ground, then the other, until he was standing, head still tipped back, his arms stretching outwards like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio.
‘Stop it!’ Lucy yelled, as he continued to laugh, beginning to turn on the spot. ‘What are you doing? Stop it!’ She ran at him, her fists pounding and flailing at his chest but he just grabbed them as easily as if she were a child and held them away from him, her skin blanching where he squeezed. ‘You’re hurting me,’ she whimpered.
‘Good.’
No one did anything, not even Barbara. They all just watched as Tuck – battle-bloodied, his face already bruising, eyes bloodshot, the deep gash across the bridge of his nose beginning to cake – stared down at her with a contempt that made Lucy fall into silence, disbelief and then despair crossing her face as she saw where they were now. The end of the road. ‘No . . .’
‘Thank you.’
She was wrong-footed again. ‘What?’
‘You’ve given me exactly what I wanted. I’m free again.’
‘Tuck . . .’ she whispered desperately, her features beginning to crumple. ‘Wait . . .’
But he released his grip on her with almost violent dismissal, breaking the cycle of make-up/break-up for the final time. He reached for an envelope that had been lying, unnoticed, in a corner on the floor, and held it out to Meg. Her name was on it. ‘Take what’s in the letter. I want it this way. I’m starting over.’
Meg, seemingly in a trance, couldn’t even lift her hands and Jonas took it from him instead, his eyes coming straight back to Meg. He was worried about her. She was as pale as a snowy sky, her breathing too shallow as her body tried to keep up with her brain. He hadn’t wanted her to know, hadn’t wanted to have to be the one to say it – but Lucy had gone too far. She’d had to be stopped.
‘Mitch . . . ?’ Meg murmured.
Tuck took a sidestep, positioning himself in Meg’s line of sight, forcing her to look up at him. ‘Meg, he loved you. You remember that, OK? You were all he could ever think about. You guys weren’t like me and her.’ He was quiet for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts, process the revelation himself. His life, perhaps more than any other, had been changed most in the past few minutes. ‘Whatever it was that happened between them, my guess is it was a one-time thing.’
‘No—’
‘Yes. When we spoke on the phone the night of the storm, he said there was something he needed to tell me, something he needed to tell me in person. I thought he wanted out of the business. We were supposed to meet at the studio the next afternoon but . . . well.’ He shrugged. They all knew what had happened then. ‘Ever since then, it’s been killing me not knowing what he wanted to say.’ He paused again and as his knee-jerk first response of exhilaration began to subside, Jonas could see the devastation in his eyes. ‘I guess now we do. I don’t know why what happened between them, happened, but I do know Mitch loved us both, Meg. It was only a week till the wedding and he would’ve wanted a clean slate. He wouldn’t have been prepared to live with lies.’
‘Tuck, do you want us to call the police?’ Dolores asked, her voice soft.
‘No . . . just want out of . . . ew start . . .’ Tuck’s voice drifted away from Meg’s ear in fragments.
Mitch. Her mind kept snagging on him, as caught fast as silk on a nail. Something wasn’t right, something was vying for her attention; it was something that woman had said in the hotel lobby, but what . . . ? Meg tried to recall her words, her eyes on Barbara as she hugged Tuck.
And then it came to her – the one discrepancy that made the official story collapse like a house of cards. The lie exposed. The truth revealed.
‘You opened the kitchens for them,’ Meg said quietly, looking straight at Barbara.
Barbara turned, and seeing the comment was directed at her, looked baffled. ‘Sorry?’
‘The woman, the mother you spoke to just now—’
‘Beth Stedman?’
‘Yes, her. She said you opened the kitchens for them.’
‘That’s right. I put some soup on for them. I knew they’d need something hot to warm them up’.
Meg’s eyes narrowed. ‘And your first sitting is at seven. The kitchens open at five.’ Meg had spent too many years with Lucy and her mother not to know the workings of the hotel intimately.
‘Yes.’
Meg looked at Tuck. ‘But you called Mitch at six.’
Tuck’s face fell again. ‘That’s right. A couple of guys came into Bill’s bitching about Search and Rescue not going out to look for them. As soon as I heard they were in Wilson’s Gully, I took off and tried to get hold of Mitch. I thought you guys were coming down to town in the weather break that afternoon so I rang Lucy first to check where you were.
But she said she hadn’t seen you so then I tried the cabin.’
Meg remembered how they’d spent the day in bed, choosing to remain snowed in. If they’d only gone down to town that day instead, Mitch would still be alive, as unable to help those people as the rest of the town.
But that ‘if only’ was not a road she could follow. They’d taken the dead end and there was no changing the fact – Mitch was never coming back.
‘So if the kitchens had to be opened especially – as the wife said they were – then the hikers had to have got back before five. Over an hour before you heard they’d even gone missing.’
Tuck’s head dropped. ‘Yeah.’
But Meg wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Lucy. ‘But you just said to Tuck you didn’t know they were back when he called.’
Lucy raised an eyebrow, surprised to be included in this conversation. ‘Because I didn’t.’
‘No, he didn’t. But you did. You had warmed the beds for them over an hour earlier – Beth Stedman said so.’
Lucy shook her head, denying the intimation, but Meg’s gaze didn’t falter. The truth was pressing into clarity at last, like a traveller emerging from the mist. ‘You had the beds warmed for them before five o’clock, before the kitchens opened – a whole hour before Tuck heard and called, asking if you knew where we were.’
Tuck whitened. A silence spread. ‘You deliberately let me call him? You knew those hikers were back?’ he uttered, a glint of fear in his true-blue eyes. ‘I thought you’d made an honest mistake, woman! I thought you’d just heard too late, like me!’
‘I forgot!’
‘Forgot?’ Tuck cried. ‘I phoned you to tell you those people were missing, that I was looking for Mitch to tell him, and you forgot to tell me that they were already safe and well in the hotel, drinking soup and having hot baths? You’d helped them! You had! That isn’t forgetting! That’s lying. That’s deception. That’s—’
It was sending a man to his death.
‘Oh my god, Lucy,’ Barbara quailed, her hands pressed to her mouth.
Meg felt the first hot tears begin to streak her cheeks because she understood it now. She not only knew what Lucy had done; she also knew why. Even if Mitch hadn’t known about the baby – and he probably hadn’t if Lucy had been only five weeks at the funeral – he’d have wanted a clear conscience before walking down the aisle. She remembered his restless agitation, those strangely tortured looks that had come into his eyes that final weekend together.
‘He’d told you he was going to tell us, hadn’t he?’ she asked, but the question was rhetorical. She knew exactly how Mitch had worked. Tuck knew too. He wouldn’t have been prepared to live with lies.
‘No—’
‘Say it, then!’ she roared. ‘Tell me you didn’t deliberately lie to Tuck. Tell me you didn’t let Mitch die, just so you could keep your secret.’
But for once, Lucy was silent. She couldn’t make any assurances of the sort.
Chapter Thirty-six
Sunday 24 December 2017
Meg watched Badger as he sat in the silver moon puddle, his nose tipped to the air as he sniffed at the scents drifting past in the evening breeze, the sky above him a marbled dance of green and red lights. Occasionally he indulged a prerogative to chase a squirrel back up a tree, or keep away the coyotes slinking past their boundary, but otherwise he was happy to sit on the steps, a far cry from the dynamic snow dog she’d seen on film that night, bounding through the snow with Mitch down near-vertical mountain slopes. He hadn’t been that dog for quite some time and she doubted he ever would be again. The night of the avalanche hadn’t just changed her destiny but his too and now his greatest contentment was sitting on these steps with her, watching the stars come out.
She still didn’t know if she was doing the right thing, leaving him. It made her heart ache every time she thought about it.
Dolores came back out, the cocoa mugs steaming in her hands.
‘There you are! I was beginning to think the racoons had got you,’ Meg joked, reaching up and taking both cups, allowing Dolores to use her hands to settle herself in the low seat, before handing her drink back again.
‘Well, I’m afraid I was rooted to the spot by the sight of the mess in your bedroom. I wasn’t sure if I’d taken a wrong turn into a landfill.’
‘Packing’s not my forte,’ Meg smiled as they both retucked their blankets tightly around themselves to keep off the winter chill.
‘What a couple of old women we are,’ Dolores sighed. ‘Thank God we’re finally getting rid of you. There might just be time for you to relearn how to act your age again.’
‘You mean, going to biodynamic dawn raves and drinking algae?’
Dolores gave an appalled look. ‘Is that what they do now?’
‘No idea,’ Meg shrugged and they both chuckled, letting the steam from their cups warm their faces.
‘Have you gone back to Ronnie about that apartment?’
‘Not yet.’ Meg bit her lip. ‘I know it looked amazing but . . . I just don’t think I want to commit to anything immediately. It’s not like I have to rush. Ron’s said I can stay at hers for as long as I like – she’s always at Jack’s or sleeping over at the hospital anyway – so I’d rather get the feel of the city first and find my own hub. Plus I want to be sure I can afford it on my new salary.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘I never knew you were such a generous employer!’
‘What can I say? You’d worked your way up to the top. It’s back to the bottom of the ladder for you now, chicken.’
‘Thanks to you,’ Meg quipped, harking back to her sacking.
‘You’re welcome. I was fifty years on this earth before I really got going. Darned if I was going to let you do the same.’
Meg reached over and took her hand, squeezing it in her own. ‘I’m really going to miss you.’
‘Can’t say as I’ll notice,’ Dolores replied, doing her best to sound neutral. ‘That damned dog’s going to take up all my time, wanting walks and feeds and cuddles all the time.’
‘I’m going to miss him so much too. I wish I could take him with me.’
‘Well, you can’t. He’d absolutely hate it, he’s a mountain dog to the bone. Besides, the customers would have something to say if they didn’t find him curled up in his corner.’
‘I wish I could take you too.’
There was only the barest of hesitations. ‘Same applies. I’m a mountain dog to my bones too.’ But Meg saw the way the moonlight glittered off her unshed tears and smiled. Dolores never had been the soft and fluffy type and goodbyes were the stuff of nightmares for her. Meg had already braced herself for Dolores giving her a handshake when the actual time came, two days from now.
‘Well, I at least wish you’d stay here tonight. It’s madness to be going back to town this late.’
‘You know I’m far too old to sleep anywhere but in my own bed these days. I could die at any moment,’ Dolores quipped.
‘I doubt it,’ Meg grinned. ‘If a bear isn’t going to finish you off, I don’t know what will.’
‘True. Perhaps I’m immortal, God help us all,’ she chuckled. ‘Martin Hughes is coming to collect me. I told him not to leave it too late or you’d have me washing up as well as packing up.’
It had certainly been a manic few weeks. Ever since That Day, when she’d finally made the decision to leave, her life had become overrun with admin – clearing and inventorying every last towel, pan and fork left in the cabin for rental (Dolores was going to manage the bookings for her); flying to New York to meet at long last the Kate Spade team – now her first clients – who’d come back to her when the other candidates ‘hadn’t panned out’; registering her fledgling business; packing for her new life in the big city; sorting out the paperwork for Titch – in spite of Tuck’s big-hearted offer, she had refused to take the cheque for his half of his share of the company; partly because it had been offered out of guilt and he had nothing to feel guilty for, but also because
he’d need cash if he was going to go ahead with his big dream of making and producing adventure films. She wasn’t the only one overhauling her life.
But now it was Christmas Eve and everything was set to go. The cabin was stripped back to its bones, her life with Mitch dismantled and segregated into little boxes. There was nothing left to do here. She was good to go.
Leave. Be gone. Depart. Fly.
Her eyes tracked a plane flashing in the sky and she wondered about the people on board, flying home for Christmas, making it with just hours or even minutes to spare. Families being reunited; homes filled. And yet hers was empty.
‘It’s so weird, don’t you think?’
‘What is?’
‘The way everything’s turned out. Putting the cabin up for rental was what we’d always planned – we’d never intended to live here ourselves and now that’s what’s happening . . . Even with work and that contract coming back to me, in spite of the fact I messed them around for the best part of five months. I was so sure, when I missed the plane that day, that—’
‘You’d missed the boat?’ Dolores quipped.
‘Exactly. I was so sure the moment had gone.’
‘Listen to me. I’m a firm believer that if something’s intended for you, it’ll keep coming back for you, no matter how long it takes.’
Meg looked across at Dolores – the comment felt pointed somehow – but she was watching the plane overhead too.
‘I take it you’ve heard about Lucy?’ Dolores asked in a sober tone.
Meg stilled at the mention of her name and she wondered how long it would take before the very thought of her didn’t induce a physical reaction. The news of Lucy’s admission to a clinic in Saskatoon for depression and anger management had been greeted with utter shock by the town when she’d left the day after the festival, but for the people who’d been in that room, it was the only solution they were prepared to accept: if Lucy would get help, Barbara would become the baby’s guardian and the police would not be called.