“They’re great,” I said. “I’ve been baking a ton of pies with Grandma. Did you know she sells them here?” I picked up my mug, and took a sip of my coffee.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that woman sitting down–unless it was to eat.”
“So much truth to that statement.” I chuckled.
“Have you talked to your mom?”
“I text her daily. She’s loving Phoenix and the weather,” I said.
“Oh, that reminds me…” Luke reached inside his jacket, pulling a small stack of envelopes from his inner pocket and slid them across the table.
“Thanks for doing this,” I told him, sifting through the envelopes. They were mostly bill reminders addressed to my mom, but there was one blue envelope that had my name on it. I felt my stomach twisting itself into knots as I scanned the return address, and knew the color had drained from my face.
“Darcy, are you okay?” Luke asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I forced a smile and gathered up the envelopes, stuffing them inside my purse. “My dad sent me something.”
“I guess he’s resorted to other ways of trying to contact you,” Luke said. “You want to open it?”
“Maybe later.” I waved my hand in the air dismissively. “I’m sure whatever he has to say can wait.” The truth was that I didn’t care about that envelope and whatever was in it. After Gabriel’s funeral, I blocked my dad’s phone number so he couldn’t call me anymore. I didn’t want to talk to him, or see him, or anything after what he’d done.
Luke shot me a careful look. “Darcy, you can’t avoid him forever.”
I snorted. Challenge accepted.
“Spring break is coming up soon,” Luke said, tapping his thumbs on the table top. “I was thinking of getting our old group of friends together to stay at my parents’ beach house for the week.” He reached up to push a lock of hair out of his eyes. “You’ll come, right?”
Beck was making her way back to us with the coffee, and she bent slightly to place it on the table in front of Luke. “Here ya’ go,” she said pleasantly. “Let me know if I can get you guys anything else.”
“Thanks,” he said. Luke picked up the mug and took a careful sip; steam was rising rapidly from the top. “You’ll come, right?” he repeated.
“I don’t know, Luke.” My voice had come out weaker than I intended. Outside the window, a mother and her two small children in their brightly colored winter coats were crossing the street and looked to be heading toward the pier. The pier wasn’t really busy this time of year, especially since the tourists were gone. Only a few extremely dedicated fishermen braved the cooler temps and the icy spray blasts from the ocean below.
“It’ll be great,” he continued, “just like old times.”
I felt something inside of me tremble like a tiny fracture on a lake of ice; tread carefully, or you just might find yourself trapped beneath it.
“Darcy?”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, but the last time I was there wasn’t exactly a lot of fun for me. ‘Just like old times’ isn’t really a selling point,” I said. Though my voice had taken on a somber tone, I was surprised at how level it remained.
“Darcy, I…”
“It’s fine,” I said, running my hand through my tangled hair. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
Luke was quiet for a moment, staring out the window at nothing in particular. He reached across the table a beat later and placed his hand over my own. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s fine,” I said again, forcing my lips into a small smile.
Luke lowered his voice. “We never talk about it, at least not where it counts.”
I knew this was a prompt, an attempt to get me to open up and talk about my brother and the accident and everything else that had been bottled up inside of me for so long. I knew I owed it to him, to my best friend who had stayed with me at the hospital after the accident, and who had gone with me to the majority of my physical therapy sessions. He’d held my hand at the funeral, not saying anything because he knew that I needed the quiet. But how long could I go without talking to someone? How else were you supposed to heal if you weren’t really taking any steps to do so?
I sighed. “I know, but I’m working on it,” I said finally. “I think being here, on the farm with my grandparents is really helping. I’m just trying to figure things out as I go along.”
“Okay,” he said, releasing my hand. He picked up his coffee mug and sipped the steaming liquid. I could tell he was disappointed in my answer but I couldn’t bring myself to give him what he wanted.
Luke shifted in his seat, pulling his wallet from his back pocket. He took out a few dollars and placed them underneath his coffee saucer.
“Are you leaving?” I asked.
“I should probably get home so I can change for my shift tonight,” he said.
“You just got here,” I complained. “Don’t let me ruin the afternoon.”
“You’re not ruining anything,” he said.
“But you’re leaving.”
“Gotta’ run, but I’ll see you soon.” Luke leaned down and planted a kiss on my cheek. Heat seemed to coil in the pit of my stomach.
I watched as he turned and headed out the door, leaving me feeling desperately alone and confused. I was aware that there were a few other people scattered through the shop, and I could hear the muffled sound of sad music as it hummed through the speaker systems above me. I picked up my coffee mug, squeezing it in my palm as if trying to get the warmth of it under my skin. As if the heat alone could chase out the memory of the one thing that I could never get out of my mind...
***
I remembered that day clearly. It was an unusually warm autumn day, a perfect, cloudless blue. The colorful leaves on the trees had reached their peak. I remembered because I had walked through a trail of bright, crimson red and vivid orange leaves that had fallen on the sidewalk while heading for my car.
Luke was throwing a back-to-school party, though classes had already been in full swing for a couple of weeks. His parents were out of town, as they had departed on their yearly cruise to the Bahamas, leaving the keys to their beach house in the capable hands of their responsible son. He had invited the group of our usual friends; this included a few people from the cross country team, several people from my art classes, and a mix of people that we stayed friends with after graduation. The list, however, had not included my brother, who had been on campus prepping for his next exam.
It was late in the evening when I received a phone call from Gabriel. I was well underway for being three-sheets-to-the-wind, and struggled to keep up with his frantic voice on the opposite end of the line.
“Slow down,” I told him, “I don’t understand...”
“Where are you?” he asked, sounding annoyed.
“I’m with Luke, at the beach house.”
“Can you get home? I really need to talk to you Darcy, we have a serious problem.”
“Home,” I asked, “I thought you were at school?”
“I was, but that doesn’t really matter right now. Can you get home?”
I looked up, searching for Luke in the crowded room but couldn’t make out anyone’s features through my blurry vision. “I can’t,” I said into the phone. “I can’t see anything right now.”
“Can’t see? Darcy, are you drunk?”
“Definitely.” I stumbled backwards then; tripping over an object on the floor which I had later come to realize had been one of our passed-out friends. I fell into the wall, sliding down the length
of it, momentarily losing my phone in the process. I could hear Gabriel’s muffled voice through the receiver, and I could tell he was angry. I found the phone again, and pushed it to my ear.
“I’m coming to get you,” he was saying.
“You can’t!” I cried out, “Dad can’t see me this way.” I had been in trouble for this once before, and I wasn’t about to willingly walk right back into the lion’s den.
“No one is here, Darcy. Dad’s gone.”
At the time, I didn’t understand the weight of those words or what they would come to mean. I was more concerned with my intoxicated state, wondering how long it would take me to get sober. I couldn’t let my parents see me this way. I didn’t want to disappoint them again.
***
The sound of footsteps forced me into the present, and I looked up to see Beck carrying a stack of logs in her arms, making her way to the fire.
“Boyfriend?” she asked me, tossing a log on the hearth.
“What?” I was struggling to gather my senses.
“Tall. Blond. Sort of charming, if you’re into that type.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s Luke, he’s my best friend.”
“Does he know that?” she asked, rocking back on her heels and wiping her hands on her apron.
I turned to face her, and waited for her to explain.
“Sorry,” she said, moving over to the table, and plopping down in the seat across from me where Luke had been just moments before. “I wasn’t trying to spy on you or anything. It just looked like a little more than friendship from where I was standing.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I don’t mean to be forward. I have this problem where I sort of just say whatever pops into my mind. I used to get into all sorts of trouble when I was in school,” she said. “My teachers would always scold me with this manta, ‘think-before-you-speak’ nonsense. I guess it never really stuck.”
Unlike Beck, I tended to have the opposite problem. Words didn’t always come easy to me. Emotions, on the other hand…
“He’s a total cutie,” she continued. “He might be a little more preppy then I tend to like them, but a definite cutie.”
I laughed lightly.
“No really, I mean it.”
“We’ve been friends since diapers, practically,” I said.
“Which I imagine, probably makes the romance for him all the more awkward.” Her eyebrows shifted on her face expressively. In fact, everything about Beck was expressive. It was like she couldn’t help it.
“Ugh, don’t say romance.” I held up my hand as if begging her to stop.
“So you really don’t feel that way about him?”
I shifted my weight in the chair, resting my chin on my knuckles. Luke was attractive, yes, but I had grown up with him. Luke had always been a huge part of my life, and I’d needed him so much, but there was a line somewhere that I couldn’t exactly see that stopped me from thinking about ever taking our friendship and making it more. Maybe it was the way he started treating me after the accident. The whole–wounded-animal thing–I just didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.
“I never really thought about it before,” I said at last.
“No?” she challenged. Her persistence was uncanny. I wasn’t exactly used to people being so up front–especially when I had just met them. Despite this, I felt oddly comfortable opening up to her.
“I just don’t want anything to change, you know? Luke has been this one constant, good thing in my life and I can’t risk losing that.”
Beck nodded thoughtfully. “Well,” she said, rising from the chair, “you might not want things to change but, not all change has to be a bad thing.” Beck picked up our cups, and pressed her lips into a thin smile, shrugging as she walked away.
I watched her disappear behind the counter. She had a point, I realized, but it wasn’t something I was ready to embrace. I stared out the window, watching the streetlights flicker back-and-forth from green, yellow and red with hardly any traffic passing by.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there. I was vaguely aware that it had begun to snow. I watched as silver snowflakes caressed the window, clinging to the frosted glass. I studied their shapes as they glistened like tiny faceted crystals in the afternoon sun. I pressed a finger to the glass, watching as the heat from my fingertips melted the flake, turning it into a single drop of water.
***
The sun was sinking beneath the horizon line as I pulled into the gravel drive. Snow was still falling, blanketing the ground in a thin layer of white dust. We were in an in-between phase as day shifted into night; twilight. Up ahead I could see two silhouetted figures, Grandpa and Liam, standing in front of the corral. I parked in front of the barn, cutting the engine. At the sound of my car door shutting, Grandpa turned, and waved me over.
“Hey,” I said, resting my arms on the top rail.
“Hey Darcy,” Grandpa said.
The gray horse with the scar was standing out in the middle of the corral, pushing one of his hooves at the snow covered ground. He was snorting softly, and nodding his head in excitement.
“He likes it.” I beamed. “He’s like a little kid out there.”
“He was kicking at his stall door while I was moving hay bales in the barn,” Liam said. “I was afraid he was going to hurt himself so I opened up the side door and let him out. I’m not even sure how he knew it was snowing.”
“Incredible,” I breathed, watching him play.
“Getting him back inside might be tricky,” Grandpa said. “He tends to throw a fit when you clip a lead to his halter.”
I watched as the horse pranced around the ring, showing off his magnificent stride. His silver coat seemed to glisten, even in the fading light.
“You’re back earlier than I thought you’d be,” Grandpa said, momentarily breaking my trance. “How was coffee with Luke?”
I looked up–past my grandfather’s face–to Liam who was peeking out sideways, underneath his long eyelashes. We locked eyes for an instant, and then quickly looked away. “Coffee was fine,” I said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Luke had to work tonight so I came back early.”
“You’ll have to invite him over for dinner soon,” Grandpa said.
“Sure, I will.”
“Well,” Grandpa reached up to scratch the side of his head, “speaking of dinner… I think your grandma has a pot roast on the stove. I don’t know about you, but I’m mighty hungry.”
“What about the horse?” I asked, gesturing over my shoulder. “Shouldn’t we try to get him back in his stall?”
“We can get him after we eat,” Grandpa said, and then turned to Liam. “Evelyn says there’s plenty to go around and she’d like it if you could stay.”
“Oh, no, I don’t want to impose.” Liam started to protest.
“Nonsense. A man has to eat, doesn’t he? Evelyn makes a terrific pot roast. Come on now, up to the house, the both of you.” Grandpa steered us toward the porch, and I felt my stomach tighten on the inside.
Grandma met us in the kitchen after we had paused in the mud room, shedding our winter layers. “Darcy,” she cooed, “I didn’t think you’d be home in time for dinner. Go ahead, everyone, sit down.” She nudged us toward the chairs. The table was set for four, leading me to believe that she was up to something.
“Smells terrific,” Grandpa said, taking a seat at the head of the table. I fell in beside him, with Liam sitting opposite of me and Grandma at the end.
“So glad you could join us,” Grandma said to Liam, smiling.
“Thanks for invite,” he sai
d. “It was very kind of you.”
Grandpa led us in prayer before we began piling the delicious looking food onto our plates. My stomach growled as I helped myself to a bun, breaking it apart so I could butter it. I realized the only thing I had eaten today had been at the coffee shop, hours ago. I reached for the honey, right around the same time Liam did, and our fingertips brushed together. I immediately pulled back.
“Sorry,” he said, “you first.”
“Sorry.” I picked up the bottle and spread the honey on my bread in a hasty fashion. God, what was wrong with me? It wasn’t like I hadn’t been around attractive guys before. I reached across the table, handing him the bottle, quickly shoveling a bite of food into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say anything else.
“How are your classes this semester?” Grandma directed the question at Liam.
“They’re going well,” he said, “but this semester has been a little difficult, actually. Cell Biology and Genetics come with a lot of ground to cover.”
“Oh I can imagine,” Grandma said.
“What are you studying?” I surprised myself by asking.
“Veterinary medicine,” he replied.
I swallowed hard, nearly choking on my roast. I coughed once, and took a gulp of water to chase down the remains of my food.
“Liam is in his junior year,” Grandma said, raising her eyebrows at me, signifying that I should pull myself together. Clearly I was struggling so she continued, “Darcy was at the university taking art history.”
“You don’t go anymore?” he asked.
“No,” I said, composing myself. “I’m not so sure college life is for me.”
He nodded, mulling this over.
“Darcy was a straight-A student when she applied herself.”
“Grandma...” I narrowed my eyes at her. What was this, an intervention?
“It’s okay,” Liam said, “I have to push myself sometimes, remind myself of the end game.”
The table was quiet for a minute. I pushed at the remaining pot roast on my plate with my fork. Grandpa was asking Liam about vaccinations for the chickens. I couldn’t keep up with the scientific vocabulary, but I pretended to listen anyway. It gave me a chance to absorb the shock from his announcement. I wondered if he had seen Gabriel in passing, but since Gabriel and I were only freshmen at the beginning of fall, I doubted they would have had any of the same classes. Still, the news had been a little unexpected. It felt strange to think someone else was carrying out a path that my brother would have otherwise been on.
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