Leave a Trail

by Susan Fanetti

  Where some MCs had a stripper pole like this, the Night Horde Missouri had a fancy chess set. Or they used to. Show had packed it up when Isaac and Len had gone away. It was the first thing he’d done when he’d returned from leaving them with the Feds.

  The SoCal crew had already voted to take the patch, so this trip really was for a party. They got a tour of the business and the clubhouse, and then they went into the SoCal Keep. The table in the middle of this room was just a table—solid oak, substantial, but just a table. The men for whom this new clubhouse was home sat around it; the Missouri Horde stood behind. Hoosier stood next to Show. In a way, this was Show’s meeting.

  “I’m not one to make a speech. But I’ll say we’ve been on a hard road together. We fought hard, and we all lost a lot.” He nodded, and Tommy came over with an armload of kuttes. “What this means to me—creating this charter, free and clear of all our old bullshit, is a new start. And I’m glad we’re starting together.” He picked up the kutte on top of the stack, already with the President’s patch sewn onto the right breast. He turned it around, showing the Flaming Mane, buttressed by the words Night Horde on the top rocker and Southern California on the bottom. Then he held it up by the shoulders, and Hoosier slid his arms into it.

  ~oOo~

  When they came out of the Keep, all the old ladies and their families were there. Riley was there with Lexi, her and Bart’s little girl. Badger thought for a minute—she was about two. A pretty little thing, with soft blond curls and light eyes. Riley clearly was pregnant again.

  He thought to go over and say ‘hi,’ but then Bart dropped his arm over his shoulders. “Hey, brother.” Bart nodded at Badge’s VP patch and then at his own. “Who’d a thunk, huh?”

  Badger laughed. “Not me. I’m fuckin’ glad to have you wearing the Mane again, man. I can’t say how glad.”

  “Me too, me too. Everything’s gonna work out. When Isaac and Len get home, thing’s’ll be good. We got through.” He lifted his drink, indicating Nolan, who was chatting up some sweet little thing in an itty bitty skirt. “And Hav’s boy is prospecting? Damn. I know he’s proud, wherever he is.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. He’s a great kid, too.” Badger turned his eyes to the old ladies sitting together. “Looks like Riley’s got another bun.”

  Bart looked over at his old lady; their eyes met, and Riley blew him a quick kiss. “Yeah. Gonna have a son. Her series ended. I’m trying to talk her into retiring. I think she might be softening to the idea. She hates to leave Lex with the nanny.” Bart turned to Badger. “Hear you got one on the way, too.”

  “Yep. Little boy for us, too. Due in September.”

  “That’s great, man. Those girls over there are the best things in my life.”

  “Yeah. It’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  “How having a family makes everything make sense.”

  “No shit, Badge. No shit.” Bart turned to the bar and set his empty glass down. “I’m gonna send my girls home. Then let’s get shitfaced.”

  ~oOo~

  It was late when they got back to Signal Bend. They’d pushed on through the last leg, pulling into the clubhouse well into the wee hours of the morning. Show had sent them all wherever they wanted to go, saying there was no need to meet in the middle of the fucking night. Then he’d ridden home. Badger had followed immediately after, feeling anxious to see Adrienne, even though he’d spoken to her when they’d stopped for supper.

  Except for the light over the front porch, and another over the stove, the house was dark. Hector had come padding down the hallway, growling softly, as soon as Badger opened the front door, but he was wagging his tail by the time he came into the living room.

  “Good boy.” Badger ruffled his ears. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Adrienne was deeply asleep, curled on her side, her hand lying on her little swell of belly. His son was in there. His son. Henry Robert, named for his father, and for hers.

  He stripped and slid between the sheets, curving his body around hers. She moaned quietly and shifted, lifting her head. “You’re home. Yay.”

  “Shhh. Sleep, babe. I’ll say hello the right way in the morning. You get your sleep.” She nodded and slipped instantly back under. He lay there for a long time, listening to her deep, steady breath, feeling the peace in her slumber slow his own rhythms down. This quiet life was the life he wanted.

  He needed it to last.

  EPILOGUE

  Note: This series began with Isaac and Lilli, and it should end with them.

  What follows, then, is more like a novella—several chapters in Isaac and Lilli’s points of view, bringing their story, and the Signal Bend Series, to its conclusion. Since Leave a Trail ends with Isaac and Len in prison, though, I didn’t want to prolong your wait for the rest of their story by publishing this as a separate work.

  But it really is a separate text from Badge and Adrienne’s story, so this epilogue gets its own title and epigraph.

  Isaac and Lilli’s epigraphs come from The Divine Comedy.

  ~oOo~

  THE TRUE SEED

  “Thus you may understand that love alone

  is the true seed of every merit in you,

  and of all acts for which you must atone.”

  —Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XVII

  ~oOo~

  LILLI

  The First Day

  Lilli parked and turned off the ignition. Then she sat there. Haunted by thought that she would have to go into the house—the house Isaac in which had lived his entire life—and live a life without him, she was paralyzed. She sat and stared at the steering wheel, the reality she had shoved aside with steadfast determination since the fall now claiming its position at the forefront of her life. He was gone.

  No. Fuck it. He was not gone. He was away. It was different. She still had him, and he still had her. This was a pause. A long tour of duty. That’s all. She shook her head to knock things straight in there.

  “Mamma? Play Legos.”

  Lilli looked into the rearview and saw her boy in his car seat, holding the toy motorcycle Isaac had given him that morning. She took a deep breath and smiled. “Okay, bud. Let’s go in.” She looked across the mirror at Gia. Only five, but brilliantly bright and too perceptive for her own good. They’d decided to be as honest with her as they could, telling her that Daddy had to go away for a long time, but they’d go to see him as much as they could.

  She’d asked how long he’d be gone. They’d told her. Six years. (Fuck, Lilli hoped it wasn’t longer than that.) Unable to get her little head around that timeframe, she’d asked where she’d be in school when he came home. She loved school; its rituals and routines were beginning to structure her thinking. Isaac had told her she’d be in sixth grade.

  That, she’d understood. And this morning, Lilli had watched Isaac peel her from his body while she wept and begged.

  Now, sitting quietly in her booster seat, she stared back at Lilli’s reflection in the rearview. “You okay, cara?”

  Gia simply stared.

  ~oOo~

  Lilli kept her phone with her, just in case, but she ignored every call that was Shannon, or Cory, or Shannon again, or Badger, or even Tasha. The only call she took was Show, letting her know that they’d been taken in. It had been a short call; neither of them needed, wanted, or were able to say more.

  She’d told everybody else to leave her alone. And yet, her phone rang so often throughout the day, she contemplated turning it off. But no. She would never turn it off, not until he was home again. Fully aware that he would not be able to call home so soon, still she would not turn it off. If something happened to him, they would need to reach her.

  And something very well could happen to him. It was known that Isaac and the Horde had killed Santaveria and led the attack that had broken a drug cartel. If someone wasn’t coming for him right now, maybe lying in wait for him on this very first day, then it was only a matter of time. Whether he could protect hi
mself, whether Len could protect him—there were too many variables in play even to begin to predict.

  If she let her head have these thoughts to play with, she’d go fucking mad before he was gone a month. So she muscled them to the side as much as she could, trying to ignore the persistent way they overran the edges, and focused on her kids. Their kids. She made the most normal day she could with them.

  It wasn’t unusual for Isaac to be gone for a day or a few. They had routines for those days that didn’t include him. Refusing to allow herself to confront the reality that those days would be all their days now, she played with her children. She fed them lunch. She read to them. In the late afternoon, she took down the Christmas decorations and packed them back in the storage shed, letting the kids ‘help.’ They took Kodi on a short walk in the cold, and Bo collected his customary pail of rocks and twigs.

  Gia was quiet and compliant all day, and it made Lilli worried. She was by nature a talkative, opinionated kid, and she spent most of her days instructing her little brother on the right way to do just about everything. Devoted to his sister and much quieter than she, Bo was happy to be instructed. Today, with Gia so quiet, and Lilli, too, Bo was a little lost. At three, he knew his father wasn’t home right then, but he had no concept of how long he’d be gone. Lilli figured that he only knew things weren’t as they should be.

  After dinner, Gia ‘helped’ her wash dishes and tidy the kitchen while Bo lay on Kodi on the living room floor and watched a Bob the Builder DVD. Then Lilli gave each child a bath and set them up for their normal ritual of stories and bed. Also sensing that all was not right with his family, Kodi followed them all around more diligently than usual, parking himself in the threshold to Gia’s room, facing outward, when it was time for bedtime stories.

  Pip, being a cat, and an independent one at that, was unaffected by Isaac’s absence. He was still sulking about the addition of a dog. and spent most of his day curled in his basket on top of the gun cabinet in the master bedroom, where he was sure to be undisturbed.

  They always did stories in Gia’s room. Isaac had made her a beautiful canopy bed, and Lilli had dressed it in yellow bedding—yellow was a color that Gia had naturally been drawn to. On this night, as every night that she did story time—and that would now be all the nights—Lilli sat propped up in the middle of the bed. Bo, wearing red fleece footie pajamas, climbed up and tucked himself in the crook of an arm, planting his thumb in his mouth.

  Gia, though, was still seated at her little desk, one bare leg swinging under her flannel nightie, the foot of the other caught by the toes over the balcony of the gargantuan Victorian dollhouse Isaac had built for her and filled with handmade furniture. He’d begun to build that as soon as he’d learned they were having a little girl.

  “You coming, G? I thought you wanted Stellaluna tonight.”

  “Just a minute, Mamma.” She was writing something down in her little, padded pink planner—part of a desk set that had been Show and Shannon’s Christmas gift to her. Only last week. She closed her marker and then the book, but brought them both with her as she climbed up and curled in the crook of Lilli’s other arm.

  “What do you have there?”

  Gia opened the planner, the red marker tight in one fist. She pointed to the date—this date. In her young, careful scrawl, she’d written Daddy left. Then she’d marked an ‘X’ over the date. “That’s today, right?”

  All of the muscles in her body had suddenly petrified, and Lilli couldn’t answer right away. When Gia looked up at her, her sweet brow furrowed, though, she found some balance. “Yeah, cara. That’s today. Good job.”

  Gia held the planner up. “I want to mark when he’ll come home, but I don’t know where it is in here.”

  It was a yearly planner.

  Dragging up more strength, Lilli kept her voice calm and easy. “That day isn’t in here, Gia. The book is only for kindergarten and part of first grade. Do you remember when Daddy said he’d be home?”

  Gia nodded, her brow still creased. “Sixth grade.”

  “Right.” Middle school. Jesus.

  “I want a book that has sixth grade in it, too.”

  Lilli didn’t think they made planners that went out as far as that. And she didn’t want to contemplate the vast, bloody sea of red ‘Xs’ between this date and that one, even if they did. But she smiled down at her daughter’s lovely face, her eyes exactly like her father’s, and she smiled. “Maybe we can make one.”

  ~oOo~

  My love,

  Not even a full day without you, and already I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I’m sitting in bed. Our bed. Alone. And I don’t know how I’m going to do this. This house, this home is not right without you in it. The kids and I aren’t right without you. They are breaking my heart. To think of them growing up without you is killing me. They need you. I need you. I think I’m all out of strength.

  Lilli set the paper and pen aside. She would never send him a letter like that. Never. To the limited extent that she had power over what he had to endure, she would make it as easy on him as she could. She would not make it harder. She turned out the light, slid under the covers, and pulled Isaac’s pillow to her face, breathing his scent deeply. Then, her children asleep and her man far away, she cried into his pillow until the cosmos took some pity on her and let her sleep.

  X

  The 57th Day

  The white Formica tables were bolted to the floor, but the chairs moved. Lilli and Gia sat in chairs next to each other; Bo sat in Lilli’s lap. One table over, Tasha and Show sat. Waiting. Isaac and Len had been away almost two months, and finally, finally they had visitation.

  Both Gia and Bo were sitting quietly, wide eyed, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the place. Lilli felt sure it wasn’t the rough men sitting around them with their families. Gia and Bo lived in a world of rough men. But there was an unsettling vibe to the place. A cocoon of suspicion and hostility around it.

  It was Saturday, so the visiting room was nearly full. She’d thought they’d have seven hours with them. After fifty-seven days apart, seven hours felt simultaneously like a world of time and none at all—but by the time they all got through the first-time visitor processing, two of those hours had passed them by. Now, they were all sitting, impatiently waiting. Every time the door opened and a man in a khaki inmate’s uniform walked through, Lilli’s heart nearly went straight through her throat. And every time it was someone other than Isaac, the disappointment dizzied her. Time was ticking. They only had four hours and forty-four minutes left with him.

  At four hours and thirty-seven minutes left, the door opened, and a beautifully familiar body filled the space.

  Gia leapt to her feet. “That’s Daddy! That’s Daddy, Mamma!”

  “Yeah, cara, it is.” Lilli stood, putting Bo down and taking his hand.

  The guard at the door let him through, and Gia ran forward. Alarmed, worried that they would be asked to leave if their daughter appeared unmanageable, Lilli hissed “Gia!”

  Show grabbed her before she got more than a couple of steps, and they waited for Isaac, with Len right behind him, to make their way to their tables.

  Len was sporting a head of short, grey hair and a healing cut across his right ear. Isaac was sporting a fading but still nasty bruise on his left cheek. His eyes were locked with hers as he approached his family.

  When he was close enough that it wouldn’t cause trouble, Lilli sent the kids forward, and they both ran to their father, who squatted and clutched them close, tucking their heads to his shoulders, his eyes closed. Lilli could sense him trying to soak in the feel of them, to try to keep it with him when they left. Show and Len embraced, and Lilli looked over at Tasha, who smiled back. She, too, was holding off for last.

  When Isaac stood, he clasped Show hard, and Lilli heard Show say, “I’m not stayin’ the whole time, brother. I’ll leave you with your family. Just needed my own eyes to see you whole.” Isaac nodded as he let him go.

/>   And then there was no one between her and Isaac. He smiled the lopsided smile she loved. “Hey, Sport.”

  “Isaac.” Her vision swam. Jesus Christ, she was going to cry.

  “Don’t, baby.”

  She nodded and swallowed, and then his arms were around her; she felt the strength of his love for her in his thick, iron embrace, and she was fighting the tears again. “Please, Lilli,” he murmured into her hair. “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry.” She reclaimed control just as he lifted her head and kissed her. It was a chaste kiss, for them, a lingering of lips, a soft sweep of his tongue, and then it was over. But her knees were weak. And he was flushed and panting.

  “Fuck, baby. Fuck.” He looked over his shoulder at a guard, and then he led her to the table, lifting Bo onto his lap as he sat, and pulling Gia’s chair up against his. At once, Gia leaned on his arm, circling her arms around his bicep. Physical contact with his children was allowed. Lilli could only hold his hand now, until the end of the visit. He reached out with his free hand and grabbed hers, linking their fingers.