Leave a Trail

by Susan Fanetti

But I do know. Every day I know how many days are left, if you come home six years to the day from when you went away. 1,826 days left from today. It hurts my heart to write that number.

  Lilli read what she’d written and almost set the page aside, in the drawer in her nightstand that was packed with all the other pages she’d written to Isaac and had then realized would hurt him too much to read. But this time, after a moment’s pause, instead of starting fresh, she kept writing.

  All those months ago, when you told me you’d rather exchange paper letters than emails, I was a little hurt. I never told you, because I wouldn’t think of denying you something like this. Or anything, that I could give you. But email felt like a faster way to reach out to you, even if it wasn’t, really. You were right, though. I love the idea of you holding these letters as I hold yours. Close to my heart.

  I’ve come to need these letters as much as I love them. Ending every night writing you helps me keep my head straight and do what needs to be done out here so that when you come home, you come to the home you deserve.

  It’s become my calming ritual, writing you on scented paper, with a fountain pen. We’re like characters out of a Jane Austen novel—the dirty one she wrote when nobody was looking and hid under her mattress next to her twisted 19th-century porn. Haha.

  She could almost hear Isaac’s laugh at her sudden, lamely puckish burst of humor, and her melancholy returned with a vengeance. She had to stop and move the paper away before her tears fell and smeared the ink. When she could, she dried her cheeks.

  Okay. I’ll write again tomorrow night and be more newsy. This is all I have tonight.

  Ti amo. Ti amo, ti amo.

  L—

  ISAAC

  X

  The 720th Day

  For most of Isaac’s life, Christmas had never been a thing. Not until Lilli. But she had filled his life with love and light and warmth he hadn’t known was missing, and since Gia’s very first Christmas, when she was only five months old, it had been one of his favorite days of the year. Hell—more than one day. Lilli had made Christmas a month-long affair. Their home smelled of evergreen and cinnamon, and cookies and pie, for weeks. Lights shimmered all over the main rooms of the house. And the kids—fuck, they loved it.

  Sitting in the prison rec room on their second Christmas inside, watching ESPN and playing a halfhearted game of backgammon with Len on a cardboard game board with plastic pieces, Isaac let himself think about sitting up with Lilli until early on Christmas morning, building some confounded contraption or another, swearing under his breath that from now on, he was going to build all of the kids’ gifts his damn self and not fight to assemble plastic bullshit from Taiwan or wherever. She’d laugh at him and bring him another beer.

  Then she’d distract him from his temper in the way only she could.

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of her lips on his neck. Her tongue. Her hands on his bare chest. The way her body closed tightly around him when he pushed deep inside her.

  Already his memory was fading. Four more years. If they were lucky.

  “Boss? You good?”

  Isaac shook it off and opened his eyes. “Yeah. One of these days, you gotta stop callin’ me that, brother.”

  “Nah. You know my position. Long as we’re here, it applies.” Len sighed and looked at the clock on the wall, adjusting his eyepatch. “I’m not feelin’ this game. Think I’ll do some time in the gym until next count. You in?”

  His back had been acting up like crazy the past few weeks, since he’d had a run-in with an especially and habitually nasty guard. “No. I’m gonna read in my bunk. Got all those new books Lilli ordered me.” They couldn’t receive packages or gifts from family, but Lilli kept his commissary account full, and, via an online distributor, she’d shipped him about six months’ worth—even by his accelerated pace—of reading material for Christmas.

  “Is it me, or is it gettin’ harder, not easier?”

  Isaac had turned and sort of half-focused on the television; now, he turned back to his friend. From day one, Len had dealt with their incarceration with a kind of dark, stubborn good humor—in perfect keeping with his personality. On bad days, Isaac got broody and quiet. Len got acerbic. Rarely did he voice any kind of real impatience with their lot.

  “I think today’s the wrong day to think about it. Today is hard.”

  “Yeah. I keep thinkin’ about the clubhouse party. And then spending the day at yours. Damn, Lilli does it up.”—Isaac swallowed hard at the slash of pain he felt, but he didn’t interrupt his friend’s reverie—“Tasha wanted all that, too. You know, one of the things Tash was most excited about in the house I built her was that big wall of windows up front—she planned for months how she’d light it up like crazy for the holidays. Remember that big fuckin’ tree she made me wrestle into the house? And she had me doing some kind of circus stunts gettin’ lights across the top of the windows. And we don’t even have kids—fuck, we didn’t even have Christmas at our house!” He chuckled softly.

  “We’ll get home, brother. We’ll get it back.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed again, deeper this time. “Sorry. Got the holiday blues. I’m gonna sweat ‘em out.” He stood and left. Knowing he was headed to the cell to change into the approved sweats for the weight room, Isaac put the game away and made some aimless chat with some other inmates in the room before he went back himself. He and Len were lucky to be able to share a cell together. But the quarters were close, and they gave each other the space they could.

  ~oOo~

  “COUNT!”

  Stretched out to the extent he could be in a bunk that was not as long as he was, Isaac looked up from the new Patrick Rothfuss novel that had been part of Lilli’s Christmas gift to him. He tucked her most recent letter into the book as a bookmark and rolled to his feet, just as Len came through the open cell door. He was running sweat; his short, grey hair—he’d let it grow a little after bitching the first few weeks about the impossibility of a satisfyingly close prison shave—glistened with it. His prison-issued sweatshirt was sodden.

  “You reek.”

  “Yeah. Had some shit to work out, I guess. I’ll hose off fast before meal time.”

  The guards walked by and peered in. One of them had become Isaac’s nemesis. At least eight inches shorter and probably a hundred pounds lighter than he, Walker had some kind of hornet up his ass over him. So far, it just seemed random hostility. His last volley had been a baton shoved hard into Isaac’s spine, out of fucking nowhere. It had driven him to his knees in the lunch line—three weeks ago, and his lower back and right leg still tingled in a hauntingly familiar way. Both Len and he had considered whether this was another move on him in retaliation for Santaveria.

  There had been two so far. Both thwarted—in one case, by Len, and in the other, by some men who’d become friends because Santaveria had been their enemy. Not the kind of friends who made Isaac comfortable, but they were useful. They’d sure been useful that day.

  Lilli didn’t know. Hopefully, she would never know. Nobody in Signal Bend knew. Len and he had fought that out—Len thought the Horde should know. He thought so vehemently. And he was right. But Isaac didn’t want the club to feel the need to retaliate outside. They were legit now, free and clear of cartels, and Feds, and Sheriffs, and he wanted them to stay that way. That was why the fuck he was in here. He wanted his family safe.

  Moreover, he simply didn’t want Show to know. Because Show had a very hard time not telling Lilli things, even when Isaac told him not to. Lilli had a way about her, a way of seeing the truth or at least knowing there was one being hidden, and Show was a fucking awful liar when he had to lie to somebody he cared about. Lilli would see that something was being kept from her, and she would dig, and Show would fold like a cheap suit.

  So nobody outside the prison walls knew that there had been attempts made on Isaac’s life. Whether Walker’s little-man games were part of another or just an asshole with a God com
plex, Isaac didn’t know yet. But when the guards paused at their cell and did the count, Walker smirked in a way that made Isaac’s hands twitch with the longing to become fists.

  They walked on, and Len muttered, “That son of a bitch is bad news, boss. Bad news.”

  “Yeah.”

  ~oOo~

  After the sad thing the prison cook called a Christmas dinner, Isaac skipped the sad thing that they were calling a Christmas party in the rec room and went back to his bunk. Len, knowing that Isaac needed some space, and also needing some alone time, went off and found it who knew where. Very rarely, during the precious times in which their hours were their own, Len would seem to disappear. He was always back for the count, and Isaac had never asked where he went off to. For as long as he known him, Len had been a loner.

  Isaac was sure, too, that Len had his back even during times like this, when he went off somewhere. The first attack had happened during such a time, and still Len had been right there, pulling the guy off Isaac and breaking the shank in two right in the guy’s hand. He was like Batman or something. They’d never seen the attacker in their block before, and, though they’d left him breathing, they had not seen him since.

  It had been more than a year since an attack, though. Unless they counted Wee Willy Walker and his baton.

  Shoving all that noise in his head to the side, Isaac lay in his bunk with his new book. He didn’t open it right away. Instead, he took in the photos and drawings that filled the wall space between his bunk and Len’s. Drawings from his kids—horses and flowers and dogs and bikes and people from Gia, mostly mazes and patterns from Bo. Handmade cards. Photos of his family. Gia, seven years old now, riding horses and taking archery lessons. Bo, now five, struggling a already in school, even though he was only in kindergarten. He wasn’t much of a talker, his boy, and apparently his teacher thought there was some cause for concern. Lilli didn’t agree. He would hate to be the teacher in that disagreement. But he’d love to be able to watch the fireworks.

  He smiled at a photo of Gia on Matilda, her Welsh pony—a new addition since he’d been inside. Lilli sat astride Flash, horse and pony side by side. His girls were wearing matching cowboy hats and wide smiles. That photo made his heart ache ferociously. It was good to see his Sport smile like that. He never saw that smile when she came here. The smile he got was tinged with loss.

  A photo of Bo, his eyes wide, holding a little goldtone trophy and a certificate for a ‘Young Writers Program’. With his mamma’s help, he’d written a story and drawn pictures for it: If I Had a Lion for a Pet. Lilli had sent him the book as a series of photos. At the bottom of each page, in Lilli’s precise handwriting, Bo had dictated such creative insights as If I had a lion for a pet…his litter box would fill a WHOLE ROOM. For that page, he had drawn a room full of sand, with a giant turd smack in the middle. He was a sharp little artist, even when he wasn’t making fractals. And the awards committee clearly had a sense of humor.

  A photo of Lilli. He had no idea who’d taken it. He hoped it was Adrienne. Because if it was a man, any man, then he’d have to kill that fucker with his bare hands. Not because she was physically exposed in any way—no such picture would have gotten through to him—but because the camera had caught her in such a nakedly unguarded moment he felt like he was seeing right down into her heart, and he was the only man on Earth entitled to that view. She was sitting in their yard, folded up in one of the ancient metal lawn chairs she’d painted vivid hues a few years back. Wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, her most common attire, her bare feet on the chair and her arms around her legs. One hand was wrapped around her other wrist; that hand held a beer. Her gorgeous, chestnut hair was loose rather than caught back in its customary ponytail, and a light breeze had caught her soft waves. Sunlight glinted and made reddish-gold threads through the dark mass. The photo had her in profile. She was staring at her knees, her head tipped down slightly.

  Obviously, Lilli had not taken the photo herself. Isaac didn’t know who had, or why they’d given it to her, or why she’d sent it to him. It was a sad fucking photo, and Lilli was nearly always positive with him since he’d been inside. Suspiciously so, considering how well acquainted he was with her impatience, pragmatism, and dark wit. Yet he treasured this photo above all others. This was his woman. He was seeing her, how she really was, while he was away. He could see her miss him. As truly glad as he was that she and their children were living a life and not merely hibernating until he was back with them, a part of him needed this, too. He needed to see her miss him. Not because he was afraid that she didn’t. He knew for a certainty that she did. But he looked at this photo and almost felt like he could touch her, like their shared yearning stretched through time and space and coiled together.

  Lifting his right arm, he stared at the ink there, done a couple of weeks before he’d gone in. A quote in Italian, circling the names of his wife and children. L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle. The love that moves the sun and the other stars. The same words made up a tattoo Lilli had gotten long before he’d met her as a memorial to her father. But to Isaac, those words, and the love they described, meant his love for Lilli, her love for him, and the life they’d made together in it.

  He set his book aside and got out his notebook and a pen, deciding to write Lilli instead. She wrote him every day. He wrote almost as often, to the extent that it was possible. She always wrote on light purple paper, scented like the scent of her soap. She’d never worn perfume in all the years they’d been together, and her natural scent was his favorite smell on the planet. When he’d convinced her that letters were better than the shitty pseudo-email system he could pay for access to, she’d begun sending him letters on this purple paper that smelled of lavender. He guessed she’d figured the next best thing to figuring out how to send him her own smell was to send him the scent of her soap. She’d guessed right. The smell of lavender would now probably get him hard until his dying day.

  His letters went out to her on plain prison commissary paper, but he didn’t think she minded. They had a joke going about their Austenian correspondence; he wasn’t sure when it had started. When they were in the mood to be funny, they’d taken to writing in Victorian diction. He wasn’t in that mood tonight.

  Hey, baby.

  I hope Christmas was good. Did B. like his electric Harley? And did G.’s new bow come in on time? I’ve been thinking all day about sitting with you on Christmas Eve, putting toys together and giving Santa the credit. Sharing a beer. Fucking on the rug in front of the tree.

  He stopped and wadded up the paper. That wouldn’t get through. And even if it would, he didn’t need some BOP fuck getting off thinking about him and Lilli. On a new sheet, he rewrote the lines up to the last sentence.

  Today was just a day here. They try to pretend it’s special, but the only special thing about it is a day off. I miss you. I miss you so fucking much it’s killing me. I’m dying off a little bit every day.

  “COUNT!”

  Damn. Isaac hadn’t realized that it had gotten so late. He’d have to finish the letter tomorrow. Or start a new one in a different mood—that would probably be for the best.

  Len swung in just as Isaac stood.

  “You good, boss?”

  “I’m okay, brother. You?”

  His friend shrugged. “Merry fucking Christmas, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  X

  The 1,070th Day

  “Daddy!” After nearly three years, Gia knew to wait, but she stood there, bouncing, waiting for Isaac to be let all the way into the Visitors Center. Bo stood at her side. He still didn’t talk much. He could—Lilli said he did, and that his vocabulary, if not his diction, was developmentally on target, but only when he was comfortable where he was. She’d finally relented and put him in speech and behavioral therapy and was getting him tested, because he would not speak at school. Or anywhere he was uncomfortable.

  Isaac hadn’t heard his son’s voice in almost a year.<
br />
  He squatted down before his children, ignoring the brief but vicious clench in his back and right hip, and pulled them in close. “Hey, you two. I love you.” Taking in their scent and touch and sound, he held on until they both squirmed, and then he let them go. This one day, twice a month thing was just not fucking enough. Sometimes he wanted to tell everyone else he knew to fuck off and leave him with all of his visitation points for his wife and kids. But he couldn’t do that. He and Len had retained their voting rights, and the club had business.

  As always, Lilli stood back a little and waited for him to greet their children. He hated the school year, too, when she couldn’t get to Marion fast enough to see him on Friday nights. During the summer, she’d come to see him alone on Friday, leaving the kids in the motel with whomever she’d brought along—sometimes it was Show, sometimes it was Lori, their usual babysitter. He’d have her all to himself for three hours or so, and they’d sit and hold hands and really talk. They almost always fought at least once during that time, but that was how they talked things through.

  He went to her now. So fucking beautiful. Almost ten years, they’d been together. She looked the same. A line or two at the corners of her grey eyes, but otherwise, she was the Amazonian stranger he’d shared a burger with one summer night long ago. Since he’d been away, she’d been working out a lot, more than she had since Gia was born. Show said she was back to her old ways, causing a stir, running around town in tiny clothes. And she was working out at the clubhouse, too. His warrior woman.

  He’d put more muscle on, too. Not much else to do but work, read, eat, work out, jack off, and sleep. But he could feel the old damage in his back aging him fast. He was beginning to wonder if he’d still be able to ride when he finally got quit of this place.