Unforgiven

by Anne Calhoun

  His world was so large, but she didn’t believe that size mattered any more to a meaningful life than it did to a well-crafted apartment. Her world would stay small, centered on family and history, roots that ran deep into Walkers Ford. She would finish Brookhaven, restore the house to its original grandeur, make right what had gone so very, very wrong.

  Then what?

  The little voice she’d thought was strangled inside her spoke up. Clear and faint as a bell in the distance.

  Then I live my dream.

  It’s not your dream.

  It’s enough, she thought back. Dreams fulfilled are for TV shows and stories in movies. We make do.

  She navigated them westward out of town and twenty minutes later turned onto a county highway. They bumped along the sloppy road; each jolt sent acid sloshing in her stomach, and the nauseated feeling made her heart beat faster. Adam gave up on the speech and stuffed books and notepad on the dash. A dingy white mailbox that tilted into the ditch at the end of a long driveway marked the end of the road. A brass plaque on the side read The Meadows, the words readable only because the black tarnish that gathered in the deep grooves stood out against the weathered metal. She parked and cut the engine.

  Adam looked around the empty prairie. “Where are we?”

  “Near Colton,” she said. She nodded out the windshield at a large, forlorn house, set a quarter mile back from the road. Distance couldn’t mask the paint peeled in long strips from the exterior, like bark from a birch tree, exposing black and rotting wood underneath. One side of the long front porch listed, empty gaps in the spandrels and railing giving the impression of a bar code. The glass in the windows was dirty but unbroken, curtains drawn in all the rooms downstairs and missing from the second floor. Automatically she began to assess needed repairs. New plumbing and wiring, new siding, shutters, and paint, new windows upstairs and down, new furnace. All of that assumed the foundation wasn’t cracked and the hundred-year-old framing had held up.

  It’s easy. Start the truck. Drive up the driveway. Park the truck. Open your door. Get your tools. Knock on the door.

  Start with turning the key in the ignition.

  She reached for her keys and felt her stomach slide hot and thick up her neck to settle at the back of her throat. Moving slowly and carefully, she rested her hand on her thigh. Her stomach retreated, reluctantly.

  His elbow braced on the door, his hand on his thigh, Adam studied the house. “Looks abandoned.”

  “It’s not,” Marissa said. “Mrs. Edmunds still owns it. She’s ninety-four. Henry Dalton Mead was also an East Coast transplant, and he went on to build houses in the Dakotas, Colorado, and Nevada. The trend back in the day was toward heavy, bric-a-brac, Victorian style, so Brookhaven’s open floor plan and simple design were the anomaly, not the norm; but he kept a few features, like floor-to-ceiling wood paneling in a large main room for the family.”

  “How do you know he repeated the details?” he asked, his attention still focused out the window.

  “I went to the architecture school’s archives and did some research on Mead,” she said, then swallowed hard. Her voice sounded odd in her ears, tinny and distant. “Did some more research on the Internet. There’s a wealth of photographs online.”

  “What’s your arrangement with Mrs. Edmunds?”

  Explaining the details was beyond her ability at the moment. “It’s mine,” she said. “All I have to do is go get it.” She shook her head, and immediately regretted it because her stomach took a roller-coaster ride from her throat against her rib cage to deep in her belly.

  “Then we’d better get started.”

  “No,” she said, and closed her eyes. Sweat broke out along her hairline, prickled on her nape. She felt hot, frantically hot. She was never hot.

  He paused in the act of reaching for the door handle, and looked at her for the first time since Brookings. Her face made him let go of the handle and sit back. His eyebrows drew down ever so slightly. “Okay,” he said. Very, very calmly. “We won’t get started.”

  “That’s . . . I’m fine . . .” She took a deep, shuddering breath, exhaled hard. The rain sounded like an entire baseball team was beating on the truck with bats. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Ris,” he said. The word slipped into her brain under the thunder of the bats. “Marissa,” he said more loudly.

  She opened her eyes. “There’s no need to bark at me.”

  “You’re having a panic attack,” he said.

  “I am not.” As long as she didn’t reach for the keys with the intention of driving up to the house, she was fine. Or open her eyes. She flattened her palms on her jeans, smoothed them back and forth. “I don’t do this anywhere else.”

  His hand landed on her knee, the heat and strength anchoring her, dialing down the bats’ volume. “Talk to me, Ris.”

  “I know why you came back to Walkers Ford,” she said without opening her eyes, but she didn’t need to see him to sense his muscles tensing. “You have to know what comes next. You need a direction, and grad school gives you that. I get that. But I don’t know what comes next. What happens next? I’ve never done anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. I’m thirty years old, and all I know how to do is dream of Brookhaven, reborn.”

  He relaxed subtly, his pants shifting against the fabric seats, his breath exhaling. “You taught yourself to remodel, build, design,” he started.

  “Oh, I do believe Keith told you I had some help there,” she said.

  They were so connected she felt him stop breathing, but he continued. “And you’ll teach yourself to do something else. Find another dream, Ris.”

  “I’m a Brooks,” she said. “There is no other dream.”

  “What about sailing?”

  “That will never happen,” she said. “It’s a rich man’s pastime, not for women living in the middle of the continent with a sizable home equity loan to pay off.”

  “Ris. Open your eyes.” She did, found that with his hand on her leg she could focus on his face, his tanned, gorgeous face. Just like that, longing grabbed her by the throat. God, she missed him. He jabbed out the window with his free index finger. “Remember when Brookhaven looked like that? If you can take Brookhaven from that to what it is now, you can do any damn thing.”

  Her stomach did a lazy flip-flop, so she closed them again. “I can’t see it, Adam,” she said. “I just can’t see it. I could see Brookhaven, but not beyond, and I certainly can’t see sailboats and oceans and cruising. I just need a couple of minutes.”

  They sat there together, the noise of the rain alternating between bats and drumsticks. Eventually he said, “Do you want me to go in and get the panels for you?”

  “No,” she said. “I can do this. I have to do this.”

  More time passed before she heard him open his door. Cold air gusted into the cab, bringing with it the damp, earthy smell of failure. “Slide over,” he said, then slammed the door and walked through the downpour to the driver’s side of the truck. Without opening her eyes, she crawled across the bench seat and curled up in the warmth left by his body. Silently, he adjusted the seat for his longer legs, then the mirrors, then he cranked the engine over and executed a neat three-point turn in the muddy road. Humming with shame and something worse, Marissa closed her eyes again and let him drive her back to Brookhaven, empty-handed.

  * * *

  THE WOMAN LEANING against the passenger door with her eyes closed and her arms folded across her chest wasn’t in any condition to talk on the way back to Brookhaven, so Adam drove in silence and reflected on the epic, slow-motion meltdown he’d just witnessed. The thwap-thwap of the windshield wipers set the rhythm of his thoughts. Twelve years ago he knew, as much as any eighteen-year-old boy could, that Brookhaven mattered to Marissa, and he’d gotten wasted and pulled down hundred-year-old paneling with a crowbar, then set it on fire.

  Psychologically, what he’d done must have felt like an assault. No wonder she’d put
off replacing the woodwork until the last minute. No wonder she balked at the driveway.

  Everyone had a breaking point. Everyone had an edge hidden behind their everyday armor, something they protected or avoided or ignored, but it was there. Drill instructors had an uncanny knack of finding those weaknesses and exploiting them. You faced what you feared because if you couldn’t handle fear in boot camp, they wouldn’t send you into combat with other Marines depending on you for their survival.

  He was a veteran of five tours in war zones, so he knew all about breaking points. He’d never hit his, because his fear wasn’t dying in combat. But he’d watched other guys hit their breaking points, and shatter. In combat, breaking points came after particularly vicious, prolonged skirmishes; IEDs; losing a fellow Marine to a bomb or a bullet; or the overlap with the civilian world. Dear John letters. News of a spouse or girlfriend’s infidelity. Missing birthdays, funerals, weddings. Money woes.

  Delaney’s wedding was pushing Marissa right up to her edge. In an ideal world she would have finished the house on her schedule, not Delaney’s. Maybe she never would have finished it at all. He shot her a quick glance, but her eyes were closed. She’d regained color in her face, though. For a few minutes she’d been the color of kindergarten paste, gray and waxy, her eyebrows and eyelashes the only color in her face. The thought of finishing Brookhaven clearly scared Marissa, but the other option made his gut clench. If she didn’t finish Brookhaven, it was entirely possible she’d live the rest of her life like her father did, suffocating under the weight of a dream she couldn’t achieve.

  She needed vision. God knew she could work toward the goal, lay down her life in service to the vision. She wasn’t lazy, or weak, or fragile, and she sure as shit wasn’t a victim. But inside she was falling apart. He’d come back to Walkers Ford with a single purpose in mind, but Marissa needed direction, a purpose, a dream. Some people were afraid to risk themselves in pursuit of a goal, afraid that failure would destroy them, but the truly strong knew that the real risk for someone like that was no goal at all. Take away the anticipation and some people got disappointed, then moved on. A ravenous soul would turn inward and consume itself.

  She needed a new dream.

  The rain went on, steady and relentless as machine-gun fire. Adam turned onto the county road leading to Brookhaven. Marissa, who probably had distances in eastern South Dakota carved into her bones, opened her eyes and pushed herself upright.

  “You working on Mrs. Carson’s house tomorrow?”

  She leaned forward and peered out the windshield at the low, leaden sky, probably calling to mind the forecast for more rain. “Probably not,” she said. “Look, it must have been something I ate. Next time I’ll be fine.”

  The wedding was a week and a half away. “When’s next time?” he asked as he floored the engine to get the truck up the hill to Brookhaven.

  “Adam, it’s better if I—”

  “Don’t,” he said, and braked to a halt under the tree by the servants’ entrance. “Just . . . don’t.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t need an enforcer to get this done.”

  “No, you don’t,” he agreed. She needed the exact opposite of an enforcer. “But you don’t have to do it alone, either.”

  “It won’t be tomorrow,” she said.

  “That’s fine.” That was perfect, in fact. They got out of the truck into the steady rain, and he tossed her the keys. “I’ll see you later.”

  He waited until she was inside. The house swallowed her up, he thought. Except for the faint light coming through the porthole window in the bathroom, the house swallowed her like the whale that got Jonah. She was falling apart, and no one noticed. Well, not no one. Keith called her an emotional freak show, but Keith had never loved Marissa, only wanted her.

  He jogged through the rain to the barn, opened the doors and backed the Charger out, then closed the doors and pointed the car toward Walkers Ford. He made a quick stop at Mrs. Carson’s house to double-check the tarp covering the siding stacked in the side yard, anchoring the one loose end with a brick before heading home. His mother was delivering reupholstered sofa cushions to a customer. Adam went for a run, and this time he didn’t detour around Oak Street. He was back, facing everything he’d left behind. He could run past 84 Oak Street. He kept his gaze on the cracked cement, his focus unwavering as he navigated the cracks and potholes, but as he drew even with the front door, he stumbled.

  Mother. Fucker. His heart leaped as fear of falling washed along his nerves. He’d tracked the conditions of both pavement and weather, and his stride, input pouring into his brain as he ran. It wasn’t the road. It wasn’t a joint. His knee didn’t buckle, and the hip flexor he pulled just before leaving San Diego didn’t give way. He just stumbled and nearly went down, in front of Josh Wilmont’s house.

  Speaking of panic attacks . . .

  His mother still wasn’t home when he blew into the kitchen, soaked to the skin. He toed off his running shoes, showered and dressed, then mopped up the rain and got water boiling for spaghetti and meatballs. Then he pulled back a dinette chair and sat down to scroll through his contacts to make a call.

  Marissa wasn’t the kind of person who put a quaint little picture/suncatcher on her fridge to remind her of her dream. She turned a five-thousand-square-foot house on the prairie into a sailing ship, and no one saw it for what it was, a primal scream of not belonging.

  Time to show her some options.

  13

  THE PERSISTENT, EVEN rapping at her door woke her from a sound sleep into predawn blackness. Marissa stumbled from bed and padded through the kitchen, her sock-clad feet curling away from the cold stone floor. She’d fallen asleep immediately after Adam dropped her off. The not-quite-panic attacks left her as limp as the prairie crocuses on her father’s grave. Hunger woke her around eight. She’d made a simple salad for supper, then taken a hot bath and given in to the urge to skim the books Alana refused to take back.

  The advice on cruising in a sailboat of her own was simple, straightforward, and pragmatic, but with the weight of Brookhaven on her back, not achievable. However, if she spent the next ten years paying off the home equity loan, and the next ten saving, she could do it, if she could come to terms with selling the house.

  On that cheery thought she’d fallen asleep again somewhere after 2:00 a.m. Pushing her hair back from her face, she blinked blearily at the clock on the microwave. Six a.m. On the dot. As if there were any question as to who stood under the tiny overhang protecting her door, she peeked through the curtains covering the window. Adam stood on the tiny porch, dressed in cargo pants, a button-down shirt, and running shoes, looking like he’d never needed sleep in his life. Steam rose into the cold air from the Heirloom to-go cups in either hand.

  She opened the door and reached for the coffee. He pulled the cup away from her grasping hand. “It is the crack of dawn,” she said, then cleared her rusty throat and added, “One of those better be for me.”

  “We’re leaving in thirty minutes. Get dressed and pack an overnight bag.”

  “Are you insane? I’m not going anywhere today.”

  “Yesterday you said you weren’t working on Mrs. Carson’s house or getting the woodwork from The Meadows. Twenty-nine minutes and counting, or I drink both of these myself.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Completely.”

  Cold air eddied into the kitchen. She stepped back and let him in. “Where are we going?”

  “What you wore when we looked at apartments is fine,” he said as he sat down at the tiny kitchen table and flipped the lid off the coffee cup.

  “That’s not an answer,” she said.

  “It’s all the answer you’re getting.”

  She stared longingly at the second cup. “Can I have that?”

  “Once you’re dressed, packed, and in the car, yes.”

  He had a completely different sense of purpose in the way he held himself. She stared at him, trying t
o figure out what was going on.

  “Twenty-eight minutes and counting,” he said, then flashed her a grin so full of then-Adam her heart flipped over in her chest. “If we’re not on the road in twenty-eight minutes you don’t get the coffee.”

  She splashed cold water on her face to wake up, brushed her teeth, then pulled together a pair of dark jeans, a silk long-underwear shirt for warmth, a soft violet turtleneck sweater that clung to her curves from shoulder to mid-thigh, and put on black ballet flats. She pulled her hair back from her crown in a silver barrette at the base of her skull, leaving the lower layers to spill loose over her shoulders and down her back.

  “One night away?” she asked as she found a simple tote with a zipper.

  “Affirmative.”

  “This is insane,” she repeated.

  “Twenty minutes and counting.”

  She threw clean underwear, a nightie, and a change of clothes into the tote, then went into the bathroom and swept her cleanser, moisturizer, lotion, lip balm, toothbrush, toothpaste, and hairbrush on top of the clothes. When she walked back into the kitchen, Adam looked up from his phone, did a very gratifying double take, then got to his feet. “Wow.”

  The old-fashioned, respectful, chivalrous response made her blush and tuck her hair behind her ear. “I’m ready.”

  He held her old peacoat for her, then carried her tote to the Charger and held the door for her, which seemed ridiculously formal for 6:22 in the morning, but she let him do it. Once out of her driveway he headed toward the highway. “Do you want breakfast? We’ll be on the road awhile.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “That’s the surprise.”

  The way energy hummed around him intrigued her. “It’s too early to eat,” she said. Wherever they were going would have more interesting breakfast options anyway. “I think I’ve earned my coffee,” she said.