by Claire Adams
“Hey,” I said as he got closer. “Are you looking for Garrett?”
The guy shook his head. Now that we were closer, he looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. “No, I’m not looking for Garrett. You’re Oliver, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Then you’re the one I’m looking for. My name’s Kevin,” he said. “Kevin Wentworth.”
The way he said it, it was as if we should know him. The name did sound familiar, though I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard it before. I glanced at Wren, wondering if she had any clue. She was looking over at me, and I could tell she was wondering the same thing.
He was well dressed, his khaki pants pressed, his shoes burgundy leather. “My brother was Isaac Wentworth.”
Next to me, Wren stiffened. “What do you want?” she asked.
So, here he was, the brother of the man I had killed. I’d thought about him before, about Isaac’s whole family, how what I had done affected them. And now one of those family members was standing right here in front of me. I swallowed and was about to say something when Kevin started talking.
“I apologize for showing up here unannounced,” he said. “I wasn’t even sure if you’d still be around this area. But my wife saw the article about you two in one of her magazines. I live in Boston now.”
“Okay,” Wren said slowly. “So, what is it you wanted?”
“I was there that night,” Kevin continued, looking at Wren. “I know it’s been a while so you probably don’t remember me.”
“I’ve tried to block most of that evening from my memory.”
He nodded. “I don’t blame you. I have, too. It was awful for everyone involved. But . . . after my wife showed me that article, I felt like I should come by here.”
“You flew all the way out here from Boston just to . . . to what?” Wren asked. “I am utterly confused by this whole thing.”
“I’m back and forth between here and Boston a lot,” Kevin said. “My parents are still out here and unfortunately, not doing so well health-wise at the moment. My wife and I are trying to convince them to move back east with us, but they’re being difficult. Anyway, that’s not why I came by. I don’t exactly know why I came by, other than I felt I should.” Now he looked at me. “To tell you something, I guess.”
“Tell me something?” I asked. This whole conversation was getting more baffling by the second.
“Yes.”
“Well, before you do that, I want to tell you that I’m sorry. And that apology goes for your whole family. I didn’t mean to kill your brother. I know that doesn’t really matter, whether I mean to or not, because the fact of it is, he’s dead, but that hadn’t been my intention. And I am truly sorry for the pain that has caused your family.”
“I do appreciate that,” Kevin said. “And I know that my parents will, too. I imagine that you’ve probably felt quite a bit of guilt concerning the whole thing.”
“I have.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Wren asked. “To try to make him feel worse? You saw that article and thought that he actually looked happy and didn’t deserve it? That’s a pretty shitty thing to do, if that is the case. Ollie has more than—”
“That’s not why I’m here,” Kevin said quietly. I reached out and touched Wren’s forearm, hoping to calm her down. I understood why she was getting defensive and acting hostile toward Kevin, but he wasn’t here to start shit, that much I could tell. And I wanted to hear what it was he had to say.
“I’m here,” he said, “because I know something that no one else did, about my brother. I’m here because I didn’t have the courage to do anything about it, and I myself feel a huge amount of guilt over it.” He looked down at his shoes and then back up at me. “Isaac was not a happy person for much of his life. It wasn’t always that way—I do have memories of us having fun together when we were younger, but once he hit the teen years, something changed. My parents were never willing to admit it—and he was pretty good at hiding it from them—but he was different.”
“I never really knew him that well,” I said.
“I did,” Kevin said, “whether I wanted to or not. He kept me around because he knew I was his little brother and I’d be loyal to him. And he was right.” His gaze went over to Wren. “I knew that night that he was going to try something with you, whether you wanted it or not.”
“How did you know?” she asked.
“That’s what he said on the drive over. I’m going to get laid tonight. She doesn’t even have to be good-looking; I don’t care. He said it a few times, and then, later, when you got there, he leaned over and whispered to me that he lucked out because you were good-looking. In much cruder terms; nothing that I care to repeat now.”
“Great,” she said, rolling her eyes. “So, your brother’s a premeditated rapist. You felt the need to come all the way out here to tell us that?”
“Wren.” I squeezed her arm gently. “Let’s let him talk.”
She pulled her arm away. “Why? So he feels better? Is that what this is about? You making some pilgrimage out here to make yourself feel less guilty?”
Kevin shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t really know. It’s not so black and white. I wish it were.”
“You’re basically coming out here and telling us that you knew what your brother was going to do, yet you decided to do nothing about it. Just sit there and be a bystander while your brother did something really shitty to someone else.”
“I’m not proud of how I handled it. And part of me just hoped that maybe the two of you would hit it off and you’d like him and he’d get what he wanted without feeling like he had to take something from you.” He shook his head. “I realize how ridiculous that all sounds. And I also realize how cowardly it was of me. There’s no excuse for it. I have a daughter of my own now and I can’t stand the thought of her ever being around someone like my brother. But he was planning on doing something else, too. He was going to drive up to Boulder the next morning and go to the open air mall on 29th Street, and shoot as many people as he could. He’d gotten two AR-15s from this guy that was a friend of our father’s. Or used to be; he started to get really into all these government conspiracies and my parents stopped seeing him. But Isaac didn’t, and he somehow got these two guns from him. I don’t know if he stole them or bought them from the guy or what—I didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell anyone because Isaac said he’d kill me if I did.”
Wren folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin. “So, you thought it was better to let him go commit a mass shooting.”
“I was scared. And I’m not proud of how I handled it. But that’s what Isaac was planning to do the very next day. He hadn’t told anyone but me. He didn’t want me to be a part of it, to go with him, but he couldn’t keep the thing to himself. He needed to share it with someone, and he knew that I wouldn’t tell anyone. He knew I’d keep his secret for him. Which I did. I always have, up until now.” Kevin took a deep breath and looked skyward. “And the reason I’m telling you now is because I want you to know that you did what I couldn’t do, even if you didn’t realize it. On more than one count. You prevented a sexual assault from happening, and you also prevented him from carrying out his plan. You might always feel guilty for taking a life, but by doing so, you spared a lot of other people.”
I could only stand there, my brain trying to process everything he said. Was he just making this up? It wouldn’t make sense for him to do that, so I had to believe it was true. Did that make a difference? Did it make me feel better that the person I had killed had been someone who was planning to do some awful things?
“I realize this is a lot of information to just have confronted you with,” Kevin said. “And maybe it won’t make you feel any less guilty, I don’t know. But I have been plagued with guilt own my own because of my inability to do anything. It hasn’t ruined my life, but it’s come close, because it’s changed the way I see myself, and not for the better.”
>
It almost felt as though he needed me to absolve him from that, to say the words that might make his guilt go away. I didn’t know what words those were, though. I didn’t know if I felt any less guilty because of what he’d just said.
“My parents thought that the worst thing in the world was Isaac getting killed,” Kevin said, “but they didn’t realize what he’d been planning to do. I could never tell them that. But if he’d done it, if he’d actually gone through with it—that would’ve been the end of them. There’s no way they would have been able to live with themselves. The details were sketchy enough with what happened between you two that they could tell themselves Isaac hadn’t been in the wrong; he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They could feel bad for him as the victim, because they didn’t know the details. Do I miss my brother? I do. I miss the brother I remember, not the one who seemed completely detached from society and just wanted to do harm to other people. I have a few good memories of him, and that’s what I miss.”
“You never came forward with that?” Wren asked.
“Why would I have? He was dead. He wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone. I thought it was over with.” He looked at her, frowning. “You didn’t come forward, either. I knew your first name, but I didn’t know your last, and I kept waiting for you to come forward, but that never happened. Until now, anyway.”
The three of us stood there for a minute, no one saying anything. In the distance, way overhead, I could hear the sound of a plane. There were people in that plane, flying somewhere, maybe going home, maybe going on a vacation. It seemed strange to think of them tens of thousands of miles in the air, like it seemed to strange to think of the way that life just happened, how one decision can change the course of it all in an instant.
The knowledge of what Keith had just said would take a long time to sink in, I knew, but I held my hand out to him. He hesitated and then shook it.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for coming out here to tell us this. I know that probably wasn’t easy.”
“It wasn’t. But nothing is easy, and just for once, I wanted to do the right thing.”
After he left, Wren and I just stood there, looking in the direction his car had just driven off in.
“Did that just happen?” Wren asked. “Or was that some sort of extraordinarily realistic daydream?”
“It wasn’t a daydream—that just happened. And I kind of feel bad for the guy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—he just looked so haunted. I mean, I believe him when he says that his guilt over the whole thing is eating him alive.”
“I’m somehow finding it difficult to feel bad for him.”
“That’s not what he was looking for. I don’t think he wanted us to pity him.”
She bit her lower lip, a frown on her face. “Do you believe what he said? About his brother planning to go shoot up a mall?”
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t really seem like the sort of thing someone would make up. I believe that his brother told him he was going to do it; whether or not he would have, we don’t really have a way of knowing.”
“But if he would have, you prevented that from happening.” Wren’s furrowed brow relaxed as she looked up at me. “And if that’s the case, then you saved a lot of people’s lives.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
And that was the thing—there was no way to know, because you couldn’t go back and change the past. But even if you could, I didn’t think I would. I pulled Wren to me, wrapped my arms around her, kissed the top of her head. She smiled and slid her hands underneath my shirt, her palms warm on my lower back.
“You’re my hero, you know,” she said. “And I mean that. I love you.”
I squeezed her against me. “I love you, too.”
Life had not been particularly easy so far, but maybe that was the point—if life, if love, weren’t hard, it would be easy to just take it for granted, to not appreciate it for what it really was.
Epilogue
Wren
Two years later
Two minutes.
That’s how long I was supposed to wait.
Instead of just sitting there, though, and ticking the seconds off in my head, I got up and walked out into the living room. Summer was winding down, and it had definitely been a success, both here at the ranch and at the restaurant.
I sat down on the couch and looked at the framed photo on the side table. It was of Ollie and me, six months ago, on our wedding. We got married here on the ranch, near the quarry, at sunset. The photo is of the two of us, the warm orange light bathing us both an almost ethereal glow. I wore a simple white A-line dress, something I’d found at the vintage shop and got for ten dollars. It was a rather small affair, and we had the reception at the restaurant.
This past season was the first that Ollie had been running the ranch for Garrett and Marie—they’d decided to buy an RV and tour the country for a year. They’d be returning in the fall and it was up in the air what their plan was after that. Ollie and I were living together in one of the cabins, and eventually, we’d move up to the main house.
I looked out one of the windows and could see Ollie coming out of the barn. He’d be heading up to the house soon; the people he was supposed to take out on a ride had decided to go into town and do the ride tomorrow. I thought about waiting for him to get up here and both of us look at the test, but then I decided I wanted to be able to tell him myself. And if it was negative, then I didn’t even need to mention that I’d taken it in the first place. But I’d felt strange for the past week or so, and my period was late, though it had been late before and I hadn’t been pregnant.
I went into the bathroom, knowing the two minutes had definitely passed. It was probably more like three. I took a deep breath and then reached over and picked the pregnancy test up off the counter.
Two pink lines.
I heard a creak as the screen door opened and then slapped shut, followed by a thumping as Ollie stomped his boots on the floor mat.
“Wren?” he called out.
I met him in the kitchen, the hand holding the pregnancy test behind my back.
“Hey,” he said. He kissed me softly on the lips. “How’s everything?”
The smile on my face got bigger. “Everything is great,” I said. “Actually, I have some exciting news.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I hadn’t told him that I was going to take a test; we weren’t actively trying to have a baby, but we also weren’t not trying, either. We’d talked about it and decided that if it happened, it did, and if not, that was okay too; we could be happy with it being just the two of us. And that was true—I knew I could be completely content if it were just him and me, and I had my restaurant and he had the ranch, and our little family was made up of just the two of us. That would have been perfectly fine, and I knew he felt the same way, too.
But it looked like that wasn’t going to be the case after all.
Ollie was still looking at me expectantly.
With a smile on my face, I held out the test and told him the good news.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Joey Bush
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