Another one of the many things Anna never told me about her family, like why she had left them when she did—running hard from them and hiding in her house on the hill as I now ran and hid, though from whom, I wasn’t sure.
“You look pretty, Mom.”
I didn’t mean to look pretty, but it was nice to know I did. “Nothing special. Just going to have some coffee and talk to Mr. Richards about stuff.”
“Cade?” There was a teasing twinkle in Davey’s eyes. “About me?”
“Probably.”
“You going to ask about his wife?” The twinkle disappeared.
Ignoring his question, I’d said, “Luna said you two were ordering a pizza and she was going to make you something special. Like cookies or something. Did she tell you that?”
“Don’t do that, Mom, I’m too old for it.” Annoyed, he’d left the room, slamming the door behind him. Too often I forget how quickly he has grown, even in the few weeks we’d been here. He was too old to bribe with cookies and pizza, to change the subject without answering his question. I’d talk to him later, when I got home. Be honest with him. Make it up to him.
Davey’s question stayed on my mind as Cade and I walked into Starbucks in the heat of the afternoon, but as we sat facing each other, Cade nervously sipping black coffee, me stirring sugar into an already too sweet latte, I could think of no way to tactfully bring it up. He gave me a shy, cautious smile that hinted he was afraid I might not smile back.
He was a handsome man, with looks that snuck up on you, that you didn’t notice until you stared at him straight, the kind of good-looking that older women murmured about with the hint of a sly smile on their lips, recalling the fine-looking men from their youth. A woman just had to grin back at a man who looked like that, and I did.
“Those are remarkable earrings,” he said, surprising me.
“Remarkable?”
He blushed, the way some men do, a half smile quickly given, quickly gone. “I mean, they’re beautiful. Navajo?”
“How did you know?”
He paused, glanced down at his coffee before he answered, so I knew his answer had something to do with his wife. The last few weeks had taught me when he got that sorrowful look that lengthened his face and took all light from his eyes, it was her. I knew it because I could see it in myself, in my own eyes. “Your wife?”
“How did you know?” he said with just the hint of a smile, and my heart warmed. He was fighting grief like me but not for so long. But I had Davey, and I was fighting for both of us, grief and fear. “My wife was an anthropologist into Navajo culture. A couple of years ago, we were in Arizona and I bought her some earrings that looked like that, same motif, same design.” He called the waitress and ordered more coffee. A grande. “Did you buy them around here?”
“They were given to me. Anna, Davey’s grandmother, was Navajo.” I added my newly learned tidbit. “Her father made them for her.”
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” He finished most of his coffee, picked up a biscotti, put it back down.
“Depends.” I was guarded.
“I don’t want this … our meeting to turn into a grief-counseling session, but, well, I was wondering about Davey, about his father. I … was hoping you could tell me a little more about him, about his father’s family, about the way his father died. He said something about feeling weird, that made me wonder if—”
“Wonder what?” I interrupted him, alarmed.
“About why he should feel weird. I wondered if maybe his father’s death had something to do with it. When somebody you love dies violently, it puts you outside of life for a while, it’s a special kind of grief, particularly for a kid, it’s extremely hard to—”
“No.” I gazed down the street at a couple holding hands so I wouldn’t look into his eyes, but he continued as if he were pulling some painful truth from a troubled kid.
“Is he in contact with the other side of his family? You mentioned his grandmother was Navajo, so I assume his father—”
“Half African American, half Navajo.”
“Well, sometimes biracial children have a tough time coming to terms with dual cultures. You know how kids are. They like to see themselves as a whole, not half of—”
“That has nothing to do with it. He’s as proud of being Navajo as he is of being black,” I snapped, but the tone of my voice belied what I’d said. It wasn’t race that tormented him. Without realizing I’d done it, I sighed, a long, sorry sound that carried the weight of Davey’s burden and mine. How long before Davey shared his true feelings with someone else?
“Raine, I’m sorry I mentioned it. I didn’t mean to upset you.” He touched my hand so gently, I wouldn’t have felt it if I hadn’t been looking.
“No. It’s okay.” I took a sip of my latte, and he smiled, amused.
“Foam on your lips,” he said. I grabbed a napkin to wipe it off. “Under your nose. Here, let me do it.” He dabbed it off with a napkin. “Reminds me of my student teaching days with kindergartners. Always a nose to wipe, a tear to dab.”
“I’ll bet you were good at it,” I said, and everything seemed lighter except the sorrow that crossed his eyes, and I knew he was thinking about his wife again.
“Yeah, I guess I was.”
“He died in bed,” I said, going back to his question and answering it with a lie because I was scared to do anything else. “My husband had—an illness—and he died in bed.”
“Was it something hereditary, that Davey could be afraid he’ll inherit?”
“You might say that.” I avoided his eyes with a thin slice of the truth. “But we’ve talked about it.”
“That’s good.”
Neither of us spoke after that, but it was a friendly silence, comfortable and easy. I closed my eyes for an instant, enjoying the sun on my face. Summer flowers—pink impatiens, red geraniums, ivies flowing to the pavement—filled large clay containers and made the space festive and relaxing, and I felt that way, too, despite the lie about Elan’s death. I glanced at Cade, his thoughts elsewhere, too. Should I simply have told him the truth? But then where would the truth stop? With Davey’s gift? Why we were running? I thought back to Davey wanting to know how his wife died, and Cade’s joke earlier about turning this into a grief-counseling session. I studied his face with those sad, distant eyes. Maybe it would do him some good, a “counseling session.” I was beyond reach; I was sure of that.
“Tell me about your wife, Denice. I can always tell when you’re thinking about her because the light leaves your eyes.”
“Dennie.” He grinned when he said her name. “Nobody called her Denice, not even her parents.”
“What was she like?”
Another grin accompanied by a faraway look in his eyes. “Can’t describe her except that she was … well … you know … indescribable. How can you pin down someone who makes you unimaginably happy? Saved me from myself. I was a wild man before I met her. Craziness. Drugs, drink, loose women.”
“Wild man?”
“Generally speaking.”
“Loose women?”
“To tell the truth, I was the loose one. Nothing going for me at all.”
“I can’t imagine that. You strike me as a steady kind of guy, the kind everyone depends on, like Davey does, like Luna.” Like I could, I thought but didn’t say.
He leaned back in his chair, as if recalling something in his past. “Well, I can’t imagine it myself these days. A lost soul, Raine, that’s what I was. Spent some time in rehab for drug addiction, finally got out of that. To this day, the back of my neck crawls when a cop stares at me sideways. This was all before I was twenty-five. You never know who people are or what they’ve been through. How life has turned them around, how someone can teach them to save themselves.”
“That’s what Dennie did for you?”
“Helped me to stop lying to myself. Running from myself, from life. Just by being there, being steady. You can’t hide from your fears. You fa
ce them down. Even if they’re inside you. She taught me that.”
I focused on the flowers behind him, the two teenagers bringing steaming coffee to their tables, anything to keep him from seeing I was a runner, a hider, too.
“Some things are impossible to face. They can kill you,” I said.
I could tell my answer surprised and puzzled him. “Not if you kill it first,” he said lightly, making a joke of it until that look came into his eyes again, a sigh with no sound. He took a long sip of coffee, picked up a biscotti, put it down, shrugged like he was hiding something or ashamed.
“I should probably talk about her more,” he said as if seeking some kind of wisdom or truth from me. “It won’t bring her back, though. I guess that kind of loneliness is no stranger to you.”
I nodded in agreement. I had no wisdom, but if the truth was what he wanted, I could tell him. “You get used to it. The loneliness.”
“How?”
“You focus on the little things that make you happy. I call it the ‘now’ in my life, living in the present. Davey is a lot of it, sketching—I wanted to be an artist once, can you believe that?”
“I believe you could be almost anything you wanted to. But it’s more than loneliness with me.”
“What else?”
“It was the way she died.” He shifted in his seat, moving away from me, as if what he was about to say could touch me, too. “I can’t get it out of my mind. What happened to her. How brutally…” He couldn’t finish at first, and I didn’t ask him to; I knew what he would say, because I had seen it, too. I wanted to cover my ears, to keep him from saying what I knew was true but didn’t. I forced myself to hear it.
After a while he found the words, but they came hard; I could tell that by the sudden haunted look in his eyes.
“They thought at first it was a break-in, then they thought I must have done it because there was no sign of a break-in, then that somebody she knew, that she must have let whoever did it into the house, and that wasn’t like Dennie to let in somebody she didn’t know. That’s the thing I can’t let go, that it must have been somebody she knew. It was like some animal had got to her. Pulled her apart. I can’t forget it, the way I found her. I can’t get it out of my mind.”
His words twisted my stomach so hard I thought I would be sick. I focused my eyes on Cade, listening to what he was saying, trying to forget my last look at Elan. I wondered if my face had given anything away, but then realized he was too lost in his memories to notice.
“Sometimes when I think about it, I wonder if it was human, the thing that killed her. If it was something she conjured up from some of those crazy places her research took her, if … You must think I’m crazy for saying something like that.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Dennie wouldn’t either,” he said after a minute, chuckling, saying her name bringing a smile again. “She was a person who believed that anything was possible in life, that there were more mysteries than our limited minds could comprehend … in life and in death, for that matter. Dennie believed in all of it.”
“Like Luna?”
“Yeah, one of the many things they had in common. Nothing was out of bounds for those two, nothing. Did Luna tell you that she was the one who found us that night?”
“No,” I said, remembering the way Luna’s hand shook when she held the teacup, of the way she’d tried to hide it from herself as much as from me.
“They never found the killer?”
“No.”
“Or clues?”
“Only thing left that I don’t remember ever seeing before was this … artifact that must have belonged to Dennie. She must have just bought it.” Cade leaned forward, facing me now. “It must have had something to do with her work, some kind of charm or something, but not for good luck. At least not for Dennie.”
“I think I saw it that day in the office. It looked like a piece of a claw?”
“Yeah. Ever seen anything like that from your husband’s people?”
“No,” I said too quickly.
It leaves a part of itself behind. Something to mark its victory.
It must have been looking for us and stumbled upon Dennie. How had it known we’d be there months before we came? The sun was hot but I felt a stab of cold deep within me. And that was when I saw her, coming down the street, strolling like she had all the time in the world. The sun picked up the blackness of her hair, the glimmer of silver earrings in her ears. Or was it my imagination, seeing Anna where she shouldn’t be? Did she live in a spectral world, trying to warn me like she always had, even from her grave?
“I need to go home,” I said too loudly, too abruptly.
Cade’s surprised glance turned apologetic. “I’m sorry, scaring you with all this craziness. Raine, I … was looking forward to spending this time with you.…”
The catch in his voice, the tenderness held me, softening my fear. “Cade … I…”
“Please. It’s been so long since I’ve talked to anybody about anything. Other teachers don’t want to hear it. My friends—our old friends, mine and Dennie’s—seem to have quietly disappeared. Luna, well, talking about Dennie tears her apart, too. Would you believe this is the first time I’ve been out, sat down over coffee with a friend just to talk since Dennie died? Pathetic, isn’t it?”
I looked to where she’d been, but the woman was gone. Maybe she had never been. A smile came to my lips, albeit a reluctant one. His words had come easily and without thought, and there was kindness in both his eyes and voice. Except for Mack, who was nearly as old as my grandfather, no man had spoken to me with such warmth in a long time. Too often there was a smack of lewdness to the remarks, an awkward request for a date, unwelcome comments about my appearance. A real date? I hadn’t been on a date once since Elan’s death. And this was a date, I realized. Despite what both of us had thought.
“It’s been eleven years for me,” I said. “To really talk about … things that are important. To listen to someone else. Eleven years. Now, that’s pathetic!” We both laughed at that, self-consciously, and I remembered how easy it had been to laugh with him that first day in his kitchen, and I’d hardly known him then. There had been an ease between us that I assumed came from Davey’s presence; I knew now it was more.
“But why so long? You’re such a beautiful woman, Raine.”
“Well … I don’t know. I guess … I’m not that beautiful to everybody.”
“Now, I can’t believe that!”
“And I can’t believe that you were once a wild man!”
“I’ll have to show you pictures sometime. Me bummed out on weed, bourbon.” He glanced down again, the glimmer of something I couldn’t read in his eyes.
“I guess a lot of my being alone is my own fault. I’ve been … trying to raise Davey on my own. It’s hard being a single mom. Traveling so much.” I hadn’t meant to let that slip out, but it had.
“A lot of the kids in my class have parents who are divorced or separated, but they still get out, go on dates. But they don’t travel. I know I’m getting into dangerous territory here, but to be honest, I’ve been wondering about that, why you don’t stay in one place. Do you think Davey’s okay with it?”
“He’s fine,” I said quickly. Too quickly.
“Every time I ask him something about school next year, he won’t look me in the eye. Maybe he thinks he’s weird because he hasn’t been anyplace long enough to put down roots.”
“You are in dangerous territory,” I said, biting the biscotti so I wouldn’t have to say more.
He nodded as if he understood. “Maybe another time we can talk about that? Maybe over dinner or something?”
“Yeah.” I wished it were true, that it would be as simple as that, to meet a man like Cade, go out for dinner and a drink, forget everything that I’d been living. Maybe there was that chance once. But not now. “I need to be getting back to Luna’s. She’s watching Davey, and—”
“More dangerous territo
ry,” he said, half-joking. “Davey is eleven. He’s really old enough to watch himself. Maybe he needs to be on his own more. You don’t want to overprotect him. Boys need room—believe me, I know.”
“Yeah.” Half an answer because I heard him but hadn’t. We finished up our coffee slowly, and as we headed out, Cade touched my hand again in the gentle way he had, and I felt something else, too, a tingling inside me, like I’d felt when Elan touched me that first time. How could that be so? Should I let myself feel it?
“Dinner? No Davey? No Luna, just us?”
“Okay,” I said, but my heart was beating fast because I was admitting to myself for the first time since I’d been here, how attracted I was to him, and that I knew he felt the same. I could see it in his eyes, shy yet strangely bold, and the way he touched me when he really didn’t need to. Things had changed between us, subtly but certainly, and I wasn’t sure where they would go from here. It was time for the “now” moments I allowed myself, with this man in a Starbucks, of all places, and if nothing else happened between us, I could look back on this day for as long as I needed to.
“Ready to go.” He offered his hand, and I took it, aware of the feel of it, the softness of his palm, the mild shock that wasn’t one, the “electricity” they talk about in love songs. I let myself enjoy it, the intertwining of our fingers that neither of us expected.
It was then that I heard it. The sound of its paws on the sidewalk. Plop. Plop. Plop. It came closer. Next to the flowerpots, nearer to our table. Past the teenagers with their coffee, stopping to sniff the air. I held Cade’s hand tight, closed my eyes, wanting to make it disappear. But it was upon us before I knew it. Nuzzling. Pushing its way between us. Licking my hand that was free.
I screamed, snatched my hand from its jaws, brought it close to my breast.
Cade held my other hand, leaned toward me, whispering, “Raine. It’s just a dog!”
“No!”
“Raine, look.” He bent down, and it turned toward him, ignoring me. He whistled low between his teeth, calling it toward him like it was a pet, and the thing looked up at him as Cade stroked its fur. It licked his hand, but turned its eyes toward me.
The Moon Tells Secrets Page 8