In-between Hour (9781460323731)

by Claypole White, Barbara

  Jacob’s eyes crinkled.

  “Yes,” Will answered. “My dad is Occaneechi.”

  Will Shepard was Native American? Although, something about his square jaw and thick eyebrows... Yes, she could believe he had native ancestry.

  “My mother—” Will pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, and Hannah gasped “—was not.”

  * * *

  “What do you mean you’ve seen his eyes before? Haunting as they are. Huge and icy blue.” Poppy swirled wine around her goblet and then drained the glass.

  The sun disappeared behind the treetops, and Hannah brushed an oak leaf from one of the cushions under her arm. Dry and brittle, the leaf crumbled to ashes, then scattered into the air.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said. “They’re so distinctive, so familiar.”

  Jacob was napping when Poppy had arrived, but she’d insisted on staying for a girls’ night. A feeble excuse, no doubt, to keep Will in her sights. And the overnight bag and large screw-top bottle of wine suggested Poppy intended to get snookered in the process.

  Poppy had a proclivity for dating guys who were either married or inherently messed up, and Will Shepard clearly fell into at least one of those categories. The absence of a wedding ring meant nothing, but Will didn’t act like someone who was married. He did, however, act like a person in pain, pain that went beyond a mere headache. You didn’t have to be a holistic practitioner to understand that physical symptoms often hinted at emotional distress. Hannah chose not to think about the study she’d read that morning, the one linking depression with heart disease.

  She and Poppy slid back and forth on the retro metal rocker, both of them watching Will retrieve a brown bag of groceries from the trunk of the Prius.

  “Hubba-hubba,” Poppy said. “Look at the muscles on those forearms. Girl, I bet he gives new meaning to the term sexual endurance.”

  “Maybe he spends his nights hanging from the rafters.”

  “Think he’s dating right now?” Poppy fiddled with the array of elastic bands on her left wrist, none of which represented anything other than her love of bright colors.

  “He has a son, Poppy. Kids tend to come with mothers.”

  “It’s weird, there’s so little about his personal life on the web. It’s all work, work, work. Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that he’s a dad.”

  So, they’d both checked him out.

  “At one time he was linked briefly with that New York socialite who died a few months back,” Poppy continued.

  “No idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You should read the gossip mags, Han. She killed herself, her lover and their son. Smashed their car into a wall. Theory is her brakes went, which is pretty suspect. Smacks of a cover-up if you ask me. But nothing I found says he’s married. Used to be a player, these days he seems to be a monk. What a waste of that body.”

  “I’m changing the subject. Tell me what you know about Jacob.”

  “Not much to tell. Sundays were skeleton staff days at Hawk’s Ridge—the director told me sweet-shit-nothing about the residents. Jacob has short-term memory loss, adored his wife, worships his grandson. Figured all that out by myself.”

  “And Will?”

  “Didn’t know Jacob had a son until I butted into Will’s meeting. Bad blood between them, if I had to guess. What’s the Galen update?”

  “He’s coming home next week. Inigo’s promised to pay for his ticket and give us a two-week pass before he visits. Until he can check his melodrama at the door, Inigo’s a problem I can’t handle. He was completely hysterical in California. It was like having a third child.” Hannah sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, allowing me to marry at nineteen.”

  “Could they have stopped you?”

  “No.” Hannah smiled. “He was hard to resist in those days—the exotic name, the Celtic heritage, that sexy smile.” Her in-laws had scheduled Inigo for greatness from inception, hoping he would become a famous architect like his namesake, Inigo Jones. And Inigo carried himself with a confidence that suggested he believed the family propaganda. But he alienated his parents in three easy steps: he married a high school classmate who wanted only to be a country vet, then he became an English professor, and for his pièce de résistance, he changed his sexual orientation.

  “Of course, now my ex is a dick.”

  Poppy snorted out a laugh. “Finally, after six years she trashes her ex. Proud of you, girl. So, it all worked out, then. With the cottage.”

  Will balanced the bag on his hip as he tugged open the screen door.

  “I guess,” Hannah replied, chewing the inside of her cheek.

  * * *

  The screen door slammed and Will turned to watch the two women on the porch drinking red wine.

  Hannah and Poppy were clearly plotting, leaning toward each other in a female conspiracy. Maybe they were discussing him and his dad, trying to figure out their relationship. Good luck on that one. Thirty-four years of living the relationship and he couldn’t figure it out.

  Will placed the last bag of groceries on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to check on the old man. Exhausted from the stress of food shopping, his dad had gone upstairs to lie down the moment they’d returned. Wise move. Normally, grocery shopping was heaven on earth: the smells, the tastes—grazing around the free samples, concocting recipes in his head. Before Freddie’s death, buying fresh produce was the closest Will came to a hobby. Today, with his dad, it had ranked on par with drug-free wisdom teeth removal. Next time, he’d hire a dad-sitter.

  The stairs creaked as Will dragged himself up by the banister. The ceiling of the stairwell was midnight blue and covered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, the same ones he’d stuck all over Freddie’s bedroom. When the interior decorator had finished, Will had balanced on a stepladder for hours, creating a perfect constellation for his two-year-old. After the accident, he’d destroyed it in minutes—ripping down stars, paint and drywall. When he returned to New York, he would hire another decorator, a cheaper one, to erase the evidence of grief.

  The upstairs hallway in the cottage was empty except for a large black-and-white photo framed and hung at the far end. The photographer had captured the woods at sunrise in early April. Dogwoods, in full bloom, rose like ghosts through a veil of early-morning fog.

  Everything else in the hall was white like the edges of a dream. Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile. And since all his furniture was crafted out of pale wood, the only color came from his lime leather sofa. One of his ex-lovers had referred to it as the bilious margarita.

  Will ran his hand over the hall railing, reading the grain. Wood could reveal a thousand stories. He’d done some carving as a kid, inspired by his dad’s garden sculptures of downed tree limbs. He and Ally had once imagined them to be fantastical creatures. By the time he was a teenager, Will saw them for what they really were—talismans.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing against the crouching headache, the throbbing pain. Nothing about this trip was turning out the way he’d planned. Not that he’d had a plan other than get in, get drunk, get out. He would never start a climb without a strategy for descent, and yet in this situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.

  His dad used to have a horde of cousins in the area. They’d spent their adolescent years together, toe-to-toe, as Uncle Darren used to say. Were they still alive? Should he reestablish contact with the tribe? Maybe his dad just needed to be part of a community again. Yeah, right. Whatever his dad needed went way beyond socializing and probably involved a retirement home upgrade from independent to assisted living. From stage one to stage two.

  Will eased open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms. A twenty-fo
ur-hour crash course in the care of the elderly had taught him that the old man’s balance was seriously off-kilter when he woke up. The shortest possible distance to the nearest toilet had been the deciding factor in the bedroom allocation—unless he wanted to start cleaning up his dad’s shit. Literally.

  The old man had collapsed onto the bed like a battery-operated toy run out of juice. A very large, very broken toy. Jacob Shepard used to have such presence—his height, his ability to say a great deal with a handful of words, his snippets of self-made philosophy.

  Even now, Will could hear his dad’s voice teaching him to hunt rabbit. Got your bow, Willie? Don’t get excited now. That rabbit, he’s under the wheat straw, but he’s gonna zig and zag. Will didn’t believe him, and when the rabbit performed as predicted, Will fell on his butt. His dad had howled with laughter.

  Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.

  Uncle Darren had said, “Your daddy, he loved your mama his whole life. Like she cursed him. He waited for her to grow up. He waited through her mistakes with other men. He waited with nothing more than the faith that, one day, Angeline would love him. And one day she did.”

  Once upon a time, Will had applied that philosophy to his feelings for Ally. For so many years, she was the only good part of his life. Such a fierce friend, Ally was the one person he trusted, the one person who—until the lie about Freddie’s Great European Adventure—knew Will’s every secret. But somewhere along the way he’d found hard cynicism. Or maybe he’d just been smart enough to realize she would never love him as more than her best friend. He’d dated other women, never seriously, but then Freddie had entered his life and filled the hole Ally had left in his heart. And now? Now it was as if he were slowly bleeding to death.

  A small thought escaped: he should have brought Freddie’s ashes. Death had finally granted Will full parental rights, and he didn’t need a headstone. He carried Freddie in his heart. Maybe Freddie’s spirit could be happy here. The few times they’d visited, he’d loved the forest.

  Will glanced around the sparsely decorated room that ran the width of the cottage. Two smaller windows on one wall looked directly into the main house; a huge pinnacle-shaped window at the back held a perfect view of Saponi Mountain. Through it, a wall of dark green was splattered with bursts of foliage the color of dried blood. The dogwoods were turning, which meant every morning his dad would wake to what was about to become a symphony of fall.

  The headache tightened. Now that he’d brought the old man back to the forest, how would he ever persuade him to leave?

  A small glass vase of horribly familiar greenery sat on the dresser. Hauling himself to his feet, Will reached out and ran his fingers up one of the stalks. Hesitating, he raised his palm to his nose and sniffed. Freshly cut sage and the memory that reeked of madness.

  A herb renowned for its healing properties, sage had become a popular bedding plant. Will had seen beautiful sage flowers of red and purple in private gardens—had even admired them from a distance. But get too close, and sage could blister his mind the way poison ivy blistered his skin. Sage was the smell of powwows; sage was the barbed remembrance of his mother dancing half-naked and disgracing them all; sage was the symbol of Uncle Darren warding off evil.

  Will staggered downstairs and out onto the porch swing. The headache was waiting to roar, waiting to tear him apart. Even the fading daylight burned his retinas. He closed his eyes and let his head droop to his chest. Blood pounded; pain pulsed through his brain in leaden waves.

  The smell of sage clung to his nostrils, leached his brain with the slow-moving film playing in his head. It must have been winter, since he was in his footed pj’s, similar to the ones Freddie had owned. Will was supposed to be asleep, locked in his tiny bedroom off the porch. Uncle Darren was outside yelling, waving his bundle of dried sage, demanding to come in and smudge the shack to banish diabolical spirits. The old man refused and there was another blowup about his mom. Had she been laughing outside the bedroom door, or had Will invented that last part?

  Pressure on his knees. Soft and gentle. Human touch.

  “Will?”

  Where had Hannah come from? He didn’t hear her approach. She smelled of hay and lavender. Mild country scents warped into sensory overload by his exploding brain.

  He opened his eyes and tried to look at her, but he couldn’t raise his head. She had beautiful hands with long, healthy fingernails—surprising for a vet. No nail polish. One ring on her right index finger—silver, engraved. Native American.

  “The headache still bad?” Hannah said.

  He moaned.

  “Give me your hands.” Her voice was low, soothing, the voice on the phone from the night before. “This won’t hurt.”

  He obeyed, ignoring the intuition that murmured, Of course it’s going to hurt. You’re a woman.

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Why not?” What did he care if she stuck a thousand needles in his hand when ten times that many pierced his heart every minute of every day?

  “Give me your right hand. Good, now splay your fingers.” She ripped open a small packet and took out a long, thin nail partially covered in copper coils. “I’m going to slide one needle into the webbing between your thumb and index finger,” she said, “into the LI4.”

  “LI4?”

  “Large Intestine 4. An acupuncture point for the head and the face.”

  “In my hand?”

  “In your hand.”

  Will closed his eyes. This, he preferred not to watch. He felt a small amount of pressure but no pain.

  She stroked his left hand, her fingers lingering.

  “How did you get this scar?”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh,” she said. “You have several. Some nasty accident?”

  “Ripped flesh. From rock climbing.”

  “Interesting sport.”

  “More like a religion.” He swallowed through the pain. “Are you going to do that hand, too?”

  “Already done.” She placed both his hands in his lap. “Now sit for an hour, try to relax, then remove the needles. I’m leaving a bag of dried feverfew. Pour boiling water over it and drink it.”

  “If I get blood poisoning, I’m suing for medical malpractice.”

  Was that a laugh?

  Everything went quiet, except for the tree frogs croaking through their nightly social. He didn’t hear Hannah leave, but he couldn’t sense her anymore. A random act of kindness. Wow, that was the stuff of folklore.

  Will kept his eyes shut to avoid confronting the fact that his hands had become pincushions. They felt a little odd, a little tight, but there was no pain from the needles. Maybe, just maybe, if a stranger could pierce his skin with foreign objects and he could feel nothing, then a five-year-old could die by lethal impact and feel no pain.

  His mind darted through unmoored thoughts, disjointed waking dreams he could remember only the essence of. Freddie died strapped into his five-point harness. Safest car seat according to Consumer Reports, unless, of course, your mother hurtled into a wall at seventy miles per hour. Why did Will’s mind have to sketch every detail, re-create an entire scene he had never witnessed and play it over and over again? Screeching tires, the crunch of metal buckling, screams, the smell of gasoline, the whoosh of flames. The explosion.

  A tsunami of grief swamped him, dragged him down to the depths. He would never break through to the surface. He would never come up for air.

  Eyes tightly closed, Will started to cry the only way he knew how. Silently.

  Nine

&n
bsp; Will woke to bright moonlight and the howling of coyotes. And a pair of delicate nails poking out of his skin. So, Hannah hadn’t been some ghostly mirage created by his burned-out mind. He felt—Will concentrated—okay. The headache had retreated into an echo of pain. Staring up at a full moon, he eased out the first needle, then the second.

  How long had he been asleep? Jesus.

  Will jumped up and tugged open the front door, gagging on the smell. The old man was stretched out on the futon, asleep and drooling. The new bottle of Wild Turkey, a quarter empty, pinned a note to the coffee table. “Dinner in—” indecipherable scribble. Oven? Oven!

  Running into the kitchen, Will stopped to glance around for a fire extinguisher. As expected, Hannah was a woman with her shit together, a woman who placed a small fire extinguisher on the wall and a smoke detector on the ceiling. The green, blinking light suggested it was fully operational.

  Will made a quick check through the glass door of the oven. Good, no flames. And the knob was turned only to two hundred degrees, probably because the old man couldn’t see without his glasses. Who knew what had happened to those.

  What other details had Will missed? On a rock face, he never doubted his ability to protect lives, and yet here he was—spectacularly inept at looking after one octogenarian. Was he supposed to remind his dad to change his underwear, brush his teeth, wipe his ass—Will eased open the oven door—take the plastic wrapping off the lasagna before heating it?

  No wonder Hawk’s Ridge charged exorbitant rates. The staff earned every cent.

  A large mug of black coffee and an internet search later, Will had compiled a list of local assisted-living facilities and researched another leg of Freddie’s trip. Will laced his hands behind his neck and stretched. Rediscovering the joy of in-depth location research was invigorating. As with every aspect of his writing, he’d grown lazy, choreographing action around backdrops rather than exploring the psychological impact of setting on character. After all, a patch of forest could brand you for life.

  The scar on his knee itched; he ignored it.