“Yeah. I guess the ultimate screw-up was mine. Thanks to me, Dad’s close to being homeless.”
“Maybe we should consider Poppy’s plan,” she said.
“No. It’s not fair on anyone. Least of all, you.”
“See? You do have a big heart.”
Could she not cool it with the compliments? A hawk screeched overhead, its usually assertive cry weak, scared, desperate. Lonely.
“What if we struck a deal?” Hannah said.
Deals were to be avoided. There was always a catch.
“You come straight to me if Galen tells you anything that you feel I should know, and I’ll do the same for you with your dad.”
“You want me to break a confidence?” he said.
She began twisting her silver ring around and around her index finger.
Realization came slowly, but then he normally bailed before the conversation got this intense. And she was recruiting him for the front lines. Or was it more of a press gang maneuver? “You mean that I should come to you if I think it’s a matter of life or death.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“Jesus, Hannah. I’m way out of my depth here.”
“So am I.”
He rubbed sweat from the back of his neck. There wasn’t a wisp of a breeze in the forest. If he were alone, he would strip off his T-shirt. Although, the thought of being half-naked and near Hannah was enough to make him reconsider.
“I haven’t thanked you,” she said, “for not judging Galen.”
“I haven’t thanked you for not judging my dad.” Or me. People were always making assumptions, thinking they knew him. But no one did, except for Ally.
Maybe Hannah was right. Maybe things did happen for a reason. An experienced climber knew when to shake out and conserve strength. When to rest so he could make it to the top and back down. Maybe being at the cottage was like reaching a solid hold on a difficult route and pausing to rest. Maybe he needed to be here while he gained strength to move forward with his life. A life without Freddie.
“We need to find the old wagon trails,” he said. “My dad will be following them.”
“You do know that your dad would be miserable in New York.”
“Of course I do. But I might not have a choice. If I can’t find a local facility, he’ll have to come north with me. And maybe that would be better. At least I could see him regularly. I can’t just abandon him when he’s the only family I have left.”
“Aren’t you forgetting your son?”
“Freddie’s with me always. I didn’t mean that.”
But she didn’t look as if she was buying it.
“How do you know about the trails?” Once again, she was letting him off the hook.
“Not hard to figure out. Lots of people were trying to scratch out a living around here, and they settled near the fords so they could stay connected—establish communication and trade routes. Every group had its own road—wagoners, people with pack horses. There were even black roads.”
“Black roads?”
“African-Americans had their own roads just as Native Americans did.”
“I don’t understand.” She shook her head slowly. More curls bounced free of the barrette. God, she was adorable.
“What don’t you understand?”
“You belong here just as much as your dad, but you walked away to live in New York.”
“I didn’t walk, I ran. Shhh.” Will held up his hand. “Did you hear that? Dad? Dad, is that you? It’s me, Willie!”
“Willie?” she whispered, but her voice had turned playful.
“Family nickname.” Just another squirrel, not the old man. “Didn’t you have one?”
“No. My family was excruciatingly serious about everything. There were no shortcuts, even with names. I guess that’s why I was so wild as a teenager.”
Hannah, a wild teenager? How improbable. Although she did have her own quiet way of approaching life, much as he did, and he’d certainly had a few wild years—smoking at twelve, drinking at fourteen, sneaking around with Ally. By junior high, though, nothing mattered beyond safeguarding his ticket out of Orange County: his GPA.
“Did your parents ever call you William?”
“No.”
“It’s such a beautiful name. Can I call you William?”
He whirred around, pushing aside the memory of Cass’s voice: I shall always call you William. “No.”
“Another off-limits?”
“Yeah.” Was she keeping a running tally?
“Wait.” Hannah grabbed his arm and he felt it again, an exchange of energy passing between them. Although this time it was definitely lust, since it landed squarely in his groin.
His dad materialized about twenty yards ahead of them, like a deer appearing by the edge of the forest on a foggy morning. And he was smiling. Smiling? Will ground his teeth together.
“What you two young’uns doin’ up here?” Jacob said.
Will wanted to speak, but his jaw refused to unclamp. Hannah, however, didn’t miss a beat.
“I came to invite you and Will for lunch,” she said. “I made pumpkin soup for my son last night and have enough to feed half the county. I was hoping you guys would help eat it.”
The old man held up a Ziploc bag with a limp sandwich inside. Un-friggin’-believable. He’d packed lunch?
“Brought along some PBJ, but I reckon homemade soup sounds a whole lot better.” His dad grinned.
Will rolled his head back to look up at the crows. How much longer could he play nanny to a grown man while his life collapsed around him?
“Why don’t we all go back to the house and have a little feast.” Hannah moved toward his dad, and they linked arms. “I’ve been out since six this morning, and I’m starving. Did you find anything of interest up here?”
Will wasn’t sure what to say or do, since he’d clearly become irrelevant to the conversation. He kicked a dead branch across the forest floor as if it were a soccer ball. Okay, so that was just childish.
“Found me a coyote den.”
“Yes, we avoid that,” Hannah said. “The coyote bit Daisy’s bottom last time she sniffed around there.”
“It were probably the male coyote, bein’ all protective. Found a small cemetery, too. And my mind’s been seein’ all manner of ghostly figures in them trees.”
Great. Hannah and his dad were going to exchange ghost stories now. It was a mystery that people didn’t find real life frightening enough.
“Did I ever tell you I were a grave digger, Hey You?”
“You certainly did, Jacob. Do you have any stories to share?”
And the moment turned almost as quickly as if Will had snapped his fingers.
His dad glanced at him, his forehead furrowed. “You young’uns been out on the mountain again? How’s your mama, Ally?”
“This isn’t Ally, Dad.” Too late he blushed and realized Hannah was staring. He wanted to explain, to shout, No, it’s not what you think. Why? Why should he care?
“Best thing you two did, Willie, bring me back to the woods. Had me a fine ol’ time.”
“Dad, you can’t wander off by yourself and get lost. We were worried.”
“Lost? I ain’t lost. I reckon you’re the one who’s lost, son. You been livin’ in the city too long if you think your daddy could get hisself lost in the forest. Me, lost in the forest,” Jacob mumbled. “I was fixin’ to come home before sundown.”
“I get lost up here all the time,” Hannah said.
This whole conversation was about as fun as squatting in a tick nest. Will needed a drink—a good stiff one. He might have to dip into his dad’s Wild Turkey, set some bad examples for his aging father. Maybe just a single, anesthetizing down-in-one sho
t. Except he could hardly turn up at the afternoon’s retirement home appointment stinking of liquor.
“Since you don’t have a cell phone,” Hannah continued, “Will might have to get you a small electronic bracelet to wear. So we know where you are when lunch is ready.”
“You buying this, too, Angel? About me being lost?”
“No. But you want the freedom to wander the forest by yourself, right?”
“I sure do, Angel.”
“Well, this will allow you to do that without Will calling out the National Guard when he can’t find you. Right, Will?”
Ever the peacemaker, ever the force of calm and reason.
“Yeah, right.” Then Will fell silent and concentrated on finding his own calm, his own quiet place between anger and desire.
Twenty-Two
Galen watched from his bathroom window. Mom and Jacob were arm in arm, smiling, and Will trailed behind, head bowed, hands in his pockets. Will had looked a lot happier when they’d entered the forest, and he’d been checking out Mom’s ass.
Shouldn’t he feel indignation that Will had been eyeing up Mom? Relief that a guy was interested? Sadness that she was oblivious? Emotions were reverberations from a life Galen no longer remembered. Nothing touched him; nothing spoke to him; nothing enabled him to interpret experience. Poetry was the medium through which he translated the world. Without it, he was blind, deaf and dumb. Zombie Galen.
The other night, Will had described returning to North Carolina as being trapped in a crack between the present and the past. It was an idea worth exploring in a poem. Or it would have been. How odd—to consider stealing from a commercial writer.
The handful of pills disintegrated silently in the bottom of the toilet bowl. Bubbles the size of pinpricks rose to the top of the water level. The pills blanched his life. They made him numb, lethargic, and he wanted to feel in Technicolor. Even desire had deserted him. His libido? Gone. Erections? Gone. The psychiatrist had warned about sexual side effects but hadn’t given options. Take this pill, it’ll make you impotent but you’ll be too apathetic to care.
Everyone insisted he take the pills as if they were some miracle cure. But he was ingesting chemicals. Being an alcoholic was different. Alcohol offered a window to oblivion, not a lobotomy. He had never been a pill taker—not one Motrin for a headache—but for over a month he’d been pumping his body full of toxins.
Nausea came and went. Even though he was standing still, it was as if he were spinning. He grabbed the shower curtain and steadied himself through another wave of dizziness. Tapering off the medication would, no doubt, be wise. Just stopping was, no doubt, a mistake. But the sooner he flushed the poison from his system, the better. He’d quit alcohol cold turkey. How much worse could this be? Short-term hell, long-term gain.
He picked up the pill bottle, dropped in some aspirin, screwed the top back on. An empty pill bottle would only alarm his mother. Not that she would monitor him. Mom had always given him privacy. In high school he could have dumped his used condoms on top of the kitchen trash and she would have said nothing. Still, he’d buried them at the bottom.
Down in the yard, Poppy appeared and shouted, “Everything okay?” Unlike Mom, Poppy had noticed their good-looking writer-in-residence. It was easy to see why Poppy had the hots for Will. If he were gay, he’d have the hots for Will.
Women had probably always fallen for Will. Every woman except the one he loved, poor bastard. And Mom. They would make a handsome couple, Will and his mother. She looked good for her age. Everyone said so. And he’d seen guys other than Will give her the once-over. He’d never understood her refusal to date. Was she protecting herself or her sons? Back in high school, he and Liam had tried to set her up with their English teacher, a sweet divorced guy with two kids. She’d refused.
Mom was hard to read. Like the two-headed Roman god, Janus, she had a second face that she rarely showed even to her family. Where did this insecurity come from, this need to make other people happy, to fix them? And what did she do for herself, other than go to the occasional sweat ceremony? On her last birthday, he’d given her a gift certificate for a massage. She’d regifted it to one of her clients with back problems. “He needed it more” had been her explanation.
When Galen was sixteen, he wrote a poem about her called, “Inside I Weep.” Mom had assumed it was his reaction to the divorce, and Galen hadn’t disillusioned her. So many times he’d heard her crying when she thought she was alone—crying either for her marriage or for his grandparents. Both of them gone within six months of each other. He didn’t really understand how Papa had died. Grief killed him, Mom always said. But when they were studying DNA in eighth grade, his bio teacher said it was romantic myth that people died of broken hearts.
Galen flushed the toilet, and the detritus of pills was sucked into a whirlpool, into the septic system. Into the water table.
He opened the door and ambled downstairs to see what was going on. A smile tugged at his lips. It felt good.
“Galen?” Mom frowned up at him. “Are you okay?”
“Wonderful,” he replied. He flexed his fingers and stared at the fine black hairs and the bloodied, chewed skin around his nails. “Wonderful, just wonderful.”
“That’s great, sweetheart.”
It was that easy? All he had to do was lie? She was so trusting. He flipped his right hand over and grabbed his wrist, his thumb finding his pulse. And yet, everything was wonderful, because finally, he knew what to do with his life.
* * *
Galen’s smile was a little disconcerting. Yes, of course she wanted to see him happy again, but this smile was beatific. While she was out rounding up a stray senior, had her depressed son found God? Hannah glanced at Will, but he was in the living room, examining the framed photograph of her blowing out candles on her twenty-first birthday.
“Great picture of Mom, isn’t it?” Galen said to Will.
“Yeah.” Will turned with the photo in his hand.
“I had youth on my side,” Hannah said.
A false memory flashed. She was meeting Will when she was his age, before the lines, before the stomach sag. Before. Hannah unclipped her hair and ruffled it forward to hide the blush. Normally Poppy would have noticed, commented—teased—but she was too busy ogling Will.
“You haven’t changed at all.” Will replaced the photo.
It was a generous comment and a lie. No one could compare that picture favorably with the face that greeted her every morning in the bathroom mirror. Will lied well, almost as well as she had done for the past twelve years. But no more; no more. Everything had changed in that one, brief decision to trust Will, and the relief was as comforting as one of her father’s hugs.
Life was about choices. Her father had chosen to die; she had chosen to keep the circumstances of his death secret. Now she had chosen to tell Will. Choices allowed you to control the present but they also set the future in motion—for good or for bad. And now the time had come for another choice. The short-term repercussions would likely be recriminations, but Galen needed the knowledge that she had withheld. She wasn’t looking for snake oil and miracles, but maybe the truth about his grandfather could help Galen feel less alienated on his journey to recovery.
Clearly, he was looking for answers and had already considered—at least once—seeking them in alcohol. They hadn’t talked about the incident with the wine, because she’d been too afraid. Of all the thoughts that had raced through her mind when she’d seen Will with that bottle, the most terrifying was the realization that her son was still so close to the edge. But right now, he didn’t look like a person who was floundering. He was smiling, really smiling. Looking strong enough to handle the news.
Closing her eyes briefly, Hannah sorted her thoughts. She could wait until the house was empty, until she and Galen were alone, but she’d ch
ickened out before. And Galen might need someone to turn to. He might need Will.
“Galen,” she said, “can I talk to you in private, in the den?”
Will looked at her, eyebrows raised. Barely moving her head, she gave a nod, and he responded with a small smile. Offered understanding without language.
“Poppy,” Hannah said, trying to sound cheerful. “There’s pumpkin soup in the fridge and a fresh baguette in the bread bin. Can I leave you in charge?”
“Sure thing, girl. Come on, boys, time to eat.”
Galen followed her into the den and flopped into his dad’s ancient armchair, the one Inigo had left behind with his family.
Her son draped one long leg over the arm and waited for her to close the pocket door.
“You seem to be feeling better,” she said.
“Yeah, how about that.”
“I guess the pills are finally working.”
He shifted. “I guess.”
A thought floated through her mind but didn’t take root: Is he lying?
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
Galen rested his head on the chair back. His black hair fanned out and for a moment she was distracted by his casual good looks, so like his father’s—despite the now-hollowed-out cheeks. “I’m listening.”
“Your grandfather—”
Galen rolled his head to one side. “Suffered from depression, right?”
“You knew?”
“I started wondering if there was a genetic component.” He stared up at the ceiling. “And Dad’s family may be mean for treating him like a deviant and us like lepers, but they’re not mentally ill.”
“Depression isn’t—”
“Mental illness? Yes, Mom. At the level I have, it is.”
He was right, of course, but hearing him bite down on the words mental illness slapped her across the face. All those years she had kept him safe, and yet she had failed to protect him from the greatest threat of all: himself.
“I’ve been remembering things,” Galen said. “Things I didn’t understand when I was ten.”
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