Still Mine

by Amy Stuart

  “You took Wilfred’s side,” Clare says, edging closer to Jared along the fence.

  “I guess I did,” Jared says. “There was no clarity. No rhyme or reason. Wilf just seemed so sure. The whole time, he owned it. He stood at the door. I’m trying to play the deputy. ‘Wilf’s right,’ I’m saying. ‘Do we all die?’ Then the banging was fading and the old-timer started really losing it. ‘Your men! Your men!’ he’s yelling at Wilf. We had to hold him back. It took eight minutes for the banging to stop outright.”

  “That’s . . . that’s hell,” Clare says.

  Jared looks down to his feet. “No one said a thing after that. The old-timer just slumped down and buried his face in his hands. I think about him sometimes, that old-timer. He had eight grandkids. He never spoke a word of it after we got out. No interviews, nothing. He died of a heart attack a few weeks after the rescue.”

  “Jesus,” Clare says.

  “Traumatized, I guess.”

  “And you were down there for a month?” Clare asks.

  “Twenty-four days. The first night was actually hell. Guys huddled and crying. Then on the second day the radio buzzed to life, and they started calling to us from the surface, and right as the oxygen was getting low in the chamber they broke through with an air shaft and found a way to pump out the methane and pump fresh air in. Even the old-timer sprang back to life. No one told us anything about the other guys, so we start thinking, Maybe they made it? We weren’t asking. But we knew. I was picturing Mikey alive and well. I had to keep myself from falling apart, but I knew.”

  “How did you survive for that long?”

  “That’s what the chamber is for. Like a spaceship. There were water rations and dried food, and eventually they got stuff down to us, this high-protein liquid diet that tasted like shit. Every mine rescue crew east of the Pacific was up there trying to get us out. It was all over the news. They brought in equipment from around the world to drill the rescue shaft. They made a show of letting the dads in the group talk to their kids over the radio. Wilfred was on his game, keeping tabs on everyone. I’d wake up and he’d be the only one awake, keeping watch. Then the rescue shaft was a go and you knew your odds still weren’t great. Still a million variables. We knew it would take each guy nearly an hour to get winched up. Wilfred would be the last to climb it.”

  “And you?”

  “Second to last.”

  Clare has some memory of this scene, the news images of men being plucked from a narrow hole lit by a floodlight, a ticker across the bottom of the TV screen flashing the miners’ names as they emerged one by one, bearded and dazed. It strikes her as strange, the revisionism, the way the memory cements itself more urgently now that she knows one of them was Jared Fowles.

  “Everyone went crazy when Wilfred finally came up,” Jared says. “Louise and Shayna were there. It was the main event. A family reunited. But Wilfred was having none of it. He refused all interviews. Batted away the cameras. Like the hero just drained out of him as soon as he hit the surface.”

  “He lost thirty men,” Clare says.

  “Thirty-two,” Jared says. “Even Charlie was there. Putting a face to the dead miners. He didn’t hate Wilfred yet. Didn’t have the full story.”

  Clare and Jared both turn and lean against the fence, facing out. Clare points to the cinder-block building.

  “What’s that place?”

  “Used to be the mess hall,” Jared says.

  “Were you friends with Charlie back then?”

  “We’ve always been friends. Even after I married his girl.”

  “Shayna was his girl?”

  “Shayna was everyone’s girl.”

  “So Charlie loved her but hated Wilfred,” Clare says.

  “There’s a picture of Charlie and Wilfred shaking hands right after we got out. For a while it was okay. No bad blood. Then Charlie started hearing from the guys who’d been below. The mine company began questioning Wilfred’s safety checks, looking for someone to blame. People said the captain should have gone down with the ship. You know what? That’s what Wilfred tried to do. He tried to go down with the ship. That’s what Charlie doesn’t get. His father and his brothers are dead because they tried to abandon the ship. They jumped overboard and drowned.”

  “Everything gets foggy in the aftermath,” Clare says. “It’s hard to blame the dead for anything.”

  “You know what?” Jared says, his shoulder against Clare’s. “That’s the first time I’ve told the story in years. After the news cameras left, no one ever asked.” He taps at his temple. “Clearly it’s all still there.”

  “Did they ever find out who was banging?”

  “Three bodies. Take a guess.”

  “The Merritts.”

  “Russ and his two boys. The retrieval crew found them piled up outside the chamber. Theirs were the only bodies they recovered. Everyone else was ash. Charlie’s been on a rampage ever since.”

  The sun peeks out of the clouds, warming Clare’s face. She closes her eyes, her stomach roiling. Has she eaten anything today? Jared faces the fence. He grips the links and scales it, landing with a thud on the other side.

  “Where are you going?” Clare asks. “Come back.”

  Jared’s back is to her, the chain-link fence between them. He approaches the steel door of the mine shaft and easily pries it open, only black beyond it.

  “Charlie took an industrial saw to the door last year,” he says. “Opened it back up. He traps animals and throws them down the shaft.”

  “You’re making that up,” Clare says.

  “Am I?”

  “Step back!” Clare says. “You’re too close to the edge.”

  Cupping his mouth, Jared hollers into the void. The echo is muffled.

  “They call it a lost mine,” he says. “All the tunnels down there. Miles of them, abandoned.”

  “Please. You could fall in.”

  “People have fallen in,” Jared says. He takes hold of the frame and leans into the darkness.

  “Please,” Clare says, a crack in her voice. She sees the top of the cellar stairs, the darkness below. That tipping sensation that comes right before you fall. Jared presses away from the door and walks over so that their faces are inches apart through the fence.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just playing around.”

  “Who’s fallen in?” Clare asks.

  “No one, really. That’s just Charlie’s dumb joke. But it would be the perfect place to hide a body. Wouldn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t sound good when you say things like that.”

  Jared steps back to take a quick run at the fence and climbs it again, landing on the other side right next to Clare. He takes her by the arms so she is facing him squarely.

  “Let me spell it out,” he says, drawing out the words for effect. “I didn’t kill my wife. I didn’t throw her down the mine shaft. She never came down here. Not even with Charlie. No one threw her down the mine shaft.”

  “You didn’t kill your wife,” Clare repeats, blinking, nauseated again.

  “Swear to God. Last time I saw her, she was in the gorge, out cold by the fire.”

  “You left her down there?”

  “I had my hands full with someone else.”

  A flash of awkwardness passes between them at this revelation, Jared going home with another woman. His thumb presses into Clare’s shoulder, prompting a stab of pain. She shakes herself free from his grasp.

  “She never would have come home with me anyway,” Jared says. “She was looking for reasons to hate me. She didn’t want me, but she didn’t want me to move on either.”

  “So what do you think happened to her? You must have a theory.”

  “I think she woke up and walked upstream. She knew the route like the back of her hand. Got home and drove away.”

  “Drove away in what?”

  “Someone’s car.”

  The way he looks at her, Jared is willing Clare to piece it together.
/>   “Derek? You think Derek took her?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? Suits him perfectly. He gets to keep her, and everyone else looks to me.”

  This is the version Clare presented to Malcolm last night. It strikes her now that she might be grasping at whatever theory absolves Jared.

  “What about Wilfred and Louise?” Clare asks. “Derek just steals their daughter right out from under them?”

  Jared shrugs. “Maybe they’re in on it.”

  “What? No way.”

  “They always listen to the doctor.”

  “You’re just pointing fingers.”

  “So are they.”

  Clare frowns, considering.

  “If I ask you something,” she says after a minute, “will you tell me the truth?”

  “Would I admit to a lie?”

  “Sara told me that you once found Shayna overdosed at her parents’ place. She said you left her to die.”

  Jared bends to pick up a rock. He tosses it over the fence so that it lands and rolls into the open door of the shaft, clanging its way down.

  “That’s the kind of story people invent when they need a bad guy,” he says. “You never knew Shayna.”

  “So you didn’t find her?”

  “I went to see her up at her parents’ place. She’d moved out a month earlier and we had some decisions to make. I wanted to file the paperwork but she was stalling. She was jonesing, actually. Off-her-head desperate. She begged me to find her something to take the edge off and I refused. Tried to talk her down but she was having none of it. Believe me, she was alive and sober when I left. I guess Wilf found her a few hours later in a coma. She must have hit up Charlie in between. I wasn’t even allowed to visit her at the hospital. I was the evil one by virtue of my wedding ring.”

  Clare spots four birds circling, hawks or falcons, she could never tell the difference. She squints up and watches them swoop and glide overhead. It’s been months, years, since Clare has bantered like this with a man, a back-and-forth both calm and fraught. An equal footing. Jared studies her.

  “You really do look pale,” Jared says.

  “Can you drive me to town?”

  “I didn’t kill my wife,” Jared says again.

  I believe you, Clare thinks. But she can’t say it out loud. Jared is standing too close to her. Please don’t, she wants to say. She’d almost forgotten the energy that signals a kiss, the ground gathering charge. Clare steps around him and walks back to the truck.

  “I told Sara I’d meet her soon,” Clare says. “I need to make a quick stop first.”

  “I told you my story,” Jared says, following behind. “Now you owe me yours.”

  “I know I do. Just not now.”

  In the truck Clare rolls down the window and leans into the breeze to ward off further conversation, to settle her stomach. She thinks of Shayna and Jared’s wedding picture, of the photographs of Malcolm and Jason hanging in the trailer, those framed photos left behind on her kitchen windowsill at home, she and Grace, that last healthy picture of her mother. You owe me your story, Jared said. What if Clare isn’t sure of her story, whether she’s remembering any of it correctly? What if she’s altered it to spare herself some key truth? If all those photographs were here, Clare would pile them into the pit at the trailer and light a fire, watch all their faces swirl together. What she wouldn’t give to be free of it, like Louise, to remember nothing, to have it all melt away.

  The driveway is marked by a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree: Meyer. The walk from the hospital has disoriented Clare so that now she is almost teetering, her mouth dry with thirst. It took some convincing to get Jared to leave her at the hospital, insisting she needed only to pick up something left behind in Louise’s room, that she’d soon head to Sara’s.

  Derek’s driveway is narrow and rocky, a trailer up ahead much like the one at Charlie’s, his SUV pulled up beside it. No house. Flies swarm her. Clare feels anxious, shaky. You are not yourself, Clare thinks. Settle down. This is just the infection setting in.

  A light is on in the trailer. Before she nears the door, Derek opens it and steps out. He looks disheveled, his shirt untucked, a day’s growth on his face.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” Derek says. “No one comes up here.”

  “The nurse told me where to find you,” Clare says. “My shoulder is bad. I’m out of sorts.”

  “Did you walk here?”

  “My car is dead,” Clare says. “I thought the fresh air would help.”

  “So you’re stranded?” Derek says, his expression blank. “That’s not good.”

  Clare feels the familiar patter in her chest. Fear.

  “Is someone here with you?” Clare asks.

  “Who would be here with me?”

  “Shayna?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Come in.”

  “Maybe you should take me back to the hospital.”

  “We’ll go if we need to. Let me have a look first. Come in. You need something to drink.”

  There is nothing else to be done, nowhere to go but in. Clare hoists herself up the steps and into the trailer. It is laid out just as hers is, the small kitchen and banquette at the center and the bedroom at the far end. Except Derek’s is immaculate, the counter wiped clean, the sink scrubbed and devoid of a single dish, no comforts of home. He places a glass of water on the table.

  “Sit down. I’ll get my kit.”

  After a minute, he returns from the bedroom with his medical bag.

  “You’re the town doctor,” Clare says. “Why do you live in a trailer?”

  Derek washes his hands at the sink. “I had plans to build a house on this lot. There’s a great view from higher up. I was about to break ground when the mine blew.”

  “Why’d you stay in Blackmore? You must have had better options.”

  “They needed me,” he says. “The other doctors left. Most of the nurses too. Everything would have fallen apart if I’d gone.”

  “But everything fell apart anyway.”

  There is a small clench in Derek’s jaw at this slight. A dizzy spell comes over Clare. She sips the water, then rests her forehead in her hand to quell the surge. Derek sits beside her and removes some supplies from his kit. He pulls on a pair of surgical gloves.

  “Let me have a look,” he says.

  Clare pushes her bra strap aside and wriggles her arm out of the neck of her shirt so that her left shoulder is bare. Derek presses gently into the skin surrounding the gash.

  “It’s warm to the touch,” he says. “A bit swollen.”

  “I don’t feel very well,” Clare says.

  Up close Derek’s eyes are too deep a brown for Clare to distinguish his irises from his pupils. He squints.

  “Do you see how the edges of the surrounding redness are jagged?” Derek traces the perimeter of the wound. “The infection is starting to spread. You need antibiotics.”

  “You like to fix people,” Clare says, studying his face.

  “I’m just doing my job. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “You tried to fix them. The women. Shayna and Sara.”

  “Not anymore,” he says, leaning back. “I know a lost cause when I see one.”

  Derek reaches into his kit for a gauze, then douses it in antiseptic. When he touches it to Clare’s shoulder, she jolts.

  “That burns,” she says.

  “It’s not the infection that’s making you sick,” Derek says. “I’ve seen withdrawal before.”

  Clare shakes her head. It’s always obvious, Grace used to say. You think you can hide it but you can’t. We aren’t blind.

  “What have you been taking?” Derek says.

  “Nothing. Not recently.”

  “You know it’ll eventually kill you, right? There’s no surviving it. You either stop, or you die.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Clare says.

  “My mother was a drunk,” Derek says. “She could have stopped. Willed herself to stop. S
he just didn’t. It was that simple.”

  “You don’t give her much credit.”

  “She didn’t deserve my credit,” Derek says.

  Clare thinks of Grace and Christopher seated together in her living room, pitted against her as she seethed at them, their intervention ill-timed, days before her planned departure, Grace’s tiny baby tucked safely at home with Grace’s husband. She thinks of Christopher following her into the kitchen, insisting she hear him out, Clare’s rage steering her to Jason’s gun in the mudroom. Clare braces herself when Derek presses the antiseptic to her skin again. It bubbles and hisses as it seeps into the cut.

  “Was Shayna pregnant?” Clare asks.

  “Where did that question come from?”

  “Louise said something about a baby.”

  “She has early dementia. She says a lot of things.”

  “She says things about Shayna. About you.”

  “Are you working for someone?” Derek says.

  “No.”

  “Are you working for someone?” Derek says again.

  “No. It’s hard not to be curious.”

  Derek presses harder. Clare flinches. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve got to get it clean.”

  “I’m trying to help Louise,” Clare says. “I think she’s searching for Shayna. You know a lot about that family. Maybe you know something that could help her. Or help the authorities track her down.”