An hour later a light tap sounded on the door. Her heart seized like a fist before swamping her veins with hot frenzied blood; she had half-lifted off the chair, praying with all of her being that Matthew was somehow here, despite everything, but her aunt Erica, looking drawn and ghost-pale, stepped into the room a second later. Bryce felt her throat close up at the expression in her eyes, but she gamely rose to return the hug that Erica’s outstretched arms were offering. The two clung for a minute. Erica could see that Bryce had been crying, and crying hard. She whispered against the girl’s soft dark hair, “Bryce, I am so sorry.”
Bryce shook her head against Erica, unable to speak, anguish racking her. She kept thinking of what she’d said to him on the dock last night, the ways his eyes had looked as she broke both their hearts, of his strong hands now shattered and aching.
Erica pulled back and smoothed Bryce’s hair. She tilted her chin at the duffle bag she’d placed on the floor, finding she couldn’t look directly at the man sleeping in the hospital bed behind them. She said, “Bryce, I want you to know that we love you, okay? But I think it would be best if you go home for a while. Wilder is going to drive you to the airport—” Erica stopped abrubtly and drew a sharp breath, looking away from her niece’s eyes. Tears filled her own, but she forced herself to continue, “To the airport in Minneapolis. He’s waiting for you…we drove separately.” Erica couldn’t admit to Bryce that she was unable to bear the long drive, that she would surely crack and make Wilder turn the truck around, and bring Bryce back home. She rushed on, “He…we didn’t tell your mother anything. I don’t know what to say, Bryce.” And then she sighed, eyes flashing expectantly back to the younger woman. She wished for a moment that she could sit down and demand that Bryce tell her the whole story.
Bryce had pressed both fists hard to her midsection at Erica’s words and looked in danger of fainting, her face alarmingly pale. Wordless, she studied Erica with the exact same terrified and hopeless expression that had covered Matthew’s face earlier. Erica gulped and said, “I have to go, Wilder is waiting. But Matty asked me to give you this.” And she passed a small, sealed envelope into the girl’s hand. Swallowing back her anguish, Erica bent and kissed Bryce’s ice-cold cheek, and then hurried from the room with no other offer of farewell. Crushed, Bryce clutched the envelope to her chest and then carefully eased it open, pulling out the folded, lined notebook paper with shaking hands. His writing was wobbly and shaky because of the cast on his right hand, the message short and to the point. She read: Bryce, Wilder told me you’re going home. I think this is for the best. I’m sorry. Matthew.
She made a small, choked sound as she read the words again and again, realizing what they meant. She sank to the faded tiles of the hospital floor, her knees simply dissolving as pain and disbelief collided within every atom in her body. No, oh please, no. Please don’t do this to me, Matthew. I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it. Oh, God. She could not even cry, her hurt ran so deep. Instead she pressed the words to her chest, and willed her heart to keep beating.
Chapter Seventeen
Middleton, Oklahoma – Friday, June 30, 1995
This can’t possibly be the place, Rae thought, stunned to her very core, her eyes ranging over the dilapidated trailers, the patchy, scraggly yellow lawns, the dented, rimless, occasionally tireless cars scattered like a broken-down herd of some kind of metal creature. Weeds grew thick in the cracks along the stained concrete; a single lawn chair with a sagging left side, reminscent of a stroke victim, huddled in the strip of shade offered against the trailer’s near side from the hammer of the 3:00 p.m. sun. My God, this is where Bryce grew up. This is where the bulk of her childhood memories take place. Shelly, Shelly…what is this? How did this happen to you?
Rae parked and climbed out of her rental car, and her heels clicked absurdly over the pitted sidewalk, surely the most civilized sound in the vicinity. She heard music drifting out from somewhere near, smelled pot, and grease and frying onions, heard the faint rise and fall of a fight between female voices. She climbed the steps and tapped three times on the tin frame of the screen door, tipped her face a few inches closer to the dim interior of the space, hoping to catch any signs of life within. Nothing. She made out a sink piled with cans, a yellow table, and farther inside, the shape of a couch. She knocked again, with more force.
“Michelle?” she ventured, and her voice surprised her, squeaking out in the pitch of a much younger version of herself. She squared her shoulders and tried again. “Michelle, are you in there?”
There was a small thump from the recesses of the trailer, followed by the unmistakable sound of running water. Rae turned and swept her skirt around her thighs, reluctant to perch on the steps but unable to conceive of any other option; if Michelle was showering, Rae would wait. Dammit, she had waited almost 21 years to see her best friend again, to hear even the most remote of explanations. It turned out, though, that she waited no more than a minute before Michelle came creeping around the edge of wall separating the living room from the kitchen, moving silently, wraithlike, wrapped in a faded pink bathrobe that hung loosely around her thin frame. She stared wordlessly at the back of a seated woman on the uppermost concrete step, observed the fancy clothes and shiny upswept hair, the taut line of her small shoulders.
Shit, Michelle thought. She was not in the mood for a pep talk about Jesus, not today, not ever.
She was about to sneak back to bed, but the air between their bodies somehow alerted the woman, made her chin tip up and around, and the next thing Michelle knew she was staring into the eyes of Raellen Taylor, with nothing more substantial between their gaze than a sagging screen door.
Rae rose to her feet, slowly, as though she were facing an animal that may at any second bolt. Wordless, she moved to put her hand on the latch, her eyes taking in this hardened stranger’s face, searching for any glimpse of the young woman she had known and loved in another life. Another life far from this desolate prairie place and wasteland of a trailer court.
It was her hand on the latch, the threat of entry, that made a small cry burst from Michelle’s throat and pop into existence. She put both hands out as though to ward off physical assault of some kind, and the sight of her wild eyes forced Rae’s feet into action; without thinking about it, she hurried into the trailer, moved to Michelle and wrapped the pathetic form in both arms, holding her tight.
Michelle tried to pull away, shaking her head, but something within her snapped like a dry twig and she sagged against the woman who had once been so familiar to her, sobs thrashing her entire body with their force. Rae held her tight, stroking one hand lightly on her stringy hair the way a mother would, trying not to think about what was happening here, what this might mean. Michelle wept like a child, a dam inside of her crumbling under the murderous force of her anguish. Minutes passed and Rae offered no words, just held her, and at last the shaking sobs subsided enough for Michelle to gather her pride and pull away. Without meeting Rae’s eyes, she collapsed on a chair at the table and buried her head in her arms.
“Go away,” she said then, her words muffled and faint from behind the barrier of her forearms and drooping blond hair. “Please, just go away.”
“Michelle, Jesus Christ,” Rae said, and her words seemed too hard-edged, too loud in this bleak, stuffy, dirty place.
Michelle lifted her head then, displaying a puffy red face, eyes rimmed in dark purple, bruise-like. She seemed to have retreated into a coldness, and although she wouldn’t meet Rae’s eyes, she no longer felt compelled to hide her own. She said, “Hand me that, will you?” and Rae, who was bent forward over the table, hands braced like a kindly teacher delivering a lesson, lifted her eyebrows, too surprised to do anything but obey. She turned to where Michelle was indicating with a listless hand and retreived a denim purse from the countertop near the sink.
Michelle reached into its depths and extraced her smokes and lighter, got one burning. She asked, “You want one?”
Rae
pursed her lips to say no, but thought better and replied, “Yes, actually I would.” She accepted the cigarette and green plastic lighter, inhaled deeply, remembering a time when she smoked frequently, had enjoyed it very much. She blew smoke casually out her nose, wondering if maybe she had misjudged atrociously and should perhaps just thank Michelle for the smoke and make her hurried exit. But she stayed, smoked in silence with her oldest friend for few moments. They both leveled their gazes on the orange ceramic ashtray acting as a centerpiece on the shitty table, let it collect their thoughts for a few.
“You’re far from home,” Michelle said eventually, swiping at her eyes with her free hand, then extracted a second cigarette and lit it with the tail of the last.
“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing about you,” Rae returned, thinking, I can play this too, Michelle.
Michelle asked, “Where’s Bryce?”
Rae ground out her butt and braced her forearms on the table. She said, “She’s still in Rose Lake. Shelly,” and her voice softened a touch, “There’s been some things going on…things you should know about.”
Michelle studied her from behind a smoke screen of the palest silver. She didn’t know what to make of Rae’s comments, could have killed herself for crying like that, for letting her guard down. Rae, whose face she hadn’t seen since she was 17, looked utterly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful and sophisticated, her golden-hazel eyes perfectly lined, shadowed and mascaraed in coordinating bronze tones. Michelle blew smoke and finally asked, “What things?”
Rae looked away then, down at the tabletop as though collecting her thoughts. When she looked back up she said, “Do you remember the night you told me about Matthew’s father being John Ryan?”
Michelle nodded, appearing nonchalant, but something in her posture was suddenly wary. “Yes, of course. But Rae, the bastard is dead anyway. You can’t tell me it matters anymore.”
“Well, actually…it does matter. It matters to your daughter.”
Michelle frowned at her. “Why the hell would it matter to her?”
Rae looked her directly into the eyes, mentally cringing at how terribly old Michelle looked, wrinkly and wizened, so unhealthy, uncared for. But there was no time for worrying about that now, and she let the bomb drop. “Bryce and Matthew are in love with each other, Shell.”
Michelle hee-hawed a disbelieving laugh. “You’re full of shit.”
“I’m not, Michelle, not at all.”
The hand holding the cigarette sank a little. Michelle squinted at her, as though gauging the accuracy of Rae’s assessment of the situation. At last she said, “You’re wrong. Bryce has a boyfriend. And Matty…” She struggled to picture the sweet little boy she’d known in another life as a grown man. The image refused to gel in her mind. “They think they’re related for Christ’s sake. And you’re telling me they’re in love?”
“Michelle, goddamn it! You owe her this. She needs to know that Matthew is not really her uncle but an entirely unrelated person who she can be free to love. And,” getting truly angry now, trying to subdue the desire to clench Michelle’s shoulders and shake her until her head flopped, “I came all the way down here to this Godforsaken shithole you call a home to ask you in person if you would grant me permission to do that!” Rae’s voice grew more shrill with every word, her eyes gleaming with angry, unshed tears. Michelle stared at her in open-mouthed shock.
And suddenly the last of the dam swept away, and tears came back into her own sore, swollen eyes. Her hands began trembling and the cigarette dropped to the floor, still burning. Michelle didn’t move, but Rae squeaked and bent down to grab it, and as she did, Michelle closed her eyes and whispered, “Your father, Rae.”
Under the table, Rae clutched the butt between forefinger and thumb, sat back up and ground it distastefully into the ashtray. Michelle’s words reached her and she responded with an inarticulate, “Huh?”
Michelle spoke through a choking throat. She pressed her fingertips to her eyes and willed away the vision in her mind, would that she was able to will it away forever. She whispered, “It was your father,” and Rae froze, an icy splash of water dousing her at the tone of Michelle’s broken voice. A moment in which everything held still, a moment in which Rae’s heart and lungs constricted as something like understanding dawned.
She lifted one cold hand and gripped the bottom half of her face, squeezed her own cheeks and whispered, even though she feared what she would hear next, “What?”
Michelle kept her hands over her eyes. She whispered, her words broken with shallow gasps, “He…raped me, Rae. He is Bryce’s father. I never told a living soul…until this moment.”
Rae sat unmoving, unblinking, as the words sank into her. Her knees stared to tremble. Surely the tightness in her chest was a part of her own heart breaking away, never to reattach. She whispered, “Oh, no, no.”
Michelle dropped her hands away from her eyes, impaled Rae with them. “It was Thanksgiving night, Rae. He drove me home that night, remember?”
“Oh God, oh God,” was all Rae could manage. Michelle continued, an onslaught of words at last given air. She pleaded, “I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, Rae. I know…” and she drew her own deep breath. When she spoke again, her voice was slighlty more composed. “I know you loved him a lot, Rae, you and Bar, both. He was very drunk that night, and so was I…and he…” She started to cry. “He thought I wouldn’t remember.”
Rae spoke from behind her right fist. “Shelly, oh God…oh, God, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” And then she moved around the table and wrapped her arms around Michelle again, both of them weeping and trembling. Rae spoke against Michelle’s damp hair. “Oh God, why didn’t you tell us then? We would have helped you, Bar would have killed him, that bastard, that perverted son of a bitch…”
Michelle whispered, “That’s exactly why I couldn’t, Rae, don’t you understand?”
“No, no, no,” Rae sobbed. She thought after Tony left she was done with tears, that surely nothing else was worth so many…but this she could never have imagined had she lived to be a thousand. This meant that Bryce was her and Bar, Jr.’s baby sister. All this time, she had never even suspected. So many things made sense, all at once, like puzzle pieces locking gently into place after so long. Her father’s strange retreat into himself that winter, after Michelle left Rose Lake. The way he bought Bar, Jr. a beautiful, expensive Cadillac for Christmas that year, as though such a thing could even begin to make up for his personal atrocity.
Michelle calmed herself and eased back, and between them now there was no coldness, no pretense. She looked something like herself again, at least in the expression in her sky-blue eyes. She said, “I had to tell you. I couldn’t live with it anymore, Rae. It was eating me alive.” Without malice, she laid her skinny arms on the table, wrist up, and pushed back her sleeves. Rae gasped to see the furrows of cranberry-colored scars running parallel to the slate-blue veins beneath. Michelle said, “I wanted to forget. I hated myself for destroying Bryce the way I did, for hating her, because she was the reason I couldn’t get over it. I saw him in her eyes, in the way she moved, in the way she would tilt her head. I hated her for it, Rae, and I could kill myself right now for feeling that way. I’ve done her so wrong. Far more wrong than Lydia ever did me. I deserve to be dead for how I’ve treated her.”
Rae shook her head, her eyes still gushing with tears. She folded her own hands over the horrible marks on Michelle’s pale skin, found the skin there eerily cold and tight. She said, “Don’t say that, Shelly. And your daughter is a wonderful girl. She’s a beautiful, wonderful girl.”
“She’s your little sister,” Michelle said, with a small hint of an actual smile. “You and Bar, Jr. I’m glad you finally know.”
“I already love her,” Rae said then, and sighed, scrubbed at her cheeks. “I love her very much. Something inside of me must have known anyway.”
“How…how is your brother?” Michelle asked, and her voice was very soft.
“I can’t forget how he looked the last time I saw him. It haunts my dreams, Rae. His eyes. It’s useless to say now, but I’ve never stopped loving him.”
It was probably unfair to a number of people, including her brother’s wife and four children, but it was a gift she could give, and Rae said, truthfully enough, “Shelly, he never stopped loving you, either.”
Michelle closed her eyes and after a moment whispered, “Thank you for that, Rae.” I know it’s not true, she thought. But she said, “Thank you so much.”
Chapter Eighteen
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – Saturday, July 1, 1995
Bryce had never been on a plane in her life, and had once figured that such an occurrence would be something relatively exciting, perhaps when she and Wade headed to Vegas to get married, for example. Or she and the girls would have somehow saved up enough cash to take a cruise in the Carribbean. On this flight she had a window seat, which gave her an amazing view of the night sky, vast and black as the huge machine skimmed south in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
She pressed her forehead to the cool glass, unable to sleep even a moment. Her head ached, her eyes were raw and sore, and in her throat perched a jagged lump of despair. She couldn’t begin to imagine explaining the past two weeks to Michelle. The long, long car ride to Minneapolis had been torture enough; Wilder had sat in stony silence, which Bryce was too afraid to break. He’d dropped her by the curb at one of the many terminals ringing the huge Minneapolis airport, had relented just a fraction as she moved for the door handle, said in a raspy voice, “Bryce, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do.”
She’d replied, “Don’t bother,” unable to meet his eyes, and pulled her bag from the backseat. It was all she could do not to slam the door with every ounce of strength; instead she’d settled for a quick, silent walk away, leaving the car door gaping, not glancing back once. If he’d sat there a moment in indecision, what did it even matter? He’d driven away eventually.
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