Sue turns the coffee she waited so long for upside down, and the dark liquid spills over into the ground in a black stream. “Tell them that we came out for Annie today because we love her. Tragedy doesn’t just happen to a person. It happens to a community. I think that’s what you see today.” She takes aim, chucks the cup into a nearby trash can, and gives Laurel a last look. “After Lydia died, we needed Annie to carry on. We needed to hope in her. And she became everything we needed her to be. We owe her this.” She widens her eyes as if to say, Do you understand?
Laurel finds herself nodding even though she hasn’t really been asked a question. She watches as Sue walks away. This time she does not call after her, does not ask for any clarification. With every day that passes, she understands this story a little more.
Clary
She watches as Travis leads the prayer for the search parties before they go their separate ways. He holds his hands up and out, palms facing down, as he invokes a blessing over all those searching, praying for safety, praying for vision, praying for a miracle. She has grown accustomed to his praying by now. It doesn’t even seem odd anymore. This is who he is now. And she is who she is. Travis was right all those years ago: she is not pastor’s wife material. They are two different people. They were, even then. She just didn’t know it yet.
In some ways, it’s as if they never knew each other at all. And, as fearful as she was of seeing him again, she is strangely at peace with it now. She wonders, if Annie had been here, pushing and urging, if things would’ve been different. For the barest moment, she is glad Annie has been gone; it has let her off the hook, allowed her to hang on to her precious secret. She is immediately seized by guilt at this thought.
“I’m sorry, Annie,” she whispers.
Travis ends his prayer, and the crowd says, “Amen.” Released, the volunteers all charge out in different directions. They are not giggling or chatting. They are somber and resolute. Which is, Clary thinks, the way it should be.
Hal York had asked the family to come and be visible, but he stressed that no one expected them to search. Clary, however, wants to walk, even for a little bit, so she tails after one of the groups. She wants to be a part of what is happening. She feels as though something is going to happen today. It is, after all, Annie’s wedding day. Something should happen today.
Someone falls into step beside her, and she looks over to find Travis there. He sees her surprised expression and gives her a small, weak smile in return. “Mind if I walk with you?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Guess not.”
They walk along in silence, both hanging back from the group of searchers. It is clear neither of them will walk very far. Soon one or the other will make an excuse to turn back. And yet they keep walking, going deeper and deeper into Eden Hill State Park, neither of them speaking yet neither of them making a move to leave. It is like when they used to see who could hold a lighter up to their skin the longest. Who would flinch, who would pull away.
They round a bend, and she sees the clearing, which stops her in her tracks. She has never approached it from this direction, so she is surprised they’re upon it so fast. Travis looks to see what has caused this reaction, and she sees recognition dawn on him as he slowly places where they are. He turns to look at her. “Is this . . . ?”
She nods, her eyes round. Of course she knew that they were near it. She and Faye had even mused this morning about the connection between Annie’s car being found near the place where her mother was murdered. Perhaps, the police theorized, Annie had gone there and fallen, or become ill, or been attacked by someone. People still went there from time to time, to see the place where the murder happened or on a dare to spend the night there. Town lore says the place is haunted. But it isn’t haunted. Clary thinks that people, rather than places, are more likely to be haunted.
Travis stands quietly beside her, his eyes scanning the small area as if something—or someone—might be lurking in the woods. But she is not afraid. In her mind, she can clearly picture Lydia and little Annie, sitting outside their tent all those years ago. Clary envisions it as though she were watching a movie: it’s a cool night, so Lydia keeps a blanket wrapped around their shoulders. Annie points up at the stars with a tiny finger as Lydia teaches her to make a wish. Annie wishes for a puppy. Lydia is about to make her own wish when they hear a twig break under someone’s foot. The two of them look in the direction of the sound, their matching blue eyes wide as the figure comes toward them. Clary wishes she could see who it is. Is it someone Lydia invited? Or a stranger?
A thought occurs to her: maybe if she tells Travis, if she does what Annie wanted, Annie will return to them. She decides it is worth a try.
“Travis,” she hears herself say, the saliva in her mouth congealing even as she tries to swallow it.
He looks back at her, and she sees that familiar fight-or-flight look he used to get whenever he felt threatened. “Yeah?” The word comes out strangled. He knows, she thinks. He knows what I’m about to say. She almost asks him if that’s true, but instead she decides just to get it over with. She will say it; she will let the chips fall where they may, and when they return she will hear that Annie has been found. She’s hurt maybe, but she’s at the hospital. She will be okay. The fantasy forces Clary to keep talking.
“What if I told you there’s something I need to tell you about, um, after we, um. Well, after you left.” Smooth, she thinks.
He cocks his head at her. Gives her a small smile that she recognizes instantly. It was his get-out-of-trouble smile, the one he used to defuse situations he didn’t want to be in. He holds her gaze for a beat, then says, “I’d say that was a very long time ago.”
“Yes,” she agrees.
“I’d say neither of us needs to go back there. Do we?”
“Annie seemed to think so,” she says quietly. She looks down at the ground, gathers her courage to say the next thing. The thing that will make Annie come back. As she does, she recalls what she said to Annie on the phone that last time.
“If I tell him, you know what he’ll do. He’ll find her. He will prevail upon her parents to let him have a part in her life. And they will go along with it because they are good people. He’ll make them believe they’re helping people. In a few months, or years, or whatever, he’ll convince them to get onstage with him and introduce her to the world. He will turn this into some heartwarming story—maybe even write a book about it. You know what he does. He will make her his story. But she’s not his story. She’s her own story.”
Clary looks up to find Travis watching her warily. The get-out-of-trouble smile is gone, and all that’s left on his face is fear. Real fear. She waits for him to say, Okay, go ahead.
But instead, he tugs on her elbow. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s keep moving.”
Stunned by his response, she almost goes along, falls into step beside him as if what just almost happened didn’t happen at all. As if now that the moment has passed, they can go on with their lives. But something stops her. It is not that she wants to stay there in that place where her aunt was murdered and her cousin was orphaned—she doesn’t. It’s that she does not want to do what Travis expects. She does not want to go one step farther with him. In that moment, the one desire is simply stronger than the other.
“No,” she says. “You go. I’ll stay.”
“Come on, Clary,” he says. “I can’t leave you here, of all places, at a time like this.”
She digs her heels into the ground a little, staking her place. “I’ll be fine,” she says, and as she says it, she feels strangely happy. “You can go.”
This time, it is her choice to stay behind. Just like it was her choice to have the baby without telling Travis. Annie says it was selfish of her. But she doesn’t understand what Clary knew then and now. Burdened by his religion, he would’ve done “the right thing.” He would’ve come back to Ludlow, married her, raised their little girl. He would’ve taken a job, shelved his calling, and ended
up a bitter drunk like his father. He wouldn’t go on to become a famous preacher. He wouldn’t have more than a million Instagram followers.
Sometimes when Annie accepts the credit Travis gives her for where he is today, Clary wants to correct them both. But of course she doesn’t. Because she knows she did what she did as much for herself as for Travis. She lied and said she didn’t know the baby’s father’s identity. Then she’d gone off to Charlotte to handle things herself.
She’d taken every step possible to keep the pregnancy a secret. She’d lied to her mother and cousin, saying that, following the breakup, she just needed to get out of town for a bit. She’d lied about a job offer, when the “job” she’d found was to grow a baby for a couple who couldn’t have one of their own. When she spoke to Annie or Faye, she’d made up stories about coworkers who didn’t exist, repeated things she’d seen out in public as if they had happened to her. She’d made excuses not to visit during the later months, when she couldn’t hide the pregnancy anymore. She’d lived with the adoptive parents, seen their lives firsthand, growing more and more certain as she did that she’d made the exact right choice for her daughter. For a few months, she’d been really happy. When Annie showed up for her surprise visit, she’d been angry at Clary’s deception. She’d called her a coward, but Clary had never felt braver.
Their daughter’s adoptive father loves her adoptive mother. He smiles whenever she walks into the room. That was how Clary chose them. From among the prospective parents she met with, he was the only one who reached over and took his wife’s hand. Oh, several of the wives grasped their husband’s hands. But this one reached for his wife’s, and it was so natural Clary could tell it happened all the time. For a girl who’d just been rejected by the boy she’d loved all of her short life, that one small action said everything she needed to know.
“Seriously, I want to stay here,” she says now. “You can go.” She smiles at him with the same encouraging smile she gives her doves when she opens the basket at a release, a smile that says what she couldn’t confidently say to Travis when she was eighteen years old. But now, she realizes, she can: It’s okay to go. I’m releasing you. You are free to fly. This time when he walks away, she doesn’t watch him fade out of sight. She turns her back to look at something else, something different.
She is walking alone through the park back to her car when her phone rings, startling her. She stops and fishes it out of her back pocket to see who is calling. An unfamiliar number is on the screen. She almost doesn’t answer, but with everything going on, she decides she’d better. “Hello?”
“Is this Clary Wilkins?” an unfamiliar voice asks.
“Yes?”
“Do you own a dove banded with the number”—there is a pause and Clary holds her breath—“AVI 3214537?”
Mica. She’s memorized that number by now. “Yes,” she says, breathless with excitement. She stops walking and looks up to the sky. You let one thing go, and another thing comes. This time the tears don’t just fill her eyes; they spill over onto her cheeks. “Did you find him?”
“We think so, ma’am. I’m at Eden Hill State Park. I need to ask you to come there, to the area where the bandstand is, and I can meet you there. Are you familiar with that area?”
“Yes,” she manages to answer. “I’m actually headed there now. I’m . . . here for the search.” Her stomach begins to churn, exhilaration being replaced by dread. This doesn’t feel right.
The man on the other end doesn’t seem fazed by this coincidence. It’s as if he already knows. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”
“But I don’t have a cage or anything for him. I need—” She starts to argue that she should go home first but then realizes that whoever it was has hung up. She walks faster toward the bandstand area where, just an hour ago, Travis prayed for a miracle.
When she arrives, the park ranger is waiting for her. She immediately recognizes him from high school but can’t recall his name. She guesses it doesn’t really matter. He waves her over, and she picks up her pace. When he greets her, it is with a familiarity that tells her he remembers her, too. But now is not the time for a reunion.
“Where is he?”
“This way. You good to walk?” he asks.
She nods and falls into step with him, though it is hard to keep pace with his long stride. They walk in silence, and she recalls the town gossip about him as they do: he was a football star who went to college but didn’t have what it took to make it at that level. He lost his scholarship. Came home and was a drunk for a while. Then he found his way.
He stops suddenly. “Listen, I want to prepare you. The bird is pretty weak and starved.” He turns to her and takes off his hat, holds it in front of his chest. She feels the sick feeling return. “We think it might be on top of an area of interest,” he tells her. “But the police can’t really investigate further until the bird is removed.”
She stops caring about her bird; all she has heard is area of interest. Annie’s car, she thinks. The search. The wedding that didn’t happen today. She’d known something was going to happen today. But not this. She hadn’t let herself think of this. Annie cannot be dead. She can’t be. She would know, wouldn’t she? She would feel her absence. But she hasn’t felt a thing.
“It might not be her,” she says aloud.
The park ranger, whose name, she recalls, is Chris, looks at her with deeply sympathetic eyes and, in an act of compassion, lies to her. “We have no idea what it is,” he says. “Right now we’d just like you to take the bird.”
“Mica,” she says.
“Mica?” He is confused. Annie said it was stupid that she named the birds. But things of value have names.
“He has some silver on his feathers,” she explains. “The pattern reminded me of mica. You know, the rocks?”
He nods and picks up his pace. She follows suit.
“I used to collect rocks when I was a kid,” she tells him.
“Yeah?” he says. “Me too.”
They walk down a small hill and into a scene. Cops are everywhere. Crime tape cordons off the area. Chris walks her to the edge of a drop-off, and she peers down at what appears to be nothing but a deep growth of vegetation. There, sitting on top of a tangle of fern fronds and dead leaves and an overgrowth of kudzu vines, is Mica. She could swear that, weak as he is, he preens a bit when he sees her.
She crouches down as close to the edge of the drop-off as she can get. Behind her, the cops all step forward in unison, and someone says, “Be careful, ma’am.”
Clary ignores them and extends her finger. “Hey there,” she greets her lost dove. “Where have you been, fella? And how in heaven’s name did you get all the way over here?”
Chris places a cage beside her, and she hopes Mica will go into it without too much of a fuss. They all wait wordlessly as Mica debates leaving his spot and coming to her. Clary can smell something foul snaking into the air. She notices that the K-9 handlers at the edge of the scene are holding back their dogs. Cadaver dogs. She wants to get out of here, and fast. She takes in the surroundings, trying to puzzle out how and why her bird could’ve ended up here. But there will be time for grappling with this irony later.
Beside her left foot, she spots something shiny and squints, at first in confusion, then in shock, as she realizes what it is. She starts to reach for it, but a man’s voice behind her calls out, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you not to touch anything.”
“But—” She turns to another cop, who was at her house just yesterday drinking coffee and helping himself to a chicken salad sandwich. “It’s mine.” She points at the antique silver barrette that had been their grandmother’s. Annie must’ve borrowed it from her again. This time Clary hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
Faye
Hal doesn’t come in person to tell her like she’d imagined it happening. He calls her right from the scene. She can hear people talking and dogs barking. It is so loud she can scarcely hear him. “Faye, are yo
u there?” he shouts into the phone.
“I’m here,” she says. She went to the search but left as soon as the parties headed out. She couldn’t be there.
“Hang on,” he says irritably. She hears the creaking sound of his gun holster moving in tandem with his stride as he walks away from the noise. It gets quieter.
Her cheeks are wet with tears she did not realize she was crying. “I was right,” she says to him.
There is a pause. “Yes,” he says. “We just found her. It looks like she was on a path and just stepped over the edge somehow, probably in the dark. It was raining hard that night—she probably slipped and fell down into some overgrowth below. It concealed her. That’s why we couldn’t see her. Which is why I’m calling. Clary wouldn’t let anyone drive her home, and I want you to be looking out for her.”
“Did Clary find her? Did she see her?” She can hear her voice rising into a panic.
“No,” Hal rushes to assure her. “It was Clary’s lost dove. Some kid saw the dove and went and got a wildlife officer. It was some kid who’s apparently obsessed with birds, so he knew someone probably owned the dove. It was just sitting there, roosting on a branch that was covering her.” He pauses. “Like it was guarding her.” He is silent for a moment, and she listens to him exhale and inhale. “Without that dove, I’m not sure we would’ve found her.”
“Okay, thank you,” she says, her voice formal and reserved. Already she can feel this changing them. In the way that Lydia’s death brought them together, Annie’s death is pushing them apart. She lets this sink in, accepting it. Lydia was the beginning. Annie is the end. Even the best stories have to end sometime.
Only Ever Her Page 21