Beware the Wild

by Natalie C. Parker

  Father O’Conner’s in a fine spirit as a result. His cheeks go rosy and he does his best to match the highs and lows of the service to the sounds of wind howling around the steeple. Candy’s unimpressed. She spends the storm-themed homily muttering about superstition and the dangers of small-town thinking. She’s not wrong. Right after Mass, this is the same group of people that’ll trot over to Clary General. It’s too difficult to tease fear from faith, so they’ll cover all their bases at once.

  At the moment, prayer doesn’t seem like such a bad option.

  Too many things have gone wrong. Fisher is too powerful. Phineas is too stuck. Who knows where Heath is, and I’m running low on options. It would be so much easier if I’d forgotten from the start, if Phin had disappeared and I’d never noticed a damn thing.

  If our places were reversed and I was the one stuck in the swamp, I know Phin would’ve found a way to save me. I’m not good at fighting. I’ve only ever been good at running far and fast, at aiming high and laying low. Phin’s the fighter. He fought his battles and mine and it worked. He kept us both safe as houses wrapped in white picket fences.

  Except it hadn’t worked so well. Lenora May was right when she said Phin was running away. It’s no easy business, keeping someone safe, and he was tired of it. Giving me the bracelet was his way of saying it was time to take care of myself because he was leaving. And I punished him for it. I knew he was afraid. I knew he was so worried about me, he’d change his plans to make sure I was okay. I used that against him. Made him think that if he left, I’d wither away to nothing.

  All of this is my fault.

  I tug at the bracelet circling my wrist, stretching the band wide enough to fall off. It would be so easy to leave this wretched hurting behind.

  Tug.

  It slips. A little more and I’ll forget it all.

  Tug.

  I won’t remember how horrible I was to my own brother, or that I got a boy killed, or that I didn’t notice when my own best friend was struggling against the swamp. I’ll forget Phineas and Nathan and Abigail and all this guilt riding my heart. I’ll be a different person. I’ll believe Lenora May is my sister, I’ll believe the fence is there to protect me, and I might even believe I’m a decent person.

  But I’d also forget the first time I made it all the way through the periodic table of elements and Phin crowed with pride, I’d forget the delight I felt when Heath took my hand that day in school, I’d forget sharing a single, nasty cigarette with Abigail in sixth grade and the coughing fit that followed, and I’d forget singing at the top of my lungs in the kitchen with Lenora May.

  I squeeze the bracelet until the bands press tight to my skin. It holds all the most powerful pieces of me. I may have lost Phin, but I can’t give up everything.

  By the end of Mass, Candy’s teased out the story of my incarceration and Heath’s disappearance. Albeit with liberal edits. She’s immediately defensive on my behalf that Heath would stand me up for our midnight rendezvous. When Mama catches me to say the church ladies need her help in the kitchen, that Darold’s gone to tend to yet more damage on the fence, and Lenora May went home with a friend, Candy offers to give me a ride. Whenever there’s a big storm rolling in, the church ladies create food by the boatload and divvy it up between those for whom getting out of their houses has become a challenge. Mama’ll be busy for hours.

  “Thanks, Candace,” she says with a smile that’s already exhausted. “But don’t drag your feet, you hear? This storm’s liable to hit any minute.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we say together.

  We drive straight to Heath’s. The Durham house isn’t a landmark or anything, but a year ago, when Candy thought Heath and I would be an item, she did some fact checking to make sure he measured up. Her mind doesn’t lose much and I’m not surprised in the least that she knows exactly how to find his house.

  We take two turns from the main road and head up a short hill. Every one of these houses has some combination of columns and brick or columns and wood or columns and columns that makes them look like mini-antebellum estates. They’re all big enough to hold two of my house and they all look like they’re posing for a camera. I know Heath’s house by his truck parked in front, obstinately blocking the view of a row of begonia bushes.

  “Now what?” I ask when Candy’s car drifts to a stop.

  “What sort of question is that? Now you ring the doorbell and ask for your lover while I sit here and pretend not to watch.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  Behind the house, the sky is thick and gray. A warm wind slaps at me from either side as I make my way to the front door. There’s no rain yet, but it’s so dim that the porch lights glow daffodil yellow in their frosted sconces. The door is made of that thick beveled glass that tempts you to stare real hard to see through. I press the doorbell and take a polite step back.

  After a minute, the door opens to a woman who looks like she’s been pulled from a magazine spread on Southern style. Her hair is swept back in a beautiful, smooth bun, and little teardrop pearls hang from her ears. Her perfume reaches me a fraction of a second before her rehearsed smile.

  “Can I help you?” she asks, folding her arms so the tips of her nails make small impressions in her green silk blouse.

  Wind ruffles my Sunday slacks, which are shabby compared to the perfect lines of her navy pants. Never in my life have I been so intimidated by a pair of pants.

  “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Durham?” I say, speaking up to be heard above the wind. “My name is Sterling Saucier and I’m here to see Heath, if he’s home.”

  Her smile goes stale right there on her face. “Sterling. How very nice to finally meet you.” She says “nice” in the normal way, but she means another word entirely. “Yes, Heath is home, but I’m afraid he’s not available right now.”

  Wind buffets me again, holding me in place.

  “Is he okay?” I can’t think of what I might’ve done to make him ignore my calls, but something’s not right here.

  “How kind of you to ask,” she says, and again her words only masquerade as polite. “I understand you’re partially responsible for his decision to refuse medication. Do you know what happens to a person when they suddenly quit taking the medicine they’ve been on for years?”

  “N-no,” I say as my heart begins to race. “I don’t.”

  “That’s right. You don’t. I think it’s probably best if you go now, don’t you? Heath needs his rest.” Her smile returns, but she doesn’t even try to infuse it with sweetness. This is a dry, dismissive smile. “So nice of you to come by.”

  The door shuts in my face. Wind howls in my ears, reminding me of all the things I’ve lost today.

  I don’t know what I look like when I crawl into the car. Windblown and devastated, or just dumb. My whole body vibrates with the ringing sensation of having been slapped. Candy gives me a moment, then, before prodding for anything at all, she leans over and pulls me into a hug. Her kindness is my undoing and I cry into her shoulder for a minute or ten, I’m not sure.

  “Tell me,” she says, when I’m sitting with a tissue in my hands that’s disintegrating as fast as my life.

  “I can’t tell you without talking about things you won’t believe!” There’s a spur of anger that quashes my tears flat.

  But Candy does the thing she excels at more than anything else and revokes my anger before it’s taken hold. She says, “Okay, then I’ll believe you. Every single word you say to me right now, Sterling Saucier, I’ll believe you. That’s a best-friend promise.”

  My throat tightens and a fresh wash of tears slithers down my cheeks. “Damn it, Candy.”

  After another hug, she starts the car and begins to steer us down the long drive of the Durham house. I’m preparing to tell her everything from the minute Phin leapt over the fence to Mrs. Durham’s cold smile as she closed the door in my face. But as we’re turning off the driveway, something thwumps against the car.

  Candy slams t
he brakes with an especially colorful curse. I don’t see anything through the rear window but the trees whipping in the wind and a piece of the Durham house hidden behind them. Candy’s halfway out of the car when the back door opens and we both shriek.

  “Jezuz, you could kill a guy with that scream,” says a voice I know.

  “Heath!”

  “You asshole,” adds Candy, pointing a single finger with all the menace she can muster. “If you dinged my trunk—”

  “I’ll take care of it. Promise. I’m sorry.” He’s slightly winded from sprinting after us. “But you were almost gone and I can’t take the truck or Mom’ll know. Any other day of the year, it’s the eyesore she hides in the garage, but now she’s got the thing parked right where she can always see it. Please, drive me away from here.”

  Candy sighs and returns her attention to the road. “I’ll put up with a lot for dramatic displays of romance, but I’m holding you to your word, Heath Durham.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  He leans forward, putting his face between the two front seats. It’s a mark of how invested Candy is that she doesn’t snap at him to buckle up like a sane person. He pauses before answering, eyes flicking from Candy to me with a question.

  “It’s okay,” I assure him. “She’s about to believe everything we say.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  ON THE DRIVE, HEATH EXPLAINS that two days ago Doc Payola informed his parents that he’d been off his antidepression medication for days.

  They flipped. His mother was sure he’d relapse and repeat the sleepwalking events of the previous summer, but Heath stood fast, and Doc Payola admitted that if they hadn’t seen symptoms of withdrawal by now, they probably wouldn’t.

  “Things got a little extra complicated after the speeding ticket,” he confesses. “Your stepdad took an interest and came by to discuss it yesterday while we were gone. When I got home, they took my phone and grounded me for a week. And when I tried to meet you last night, well, things went from bad to worse.”

  “And how did your mom come to blame Saucier for the sky being blue?” Candy’s tone suggests the question’s innocent, but I see the glint in her eye. She’s following a scent, and if Heath’s answer doesn’t satisfy, she might dump him right here and tell him to march home.

  Heath fidgets. I could save him, but I let the question stand.

  He clears his throat and says, “I may have delivered an impassioned speech about having found someone who believed me when I said I wasn’t crazy, and someone who supported me no matter what. And I may have said that person’s name in the course of a shouting match with my parents. And that may have been a huge mistake.”

  “No,” I say, “it wasn’t.”

  I spend the rest of the drive cataloguing all the ways he’s different from his mama. They may have the same gold tones in their eyes and skin, but Mrs. Durham manages to look sharp and cool where Heath looks like a summer day. Ten minutes later, we’re gathered around my kitchen table with a pot of coffee between us, ready to put Candy’s promise to the test.

  The house is empty but for us. In spite of Mama’s warning that we hurry home, Lenora May must be with her friends. This would be easier if she were here, but I try to imitate her calm, deliberate manner of explaining impossible things to Candy. She has a way of making this insanity sound like something that not only could happen, but has. When I say it, it sounds desperate. Heath helps, adding a bit here and there, lending even more credibility to my tale.

  I finish with a condensed and severely edited version of the previous nights’ events, sans ultimatum. I skip anything having to do with Nathan. Heath has to be the first to hear it. Even without that addition, I can feel tension rolling off his shoulders.

  Candy sits through the whole thing, still as a rock. Her eyes don’t leave my face, her fingers are flushed white from being pressed so tightly against her mouth, and even her hair seems to have become straighter in its ponytail. Without warning, she stands and walks to the sink, dumps her coffee, then disappears around the corner into the bathroom.

  I share a nervous glance with Heath before refilling both our mugs. I like coffee so strong you could stand a spoon in it and this comes close. The cinnamon stick I threw into the grounds adds even more bite. I enjoy the hint of spice on my tongue, but Heath cools his mug with a liberal application of milk and sugar. By the time he’s done, it’s barely coffee anymore.

  “Did that go well? I can’t tell,” says Heath, slurping at his coffee and hissing at the heat. “I don’t know if you know this but Candy’s . . . intimidating.”

  “That’s why she’s captain of the volleyball team. We win or lose most of our games before the first serve ever goes up simply based on her intimidation factor.” I laugh at a memory of Candy facing off with a girl twice her size from Alexandria. Candy shook the girl’s hand and said maybe three words. The poor girl shrank a whole foot in the exchange. “I think it went well. At least, better than the other times I’ve tried talking to her about this.”

  Just then, Candy reappears. She looks much the same as she did, but she sweeps her car keys from the table and snatches her purse.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she states, stalking to the door.

  And then she’s gone. We listen as the sounds of her car get farther and farther away and we’re left with nothing but the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall, and the tap-tap-tap of Heath’s foot.

  I need to tell him, but I can’t bring myself to speak. I stare at him so long and so hard that he finally cracks.

  “Um, you wanna see a trick?” he asks with a playful grin.

  Without waiting for an answer, he digs a quarter from his wallet and holds it for me to see. In a quick series of motions, he mimics swallowing it only to reveal it’s still safely in his palm.

  “Sneaky.” I reach for the quarter to verify that it is, in fact, real. “And surprisingly useless. Where’d you learn that? Two minutes on a smartphone?”

  “Nathan.” The word is a blow. “He had uncles who were really into magic tricks and they taught him when he was a kid. He tried to teach me a few of the easier ones, but this is the only one that stuck. He used to say that I couldn’t turn tricks if I were a New Orleans hooker.”

  His laugh is a short bark. I should laugh because it’s funny and a good memory. I don’t want him to think I’m so prudish I can’t take a joke about a whore, but I can’t laugh. It would be terrible to laugh and then tell him Nathan is dead as a direct result of something I did.

  “Sorry,” he adds when I’m quiet too long. “I’m pretty susceptible to caffeine since I quit taking those pills.”

  I don’t want to tell him.

  “Hey.” He runs a thumb down my cheek. “What’s wrong?”

  I’m stuck in his sympathy. I don’t want to shake it away. I want to go back to yesterday afternoon when everything was good and promising. I want to return to that dusky moment when we kissed and nothing else mattered. But I won’t run from this.

  “Heath, I have to tell you something.”

  I hate the words as soon as I’ve said them. Generic and cowardly, they do nothing to prepare him for what’s coming next. Even I don’t quite know. I try to imagine how I’d want to hear that my brother was dead.

  And then I stop trying.

  “I haven’t told you everything that happened last night.” I pause, waiting for a reaction, but aside from surprise, there’s not much else. He has no reason to suspect the truth.

  If I don’t say it now, I never will. My throat begins to close, as if it might stop this horrible confession. “Nathan’s dead.”

  “What?” he asks, not because he didn’t understand, but because he doesn’t want to.

  Swallowing hard, I continue. “Fisher was angry about the peaches. I don’t even know how he found them, but he did and he knew. Everything
happened the way I said except this bracelet protected me. He thought I’d lied to him. He thought I was trying to fool him, and—” The sight of Nathan’s face as Fisher pulled the life from him is so clear in my mind. “I didn’t think Fisher would kill him and I’m so sorry, Heath, because I should have known.”

  “How could you have known?” His voice is a faraway thing, all hollow and empty.

  He moves away from me, to the living room, where he stops, staring through the window to the swamp. His eyes are dry as kindling, his body tranquil as a locust shell, clinging to the side of a tree.

  I pull his hand into mine, biting my tongue against the urge to say soothing things. But I know how horrible soothing words can be when you’re dealing with something so heavy it hurts, so I press my tongue against my teeth and fix my gaze to the broken fence.

  “You should’ve waited for me.” His hand is cold in mine, and tense.

  Arguing the point feels petty. “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did he say anything?” He turns to look at me. “How did it happen?”

  Quietly. “He was searching for you.” His voice was hoarse from shouting. “He didn’t really seem to understand what had happened. I think he got stuck in that moment after the crash. For him, it was still that night. And then—”

  I think of Phin’s body hanging in the air. How easily it could have been him if Fisher had decided differently.

  “And then, Fisher just—” I don’t have to close my eyes to see it all again. Nathan’s mouth frozen in a silent scream and full of light. “Fisher just took his life away. It was easy for him. Like blowing out a candle. Fisher’s not even human. Maybe he used to be, but he’s—oh, God, he’s not anymore.”

  Suddenly, Heath’s eyes are full and wet. He slumps next to me, knees crashing to the floor. I collapse with him. His shoulders shiver against mine. My lips tremble and I try to push thoughts of Phin from my mind.

  This could be me—the only one left to bear the memory of an entire life. It might still be me and right now I’m sure that if I lose Phin I’ll take this bracelet off and sink into ignorance.