Moondust Lake

by Davis Bunn

  When they pulled up to a stoplight, Carey glanced over at Beth. A passing streetlight illuminated the way her mother was partially curled up in her seat, using the door for support.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this, Momma?”

  “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  “You don’t look good. Do you have your pain medication?”

  “In my pocket. Where it’s staying until this is done.” Beth met her daughter’s gaze. “Now isn’t the time to be concerned about me.”

  They used the house directly across the street as their way station. Beth knew the owners spent their winters in Arizona with their son’s family. She had a key to their home, which she probably should return. Beth was friends with all her former neighbors. Beth also assumed they shared a unified response to news she had left Jack: Finally.

  When Carey pulled into the drive, Beth told her daughter, “I’m so proud of you.”

  Carey cut the engine and turned in her seat. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “I’ve made a mess out of my life. I fell in love with the wrong men and pretended I could make it right.”

  “You refused to let your father crush the child in you. In your own way you are a very strong and capable young woman.”

  Carey’s eyes shone bright in passing headlights. “You’ve never told me that before.”

  “Which is my mistake.” Beth reached over and touched her daughter’s cheek. She wanted to say that if it were possible to pine for someone from the grave, Beth would miss her baby girl most of all. But now was most certainly not the time for maudlin tears.

  Carey stared across the street at her former home. “I can’t believe I’m about to go ask my father to do the impossible.”

  “Two things, sweetheart, and I want you to listen very carefully. First, the important thing here is that we try. Second, it’s impossible only if Jack insists on holding to a course I know, deep as my own bones, that Jack already realizes is wrong.”

  Her husband chose that moment to pull down the street and into the drive. As the garage door cranked open, a pain momentarily seized Beth, which was bad, but it fled as swiftly as it had arrived.

  “Are you all right, Momma?”

  “I’m fine.” The boundaries of her world were growing smaller by the hour. “Come around and help me, please.”

  * * *

  Beth entered the house, supported by her daughter. Upstairs, Fox News blared from the television in their bedroom. Jack followed a nightly routine, going straight into the shower with the news turned up high enough for him to hear it over the water.

  Carey’s breathing was audible, tight little gasps that were a fraction of an inch off moans. Beth wanted to tell her it was all going to be just fine. But she would not taint this night with a lie.

  Then the television cut off and a heavy tread emerged from the bedroom and started down the upstairs hall. Carey’s grip tightened to where it pained Beth.

  As prepared as she thought she was, watching Jack come down the stairs was a shock. Her husband wore a suit she had never seen before, three-piece and black and creased from having been stored away for a long time, perhaps even decades. He wore a starched white shirt buttoned to his neck, and no tie. He froze on the middle step, clearly astonished by their appearance. “What on earth?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.” She pointed at his attire and said the first thing that came to her mind. “You’re wearing clothes from your darkest hour.”

  “Beth, I . . .”

  “Is that a proper way for you to go meet with your son? Our son, Jack?”

  “He’s gone against me.” But her presence had rattled him in an unexpected fashion. Beth could see it in his gaze.

  “Tell me something, Jack. Do you even remember the day we met? How you begged my grandfather to stop his revival and take you down and baptize you? How you pleaded with him when he asked you to wait until the lakeside service that night? Do you remember the words you spoke?”

  He stared at her, then Carey, then back again. He did not move from the middle stair, as though their presence trapped him.

  “Do you remember, Jack? How you screamed the words there in front of everybody? What did you say?”

  Her daughter had turned to her as well. Hearing these things for the very first time.

  “You told my grandfather, ‘I’ve got blood on my hands.’ And what did Granddaddy do, Jack? He walked you down to the lake’s shore and he dipped you in the water. And what did you do, Jack? Do you even remember? You wept. You cried like a little child.”

  Beth was weeping now, and she heard Carey’s half-formed sob. But the tears weren’t important. The only thing that mattered was how her husband remained there. Mouth agape. Listening.

  “That is the man I married, Jack. That is the man I’m asking you to be once more.” She shook her hand at him. “Not this man who drapes himself in old shadows and goes off to do wrong. And that’s the only way to describe what you’ve set in motion, whatever it is. A dark and dreadful wrongness.”

  She stopped then because the pain struck, as though she needed the punctuation mark to halt her. She held herself erect by will alone, and took one tight breath after another.

  “Daddy?” Carey’s voice was little-girl small. But it came out clear enough to cause her father’s gaze to swivel around. “Something’s come to me during therapy that I want to share with you.”

  Her father wanted to sweep it away as garbage. But the motion died before it was formed, a mere toss of his left wrist, a grimace, and neither truly felt. Jack stood. He waited. He listened.

  Carey went on, “I remembered something I had forgotten or just put away. That’s a big part of therapy for me, dealing with memories. I remembered how it was when Sylvie went at you like she did. And how it brought out . . .”

  “The shadows,” Beth offered quietly.

  “Right. The thing is, the reason I’m here, I want to be the other daughter. The one who helps bring you back to us.”

  Beth’s breath caught up sharp, but this time it was because her heart was pierced by joy. “Carey, that is so beautiful.”

  Her daughter glanced over. “I’ve been thinking about that ever since you asked me to come tonight. How I want to be the daughter who helps heal away the scars.”

  He took a shuddering breath. And tried to push them away with the words “I need to be going.”

  “Go where, Jack? Away from your wife and your daughter?”

  “You were the one who left me.”

  “And look where it’s brought us.” She felt an immense calm settle upon her, a rightness that flooded her with a force so powerful she knew he was going to agree before she spoke the words that had come to her in the car. She knew this. “Jack, look at me. No, I want you to really look. Do you see it, Jack? I’m leaving this earth. It’s only a matter of weeks now, maybe even days.”

  “Oh, Momma . . .”

  “Shush, child, I’m speaking to your father.” Beth waited through another hard breath. “Jack, you’re the only man I’ve ever loved. And without you there beside me, heaven is going to be a lonely place.”

  Carey collapsed. She fell to her knees there in the front hall, and she sobbed. Beth rested a hand upon her daughter’s head, stroking the child she loved more than life. Then she reached out her free hand and she said, “Turn away from those shadows, Jack. They’re not you, and they don’t own you. Come back to me and your family. While there’s still time.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Buddy Helms approached the Hamlin Courthouse through the park. The clouds had rolled back, and the Central Valley was enjoying a splendid night. The moon fashioned a silvery carpet as he stepped forward. Buddy walked alone because he had said it needed to be done this way. The growing number of people who had joined him disliked the idea, but they had relented. Mostly because their leaders, Preston and Stanton and Cliff and Ross and Bernard, had granted him sil
ent agreement. So he started through the last line of elms, armed only with the phone in his right hand.

  But as he started to emerge, a phone sounded from up ahead. The sheriff lounged on the top stair with a pair of aging scarecrows. Their dark suits and narrow expressions were drawn from a bygone era. Several uniformed deputies lounged a couple of stairs lower. They all watched as the sheriff lifted his phone and said, “Jack, where you at?”

  The night held its breath as the sheriff angled his body around, his thick leather belt creaking as he turned to the two dark-suited men and said, “What you mean, you ain’t coming?”

  One of the old men tromped forward, hand outstretched. “Give me that.” He wrenched the phone from the sheriff and said, “We’re here on account of you and that debt. Now I want . . .” The old man’s voice did not so much cut off as grind down, reduced to ashes by whatever he heard. The hand retreated slowly from his face. “Jack hung up on me.”

  Buddy took that as the only sign he was likely to get that evening, and stepped through the trees and down into the street.

  “That’s far enough!” Despite the night’s unexpected change of direction, the sheriff’s voice carried stern authority. “You the Helms boy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What took you so long?” He gestured to the two silent wraiths. But the motion carried the same sense of uncertainty as his voice. “You kept your betters waiting. They don’t like tardiness. You’re gonna have to pay.”

  “Let Kimberly go, and we’ll leave,” Buddy said. “No foul, no penalty.”

  “Boy, you must think you’re still out there on the coast. This here is our town. You done stuck your lady’s hand in a whole mess of trouble.” The sheriff and his deputies started down toward him. “And you’re gonna rue the day.”

  Buddy raised his voice and yelled, “Now!”

  The sight of all those men and women appearing through the trees must have been something. But Buddy could not risk looking. He kept his gaze steady upon the sheriff, who faltered for a second time. “Y’all get on about your business!”

  “That is exactly what we’re doing!” Cliff Hazzard shouted back. “This young man is all about my business.”

  “This is an unlawful assembly! Move or we’ll . . .”

  He stopped when the two news crews came into view. Cliff Hazzard’s press team had done their job well. Fresno was the closest city to possess a television station of its own, and to have two show up on such short notice was a remarkable feat. Cliff yelled, “Smile, why don’t you, Sheriff! You’re going out live at eleven!”

  The sheriff barked at his deputies, “Clear that group out of here!”

  While the officers’ attention was elsewhere, Buddy lifted his phone and said, “Go. Repeat, go.”

  For an instant nothing happened. Then bedlam erupted in front of him.

  Every light in the courthouse blazed on. Every siren whooped. The lights went off again. Then on. Now they flickered, slow at first, then faster and faster, flashing like manic Christmas lights. The police siren and the fire alarm and the door alarms yelped in unison, all forty-three of them. Buddy knew the number because one of Mark Weathers’s top software engineers had hacked the courthouse system before he and Cliff Hazzard and Preston had entered the Hamlin city limits. Weathers had tried to hide his humor behind weary resignation as he had explained how most of the truly gifted software engineers were hackers at heart. His team had shown a childlike delight at taking over the Hamlin Courthouse’s system. On company time.

  The building also possessed a massive PA system, intended to supplant regular communications in an emergency. Which Buddy figured the sheriff and his deputies, by now, agreed this most definitely was. From all-weather speakers embedded in the high concrete eaves came a blast of electro-rock and the banshee wail of youths screaming that it was time to freak the system.

  The sheriff had his pistol out, but the television lights competed with the courthouse’s strobe effect. The music overwhelmed anything he might have been trying to say.

  Which was when every electronic-controlled door in the entire courthouse sprang wide open.

  Buddy decided now was as good a time as any to mosey on inside.

  He was midway up the main stairs when Preston bounded up beside him. The music had switched to an electro-punk version of the old Beatles song, inviting the world to relax and float gently downstream. Preston shouted something Buddy did not need to understand, and then together they passed through the main entrance.

  One of the television crews had opted to join them, which was probably why none of the deputies impeded their progress down the hallway. They followed the map the hackers had kindly supplied, compliments of county records.

  Their good humor was erased, however, when they entered the women’s wing and found Kimberly inside the cage. Preston wept and shouted his defiance at a pair of bulky officers who tried to stop them. Buddy did not trust himself to speak at all. He merely hefted the wounded lady and carried her out.

  Kimberly hid her face in his neck, for his every step was marked by the television lights. Buddy knew his rage showed, as did Preston’s angry tears. And he decided that there was no reason why one of his precious team should not weep over the casual cruelty of life’s uncaring hand.

  Buddy carried her back outside, past the furious sheriff. He did not release her, not even when the pastor reached out for her, not even as he slipped into the Rolls’s rear seat. Nor did he speak, for he would not permit the evening to be lashed by a rage he could scarcely keep inside. He would not foul this night or his life by taking his father’s course, and releasing the molten force that would most certainly wound friend and foe and family alike. No, his was a different compass heading. Buddy showed the gentler choice he had made by the way he cradled his newly beloved, and stroked her hair away from the damaged cheek, and watched the fetid stench of Hamlin vanish behind them, and let Kimberly sink into the mercy of sleep.

  CHAPTER 40

  Buddy woke twice in the night, chased into wakefulness by the monster’s roar. He lay on his makeshift pallet and stared about him, both times unable to remember at first where he was, or why. Then he heard the breath of uneasy slumber from the next room, and it all became clear.

  Both times he stepped to the open doorway leading to Kimberly’s chamber. He stared down at the form on the bed. The moon was not quite full, but it fell strong and silver through the window. He saw the sheen of perspiration on her damaged face. Buddy felt the invitation to rage at the monster who had managed to creep from his nightmares and invade his world. But he refused to give in.

  The next morning he borrowed running gear from Preston, who offered them with the ease of a man who was genuinely happy with his company. Buddy ran the alien streets beneath maple and oak and pine. He made mental note of the more attractive lanes. He jogged and he looked and he wondered if this was how it meant to redefine his own boundaries.

  Kimberly was up when he returned. She lifted her face, and Buddy realized she was inviting him to kiss her undamaged side. Preston got off the phone and announced that he had not been able to make a doctor’s appointment until that afternoon. Buddy told her, “You should go back to sleep.”

  “Another hour or so won’t make any difference.” She eyed him above the border of her mug. “Thank you for staying over last night.”

  “You asked.”

  “That’s right. I did. How was your bed?”

  “He didn’t have a bed,” Preston said. “He didn’t want one.”

  “It was fine,” Buddy replied. “I often sleep on the floor.”

  “You told me that last night.” She set down her mug and reached for his hand. “You told me a lot of things.”

  Buddy colored, mostly at how Preston smiled at the two of them. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was, until I realized what you were whispering. Then I made myself stay awake.” She slipped her second hand atop his. “You can tell me again, now if you w
ant. Just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

  Preston cleared his throat. “I think this is the point when I pretend I need to be heading to the office.”

  Before Buddy could come up with a decent response, the house phone rang. Preston answered, then held it out. “It’s for Buddy.”

  He took the receiver, and afterward it seemed as though he had known what was to be spoken even before the words emerged. As though some ethereal force invaded his peace before he held the phone.

  A tearful Carey said, “Pop’s housekeeper found him on the kitchen floor and called an ambulance. He’s suffered a stroke.”

  Buddy found himself mildly grateful over how his sister could weep for them both this morning. But all he said was “I’ll be right over.”

  “Wait, Buddy, there’s more.” And with a heart far more broken than her voice, she delivered the morning’s real news.

  CHAPTER 41

  Six days later, they moved Jack Helms by ambulance from the regional hospital into the hospice care center at Moondust Lake. Beth already resided there. Buddy traveled up in the ambulance, accompanied by his sister.

  Carey bore the bruised creases of too many sleepless nights. Buddy assumed he looked pretty much the same.

  Kimberly was waiting for them when they arrived at Moondust Lake. By this point her presence had become a natural component of his life. She had molded herself into his routine of tragic responsibilities, and done so willingly. Her face was wreathed in the rainbow of healing bruises. Several times each day Buddy endured the tight gazes of nurses who assumed he was the one responsible, and who accepted Kimberly’s explanation of a car accident with bad grace. But their lives were so full, they could not afford to give much room or concern to such suspicions.

  On the ninth day Buddy worked out a routine so that they could all spend time with the afflicted while granting each of them space to resume their normal lives. They had to. The world was turning, and it did not appear that either parent would be going home. Ever.