by M. O'Keefe
I couldn’t remember from the frantic middle-of-the-night drive up to this mountain how long it took, but I settled into the plush backseat, exhausted yet wide awake.
The first of the leaves were turning up here, and in the dense green of the forest, there would be one bright blaze of color. Red or orange. The sign that change was coming.
We drove down a gravel road and I saw the other buildings. A charming house set back in the forest that must have been Margaret’s. And a little farther, what looked like an airplane hangar. There were trucks parked in front.
That must be his garage, I thought, turning as we drove by until I was looking out the back window.
He was there, standing in the shadows, and as we drove by he stepped out into the road, watching us as we made our way off his mountain. He wore a black fleece with his jeans, and the late afternoon sunlight slashed across his face.
I pressed my hand against the glass as if I could touch him. Desperately I wanted to believe this wasn’t goodbye.
But I wasn’t lying to myself anymore.
The Flowered Manor was entirely the same, but somehow completely different. What had appealed to me before when I’d been scared and looking for a place to hide now seemed utterly astonishing. Repellant in a way.
It was so small. A tiny island of RVs and double-wide trailers in a wide sea of forest and kudzu. The rain and the darkening sky made everything seem sad. Fragile somehow. As if the metal and plastic walls people lived behind were a laughable attempt to keep everyone safe.
A solid wind would blow all of this away.
“I’m leaving you here?” Margaret asked, clearly horrified.
I smiled, weary. I nearly said it was my home, but my home was a thousand miles away from here. A two-story white farmhouse surrounded by soy and cornfields and wide, white-blue sky as far as the eye could see.
I had not missed it and I couldn’t say that I missed it now, but I felt very keenly that it was mine.
“You can stop here,” I said, just as we drove up to the office. Looking at it now I realized it was a modified garden shed, not unlike the one where all the tools I’d been using were kept.
“Are you sure, honey?” she asked.
“I’m sure. And thank you…for the food and the ride.” For taking such good care of Dylan.
“My pleasure and,” she sighed, “I love that boy to death. Like he was my own. But he’s not easy. And he carries a burden so heavy he’s getting crushed under it and doesn’t even realize.”
I knew that; perhaps that was part of what we’d been attracted to at the beginning. Both of us knowing, somehow, that we were carrying impossible loads.
“And sometimes,” Margaret continued, “I wish he would meet a girl. Someone like you. Someone who doesn’t care about his money and his scars. Or what he’s done in the past. Who cares about him. Who makes him smile and pulls him out of that garage where he’d spend every living moment of his life, and then I think…no. If he met a girl who loved him, she would get crushed under that burden too.” She turned to face me. “Don’t come back, Annie.”
I blinked, stunned.
“It hurts me to say, but you’re a good girl. Find yourself an easier man and don’t come back.”
I stumbled out of the car, my goodie bag of gourmet leftovers banging against my legs. She lifted a hand in a wave and the car pulled away, flinging mud up everywhere. My eyes burned. My throat hurt and my body was sore from Dylan’s hands.
Instead of going to my trailer, where I would do nothing but lie there and think of Dylan, I walked toward the office. Toward distraction.
The bell rang over the door as I stepped into the office. Kevin was playing solitaire in front of the blasting air conditioner.
Exactly the same. Like I’d never left.
I appreciated Dylan’s offer of the house, but if I was going to divorce Hoyt, I had to stand on my own two feet. And that meant staying here. Working here. Living here. The luxury of my hours with Dylan was a dream. A beautiful dream. But it was time to wake up.
“Hey there,” Kevin said, glancing up from his game.
“Just checking in on the storm damage,” I said. “You need me to do any work?”
“We got a shit ton of fallen trees in the back lots. One of the trailers nearly got crushed. We’re going to need a chain saw.”
“We don’t have one in the tool shed,” I said, jumping with great relief onto the idea of work. Physical hard work would clear out my head. Get me right. If nothing else, it would fill up the empty hours.
“Yeah, I’ll need you to go into Cherokee and rent one. Come back in the morning and I’ll get you some cash.”
“Thanks, Kevin,” I said and walked back out the door, the bell tinkling all the same. Coming, going, it didn’t matter. I found the consistency comforting. I paused in the doorway and thought for a second that I should ask him about Dylan. What he knew about us. But in the end it didn’t matter.
There was no more us.
I walked back through the trailers with the families, where a few people were clearing branches out of their driveways or away from their cars. Tiffany was in the playground with her kids picking up branches, or at least she was picking up branches. The kids were in a stick sword fight.
“Stop it now, kids,” she said. “Someone is going to get hurt.”
“Hey,” I said as I walked by.
“Hey,” she said, pushing her long hair off her face. She seemed startled to see me. Like she hadn’t expected me to come back. “You’re here!” She wore men’s work gloves that made her wrists and arms seem so fragile. More fragile than the sticks she was carrying. “You weathered the storm someplace else?”
“Yeah, a friend’s. It was bad here?”
“Scary. A little,” she said. “Kids were freaked out, but Phil was here and he kept us all in the bathroom. Made it seem safe.”
I absolutely tried not to react, but my eyebrows hit my hairline anyway.
“No one is all bad, Annie,” she said, her eyes blazing, her lips pinched. She looked sour and mean and old. Older than she should. A million years older.
“Some people are bad enough,” I said. I thought of how I’d used Dylan, lied to him and pulled him into my misery. That was something bad enough that the good—the pleasure and the kindness—was invalidated. “Bad enough that the good shit doesn’t matter. We both know that.”
I would never have had the courage to say those words to her before. To stand there, holding her eye contact until she flinched away.
“I’ll be here,” I said. “When it’s bad again.”
Her cheeks were bright red and the kids were watching us, the ends of their stick swords dragging in the dirt.
“Mom?” the boy asked, stepping forward like he would use that stick to stop me.
“Hey, baby?” Those familiar words in a man’s voice made me start. Made longing open up in my stomach like a giant pit. But it wasn’t Dylan. Dylan wasn’t going to be calling me “baby.” Not for a long time. If ever.
It was Phil, coming across the road to the playground. “You ready?” he asked. He smirked at me, his eyes taking in my pajamas and hoodie. The slippers Margaret had given me. He made me feel naked, despite all my clothes. That’s what guys like Phil specialized in, making a woman feel vulnerable.
I straightened my spine and stared right back at him.
“Yeah,” Tiffany said with a bright smile. “Let’s go, kids. Daddy’s taking us out for dinner.”
The kids dropped their sticks and ran back to the trailer. Tiffany tossed her own sticks in the big pile she’d made on the far side of the slide.
“I’ll see you later,” I said, watching this strange scene of family happiness. The rot underneath it. Yes, it was safety and dinners now, but Tiffany knew it was going to turn again and this man would raise a hand to her. Or to her kids.
Inevitable.
Dylan was right. Some things were just waiting for us out there in the dark.
; I turned away, heading toward my own trailer.
“Annie,” she said, stopping me. Panic laced her voice. Her eyes skittered over my shoulder to the rhododendron. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Tiffany!” Phil yelled and Tiffany ducked her head and headed back to her own trailer. The blue muscle car waiting beside it.
Past the rhododendron my trailer sat closed up and dark. Beyond that Ben was in his garden, cleaning up from the storm.
I took my bag of treats over toward him. “Hey,” I said when I got close.
His head shot up. He had his color back and looked infinitely better than the last time I’d seen him—old and frail and gray, pushed aside by…Max. His son. Big pieces of the Ben puzzle slowly fell into place. One of those people he regretted hurting was Dylan.
“You all right?” I asked, looking him over for signs of harm. For signs that Max had hurt him.
“Fine. Just fine.”
“Last night—”
“An argument. That’s all. Where you been?” he asked, retying the strings for his runner beans despite the fact that they were ruined. He’d clearly tried to replant some things that had been uprooted in the storm. But the beans looked smashed beyond repair.
“With Dylan,” I told him, point-blank.
The string fell from his fingers, which were suddenly shaking.
“Did you know he lived nearby?” I asked, and he nodded, his throat working as if he were swallowing something big. Something hard.
“Did you know he owned the trailer park?”
“Yeah,” he breathed. “I know. It’s not a secret. Half the people living here know Dylan Daniels owns the park. Phil, the asshole, just got fired from his shop a month ago.”
I nearly reeled under the information. Phil was the guy Dylan fired?
“Did you know I was watching you? That’d he’d asked me to keep an eye on you?”
“I figured,” he said. “He’s had a spy on me for a while. None of them like you, though.”
“What does that mean?”
He smiled at me. “None of them made me pasta sauce.”
“He told me to stay away from you.”
“Well, you didn’t listen to that, did you?”
“He said you were dangerous.”
Ben sucked on his cheek. “Makes sense he would say that—it’s all he’s ever known from me. You two a thing now?”
I shook my head.
“That’s for the best, I imagine.”
“Why?”
He looked at me for a long time and then shook his head.
“Because he’s my son,” he said. “And some apples don’t fall far from the tree.”
“Dylan’s not dangerous.”
“If you honestly think that, then you don’t know the whole story.”
“I know Dylan.”
He looked at me for a long time like he was trying to talk himself out of something. Or into something. “You can’t go walking around thinking he’s something he’s not. You can’t keep thinking he’s…tame.”
“If you’re going to tell me something, Ben, just do it. I’ve kind of had a long few days.”
Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He was arrested when he was a kid. Sixteen. He and his brother got into trouble for stealing cars. Illegal racing. Dylan went to jail. Juvie. It was supposed to be a short sentence; he…he was a good kid. Never in trouble. But in jail he changed. He was fighting. A lot of it. More and more violent. Until he stabbed a kid—”
“You’re lying.” I held up my hand as if I could get him to shut up. As if I could shove those words back down his throat.
“I’m not. I’m not lying. And he didn’t tell you, did he?”
“Shut up, Ben! Shut up, you’re just…this is a game you’re playing. Some awful way to punish Dylan. To get me not to care. Something—”
“I don’t give a shit if you care for him. I’m telling you not to trust him. Not to trust…yourself with him.”
I wanted to yell and scream that Ben was lying. That I knew Dylan, I knew what mattered, knew the soul-deep goodness of him. Dylan and Ben might both be closed up, locked down, hiding a kindness they didn’t entirely trust within themselves.
“He’s not like you. He wouldn’t do what you have done.”
Ben was watching me, with those eyes that I recognized in Dylan’s face. Deep-set, heavy-lidded. Eyes that saw everything.
“Ask me,” he said. “I know you’ve wanted to for a while.”
“Did you know about the little girl? In the house?”
He slowly shook his head. “I didn’t.” A long, ragged breath sawed out of his chest. “I wish I had more than anything else in my life—I wish I had known that girl was there.”
I understood that I had a will to believe the things that made my life easier. That fit the way I needed to live in my world, and yes, it was easier to believe that Ben—a man I liked, Dylan’s father—did not kill an innocent girl in cold blood. And I should have, perhaps, doubted my belief. My faith.
But I didn’t. I believed Ben was telling the truth.
Did that also mean I had to believe Ben about Dylan?
I was torn in half. My head pounded. My heart ached.
“Dylan said he didn’t think you knew the girl was there,” I said, wondering if the words would bring him any peace. Or me.
What would bring me peace?
“You look so tired you’re about to collapse,” he said. “Go lie down.”
“But—”
“Go. We can talk later.”
Right. Okay. It was too much. The last few days were too full and I was officially overwhelmed. I turned slowly, the bag of food banging into my leg. “Oh,” I said. “I brought you some stuff. Would you like—”
I pulled out half a cantaloupe covered in Saran Wrap. A small piece of Dylan’s world in this unlikely place. I offered it to Ben.
“No, girly. You take that stuff. I got all I need.” Those were nearly the exact words Smith would have said, and I nodded, my throat swollen. Why, I wondered, thinking of Smith and Dylan and Ben, were the men in my life so good at self-denial? So good at holding at arm’s length the things they wanted?
Even Hoyt, to some degree. There was something really awful in him and he just tried to keep it covered. Deny it. Until it came leaping out.
“I’ll talk to you later,” I said and walked back over to my trailer. I stopped at Joan’s and knocked on the storm door. But no one answered. Maybe she was working tonight. I wasn’t even entirely sure what day it was. Sunday? Monday?
It hardly mattered.
It hardly mattered.
Perhaps it was my exhaustion. Perhaps it was finally telling my secrets to Dylan. Perhaps it was finally hearing the truth from Ben.
Or maybe under the shock I realized…I knew…what I had always known about myself, about Dylan, about life.
When we were pushed to the edge we were capable of anything. Surviving was the only thing that mattered.
I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Dylan. But he survived.
I stumbled to a stop in the middle of that dirt track between my trailer and Joan’s and pulled the phone out of my back pocket. Its weight and heft had grown so familiar. I liked the way it felt in my hand, how it centered me, in a way. Connected me, to a version of myself I wanted to be. To Dylan.
To the future.
Quickly, I texted:
I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.
I bit my lip. Somehow, after all that had happened between us, now I felt the most brave. The most vulnerable. In this moment.
If you’ll have me.
DYLAN
“Dylan? Jesus. Earth to Dylan!”
Dylan jerked when Blake punched him in the shoulder.
“What? What th
e fuck?” Dylan snapped. There was a precision wrench in his hand, and he didn’t know what he was doing with it. The transmission in front of him was in pieces, but he could not for the life of him remember what he was doing. Was he putting it together or taking it apart?
Stop. Just stop. I’ve been bossed around, thrown into cars, driven to some kind of mountaintop fortress to…you. You, Dylan. You ended it and I still wound up here. To you!
Annie’s voice ran in a loop in his head.
She’d been inevitable, all along. From the moment she picked up that phone, every road led them to each other.
And now…now the roads were empty. And the work that had satisfied him, that had pulled him out of the shit of his past, away from the ghosts and the demons that haunted him, was stretched out in front of him and he did not care.
He was going to miss her for the rest of his life. Every minute she was gone, he was going to be eaten up by a kind of loneliness he’d never thought he’d feel again.
Not since Max. His parents. Those long, awful nights behind bars.
The kind of loneliness that came from the absence of one specific person.
But the jagged hole made by Annie’s leaving was sharper somehow, because for so long he’d mastered feeling as little as possible.
And he didn’t know if she was going to come back.
The rest of his life was going to feel this way.
He felt like he had after the accident. The fire. High on painkillers, staring down at his body like it was meat. Like he was somewhere buried inside of it, or floating above but not at all a part of it.
Not a part of anything.
“Get out of here,” Blake said. “You’re a fucking mess.”
He was. He was a fucking mess. He threw the wrench down and left the warehouse. His guys…Blake, they could do it all at this point. No one needed him.
I need you. Please, I need you.
He’d go down off this mountain to her. To make sure she was safe. That he hadn’t made a mistake letting her go down there alone with just her phone and the number of his lawyer.
But she’d insisted on going alone and he respected that.
Fuck.
His phone in his back pocket buzzed and he fished it out. His heart stopped when he saw it was a text from Annie.