Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  The rain seemed like it was getting even more intense, and Des shivered. The thunder seemed like it was constantly growling, and the house was getting dark enough to be lit up occasionally by flashes of lightning.

  She thought about what Lacey had said.

  She could remember how much she wanted to be included, to be noticed, when she was a kid. She had followed Lacey and Sarah around, and she watched Sam like a hawk, waiting for an opportunity to sidle into whatever it was he was doing. Did she still do that? What was it that she was waiting for, here?

  A half a year ago, her dad had died. Against the disapproval of the parish priest but in keeping with their dad’s wishes, he was cremated. He’d wanted half his ashes buried next to their mom in the churchyard and half released in his beloved Lakefield, after the memorial service at their mother’s grave.

  It had been so cold, the snowflakes huge and heavy, and later that night it had all gone to ice. The four of them drove in the limo to a walkway over the lake, the buildings of Lakefield all around.

  As she watched her brothers and sister release her dad’s ashes to mix with the falling snow, she had wished, so hard, that they would move on from that moment together. In the cold, they’d pressed in close and even though they had been sad and miserable all day and were releasing their dad’s ashes over the lake, they laughed at the absurdity of the bitter cold and of the moment.

  It had felt, for just a minute, like the beginning of something instead of the end of their dad’s life.

  She thought, that maybe, she was afraid to lose her chance at that moment’s happening again, the moment’s actually lasting, stretching into the future.

  But it couldn’t be what her parents would have expected or wanted.

  Her parents had left their own families to make theirs, they knew that their children would do the same.

  She supposed she was, in a way, still a little girl dragging around her littler brother, dressing in her sister’s clothes, and crying when her big brother was mean.

  She toggled to the little weather app she’d loaded with Aberaeron’s forecast. Over the date was a raincloud and current condition listed rain.

  It was the middle of the night where he was. The rain was on his roof. Maybe it was loud enough to drown out the sound of the sea and so what he was hearing, in his sleep, sounded just like it sounded right now, in her house.

  She felt a tightness, all over, a physical grip around her body and around her heart. He had seen her, really seen her. Hefin, a goose person predisposed to seeing only his goose. He opened up a space around her, one with only her inside it, and not only let her say whatever it was that she wanted, but took her words inside of himself and let them break against him and change him.

  He made her the dome.

  Her love spoon.

  Taciturn and shy, he’d let her family see him, too.

  Her mother hadn’t waited even a minute.

  Eighteen years old, from a loving family, she had looked at Patrick Burnside and taken up another life, another faith, another city.

  And it wasn’t because of some lack of love or love she couldn’t get from her family but because of all the love her family had given her. All that love meant that her heart was big enough to make that leap; it had been made big by the love of her family.

  The love of her family gave her mother confidence to face a new life, and like Betty said, the sacrifice was simply an action that returned more love than was otherwise possible.

  She took a breath, staring into the dark.

  Oh.

  She wasn’t here because she didn’t love Hefin enough, or because she wasn’t sure of him, she was here because she had been unsure of the love here.

  But she was loved, and Hefin had tried to tell her that.

  Sarah loved her enough to tell Sam she didn’t need her to get better and to move in with Betty and take care of herself. PJ had never doubted, either, so accustomed to love he’d been, all his life.

  Sam was where she had been, stuck and needful, but he loved her too, or he wouldn’t hold on so hard.

  And now she could feel her mother’s love. She remembered the simplicity of it when she was a child, and somehow, Betty had introduced her to the kind of love she might have had with her mother as an adult. A kind of love that was interested in her life but saw her life, saw what her life needed, and placed that need as the highest priority even if the needs for her life took her to previously unimaginable places.

  PJ was willing to go to the moon for love because he was easy with love, understood the expansiveness of it.

  Love didn’t understand geography. At all.

  She didn’t need to see Hefin’s beach, or his town, or be able to imagine the landscape of Wales or the sea.

  It was enough that she could always see Hefin—his quilt pulled up to his ears, listening to the rain.

  Like Betty said, everything she needed was already all down inside of her, no matter where she went. Her name in the concrete of a threshold of a small brown house, her family carved into relief for generations by the man whom she loved, the people she’d known her whole life who smiled when a navy blue limousine drove down the street.

  All of that, all of it, wasn’t pinned to a map she would have to leave behind; it was already inside her, all the time. It’s why she cared about it so much.

  Hefin had known that even if he left, he’d still have her, inside his heart, just like he was in hers. She wondered how long he had planned on being patient before she opened the door one morning and found him on her stoop.

  Well, she wasn’t going to wait and find out.

  She belonged with him. Seeing the world—she would do that to make her heart even bigger and because her mother always thought that she would.

  She fell asleep holding the phone against her chest.

  She woke up to what she thought was terrible thunder but couldn’t work out why she felt like she couldn’t breathe, why her arm hurt, and why she was completely wet.

  She moved, and her knee slid into the carpet of the living room, which was saturated. The recliner was on its side, it had tipped over, why? She looked around, her heart panicked and painful for how fast it was beating.

  There was a tree in the living room. Tree branches, impossibly huge, were spread out over everything that wasn’t covered in something white and wet. Snow?

  Destiny curled on her side to come free of the recliner arm. Not snow. The ceiling.

  She tried to figure out where the door was but could only see leaves and branches. The rain was coming down so hard, it seemed like water was actually pouring into the house, but she couldn’t see up through the ceiling for the tree. She crabwalked to a spot that seemed more open and felt something cold sliding down her front. She slapped at her shirt, momentarily freaked.

  Her phone.

  She scrambled at it, trying to force down the sobs that were gathering now that she understood what was going on.

  “Please work,” she whispered.

  It lit up like a floodlight.

  She called 911, crouched under the branches, her feet squished in ceiling plaster and wet carpet. As she waited for the emergency number to pick up, she saw the green flash of two eyes somewhere in the branches that spread into the kitchen, and started screaming and screaming.

  The dispatcher picked up, and she could barely speak, just kept breathlessly repeating her address, she couldn’t find where the animal’s eyes were, and she realized she was bleeding from a cut on her arm.

  “Miss, I’m showing that a squad is already dispatched to your address. Are you hurt?”

  She made herself breathe. She made herself stretch out all her limbs. “I think just a cut on my arm, but I can’t figure out how to get out of my house and—I think there is an animal in here.”

  “You can stay on the line with me. It’s better that you don’t move; can you tell me how far you think you are from an exit?”

  “I think I’m just maybe eight feet from the
front door, but a huge branch is in the way.”

  “That helps. They are one minute away, okay? You just stay on the line with me.”

  The dispatcher talked to her and kept her from crying. She wished it wasn’t so dark and she wished she knew if the animal that had come in with the tree was a cat or a raccoon or an opossum. Or at least, if it was friendly. Not rabid. She babbled about the animal, she knew, and it sort of seemed like the dispatcher talked back to her, but some part of her brain knew she wasn’t making sense.

  Then she heard the sirens, earsplittingly loud, and couldn’t hear the dispatcher anymore. The rain had picked up, smacking against the leaves all around her, sounding completely wrong inside her living room. Then there was pounding and crashing, impossibly loud over the sound of the rain against the leaves, then there were firemen everywhere; she saw their legs first, their boots squelching into the carpet.

  She was clutching her phone. They shimmied her under the large branch while they braced it with something. Maybe it wasn’t so big; maybe she could have gotten out on her own.

  But then she was carried into the street, three fire trucks and an ambulance bouncing lights everywhere.

  The rain was coming down even harder, but somehow she couldn’t feel it, and she realized it was because she was soaked from the skin out.

  She managed to keep it all in until she saw Betty.

  She would swear, later, that Betty had picked her up herself from the fireman’s arms. That she was way stronger than she had ever looked.

  As it was, her arms felt immense, and they held her as tightly as she needed to be held, and they squeezed even tighter the harder she sobbed. Betty held her head against her chest in the middle of the street and rocked her. Said “shh, shh,” until she was quiet.

  Then Betty led her to the ambulance, where she sat still with a blanket around her while she was examined and her cut cleaned and bandaged.

  Once she was mostly dry, and had drank hot chocolate out of a paper cup, and taken Tylenol, the rain stopped.

  She and Betty held hands and stood in front of the house.

  “I heard it, and I just knew.” Betty said. “I called 911 without even looking out the window. When I came outside and saw this, all of my breath left my body. I couldn’t get the front or back door open and had to wait for the fire department. I was such a fool about that tree, and the fact of it is that Marvin would have had it taken out last year when it started going bad, and here I hung on to it for no good reason except that he planted it for me.”

  Des squeezed Betty’s hand. “That’s a good reason.”

  “Not reason enough to get you killed.”

  “It’s hard to let go of things, I’ve found.”

  Betty put her arm around Des, her head on her shoulder. Des was shocked to realize that Betty was shorter than she was. She’d never noticed. “Is that right?”

  “But like you said, sometimes you’ve just got to let go because the alternative is so much worse it doesn’t matter.” They looked at the tree, bisecting the little house into two smashed halves. It didn’t even look real. Des found it amazing that the little house had been able to shelter her at all, so easily was it destroyed.

  “Your dome didn’t make it, honey. I noticed when I tried to get into the back door.”

  “That’s okay. Maybe I’ll make another one.”

  Betty turned her around, pushed the hair behind her ears. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. On the beach. With driftwood maybe. I hear there’s lots of driftwood on beaches.”

  “When Marvin and I went to North Carolina, there was driftwood everywhere on the beaches.” Betty smiled, then her face crumpled. For a long time, Des held Betty as she sobbed, for what she had lost, and for what she nearly lost.

  Des thought about how it was all mixed up together. How imperfect grief, like the grief of a child, or a young wife, unspools itself over all the rest of a life lived, tangling itself in all the rough places. Every tug, then, just made the grief sore all over again.

  She thought of what Sarah needed to heal her body, the time, the medicine, the vigilance. How she had to remind herself that it was worth it to heal by standing Hefin’s block on her bedside table. How healing couldn’t be the goal, at all, only what came after.

  Maybe the hope of what came after was the thing that made healing possible.

  She hadn’t known she was bearing so many wounds until love tugged on their tender edges. But now she knew what came after.

  She could heal on the way.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Hefin sat on his rock, a little peeved with the gorgeous weather.

  The shallows and smoothest parts of the beach were filled with families on holiday, their shouts and laughter woven in with the sounds of the gulls, surf, and wind. Up on his rock, none of the sounds were louder than the other, and it just blended into a general summer noise.

  This was the very sort of day he imagined spending with Destiny. A long shore walk, followed by food at the tearoom, perhaps a drink with his parents, then a long night together at the hotel.

  He’d rather it be raining than have a perfect day like this, made utterly imperfect by what was missing.

  He’d already, actually, reserved a flight to Ohio for next week, and he hadn’t purchased a return on it. He and Destiny had talked nearly every day recently, but she had been distracted and brief, almost as if she wanted to keep their conversations very short. He hadn’t been able to understand it, and his previous confidence that giving her time in order to gift her with perspective on her feelings, and his, was feeling shaky.

  He had been feeling unfair, particularly as the early summer was unfolding so beautifully and represented such a contrast to the life he knew she had to deal with every day in Lakefield—her sister’s health, her fledgling business, the end of her library appointment.

  There was no rule he couldn’t spend time with her in Lakefield, couldn’t ease into a long-distance relationship and still have better hopes for it.

  Also, he just needed to see her. He needed to hold her and feel her skin against his. He need to kiss her and kiss her and kiss her. Then listen to her talk.

  He had told her that his love was about wanting, and not needing, but he hadn’t accounted for what the muscle of his heart had to say about it, how much it had come to depend on its own fullness and satiety.

  He rubbed his thumb over his phone, compelled to call her. It would be late afternoon in Ohio, which was often a good time to catch her. He stared down the beach, worrying his phone, watching, of course, a ginger-haired woman in a yellow-flowered dress make her way down the shore with her blanket and picnic.

  He always noticed ginger-haired women.

  Except, as she walked closer, his heart stopped, so hopeful it couldn’t manage a beat.

  She was too far away to possibly hear, but he couldn’t help it. “Destiny!” He yelled, straight into the wind, except, she stopped and turned her head toward his position on his rock.

  Then the gorgeous, mad, amazing ginger-haired woman dropped her blanket and her picnic and ran.

  Toward him, unbelievably.

  By the time he scrambled off the rock and stumbled inelegantly onto the sand, she was on him, in fact she was on him so fast he couldn’t keep ahold of both of them, and fell backward. But he kept his arms around her.

  “Oof,” he grunted. Their eyes met once, just glancing really, and then she was kissing him.

  God, he thought. It was perfect. Even with the cold seawater seeping into his pants and her bony knee boring into his thigh and her hands a little too tight in his hair. She could barely keep her mouth on him, breathing so hard from her run across the beach, but he caught her mouth with his whenever her lips met his.

  He inhaled her—her breath, her hair, the sunny smell from her body. He moved his arms to her shoulders and flipped her over so he could pin her down and really look at her.

  Take her in.

  “You’re here,” h
e said.

  She grinned up at him, more beautiful than the weather, her eyes silvery. “I am.”

  “I’m certain I’ve just sat in the sun too long, and I’m imagining it.”

  “You didn’t tell me your mother was so—helpful.” She wrinkled her nose.

  He laughed. “Making that face after meeting my mum is definitely proof of life. You’re not a mirage.”

  “I’m here. For real. I know it’s real because everything’s all filled in. I took a plane, and a train, and a bus to get here. I got a little worried at one point that I would also have to take a boat, because did you know that Aberaeron is far away from Ohio? Like, there is almost not enough land around here to give this place a name. Oh! I saw London! Just a few parts, but that’s where I flew into.”

  “You came straight here?”

  “Straight here from Ohio. No stops. The bus driver very kindly dropped me off at your mom and dad’s place when I told him where I was going.”

  “Old Luke?”

  She laughed. “Yes! That’s how he introduced himself. ‘Old Luke ydy f’enw I,’ he said, and I shocked the hell out of him when I said ‘Mae’n dda gen i gwrdd â chi, Destiny ydy f’enw I.’ It turns out that it was a really, really long trip, and I may have a knack for languages. Who knew?”

  He was trying to recall a moment he’d been happier but couldn’t manage it. “I’m not sure what to say. You’re here. Beautiful and perfect and with a very acceptable Welsh accent, and here.”

  She reached up and took his face her in hands. “Fi cariad eich, Hefin Thomas.”

  He had to look away. Just take a moment to look at the sea, wide and calm. He buried his face in her neck. “I love you, too.”

  She pushed up on him, and he pulled her up to sit on his lap and lean against his rock.

  “Your mom said you’d be on your rock and gave me superlong and freakishly accurate directions, including which people I would pass on the beach.”