by Nicole Baart
Fetus? Hailey was . . . pregnant? Abigail thrust herself away from the table, stumbling over her own two feet in her rush to get away from the devastating pages. “No,” she said, the pebbly scratch of her voice startling her. “No.”
But she knew what she had read. A horrified glimpse reconfirmed it. Those words, printed in unmistakable black and white, didn’t lie.
Abigail began to hyperventilate. Air, she needed more air. But the more she breathed, the more she felt like she was going to explode. Her chest burst beneath the terrible weight of knowing that it was not just Hailey’s death that she mourned; it was also the death of a child. Her nephew. Maybe her niece.
Pressing her palms to her mouth, Abigail struggled to contain what was threatening to spill from her. A scream? A sob? She was sure there was more at stake than a cry of anguish that would stop at the four walls of the trailer. Her very soul writhed in agony. It seemed capable of crawling up from the pit of her being to slip away into the night, a dark and wounded specter.
Hailey had been pregnant. With Tyler’s baby?
Tyler’s baby.
The realization roused Abigail from whatever attack had momentarily claimed her. Without pausing to consider what she was doing, she staggered lead footed to the bathroom and bent to throw open the tiny cabinet door. The Glock was there, loaded and ready. It felt good in her hand.
Abigail yanked open the trailer door and lurched with unsteady, halting motions across the driveway. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she was coherent enough to note that Eli couldn’t possibly be back from the winery yet. That meant the soft light of the television emanating from between the slats of the venetian blinds had to be for Tyler. She could picture him half-asleep and prostrate on the couch.
Slipping her shaking fingers around the handle of the side door, Abigail held her breath and turned the knob. The door popped open with a muted click. Tyler hadn’t bothered to lock it.
Nan came trotting across the carpet, his tongue lolling in welcome. Abigail hesitated long enough to give the dog a distracted scratch; then she grabbed a scruff of fur at Nan’s collar and pulled him out of the house. She stepped inside and had the forethought to lock the door behind her.
“Eli?” Tyler called.
She emerged slowly from the shadows of the mudroom into the darkened kitchen. Since the main living space was an open great room, Abigail could peer past the stylish island and see Tyler sprawled on the couch in front of SportsCenter. The TV was the only source of light in the house.
“Abigail,” Tyler said, pulling himself to a sitting position. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”
Her aching mind registered that he was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, the same outfit Hailey had donned to climb in a bathtub and bring her own life to a close.
“Did you know she was pregnant?” Abigail whispered, pressing herself against the island, hiding the gun beneath the line of smooth countertop.
“Excuse me?” Tyler cocked his head at her, his eyes filled with confusion.
“She was pregnant,” Abigail yelled this time. “Did you know that?”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Tyler stood, the look on his face betraying the fact that he felt something menacing in the room. He took a few tentative steps toward her. “Are you okay? You seem—”
“Stop,” Abigail muttered, the pitch of her voice enough to render the man across from her statuesque. “I asked you a question.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tyler said, holding his hands up in entreaty. “Is this some movie I was supposed to watch?”
Abigail wiped her forehead with the back of her free wrist and took a shuddering breath. She couldn’t control the tremors stealing through her entire body, and she watched Tyler note her involuntary movement with alarm.
“You’re not okay,” he insisted, answering his own question. “Did something happen? Do you need a doctor?”
“No!” Abigail didn’t mean to shout, but it did make Tyler take a step back. “My name is Abigail Bennett,” she said, a little softer but no less forcefully. She clipped each syllable, all but spitting out the final T. “Bennett. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Tyler didn’t skip a beat. “I dated a girl with the same last name, but that was months ago.” Then a sudden wash of understanding spilled over his features. “Wait, Hailey had a sister. Her name was . . .”
“Abby?”
“Are you telling me you’re Hailey’s sister? I would have never guessed.” Tyler grinned through his bewilderment, apparently trying to lighten whatever hung dark and heavy in the air. “Small world. But how did you know I dated Hailey? And what are you doing here? I thought . . .” Abigail was still looking at him with apparent malice, so he swallowed the last of his musings. In a different tone he said, “How is Hailey? I haven’t seen her since March.”
Abigail shook her head as if to clear it. He didn’t know? How could he not know? “Hailey’s dead,” she said, her gaze boring into him with caustic precision. “And so is her baby. Your baby.”
She may as well have taken the gun and leveled it at Tyler’s head. He hardened into something implacable, his face chiseled into a mask of unrealistic calm. Abigail could see that he didn’t believe her, that none of this made sense to him. But she was deadly serious, and the gravity of her words, the rigidity of her posture as she stood before him didn’t take long to prove convincing. Hailey’s dead. The words settled over him, a mantle so burdensome he bowed beneath the load and was forced to put his hands on the arm of the couch for support. Your baby . . .
“What?” he gasped.
“Hailey killed herself on March 14. Her birthday,” Abigail added almost to herself. “She took her baby with her.”
Tyler’s eyes were wide and unblinking, but Abigail could tell he wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t even aware of where he was. It was obvious that his mind’s eye had rewound the clock five months to the last time he had seen Hailey alive. “But I saw her. She was . . . she was upset . . . but . . .”
“What did you say to her?” Abigail demanded, choking on the intensity of her longing to know. “What happened between you two?”
“We broke up,” Tyler confessed. All at once tears dripped from his eyes. Abigail was convinced that the wetness startled him by the way he hurriedly brought his hands to his face and tried to erase the evidence with his palms.
“When?”
“I don’t know. . . . A few days before I left for Vancouver.” Tyler’s words trickled over each other, an avalanche of explanation. “It was, uh . . . My plane left on the twelfth, and it happened before . . . just before I left. But I didn’t know that. . . . I didn’t know.”
Two days. She had lasted two days without him. “Why?” Abigail pleaded. “Why did you break up with her?”
“Because we were a mess,” Tyler said. “Because she pulled me down.”
Abigail growled. If she had even a drop of sympathy for him, it evaporated with that one statement. “So you knocked her up and left her?” She was so furious she jerked away from the island and started toward Tyler.
“What?” he sputtered again.
“You heard me! My sister was pregnant with your baby!”
Tyler went down on his knees, a supplicant before Abigail’s livid, approaching form. “She told me she was pregnant, but I thought it was just a ploy to get me to stay. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know it was for real.”
“It was!” Abigail screamed, throwing her arms in the air, lashing out at nothing and everything. She didn’t point the gun at him, but it loomed ominous in her hand. It was a hostile, animate thing. It hovered like a bird of prey; it reigned over them as fateful as a rumbling, oppressive cloud.
When Tyler caught sight of it, he went so pale Abigail feared he might pass out. “Wh-what are you doing, Abigail?” The words wavered in the stillness before flickering out.
“I’m atoning. You killed my sister.”
“Because of you.”
“No.”
“You left her pregnant and alone. You knew she was sick.”
“I knew she saw a psychologist. I knew she took pills.” Tyler’s head still jerked from side to side. “I didn’t know she was suicidal.”
Abigail’s head hurt. Her heart hurt. And she became conscious that her right arm hurt, too. Looking up, she realized that the gun was still clutched in her hand, raised over her head as a talisman, a warning. It was heavy and angular. It was hard to hold. She lowered it slowly, holding it out. Pointing it at Tyler. “She wasn’t well. There is no way you could not have known.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he pleaded. “I loved her; I did. If I had known . . . Don’t. Just don’t. This won’t solve anything. It won’t fix anything.” He focused behind her, but Abigail was too intent on the barrel of the gun to turn around.
Her finger was on the trigger and her mind was spinning with the unyielding burden of everything she knew. She saw Hailey in the bathtub, gray and lifeless. She saw the light go out of her father’s eyes when she told him about his baby girl. She saw the long, dark road to Revell and the troubling sparkle of the mirror where she peered into her own soul. There were the unexplored emotions of the moonless night she spent with Tyler. And rising slower still, but surfacing all the same, were memories of Hailey, sparks from her childhood like the final shimmer of fading fireworks against a cloudy sky.
Suffusing every thought, bathing her memories in a stain of unexpected crimson, was the wine she shared with Eli, the invitation she had accepted.
But Abigail didn’t know what to do with all that. She didn’t know how to reconcile what had happened, the lives that had been lost, with a sacrifice she couldn’t claim to understand.
“You don’t get it,” she said, though she didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to Tyler.
When he made a little noise in the back of his throat, Abigail tore her eyes away from the gun and glanced at the man on the floor in front of her. He was looking past her, and in a flash of instinct Abigail knew that someone was behind her. She jumped away and spun around in time to see Eli lunge for her and stumble into empty space.
The older man straightened up slowly, putting his hands in front of him as if to show her that he had nothing to hide. There was a key in his hand, and he laid it on the counter in one unhurried, deliberate movement. “Hey.” His voice was so calm, his movements so reassuring that for a moment everything seemed perfectly normal and sane.
Abigail just stared at him. But then Tyler called out his uncle’s name, and Abigail remembered the gun in her hand. She aimed it into the room at no one in particular because she couldn’t bring herself to point it at Eli.
“I heard everything. I was coming up from the fields and I saw you come out of your trailer with the gun in your hand.” Eli’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Though Abigail hadn’t shed a single tear since reading the sickening autopsy report, with Eli before her looking so composed and comforting, she felt something inside her break. In an instant her cheeks were streaked. “She was pregnant.”
“I know.”
“I should have been there for her. I should have known.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was Tyler’s fault.”
“No, Abigail. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. She had an illness, a disease.” Eli took a step toward her. “What did she suffer from?”
The question startled Abigail, but she answered because she didn’t know what else to do. “Hailey was severely bipolar. But there
were other things, too. ADHD, maybe even borderline personality disorder . . .”
Eli nodded as if he understood. “She was pursued. Can you imagine what it must feel like to be so relentlessly pursued?”
“Eli . . . ,” Abigail whispered, warning him.
“Can you imagine how hard that must have been for her?” he repeated, moving a little closer. “Your sister was overcome.”
“What does that mean?” Abigail cried, sniffling.
“She was hunted. Like cancer taking a victim, her illness took her.”
“Where?” Abigail demanded. “Where does my sister get to go?”
Understanding widened Eli’s eyes. “You think she’s in hell, don’t you? Or in between, stuck in some nebulous purgatory.”
“I don’t know,” Abigail confessed, using the hand that wasn’t holding the gun to run shaky fingers through her tangled hair. She caught a handful of it at the back of her head and moaned.
“Maybe God wants to be merciful.”
“But that doesn’t change anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“That communion you orchestrated, all that stuff about forgiveness and grace . . . Hailey still killed herself. And I . . .” She was at a loss for words. She waved the gun as if it explained everything.
“You what? You don’t think the sacrifice of the cross is enough to cover you? He paid it all, Abigail; all you have to do is accept the gift.”
She pressed her eyes shut for a second but whisked them open when she heard Eli’s socks swish across the carpet. He was a few feet away from her.
“I know what you’re doing,” he told her. “I’ve worked by your side for months now, and I can put the pieces together. You think this is your penance, don’t you? You think it’s your job to somehow make this all right.”
“I’m her sister,” Abigail said. “I was practically her mother. I have to.”
“That’s not true. You don’t have to do anything. We talked about wine, remember?” Eli searched her face. “What if your life is an offering poured out in a single glass? What if surrender is exactly what God is asking from you? What if surrender is all he is asking from you? A moment of forgiveness. An act of grace.”
“But I promised . . .”
“What did you promise? Who did you promise?”
Abigail could hardly form the words. “My father,” she mouthed. When nothing came out, she said it again, the tiny breath of sound barely loud enough to hear: “My father.”
Something in Eli’s face shifted. “Your father wants you to kill Tyler?”
Just hearing him say it made Abigail shake her head with unexpected vehemence. “No, no, he never said that. He doesn’t . . .”
“Of course he doesn’t.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” she shouted.
“There’s nothing you can do other than love her, grieve for her, and let her go.”
Abigail watched him until her eyes were so filled with tears that Eli’s face was completely obscured.
“Maybe this time it’s not about judgment,” he said. “Maybe it’s about grace.”
She didn’t like hearing her words turned around on her, but Abigail couldn’t stop herself from grasping at Eli’s proclamation as if it could be true. For a moment she faltered, hoping. But that was too easy. It had to be. “What if you’re wrong?”
“What if I’m not? What if God—?”
“It’s his fault. He made her that way,” she accused, venom spiking each syllable as it fell from her lips.
“And he loves her. Surrender Hailey,” Eli pleaded. “Just let go.”
“No.”
“Give me the gun.” He took another step closer.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
She aimed it at him.
“You don’t want to use it anyway.”
The tip of the barrel dipped the tiniest bit, and in less than a second Eli was gripping her wrist, pointing the gun at the floor.
Abigail’s hand shook so badly that Eli had to come beside her and pry the weapon from her fingers, one stiff knuckle at a time. Then the Glock was in his hand, and he removed the chambered bullet, ejected the magazine, and stuffed the useless husk of gun in the belt of his k
haki pants.
When the weapon was safely dismantled, Eli put one firm arm around Abigail’s shoulders and was ready and waiting to sweep the other beneath her knees when she sagged against him. He picked her up.
XVII
I would be lying if I said that it was a relief to find myself back in Rosa Beach.
Honestly I don’t remember much about the trip home other than snatches of almost-robotic awareness: I recall packing my bags with apathy, pulling out my credit card to pay for the extraordinarily expensive and poorly routed plane ticket home, and turning rather rudely from one of the suited flight attendants when she asked me if I preferred water or orange juice.
Other than that, the fourteen-hour trip from Kelowna to Vancouver, Vancouver to Seattle, Seattle to Denver, Denver to Chicago, and Chicago to the Fort Myers airport was a mind-numbing blur.
When I got off the plane, the first thing that hit me was the temperature. Surviving a mid-August heat wave in southern Florida is akin to persevering for weeks in a pressure cooker. I should have known that. I should have been ready. But although I had lived in Rosa Beach for twelve years, I wasn’t prepared for the physical impact of stepping out the door of the ice-cold Boeing 747.
With my skin prickling in the intolerable heat, I took the shuttle to my car in a long-term parking lot a few miles from the airport. Clicking off the locks, I melted onto the soft gray leather seats, vanishing back into my real life. Trying it on for size. I couldn’t tell if it fit or not. I was too tired, too used up, so I turned the ignition in my poor, neglected Passat, and headed south, slanting my car toward the ocean and home.
Home? Was my chic apartment home? Was Florida? Startled by my own train of thought, I had to dig even deeper. Had Minnesota felt like home to me? I contemplated my childhood, those years under the same roof as Lou and Melody, as Hailey. No, Newcastle didn’t feel much like home either.
I decided right then and there that if home is where the heart is, my heart has been homeless for a very long time.
After Eli disarmed me the night I pulled a gun on his nephew, we spent some time talking about home. I thought that after what I did to Tyler, my relationship with Eli would be over, the beautiful evening we spent in the winery sharing a supper I never dreamed I’d be a part of again would be a meaningless blip on the shaky radar of my messed-up life. But Eli didn’t turn on me. He lifted me up, carried me to his couch, and when I had wept long enough to render myself dry for the rest of my life, he talked to me.