by Jenna Barton
I followed him outside, pulling the front door shut behind me. The sight of his back moving away from me, going home alone to the tiny cabin at the edge of his forest, sparked a flare of fury in me. I turned to glare at Dani through the window.
Without me there, she’d started looking around again, moving to the bookcase that housed my small television and the few sentimental items I’d bought since moving to North Carolina. She picked up the amethyst formation Claire had insisted I buy that April Saturday, when we met outside of Paul’s office for the first time. The day she confirmed to me who she was. The day she told me about the Enclave, about her friends who were people just like her—and, she promised—like me.
Dani’s nose wrinkled as she considered the crystal in her hand. She set it down again—in the wrong place—and it shuddered on its jagged surface until it found a hesitant balance.
“Erin? I’m gonna go now.”
I knew I needed to put together words to explain it to him, how Dani, and often my mother as well, took without pause, assumed consensus, and they never asked just what I wanted. But I went mute.
She’d come into my home without warning, invited herself right inside and took my chicken enchiladas and Walt’s beer and was wearing my favorite headband and eating those saucy, messy damn enchiladas on a beige sofa I’d kept clean and neat because I had a kitchen table where eating was done. The living room wasn’t a dining room and a bedroom and I didn’t have to share anything with anyone I didn’t want to give to. Except him.
Say something. Tell him.
I turned back to him. He’d started down the steps. Away.
“Walt?”
“Yeah?”
He stopped and turned, waiting for me at the edge of the porch.
After watching my mother and Dani do it so many times throughout my life, I should have known how to chase after a man who’d decided it was time to go. I’d heard the theatrical pleas, knew the timing of every wail and tear that should be coming. It should be easy.
They always walked away. The ones I liked, and the ones who terrified me too. They always left, no matter how loudly Mom or Dani called for them.
My legs went useless under me.
After a stretch of seconds watching each other, Walt nodded, a crisp efficient jerk of his head. Clearing his throat, he stepped forward and folded me into his arms.
“I’ll talk to you later.” He kissed the top of my head and took the stairs in one long stride. He didn’t turn back to me as he usually did, walking backward as we continued to smile and laugh over our repeated good-byes.
He just walked away. Walt. My Walt. My friend, my lover, my Sir. My love.
Mine.
I moved forward, nearly stumbling over the worn wood underneath my bare feet, and managed one step before the others beneath it receded into twilight. My hand hovered at my side, reaching for something, for some manner of support that wasn’t there.
“Walt?”
His hand rose in the night shadows, waving, and he disappeared into the darkness.
“Walt?” I called again, alerting the neighborhood dog and, based on the front porch light next door, Mr. Jensen too. I stepped off the porch, the dewy grass sick under my soles. “Walt? I…I’m—” I shuddered at the plaintive, pathetic squeak in my voice, and snapped my mouth shut. This time, the time it mattered most, I couldn’t make myself say I’m sorry.
“Call me when you can. If you want.”
I sank to the sun-rippled boards behind me and watched his truck’s taillights disappear around the corner, heavy in the knowledge I’d hurt him more than he’d ever admit to me. He’d think I was ashamed of him, and think I’d deny our relationship to my sister, because that had already happened to him. Why couldn’t it happen again?
The next morning, I did everything I could to keep Danielle away from the part of me that needed Walt. Polite redirection wouldn’t stop her, so I offered an afternoon of shopping in either Asheville or Charlotte as a distraction. Calls to Lucy and Claire went unanswered, not a surprise after the scene the night before, and I left messages with both of them, inviting them to join.
I also called Walt, who was on duty for the day at Poplar Branch, but knew he wouldn’t answer either. I disconnected without leaving a message.
“So, which one’s better? Charlotte or Asheville?”
“Um, well, Charlotte is a large city that’s had something of a business renaissance over the past few years, so there’s a lot of little boutiques downtown. Restaurants. I’ve only been there a few times wi—for dinner with friends.”
“Oh. I see.” She pursed her lips and batted her eyelashes. “Dinner with Sugar Bear?”
“Asheville is in the mountains. It’s very eclectic. There’s a lot of galleries and new age stores. Oh, and this place that makes their own chocolate and a bookstore—”
“Charlotte. Definitely. The last thing I want to do today is follow you around a dusty hippie bookstore.”
I stood, collecting our breakfast dishes, and took them to the dishwasher. “Okay. Charlotte it is, then.”
As we passed through Callahan, Dani asked about the new businesses opening in the old mill town’s restored Main Street.
“What’s ‘Merle Travis’s Taproom’? Do they have their own brewery? Y’know I went to this workshop with Dante one weekend in Portland called Craft Brew U. I wonder if they’ve ever considered having a beer sommelier?”
“Portland? That sounds fun. What did you learn?” Portland. Not Callahan, Dani.
“Just stuff about flavor profiles and food pairings, how small breweries can expand to the wine-buying customer. Have you been in there?”
“Didn’t that girl you know from Cupertino move up to Portland?” I was determined to keep her attention on her own coast—where our mother and Dante were.
“Okay, Erin, would you please just stop? Ugh—and don’t call Linda a girl.”
“Stop?” I forced myself to look at the side of the street opposite the tiny Trattoria Stella, home of Nonni Isolde and chicken piccata and Walt’s hand in mine. This morning was supposed to be ours, a chance to sleep in and indulge ourselves with a few long, lazy hours in bed before he had to go to his forest. We had discussed trying canes at Tate’s house, in one of the bedrooms upstairs. I was going to wake up with Walt’s arm hooked over my hip, his hand resting on my thigh and his marks on me. “Stop what?”
“Stop ignoring me. I’m asking you about your life here and you’re ignoring it.”
“Dani, please. Let’s focus on you, okay?” I smiled mildly at her. “This is your weekend to figure out how to talk to Dante about all of this. It’s not about me.”
“I don’t have anything to say to him.” She stared ahead, folding her arms over her chest.
“You should talk to him.” I turned on to the highway. “You’ve never been so serious with a guy, Dani. You break up with them way before they gain traction in your life. I could see he was different when I had dinner with you and Mom last month.”
“Was.”
“Dani,” I said. “Have you called him?”
“I called him plenty of things when I threw his ring back in his face.” She snorted. “Look, I don’t want to talk about him anymore. He wants a vintner’s hostess-wife, that’s fine. But that’s not me.”
I inhaled deeply, wishing I’d stopped at the Callahan biscuit shop for coffee. A Wine Country wife was exactly what Dani had always wanted to be, down to the imported Spanish espadrilles and Wednesday afternoon French manicures.
“I feel like shopping. Let’s dump the museum and go look in those boutiques you were talking about, Pudge.”
It was going to be a very long, very expensive day.
Well after lunchtime, I had simply had enough of standing beside changing rooms, waiting on Danielle.
“I’m going to go sit down,” I said, rising on my toes so I could speak over the door. “Let’s go have lunch after this, okay?”
Her head popped through the neckli
ne of a small, sheer garment she identified as a dress. “I wanted to go to that jewelry place across the street.”
“Dani, I need to have lunch. Soon.”
She looked at me like I was speaking another language. “Fine. Okay. Whatever.”
Once I found a place to sit, I dialed Claire, whose number went straight to voice mail, and then Lucy.
“Hi there. What’s up?”
“I’m with my sister.”
“Uh-huh, figured so. Well, that sigh says it all. They might be uptight WASPs, but I thank the heavens above every holiday season that I have brothers. Hang on,” she said and jostled her hand over the speaker. “No…no, Alex, they’re in the other bathroom. We can come back for her winter clothes. Just the stuff from the bathroom in the basement and her desk.”
“Is Claire with you?”
“No, she’s still over at Tate’s. She’s going to be there for a while.”
“How…” I faltered. How were any of them? I’d missed being there for Claire, really all of them, in the aftermath of what happened. “So this is definite?”
“Done deal, Sugarbritches.” She actually sounded breezy about the whole moving-Claire-from-her-house business, like she was really in Claire’s house to hang a new painting or help with a casual dinner, not beginning demolition on a marriage of twelve years.
I gnawed at my lip, glancing around the shop for Dani. “Is she, you know…how is she?”
“Nerita and Tate are with her.”
“I tried to call. I don’t know, maybe she didn’t want to—”
“Oh no, she wants to talk to you. She asked about you this morning. It’s been a while since there was a grand-scale drama unfolding, so last night it was all of a sudden about the kinky telephone tag, people she’s not heard from in months calling for the story. Fucking gossipy hens, every one of them. Tate finally had to turn off her phone when it wouldn’t stop ringing.”
“Will you tell her I’m thinking of her?” Like that would do anything to help Claire feel less of a spectacle and not abandoned in front of her friends at a party. Suddenly, Walt’s solution to Dr. Paul Saldino made much more sense to me. “I can’t really leave Dani today but once she’s gone…” Unsure of a concrete thing I could do for Claire, I left it as an offer of my presence.
“Talked to Walt today?”
“No, I—” Wincing at the sound of Dani’s voice, I tucked my phone closer to my mouth. “He’s on duty at Poplar Branch today.”
The line went silent for a moment. Finally, Lucy spoke again.
“Hey, you know…this is not really any of my business, Erin, but someone should say it to you because Walt won’t. He doesn’t like to let himself go like that easily, you know? Brings up stuff. It’s hard on him.”
“No, I get that. I…he shouldn’t worry about it, though. Everyone was angry in their own way. And for good reasons, too.” It was a cop-out statement. We both knew it, too. I didn’t know how to say more to Lucy, how to explain what I’d done to him. And once she heard, she most likely wouldn’t want to hear my flawed rationale anyway. “My sister’s ready to go to lunch, Lucy. I should go.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “Chin up, buttercup.”
Chapter Twenty
AFTER HE LOST his ROTC scholarship for injuring Joyce and Zane, one of the stipulations of Walt staying on campus as a student at Clemson was two semesters of weekly anger management sessions at the student counseling center. His assigned counselor, an older woman he only knew as Eva, didn’t begin with talking about his feelings or getting him to cry or some other feely-weely shrink shit.
She asked him to start running. Not because a coach or a bat commander or a teacher told him he had to. He could go three or four times a week, over to Issaqueena Lake, and run on the trails there, just himself. No Brady, no Lucy. Just Walt and the big, silent forest. It was the one thing he’d admit to Eva he cared for besides his two friends.
It wasn’t easy, with his arm still wrapped up in gauze and fiberglass, and he slid down more than one pine needle covered hill on his ass when his feet got tangled up under him, but eventually the cast and the sling came off. Eventually Walt found his stride.
Trail running was something that got him breathing fast enough to feel like he’d worked hard and got his feet pounding so heavy he couldn’t hear old voices in his head. Once he found some peace from their near-constant chatter, he decided to give Eva and her weekly talks a chance. She had, after all, been right about the running.
And still from time to time, once the park was closed, he took to the Overlook Trail and just ran. It was his secret benefit of being an onsite ranger at one of the smallest parks in the state.
No matter how hard he pushed himself up the hills or how heavy his breath crashed in his ears, Walt couldn’t get past what brought him out to the trail in the first place. Because Erin was here too. He’d brought her here, without a second thought, less than twenty-four hours after they met. Just opened everything up for her to look at and turn over and consider, if she wanted. So much for sitting out anything but the most superficial relationships.
How’d that work out for you?
Fucked. That’s how it worked out.
He let momentum carry him down a steep incline, taking a narrow stream in one leap. As his feet came back to the trail, something small fluttered toward him and bounced away at a sharp angle. Walt made it two or three strides further before he realized what had happened.
He scared it. He hurt it. He broke it. That’s what he always did, even when he’d never intended to, when he couldn’t have on purpose. Things came close to him and he broke them.
If he could just get it to her, she could fix it. She always made it better.
“Mama, I hurt it. Help me fix it.”
“Let’s see here, Bub.” She had blue eyes, blue like the lake out at Indian Path Park where they went for the swings. Her eyes looked sad today. More sad than usual. She turned away, coughing hard, and then sat it in the grass beside her. “Honey, it’s not fixable. Sometimes things aren’t. Butterflies are delicate creatures. I’m sorry.”
He looked overhead, in the direction the Monarch flew. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure if it was Erin or Holly or Mel or his mom but not one of them called back to tell him it was okay, that he hadn’t broken them too.
A stitch coiled up his side and he walked in circles, hands on hips, trying to shake it off. Through pants of breath, he was saying something, rambling out gibberish to the oaks overhead as he scrabbled after air and once he knew he was talking and not just panting, he heard his own voice over the dusky stillness of the woods around him.
He roared out, into the tree canopy, sending birds squawking into the evening sky. A long-dead black walnut trunk listed over the stream and Walt charged it, shoving it to the ground with his shoulder. He staggered past the cracked wood and slammed his fist into a narrow dogwood, sending a shower of leaves down around his head.
“I’m sorry, all right? Fucking sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
And there was no answer.
After so many years of saying sorry for just being himself, one more apology just wasn’t going to help. He was what he was. Sorry wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to fix it.
He sat down hard on a big rock, not bothering to look around and check what might be sitting there already. His breath was coming down, but still shuddered in his ears. Not winded. Crying. And this was as good a place as any to do it.
Alone, Walt bent his head into his hands and sobbed.
Dani and I drove back to Callahan in silence. In turns, I worried and seethed, sure she was wrecking a relationship over her own pride and certain she would take mine down along with hers if she knew more about Walt.
It was dusk when I signaled and turned off the interstate at the Callahan exit. Beneath the green sign was a matching brown one giving directions and the distance to Poplar Branch State Park. When the headlights swung ove
r a graphic indicating hiking, I flinched, sending the car fishtailing.
“Please try not to kill me in North Carolina,” Dani said, hoarse. She’d been sleeping.
“Sorry, I thought something ran across the road.”
“In this wilderness wonderland, that could be any kind of man or beast.” She laughed softly at her joke and turned to me. “I never would have put you in a place like this and with a guy like him.”
“Please, Dani. Don’t.” I’d come to this. A bereft, weepy woman who believed even the road signs were emotionally attuned to her.
“Why won’t you talk to me about him?” She shifted in the passenger seat, reminiscent of how Walt turned to me the night his truck broke down and I took him home. She shrugged. “He seemed like a nice guy. Not your type at all, but nice.”
“I…”
“Dante calls guys like that ‘non possono essere tenuti al guinzaglio,’ like the big Brunos from his town that work on the line.”
“What does that mean?”
“Um, sort of like a big horse that can’t be put on a lead? Il grande stallone, non possono essere tenuti al guinzaglio.”
“When did you learn Italian?”
“Dante.” She let out a long breath. “He taught me. It’s nothing special, just kitchen Italian.”
As I turned down Main Street, I glanced her way. “So speaking his language is okay, but…?”
“Erin, it’s different. That’s…it’s nothing. It’s just learning slang a bunch of line cooks say to each other.” She faced the road again, blinking. “It was nothing.”
I parked the car. “You wouldn’t spend your half of the rent to fly across the country for thirty-six hours if it was nothing.”
She looked down at her hands and blinked again. Exactly like me when I tried not to cry. “Why did he have to expect so much from me?”
“I don’t think he expected anything more than what he knew you were capable of.” I took my keys from the ignition. “Sometimes it’s better to listen to someone who loves you over the voices in your own head.”