by Roz Nay
“You’re done!” Dad bellowed. “Go to bed. You won’t be seeing him again.”
He left the porch before Ruth did: I heard his heavy tread as he came upstairs. She sat down there alone for ages, creaking back and forth in Dad’s rocking chair. When she finally came up to bed, I pretended I’d slept through the whole thing.
Dad fired Hal the next day, but Hal still lingered out by the road, waiting around for Ruth to see him. All day long, he was out there while Ruth remained grounded inside the house. He tried to get my attention a few times, talk to me, probably wanting me to send a message to Ruth. He hung around after that first day when he thought Dad wouldn’t be there. Mom was watching Ruth closely by then, a new development for which Ruth blamed me entirely.
“Thanks a lot, golden girl,” she’d say to me when Mom moved away from the kitchen table at lunchtimes. “Just wait till they find out what you’re doing.”
But I wasn’t doing anything, except trying to avoid Hal Nightingale lurking about the farm. Each time I saw him down by the road, I felt electrified, and terrified. Then, one day in town, he whistled at me. I couldn’t tell Ruth—she’d never believe me—and if I told Dad, there’d be a homicide. So instead I went to my mom.
“Hal Nightingale did what?” She dropped her wooden spoon in the pudding bowl.
“I really hope he’s not following me, Mama. He’s skulking around all the time.”
“Has he touched you? Alex Van Ness?”
The image of Hal and Ruth in the field filled my vision. I felt a deep pull in my pelvis, and I didn’t know what it meant. “No, he hasn’t … touched me,” I said.
My mom grabbed my hand, her skin rough like used paper. It was unexpected how quickly she lit. “You’ve done the right thing by speaking up. I’m telling your father.”
“Mom, don’t. Ruth will be—”
“Ruth must realize what she’s done, what danger she’s put herself in and, now, her little sister, too.”
“Please, Mom. It’s not like he did anything, not really. I don’t want Dad to worry.”
She went silent. I don’t think she told Dad, in the end. In hindsight, I wish she had. I wish Dad would have threatened him even more. Maybe Hal would have given up on Ruth once and for all and things would have ended differently. Differently for Ruth. And differently for me.
RUTH
I was so caught up with Hal and the life we were planning together that I didn’t realize how far Alex would go, how far gone she already was. In the weeks after I was forbidden to see Hal, she’d made Mom her confidante. She’d made Dad her pet. It was as if she saw the opportunity to benefit from my being in trouble—she almost relished it—and try as I might, there was nothing I could do to make the pendulum of our parents’ favor swing back my way. I didn’t want to leave home; I was too afraid. And I still believed that surely they’d forgive me and come around. So when the shit hit the fan—Alex’s shit, for once, not mine—how was I to know that, even then, they’d take her side? One way or another they’d all find a way to make it my fault.
One day, just as summer was starting to fade, I came back from a secret visit with Hal and walked into the kitchen. Mom was sitting at one end of the table, and Alex was at the other. Neither was speaking.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Mom looked at me, her eyes a strange watery hardness, like pumice stone at the bottom of the bath. “Do you know about this?” she asked, gesturing to a form on the table.
“She doesn’t know,” Alex mumbled.
I picked up the form and read it. It was a clinic form, parental consent for an abortion. An abortion? I had to read it twice to actually believe it. And when I realized it was for Alex, I almost wanted to laugh. Imagine it: all those years spent pointing at me for being the family fuckup while Alex was the one to get herself pregnant.
Her face was streaked with tears, desperate. I felt bad for wanting to laugh. Despite what my family thought of me, I wasn’t the bad one after all. I wasn’t the monster.
Alex looked at me then, and I saw the same little girl standing on that ladder the day Pim disappeared. Do something, her face said. But I couldn’t save her. Not this time. What she did with Tommy was her choice.
A part of me that had been closed for so long opened up. I wanted to reach out to her, hold her, but I didn’t.
“Does Dad know?” I asked. At the mention of him, Alex looked down into her lap.
“Not yet,” Mom said. “Good God, hasn’t that man gone through enough, lived through enough agony for a lifetime? Haven’t we all? And now. Now, this.”
“Mom, you can’t tell him. He’ll disown her,” I said. “He’ll burn down the Gunnarsson homestead. He’ll shoot Tommy himself.”
“Don’t!” Alex said, and suddenly her desperation and sadness transformed into rage, all of it focused on me.
“Ruth, I need you to drive your sister into town on Thursday,” Mom said. “You can do that for her, at the very least.”
“But, Mom, I—”
“You will do this. For me. For your sister.” She said it with such viciousness, she was practically spitting at me.
Another bucket of trouble thrown into the air, and somehow it was all still landing on me.
* * *
The outside of the clinic was horrible. Hordes of red-faced, sweaty women with banners shouted at Alex and me as we pressed through. I shoved a few of them. Jesus. It’s hard enough without that kind of baying in your face. Alex had been quiet on the ride in. She’d even apologized to me for having to come with her. I’d tried everything to distract her: music on the stereo, chitchat, sympathy. None of it worked. Once we got inside, she handed in the consent form.
“Is this your mother’s signature?” asked the nurse, flicking at the page with a glittery fingernail, her voice one bored straight line.
“Yes, ma’am,” Alex said.
“Do I need to call her and check?”
I cut in. “It’s our mom’s handwriting,” I said. “And besides, I’m her big sister, and I’m twenty. Mom asked me to come here with her. In loco parentis. Can we please just sit down?”
We found seats next to each other in the waiting room. They deflated like sighs as we sat down. The whole room was stark and blank and smelled of acid.
“What are you looking at?” I said to a guy across the aisle who was staring at us. He buried his face in a magazine.
Alex was sucking the end of her hair, that nervous habit she’d developed after our lives turned to hell.
“How far along are you?” I asked gently. I didn’t even know this much. She’d refused to speak to me in the days leading up to this.
“Six weeks.”
“Have you told Tommy?”
Silence.
“You can’t just let him off the hook, sis. And he deserves to know. This is his fault, too.”
Her eyes did that thing again, turning from sadness to red-hot anger in a flash. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s yours,” she said.
“Mine?” I felt like I’d just been slapped.
“If you hadn’t—” Just then her name was called, and she stood. “Don’t come with me. I’ll do this on my own. Like with everything else.”
She walked away from me then, and I was left in the waiting room, sweating. Why on earth did she feel this was my fault? Because I’d been caught up in my own world and didn’t really notice what was going on with her? Because our parents had practically disowned me? Because I was a ghost living in their house?
I sat miserably, staring at the shoes of the other people in the clinic. Were all the paths they trod as bumpy as mine?
The abortion was quick. She walked out on her own, refusing my help, her own arms wrapped around herself. All the way home in the truck, she stared out the window, looking both younger and older than she had on the ride in. What had happened to my little sister? Was it that day in the clinic or years earlier that she had disappeared? Guilt made me nauseated. I’d let her down. Again.
I parked in the driveway and got out of the truck. Mom was on the porch squirreling one hand over the other. Something was very wrong.
“Mom?” I asked. Alex got out of the truck slowly. Mom was crying when she went to Alex and opened her arms.
“My little tiger, I am sorry. I am so, so sorry. I didn’t realize. I really didn’t know.” Mom cried on Alex’s shoulder, her breath coming out in rakes. Alex’s arms went around her, and she began crying, too.
“Mom!” I said, stepping closer. “What’s going on?”
She pulled herself away from Alex’s embrace. Her face was on fire. Never before had I seen her look so fierce.
“Your father’s gone after him.”
“Gone after who? Tommy?” I asked.
“No, Ruth. Not Tommy.” Next to her, Alex was gripping Mom’s sleeve. She looked just like a little girl. Her expression was strangely blank, despite the tears that ran down her cheeks. When she spoke, it was without inflection.
“I left them a note,” she said. “Before we left for the clinic. I told Mom and Dad what really happened.”
She began to walk to the porch steps. Mom helped her up them.
“What are you talking about? I don’t even know what you’re saying.” It took me a beat to catch up. “Wait, what? You’re not suggesting … No. No!” Every cell of my skin started to prickle. He would never, ever lay a finger on her. “Alex!” I yelled. “You’re not suggesting Hal got you pregnant?”
Alex turned slowly, Mom’s arm still around her shoulder. “Ever since the day Dad ran him off the farm, he’s been following me,” she said. “One day, he put his hands on me. I couldn’t get away.” She started to cry then, great heaving sobs that racked her, each one folding her with pain. Mom pressed her again into an embrace. She began to cry, too.
“Alex, no. It’s not true! Hal wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.”
She moved a half step behind Mom.
Mom spoke for her. “You’re oblivious, Ruth. You don’t see the truth. You’ve created all the trouble this family has ever known.”
Suddenly Dad wheeled into the driveway in his truck, but he didn’t stop by us, he drove straight to the barn. We all watched him, wide-eyed. He got out, his legs and arms angled and tense.
“I’ve been looking all over!” he yelled to Mom. “Now I’ve found out where he is.” When he got back in the truck again, he was holding a baseball bat. His eyes were stone-hard on me as he peeled back out onto the grid road.
“Stop!” I shouted at him. The earth beneath me began to shift and slip. I was gulping for air, drowning. “Stop him!” I pleaded at Alex. “Tommy did this to you, not Hal!”
“Mom,” she sobbed. “It’s not true. Ruth is a liar.”
It wasn’t Hal. Not my Hal. If anything, he’d been kind to Alex, always. She probably let Tommy do it. Then when this happened, she had to find a way to make it not her fault. I stumbled up to the house and pushed past them, letting the screen door swing shut.
“Ruth!” Mom called out. But I climbed the stairs, grabbed a bag, and rammed everything I owned inside it. Mom came to the bottom of the staircase. “Please,” she called up, but without conviction. She didn’t mean it; she didn’t climb the stairs; she didn’t want me. None of them had wanted me, not since Pim died. Hal was the only one who understood me. Who made me feel any sense of happiness, who made me feel like I belonged.
When Hal pulled up at the end of our driveway a couple of hours later, his face was busted up, lip bleeding, left eye swollen shut. I put everything of mine into his trunk, and I slammed it shut. What else could I do?
“Are you going to be okay?” Alex had the gall to ask me before I got into his car. I laughed right in her face.
Mom came out and stood on the porch, not waving as Hal and I pulled away from the farm and roared south toward the highway, the house and my family a dwindling flicker in the dust of the rearview mirror.
PART THREE
THE THIEF
ALEX
It’s late now, but still I can’t bring myself to go back to the loft. Chase will have too many questions; I don’t have the strength to answer them. I sit for a while on a park bench watching the moms with their little kids. At the top of a slide, a girl of about five waves at me as she gets set to go. Look at me, she’s saying. I can do this; I’m this brave. For a second I worry that she’ll topple backward. But she’s done this before; she has a good grip on the metal siding. I wave back but can’t muster a smile. Every minute that passes, I fight the urge to text Sully. Already I’m so muddled. If I tell Sully anything, I’m in danger of telling him everything, and it doesn’t seem fair to Chase.
When I finally get back to the loft, Chase is showering, but Ruth is sitting on a stool in the kitchen. She turns when I come in and all but pounces.
“It wasn’t me,” she says immediately. “I don’t know how many different ways I can tell you. I never showed him that photograph of Pim.”
I don’t answer. I can’t play this game anymore.
“And you know what?” She shifts in her seat, jabs a forefinger in the air. “Your rule about not talking about the past was crazy. Nobody lives like that. It was an impossible thing to ask.”
I sigh and close the front door. “Well, apparently it wasn’t a rule you took seriously anyway.”
“No, because it was stupid. Here, let’s try it: You tell me a story about yourself, Alex, and none of it can be about anything that’s happened to you. Go.” Her right knee is jiggling. As usual, she’s the one who’s angry when I’m the one who’s been wronged.
“I’m really tired, Ruth.”
“Do you believe me?”
“No, I don’t.” I walk to the fridge and open it, my back to her at the counter. “I think you love that Chase found out and is mad at me. You had something over me. I think you saw that as an opportunity to hurt me, and you took it.”
When I glance back, she has her palm flat against her chest, her mouth outraged at the slander.
“It doesn’t work on me, Ruth.” I pull a container of some kind of pasta from the fridge and open it, put it back again. “This whole poor me act you have going. You know what you’ve done in your life, all the things you chose. And you chose them for everyone. No one else ever had a say.”
“What are you talking about?”
I slam the fridge closed. “If anyone has a right to be mad, it’s me. But look at you! You’re trying to steal that from me, too.”
She sits up so straight it’s like the chair has turned electric. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself, Alex, and I’ve come to terms with a shit ton of things. I think it’s time you did the same.”
“Oh, spare me.” My voice is rising now, but then to my left I’m aware that Chase has come out of the shower. He’s standing in his shorts, his hair tousled.
“Hello,” he says. He looks scared more than anything, as if the floor is full of land mines.
“Chase.” I walk toward him. “I’m sorry I took off. I needed to clear my head. Today has been awful, start to finish. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he says. “It’s okay. But can we talk?” He looks around as if only just noticing there’s nowhere private in this condo. “Can we go somewhere on our own right now?”
“I’d like that,” I say.
“Are you hungry? You must be. Come on, I know a place.” He throws on a T-shirt he’s left on the couch, grabs his keys from a hook by the door. “Will you be all right, Ruth?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says, standing.
“She’ll be fine,” I say. And then to her: “Don’t wander off.”
The last thing I see before the front door closes is Ruth helping herself to the pasta from the fridge.
We take Chase’s car because it’s quicker. The town is deserted and closed up for the night, but he knows a wine bar that’s attached to the Snow Ridge hotel on the way out to the ski hill. The hotel itself is fancy—the kind of place moneyed weekenders would st
ay at before returning to their corporate jobs in Denver or LA—and the wine bar’s still open, jazz blaring from the sound system. It sounds frenzied, wailing, upsetting.
“Have you been here before?” I ask. Never before have I seen so many suits and Rolexes in Moses River.
“I come here all the time.” Chase waves at the bartender. “I get a special rate because they know me.”
“When do you come here?” I ask, and he looks worried again.
“For work things,” he says. “If marketing associates come from other resorts, we always host them here.”
“Oh, okay.” It’s the first time I’ve ever wondered if there’s anything else I don’t know about him.
We sit in the quietest corner, if that’s possible, since all of them are spot-lit by expensive lighting, overhung by speakers, hemmed in by plush cushions and low, polished tables. When the barman approaches, Chase orders a gin and tonic, but all I can stomach is ginger ale. Neither of us speaks until the barman leaves.
“Where were you all evening?” he asks.
“Just walking around.”
“On your own?”
“Yes, Chase. I swear.” There’s a long silence. “You can ask me, you know. You have a hundred questions, I can tell.”
He exhales. “I really only have one. Why couldn’t you tell me earlier about your brother?”
I lower my hands to my lap. “How much do you know about him?”
“That he died in an accident on the farm when he was really little. It’s awful, Alex. I feel horrible for you. And I don’t know why you didn’t tell me.”
A pocket of stress is swelling in me, spreading out as it rises. It’s a pressure that has to get out.
“The truth of how Pim died is hard for me to think about, even now. It happened so long ago. My parents were out, and he fell into a grain truck. Ruth was the oldest. She was in charge.”
The bartender brings drinks and leaves.
“But … was she to blame?” Chase asks.
I wait a beat. “Like I said. My little brother’s death was an accident. But Ruth was supposed to be looking after him. She knew better than us, and she failed. She didn’t keep him safe at all. It’s the worst thing she could have done.” I move my drink farther away from me on the table. “I was close with my mom and dad until my brother’s death left this big brick wall between us. We never got past it.”