My stomach growled. I couldn’t sleep but laid my head on a pair of wadded-up sweatpants and let my mind dream of food my mouth longed to eat. Cooking was a skill I’d picked up as a kid. When my mom was up for it, it was actually one of few activities she genuinely enjoyed. She was good at it, too. Neither of us were adventurous eaters, but she taught me how to roast a whole chicken and bake oven fries salted with garlic and how to flip an omelet in a way that looked fancy. That last she’d learned from her line-cook days. Rose, on the other hand, always wanted me to branch out with my culinary interests, growing impatient when I didn’t want to try things like ceviche or tripe or even our own local Humboldt Bay oysters topped with horseradish. “You have no culture,” she’d say, exasperated, and while I saw her point, I also thought she was wrong. I was the product of my culture, same as her, and I didn’t have to like or respect it any more than she did to know it was still a large part of who I was.
As I lay there, eyes closed, I overheard Avery talking to Rose. It was a quiet conversation, punctuated by the crack of falling branches and the sound of snow turning to rain to the strike the roof above us. I couldn’t hear it all, what they were saying, and I suppose I wasn’t meant to. Rose’s voice, in particular, was softer, barely there, but I took in what I could.
“You’re brave, Rosa,” I heard Avery whisper. “I mean it. You’re going to be okay.”
There was a long pause as Rose said something I couldn’t hear.
“No. It won’t be like that . . . Yes, I promise.”
Another pause.
“To the best of us,” Avery said softly. Then: “Yeah, I miss him. I didn’t . . . I thought this weekend was going to be different. I know you thought that, too. Maybe that was stupid, some of the things he said. But I know you tried. We all did.”
Rose’s answer still wasn’t audible, but I knew she said something and I knew Avery heard her, because she said one last thing to Rose.
“It’s how we should all go. I mean it. You gave him that. It was a gift. Your gift. We should all be so blessed.”
—
Although the temperature rose enough to cause rain, the storm lasted most of the afternoon, sending sheets of water down from the sky; and it was hard not to picture Archie up there throwing buckets on us with glee. Lying awake while the girls slept, I endured a stretch of panic, envisioning us being washed away by a flash flood. Nothing came of it, though. The rain tapered off by dusk and we crawled from our tents to survey the landscape.
Clay got the fire going again by some sort of alchemy. A lot of the snow was gone, but everything was soaked, pooling with rainwater, including much of our firewood. I was sent to check on the second bonfire, which was likewise ruined. Shelby and Avery gathered all the food they could find and set it on the card table for an inventory. It wasn’t much. Even with what we’d brought back from the upper campsite, we had only three packets of instant cocoa, a half-empty bottle of vodka, a package of beef jerky, two dehydrated camping meals, some trail mix, and a bag of cheese puffs.
“This is depressing,” Clay said. “No one’s coming for us.”
“What’re we going to do?” Shelby asked.
“We need to walk out,” Avery said. “We should try the access road first.”
Clay looked at her. “Tomás says it’s impossible. The whole trail collapsed.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”
“What about the long way?” I asked. “We could go out through Canyon Creek.”
“It’s ten miles,” Shelby said.
I did the math in my head. It had taken us at least two hours to travel four miles that morning. And that had been downhill. “Then let’s try the access road first. It can’t hurt. Maybe there’s a way around.”
“Now?” Clay asked.
“No . . . it’s getting dark. We’ll have to wait until morning.”
Shelby nodded. Rubbed her hands together. “Can we eat something already? I’m starving.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s not a lot left . . .”
She groaned. “I’m hungry, Ben. I don’t think I can stand spending the night like this. And if we don’t get out of here tomorrow, then it won’t matter anyway because we’ll all be—”
“Fine.” I cut that thought off. “Let’s eat the jerky and the cheese puffs. We’ll save the rest for the morning. How’s that sound?”
“Sure.” Shelby reached for the food. “I can live with that.”
42.
THE CURTAIN OF night came down, blanketing our world with darkness. The temperature sank below freezing again, turning everything icy and slick, a morbid chill.
We hadn’t decided who was going, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be the one to hike out for help in the morning. Not with my busted shoulder. To atone for my frailty, I volunteered to stay up that night and keep watch.
“Keep watch from what?” Tomás asked me, as the others trailed off to their respective tents. He’d been in with Rose for the past hour or so, which meant he’d missed the earlier conversation about the food rationing and what we planned to do.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything. I’ll keep the fire going.”
He dropped his body into the damp chair beside me, pulled it close to the flames. “Mind if I keep you company?”
I looked at him.
“I can’t sleep,” he explained. “It’s kind of a long-term problem.”
“I see.”
“And I’m worried about Rose.”
“Yeah, I am, too.”
His fingers pulled at a string dangling from his sweatshirt sleeve. “She can’t keep anything down. She’s getting weaker. She’s sleeping now—Shel’s with her—but it’s not good.”
I nodded. I was too scared to say anything else.
After a few minutes, Tomás got up and retrieved the bottle of vodka from the card table. “You want some?”
“Yeah.”
We passed it back and forth, foolish maybe, but it was the only warmth available.
“So is it true what they say about twins?” I asked, after a moment.
“Is what true?”
“That you can feel each other’s pain.”
Tomás snorted. “Hell, I’m always in pain, man. How would I know which was hers?”
I didn’t have an answer for that but that Chatterton poem he’d always been so enamored with floated through my mind. So I spoke the words aloud:
“But ah! my breast is human still;
The rising sigh, the falling tear,
My languid vitals’ feeble rill,
The sickness of my soul declare.”
Tomás gave me a funny look, but then dipped his head, seemingly appreciative of the effort if not the delivery.
“Can’t believe you remember all that,” he said. “I thought you hated that poem.”
“I do. That’s why I remember it.”
He laughed, and I continued to drink and he drank more. I was buzzed in no time—there was nothing in my stomach—which turned out to be a good thing. It kept my mind off Rose and fear and loss and a martyr’s march into the quiet death of snow. Not to mention the unfortunate fact that my arms and legs were itching like crazy.
“Hey, Ben?” Tomás asked.
“Hey, Tomás?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Anything you want.”
“Hold on.” He held up the vodka bottle while rummaging around in his sweatshirt pocket. Finally he pulled out a pack of American Spirits and a Zippo. “Want one?”
“Sure.” I wasn’t a fan but was in no position to deny myself heat. “What’d you want to tell me?”
Tomás lit his own cigarette before handing me the lighter. “Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s not going to be easy.”
“Telling
me something’s not going to be easy?”
“Confessing,” he said. “I need to confess something to you.”
I burst out coughing, the cigarette more harsh than smooth. “I hate to break it to you, but confessing’s not supposed to be easy.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because it’s meant to make you feel better after you’ve done it. You’re not supposed to enjoy for its own sake. That’s why it’s a virtue.”
“Confessing’s a virtue?”
“Honesty is.”
He blew smoke from his nose, letting it mingle with his frosted breath. “You really think that’s true?”
“I’m probably the wrong person to ask.”
“Yeah, you are, aren’t you?”
I was silent for a minute, thinking of all the sins I’d confessed to in my lifetime and all the ones I hadn’t. “You know what I do believe, though?”
“What?”
“Confession only makes you feel better under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re sorry.”
At this, Tomás leapt to his feet with a shudder. After another swig of vodka, he began to circle the fire, walking around and around—a restless route, his shoes squelch-skidding in the icy slush as he paced. He wouldn’t look at me, but more than once I watched as his gaze darted to where Abel’s rifle hung from a tree branch above us.
“Ben, you’ve killed someone, right?” he asked. “I mean, we’ve never talked about it, but everyone knows. You shot your stepfather when you were ten. It was an accident, I know, but still . . . you killed him.”
“Yeah,” I said flatly. “I killed him.”
“So how do you live with yourself?”
“Jesus, Tomás, I don’t know. I try and forget about it most of the time.”
“Can you really forget about it?”
“Sure. In a way. But I don’t feel sorry for what I did. I hated him.”
“Did he hit you or something?”
“No, not really. A few times, sure. I mostly stayed out of his way. He hit my mom a lot, though. When he thought she wasn’t respecting him. And he did . . . other stuff to her. All the time. And the worst of it was, I couldn’t do anything to stop him, because no matter how much he hurt her, she . . .”
“She what?”
I stared hard at the fire. “She believed she deserved it. She wanted him to care enough to hurt her. That’s really fucked, isn’t it?”
“I killed Archie,” Tomás said. “And I almost killed you. That’s what I needed to confess.”
—
My mind didn’t comprehend the words he’d just said. “You what?”
“I killed him. I mean, he’s dead, right? You were there. He stayed on that mountain in the middle of a blizzard with no shelter or warm clothes or food, looking for some hidden money he thought was up there. So he’s dead. He has to be.”
“I believe so, yes. But, Tomás, you didn’t—”
“I did!”
I drank more of the vodka, burning my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
Tomás kept pacing. “You really want to know where I was that night? While Mr. H. and Dunc were getting shot? While everything was going to shit?”
My eyebrows went up. “Uh, yeah, I do.”
“Well, after we left you up in the meadow, we all walked down here, just trashed off our asses, and I knew it was stupid. I knew the whole time. I mean, yeah, I care about Clay’s sister, but that’s no excuse. Or maybe it is. I don’t know! But I wanted to somehow stop them before we actually did anything, only I couldn’t. Even Rose wouldn’t hear of it, which really pissed me off. Because it wasn’t like coming down here was a decision any of them would’ve made on their own, you know? They could’ve only made it together. With Archie. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? Being stupid as a group, but not as an individual. What is it?”
“Groupthink?” I offered. “Risky shift?”
“Yeah, maybe. One of those. I mean, that night when it came to risk, all bets were off. I kept telling Archie we didn’t know for sure who these guys were. I mean, we really didn’t. We were basing it all off a hunch that I think you told us, you know?”
A swirl of dread went through me. “Wait, are you saying—”
“Let me finish, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, I had my phone with me, only there’s no reception out here. And we were nearly to the junction when Archie told me if I was so worried about what we were doing, that I should run down to the staging area and see if I could get a signal there. Then I could look up these fugitives online and see what they looked like. That would tell us. I agreed, of course, and Archie said he’d wait for me to get back.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s what you did? You walked all the way down to the parking lot? That’s like two miles.”
“I know.”
My heart sank. “Shit, Tomás. You could’ve gotten help. You could’ve left and—”
“I know. I mean, I didn’t have the keys and I didn’t know what had happened. But . . . yeah.”
“Archie didn’t wait for you, did he?”
“Of course not.”
“What an asshole.”
Tomás stopped walking to light another cigarette, a flame in the darkness. “We all were.”
“What’d you find out?”
“It wasn’t them.”
I froze. “What?”
He gave me a sick grin. “That’s what I found out. Those inmates, the ones from Napa, they were caught near Sacramento early Saturday morning. Before we even got here. And by the way, they hadn’t robbed any bank, so I don’t even know where the rumor about the money came from in the first place.”
My mind turned slowly. “Wait, so you knew it wasn’t them . . .”
“But I didn’t get back here until after Rose was shot, and Dunc and Mr. H. were killed. I couldn’t have stopped that. But I was so mad at Archie for what he’d done, for leading everyone into danger and for nothing. He got them killed. And he risked Rose’s life because he didn’t care enough to wait for me to find out the truth. That there wasn’t any money to begin with.”
“No money,” I echoed.
“No.”
“But Rose said . . .”
Tomás waved a hand. “I know what Rose said. That guy, Abel, I think he must’ve been fucking with her when he told her that. He probably heard you guys talking about the money and decided to screw with us. But the thing is, I knew when you and Archie left that you were going after something that didn’t exist. I knew and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t try and stop you. I let you both go. In part because I blamed Archie for everything, but also, because I really fucking hated that guy.”
“Oh.” My mind continued to spin. There were other implications in what he was telling me—something wasn’t right—but I was too drunk to see the whole picture, to put all the pieces together in a way that made sense.
“I’m really sorry, Ben,” he said. “I thought you’d just come back with the keys and leave him. But then the storm . . . I didn’t know—”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly.
He stopped walking. “No, it’s really not okay. Don’t say that. That’s what you always tell Rose.”
I tilted my head. “What do I always tell Rose?”
“That everything she does is okay. It’s not good for her, you know. Or you.”
I didn’t respond. It wasn’t that he was wrong, it just didn’t seem very important at the moment.
“Then who were those people?” I asked. “The Preacher, he kept saying I knew who he was. They were hiding something, for sure.”
Tomás turned toward the flames before answering, letting the smoke blow
in his face. “You want to know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think they were transporting drugs. The guy who died last night, Abel or whatever, I was the one who had to move his body when we found him this morning. He had a bunch of meth or something on him, these bags were taped to his chest. They must’ve thought we were on to them about that, but I don’t know where they were going with it or why they were here.”
“Eureka,” I said.
“Eureka?”
“That’s where they were going.” I pulled the paper I’d found earlier from the pocket of the Preacher’s jacket. Pointed to the letters EUR AMTK. “I think they were probably meeting someone there. At the train station, I guess?”
Tomás stared at the paper for a long time. “This is all kinds of fucked up, you know? I mean, in a way, they were just camping like we were. But with drugs. And guns.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t bother mentioning that we’d brought our own drugs and guns. “So do you feel better after confessing that to me?”
“A little, maybe. I’m not sure. How do you feel?”
“About that?” I asked. “Okay, I guess. I already knew you didn’t like me.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“It’s not?”
“No. I mean, I get that I can be a dick to you. But it’s more that I don’t think you’re good for Rose. Or really, I don’t think Rose is good for you. You remind me of me, actually, Ben. Or you did when you two first got together. I knew my sister wanted to fix you the way she used to want to fix me.”
“Fix you how?”
“Rose never told you?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “I kind of had a breakdown, I guess, when I was in eighth grade. Got really depressed and ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks. It was part of why we moved. Rose tried to do everything for me after that and tell me what to think so that I’d feel good about myself or whatever, but it got annoying. She resented me for needing help, but it wasn’t help I’d asked for in the first place.”
“And that reminds you of me?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” I said. Then I scratched at my legs.
Tomás looked over. “What’s wrong?”
When I Am Through with You Page 22