by Anna Bailey
‘Right.’
‘Look, Blake, take it from someone who has literally nothing: one day you’re going to want a mother. Accepting her apology doesn’t mean you think that what she did was okay, it just means things get to change now. Isn’t that what you want?’ Noah watches him rearrange his hair to conceal his disfigured ear. ‘And for the record, of course I’m still mad about the fire. But who does that benefit? Can’t go on being ugly and miserable, or even you’ll get sick of me.’
He starts to walk away, but Noah grabs him by the elbow, cupping his scarred jaw in the palm of his hand. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘It is what it is, Blake.’
‘None of this – you and me – ever happened because I looked at a boy and thought he was beautiful. It happened because when I looked you looked back. You saw me. I felt like no one had ever really seen me before, and now I see you too, just like this. And I’m still looking back at you.’
Noah kisses the top of his head, and he thinks he likes the way Rat smells more like shampoo than cigarettes now. He wraps an arm around his shoulders. ‘You won’t ever have nothing. Just by the way.’
It isn’t a wake so much as a handful of people who didn’t want the family to be alone. Melissa brings a casserole. Ann Traxler brings a dish full of chocolate brownies that she baked herself. ‘They’re not funny brownies,’ she keeps saying, and Dolly thinks that is the most absurd thing she can imagine, Ann baking pot brownies, but also more’s the pity. Samuel would have hated it.
When she hears the rumble of Rat’s motorcycle in the driveway, sees Noah climbing off the back, she has the strongest feeling that some guillotine blade has just come down between them. His returning here for the wake is only performative: in his mind a decision has been made, she can tell. He is already far away.
There is so much she wants to tell him, but in the end, all she can do is push his bright hair back from his face and say, ‘California’s a long way. I’ll miss you.’
Noah nods, looking at his boots. ‘Jude can finally teach you how to video call.’
‘Oh, sure.’
It’s not just him leaving, it’s all of it: the memory of the weight of that rifle in her hands, the nightmares where she rolls over to find Samuel still lying beside her, and the fact – the awful, weary fact – that her daughter really is dead.
‘Mom …’
He hesitates, and for a moment she’s not sure if he’s going to do it. Then suddenly he has her in his arms, and how big they are now, how small she feels pressed close against him. He is no longer that baby who made her husband hate her. He hasn’t been for some time.
‘Promise you’ll call,’ she says. ‘Only when you have time. But promise.’
She lets go of him and looks over to where Rat is letting Emma Alvarez try on his sunglasses. ‘He’s nice.’
‘Yeah, he is.’
Noah says this carefully, as though he suspects it might be a trick, and Dolly can’t help thinking: I did that to him. That thought will keep coming back to her, every now and again, throughout the lives of both her sons. There will be drunken phone calls at strange hours of the night, angry calls, and calls that end with tearful I-love-yous. There will be one Thanksgiving when Noah storms out and smashes a bottle on his father’s grave; there will be many more that do not end this way, but then a Valentine’s Day when Jude announces he is getting a divorce, and a Christmas when Noah refuses to come home at all. Every time, Dolly will think, Yes, I did this to them. But although neither of them ever says it aloud, it will never be her that Jude and Noah blame.
Evening stealing over the mountains finds Emma and Hunter at the Tall Bones, sitting on the trunk of her car while the season’s first snow settles thin and tentative over their hair and shoulders. At the edge of the trees, the scrubby ground where Emma last saw Abigail has already disappeared beneath the white.
She’s always thought they were eerie, these tall, pale rocks, but now they seem to her like a mirror of all things: half buried in the earth, half reaching towards the sky, they are the meeting place between two worlds – the fixed and the possible, the past and the future.
She could stay. She could wait for the grass to grow up around her ankles and fix her here too. There will always be a part of her – she understands this now – that will remain here, where her mother is, where Abigail was. But then somewhere out there is her father. For the first time since she was four years old, she can feel herself reaching towards him.
It’s strange, the liminal sense this place gives her. She imagines she can see them all – her friends, and what a word that is – their lives stretching upwards as though each of them were a stone in this circle. One day (and she is sure of this, although she cannot say why), driving back from California, Noah and Rat will stop at some lonesome gas station on the other side of the Rockies. And Rat, waiting in line to buy nicotine patches, will see a red-haired woman, who smiles at him like she half remembers him from another place, another life. Out in the dusty daylight, the smell of pine resin in the air beckoning them home, he will watch this woman climb into a car with a man who kisses the top of her head, with children who tug on her red hair and make her laugh. And when Noah, who no longer chews his lip or walks with his shoulders hunched, says, ‘Who’s that?’ Rat will simply watch the car drive away, leaving insect-shaped offerings all along the blacktop. He will wait for the dust to settle before he replies, ‘Nobody, dragă,’ and who’s to say that won’t be true?
‘Em, you’re shivering. Here.’ Hunter takes off his coat, holding it out to her awkwardly.
Emma smiles and shakes her head. The coat smells musty, and reminds her too much of Rat’s jacket, which he once gave to her here, at the Tall Bones, when they were all different people. Instead she takes Hunter’s hand, stroking her thumb gently over his knuckles, because she wants to tell him, wants him to know that she knows: We are different people now.
‘We can head back,’ he says, ‘you know, if you’re cold.’
‘In a minute. Just a minute.’
She has always loved the way snow falls, so soft and noiseless, filling up the hollows of the landscape. That is what they need now, she thinks, this moment of quiet, just for themselves, before they continue.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my editors, Kirsty Dunseath in the UK and Kaitlin Olson in the US, for their commitment to this novel and for being such a joy to work with. Thank you to Alison Barrow for promoting this book so passionately, and to everyone at Transworld who worked so hard to make it happen. I am beyond grateful for my wonderful agent Alice Lutyens for all her astute advice, whether on writing or life, and for Sophia MacAskill at Curtis Brown for reading Tall Bones in the first place.
Thanks to Anna Davis and Jack Hadley at Curtis Brown Creative; to everyone on CBC’s online novel-writing course for their wise words; and to my tutor Lisa O’Donnell for giving me confidence in my writing.
Thank you to Aude Claret for all her insight and fierce encouragement. To Lucy and John for their patience and enthusiasm. And to Jane Bailey for her unwavering support, without which this novel would not have been written at all.
Lastly, my thanks to all the people between Texas and Colorado who shared their stories with me in a country so divided. Your nation is richer for having you in it.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by Doubleday in 2021
Copyright © Anna Bailey 2021
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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Cover design by Beci Kelly/TW
Image © Getty
ISBN: 978-1-473-58127-2
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