“What’s going on? Jo okay?”
“For the moment. Look, this isn’t easy to say. Seriously. Can you put that cello away for just a minute? Have a drink. Or two. It’ll take the edge off.”
Braden sits up in bed, breathing far too fast.
Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me.
Getting up as quietly as possible, he grabs the box of matches from the shelf where they’ve been kept as far back as he can remember, pulls on his jacket and shoes, and eases out the back door.
It’s not quite pitch-dark, the snow-covered lake and trees creating what he’s always thought of as snow light, and he’s able to make out dim shapes. The barbecue. The deck table and chairs. He takes care with his footing. The stairs that lead down from the deck are steep and can be icy and slick this time of year. Using the railing, taking his time, he works his way down to the firepit.
Firewood is neatly stacked and covered to keep it dry. The kindling box is full and also contains old newspapers wrapped in plastic. He pictures Jo out here replenishing the wood supply. Making kindling. Skills she was always better at than he was. His mother hadn’t let him use the axe at all until he was old enough to defy her. He didn’t do Boy Scouts, he went to summer music camp. Everything in his world was music until suddenly it wasn’t.
Back then it was Jo, not his father, who taught him how to make a fire. Who spirited him off from his mother’s hovering and taught him how to fish and shoot a gun. It was Jo who took him hiking in the woods on the long summer days. And look how he has rewarded her.
Braden crumples a couple of sheets of newspaper and sets them in the center of the firepit. He adds kindling and tops it all off with two bigger pieces of wood. Then he strikes a match and holds it to the paper, the small flame quickly transferring itself to the edge of the paper, blossoming into light, licking at the kindling.
Now he can clearly see the chairs around the firepit, lightly dusted with snow. Mitch sat right there, across from where Braden is standing now, his back to the dark expanse of snow-covered lake.
The memory flash hits him again.
Snow drifting down.
Rage and grief and loss flooding his body.
Mitch’s face, alternately shadowed and illuminated by the crackling fire.
The two loose ends of the flashback flail, loose in the breeze, connected to nothing. Braden watches the firelight, ironically amused at himself. On the trip here he’d fought a giant inner battle about whether to allow himself to remember, as if his psyche is a take-out window where he can order at will.
One memory to go, please, supersize the fries.
And now, nothing.
“Talk to me, Mitch,” he murmurs out loud.
“Mitch is not the talkative type.”
Braden startles at Jean’s voice. He’s been so lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t hear her descending the stairs and coming toward him.
“Mind if I join you?” She sits before he can answer, across the fire in the place where Mitch sat so very long ago.
“Allie’s fine,” she says before he can ask. “I checked the loft before I came out. All three girls, sound asleep.”
“What brings you out?” he asks, at a loss for what to say to this woman he barely knows.
“Same as you, I imagine. Couldn’t sleep. Too much emotional processing. I heard you moving around, thought I’d see what you were up to.”
“Just sitting here. Thinking. Not remembering.” He gets up and adds wood to the fire, sending crackling sparks up into the darkness.
“This is not the typical intervention adventure,” Jean says, her voice so quiet Braden needs to strain his ears to hear her. “Usually it’s more celebration and party. Phee didn’t tell us we’d be dragging you through the dirt.”
“Have you had an intervention?”
She shakes her head. “It’s rare with the Angels. Phee, once, not long after we started. Katie, a couple of times. You know about Dennis. And now you.”
Braden thinks about Phee relapsing, replays the story she told him about the violinist and the old man, that she blames herself for what happened to both of them.
“You’ve remembered something,” she says, scrutinizing his face.
“Written in flaming letters on my forehead?”
“Not like that. More like . . . you seem more solid. Like a piece of you came back.”
“It’s not a good piece,” he says, poking at the fire with a stick. “My memories are going to hurt people.”
“Whatever happened already happened,” she says. “So the harm is already done.”
“And if what I remember hurts them more? Things they don’t need to know, for example.”
“I think you need to trust that people are strong enough to carry the truth.”
“Seems like maybe it would be better to keep my mouth shut.”
“As your own private punishment? In which case, sooner or later, you’ll go back to drinking. I’m a bit psychic.” She glances up at him, measuring the impact of her words, then returns her gaze to the fire. “It left me wide open to people’s emotions when I was younger. I didn’t know how to shield myself. I didn’t believe what I’m telling you now, that people have to carry their own burdens, that they’re responsible for their own emotional journeys. I sank under the weight of it all. And so I started drinking.”
“But you joined the Angels, and now you give people adventures and everything is hunky-dory.” He regrets the bitterness in his voice, knowing she’s only trying to help.
“Not quite so easy as all that. I drank because of other people’s pain, or at least that was my excuse. And then I drove drunk and crashed my car and somebody died.”
Braden, even though he’s warm in the circle of the fire, shivers with the impact of what she’s telling him. Her eyes meet his now, and she holds him with her gaze. “I did prison time. But being locked up wasn’t justice for taking a life. So a month after I was incarcerated, I tried to kill myself. I failed. When I woke up in the hospital, I realized that wasn’t justice, either. It didn’t bring the woman back to her family. No possible form of punishing myself was going to make the world better for anybody.
“I came to believe that the only true recompense is to give to the world whatever I have to give. To live every minute enough for the two of us, myself and the woman whose life I stole. This is how I choose to repay her.”
Braden takes this in but says nothing.
“This thing you’ve blocked out of your memory—maybe you’re not the one who gets to say whether it will heal or hurt.”
“Doesn’t appear I have any control over it, want to or not,” he says.
For a while both of them just sit, staring into the fire, then Jean stretches and gets to her feet. “I’m too old for all-nighters. I’m going to try for a couple of hours of sleep. Go easy on yourself.”
He watches her walk away, turns back to the fire, and continues to ask himself the question he still can’t answer.
Do I really want to remember?
He hadn’t wanted to hear whatever Mitch had to tell him, all the way back then. Doesn’t want to hear it now, but he takes a breath, pokes at the fire, hears his memory self, seated behind the cello in the long-ago cabin, say to Mitch:
“Whatever it is, spit it out.”
And Mitch squares his shoulders and turns to face him. “Suit yourself. It’s about Lilian. I’d suggest you sit down, but you already are. So. Here goes. Lil and I . . . we’re having an affair.”
The words make no sense. Not Lilian. Not this.
“Look, man, I know it’s gotta be hard to hear. But I’m sick of sneaking around behind everybody’s backs. I told her we needed to have it out—”
“Do you mean had an affair?” Braden interrupts. “Past tense.” He can’t work out the logistics. It’s been years since all of them have been together; Lilian never comes out to Colville if she can avoid it.
Mitch shakes his head. “We Skype almost every day.
Meet for a week together twice a year.”
Braden’s fingers tighten around the neck of the cello as the words sink in. The separate vacations. The continued education trainings Lil goes to for her nursing license, always somewhere out of town.
Still, he can’t believe it. He pictures her kneeling by their bed every night to pray. Reading her Bible, going to church.
“She wouldn’t.” But even as he says it, he feels the cold certainty of the truth.
“I asked her to marry me,” Mitch says. “Last week. Told her I’m sick to death of this. ‘Let’s both just get divorced and get it over with,’ I said. She wanted to wait until the kids are older, but I want . . . I don’t want to wait. She’ll be mad that I told you, but I figured you’d want to do the right thing and let her go.”
Braden doesn’t want to hear this, not any of it. He starts playing again, his hands finding their own music. Allie’s lullaby, transposed this time into a minor key.
“How long?” he asks, but he knows, wants to stop what’s coming, but it’s already too late.
“Since before Trey was born.” Mitch’s gaze focuses on him directly, and Braden sees it now, sees what he didn’t notice before because he was so damn trusting and never looked for it. Trey looks exactly like Mitch and Jo’s son, Jimmy. Jimmy looks exactly like Mitch.
Mitch raises his voice to be heard above the music. “Trey is my son. Maybe you already guessed that.”
Braden stops in the middle of a phrase, an unresolved chord hanging in the air between them. It seems to him that he and Mitch are in the eye of a storm, in an eerie and deceptive calm with destruction swirling all around them.
“And I suppose you want to get to know your son, now that we’ve got him past night feedings and diapers.”
“Time to have this out in the open. Better for everybody.”
“Really? I don’t see how this can possibly be good for anybody.”
“What I don’t understand,” Mitch says, “is how you never saw it. The boys could be brothers.”
“I wasn’t looking for it. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t trust my wife, especially with my sister’s husband. What the hell, Mitch?”
Mitch opens yet another beer. “Look, I’m not proud of any of this. But I will say this much. Lilian is dead right about you.”
“In what way, exactly?”
“You don’t see her. You don’t notice anything that’s not connected to that cello. She’s a hell of a woman, and you don’t deserve her.”
Braden’s body has become a sounding board for accusations and self-recriminations, all of it escalating toward rage.
“You’ve been fucking my wife and you’re blaming me for it? Are you going to blame Jo, too?”
“Jo is an admirable woman, but she’s so goddamn self-sufficient. Lilian, now, Lilian needs me.”
Lilian is all need, Braden thinks. Needs he hasn’t ever been able to meet. He can see, now, with terrible clarity, how she and Mitch would fit together. A strong man who wants to take care of a woman, a woman who wants to be taken care of. A fleeting sympathy for both of them, a tortured understanding, collides with an awareness of collateral damage.
Jo will be devastated. All of the kids will be marked by this. Jimmy. Allie. Trey.
“I’ve been trying to get her to marry me since Trey was born,” Mitch says. “We made a point of not being seen together or letting the boys be in the same place at the same time. I told myself it was for the best, but I still love her, Braden. I’m tired of a long-distance relationship, and yes, I want to get to know my son.”
“Are you asking for my blessing? Some old-school transaction where I, what, give her to you? She’s my wife, Mitch. And Trey is my son in every way that counts. You don’t even know him! And Lilian’s not on board with your plan. She told me if I give up the cello, we stay together. So that’s what I’m going to do. Lilian and I—and you—all of us will do the right thing. You stop the thing with Lil. Jo and the kids never need to know any of this.”
“So we just go on and pretend it never happened?” Mitch laughs harshly and without humor. “How anybody can look at that boy and not know he’s mine, I can never understand. It’s going to all come out sooner or later. God. What a mess. You sure you don’t want a beer?”
He’s flushed and slurring, shifting from apologetic to belligerent. “This isn’t over, but I’ve said what I came to say. I’ll go home and let you think about it.”
“You’re drunk. It’s snowing. You can’t drive back tonight.”
“I’m fine.” He heads for the door, his footsteps weaving . . .
And there the memory ends.
Braden sits by the fire, attuning himself to Lilian’s betrayal, the knowing that Trey, his golden-haired, sunny boy, wasn’t really his. The memory doesn’t feel new; rather, he has an odd sensation that it’s always been right there, just outside the focus of his attention.
But it won’t be that way for Jo, for Allie.
Does he say something? The only other two people on the planet who knew this secret are dead. Nothing would be served by Allie knowing that Trey was only her half brother, by Jo knowing that her beloved deceased husband was unfaithful for years.
Unless, as Jean says, he should trust them to be strong enough to hold the truth.
Allie’s words come back to him.
“I didn’t want my death to be a lie.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
PHEE
Phee wakes to the smell of coffee. Dog drool is cooling on her arm, a sound of panting loud in her ear.
“Leave me alone,” she grumbles, and then her eyes fly open as she remembers where she is, the audacity of what she has done.
Jean is still asleep beside her, turned on her side, a pillow half over her head. Celestine’s tail wags dangerously, and Phee knows from long experience that there will be no sliding back into sleep once the big dog has ideas of outside and breakfast in his head. Not that she could sleep in, anyway. Not today.
She doesn’t wear a watch, has no idea what time it is. Dim light could mean either very early morning or just an overcast winter day. Rolling out from under the covers as quietly as possible, she slips into her jeans, smooths the T-shirt she slept in, and attempts to run her fingers through her hair. It’s hopelessly tangled, and she settles for weaving it into a messy braid. One hand on Celestine’s collar, she tiptoes toward the bedroom door. Celestine is anything but stealthy, but Jean doesn’t wake.
Out in the living area, Braden’s pullout couch is empty, the blankets and sheets tangled and tossed aside. Katie is in the kitchen, clattering mugs out of a cupboard, a coffeepot on the counter generating the rich aroma of fresh coffee. Low voices and rustling in the loft signal that Steph and Allie are also awake.
Phee feels like she’s been drugged with a tranquilizer, her movements all slow and clumsy, her thoughts heavy and lumbering.
“Where’s Braden?” she manages. “And can I have a mug of that, like now?”
“He’s outside. Coffee in about two minutes.”
Which is time enough to go to the bathroom, to splash cold water over her face, to second-guess this trip about thirty-seven times.
Back in the kitchen, Katie hands her two mugs. “One for you, and one for him.”
Phee accepts the mugs, taking a scalding sip of her own, letting the promise of caffeine nudge her brain cells into waking.
“How do you know he’s outside?”
“You can see everything from the loft. Window on the world. I’ll get the door. Also, hey, he’s got a fire out there. Can we roast hot dogs for breakfast?”
“Those were meant to be dinner.”
“So, we eat whatever was supposed to be breakfast for dinner. Come on, it will be fun. Whatever weird shit you’re pulling with this intervention, Phee, we still get to have some fun.”
“Fine, all right. I’ll be back in—”
“I got it. The girls will help me. Right?” she calls up to the loft. “You two l
azybones want to roast hot dogs on the fire for breakfast?”
Two heads appear over the railing of the loft a minute later, disheveled and sleepy eyed. “Yes! I’ve never roasted a hot dog,” Steph says. “We’re getting dressed.”
Muffled voices in the room the men are sharing mean that Len and Dennis are now awake as well.
Katie opens the back door, and Phee steps out into wonderland. The sun, just emerging from behind a mountain, lights the tops of the evergreen trees across the lake and turns the snow pink. The sky is a shade of blue she’s not sure she’s ever seen before.
Celestine takes off running, or tries to, his feet scrabbling on the frosty deck. He slows, taking his time with the stairs, and Phee follows, placing each foot carefully, conscious both of the slippery surface and the two brimming mugs of hot coffee. Braden meets her halfway and relieves her of one mug.
“You need to hang on to the railing so you don’t take a ride down on your ass.”
Celestine sniffs around the campfire, then heads toward the open, flat expanse of snow.
“Hey, get back here!” Braden shouts, and the dog pauses, looking back over his shoulder.
“Cold today, but it’s been warm,” he explains to Phee. “Looks solid, but there are soft spots.”
“Celestine!” Phee calls, and he heads back in the direction of the campfire, stopping to cock his leg on a nearby bush.
Braden sinks back down onto one of the camp chairs with an exhalation that is part sigh, part groan. He looks exhausted. Dark circles under his eyes, the lines of his face etched deeper.
“Did you sleep at all?” she asks.
“Spent most of the night out here. Thinking. You?”
“Slept like the dead,” she says. “Sorry. That was not the best analogy.”
He shrugs, drinks coffee. “Thank you for this.”
“You’ve Katie to thank for the coffee.”
He is closed and silent, avoiding eye contact.
A door slams above them, followed by a giggle. “Look out. Nearly fell on my butt.”
“You girls be careful up there,” Phee calls.
They come down off the deck in a procession. Katie has the hot dogs and buns, Steph a tray full of condiments, Allie a basket of paper plates and plastic cutlery. “Aunt Jo’s here. She said to just bring stuff down here since it’s so slippery and we don’t want people going up and down. The guys are getting a folding table.”
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