Crossroad

by W. H. Cameron

  I lift my head. “You didn’t need my permission.”

  “I knew you were okay.”

  My numbness dies in a sudden flash of anger. The space between us seems to expand with an energy that threatens to burn me alive. I press my hands against the table … breathe in, breathe out. Count backward from ten.

  I don’t make it to seven.

  “I am anything but okay. Half the county thinks I’m a body snatcher, and the rest want to feed me to the coyotes over a rapist football player. When I’m not kicking babies, I’m a murderer on the lam. I’ve repaid everything Uncle Rémy and Aunt Elodie have done for me by jeopardizing the business they’ve devoted their lives to. I just spent the night in jail. The sheriff thinks I’m crazy. His chief deputy thinks I’m guilty. And the hell of it is, they’re not wrong. What kind of dumb bitch takes evidence from a crime scene?” Tears in my eyes, I point at myself with both thumbs. “This kind. So don’t tell me I’m fucking okay.”

  She reaches across the table to take my hand, stops just short of touching me. “We all make mistakes, Mel. It’s behind you now.”

  “How would you know?”

  Her gaze falls to her empty hand.

  “You shouldn’t have come all this way for me.”

  “I should have come sooner.”

  Her tone is offhand, but the words are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered across the table. I finger them in my mind, feel for the connections.

  I’ve called Helene far too many times and left far too many voicemails. Desperate messages, yet devoid of substance. Even last night, I’d danced around what really happened—

  I’m in trouble.

  It’s not your problem.

  And, as always, my tiresome refrain.

  I just hope you’re okay.

  Somehow that message, of all of them, triggered the drive from Seattle to Shatter Hill.

  Or had it?

  Someone must have told her what’s been going on, someone who mattered enough that she’d pick up when they called. Helene is Elodie’s actual niece, not some faux kin by a broken marriage. She visited Barlow County when she was a kid. She probably knows the Old Mortuary and the Pioneer Cemetery better than I do. She’s probably been in touch with Aunt Elodie all along.

  “You’re why I’m here.” It’s so obvious, I should have seen it ages ago.

  “In the kitchen?” She laughs awkwardly.

  “In Barlow County, at Bouton Funerary Service. Living in this house, working for your family.” I marvel at the words even as they spill out of me. “You’re why Aunt Elodie called me the day I got out of the hospital. Why she and Uncle Rémy put me on that train.” Hell, even how Elodie knew what size clothes to buy for me before I got here. “Christ, you must be why she still puts up with me even …”

  … even as Uncle Rémy slips away.

  I wince, unable to finish the thought aloud.

  “Mel, wait—”

  “You called Mr. Berber on the golf course, then talked to him after the big conference.”

  She looks at her untouched tea as if answers float among the melting ice. “Your confidentiality wasn’t violated. I promise you that. All he said was the situation had been resolved in your favor.”

  “Resolved in my favor.” A sudden knot forms in my stomach. “Jesus, how much do I owe you?” I don’t know what attorneys cost, but if I have to fork over every last penny of my savings, so be it.

  Then a fresh revelation hits me. “You wrote the check Uncle Rémy gave me.” Her strained silence is all the answer I need. “Do you pay my wages too?

  Money was never an issue for Helene, or for Geoffrey. Even when his parents threatened to cut him off, he just laughed, saying he had his own means anyway. Like him, Helene always had money—for college, for law school. For a nice apartment and good wine and dinners out. She could easily launder ten grand through Uncle Rémy.

  Her neck stiffens. “That money is yours.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t accept it if you knew who it came from.”

  “Why give it to me at all?”

  “Because of what Geoffrey did to you.”

  My bark of laughter is so sharp the table shakes. “He didn’t do anything to me. Whatever happened, I played along. I was foolish, maybe. And impulsive. But all he did to me was leave.” Went out for croissants and kept walking.

  “He left you alone and penniless, thirty-five hundred miles from home.”

  “I still had my return ticket.”

  A sad expression is her only response.

  We sit in awkward silence for a few minutes, then she gets up. I watch her wash our empty glasses and set them in the drying rack with the familiarity of someone who’d stood at the Old Mortuary sink countless times before we ever met. Then she wraps her arms around herself as if she’s caught a chill.

  “I should go.”

  Neither of us speak as we walk out to her car. But before she drives away, I ask her the question I’d never had the courage to voice.

  “What did you ever see in me?”

  I know what I saw in her. She’s beautiful, yes, but that wasn’t it. She sees a problem and doesn’t hesitate to tackle it, no matter how intractable. “I’m not afraid of failing,” she once said. “I’m afraid of never giving myself a chance to succeed.” What would be a treacly platitude from anyone else was, from Helene, a confession. Her movie-star eyes may have drawn me in, but her sense of commitment kept me anchored. At least until I threw it all away with Geoffrey.

  There on the gravel driveway of the Old Mortuary, she ponders my question. When she answers, her voice is full of regret. “I loved your fearlessness.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Weeping Parlor

  Across from the Old Mortuary’s unused office is what Aunt Elodie calls the Weeping Parlor. “In the old days, should someone become overwhelmed by grief, they’d be led up here,” she told me. In the privacy of this small, wood-paneled chamber, mourners wept and wailed to their broken heart’s content. Downstairs, funerals would continue in decorum and peace.

  Lit by stained glass lamps and furnished with stiff settees and marble-topped side tables, the room is now more museum than parlor. The smell of must in the air reminds me of my grandmother’s house back in Lowell. Plastic runners cover the threadbare areas of the carpet. Antimacassars disguise fraying upholstery. Silk flowers, gray with dust, droop in porcelain vases. A glass case is filled with old photographs: mourning portraits from another era.

  I may be the only person who still comes in here, though no one would confuse me with a weeper. I come for the mourning portraits. One in particular, of a young boy propped in a wooden chair, draws me back again and again. His name and fate are written on the back in soft pencil.

  His mother stands beside him. From behind, his father holds his head straight. A girl in a long skirt and high collar leans into the woman’s hip. The boy’s eyes are closed, but the others stare bleakly into the camera.

  The boy looks nothing like Fitz. His parents are dark where Cricket and Stedman are bloodless. Their clothes are stiff and formal while Cricket and Stedman dress like New England Casual catalog models. And the girl—she belongs to them. The mother clings to her daughter like she never wants to let go. I don’t need therapy to tell me why the moment Helene drove away may be when I finally understood why the mother in my favorite mourning portrait held her daughter so close. When you lose something precious, you hold on to whatever you have left that much harder. But unlike Aloysius Ludvik’s mother, I have nothing left.

  I’m still in the Weeping Parlor when Aunt Elodie returns from Crestview. Only one lamp is lit.

  “I’m sorry you had to stay in that awful jail overnight. You should have called me.”

  “It’s okay.” In some ways, that awful jail was better than my old apartment in Amherst. “You and Uncle need your rest.” Even in the dim light, I can see the weariness in her face.

  “Nons
ense. I needed to be down there rapping Omar Duniway on the forehead with a mallet.”

  I smile in spite of my mood. She points to my cup on the side table. “What are you drinking?”

  “Tea.” Untouched.

  “I think we’ve earned something a little stiffer. Come on.”

  In the kitchen, she pours us each a generous dose of Blanton’s in crystal lowball glasses. As she comes around the table, she squeezes my shoulder before easing into her chair. Though it’s been hours, the air feels charged, as if Helene left something of herself behind.

  I take my glass in both hands but don’t drink. The whiskey’s aroma, heady and warm, is enough for now. “How is Uncle Rémy?”

  “Walking better.” She sips from her own glass. “He told you about the Spirit, I hear.”

  I nod.

  “Did you really see her?”

  Almost exactly what he asked. “I saw something. But whether it was someone in the desert or in my head I couldn’t say.” I shrug, as if one option is the same as the other. “Have you ever seen her?”

  “I haven’t, no.” She shakes her head slowly. “But even if I had, I wouldn’t assume she’s real. Tell a story often enough, and it gathers substance in our minds. Then, we see what we expect rather than what’s actually there.”

  Though I don’t think she meant any reproach, I can’t help but sense a phantom of doubt behind her kind eyes.

  “I’m sorry I’m so much trouble.”

  “Melisende, dear, if anything, I should be apologizing to you. I’ve managed this situation with Rémy poorly, and left you dangling as a result. I should have done more to support you. Even if it was just to tell Quince to take a break from fishing and give you some backup until Carrie got back from her vacation.”

  “That’s not it.” I doubt Quince would have made things any better. “I know it wasn’t your idea to bring me here.”

  Outside, darkness shrouds the desert in blue-gray shadows. The mercury light on the wall of the crematorium comes on, but the silver glow doesn’t banish the night so much as merge with it. Inside, only the dim bulb over the stove is on. Frowning, Elodie leans over and hits the wall switch for the pendant lamp hanging above the table. In the sudden light, the hollows under her eyes look like bruises.

  “You saw Helene, then.”

  I nod.

  “We should have told you.”

  If I’d known, I would never have agreed to come. I wouldn’t have accepted the check. I’d still be in Massachusetts. Back in psych hold or sleeping under a tarp. Maybe dead. I’d worn out my last welcome and had nothing left. Even so, my guilt over the situation with Geoffrey would have left me incapable of accepting a cup of coffee from Helene, let alone a home, a job. A life.

  “Do you miss her?” Aunt Elodie says as if she’s guessed where my mind went.

  I’m not sure how to answer. My feelings for Helene are too entangled with my guilt about Geoffrey. Even in this house of mourning, I can’t mourn him. He threw himself into the abyss, and even if I held back at the precipice, there’s no returning from some choices. The path disintegrates behind you.

  “I asked her to stay over,” Aunt Elodie adds quietly. “But her test is coming up, and it’s a long drive back to Seattle.”

  “I can’t stay either.”

  I hadn’t known how to say it. In the hours since Helene left, I’ve rehearsed a dozen variations. But when the moment comes, blunt and without preamble seems all I’m capable of.

  She smiles sadly, her expression a mask of acceptance and denial all at once. I look into my glass, but the amber liquid is out of focus.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I have a few ideas,” I lie.

  “There’s no rush. No matter how it started out, Melisende, you’ve made a place here.” Aunt Elodie takes my hand. I don’t fight it. “This is your home now.”

  “Some grow up in the work,” she’d once said, “and others grow into it. But you? You seem born to it.”

  “I know you’ll need time to find someone to do removals and help around the shop.” My voice catches as I remember the soaker hoses and add, “And someone to care for the grounds.”

  She tosses back the last of her whiskey like Barb at Friday happy hour, then stands. Before she leaves, she takes my hand again. She’s become someone else I’ve granted permission to touch me. Too late, though.

  Then she surprises me yet again.

  “You’ve had a hard week, Melisende. Get some rest. Maybe tomorrow you’ll feel differently.” She gives me a squeeze. “Whatever you decide, I just hope you do it as the woman who pulled Landry MacElroy out of the back of that pickup.”

  When she’s gone, I pick up my own glass but hesitate. I don’t want whiskey anymore.

  I take my teacup and the two lowball glasses to the sink and wash them all. Set them in the rack next to the glasses Helene washed. This has been my kitchen sink for more than a year, but while Helene was here, I felt like a guest who had overstayed her welcome.

  Now, with Aunt Elodie’s parting words echoing in my mind, I’m not sure what to feel.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Callout

  I’m back at the Cerise Creek trail. The others are gone, or haven’t arrived. Maybe they never will. There’s no Caitlyn and family, no vomit beside the trail. Under a pale sky, the stream pours through Tsokapo Gorge with the force of the spring melt, white and foaming. Kendrick Pride’s blue body floats facedown in the pool at the base of the falls. Blood threads from his fingers like dark lightning. High above the bridge, the raven rides the thermals, calling out in a familiar voice.

  “I loved your fearlessness.”

  “She shoulda seen you scamper down that trail away from Landry.” Fitz laughs as the raven drops in a narrowing gyre toward me.

  “I tried to be you,” I call out. “I tried to be you, but—”

  The cell phone’s chirp cuts me off. My eyes shoot open. A cobweb hangs from the light fixture overhead. For a second I think I’m back in the jail cell. But the ceiling is the color of brie; the fixture, a frosted globe mottled with the remains of dead flies. My body floats in clammy water in a claw-foot tub large enough to swim laps. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. Last thing I knew, wisps of steam were rising from white foam. The bubbles have long collapsed into iridescent scum on the water’s surface.

  The ringing stops. I suppose I should see who called, but my phone lies out of reach on the marble sink. No such thing as a small room in the Old Mortuary. I toe the hot-water handle. As the warmth spreads, feet to thighs, to belly, to breasts, I let myself sink underwater. My hair floats in a tangled net around my head. Dissolved bubble bath burns my eyes. When I close them, I see the raven.

  I tried to be you …

  Aunt Elodie wants me to be the woman who pulled Landry out of the back of his pickup, but who is that exactly? A fool, based on how it all worked out.

  “Where you gonna run now, little sister?”

  I’ve been a leaf in a rushing stream my whole life. I don’t know how to be anything else.

  I tried to be you, but only you can be you.

  A tantalizing languor overcomes me as heat infuses the tepid water around my head. I let air trickle from my nose in a stream of bubbles. As I shed breath and buoyancy, I long to float here forever. Yet the moment my back touches bottom, my tranquility is shattered by the phone. Teeth clenched, I will the damnable thing to be silent. The piercing bleat continues.

  “Where you gonna run now?”

  As far as the stream carries me.

  The ringing stops, but not before my lungs start to burn. I press against the side of the tub and remain submerged, fighting the instinct to rise and breathe until the effort threatens to split me open. When I finally sit up, gasping, the phone starts up again.

  “You still work here or not, Mellie?”

  He’s right. I promised Aunt Elodie. Even running away from the high desert requires me to buck the current.

  Before I ev
en step out of the tub, the phone goes quiet. They’ll call back, or they won’t. They’ll leave a message or call Swarthmore. It has to be work, a body, a removal. Short of an emergency, Barb wouldn’t call this late. I don’t think Jeremy would either—though his idea of an emergency might be feeling kinda sad.

  What that has to do with me, I don’t know. He was never going to stay in Barlow County and—until today—I had no plans to leave. One of the first things he told me was how he’d be gone the minute he landed his coveted big-city job. Good for you, I’d thought at the time.

  Still do.

  At least he knows where he wants to be.

  The phone rings again on my way into my bedroom. “Private Number,” the display tells me. I note the time before picking up: ten till one.

  “Bouton Funerary Service.” You stab ’em, we slab ’em, my brain adds in echo of the L.A. county coroner’s T-shirt I pull from a pile of unfolded laundry.

  “Having a hard time waking up?”

  The voice is familiar, but it takes me a second to place—last heard across the conference room table twelve hours ago. “Dr. Varney?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I should have said so when you answered.” I can’t tell if he’s slurring or if the words are swimming in my own head. “Can you make a pickup?”

  As if I’m a cab driver. “Sure. Where?”

  “Copper Hollow. You know where that is?”

  “Sort of.” Paddle Creek flows east from the Dryer Lake dam through a winding ravine, eventually pouring into the John Day River. Copper Hollow is a spot along the creek Quince mourns as a good trout hole lost to development.

  “It’s one of the resort homes on the bluff, east side of the golf course. I’ll text you the address.”

  Their owners are the ones who come and go by private jet—though for most, Dryer Lake serves less as home than glam-rustic weekend getaway. Barb’s cottage across the lake is a hovel in comparison.

  I guess I should wear a proper work shirt.

  After I disconnect, I consider the idea he’s doing me a favor, but if he’s doing anyone a favor, it’s Uncle Rémy and Aunt Elodie. More likely, he thinks the sheriff moved me off the county shit list today, if he ever knew I was on it. Although he serves as deputy medical examiner, he’s a physician first. He may not have much day-to-day contact with law enforcement.