by Laura McHugh
“Not that.” A slow grin spread across his face. “Come on. Trust me.” They climbed up the bank, dripping, and made their way back to the rope. “Let me take you down to the bottom.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll hold on to you and you hold still. Don’t try to swim. Don’t fight it. Just let me take you down and back up.”
“Why?”
“To show how much you trust me,” he said. “You do, right?”
It wasn’t something she had thought about. She liked the way he looked at her, the heat that spread through her body when he touched her, the way he had opened up to her and gotten her to open up to him. When they were together, it didn’t matter that she was a Pettit and he was a Sullivan, that her mother was an addict, that everyone in town thought he was an arrogant ass. She liked him, but she wasn’t sure she trusted anyone enough to drag her to the bottom of the river.
He took the rope in one hand and extended the other toward her. “Please?”
She hesitated. “Are you being serious?”
“I want to show you,” he said. “You can trust me like you’ve never trusted anyone.”
She wasn’t scared, exactly, despite the sense of unease prickling up her spine—she didn’t think for a second that he would do anything to hurt her—but she couldn’t quite grasp why he was pushing her to do this. She looked into his eyes, an intensity focused solely on her, and shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
He lifted her up, careful not to let go of the rope, and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He embraced her, pinning her arms to her sides. It was still a new feeling, his body pressed against hers, and she felt herself flushing. “Don’t fight it. I’ll keep you safe,” he whispered in her ear, and then they were flying out over the river. Her stomach dropped when he released the rope, and panic overtook her as they fell. Their bodies pierced the bright surface, rocketing down toward the chilly depths.
They hovered near the bottom, her eyes pinched shut, toes kicking mud, and he gripped her tightly as she instinctively squirmed. For a sickening moment, she wondered if she’d misread everything, if he might be as reckless as people said, if he would, for some unknown reason, hold her under until they both drowned. In her heart, she didn’t believe it. She forced herself to relax and hold still, to show that she trusted him, and as soon as she did, he launched them upward with powerful kicks, surfacing and gulping air, and then his mouth was on hers, kissing her, Jason doing all the work to keep them afloat. It went against every instinct not to swim for herself, but once she broke through the dark curtain of fear and doubt, it was intoxicating—surrendering control, allowing herself to trust him with her life.
His lips moved along her neck, igniting her skin, and she wanted him so urgently that she was on the cusp before they fell onto the sedge grass, his body stretched over hers, his muscles taut and trembling.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered, burying his face against her throat, his breath hot in her ear as his fingers traced her jawbone, her clavicle, looped into the necklace and tugged just enough that the chain nipped her flesh. “And I’ll never let go.”
Gravy had shown his displeasure at my coming home late from Hannah’s by knocking the African violet off the coffee table and chewing the basket into sharp little bits of confetti. It reminded me that I still needed to thank the people who had sent flowers to the funeral, so on my morning break at work the next day, I googled addresses for Dave Gorecki and Leola Burdett.
Once I found Leola, I remembered why her name had sounded familiar. She lived way out on what old-timers called Wildwood Lane, though it had been thirty years since all the county roads had been rechristened with numbers. I’d accompanied another social worker on a home visit to the Burdetts’ when I was new to the job and Leola was needing assistance following hip replacement surgery; she’d been embarrassed about asking for outside help. I had no idea how she knew Shane. Her number was listed, and I decided to call her.
She answered right away, and as soon as I explained who I was and thanked her for the plant, she told me she was glad that I’d called.
“I have something for you,” she said, her voice wavering. “Something of your brother’s. I don’t get to town much, but you’re welcome to drop by anytime.”
“I could come today, on my lunch break.”
She seemed a bit startled that I’d taken her up on her offer so quickly but said that would be all right.
* * *
—
Wildwood Lane turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt, meandering between fallow fields and overgrown tracts of invasive honeysuckle as it angled north and east of town. The unmarked cutoff to Raccoon Ridge Conservation Area, where the skull had been found, was blocked with an orange-and-white-striped barricade.
When I reached Leola’s, the midday light filtered through a gauze of dull clouds, washing the property in the faded tones of an old sepia photograph. The weathered farmhouse had a tin roof and a small porch, firewood stacked waist-high between the posts. A chipped cast-iron tub sat upended and half buried in the front yard, providing a shrine for a Virgin Mary figure in flowing robes, and the flowerbeds around the house’s foundation were crowded with spinning whirligigs, gazing globes, and an assortment of stone angels.
I knocked on the storm door, which rattled in its frame and set a chorus of dogs to yipping inside the house. The inner door opened and a frail woman with a long white braid appeared, three tiny dogs bouncing up and down at her feet.
“Hello, Mrs. Burdett? I’m Sadie.” The wind picked up behind me, cutting through my jacket and setting all the whirligigs in the yard to squawking.
“Leola,” she said. Her voice warbled like a bird’s, a soft drape of flesh beneath her chin quivering as she spoke. “You can come on in.”
She pushed open the storm door with a creak, and the little dogs sprang toward me, scraping at my boots with tiny claws. They were some sort of cartoonish Chihuahua mix, with bug eyes and long hair. I stepped inside, doing my best not to trip on them. The front room of the farmhouse had faded yellow-and-green floral wallpaper and carpet that had been worn down to the backing in a path from the door to the hall. A potbelly stove sat on a brick platform in one corner, an overflowing ash bucket next to it, waiting to be dumped. Leola was bundled in a thick shawl, an ankle-length housecoat with a lace collar, and a pair of men’s loafers, and while I’d thought at first that the cold air had blown in with me, it quickly became apparent that there was no heat coming off the stove. I pulled my hands up into the sleeves of my coat to keep them warm.
Leola sat down and the dogs bounced up onto the sagging couch and huddled at her side, growling at me with sidelong glances as I took a seat in a recliner with dishtowels draped over the armrests.
“I am so sorry about your brother,” she said. “He was a fine young man.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And thank you again for sending the violet. It was so thoughtful.” I left out the part about Gravy destroying it.
“It was a small thing, after everything he’d done for us. I wanted to come to the visitation,” she said, “but I’m afraid I don’t get out much anymore.” One of the dogs turned circles beside her on the couch, making a little nest in the shawl.
I didn’t want to have to ask, but it seemed like she wasn’t going to say it without prompting. “I was wondering, Leola…if you could tell me a little bit about how you knew Shane? I feel like I should know, but…”
“Oh,” she said, fiddling with the collar of her housecoat. “I shouldn’t have expected you’d know me by name. I’m Charlie’s granny. I halfway raised him.”
Charlie. I remembered the child’s craft I had found in Shane’s things, the misspelled name written in crayon that wasn’t quite Charlie or Charles. A tingling sensation spread from my chest out to my fingertips.
“I’m sorry,” I said. �
��I don’t know Charlie either.”
Leola eyed me carefully, studying my face as though questioning the clear family resemblance. Same blue eyes, same ruddy cheeks, hair so dark it almost looked black. “Were you and your brother not close?”
I’d thought we were. We saw Shane at Mom’s house for every holiday and nearly every other weekend before he started dating Crystle. I’d always felt close to my brother, but maybe the tight bond we’d shared as kids had loosened so gradually that I’d failed to notice. Dad’s belt, in a way, had bound us together, united against a common threat. Once we’d escaped the pressure cooker of our childhood home, there had been no need to cling so tightly to one another.
“He didn’t talk a lot about himself,” I said. “I don’t know why. I wish he had. Or that I’d asked the right questions.”
“Well,” Leola said. “He didn’t run his mouth like so many fools you see now. One of the things I liked about him.”
“So how did he get to know you and your grandson?”
Leola patted one of the dogs with an unsteady hand, a wadded tissue cupped in her palm. “Charlie used to live out by your brother, back when his mom still had custody, and he really took to Shane. Stuck to him like a bur, and I was glad for it. My daughter-in-law couldn’t handle him on her own—she never was much for mothering. Shane was a good influence on him. He’d spend hours tinkering with that old car, teaching Charlie how to fix things. Really turned him around, got him on a good path. I didn’t hear the story till years later,” Leola said, “but the first time they laid eyes on each other, Charlie was in Shane’s driveway smashing his taillights with a tire iron. He was only about seven or eight years old.” She shook her head, a faint smile on her lips. “Shane told him he’d have to help fix it, and he’d show him how. I think your brother saw a bit of himself in Charlie. Wanted to help. And look at him now—off at the technical college. That’s Shane’s doing.”
One of the light bulbs in the overhead fixture flickered and buzzed, and Leola leaned forward to spread her liver-spotted hands over the photo album that lay open on the coffee table. She turned the pages carefully, running her knobby fingers over each picture until she came to one of Shane.
I couldn’t tell exactly how old the picture was, but he still had most of his hair. He grinned proudly, crouching next to a little blond boy, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. On the ground in front of them was a Pinewood Derby car.
“That’s Charlie,” Leola said. He had a wide gap between his front teeth and an unruly cowlick at his crown, like he’d forgotten to brush his hair. “It was doubly hard on him, I think, losing Shane after he’d already lost his daddy.”
“Your son?”
Her jaw worked back and forth. “Yes. Years back, accident at Sullivan.” She flipped through the album to the last picture before the pages went blank, a more recent shot of Charlie leaning against a dilapidated pickup, his hair in his eyes, limbs long and gangly.
“That’s Charlie now?” I asked.
Leola nodded. “Tall as all get-out.”
“I don’t remember seeing him at the funeral.”
She looked down at the dogs. They appeared to be sleeping. “He couldn’t stand to go,” she said. “He didn’t quite get along with Crystle.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did something happen? Or…?”
Leola hesitated, weighing her words, as though deciding how candid to be. “He didn’t like the way Crystle treated Shane, and Crystle didn’t like him saying so. He figured she’d be peacocking around the funeral, making it all about herself.”
“Do you think he’d be willing to talk to me?” I said. “I understand if he wouldn’t want to, but if he and Shane were close…there are some things I’d like to ask him.”
“I’m sure that’d be fine,” she said. “He’ll be back to visit soon. I’ll let you know. Pardon me a minute.” She attempted to get up from the couch without disturbing the dogs, but they hopped down and trailed her out of the room. She returned with a battery-powered lantern and handed it to me.
“Shane’s. Been meaning to give it back to him and hadn’t got around to it. Power went out in a windstorm back in the spring, and he didn’t want me using the old kerosene lamp. Thought I’d trip over a dog and set the house afire.” A sad smile deepened the grooves around her mouth. “He made a joke of it, of course, like he wasn’t serious—didn’t want me to feel as old and useless as I really am—but he worried about us. Looked after us. That’s the kind of man he was.”
“Why don’t you keep it,” I said, giving the lantern back to her. I dug in my bag for a business card. “My cell number’s on here, and the office number, too. Call me if there’s ever anything you need help with.” She tucked the card into the pocket of her housecoat without glancing at it. “Can I stoke the fire for you before I go?” I asked. “Or bring in more firewood? It’s getting colder out there.”
Her thin lips pressed together and she shook her head. “Thank you all the same.”
I’d offended her, possibly, with my offer. Social workers weren’t always welcome. It wasn’t uncommon, people too proud to accept help from anyone other than family. It showed how much she’d thought of Shane.
* * *
—
I’d planned to go straight home after work, but Becca was in Blackwater, having dropped the boys off at her in-laws’ for an overnight visit, and she wanted to meet up for dinner and hear more about Charlie and Leola than I’d been able to tell her on the phone.
Two police SUVs drove past me on the way to the Blackwater Diner, the kind with the low-profile light bars on top that make it easier to sneak up on you. Main Street was nearly deserted, and the SUVs rolled through the intersections without coming to a complete stop. Becca was waiting for me when I arrived. The diner had a comforting retro feel, with red vinyl seats and Formica tabletops and slabs of cream pie in a glass-front cooler at the counter. It was Lily’s favorite place to eat, and it felt strange going there without her. Aside from Becca and me, the early dinner crowd included a few overall-clad farmers and a cluster of gray-haired women wearing turtlenecks and Christmas sweaters. Johnny Cash played low over the speakers, fry grease crackling in the back.
Becca ordered the special, a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich the size of a catcher’s mitt, served with onion rings and coleslaw. I ordered two slices of pie, chocolate cream and buttermilk chess, and when our food arrived, we divided it all in half to share.
“You look nice,” I said. Becca had mascara on, a blouse she’d clearly ironed, shoes with a slight heel. She had curled her hair and might have even spritzed it with hair spray.
“Thanks,” she said, smacking her palm on the ketchup bottle to get it going. “It’s the first time I’ve left the house in days and I wanted to feel human. You go too long without wearing shoes and a bra, it’s hard to go back.”
“That sounds like a proverb,” I said.
“Well. You start to get philosophical after watching five episodes of PAW Patrol back-to-back.”
“Hey, you’re lucky,” I said. “Remember when Lily was that age? How much she loved Barney? Greg’s mom got her that horrid Barney’s Best Manners DVD and she watched it on repeat. I was ready for a lobotomy.”
“It’s weird,” Becca said, using a knife to cut up a monstrous onion ring. “Today I was wondering how long I should wait before going back to work—you know, whether we should keep trying for a third or start looking into preschool for the boys so I can work part-time. And for the first time, I didn’t get teary-eyed thinking about not being home with them every day.”
Becca had always wanted enough kids to fill a minivan, though she’d had trouble conceiving the boys and had been worried that she was getting too old, that she was running out of time.
“I think kids are wired to drive you just crazy enough that you’ll be willing to let them go to kindergarten.”
“I don’t know. She’s not exactly maternal. I don’t remember Shane ever talking about it.”
“I don’t either,” Becca said. “He would have been a great dad.”
“He was always so good with Lily and the boys.”
Becca nodded, sniffing. “I wish they were older. You know? So they’d remember.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you talk to Mom about Charlie yet? I think it’ll make her happy.”
“Happy might be a stretch.”
“You know what I mean, Sadie. It’s a nice surprise. I like knowing Shane had that in his life, since he never got to have kids of his own.”
“But why didn’t he ever mention him? If this kid was so important to him, why didn’t he share that with us?”
Becca scrubbed grease from her fingers with a napkin. “I don’t know.”
“It’s not the same,” I said, “but it makes me think of stories you read in the news, where some guy has two different families who don’t know about each other, and you wonder how they could possibly not know.”
“Maybe it’s not as big of a deal as we’re making it out to be,” Becca said. “He might not have thought it was worth telling us that he was helping out a neighbor. It’s just something you do, no need to brag about it.”
I knew it wasn’t realistic to expect him to tell us everything. Becca and I talked about plenty of things without including him, and we all kept pieces of ourselves secret from one another, intentionally or not. Still, there was a slight pinch of hurt or betrayal that, for whatever reason, he’d kept the two parts of his life separate. His old family and his new one. The one he was born into and the one he chose.
