by T. S. Joyce
Caleb
I spent more time than I thought possible picking out flowers for Mira. The tiny florist off Main Street didn’t have that big of a selection, and still I stood staring at the bouquets for twenty minutes, at least.
I hopped out of the truck and opened the gate to Mira’s property, mindful of stepping around a gigantic pile of horse crap so I didn’t get my dress shoes dirty. The windows were down and the crisp autumn air bit into my flesh. I ignored it and turned up the radio. Open windows made Mira more comfortable and relaxed my inner animal, so down they’d stay.
The truck bounced along for what seemed like forever in my haste to see Mira again. I hadn’t been able to keep my mind off her after our date. The rig kept me busy, but she wasn’t far from my thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d looked when we danced, or when she was reclined in the bed of my truck, smiling at me like I was the most important man in the world. Or the way she said my name when I touched her. That little moment visited my memories whenever I sat behind the wheel. She was perfect.
My knuckles made a hollow sound as they rapped against her front door. It was as if they already knew she wasn’t inside. I slid a glance to my watch. Right on time. I squinted at the door, then hopped off the porch.
I opened my senses, something I was learning to hone more and more. The subtle sound of human movement touched my ears, and I headed around the corner, flowers in hand. I opened my mouth to call out to her, but stopped when I saw what she was doing.
Hunting season was the same every year. October and November came, and droves of hunters descended upon the open forest around here. In every bar and restaurant and gas station, you could find men and women dressed in camouflage with sheathed hunting knives hanging from their waists.
Mira, apparently, was one of them.
She had a wild hog hanging from a tree upside down from a pulley system. She jerked and cut with the easy precision of someone who had harvested game a hundred times. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows, and her face was frozen in the fierce concentration of a woman who knew exactly how sharp her knife was.
I was at once startled and intrigued. Three more swift cuts and the back strap came free. She tossed it into a black plastic bag and went back to work without so much as wiping sweat from her brow. Her quiet turmoil confused me. I sat slowly on the middle step of her back porch and watched her work, as if doing so would help me to solve the mystery of which inner demon was eating her alive right now. I would have to cancel our reservation in the city.
She had to have known I was here. She was as skittish as a half-broke pony. Her senses wouldn’t have missed me sitting so close.
She moved around the hog to remove the tenderloins, and the half-harvested animal sagged as the pulley system failed.
Mira cursed under her breath and shoved her knife dexterously into the sheath that peeked out of her pocket. She caught the rope, but I was already headed toward her to help.
“Don’t,” she yelled, failing to meet my eyes.
I froze, my hands out as if they still wanted something to do.
Mira yanked violently on the pulley and tied the end of the rope more securely around the trunk of the tree. “I don’t need your help.” Her voice shook.
I was at a loss. I opened my mouth but only an inaudible sound of confusion came out.
Mira wiped her face against her shoulder and waited, eyes on the ground.
“What did I do?” I asked, putting a voice to my confusion.
“Nothing. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just—” Mira bit her bottom lip, but not before I saw the tremble there.
I lowered my voice. “Why don’t we just go get cleaned up and go on our date, and we can talk about whatever is bothering you. We’ll fix it.”
“It can’t be fixed. Don’t you get it? I can’t be fixed.”
“No, I don’t get it, Mira. I have no idea what I have done to piss you off, and you’re talking in riddles. Just tell me what you want from me.”
“I don’t want anything from you. You pushed me to get a job. You fixed my whole damned house to look like it belongs in some Pottery Barn catalog. You force me to spend time in town with all of the people who have hurt me. I was happy, Caleb. Before you came along, I was hungry, sure, but I knew my place in the world. I’m not good enough for you if you don’t turn me into a proper townie, and I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. I don’t think I should go on a date with you.”
I shook my head slowly back and forth. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Like what? Like I’m crazy? Because I am. You’ve just been too dumb or too stubborn to see it. Every single person in town knows it, Caleb. Time you accept it, too. Please leave.”
I clenched my jaw to stop from yelling. Didn’t she see? I couldn’t just leave and forget about her. She had changed me—permanently. “I’ll give you space,” I gritted out. “We’ll talk about this in a few days when you aren’t so angry. It can’t just end like this, though. I need more.”
Mira looked like she was going to be sick. She was pale, and her hands shook. She swayed slightly when she uttered the words, “That’s the problem. You need me, but I don’t need you.”
And just like that, I knew she was right. I had suspected it since the day she had stitched up the damage Eli had done to me. She didn’t need a man to complete her, to walk side-by-side with her. She was as lonely as the long whistle of a midnight train, but that’s how she preferred it. The realization cut me deeper than that bear shifter ever could have. I knew I needed her. I hadn’t needed anyone since Mom died, and in desperation to connect with Mira, I had given in. And that was proving to be the biggest mistake of my life because I had allowed in a pain so acute, I would drown in it.
Without another word I left, fists clenched and a sea of red threatening to overwhelm me. My ears roared as I jerked open the door to my truck and sat in the front seat, wanting nothing more than to scream until I couldn’t see straight.
I left Mira to her beloved, lonely existence.
****
Mira
The door to Caleb’s truck slammed shut, and he peeled out of my front yard. I squatted down and pulled my hands over my head as if that would keep all of my shattering pieces together. My fingers wound painfully in my hair as I clenched my tresses, and a sob escaped my lips. How would I ever recover from something so painful? I hadn’t meant any of it. Not a bit. I was grateful to Caleb for giving me a life. For giving me a future with all the basic necessities so many took for granted. I was thankful for the change he had started in me. He had never tried to transform me to fit what he wanted in a woman. I just didn’t know what else to say to get him to move on.
He’d take the job on the big rig. Meet a nice, normal girl and live in a big house. I would always respect what I had done, setting him free like that, but hate myself, too. No one would suffer more than me.
And telling him, so cruelly, that I didn’t need him like he needed me…
I wretched. In one fluid motion, I stood and pulled the knife from its leather case in my pocket. I hurled it at a nearby tree. It spun in a beautiful dance before it shanked off my intended target and ricocheted off into the woods. I turned away from my failure to find a dash of color sitting forlornly on the porch.
My breath hitched in misery as I touched the edge of a pink rose with the tip of my finger. He’d brought me flowers. I clutched them to my chest with bloody hands and cried on the stairs until my head ached from the emotional effort.
Hours stretched into night and day again. Evenings were the loneliest when I had nothing to do but think about Caleb. My tears washed away the things I’d begun to like about myself.
Later that week, Brian came by the pie shop and kindly told me that Caleb had, in fact, accepted the job on the big rig three hours away. And though it had been my plan to give him the life he deserved, the realization that Caleb was really lost to me was a new and devastating cut.
&nbs
p; I worked for Opal in a numb haze. My hands did their job, but my mind, in an effort to protect itself from the hurt, bumbled from one unimportant thought to the next, the background noise nothing more than the sound of a beehive in late spring.
I’d had him. For one bright and explosive moment, I had everything. A future and a man who loved me. Safety. It would have been better if I’d never had anything at all. If I could erase it, I would. I’d have gone back to existing instead of living if it meant the clenching, suffocating tightness inside my chest would ease.
****
Caleb
Becca hailed me from across the street, but I did my best to ignore her. Maybe if she thought I didn’t see her, she would give up on whatever annoying errand she was on. Apparently, I gave her way too much credit.
“Caleb,” she shouted, stopping just about everyone on Main Street.
I growled and turned to glare at her. “What do you want, Becca?”
She jogged across the street with a large stack of papers in her hands. “I just thought you would want to know some things about your little girlfriend before they become public knowledge.”
“We’re not together anymore.” I walked off but Becca followed closely behind.
“Well, thank goodness you finally came to your senses because, apparently, Crazy Mira really is crazy.”
I sighed in utter irritation and rounded on her. “What are you talking about?”
Becca shoved a stapled stack of papers into my chest. “Mira spent a year in a mental institution. Says so right there in her report, along with a whole list of things she was admitted for.”
“What? Where did you get this?” I asked.
“That doesn’t matter, Caleb. You’re completely missing the point.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Tell me Sheriff Clancy doesn’t know about you getting these.”
Becca straightened her spine and lifted her chin primly. “He doesn’t.”
I wanted to laugh at her gall. It was an insult to her character that I wasn’t even surprised. I snatched the stack of papers she still clung to and marched toward my truck.
“I still have the original,” Becca sang after me. “I can always make more copies.”
I tried to make it all the way home before I read Mira’s records, but I couldn’t. The truck skidded to a stop on the side of the road, and I pinned the first page against the steering wheel.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
Depression
Possible Bipolar Disorder
Speech Impediments due to Mental Trauma
Violent Outbursts
Panic Attacks
Chronic Anxiety
The list went on to name the medications they had tried on her. Which ones worked and which ones didn’t. Sedatives seemed to be the only thing that helped consistently.
I did some quick math on the date. Mira had been ten years old at the time. A part of me wanted to mourn for what she’d been through, and another part was pissed that she never told me anything about such a huge childhood experience. I flipped through a small rap sheet, mostly made up of Sheriff Clancy’s disturbing-the-peace arrests, then leaned back into the seat.
I really didn’t know Mira at all.
Chapter Twenty
Mira
“I’m taking a break,” I informed Opal, who sat comfortably on the stepstool in the storage room, taking inventory. “Keep an eye on the front?”
“Yeah, yeah. You got it. See you in fifteen,” she said in a distracted voice.
Her pen tapped loudly against her clipboard, and I knew she was doing math. “It helps me focus,” she had told me one day when I couldn’t stop staring at her pen, blurred with motion.
I had big plans to run down to the gas station and buy a two pack of Twinkies as a reward for surviving the past week. Never before had I tasted one, but I’d heard good things, and I needed a distraction. The corner of a piece of paper taped to the door lifted and fluttered in the breeze. Opal didn’t normally allow flyers on her windows so, out of curiosity, I stopped to read it.
The sound of my heart was deafening as I read the dreaded summary of my past. I gasped as I ripped it off the window and glanced around to see if anyone else had read it. Clusters of people talked in hushed whispers as they watched me, and my gaze crashed into a telephone pole that held another report. Proof of my mental instability.
Copies were attached to every visible wooden or glass surface on Main Street, like a snowstorm of my indiscretions. Horror sat on my chest and made it hard to breathe. “No, no, no,” I chanted as I ripped page after page down and wadded them up.
“What’s going on here?” Opal asked as she came out of the pie shop. She cast a confused look to the people in her store who stared out of the clear glass, like window pups at a pet store.
“Opal,” I sobbed. Tears burned my eyes and trailed down my cheeks.
My fists were full of the crumpled, damning papers. Opal pulled one off a blue metal mailbox in front of her shop. She scanned it, and her face fell. “You people should be ashamed of yourselves,” she yelled. Quietly, to me, she said, “Mira, go home.”
I panicked. Everyone would see them. He would see them. “But—”
“I’ll clean all of this up. You go on home now, you hear?” She turned to the gathering crowd. “Pie shop’s closed for the rest of the day.”
Opal turned to pull another report off the window of the shop next door. A few of the onlookers began to help her, and I bolted for my truck.
Caleb was on the rig all day. Opal would have them all cleaned up by the time he got off work. He would probably never see them. Oh, who was I kidding? Nobody took a shit in this town without every last person knowing about it.
I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, over and over until it throbbed. Who would do such a thing? Clancy and his deputy were the only ones in town who had access. What could I have possibly done to piss them off so badly that they would ruin my life like this?
I never checked my mail. It was pointless when you had lived off the grid for so long and didn’t get bills. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t like I was in danger of receiving a Christmas card. But a copy of my report fluttered in the wind, held onto the rusty old mailbox by a thin piece of tape. I threw my truck into park and jumped out to rip it off, like the faster I did, the less it would be true. The lid clunked open and a very official looking packet lay folded inside. After I wrestled it out, I read the return address logo.
Avery and Woods Law Group. The name pulled on the edges of my frayed mind. I wiped my damp lashes with the back of my hand and tossed it into the passenger seat before I got in my truck. As I drove through the woods that led home, my gaze was attracted time and time again to the oversized envelope. The only lawyer I knew was Sam Burns.
And the lawyers from the trial.
I slammed on the breaks and stared in fear at the package. My fingers couldn’t work fast enough as I tore through the top and pulled the papers out. Scanning the document, my heart fell to somewhere between the soles of my feet and the rusted out floorboard.
…Angus French……released early……parole……good behavior…
The rest of the letter didn’t matter to me. I was supposed to have three more years of safety, but my stepfather somehow convinced a panel he wasn’t evil anymore and got himself released.
He’d be coming for me.
I scanned the date at the top and cursed myself for not checking my mail more often. He could be to my house as early as tomorrow if he got lucky with a ride. Maybe even today. My fingers clenched the paper as I searched the woods. My forest suddenly became darker, more sinister. A chill ran up my spine and gooseflesh raised over my arms as I imagined Angus watching me from some unknown hiding place in the shadows. I couldn’t stay here. The Fletcher house was where he would come first.
The mouse in me said I was going to die just like Angus had told me all those years ago, but the survivor in me was already searching for a
hidey hole. I needed to find asylum.
I pulled the truck around and headed for town again, my earlier dilemma forgotten in the wake of unmitigated fear. I could go to Sheriff Clancy. He was a cop. He was supposed to, by profession, help people who were in danger, right? I growled. Clancy hated me. He’d probably assist my stepdad and then dance on my grave.
Sam Burns? He was a lawyer who could get me in touch with people. Maybe he could get me into some program where they would give me a secret identity and I could hide in some foreign country for the rest of my life. I thought about my timeline and clenched my teeth together. Sam Burns didn’t know anything about my case, and I didn’t have time to catch him up. I had succeeded in convincing exactly zero people to believe me about my stepfather when he’d killed my mom. I doubted heavily that Sam Burns would be my first.
My truck blew through town before I even fully registered where I intended to go. In quiet desperation, I sought the only safety I’d ever known.
****
Caleb
One week. I had one more week before I’d be working on the big rig and out of this tired little town. I liked my home, but being so close to Mira was suffocating me. I didn’t have it in me to watch her move on.
“Ho!” Brian yelled over the clanking machinery below.
I dragged my thoughts back to the present and set my clipboard down. Sparing a testy glare for my brother, I yelled, “What?”
Brian jerked his head toward the parking lot. “Visitor,” he clipped out before he turned to help haul up another length of pipe.
I had received a visitor exactly one time at work, and that had been the day my mother passed.
I squinted down the stairs but couldn’t see past the gleaming metal of the machinery that ran the rig.
“No personal shit at work, McCreedy,” Mr. Wilson warned around a toothpick that hung precariously out of the corner of his downturned mouth.
“Yep. Two minutes.” I handed him the clipboard and ducked down the stairs that led to the parking lot.
I spotted her green truck first, and my pulse picked up. I was mad at her but couldn’t seem to tell that to my heart. It stuttered at the prospect of seeing her. She fidgeted at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes dashing around with all of the paranoia of a frightened animal.
