by Urban Waite
“So no one knows?” Patrick stood on one side of the little grave and Drake on the other. Patrick looked up at Drake and then looked away, across the orchard to where the house sat.
Drake checked his watch. Sheri’s lunch shift ended in two hours. “We’d been seeing a doctor in Bellingham. She had some stomach pains one night and she went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time.” Drake didn’t know how to go on. He didn’t know how to tell his father about how Sheri had locked the door, about the sound of her in there, the crying, the way her voice carried through the wood and came to Drake as if through the walls. The crying turning to sobbing and then the sobbing turning to silence. Drake having to ask again and again for her to open the door.
RECENTLY, THERE’D BEEN a lot of times when he had to remind himself they were going to be fine. That all would pass, and they could still have the future he had always thought they’d have.
Drake closed the refrigerator door and turned to look over at Sheri where she sat at the table. Patrick, sitting opposite, turned to look at Drake. “The lettuce,” Sheri said. “There’s a big plate in there with the cut tomatoes.”
“Right,” Drake said. He turned back to the refrigerator and opened the door. There it was, on the middle shelf. He reached in and brought it up and set it on the counter. It had happened again, he’d drifted, found himself just staring into space. The same thing had happened that morning, looking over the deer carcass, the cell phone in his hand and—for only a moment—no idea at all what to do.
He looked back at the table. Grilled hamburger patties, buns, a jar of pickles, potato chips, and all the condiments set out. Drake closed the door and brought the plate of lettuce and tomatoes around the counter and out into the dining room. Sheri trying to answer a question about her hometown, where her folks were from. Patrick leaning into the table with his forearms, his shoulders pushed forward as he listened. Drake set the plate down and asked, “Anyone want a beer?”
Sheri said she’d have one and when Patrick wanted one too, Drake went back to the kitchen and found three on the bottom shelf.
Everything with Sheri and Drake was in the open now. Sheri had come home after her lunch shift and met Patrick. Then she’d gone into the bathroom to take a shower as Drake unloaded the groceries Sheri had brought.
It was just before dinner when they were all outside by the grill at the bottom of the back stairs that Patrick brought up the changes to the house. The pictures and furniture. The way the house looked new to him. How well they’d taken care of it, painting the outside and updating the bathroom. Patrick and Sheri sitting on the stairs while Drake stood a few feet apart, spatula in hand as the burger meat spat and hissed on the grill. “It never looked this good when Bobby was growing up here.” He gave Drake a quick glance before continuing. “I noticed the things you got for the second bedroom.”
Sheri looked away toward the orchard and then turned back.
Patrick glanced at Drake again, almost asking permission. “Bobby told me about the baby. I wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened.”
Sheri took a moment. “Thanks,” she said. “We never told anyone about it and so when we lost it we didn’t feel like we had anyone to talk with.”
“I’ve felt the same way,” Patrick said. With his fingers he worked a splinter up from the stair on which he sat and then flipped it away. “Bobby’s mom and I tried for a while after Bobby started school here in Silver Lake, but with her getting sick we lost a couple pregnancies and then just figured we’d wait till she got better.”
Drake was staring at his father. He’d never heard his father say anything like that to anyone. He’d never heard the man talk about anything personal, really. It was only when the burgers started to flame that he remembered they were there at all.
“They say it’s common,” Sheri said. “That’s what they told us at least. They said it’s just one of those things.”
Drake flipped a few more burgers and let them cook. When they were finished he asked for a plate and waited while Sheri went inside to get one.
Now he stood looking into the refrigerator again, the beers suspended between his fingers. He closed the door and walked back to the dining room table. His father there with his wife, and Patrick telling Sheri about the day they’d had. Talking about how nice it was to sit at a table and have a burger, to drink a beer, to not have every day repeat itself like every day before.
“Did Bobby tell you about the wolf?” Patrick asked, taking the beer in his hand and twisting the top off. He didn’t wait for Sheri to answer before going on. “First in the valley in fifty years.” He was smiling now and for a moment he looked at Drake and then looked back to Sheri. “I bet he didn’t tell you about the new Fish and Wildlife officer, either.”
“HOW MANY DAYS will you be out?” Sheri asked.
Drake sat on the edge of their bed and slid one boot off, followed by the other. “Two to three, depending on how it goes.” He looked back at Sheri. She was a few years younger than him, wrinkles just beginning to show around her eyes when she smiled.
They had met at the Chelan County Fair a couple years after Drake moved back to Silver Lake. Drake off for the weekend with one of the other deputies. Sheri with her friends, walking around the fairgrounds looking over the various prizes. The whole time Drake trying to catch her eye and missing every time. Watching her until he’d finally worked up the nerve to talk to her.
Now, turned on the bed, he looked back at her and thought over all the time that had passed in between. Sheri was already under the covers with her head resting on a pillow against the headboard. “The Fish and Wildlife officer wants me to take along my father.”
Sheri turned in bed and moved her feet beneath the covers, digging one of her toes into Drake’s side. “You mean the cute Fish and Wildlife officer that you didn’t tell me about?”
Drake watched his wife for a second as he tried to decide whether she was playing with him, or if this conversation held any hidden pitfalls. He moved a hand down and caught her foot, pressing his thumb into the arch. She made a small animal sound. Her body curling up as she brought her other foot from beneath the covers and placed it on his lap.
“This how you passed the time last night?” Sheri said. “When you were out late on your stakeout?”
Drake screwed his face up, trying to look disgusted. He finished the massage on the first foot and started in on the other. “On Ellie? No,” Drake said. “She’s got horrible corns and the calluses on her soles cut my hands any time I try.” Drake smiled back at his wife and Sheri dug her free foot into his side again, this time with a little more force, almost pushing him over.
“So she wants you to take your father along?” Sheri said.
Drake finished with the massage. “I haven’t told him. I don’t know if it’s the best idea. Going along with us so soon after getting out.” Drake pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it to the corner of the room near a wicker hamper. “Seems like he’s able to charm everybody except me.”
“Pat has been perfectly fine,” Sheri said, and Drake knew he had. Over dinner Patrick had asked Sheri questions about herself, where she worked. What she did at the Buck Blind, waitress or bartend. Who she knew in the valley. He complimented her on the garden out back and the line of time-warped mason jars she’d collected over the sink window. After dinner producing a gift from his little cardboard box of possessions, a whittled horse figurine he’d done for her in the prison shop. Sheri leaned in to kiss his cheek, and afterward asked, “How is it being back here in this house?”
“Strange,” he said. “But in a good way. Everything is the same and everything is different. You know what I mean?”
Drake was leaning against the counter between the kitchen and dining area finishing his beer when Patrick looked away from Sheri, fixing Drake for a moment before going on. “Just strange, that’s all.” He looked back to Sheri and said, “It feels like I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them agai
n and twelve years passed.” He shook his head, thanked Sheri and nodded to Drake, and said good night to them both.
Drake tried to put it all in perspective, but it just wouldn’t go. For the next hour after his father had gone to bed Drake kept rolling around the idea of blinking away the past. Nothing like that had happened to him in those twelve years. All that time now seemed longer than anything. And everything before—when he’d been a boy in Silver Lake, then gone on to college—like water in his hand, bleeding through his fingers and then gone.
“The truth is,” Drake said, “I can’t trust him. I want to but I just can’t.”
“He’s your father. I don’t know what else you want from him. I’m sure he’s sorry about it all.”
“He’s not the same person. He’s not who I remember. Earlier, on our way home, he thought someone was following us.”
“What do you want me to say?” She looked over at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “It’s just nerves. When they told us he was getting out they said it might be difficult.”
“Stop acting like you know him,” Drake said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“Did you ever think that maybe you don’t know him?” Sheri said. She’d pushed herself up on the bed now, her thin, fine-boned hands at her sides. The brown hair she usually wore at her shoulders, tied up in a ponytail, a smattering of freckles on her cheeks that would only grow darker as the season warmed. “You went to visit him only once in all his time away. At least I tried to write him and keep him in the loop. Telling him about you and what was going on here in Silver Lake, and he was good about responding, about wanting to hear about you. At dinner tonight you heard him yourself, talking about the land, about the hills and mountains, about how you two used to ride up into the valleys on horseback. It seems like going along with you would be something he’d want.”
Drake shook his head. He knew already there was no point in going into it. He was being the asshole, but he didn’t care, he was angry at his father, he’d been angry for a long time, and his father’s coming home wasn’t going to change that. He got up from the bed and crossed to the dresser, where he took out a pair of thin cotton pants and changed into them. For a little while, when Sheri had become pregnant—when they had stayed up late in bed, the lights off, making plans for the future and whispering to each other in the darkness even though there was no one else to hear—Drake had let himself forget about who he was, about where he’d come from and the reasons his life was the way it was. His father a convicted criminal, and anything Drake had wanted to be in his younger years no longer a reality he could ever hope for. “Don’t you see that my life would be completely different if it wasn’t for him?”
“You would have finished college,” Sheri said.
“Yes.”
“And you would never have come back to Silver Lake.”
“Probably not.”
“And you never would have met me.”
Drake looked over at her; he didn’t know what to say. It was the truth. He never would have met her. He started to tell her it wasn’t true, but then gave up. He was being pigheaded. He loved her. He depended on her, knew she would never lie to him, that she would always give it to him straight. He felt bad for every unnamed thing that had been going through his head from the moment he’d woken up this morning, to this moment, here in their bedroom.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I get it.” Her voice losing some of the sharpness that had been growing in around the edges. “But it’s not like you can invent a time machine and go back. Your life isn’t going to change in that way. Not ever.” The last few words beginning to tighten and catch in her throat as her voice broke.
“Hey,” he said, and then, “Hey, hey, hey.” His voice dropping to a whisper as he stood next to the dresser and looked back at her, knowing what she’d just said wasn’t really about him alone. It was about them. It was about the baby they’d lost and a million other things that had been adding up to this moment alone.
She was crying now, softly, with her body turned away from him on the bed. The sheets pulled tight over her shoulders. He went around the bed and sat next to her. With his hand he tried to rub some warmth onto her back. “Hey,” he said. “We’re okay. We’ll be just fine.” But he didn’t know it and he said it again, repeating it like a mantra.
For a while now he’d thought maybe they were both waiting to see who would leave first, and then when the parole board had called to tell Drake about his father’s release, Drake had thought maybe they would stay together, maybe they would figure it out.
He knew losing the baby had hurt Sheri in a deeper way than he could understand. He hadn’t been there for her. He’d been on the outside, listening through the bathroom door. Stuck between knowing what to do and not knowing. No clue. No training for a thing like this—for life to come at them out of the dark without warning. But hadn’t that been it? Drake thought. One moment you’re joking about calluses and corns and secrets and the next . . .
Drake sank into the bed and pulled Sheri toward him. Her wet face to his, warm and soft, strands of loose hair come free from her ponytail where they lay against her cheeks. She wasn’t crying anymore and he listened to her snuffling breath. Her nose and mouth close into his shoulder and her hot breath on his skin.
“It’s good,” he said, taking his time, “that you were able to talk about it with my father today. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He felt her give the smallest nod. The crown of her head just below his chin. “We had to start talking about it sometime.”
Everything Drake had thought or done in the last month felt like it was all coming together. His past life asking questions of his present. Still, he’d gone rigid when Patrick had started talking to Sheri about the baby. Drake just standing there holding the spatula, paralyzed. Everything inside telling him he needed to protect Sheri. But at the same time, realizing that he’d been waiting for this, waiting for this time of his life. The past meeting the future, Drake adding a new role, being a father, sweeping all the failures of the past away to make room for this new stage in his life. He’d wanted that baby more than anything he could remember wanting before.
Instead they’d lost it and now their marriage felt like something fragile, like an egg in the palm. Hold too tight and he’d crush the thin shell in his hand, too loose and he’d drop it on the floor.
He kept her close for a long time, feeling her breath whispering on his clavicle. He remembered the days after. Sheri home in bed, not wanting to move, not even bothering to take the medication the doctor in Bellingham had prescribed for her. He thought of this now and about how fragile she’d become in such a short time. So different from the person she’d become to him. The person he thought of as his wife. When she fell asleep he turned and flipped off the bedside light and lay there listening to the air in her lungs, feeling his heart beating in his chest.
He lay there until he was quite cold, feeling the chill on his skin but worried that if he moved to pull the sheets up and cover them both fully, she would wake. Eventually, when the goose bumps had risen and pricked his skin like chicken feathers, he got up from the bed and loosened the sheets from the bottom where Sheri had tucked them that morning. When he climbed back in, Sheri’s breath had changed and he knew she was awake.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel bad about what I said to you. About another life. About things being different.” He moved his fingers down the outside of her arm, feeling the little hairs that grew there, and for a while he wondered if she’d heard him.
“I thought tonight might be different,” she said, eventually. “Meeting your father for the first time. Having him out of prison finally. To anyone else this would be a happy day.”
Drake didn’t know how he felt about it, either. He ran his hand down all the way to her fingers and squeezed them in his palm. He wanted to let her know he was there but he couldn’t find the words to say it aloud
.
“So you’ll leave tomorrow?” she asked, her voice muffled by his arm.
“The next day,” he said. “I need to go in to the department tomorrow. I need to talk to Gary about all this.”
HE WOKE EARLY and made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The sound of his father’s snoring coming from beneath Drake’s old bedroom door. All Patrick must have been thinking as he lay down in that bed last night, in that old room, painted now for a small child who had never arrived, while Sheri and Drake slept just down the hall in Patrick’s old bedroom.
Drake poured a cup of coffee and tried to imagine what his father had thought before he closed his eyes. The unfamiliar becoming the familiar again. Like watching an old movie that hadn’t been seen in years. The same lines replaying, the same scenes, and plot twists. A half-remembered life slowly coming back into focus.
Drake sipped at the coffee. He was barely awake. The thoughts in his head seeming random and disoriented, bumping around inside him with a sleep-starved stumble. After Sheri had drifted off, he’d slept poorly and in the morning he’d woken and dressed in his uniform. The light just up over the mountains and the back acre of their property—where the apple trees grew in unkempt lines all the way to the forest—bright with the morning sun.
He drank the coffee and watched the orchard. The year after his mother died, the apples had sat in the field unpicked. Drake, age nine, watching as a yearling bear wandered around, picking the apples from the ground. Going from tree to tree and eating what apples it could find. The bear drunk on rotting apples by the time it had reached the fourth tree.
His father had come to stand with him at the window as the yearling lay back against one of the apple trunks and rubbed its spine one way, then the other. Eventually falling back into the grass and rolling around with its arms half suspended in front of its face. The bear dozing for over an hour before lumbering off again.
