by Deborah Reed
“Just tell me if it was a man,” Calder insisted yesterday.
Joshua finally nodded yes.
Calder turned away and nearly wept with relief. He thought of the different shades of white in Sidsel’s hair, her fingernails smooth as frosted glass, her full lips always ready for a kiss. “All right,” he said. “What are the initials?”
Joshua shook his head. “I’d rather not say.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t…Trust me. They’re the same as somebody else’s.”
“Whose?”
“Never mind. You’ll find out soon enough.”
“I need to know now, Joshua,” Calder said, fighting off the urge to blink. “Look at me. I. Need. To. Know. Now.”
Joshua rubbed his face, struggling. He took a deep breath. “Remember that time in the spring when Annie and I went to Disney World?”
Calder narrowed his eyes. “No.”
“Remember?”
“No.
“Sure you do. We came home and someone was at your house. Someone who wasn’t normally allowed to be there. He’d come to see your mother and I had to take him home.”
Calder leaned back in his chair with the realization. “What are you talking about? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’ll spare you the details, Calder. I came up on him right after it happened. He didn’t seem in his right mind if that makes a difference.”
“I don’t understand.”
Joshua appeared pained at the memory. He didn’t meet Calder’s eyes when he spoke. “He said, ‘He would have killed my boy. If it weren’t for me the two of them would never be together.’”
Calder dropped the phone in his lap. At some point he held it up to his ear and said good-bye. At some point he hung up and walked back to his cell with a guard because that’s the way it is always done. All he knows for sure is that all night long he’s watched snow falling past the iron mesh of his window in a state of disbelief.
THIRTY-TWO
Bill returns with a Gibson. Frank with his fiddle. He dims the tavern lights even more than they already are and flips on a single light above the stage. “This here’s a pretty little lady who felt like singing us a song,” he says into the mic.
The place settles to near silence when Annie hops on stage. The jukebox cuts off, and Annie’s close enough to hear the firewood pop behind the sooty screen. She hasn’t sung a note in months, and here she is about to make a fool of herself in front of all these good people who, only moments ago, were full of such holiday cheer but are now shifting in their chairs, waiting for something that clearly better be good.
Then a loud burst throws everything into black. Voices rumble in a mix of groan and delight. The fireplace gives off the only light in the room. Long, shadowy heads stretch against the ceiling where everyone seems to be searching for the missing light. For a moment there’s only the crackle and hiss of burning wood.
Annie doesn’t move. The stage is dark, and she’s sure to trip and tumble to the floor.
“Don’t panic, folks,” Frank says and is quickly groping his way across the room. “Storm’s knocked the power off is all.” Others join him and before long, a dozen or more candle flames tremble across tables. Flashlights pulled from the trunks of cars shine beams onto plates of half-eaten meals and empty beer glasses.
Annie waits on her stool, not knowing what to do.
Frank moves through the crowd with a kerosene lamp like a nineteenth-century ghost. He places it on the stage near Annie’s feet and his gap-tooth smile, lit from beneath his chin, is both spooky and hysterical.
“You ready?” he asks.
“To sing?”
“No. Shovel snow. Of course, sing.”
“As I’ll ever be tonight,” she says, convinced she’s about to make an idiot out of herself.
It takes a while for her to tune Bill’s guitar, and this stirs a few jokes into the quiet about him singing so far off-key that it’s actually tuned about right.
The snow has stopped falling and the moon has come out. From the corner of her eye a clean swath of snow shimmers across the patio.
The fire weakens and a young, aproned woman from the kitchen plops another log onto the charred wood. Embers smolder among the ash and rise up the chimney, and the fire gains strength.
Annie feels like a child pushing herself to rise through the air on a swing. She pulls the air to the bottom of her lungs and lifts her chin, taking one last look at the trembling candles, and suddenly her voice emerges from deep inside her chest.
She sings about the evening sky going dark, and the sound of her voice is warm and thick and bigger than the room. She sings about a tingle in her bones.
When Frank draws the bow across the violin she nearly weeps at the sound. Her voice continues on, as if without her, her mind as big and empty as the spring-blue sky.
“He woke up and she was gone,” she sings. “He didn’t see nothing but the dawn. He got out of bed and put his clothes back on, and pushed back the blind, found a note she’d left behind, to which he just could not relate, all about a simple twist of fate.”
It isn’t until the end when the crowd stands in near darkness and claps for her that the gravity of what has just happened sinks in. Frank pats her back and leans into her with a huge grin.
“You got another one in you?” he asks, and she tells him that yes, she believes she does.
THIRTY-THREE
Owen looks around the kitchen one last time. What he’s looking for is food. His appetite has suddenly swelled. He’s like a teenager scrounging and stuffing, first a blueberry muffin, then a banana and a glass of juice, and after that another muffin while he scrambles some eggs; and it’s while he’s on the phone with the airlines that he rakes the eggs, along with a piece of buttered toast, into his mouth.
“Let me see,” the woman says. “It doesn’t look good.”
No matter, he feels light and airy as if the egg has turned him into a soufflé, rising and light, even after cramming in all this food. It’s not so much the fact that he’s going home that makes him feel so buoyant, but rather the sense of direction he feels. A hum, a call, this way, now.
“The next one leaves in two hours,” the woman says. “Though there might be some delay.”
He hasn’t understood until now that it wasn’t so much that he needed to come back for Annie, not really, though a part of him did, and probably always will. What he needed to come back for, truly needed, was for her to tell him to leave.
“I’ll take it.”
He hangs up and calls for a taxi. A driver finally agrees to meet him at the turnoff to Annie’s road, a mile down from her driveway.
Then he calls Tess with his eyes squeezed shut. He doesn’t open them until he hears her voice.
“It’s already started,” she says.
“What?”
“They’re not close yet but it’s happening.”
“What? Right now? You’re in labor right now?”
“My water broke when I leaned down to plug in the lights on the tree. We’re going to have a Christmas baby.”
“There’s a flight in two hours. It only takes half an hour to fly home, but I’ve got to get to the airport. I’ve got to leave right now.”
“You need to hurry!”
“Don’t let her come before I get there.”
“Ach!” she says. “I’m having another one.” Her voice squeezes out.
“Hold on. Can you make it stop? Is there anyway to make it stop?”
Her teeth seem to be chattering. “There. OK. It’s all right.” She seems to catch her breath. “Did you see Calder? Is everything all right?”
He can’t believe she’s asking this now. He promises not to hate himself for what he’s done. What good would it do Tess, what good would it do Caroline? “Yes. I did. And it’s all right. It’s fine. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”
And then he adds, “I love you, Tess.”
/> There’s a pause on her end of the phone. Maybe she’s looking at the ceiling the way she did when he first laid eyes on her, studying and thinking things through. It’s clear that she knows more than she’s letting on. She’s always known more than he gives her credit for. She understands the meaning of every little nuance in his face. You’ve gone there again, haven’t you? And look, now you are back. It’s only in her sleep that she gets a reprieve. “Tess?”
“I love you, too,” she says.
Owen throws on his coat and runs coughing down the snowy driveway with the pills clanging in his pocket. The cold air irritates his chest, though not as much as yesterday. Something shifts at his back and he turns to see the storm has knocked out the power in the house. Airports have generators. It will be all right.
When he reaches the gate he sees a man in a long camel coat holding a poinsettia on the other side. He’s talking to the security guard. He doesn’t look like he’s from here. Something in the way he holds himself, the gesture of his hands, the self-assured laugh he shares with the other man.
The two men fall silent when Owen approaches. The man in the camel coat nods, the guard does not, and Owen looks away at the exhaust on the Suburban melting a dirty hole in the snow.
The man hands the guard the poinsettia. “Tell her it hasn’t been watered so the card tucked inside is nice and dry.”
Owen looks in the distance for the taxi. He waits as the guard places the poinsettia on the hood of his Suburban and opens the gate just far enough to let Owen out, and there is no good farewell spoken here, just the clang of the iron behind him and the crunch of his shoes in the snow.
Owen walks past the Miata. He will have to hire someone to drive it to Destin when the snow melts.
Twenty feet down the road the man in the camel coat, the man from who knows where, pulls up beside him in a Land Rover. “Can I give you a ride?”
Owen decides he’s a reporter from New York. Maybe L.A. He wants to get Owen in the car so he can ask him questions about Annie and Calder. Owen looks down the road for the taxi. There’s still no sign. What if he doesn’t show? His socks are already wet inside his shoes.
“The airport?” Owen says.
“Hop in.”
The two of them pull away in silence. Any moment the man is going to start asking questions.
Minutes go by, then several more, and all the man does is whistle.
Owen is so grateful for the ride that he decides to tell the man whatever he wants to know. But they are on the freeway and the man still hasn’t asked him anything.
Owen looks out at the stream of white fields and snow-covered roofs. It reminds him of the beach at home. “My wife is about to have a baby,” he says.
The man nods at the road in front of him. “Are you going to or coming from the scene of that?”
Owen laughs. “Going to. I live in Destin.”
The man smiles and nods again. “Congratulations. A boy or a girl?”
“Girl.”
“Got a name picked out?”
“Caroline.”
“Pretty name.”
“It is a pretty name.”
They ride again in silence. They are nearly at the terminal when Owen says, “Why didn’t you ask me anything?”
“About what?”
“Aren’t you a reporter?”
“What makes you think I’m a reporter?”
“Well. For one, you just answered my question with a question.”
“Are you Annie Walsh’s boyfriend?” the man asks.
“No.” Owen slowly shakes his head and looks out the window. Not anymore, he thinks, and sits with the feeling.
“She married?”
“No. She’s never been married.”
The man nods slowly as he winds the car into the terminal. “Well. It looks like we ran out of time for more questions,” he says.
THIRTY-FOUR
“There you are,” Calder says, as if they’re still kids playing a game of hide-and-go-seek and he has just found her behind a tree.
“Orange is not your color,” Annie tells him through the video screen. He looks as if he’s aged several years since she saw him on her porch.
He glances at his shirt and smiles with more delight than a person ought to have locked up in a place like this on Christmas day.
“And not exactly festive,” he says, running his hand through his floppy hair.
“Merry Christmas,” Annie says.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Sidsel’s coming over for dinner,” she says. “In fact, she’s making the dinner herself. She insisted. Mom’s coming, too.”
Calder sucks in a sharp breath and leans into the back of his chair. “All the women I love gathered around one table.”
“She’s lovely, Calder. I’m a little in love with her myself.”
“You see?”
“I do.”
Calder leans into the screen and places his hand against it.
“I’m sorry,” Annie says, and raises her own hand to the glass.
“For what?”
“Everything. This. You in here. Me not coming to see you before now.”
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
Annie sits on her free hand and braces herself. Don’t let it make a difference, she thinks, you love him either way.
“It’s all right,” he finally says. “Something’s come up to get me out of here.”
It takes a moment for the words to register.
“What are you saying?”
“I’ll be out before you know it.”
“How?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, I promise,” he says with a flicker of trouble in his eyes.
“Tell me.”
“I can’t. Besides. It’s Christmas. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Calder.”
“You’ll just have to trust me.”
“You’ll just have to tell me,” she says.
“I don’t want to ruin today.”
“Telling me how you’re about to get out of here is going to ruin the day?”
“Yes,” he says, with a seriousness she hardly recognizes. “Trust me, Annie. Please. I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want you to think I’m going to be in here for life. Or worse. I’m not. It’s going to be all right.”
“When you say ‘something’s come up,’ does that mean they found the person who did this?”
“I can’t talk about it right now.”
Annie takes a deep breath and decides to back off. She understands there isn’t a whole lot he can say over the phone like this. Then she changes her mind. If he didn’t do it, then who called him from Hal’s and why?
“Fine. Just one question. Who called you from Hal’s that night?”
“What?”
“From inside Hal’s. Who called you from the payphone?”
Calder looks stricken. “Who told you that?”
“Sidsel. But I’m sure it’s common knowledge by now.”
“I don’t know,” Calder says, looking away.
“Well? Who was it? If you had nothing to do with it, and I believe you when you say that, then why was someone calling you from there?”
Calder leans back in his chair and blinks softly, the way anyone might when they are thinking something through.
Something doesn’t feel right. There’s a faraway look in his eyes. Maybe it’s just the medication, but there’s a distance, and it seems to be widening.
“You’re lying,” she says.
“No. What? I’m not.”
“Who called you then? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely, Calder. You’re lying about something. Is it because we’re on the phone like this?”
“No. Yes.”
“Come on. Which is it?”
“I can’t tell you. I haven’t thought this through. I need to wait.”
“Th
ought what through? Wait for what?”
“Can’t you just take it on face value that it’s going to be all right? Stop interrogating me!”
It can’t be easy. She knows this. Being locked up in here for such a terrible crime. And yet his anger still feels misdirected. Something in his tone is off-key, as if he’s upset that he’s about to be set free.
“It’s Christmas,” he says, with a sigh. “Can’t we talk about something else?
Annie nearly laughs. “What else is there to talk about?”
“You.”
“Me.”
“Yes. You.”
“You’re not going to try something stupid, are you?” Annie says. “To get out of here?”
“What, like escape?”
“Well, I guess not, if you’re blurting it out like that over this phone.”
He laughs. “No. I don’t have a way of filing myself through the concrete walls. Now let’s talk about something else. Have you had any visitors lately?”
How does he know? She feels a sense of betrayal rise up. The two of them on one side, Annie on the other. She tries pushing it away.
“As a matter of fact.”
Calder gets a big grin on his face. “How’d it go?”
“I sent him home and hope to never see him again.”
“What? Why’d you do that?”
She thinks of how she felt when she’d opened the door last night to find Owen gone again. He’d left the tree lights on and the ornaments were still there, along with the broken cup on the floor. She didn’t even call out his name. She knew the feeling in the air. Vacant. Eternal. Only this time was different. This time it allowed her to breathe.
Calder chews the inside of his cheek.
“He’s about to become a father. Did you know that?” Annie says.
“What? No. I didn’t even think he was married.”
“But you’re the one who told Mom he got married.”
Calder stares with a look of complete confusion. “Who are we talking about here?”
“I’m talking about Owen. Who are you talking about?”
Calder leans back in his chair and laughs. He leans forward and shakes his head. “You saw Owen. Where the hell did you see Owen?”
