Into the Storm

by Susan Fanetti

  Still grinning, Shannon said, “Hey! Remember, this was your idea.” She handed him the salmon and gold ribbons.

  “That’s pink. What did Edgar just say?”

  “It’s not pink, it’s salmon.”

  Show just stared at her. She liked him looking at her. She liked this new playfulness, too. He wasn’t flirting—she was, but he wasn’t—but he was more at ease with her than he’d been.

  She grinned and put her hand on her hip, popping it just a little. “Okay, okay. How about gold and green. Edgar okay with that?”

  “Yeah. That’ll work.” Just like that, something in Show’s expression had changed, gone flat.

  She handed him the ribbons. This time he was careful not to touch her hand, and that was disappointing. She’d thought their little banter might mean something was catching between them.

  Then she saw a truck pulling up—the florist from Springfield. She had to go. She turned to Badger and said, “The garland is here. You have a place for it until you need it?”

  Badger got up from his work stool and nodded, wiping his oily hands on his jeans. “Yep—over on that wall.”

  “Okay. I’ll send them back with it. I’ve got to get back up to the main house.”

  On her way past Show, she put her hand on his back. He went stiff. “Thanks for this, Show.”

  “Pleasure,” he said without turning to her.

  It was as if he’d also noticed something about to catch between them and shut the door before it could.

  Shannon was confused and frustrated. Time to move on, then.

  ~oOo~

  The wedding was a brilliant success. There were a few snags, but nothing the wedding party knew about. The weather was perfect—still and clear, the afternoon sun bringing the temperature up to seventy—and there were no drunken family brawls. Edgar and his ribbons and flowers looked perfect, and the carriage gleamed. Badger was even wearing a top hat and a black tailcoat over his jeans and white oxford. Shannon had no idea where he’d come up with that outfit. She’d asked only for a button-down shirt.

  The reception was over by midnight, and the inn was back to its normal state by three o’clock. She paid the event staff and closed the dining room. Then she took Amie, her photographer friend from Tulsa, back to her apartment, where they caught up over a couple of glasses of wine, and then she made up the sofa for Amie and went to bed.

  Exhausted as she was, she lay sleepless for a long time. She was at peace about the wedding—she’d put on the best event she could, and it had worked. Amie had shown her the digital proofs, and the photographs were amazing.

  No, it wasn’t the wedding keeping her awake. It was Showdown. He’d warmed up to her a little over the past couple of days, and she’d seen more in him to like. She thought she might even have sensed some interest. But then that was gone, and he was back to mumbling with his back to her. Even if he was interested, he wasn’t interested. She needed to get over this schoolgirl crush.

  Maybe she just needed to get laid. She hadn’t seen any action since she’d left Tulsa, and that was four months ago. That was a long dry spell. She and Keith had left things on good terms. Maybe he’d like a weekend away in the country.

  With that thought, she rolled over and found sleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Show sat on the porch steps, his elbows on his thighs and his hands hanging between his knees. His eyes were fixed on the peeling paint on the steps at his feet. Up close like this, his house was showing the signs of a year’s neglect.

  A year. Today.

  The autumn chill had finally set in. Show’s breath lingered in faint wisps of vapor. The weedy yard and Holly’s overgrown planting beds had turned yellow and crisp. Rotting vegetables littered the ground around the vegetable beds or clung desperately to their dead plants. The old swing set had finally rusted through and collapsed. A milkweed vine had gone to town on it, coiling around and tracing the faded stripes of the pocked poles.

  This was a dead house.

  He’d woken up in the morning and knew that he had to do it today. He didn’t know if he really could live in this house again, but this was the day he had to face the ghosts. Either face them down or let them have him.

  Maybe he was crazy. In fact, he was pretty sure that was true. Mostly, he felt like a dead man walking. He got through his days, he did his work, he talked to people, but with few exceptions, everything was hollow. Deadwood.

  The exceptions were Isaac and Lilli. Little Gia. And, in ways that worried him, Shannon. He felt a stirring of life when she was around. It wasn’t even a sexual thing, although she was stunning, with that fiery red hair and that old-fashioned pinup body. Though he’d thought about getting his hands around those hips, it wasn’t that thought that had him distracted. There were plenty of curvy, pretty girls around the clubhouse. He didn’t know what it was about Shannon, but he felt himself wanting to talk to her more than anything else.

  He was not in the market for someone to talk to. He had Isaac, or Lilli, if he needed to talk. He didn’t. He had nothing to say.

  He knew Shannon was interested in him—and not for somebody to talk to. She hadn’t come out and said it, but she wasn’t trying to hide it or be especially coy. Her interest had been palpable a couple of weeks ago, when he’d helped her get Edgar ready for the wedding. He’d been stupid, offering to help. Talking to her even that much had gotten her stuck in his head.

  He, however, was done. He was empty. He had nothing for a woman like that, and there was no sense in taking even one step down that road. Even if he got through this day and managed to find a way to make a life, he couldn’t see ever wanting a woman in it again. He could barely imagine connecting enough even to fuck one, but that was something he was beginning to want back. Shannon was not the kind of woman who just got fucked, though. She was the kind of woman who got loved.

  And that meant Show needed to stay away. He was fresh out of love.

  A huge crow cawed and landed in the middle of the yard, cocking its head at him and bringing him out of his thoughts. If he’d ridden out this way just to sit on the porch and brood, then he was a truly lost cause. He needed to honor his Daze in some way. He couldn’t lay flowers at her grave; Holly had taken her body to Arkansas and buried her there. This was the only thing he could think of to do.

  With a sigh, he stood and crossed the porch. Opening the red door, he entered his dim, dead house and climbed the stairs to his dead daughter’s room.

  He stood outside her closed door, which was covered with quotes from her favorite books, handwritten on little pieces of paper. Daze was all about the books. She was fifteen when she died, but she hadn’t yet really begun to think about boys much. She wasn’t a girly girl. Her sisters were—they loved dolls and dress-up and glitter. Daze had liked to read. She’d liked to hike and swim and fish. She’d worn glasses and braces and kept her hair short. She’d favored jeans and t-shirts. She’d had a quiet but sharp sense of humor that had gone over her mother’s head—which was often a very good thing. She’d liked his bike and his kutte. She’d wanted to ride with him, but Holly wouldn’t hear of it, and Show had deferred to his wife in most things at home. He’d wanted a quiet, stable home, and Holly had a tenacious need to win and a tendency to gnaw at every disagreement until it was a full-blown fight. It had dawned on Show in the past year that she’d probably hated the club so much not only because of what they were or did, but because it was one of the very few fights he’d pushed hard enough to win.

  As he stood in the hallway, that last morning played out vividly in Show’s mind. He’d been all business, trying to have the morning go as quickly and quietly as possible. He and Holly had fought hard the night before—which meant Holly had screamed at him and he’d taken it, trying to get her to quiet down. Will Keller had been killed and his property burnt to the ground, and everyone had known it was Lawrence Ellis who’d done it, trying to get control of that property so he could build a meth factory on it. Ellis was a powerful ma
n and seemingly untouchable. He had been, anyway, until his personal feelings got in the way and he’d made the mistake of taking Lilli. Now, he was dead, and Lilli owned the Keller property, where she’d built the B&B in Will’s honor.

  The morning after the fire, the day that Ellis had orchestrated the attack on Isaac and Show’s families, the attack that had killed Daisy and destroyed his family, he’d met Daze in the hallway, as she’d come out of the bathroom. She’d been wearing a 4-H t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. He’d seen in her eyes that she’d heard the whole fight, during which Holly had shrieked, among other things, that he was going to get them all killed.

  Daze had said nothing at first. She’d simply wrapped her long, skinny arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. He’d put his hands on her narrow shoulders and kissed her head.

  Then she’d said, “I love you, Dad. Be safe today.”

  He’d said, “Yep. Love you, too, Daze.” Then she’d unwound herself from him and gone back to her room, closing the door between them.

  The next time he’d seen her, she’d been lying dead on a gurney.

  He wrapped his hand around the knob and opened her door.

  Shit. But for the dust and stale air, it was as if she were simply elsewhere in the house. Her bed was unmade, and her 4-H t-shirt and flannel bottoms were wadded up on her pillow. The book she’d been reading was tented on her little round nightstand, under his old gooseneck lamp. He walked over and picked it up, blowing the dust off the cover. Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Looked like science fiction. She’d started to read a lot of science fiction over that last summer, turned on to it by her ninth-grade English teacher. She’d been trying to get him to read some of it, too, but he’d found it silly.

  That same teacher had taught her to write in her books, to mark passages she especially liked and to make notes about what they’d made her feel. She’d talked often about that teacher, Mr. Radev. Show had figured she had a little crush. With orange pen, she’d underlined a passage on one of the pages her last book had been open to:

  Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

  In the margin, in her tiny, round hand, she’d written, “Restless.” Show smiled, feeling like he understood. Even out of context, the passage was sensual, even sexy. There was desire in it. He thought about his Daze lying in her bed that last night, after her parents’ fight had finally ended, reading this passage, feeling restless and not sure why. His sweet, innocent girl.

  He sat down on her twin bed with its battered wicker headboard, held her book to his chest, and wept.

  He had no sense of how long he’d let his grief have its way, but when he was able to compose himself, he folded over a corner of the page she’d left open, and he closed the book. Sitting on her bed, he took in her room. It was by far the smallest room in the house. Not much more than a closet—in fact, it didn’t even have a closet. It had been Holly’s crafting room. She was a big crafter, always working on some kind of project, usually adding more Americana crap to the house. Red, white, and blue everything, that was Holly’s style. A lot of women around Signal Bend seemed to share her taste, to the extent that they could afford taste.

  But when Daisy turned thirteen, what she’d desperately wanted for her birthday was a room of her own. All three girls had always shared a bedroom, and Daze had been feeling more and more crowded as she’d entered her teens. So Show had built a little shed, what Holly took quickly to calling her playhouse, for the crafts, running electric to it and everything. And Daisy had taken this narrow little room. He’d polished the floor and painted the walls the deep plum that she’d picked. It made the room seem like a burrow, close and dark. She’d loved it.

  She had a bookcase full of books, a small table she used as a desk, an old dinette chair, and a tall, narrow chest for her clothes. She’d had only three pairs of shoes, and they were lined up neatly against the wall next to her chest. With that and her twin bed and little nightstand, the room was packed. But she’d kept it neat and had decorated it with posters of bands and movies.

  Her little clothes hamper was full. Show stood and walked over to it, pulling a plaid shirt from the top. He pressed it to his face and breathed deeply. Under the dust, he could still smell her, just faintly. Or maybe it was only the memory of her smell. Either way, it made his heart hurt so badly he doubled over with a groan.

  He picked up the hamper and dropped her shirt back in it. Then he took it to her bed and put her t-shirt and pajamas in. He stripped her bed. Then he carried the hamper down the stairs and out to the closed back porch, where the washer and dryer were. There was a stack of folded towels, now thick with dust, on the dryer.

  He opened the washer and put all of Daisy’s dirty clothes in. He hadn’t done a load of laundry in…he’d never done a load of laundry. But there were instructions on the inside of the lid. Apparently, he should have sorted the clothes by color, but that was more than he was capable of undertaking. For good measure, he put the dusty towels in, too. The load was full, but he made everything fit. He poured detergent in and figured out how to start the machine.

  Then he grabbed some of the boxes left over from packing up for Holly and went back up to Daisy’s room. He spent the afternoon packing her life into those boxes and sealing them shut. When the buzzer on the washer went off, he figured out the dryer. When her laundry was clean, he packed that up, too. He packed almost everything. He left out Neuromancer; and a silver charm bracelet she’d been adding to since she was five; and her red second-place ribbon from the Crawford County Science Fair when she was in sixth grade. And a small stack of bound books he’d found in her bottom drawer—she’d kept a diary. He’d never known. Once he’d understood what he’d found, he couldn’t bring himself to read them, but he wanted to be able to someday. A new piece of Daze. He didn’t think she’d mind if he read them, when he could.

  When he was done, he sat down on her make-do desk chair. It had been his intention to try to move back into his house on this day, to move back to Daisy. He had not intended to pack her away. He’d done it almost without thinking about it, without seeing what he was doing. Now, he sat and waited for the guilt to claim him.

  It didn’t. He was sad and missing Daisy as much as ever, but there was no guilt for packing her away. There was something else, something lighter. Relief? No, that wasn’t it. But something like it. A more manageable pain.

  He hadn’t packed her away. He’d brought her closer. He had her with him again, and not merely her death. He had who she’d been. Reading weird books—all books, really. Learning chess with him. Hiking through the woods. Developing a taste for Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. Crushing on her teacher—and on Isaac. He remembered that now, the way she got all pink and tongue-tied around his friend. He grinned, recalling how she’d flutter when Isaac winked at her.

  Restless. She’d been restless. Of course she had. She was fifteen, on the cusp of her real life. There was so much she hadn’t gotten to learn about, to experience. All she’d had were dreams.

  He picked up her diaries, Neuromancer, her prize ribbon, and her bracelet and carried them into the room he’d shared with Holly. They’d shared a room, but not a bed. They’d had separate twin beds, which Holly had pushed together every morning and made up like a king bed, so the girls wouldn’t know. Somehow, she’d managed to pull that off for years. But well before the end, she could barely stand for him to touch her at all, even in passing.

  He set the stack of Daze’s things on the dusty, made beds and went into the closet, pulling a big grey lockbox off the top shelf. He set it on his dresser and thumbed the combination. When it was open—mostly empty but for his father’s Colt pistol and a few old papers, he put the diaries, bracelet, and ribbon in it. He put i
t back on the shelf it had come from. Neuromancer he took with him. He would read the last book his girl had read. He would finish it for her.

  He wasn’t ready to live in this house again. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be. The memories were heavy and viscous, and they pressed down hard on his shoulders. But if Daisy’s ghost was here, he thought he’d made some peace with her. Maybe she’d come with him to the clubhouse. He wouldn’t mind that.

  ~oOo~

  When he got back to the clubhouse, Isaac was sitting on one of the couches, watching ESPN. The clubhouse was otherwise empty, as it tended to be these days in the early evening. The Horde and their hangers-on had jobs or families, or both. Now that the town was safe again, and they were out of the meth business, the clubhouse got quiet in the daylight hours. It would get moving again after supper.

  In fact, Show was surprised to see Isaac here, sitting alone in the Hall, with only Omen, the newest Prospect, around. But the kid was working, stocking the bar.

  Isaac looked over the back of the couch as Show approached. “Hey, brother. Where you been? Checked in at the feed store, but they said you weren’t around today.”

  Show sat down in a leather chair near Isaac. “You keeping tabs?”

  “Today, yeah. I am. You okay?”

  Of course Isaac would remember what this date meant. Lilli had been attacked, too, a year ago. But she was a former soldier. She’d gotten the drop on her intruder. His family had not been so skilled or prepared. Lilli hadn’t been so lucky, either, the next time Ellis had come for her.

  “Maybe. I might be okay someday. Packed up Daze’s stuff today.”

  Isaac turned off the television and leaned forward, his brows drawn. “Jesus, Show! You did that on your own? Today?”