The Edge of the Light

by Elizabeth George

  Seth was too bummed after talking to Prynne’s parents to engage in any search of Grand’s property. He figured there wasn’t any dope at his own parents’ house, but if there was, Prynne was probably going to keep it close.

  It was a phone call from Steamer Constant that set Seth on the path to a confrontation with Prynne. The talent scout called to tell him that the music agent Freda Windsarm was back in town. She’d talked her into giving Triple Threat another listen. Seth told the talent scout that it would have to be just the guys this time as Prynne wasn’t doing so well. In reply to this Steamer Constant revealed that it was Prynne who’d taken them over the top. Terrific musician and excellent technician were the words she used and she added, even when Prynne obviously wasn’t at her best. “So give us a yell when she’s feeling better” was how Steamer Constant ended the call. Seth said he would.

  He’d learned from Prynne’s parents that they’d run through their savings sending her into recovery programs. They were well into her brother’s college fund trying to help her when they came to understand this wasn’t the route that was going to save anyone. From this Seth took the knowledge that Prynne would die if she didn’t recover. He also took the knowledge that she would die if she didn’t want to recover.

  When he got to Grand’s house that afternoon, he shoved the tin of black tar heroin into a canvas satchel. He found Prynne in the garden with Jake and Grand, sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the sun.

  Gus was with him, and he loped to the porch where the bone box was. Instead, Seth rooted for a ball and handed it over. Gus dashed onto the lawn and dropped the ball at Grand’s feet. Ralph bent slowly. With his good hand, he picked it up. He gave it a toss that he couldn’t have given two months ago. Jake and Prynne said “Way to go!” and “Wow!”

  Seth shouldered the satchel and went to them. He kissed Grand on the top of the head and said to Prynne, “Want to go for a walk?”

  She jumped to her feet. “Where to?”

  Seth decided on the tree house. She’d never seen it.

  He could feel Grand watching him in that way he had as he and Prynne set off into the woods. No one knew him better than his grandfather. Grand had picked up that something was wrong.

  Seth didn’t talk much as they walked the path, other than to say he needed to get out here and do some work on it. The way of path-keeping in the forests on Whidbey was to fight reclamation by nature. Within three years, any path made by man would be overgrown if someone didn’t make the attempt to get the plant life under control. Seth told Prynne this in fits and starts. Had to bring the chain saw out to remove a downed tree, had to yank out some yellow archangel before it took over, had to pull out that English ivy.

  Prynne said nothing other than hmmm and oh. It was in this manner that they arrived at the clearing where Seth had built his tree house under the watchful guidance of his grandfather.

  Seeing the building nestled between two hemlocks, Prynne said, “Seth, this is amazing,” and for the first time in days, she seemed enthusiastic about something. “C’n I go up and see inside?”

  “That’s why we’re here.” He went first up the stairs in order to open the trap door onto the deck. He was happy to see that the wood was holding up strong and true.

  Inside, the place smelled musty from disuse, and there was a fair amount of dust because the stove that heated the single room in winter had been left ajar and a film of ash from the last fire within it had been blown out. Seth opened one of the windows. He noticed that jays were chattering shaark shaark shaark in the trees. A crow called out a warning to the rest of his gang and flew off as if in indignation at the human invasion into the woods.

  “How come you’ve never showed me this before?” Prynne went to the cot. She sat and tested its strength. “Do you ever sleep here? It would be fun. I always wondered where the trail went. I walked a ways along it, but—”

  “Why?” Seth asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you walk a ways along it? Were you looking for something?”

  Her face became wary immediately. “What would I be looking for?”

  Seth opened his satchel and brought out the old tin. “A place to hide something like this,” he said.

  She said nothing at first. She managed to look supremely confused. Finally, she said, “What’s that?”

  “A tobacco tin,” he told her. “A real old tobacco tin.”

  “An antique? Is it valuable?”

  He wanted to laugh. He could feel laughter’s nastiness bubbling up. “What’s inside is worth money. Not a whole lot but probably more than the tin. Want to see it?”

  “I don’t know . . .” and there she faltered.

  “You don’t know what? What’s inside? Where we found it? What don’t you know, Prynne?”

  He opened the tin. He dumped the contents next to her onto the sleeping cot. When she started to say something, he jumped in. “Don’t even bother. I’ve been to Port Townsend. I’ve talked to Steve. He sent me to your mom and dad, so I went to Port Gamble and talked to them. If you want to tell me this isn’t yours, go ahead, but we both know it’ll be a lie because we both know lying is what you do best.”

  Her good eye filled. “It isn’t mine. I don’t even know what that stuff is. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know where you found it. I don’t know what it’s used for. I don’t know.”

  “Oh yeah right.” Seth grabbed up the square of aluminum and a small chunk of the heroin. He snatched up the Bic lighter from beside her leg. He said, “You don’t know, huh? Want me to show you? You think it’s mine?”

  “I didn’t say that. It could be anyone’s. It could be Jake’s. Or Celia’s. Or Becca’s. Or . . . or. . . .”

  “How ’bout Grand’s? Grand’s smoking heroin in his free time these days?”

  Her lips trembled spasmodically. She clenched her fists in her lap and lowered her head so her hair spread around her like something meant to protect her from what would come next. She said brokenly, “You’re the best thing in my life, Seth. You’re the only thing in my life. You and my music and if I lose you . . . I can’t lose you, Seth.”

  “You lied to me about everything,” Seth said. “Right from the first. You claimed all you did was weed. You said that whole thing with my mom’s Oxy was just giving it a try when the truth was you hadn’t found a heroin source on Whidbey yet. You had to use the Oxy and you would’ve kept using it if Mom hadn’t needed to renew the prescription.”

  “All I have is you and my fiddle,” Prynne said, and this time she looked up. She’d started to cry and she didn’t cry prettily. She went all red in the face, her neck got splotchy, and she had to wipe her nose on her arm. “You have to know that you—Seth, you—are the most important thing in—”

  “Dope is the most important thing to dopers,” Seth said. “Everyone knows that. Like Steve, like your parents, like everyone. Where the hell did you get this stuff? How’d you figure out . . . ?” It came to Seth even as he was speaking. “Langley,” he said. “I bet it was the music store. You said you needed strings and rosin and you kept me from going in with you. That was when, wasn’t it? Someone in the music store knew where to find this stuff. Someone told you and you made contact and that was that.”

  “Please,” Prynne cried. “Please don’t leave me. I’ll stop. I swear it. I can stop, Seth. I’ve done it and I can do it again. I can. I will.”

  “Your mom and dad said you’ve been in recovery three times. Three times and they spent their savings and some college money trying to get you straight. Do you know that, Prynne? All their savings before they gave you the boot.”

  “They . . . they should have told me. They never told me. They should have told me. I didn’t know. I swear. If I knew, I would’ve—”

  “What? Been cured because they’d used up all their money trying to get you cured?”

&nbs
p; She rose creakily. She extended her hands in a gesture that looked like someone pleading for a handout on the street. “Please help me,” she said. “Do you think I want to be this way? Do you believe that I haven’t tried and tried and told myself . . . but they sent me to the wrong kinds of places. I went and I did everything they told me to do and it didn’t take. But something will. I know something will. I swear I’ll make something work for me. You have to believe that. Just don’t . . . Oh God please don’t give up on me. I know we can make it together. And what’s changed? Nothing, Just this. I have a problem. I’m trying to solve it. Help me solve it.”

  Seth began to gather what he’d dumped from the tin. Prynne touched his arm so tentatively that it felt like the touch of a frightened kitten. “If you give up on me, too, I won’t have anyone. And you and me . . . we’ll lose our chance at happiness, Seth. And we were happy. I know we c’n be happy again.”

  Seth closed the tin on its foul contents, but what he saw in his mind’s eye was Prynne playing her fiddle that first day he’d encountered her. He saw the liveliness of her, the joy in her music, the way she carried her audience effortlessly with her. He saw her in her gypsy shirt and her old blue jeans, tapping a foot shod in a cowboy boot. He saw her when she was asleep in the morning and when she sat up in bed at night reading a book. He saw her helping his mom cook dinner, throwing the ball for Gus, showing Grand his flash cards, and more than anything else, he saw her believing in him.

  What he knew was that he couldn’t let her go. What he knew was that he didn’t know how to keep her.

  42

  On the day designated to introduce Rejoice to his parents, Derric took Becca with him to pick her up in La Conner. Rejoice didn’t get into the car at once, though. Instead, she stood before Becca and looked her directly in the eyes. “I got something I have to say to you,” she announced.

  Becca had been wearing the earbud, so she hadn’t a clue what Rejoice wanted to tell her. Before she could reply, though, Rejoice rushed on with, “I acted bad with you a bunch of times and I’m really sorry. I was, like, gynormously dumb. Der was trying to be cool with me and to make sure he didn’t do anything to give me the wrong idea. I was totally the one to try to make something happen between us. And I got to say now . . . I’m so happy to have a real brother. I mean a real brother from the same parents. It makes me feel like I have a place in the world, if that makes sense.”

  “It totally makes sense,” Becca told her.

  “C’n we be friends, then?” Rejoice said.

  “Like, forever,” Becca replied.

  The two girls hugged and Derric cried, “Group hug!” and threw his arms around both of them.

  Becca felt what the word bittersweet had to mean: the joy of Rejoice’s homecoming into a family comprising her only sibling and the sadness of having no sibling of her own and of having no knowledge of where her family—in the person of her mother—was.

  They piled into the car for the drive to Derric’s house near Goss Lake. When they arrived, Becca saw the building through Rejoice’s eyes, pleasantly gray-shingled in a clearing made to contain it, with the land surrounding it left in its natural state of ferns, salal, wild huckleberries, and grasses. Rejoice, she saw, was taking it all in.

  Once inside the house, Derric called out “We’re here” and his parents responded with “In the kitchen” and “In the office.” He and the girls chose the kitchen, and trooped in that direction to find Rhonda icing a cake meant for their dessert that evening. She looked up as Derric said, “Here’s Rejoice, Mom.”

  Becca could never have predicted what happened next. Rhonda said nothing for a moment. Her lips parted, then closed, then curved in a smile. She said, “My holy God. You’ve found your sister,” and then she cried out, “Dave! Come here!”

  She crossed quickly to Rejoice and took both her hands, saying, “You are lovely, sweetie. Welcome.”

  Derric, Becca saw, was completely dumbfounded. So was she. They looked at each other wordlessly as Dave Mathieson hurried down the hall from his office, coming in answer to the insistence he’d heard in Rhonda’s voice. He stopped short at the sight of Rejoice. Then he said, “Good Lord. They were right.”

  Dave went to Rejoice, saying, “Well, you’re the image of him. We should have known. Had we known, things would’ve been different.”

  Next to Becca, Derric stirred. He said, “You guys want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Let’s go to the living room,” was Rhonda’s reply.

  There she explained, and her explanation was simple. The director of the orphanage had suspected that Derric had a sister among the children who were picked up off the Kampala streets on the day he’d been taken to the orphanage. But there were twenty-five children brought in to Children’s Hope of Kampala on that hot afternoon, and among them at least twenty were sobbing their little hearts out, terrified because their world was undergoing an upheaval again. All of them had lost their parents—mostly to AIDS—and getting along on the street had become a way of life. Now they were thrust into yet another world, this one peopled by strangers who were examining them, administering strange syrups and pills to them, inoculating them, bathing them, finding clothes for them, assigning them to beds, assessing them for everything from language skills to the ability to follow simple directions. Derric, five years old at the time, had been put at once into Sick House. He’d come into the orphanage with pneumonia and a fever raging at 105 degrees.

  “You talked about a sister,” Rhonda said, “but you were so ill that it seemed you might be imagining her or she might have died along with your parents. Had we known . . . Oh sweetie, I hope you know we never would have separated the two of you. We would have adopted Rejoice as well. But then later on, you never mentioned a sister and none of the girls ever said they had a brother.”

  “She was too little,” Derric told his mom. His face looked totally haunted. “Like I said before, Becca was the one to find her in La Conner. See, when I fell in the woods? When I was in the hospital all that time? Becca was there that day when I fell and she went back to the woods to try to figure out why I’d been there. I had a hiding place where she found the letters and . . . Becca always wanted me to tell you but I was scared because . . .” Tears began to course down his cheeks as he spoke, and he seemed to be unaware of them.

  “Oh, sweetheart, why?” Rhonda asked him.

  “Because I left her in Kampala when I could’ve maybe brought her here,” he said. “Because I never said when I could’ve said. Because I made it all about me coming to America and I liked you and wanted you to be my mom. . . .” He turned away from them all, raising his arm to cover his face.

  Rejoice scooted along the couch where they were sitting. She put her arms around him. She said, “Big bro, it’s so okay. I came to America anyway. You tried to tell them right when we got there to the orphanage. And me? I forgot I even had a brother, so I was always okay. We were both always okay.”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Dave Mathieson said.

  “I think we owe a lot to Becca,” Rhonda added.

  • • •

  BECCA HAD A small hope that Dave Mathieson might be of a different mind in the aftermath of the reunion and reconciliation among all of them. But that hope didn’t live long. Dave took her aside for a moment as Rejoice and Derric walked out to the car to make the drive back to La Conner.

  Dave said to Becca, “I need to thank you.”

  She was surprised. “What for?”

  “For finding Rejoice for him. Rhonda and I should have put in more effort, especially when those letters turned up.”

  “I had the advantage,” Becca said. “You knew he was writing to someone called Rejoice, but I knew Rejoice was his sister. And you did ask him about her. I think you did everything you were s’posed to do.”

  He ran his hand back through his salt-and-pepper hair. Up ahead, Derri
c and Rejoice laughed and bumped shoulders together and Rejoice cried out, “Oh totally no way!”

  Dave said, “One way or the other, you did a good thing. We’re grateful for that.” And then when Becca would have left in good spirits, he said, “Have you told him yet? Olivia Bolding and her search for Hannah Armstrong?”

  “I promise I will.”

  “I hope you keep that promise,” Dave replied. “Things need to be made right everywhere, and in this case, you’re the best person to do it.”

  43

  When Jenn was next at school, she knew that she had two things that she absolutely had to accomplish. As soon as she saw Becca, she set about accomplishing the first of them. She didn’t want to become some dumbo who crashed through her life burning personal bridges right, left, and center, and she understood that she’d come pretty close to doing this with more than one person in her immediate group of friends.

  In their shared English class, she passed a note to Becca— Talk to you whenever???—and waited to see what would happen. Becca looked over at her and nodded. She mouthed the word lunch and Jenn nodded back.

  They met outside. They went to the back of the school where they could watch the potheads slithering up to the woods of South Whidbey Community Park. It was the kind of day that suggested an early summer instead of twenty days of nice weather beginning sometime after the Fourth of July. In Washington, though, you never knew, so they held their faces up to the sun while it was available to them.

  “My life’s getting . . . well, it’s sort of complicated,” Jenn said.

  “Yeah?” Becca lowered her head. She took her earbud thing out of her ear and started searching around in her backpack till she brought out a pipe cleaner that she used on it. Jenn waited. Becca looked up. “I c’n hear you good without this,” she said. “Especially when it’s just you and me.”

  “Oh! I didn’t know that. Did you tell me before?”

  “Prob’ly not. I forget to sometimes. Anyway, what’s happening?”