Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  “You saw her the night she died.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what they’re saying.”

  He slumped forward and hung his head so I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “You saw her, didn’t you? You had a fight? At the Jack Knife?”

  He nodded.

  “Why? What was it about?”

  He kept his eyes lowered and didn’t answer.

  “Tell me. Please.”

  He lifted his head, looked straight at me.

  “Please,” I said again. “I want to believe you. But you have to tell me the truth. All of it from the beginning.”

  He hesitated, drew in a long breath, let it out again. Finally, he said, “She wanted to know about something that happened a long time ago, something that was none of her damn business. I told her to leave it alone, to leave me alone, but she kept asking questions. So I shouted at her, I said things I shouldn’t have. I made a scene. And then I left. By myself. I lost my temper and I made a mistake behaving how I did, but she was alive when I left the bar. I never saw her again after that. And that’s it. That’s what happened. That’s the whole story.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” He scowled at the ceiling.

  “What about the jacket?”

  “I told you already, I found it in the bushes.”

  “You didn’t know it was hers?”

  He paused a few seconds before answering. “She wasn’t wearing a jacket at the bar. I didn’t think anything about it until you told me you found her body in the river.” He leaned close to the glass, holding my gaze. “Sam, listen. If I’d known that jacket was hers, I would have left it right where I found it and called the police. I would have never brought it back to our meadow.”

  I dropped my gaze. He’d wanted to take the jacket to the police from the start. He’d wanted to tell the truth about everything. But I’d been so afraid. I hadn’t trusted him at all.

  “Sam.”

  I looked up again. He laid one hand against the glass.

  “This isn’t your fault.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek.

  “It was my responsibility. I’m the parent.” He pulled his hand away from the glass and looked down at the counter. “Sometimes I forget how young you still are.”

  “What about the key?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know how it got there.”

  “You lied to me about the scratches.”

  He rubbed his eyes again, nodding.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want you to think . . .” He took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter why. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you everything.”

  “Like how you went to prison for driving drunk and killing somebody?”

  He jerked back like I’d slapped him, and tightened his grip on the phone.

  I said, “That’s what you and Taylor Bellweather were fighting about, wasn’t it?”

  Bear’s mouth twitched, and his jaw tensed, and I saw just how much of himself he’d been hiding behind his beard.

  I continued, “That’s why you got so upset? Because she kept pushing? When all you wanted to do was forget?”

  Bear took a deep breath.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He scraped his lips over his teeth and was quiet for so long I was afraid he wasn’t going to answer me, that I would have to leave this place still not knowing. Then he sighed and propped his head in his hand. “Have you opened the new hive yet?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Don’t wait too long,” he said. “That burr comb can get bad faster than you’d expect. And if the queen’s not laying—”

  “Bear, stop. I know how to take care of the bees.”

  We stared at each other.

  I switched the phone to my other hand and asked again, “Why didn’t you tell me about the accident?”

  He shrugged. “You were just a kid when it happened. And then a couple years went by and I was starting to feel like I was getting my life back again. Like maybe I could even put it behind me and move on.”

  “You should have told me. I deserved to know. Ollie, too. We both deserved the truth.”

  “It just never seemed like a good time.” He leaned his forehead against the palm of his hand. “I’m not the same person I was back then, and I couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing you.”

  “You were gone for two years! You left us and we had no idea where you went. You didn’t call. You didn’t write. You just vanished. I was worried sick about you. And Ollie, she was just a baby and I was worried about her too. And Mom wouldn’t tell us anything.” My hands were shaking. “Those two years were the worst years of my life.”

  “Sam, I’m sorry. I called. I wrote. I did all those things, but your mother . . .” He shifted his weight on the stool and sat up a little straighter. “We both thought it would be best if you didn’t know about the accident and my time in prison. We were trying to protect you. We thought it would be better for you in the long run.”

  I clamped my teeth down hard, biting back all the words I wanted to scream at him, all the ways he’d failed us. I thought about the unfinished letters I’d found in the teepee, how it seemed he’d started to tell me, but the words had slipped his grasp. All the explanations and apologies in the world couldn’t change what had happened. We carry our pasts with us, no matter how hard we fight to break free. He knew it, Mom knew it. I knew it now, too. I took a deep breath, and then another. I came here for the truth, and that’s what Bear was giving me—take it or leave it.

  I started to hang up the phone.

  “Wait,” Bear said.

  I brought the phone to my ear again, but I didn’t look at him. I stared at the scabs on my knees.

  He said, “It’s nearly impossible for a bee to join a colony she wasn’t born into. Did you know that?” He paused, but when I didn’t respond, he continued, “She can bring gifts. Pollen, nectar. And maybe the hive will accept her as one of their own. Maybe. Usually, though, it doesn’t end well. It’s the pheromones. She doesn’t smell right. They can tell she doesn’t belong.”

  I lifted my head.

  Bear laid his palm flat against the glass again. “I tried, Sam. I wanted to come back. I wanted to start over. And I wanted us to be a family again, but . . .” His mouth stayed open, stuck on some excuse that wouldn’t fix anything. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. If I could go back in time, I would. If I could do everything over . . .”

  I watched him a few seconds, taking in the way his shoulders sagged and how his hand moved across his chin, pulling at a beard he no longer had. I said, “The night Taylor Bellweather died? That night you left me and Ollie alone all night in the meadow?”

  He blinked at me.

  “Where were you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “To me it does.”

  “I was alone, Sam,” he said. “The whole night. No one saw me. No one can give me an alibi. So, no, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I want to know where you were.” I leaned close to the glass. “I want to know what was so important you left us alone.”

  He closed his eyes. After a while, he opened them again and said, “I was visiting your mother.”

  I pulled back a little. “At the cemetery?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I needed to . . .” He swallowed hard and fast and wiped his hand down his face. “I needed to say good-bye.”

  He had skipped Mom’s funeral. I’d pleaded and Grandma had argued for over an hour, but he still refused to leave the house with us. He said he wanted to remember his wife alive and smiling, not laid out in some ridiculous coffin, low
ered into the ground, and covered in dirt. I told him he was selfish. He’d shrugged his shoulders and told me maybe when I fell in love I’d understand.

  Bear tapped his finger on the shelf. “I let her down so many times. I let you all down.”

  I leaned close to the glass again, waiting for him to continue.

  “I shouldn’t have gone to the Jack Knife that night. I shouldn’t have been there. But I wanted to do something symbolic, something to show that I was ready to start over. Really start over this time. With you and with Ollie.” His eyes pleaded with me to understand. “I ordered a scotch straight up, but I wasn’t going to drink it. Honest to God. I was going to leave it there on the bar. I was going to get up and walk out and leave it all behind.” He shook his head. “And then that reporter. She just showed up out of nowhere and sat down next to me like we were old friends. She sat down and started asking questions and digging up ghosts, and all the worst parts of me came rushing back. After I left, I just . . . I couldn’t come back to the meadow after what happened at the bar. Not right away. I needed to be alone for a while, get my head straight.”

  He rubbed his chin.

  I gripped the phone tighter.

  He said, “I went to your mother. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for everything. For ruining our family and for not being a better father to you and Ollie. For failing her as a husband. I wanted to tell her I was sorry and I missed her and that things were going to be different starting now. I was going to change. I was going to look after you and Ollie the way I should have been doing all these years. I was finally going to be the father you both deserve.”

  He closed his eyes, and I wanted to tell him he hadn’t let anyone down, that he was a good father, the best, but the words jammed in my throat. When he opened his eyes again and looked at me, something had changed, something I didn’t understand right away.

  He stiffened his shoulders and took a deep breath. He said, “You and Ollie are going to be fine now. Grandma and Grandpa will take good care of you. Better than anything I could ever do.”

  I pulled back, startled, realizing what was happening, not wanting it to be true. “What do you mean? You’re not thinking of . . . you can’t stay here. You can’t let them . . . you didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “I will never be the father you need me to be, Sam. I’ve tried. And I just can’t. I already had my chance. And I blew it. I belong in here.” He sighed and lowered his head, hiding his face from me. “It’s better for you and Ollie this way. It’s better for everyone.”

  “No,” I said. If there hadn’t been glass between us, I would have reached out and grabbed his chin, forced him to look me in the eyes and say those words again.

  “I know you’re upset now, but you’ll get used to the idea,” he said. “You’ll see I was right. Just give it some time.”

  “You can’t give up now.” My voice rose louder. “You have to keep fighting. For us. For me. And Ollie. And Mom. What about Mom? She wouldn’t want this.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the guard by the door and nodded, then turned back to me and said, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “Bear, don’t do this!”

  He hung up the phone, stood, and walked away from me.

  “Dad!” I pounded on the glass and shouted for him to come back, but it was an underwater sound, too weak to carry very far.

  The buzzer sounded. The door on his side opened. And then he was gone.

  Zeb and I sat in his truck in the parking lot outside the jail. The keys were in the ignition, but the engine was off. I cranked down my window and turned my face to catch the breeze. Zeb buckled his seat belt. Then he unbuckled it again, rubbed his hands across his knees, and said, “You know, when I found your daddy in the meadow, I didn’t know what to think at first.”

  A group of people came out of the jail, walked down the front steps, went to their separate parked cars, drove away.

  “He was half starved and not dressed right for the winter we were having,” Zeb said. “I brought him up to the house, gave him some supper and a clean set of overalls, a nice heavy coat. Even offered him a bed for the night, but he said it’d been too long since he slept out under the stars. Said if it wasn’t too much trouble, could he just stay awhile in that old pasture I wasn’t using anymore? I told him he could stay there as long as he needed, but he’d have to give me fifty dollars a month when he had it so I could tell anyone who asked he was renting the place, not just squatting. He wanted to give me three hundred that night. Said it was all he had. I took a hundred and told him to use the rest for food and a nice warm sleeping bag.”

  I propped my chin on my hand, stared out the window, and tried to imagine Bear’s first, cold night. The hard ground, the chill creeping into his bones. The shame he must have felt for what he’d done, how heavy it all must have been to keep him from coming home to his wife and daughters. I imagined him looking up, seeing nothing but black space and glinting stars after all those months in prison and beginning to feel the first sparks of freedom and stirring of possibility, a longing to start over. I’d been to the meadow enough times now to understand why he’d stayed.

  Zeb said, “We all knew who he was, a’course.”

  I looked at him. He was staring out the windshield, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Zeb turned and met my gaze. The hard lines around his mouth softened into a weak smile. “Well, now. The accident happened west of here, out near Suttle Lake. Your father was driving back to Eugene. The other car, coming on home to Terrebonne.”

  “Did you know the other driver? The person who died?”

  Zeb bit his lower lip, hesitating a moment, then saying, “It wasn’t the driver who died.”

  “But you knew them?”

  Zeb nodded. He twisted his hands on the wheel, his knuckles protruding sharply beneath his thin skin. “It was Billy Roth driving the other car. His daughter, Delilah, was riding along with him.”

  “Travis’s sister?” I pinched the skin between my finger and my thumb, but it didn’t make the pain in my stomach hurt any less.

  “Yep,” Zeb said. “She wasn’t too much younger than Ollie is now when it happened.”

  I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Was it quick?”

  Zeb coughed once. “Don’t know. I expect so. Those roads can get real slick in the winter, real icy. Hard enough to drive that pass sober. Papers said your daddy crossed the center line, scraped along the side of Billy’s car, and pushed them through the guardrail over the edge of a short cliff.”

  I snapped my eyes open, not wanting to picture it, not wanting those dark images to form.

  “They hit a tree.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. Really, I am. I know this is hard to hear.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. No, it is. But it’s . . .” And I couldn’t think of how to describe what I was feeling, a sort of sinking heaviness in the pit of my stomach, and yet light and tingling at the same time, like my body was getting too big to fit in my skin.

  “It’s better to know,” he said. “I would have said something a long time ago, but your mama asked me to keep it a secret.”

  I leaned my head back against the seat and sighed.

  “She thought she was doing what’s best,” Zeb said, reaching and taking my hand, squeezing it once, then letting go. “I never once thought your daddy was a bad man. Some people did, even I suspect your daddy himself, but not me. Not Franny. During the trial, and even after. We always just said he was a man who made a bad mistake. That’s all. And he deserved a second go at life just like the rest of us if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation. When he came around again, I wasn’t surprised. Figured he still had his own demons to fight. And maybe, too, he wasn’t done doing penance. Whatever his reasons for returning, I tho
ught the least we could do was give him a safe place to stay until he put himself back together again, until he was ready to go home. What I didn’t figure was that he’d stay so long. Or that he’d start to feel so much like family. And I sure as hell didn’t figure on you and your little sister.”

  He laughed quietly to himself, then said, “For what it’s worth, though Lord knows it ain’t worth much, I know your daddy didn’t kill that reporter.”

  It was me reaching for his hand this time around and when I had it, I didn’t let go.

  Franny was waiting for us at the kitchen table with Deputy Santos. They were deep in conversation but stopped talking when Zeb and I came through the door. Deputy Santos was in plain clothes, jeans and a button-up green shirt. No hat, no badge, no gun. We made eye contact, but I didn’t smile at her, and she didn’t smile at me.

  Franny started to get up.

  “Sit down, Mother,” Zeb said, resting his hand gently on her shoulder. “It’s just us.”

  Franny lifted a plate of oatmeal cookies from the table and offered them to me. “How’s your father?”

  I shrugged and took a cookie even though I didn’t want one.

  Zeb said, “Seems to be gettin’ on all right.” He opened the cupboard above the coffeemaker. “Fresh pot?”

  Franny nodded. “Left some for you.”

  Zeb took down a gray mug, then glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hot cocoa?”

  “Sure. I’ll get it,” and I stepped up behind him to grab my mom’s mug. I moved aside a white and yellow one, and one that said I’D RATHER BE FISHING, but I couldn’t find her ruby red one with white polka dots. And it suddenly seemed the most important thing. As if wrapping my hands around it would be the same as a hug. As if touching my lips to where hers had been would be the same as a kiss. As if somehow, I could be close to her again, find comfort, feel protected.

  I turned away from the cupboard to look in the dish rack by the sink. Zeb finished pouring his coffee and sat down at the table beside Deputy Santos who lifted her cup to take a drink. Rounded red sides, white polka dots. My mother’s cup. The cookie I’d been holding was now a crumbled, sticky mess. I threw it in the trash before anyone noticed.