“Thirty-six million, huh? And I thought I was rich,” said Danny.
“You are rich.”
“So you’re Lily’s boyfriend? Husband?” He picked up his can of Budweiser and took a long sip.
“Just a friend.”
“She’s something else, isn’t she?” He looked over at her and smiled. She didn’t notice, too busy talking to her father in what looked to be a serious conversation.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, she’s something else. You know—different than the rest of ‘em. Not like the other girls. I mean, she’s hot—which you don’t see a lot of here in Burns Bog—but she’s got a good personality too. I like her a lot.” He continued to admire her from afar, not bothering to look back at Aaron.
“I guess so.”
“Hey man, can I ask you a question. Just between you and me?” Danny shuffled in closer to Aaron.
“What?”
“Don’t tell her I asked, okay?” His voice became low and he looked around to make sure no one was listening in.
Aaron shrugged. “Alright.”
“You seem to know her pretty well. Is she single? I don’t see a ring on her finger, but it seems hard to believe she doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything. Did she recently breakup with someone, or anything like that?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can I ask you another question? Just between you and me.” He shimmied in even closer and lowered his voice even more. “Are you into her?”
“Into her?”
“You know—planning on making a move. Because, you know, I don’t want to step on any toes here.”
Aaron hesitated. He thought about saying yes, just because he hated the idea of an idiot like Danny bringing Lily down with him. He would probably end up ditching her as soon as he saw the next girl, or he would end up keeping her around and cheating on her. But Aaron liked the idea of being friends with Lily, and he didn’t like the idea of gambling that friendship on a trying for a relationship. “No, I’m not interested in her like that. We’re just friends. She’s been showing me the town. Between us, she’s a little bit crazy for me. Lot’s of baggage, you know?” he said, hoping it would turn Danny off of the idea.
It didn’t. A smirk swept across Danny’s face and he laughed. “Hey, I have no problem with a little bit crazy. What did you say your name was again?”
“Fred.”
“Fred. I like you, Fred.” Danny raised his beer for a cheers. Of course, Aaron knew damn well that Danny didn’t like him. Aaron was fairly certain that, if it wasn’t for Lily, Danny would have smashed the bottle on the side of Aaron’s head, he hated him so much.
But Aaron was okay with that, because he thought Danny was just a less successful, less pronounced version of all the other NFL stars he’d met in his life. Danny was just a wannabe, a guy wishing he was the guy who idolized Mr Peanut. Let him squander his money, Aaron thought—let him try his luck with Lily. She knew better than to go for a thick-skulled loser like Danny.
Or did she?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next morning, the town of Burns Bog woke up to a heavy, windless snowfall. The snow was piling up faster than anyone could shovel it away. Cars wouldn’t make it out of their driveways, and phone-lines collapsed under the weight of the heavy build-up.
Lily watched the snow falling from the staffroom. She loved the snow. The number of issues the snow was causing that morning in Burns Bog should have caused a great deal of anxiety in Lily—no workers showed up and she couldn’t reach Danny by phone to tell him there would be no work until things cleared up—but the falling snow was too beautiful, too calming to get worked up over. “It is what it is,” her mother used to say to Lily when life’s problems were outside of her control.
She needed the peacefulness of the snow that morning, the serenity it brought. She needed it after the bombshell her father dropped on her the night before, at Danny’s welcome home party.
Kilgore had been seeing someone—a woman. Apparently, he’d been seeing her for a while. When Lily asked how long, Kilgore didn’t say, but she could see in his eyes that it had been a long time. Lily tried her best not to think of what that meant—whether he’d been having an affair or not. The thought made her nauseous.
As she watched the snow falling, she also tried her best not to think about her father’s possible mistress, the woman Kilgore was suddenly very keen on Lily meeting. “I feel like I’ve had this secret weighing me down for so long, and I just want to get everything off of my chest. We’ve talked, and we’ve decided we want to be serious.”
Lily didn’t have to ask any questions to find the answers she’d been looking for. Kilgore’s recent attitude shift, his sudden desire to move to Los Angeles—though, it still didn’t explain why he wanted to drag Lily to Los Angeles with him, but Lily was certain it was probably somehow related.
“Who is she?” was the only question Lily managed to ask through her shock.
She was a Chinese immigrant named Ming Wong, whom Kilgore met through an online dating website, presumably from Los Angeles. He’d never met her in person before, but “that doesn’t make her any less real,” according to Kilgore.
Amazingly, Lily did not vomit after receiving the news. Though she nearly did when her father told her, “I proposed on the weekend. She said yes. I understand this is hard for you to hear right now, but it’s what I want, Lily. It’s the first time I’ve been happy since your mother died—I mean—you know what I mean.”
Lily felt like a patient at a mental hospital, staring out at the falling snow in a state of mindless sedation. She was waiting for her father to show up and tell her what to do for the day but her father was still across the lot at their house and the window of his bedroom was lit. Lily wondered what was taking him so long. Then she pushed the thought away when she started to consider the possibility Kilgore was chatting with Ming Wong, his Chinese immigrant mistress from Los Angeles, California. Luckily, that was impossible since the phone-lines were all down, along with the internet, and communication was only possible with flapping lips and vibrating vocal chords.
So Lily looked back out the window and let the floating snowflakes pull her back into a state of hypnosis. An hour passed.
It was ten o’clock when Kilgore finally made his way down to the office. He looked unusually peppy but Lily didn’t care to ask why. “No one showed up. I’m guessing they’re all snowed in,” she said to her father.
“Good guess. Have you gotten a hold of Danny?”
Her gut turned. Kilgore didn’t call anyone by their first name—ever. It was even rare to hear him refer to her as Lily, and not Ms Parker. “The phone-lines are all down, Dad. I’ve tried about a dozen times.”
“Hm,” Kilgore said, pacing the room while he rubbed his chin. “Do you think you could get a truck over there?”
“A truck? What truck?”
“That truck.” He pointed out the window to a cube van. “I was talking to Danny last night, and he asked me if I knew where his indoor golf simulator was. When I got back in last night, I checked our files, and realized we have it here, in that truck. The truck looks so much like one of ours. It’s not. I guess we just need to be more careful from now on. He’s been hoping to practice his drive before the season starts up next month.”
“You want me to go out and bring him his indoor golf simulator in a blizzard?”
“If you don’t mind, and then that way you can tell him that we’re snowed in, so he doesn’t think we forgot about him.”
“I don’t think that truck will make it all the way to Danny’s house in this weather.” Danny’s house wasn’t within the city limits, twice as far away as Aaron’s house.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Fifty years in this business, I’ve never had a truck fail on me. You just have to keep it in a low gear and keep your tires moving through the turns. You’ll be fine.”
So Lily took the truck and started towards Danny’s house. The
truck nearly didn’t start. The engine coughed and barked for a while before taking, and then Lily had to rock it back and forth to get enough momentum to get it moving. The snowfall was so thick; her vision was limited to fifteen feet in any direction. All she could do was hope and pray that someone else wasn’t travelling in the opposite direction, which was unlikely because you’d have to be bonkers to try and drive anywhere in a whiteout that bad.
And had it been any other day, Lily would have told her father to take a hike. But given recent revelations, the last place she wanted to be was at home, at the lot, which was filled with memories of her mother and her father, together, happy, in love.
There was an old bench-swing that hung from one of the trees on the property. When Lily was hardly old enough to walk, she looked out the window and saw her parents sitting on that bench, swinging gently, holding hands. They dreamed of moving to Florida together, spending their old age watching the waves crashing against the shore. Back then, there was no Ming Wong. There was no talk about Los Angeles.
Now, everything was different.
Lily wiped the stray tear from her cheek and tried to change the course of her mind. She put on the radio, but there was only static, so she put in a CD—Aaron Brown’s CD. The first song on the album began to play and then it stopped, along with the car’s engine.
“No, no, no,” she said, turning the key in the ignition. The engine wouldn’t respond—not even with a cough, a growl, or a sputter. The truck was dead and she wasn’t even halfway to Danny’s house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lily was over five miles from town, and a good ten miles from Danny’s house. But she wasn’t even a quarter mile from Aaron’s house. So after a moment of frustrated disappointment, and then another moment of stress and deliberation, Lily started on foot towards Aaron’s house.
The quarter-mile uphill hike was surprisingly tedious thanks to the deep snow, the harsh cold, and the limited visibility. Her bare fingers were shades of blue and ivory when she finally reached Aaron’s door and knocked. No one answered and strangely, the door was locked.
She did a lap around the house, looking in through the windows and yelling out Aaron’s name. Still, there was no reply. On her way back around the house, she noticed a set of snowshoe tracks leading from the garage out towards the wilderness. Strange, she thought. Aaron didn’t seem like he enjoyed snowshoeing too much when it was nice out—never mind in a total whiteout. Lily’s body was beginning to tremble, so she stopped questioning the tracks and started following them instead. She didn’t have much time to think before the cold crept into her bones. The snow was already up past her knees and the fresh snow was beginning to make the tracks disappear.
It didn’t occur to her until she was well out of sight of Aaron’s home that there would be no tracks to follow back if she didn’t find Aaron. Within minutes, the snowfall had become heavier. Fifteen feet of visibility became ten feet, and then five feet. Panic set in. The tracks were gone. She spun around, but couldn’t tell which direction was which. She could hardly see her own feet, never mind her own tracks.
“Aaron!” she called out. Her voice didn’t even echo back at her. Tears began to cloud her vision. “Aaron!” she screamed again. Still, there was no reply.
She was in a snowy purgatory, a frozen limbo. Blind. No sense of direction. It would only take a few minutes for her body to become buried once she stopped walking. Between the snow and her tears, Lily’s surroundings had been reduced to a blur of white. She dropped down to her knees, and she could feel the snow rising around her, engulfing her, consuming her.
Someone’s arm wrapped around her and lifted her up, pulling her tight into its body. “Are you okay?” It was the voice of Aaron. It was his warm embrace that was now holding her, warming her. She tried to reply but she was weak—so weak that she blacked out.
When she came back to, she was wrapped up in a warm blanket, on a couch across from a roaring, crackling fireplace. It was Aaron’s living room, but Aaron wasn’t in it. She considered that possibility that she was waking up from a nightmare, and then she considered the possibility that she was currently in a mid-death hallucination.
As she sat up, she was overwhelmed by a splitting headache, which she tried to muffle with both of her hands. Her hands did nothing.
“She’s awake.” Aaron came into the living room with two steaming mugs. “By God, she’s awake!”
She wanted to ask what happened, but she already knew the answer, and didn’t want to relive it. “You saved me,” she said instead. “Thank you so much.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank whatever hillbilly god you people here believe in. The only reason I found you is because I nearly tripped over you. What were you even doing out there?”
“Looking for you. My truck broke down just down the street from here.” The headache came back with a bite and Lily winced. It continued to come and go in waves.
“Why didn’t you just wait in the house?”
“It was locked.”
“Oh right.” After the last time Lily let herself into his house, he started to lock his doors. It wasn’t just Lily, but everyone in the backwards town. The day after Aaron moved in, some God-fearing woman let herself into Aaron’s when he didn’t answer the door. The crazy lady walked all the way up to Aaron’s bedroom, yelling “Is anyone home? I’d like to talk to you about our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ!” Aaron hid in the closet until the psychopath left.
Lily grabbed the steaming mug that Aaron brought her, which was filled with hot chocolate. She smelled it before taking a sip. “It smells good,” she said.
“It’s just the crappy store-bought stuff.”
“That’s my favourite stuff.”
Aaron took a seat on the adjacent couch. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
Lily looked up at Aaron. Before she could respond, she noticed his face—which was no longer covered by a thick, wiry beard. He’d shaven it off. He looked at least ten years younger, like a baby, like the Aaron Brown she grew up with. Lily spat out her mouthful of hot chocolate. “Your face!” she said, eyes wide.
Aaron felt his face, as if he didn’t know what Lily was talking about. “Oh yeah, I shaved this morning.”
Lily hesitated. “Why?” She couldn’t peel her eyes from his face. She was suddenly shy, nervous, starstruck. Without his beard, his identity became real, not that Lily didn’t believe it was actually him, but because she was now staring at the same face she last saw singing in front of seventy thousand screaming fans in a massive stadium.
Aaron continued to feel his face with his hand. He turned and looked at his reflection in the nearby window. “What do you think? Does it look weird? It’s been five years since my face has seen the light of day.”
“Weird?” Lily said, still staring mindlessly at Aaron’s face. “No, it doesn’t look weird.” She was practically drooling. It was the grownup face that People’s Choice rated the sixth sexiest, and that was back when it was on his hardly-an-adult body. Now, it sat atop a matured, chiselled masterpiece of a body.
“I can’t decide if I like it or not. I might grow the beard back.”
“No,” Lily said, nearly shouting. Her cheeks became red. “I mean, do whatever you want. I think it looks fine this way.”
Aaron rose to his feet. “I’ve been trying to call an ambulance, but I can’t get through.”
“I think the lines are down—but I’m okay. Really. I’m feeling much better.”
Aaron stared down at her. She was looking a thousand times better—there was colour in her face and she had stopped shaking. “You should probably still get checked out.”
“I feel fine, seriously.” As she said it, another wave of headache washed over her and she winced.
Aaron continued to stare in silence, trying to decide for himself whether she needed to see a doctor. “At least let me bring you to a clinic when the storm clears up. Until then, get some rest. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“
Thank you, Aaron.”
“Don’t mention it.” Aaron left the room with his mug of hot chocolate. “This storm doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, so you’ll probably be stuck here tonight.”
Lily looked towards the large, picture window, which held back a massive mound of deepening snow. Heavy snowflakes continued to float down, obscuring the distant treeline.
The headache continued to come in waves, but each wave was weaker than the one before it. Tired, Lily closed her eyes and began to drift asleep. Then, she heard the quiet, muffled strum of a guitar emanate from the basement. After a few chords, she could hear Aaron’s voice, singing his own song, Calling to the Trees, beautifully. Even fifteen years since she’d last seen him perform, he was still able to hit the same high notes. His voice was the same with an added twang of hoarseness and emotion.
The pain in her head subsided. She was warm, comfortable, and safe. Before the song was out, she drifted to sleep and she was happy.
PART TWO
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
JIMI HENDRIX
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Lily woke up the next morning, the house was silent. The snowstorm had stopped, and a newly formed snowdrift covered half of Aaron’s living room window. Lily stood up from her couch bed, touching her feet down on the toasty-warm floors. The fireplace was still crackling, flames still high as if someone had just added new logs. Upon closer inspection, the logs were still fresh, not yet black, not yet engulfed completely. But the house was silent, and no one but Lily was up and about.
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