by Lisa Wingate
“Nnn-no,” he whispered, his face hidden in the shadow my body cast over him. “Just . . . the cot . . . cot-tage.”
“Clay, you need to be looked after. We need to call a doctor. You shouldn’t try to get up until someone checks your neck.”
His grip tightened, and he shook violently. Rolling to the side, he pulled his knees under himself in an attempt to gain his feet. A violent cough racked his body, and his arms quivered inside his coat as he struggled to brace himself up.
“Unn-no, Hess . . . the cot . . . cot. . . tage. Just help . . . meeee . . .”
I understood his plea, even though I didn’t want to. He was desperate to avoid having everyone else see him like this.
I knew it wasn’t the best course of action, nor the safest, but I helped him up. Tremors wracked his body, and he swayed against me, leaning hard on my shoulders as we dragged trails in the frost, one unsteady, labored step, then another, across the hillside, the distance seeming an impossible barrier. In our wake, Roger followed quietly.
My lungs were burning by the time we reached the porch and climbed up. My knees buckled and shook under the strain of lifting Clay’s weight up each step and then finally through the door. The night chill followed us inside, clinging to us, and I laid my brother on the couch, then went back and closed the door. Roger trailed me nervously as I opened the damper wide and grabbed the quilts from the bed, piling them on top of Clay. His face and hands were white, icy cold. Turning on the lights, I saw the blood-streaked hair on the side of his head and bent to check it. The cut wasn’t that large, but it had bled quite a bit, and the flesh around it had swollen into a nasty lump. Roger sat beside Clay and watched with concern as I made an ice pack and wrapped it in a kitchen towel. Moaning, Clay rolled onto his side and curled into a ball, his body trembling when the towel touched his head.
“Shhh,” I soothed, looking under the towel, then carefully placing it back on my brother’s hair. This wasn’t an unfamiliar position for us. As a kid, Clay was always falling out of trees or having wrecks on his bike and coming home with injuries. “You’ve got a pretty good bump under there.” The blood in his hair was crusty and tipped with ice. How long had he been out there? How much longer would he have made it in the cold, if Roger hadn’t come looking for me? Roger might have saved his life.
Clay could be gone right now. We could be one of those families, huddled together in some hospital in the middle of the night, telling a police officer that we didn’t know Clay had a substance abuse problem.
Despite what Blaine had told me, what he’d promised, was there any other possible explanation for Clay’s behavior, for what had happened tonight? I wanted to come up with one, but I couldn’t. How could Clay do this? How could he be so irresponsible? How could my mother have let it go on? Clay could have killed someone on the road. He could have killed himself.
“What happened to you?” I leaned over to him, tried to pry his eyes open, to tell whether his pupils were dilated. “Where were you tonight? What were you doing?”
Groaning softly, he batted my hand out of the way, taking over holding the ice pack. “G-guess . . . I . . . uhhh . . .” His brows squeezed, and his lips drew back, his teeth clenching as he changed positions slightly. “I’m . . . so c-cold.” Another round of shivers racked his body.
“Clay, where were you tonight?” I sat on the coffee table, an ache spreading inside me but my voice surprisingly level, my mind still racing. Should I call 9-1-1? Go wake up Mom and the uncs? Drive him to a hospital? “What happened?”
His free hand dragged the quilts higher, then investigated the head wound, his fingertips quivering at the hairline, slipping under the ice pack slightly, then pulling back. “I bump . . . g-guess I bumped my head-d-d. . . .” He opened his eyes, then let them fall closed again.
“Clay!” I snapped, in the bossy, impatient big-sister voice from days gone by. “Clay, don’t you dare go to sleep. You tell me what happened. Now. How did you end up out there?”
Slowly, he shook his head, the frosty tips of his hair melting into little round pools, some clear, some reddened with blood. Roger climbed onto the opposite end of the sofa and belly-crawled forward, resting his chin on Clay’s leg. “Hey, bud-d-dy.” Clay reached for the dog, but then just let his hand fall and sighed. “Got home . . . from . . . from Amy’s, I th-think. The truck . . . rolled down . . . maybe. What . . . what time is . . . ?”
I glanced at the clock by the stove. “It’s four thirty-five in the morning. It’s freezing. What were you doing, sitting out there in your car?” Had he come home, parked the car, and passed out, or had he arrived home so messed up that he’d driven right off the end of the driveway? Had he gone out there to maybe take a hit of something where he wouldn’t be seen? What? “Clay, what were you doing sitting in your car in the middle of the night? When did you get home? What time?”
Dragging his eyelids upward again, he moved the ice pack away from his head, the white towel now pink with watery blood. “I’m not . . . don’t remember . . . coming. Here . . . take this. It’s-s-s cold.” He set the ice pack on the table and bunched the blankets under his chin. Roger looked at me, brows wrinkling, as if he were doing the same thing I was doing—trying to piece together the evening’s events. Clay had been out on a date with Amy, come home and . . .
“You’ve been outside a long time, Clay. What were you doing in the truck? Why didn’t you go in the house when you got home?”
“Ummmph . . . don’t remem . . . ber,” he muttered, turning his head away as if I were disturbing him. “Fell asleep . . . I guess. I was . . . listening . . .” His voice drifted off as he sank deeper into the pillows. “ . . . to a song . . . I think.”
“So you were listening to a song, and you fell asleep, and the truck rolled down the hill. Is that right?”
“Umm . . . maybe. Yeah-h-h. I g-guess.”
He shivered again, his knees curling upward. I wanted to grab him and shake him, yell at him, You know what, if it weren’t for the fig tree, you’d be in the lake right now! If Roger hadn’t been outside, you might have frozen to death! What is wrong with you? What are you doing to yourself? “All right, listen. I’m going to go wake up Mom and the uncs, and we’re taking you to the hospital. You need an MRI or something to check for a concussion.” And a toxicology scan, too. We could kill two birds with one stone, and with a hospital report to back me up, we’d finally be able to face whatever Clay was dealing with. There would be no more room for denial, on anyone’s part.
I put my hands on my knees to push to my feet. My legs were stiff and logy, like I’d just run a marathon.
Clay caught my wrist, holding me in place, his eyes opening, suddenly more alert. “No.”
“Clay, you need help.”
He blinked hard, pushed against the sofa, and lifted himself slightly, as if he intended to get up and stop me from leaving. “I just fell . . . asleep. I’m fine.”
I couldn’t say why I gave in to the pull, but I sank onto the table again, weary, confused, drawn in by the sudden intensity in my brother’s face. “You’re not fine, Clay. People who are fine don’t fall asleep in the car and almost end up in a frozen lake. People who are fine don’t carry vials and ziplock bags in their pants pockets. They don’t sneak around in alleys, making secret pickups through back doors. You’re not fine. You’re on something, and that’s why you passed out in the truck tonight, isn’t it?”
“On some . . . thing?” His lip curled, flashing an eyetooth, and he blinked again, seeming alert but genuinely confused.
“Drugs, Clay.” Finally, the chance to spell it out, to confront the problem at the source, and with evidence to back me up. “Drugs. How stupid do you think I am? How long have you been doing this? Does Mom know you’re using? Do the uncs?” Does Blaine? He promised me you were fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Was he fooled like everyone else? Would he lie for you?
I jerked my arm back, but Clay’s fingers squeezed tighter. “There’s not
. . . There’s n-nothing to know.” He forced a lopsided, wavering smile before a shiver coursed through him. “I’m not on dr-drugs, Hess. I was just . . . tired. Too m-many late nights.”
“With Amy? With Amy, whom you’re so crazy-serious about that you’re texting with some chick from Fort Worth? Tara somebody? What’s going on with you, Clay? That’s not even like you. You’ve never been this way with people—lying, cheating, this whole line about taking over the restaurant, but you’re never there. You’re not exactly working yourself to death learning the business. If all of this is some sort of scam, you have to come clean. Now, Clay. Before things get any worse. You could have died tonight.”
Tears pushed into my eyes, blurred my vision of him, spilled over. He met my gaze, and through the sheen of water, I saw the little brother who had been my only reason to keep moving forward through the most violent storm of my life.
The words I hadn’t been able to find then came to me now. “I love you, Clay.” I realized it had been years since I’d said that to anyone, since I’d allowed myself to feel the raw vulnerability of love. A tomb inside me cracked open, a slumbering spirit rising like Lazarus. I remembered how it felt to really love. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
His fingers slid down my wrist, and he took my hand in his, pulled it toward him, tucked my fingers under his chin like he used to when he was little. Fresh tears filled my eyes. I remembered all the nights I’d sat by his bed, comforted his hurts. All the times we’d walked in the woods together, when I’d played along with his games of Robin Hood and Star Wars.
“I love you, too, Hess,” he whispered, his eyes earnest, compelling, tender, seeming completely lucid now. “I just fell asleep . . . and the p-parking brake . . . it’s old. That’s all. I promise . . . I’m not on dr-drugs, all right?”
“All right,” I answered. Then I just sat watching him, trying to decide what should come next.
The river reveals its mysteries in its own time.
—Anonymous
(left by Herbert Hampton, undertaker, Moses Lake)
Chapter 17
Valentine’s Day dawned bright and sunny. Clay was still sleeping on the cottage sofa when I walked up the hill for breakfast. I’d checked on him several times, and he seemed to be fine, just exhausted and embarrassed about what had happened. His admonitions not to worry Mom and the uncs swam in my head as I crossed the veranda. What possible good could come of my keeping it a secret that, if not for Roger, Clay might have drowned or been found on the lawn this morning, hypothermic or worse?
But in the back of my mind, there was a still, small voice. A memory of the look in Clay’s eyes when he begged me not to tell. If I outed him to the family, would he do what he had often done in the past when one of his card castles came tumbling down—simply take off for parts unknown, disappear into the wide, wide world until he decided he was ready to turn up again? What if this time, he disappeared forever?
But did I really have it in me to tell Mom and the uncs what Clay wanted me to tell them—that the Ladybug was marooned on a fig tree because it had rolled down the hill unoccupied? They would never know the difference, of course. Morning sun had caught the lawn. The frost was already melting off in glistening, watery patches, Clay’s footprints and mine bleeding together in an indiscriminate slug trail. Slipping through the back door, I took one last look at the truck, listing like a shipwreck as moisture drew streaks in the layer of grime. What was the right thing to do?
Inside the house, Mom and the uncs were gathered on the sun porch. Snatches of an ongoing conversation floated in the morning air, but the flow stopped abruptly when they heard me in the kitchen.
“Is that Heather?” Mom called.
“It’s me.” I leaned back from the counter to see if she was coming into the kitchen. When she didn’t appear, I poured a cup of coffee and headed for the sun porch, glancing into Uncle Herbert’s office as I passed. The desk was stacked with carefully-arranged piles of what looked like papers and receipts, and on the overhead shelf, an old mantel clock had been wound, its steady ticktock the only noise in the room.
Everyone turned my way in unison when I entered the sun porch. They were gathered around the wood stove, avoiding the winter chill at the edges of the room. The white shutters were closed on the back windows, barring the low-angled morning sun off the lake, which explained why Clay’s marooned truck hadn’t yet been noticed. I had the distinct feeling that I was interrupting something, though.
“So what’s the deal with the guy working in the office?” I asked, stalling for time, trying to decide what to say about Clay. I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t seen his vehicle balancing at a forty-five degree angle in the backyard.
Mom’s lips curved upward. She was trying to look cucumber-cool this morning, but she wasn’t. There was something haggard and haphazard about her appearance. She hadn’t combed her hair and plaited it in the usual braid. It hung loose around her shoulders, and mascara circles rimmed her eyes, as if she’d gotten out of bed in a hurry and come straight downstairs. “He’s just going over Uncle Herbert’s books from the funeral business—you know, getting everything ready for the sale.”
“The sale to you and Clay?” I was determined to pin her down. “Why would the books from the funeral home have anything to do with that? I thought you were buying the house so you could open a bed-and-breakfast, not a funeral home.” I stressed bed-and-breakfast, so as to let her know that I didn’t believe any of it. The entire time I’d been at Harmony Shores, I hadn’t seen Mom working to refit the house for use as a bed-and-breakfast any more than I’d seen Clay frying catfish.
Mom squirmed in her chair. “We just want to get everything squared away.” Scooting forward, she glanced out the side window toward the driveway, where the funeral sedan and the hearse were parked right now. “Have you seen Clay today?”
It was my turn to be uncomfortable. I felt the moment of truth upon me. To tell or not to tell? Tell, a voice insisted in my head. Tell them about last night.
But I remembered the way Clay looked at me—just the way he used to when the kids at school had picked on him or passed him over for a dodge ball game, or he’d forgotten to do some assignment and received a bad grade. Disappointing everyone and admitting failure, when he finally had to stop pretending and face it, was almost more than he could bear. All his life one big plan after another had come tumbling down upon him, like buildings constructed on sand. “He’s down in the cottage, asleep. He locked himself out last night,” I heard myself say. Guilt slipped over me, heavy and itchy. “His truck rolled down the hill. It’s stuck on the fig tree.”
That revelation, of course, was enough to end the morning conversation. Mom and the uncs hurried out to see about the truck. There was some discussion about waking Clay, but as usual, everyone was weirdly sympathetic to the fact that he’d kept himself out all night. They decided it would be just as well to let him rest, since there was really nothing he could do about moving the truck, anyway. In short order the uncs had made a few phone calls, and we were waiting for Blaine to show up with a tractor. He soon arrived wearing a faded barn jacket and jeans that were haphazardly tucked into the tops of muddy cowboy boots. The well-used boots called up a memory that unfurled, full and clear in my mind.
My father and I were at the farm when I was little. The barnyard was muddy, but he carried me over it, his feet sinking into the muck, his jeans tucked into the tops of his boots.
Closing my eyes now, I could smell the fresh scents of hay and Irish Spring soap. Dad set me on the tractor seat, then walked through the mud and opened the gate while I played with the steering wheel and the levers, pretending to drive. Finally, he climbed onto the seat behind me, and I half sat, half stood between his arms, my hands wrapped on the wheel next to his as the tractor chugged out of the barnyard. After we passed through the gate, we turned the wheel, pointing the tractor down the dusty lane that led past scrappy fencerows overgrown with mustang grapes and w
ild roses. The remaining animals on the farm were old and tired, seemingly unmotivated to challenge the ragtag barriers. My grandfather was known for being frugal to the point of patching the fences together until they were as threadbare as a hobo’s pants. Inside the pasture, the grass was short, the cattle shearing it down near the soil.
I pointed to a broken place where only one wire and a cedar tree kept the little herd of Angus cattle from making their way to the lane, where high grass awaited.
“They could get out,” I said, gazing back at the pasture. The bull looked massive and mean. I didn’t know much about cattle, but my grandmother had warned me many times to stay out of the cow pasture because the bull liked to chase people.
“They won’t get out,” Dad assured me. “There’s always been a fence there.”
“But there’s not a fence there now. Not really.” Even at nine years old, I was inquisitive, prone to questioning—a kid who liked science fairs and wanted electronics kits for Christmas when my mom insisted on buying me sets of watercolors, blank journals, classic novels, musical instruments, and weaving looms, trying to bring out my sadly anorexic whimsical side. The truth was that I wanted to be like my dad, to align myself with him, not with her. My dad’s world was measured, secure, reliable, while hers seemed unpredictable, like waves on a stormy sea.
In a weird way, I had a feeling that the very thing I disliked about her was what drew my father in. She ignited a different sort of passion in him, tossed glitter and spatters of bright color over his black-and-white life.
Then again, he was gone on business at least half of the time. He didn’t have to deal with the parties she threw to keep herself occupied when he was away. On those nights, there might be strangers in the living room discussing art-for-art’s-sake or rehearsing lines for community theater at all hours of the night, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there were children nearby who needed a snack and a bath, or a fresh diaper and a bedtime story. By eight years old, I had assumed responsibility for the practicalities of caring for Clay. Unless my father was there, I took care of baths, baby food, and read Cat in the Hat a million times.
