Last Kiss

by Luanne Rice

  She’d dreamed of a river flowing in slow motion. Overhead the stars were coming out, but they weren’t like stars in nature: they were not simply constellations, not just shapes suggested by a few stars, but actual beings come to life. Orion was really a hunter, the Pleiades were really seven sisters, Gemini were two twins, and Ursa Major was a big bear.

  Nell had been little in the dream, just a child. She’d been on her father’s shoulders, taking a walk by the river, and she’d stared up, delighted: so many beings and creatures up in the sky! She and her father had laughed, watching the bear run. But suddenly it turned on them, bared its teeth and came at them.

  That’s what woke her up: the image of that bear in the sky, about to eat her and her dad. Lying on the mattress, Nell tried to catch her breath. She started out dissecting the dream, trying to separate all the images. But then something else, a recent memory, pressed into her mind.

  Jeff…something he’d said.

  Nell lay still, her heart pounding. She stared at her open window, saw tendrils of fog drifting past. The atmosphere felt thick and impenetrable. Living at the beach brought the clearest days, when you could see out to Long Island and beyond. But it also brought heavy air, laden with moisture picked up from the sea, when every breath tasted of salt.

  She pushed herself up, rubbed her eyes and tried to wake up. Why did she feel so upset? Had her dream been about Jeff? Was he the bear, charging to attack? Looking around, she almost felt Charlie’s presence. They had spent so much time up here. If only she could turn to him, ask him about Jeff. But knowing she couldn’t, that he’d never come up here to the attic again, filled her with despair. She thought of Sheridan having to live in that empty house where Charlie had been so alive, and couldn’t imagine how hard it must be.

  And that made her remember: that was it, the thought pushing into her dream. Jeff had said he had something to tell her and Sheridan. The two of them together. Nell felt sick to her stomach. She should have gone straight there, to see Charlie’s mother, instead of falling asleep.

  Knowing she had to be with Sheridan, Nell stopped by Stevie’s studio to tell her where she was going. But Stevie was lost in painting, completely immersed in her work, so Nell didn’t say anything. She just walked downstairs and slipped out into the fog.

  THE JET HAD MADE ITS DESCENT and was now flying in slow circles. Gavin pressed his head to the window and couldn’t see the ground.

  “Why aren’t we landing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vincent said, starting to push the button to call the flight attendant when he entered the main cabin.

  “We’re fucking WOXOF,” Gavin said, staring down.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Indefinite ceiling zero, sky obscured, zero visibility,” Gavin said. “Fuck.”

  “The captain asked me to tell you New London is socked in,” the flight attendant said. “We’re waiting for the fog to clear so we can land.”

  “When does he think that will happen?” Gavin asked.

  “Uncertain,” the flight attendant said.

  “Laney and I have tickets to Shakespeare in Westerly,” Vincent said. “Outdoors, in the park, under the stars. Shit. The weather was supposed to be good.” He shrugged. “She’ll be pissed that I’m late, but at least if the weather’s too bad to land, the production will be canceled.”

  Gavin glared at him. “You’ve been a divorce lawyer too long,” he said. “Your thought processes are far too convoluted for anyone’s good. Where can we land?”

  “Sir?” the flight attendant asked.

  “Fog is coastal. How far inland do we have to fly to get away from it?”

  “I’m not sure,” the flight attendant said. “I’ll ask the captain.”

  He walked forward, disappeared into the cockpit.

  “Shit,” Gavin said out loud. He had tried Sheridan’s number repeatedly, but each time the call went straight to voice mail.

  “I know,” Vincent said.

  “What do I do?”

  “We’ll get there as soon as we can. Look, I bet Jeff won’t go see Sheridan at all. He’ll chicken out.”

  “No he won’t.”

  “He’s not going to stand there right in front of Charlie’s mother and confess to his murder.”

  “He’s on his way to see Sheridan, if he isn’t there already.”

  “Gavin, say that Randy was telling you the truth…”

  “He was,” Gavin said, remembering the scene back in Randy’s office, the anguish in Randy’s eyes as he finally told Gavin what had happened.

  “Well, even if he was—and it’s not a pretty story, sure makes Randy look bad, covering for Jeff all this time—say it’s true, and he’s right, why would it be bad for Sheridan to find out?”

  “She has to find out,” Gavin said. “But I need to be with her when she does. I don’t know if she can handle hearing it alone. And, shit—”

  “Shit, what?”

  “The kid is a loose cannon. Something triggered his anger that night, and he killed Charlie. What if Sheridan says the wrong thing? She’s going to explode when she hears—what if she provokes him into hurting her?”

  Vincent stared at him, nodding gravely.

  Gavin pressed his head to the Plexiglas and stared out into murky nothingness. They were a few thousand feet up, and just a few miles east of Hubbard’s Point. Once the plane landed, Gavin could be at Sheridan’s door within fifteen minutes.

  “I say as soon as we land, we call the cops. They can arrest him on suspicion of Charlie’s murder,” Vincent said.

  Gavin thought of what Randy had told him, saw his sunken, troubled eyes. This had haunted him. He thought of Sheridan, of the last year. If someone had ripped her heart out of her chest a year ago in that city park on the river’s edge, it would have been less painful than what she’d been through. He couldn’t imagine her going through this, too.

  “Excuse me,” the flight attendant said, emerging from the cockpit. “The news is not good. The fog extends all the way inland to Hartford, all along the Connecticut River Valley.”

  “Any updates on how long he thinks we’ll be circling?”

  “No. It seems there was a sudden and unexpected temperature inversion—cold air from Canada that had been held up by a stationary front seems to have—”

  “Can he land in Hartford?”

  “Brainard Field, yes,” the flight attendant said.

  “Ask him to do that,” Gavin said.

  Vincent nodded his agreement. The plane stopped circling; Gavin felt it level off and thrust forward, northwest toward Hartford. Still staring down at the invisible ground, Gavin heard Vincent talking, trying to calm him down. He was saying that Judy always tracked his flights, that as soon as she realized they were diverted, she’d call the limo company they used in Hartford and make sure there was a car waiting on the tarmac at Brainard when they landed.

  Gavin did the math: twenty minutes in the air, forty minutes—thirty if the driver was good—down to Hubbard’s Point. Worst-case scenario, he’d be at Sheridan’s within an hour.

  CHAPTER 21

  SHERIDAN SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, IN THE DAMP breeze and flickering candlelight, with Jeff. She was home, but everything felt unfamiliar, as if she had allowed this stranger into her house and with him entered a brand-new country.

  “You killed my son,” she said steadily.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The words seemed impossible, both from her lips and in her ears. This wasn’t a conversation people had. It was supposed to happen in police stations, or at crime scenes, between two strangers, one of them a cop. It took place between characters in a movie. It wasn’t supposed to be happening between a mother and the young man who’d killed her boy.

  “Do you want someone to be here with you now?” he asked nervously.

  She shook her head. “I need to hear straight from you what happened. I don’t want anyone else getting in the way of you explaining it to me. That’s why you came,
isn’t it? Because that’s what you want, too?”

  “What’s it matter?” he asked.

  “You’re right,” she said softly. “I don’t really care what you want.”

  Sheridan and Jeff sat across from each other, on the loveseats tucked by the fireplace. A low table rested between them; Charlie had made it from a driftwood log that had washed up after a storm, its gray wood smooth and silvered by time in Long Island Sound.

  In the center of the table, a shallow pottery bowl held shells and stones, all gathered by Sheridan and Charlie over the years. Things thrown out of the Sound—they’d survived countless storms and tides, withstood waves that had traveled across the whole ocean, and finally washed up on Hubbard’s Point beach.

  Sheridan leaned over and reached for a shell—a small moon shell, no bigger than a marble, faultless and without any chips. She ran her thumb over the surface, felt the tiny whorl, considered the perfect pattern that made it so like every other moon shell that had ever been created. After holding it for a moment, she handed it to Jeff.

  He accepted it, his expression confused.

  “Look how delicate that is,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That shell is finer than china. Thinner…If you hold it up to the light…” For the first time, she reached over, turned on a lamp. When Jeff didn’t move, she guided his hand up, so the incandescence illuminated the small shell. “You can see how fragile it is, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “While Charlie was so…strong,” she said. “So powerful. He ran cross-country at school, and in summers he ran on the beach. Loved to swim. He played basketball…worked out. His arms were muscular. Funny, I didn’t always think he was that strong. When he was little, I was always afraid he’d get hurt, that something terrible could happen…”

  “Ma’am,” Jeff began.

  But Sheridan cut him off with a look.

  “I thought he’d fall off the monkey bars, or out of the tree he was climbing. I worried he’d dive off the raft and hit his head on a rock. Break his neck…I worried that he’d play on the train tracks, like his friend…” She trailed off, thinking of Steven Mayles.

  “Maybe that’s how it is, being a mother,” she continued. “You have to consider the worst possibilities before you can learn to relax. But you know what?” When Jeff didn’t reply, she went on. “Charlie wasn’t breakable. He could swing from branches, dangle from the bridge, do a perfect swan dive. I knew his body was full of tensile strength…and he took care. He was brave, but he was cautious. I took comfort in that, and I began to trust.”

  Jeff tried to hand the shell back to her.

  “Keep it,” she said sharply. “Because I want you to think about something. That tiny shell, the size of a peanut…it was lashed by the ocean, thrown around the rocks and the sand, rolled in the tides—you know, the tides come in and out twice a day. High tide, low tide, high tide, low tide…every twenty-four hours. Day after day, that little shell survived. But my son…”

  “Ms. Rosslare,” Jeff said.

  “My big, strong, smart, wonderful son,” Sheridan continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “couldn’t even survive one day with his brother. Couldn’t even survive the first—only—meeting with you.”

  “Please,” Jeff said. “Let me—”

  Sheridan exploded out of her seat. “Let you? I will force you to tell me. I want to know every second of what happened. Tell me, Jeff. Tell me how you killed Charlie.”

  “I will, Ms. Rosslare,” Jeff said nervously, his voice gentle, as if he wanted to defuse the situation, as if he thought he could somehow soften what was coming.

  “You did it,” Sheridan said, nearly spitting at him. “You came here to Hubbard’s Point, went to his grave. You talked to Nell, and you drove by my house. I saw you—didn’t you think I’d react, seeing someone who looks so much like my son? You came up here, you sat in his chair. You looked at the picture of his great-grandmother on the mantel! While all the time, all this year without Charlie…I’ve been missing him every second.”

  The young man looked shocked, but Sheridan didn’t care. Her grandmother had always told her that power came from three things: love, words, and the sea. Their use had to be undertaken with great care, because they could cause either joy or grief, salvation or destruction. These last twelve months she’d known only grief, and it came pouring out in her words now.

  “So,” she said, never taking her eyes off Jeff, her whole body shaking. “Tell me what you did to my son.”

  AND JEFF DID. This was what he had come here for. He could see Sheridan’s rage, and he was ready for it. He’d grown up in the South, and he felt the way he did on hot August afternoons when you knew thunderstorms were coming. The low pressure would sit over the county like a big headache, just tightening and squeezing till you thought your skull would crack.

  That’s what his guilt had felt like. Building all this year. Coming between him and Lisa; her wanting him to hold her, say her songs were good, ride with her in the bus on the way to the next show, share with her his deepest feelings about losing his brother. She’d met Charlie at the same time as Jeff—that night, right after the gig. They’d all stood on the street, taking pictures and saying how good it was to get together, how important family was.

  Then Lisa had headed for the bus with the rest of the band. The plan was for Randy and Jeff to drive home to Nashville to meet with some studio musicians, and then Jeff was going to fly up to Boston, continue on the road with her.

  That never happened. Once the news of Charlie’s death hit, Jeff had done just what Randy had told him—acted as surprised as anyone. Lisa had comforted him, crying in shock and sorrow at the random, terrible killing of his brother. She’d been told by Randy that he and Jeff had headed south right after she’d left, as planned. They’d heard the news from Sheridan—when she called a day later, after the New York cops had found her.

  All through this last year, Jeff and Lisa had drifted apart. Grief and guilt just chipped away at what they’d had. He couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t stand letting her touch him. It was as if seeing his brother die, seeing what became of a human body—watching the life whisper out of it, watching the soul leave the eyes and skin, seeing how strength was so temporary, seeing Charlie just lying there in the dirt—had made him renounce everything in the physical world. He couldn’t hold or be held, couldn’t kiss or be kissed.

  Talking, too. He’d never been much of a confider. He’d learned early, during his painful childhood years, to keep the worst of what he felt bottled up inside. Juvenile hall had intensified that tendency, as had being the outsider in the Thorpe family. Once Randy had come into his life, Jeff had found himself opening up a little. Randy had wanted father-son talks, and the more he tried, the more Jeff realized that he wanted them, too. He’d had a lot to say; at first he’d held back the parts about feeling angry and abandoned, but Randy had told him to let it all out. That if he kept his feelings bottled up, he’d wind up having a heart attack before he was fifty.

  So Jeff had tried. He’d started figuring out how to match words with feelings, even his deepest and darkest ones. And nothing in his life had ever made him feel more loved than the fact of his father wanting to hear them. Sitting there in the office, across the desk at Randecker Records, Randy’s face grave as he listened to Jeff tell him how much he’d wanted a dad, how seeing his stepbrothers with John Thorpe had made him want a dad so badly he’d wanted to die.

  Once he and Lisa got together, he’d started talking more. She loved words, loved putting them together in the songs she wrote, and even more, she loved lying in bed with him and getting him to tell her stories. They both did, about places they’d been, people they’d known, things they dreamed of doing someday. She’d taught him that words were connection, that talking was music.

  But after that August night, Jeff couldn’t talk to her anymore. He was full of secrets. It wasn’t even as if she probed him for what had happened with Ch
arlie—she never suspected anything. She’d taken Randy’s and his story at face value—she was a trusting girl, and she loved them both, and it would never occur to her that Jeff would ever hurt his brother.

  It had never occurred to Jeff, either. He felt bewildered by it, which only added to his storm of confusion and guilt—and it had been getting worse as the anniversary came around, feeling like the hours before a huge, tree-ripping, barn-destroying, river-flooding storm: “yellow-sky storms,” his grandmother had called them, the kind that spawned tornadoes.

  Sheridan had been holding her fury in so long, she was like a yellow-sky Southern storm, all jagged lightning and torrential rains, and sitting across the table from her, he was glad it was starting. It made him feel as if the pressure on the outside finally equaled the unbearable pressure inside, and it gave him some strange relief.

  “Tell me,” she commanded.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said softly.

  “That doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did—whether you ‘meant’ to or not.”

  He swallowed, his heart right in his throat, the taste of blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten down hard on the inside of his cheek. He felt jangled and wracked by emotion—sort of like how he’d felt the night he met Charlie. As if he didn’t know what might happen next, and all he wanted to do was keep a little control over everything, over himself. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands.

  “We’d been at the club,” he said. “I manage Cumberland, Lisa’s band. She is, was, my girlfriend…. Usually Randy wasn’t thereat the gigs, but that night, well, it was our New York debut. So he came.”

  “Randy?” she asked, looking shocked.

  Jeff nodded, realizing she hadn’t known he was there that night. He wanted to protect his father as he had done for him, but right now it seemed most important to just tell the story, and tell it straight and true. “Yes,” he said. Then, quickly, “But none of it was his fault.”

  “Did Charlie go there to meet him?”

  “He did,” Jeff said, staring at Sheridan. “I…was real surprised.”