by Julia Keller
A knock at the back door.
Bell was startled. Could it be Carla? No, she’d use the front. And anyway, Carla had a key.
She opened the door. She’d forgotten to turn on the back porch light, and so she based her instant identification of the visitor solely on his silhouette. Clay Meckling was six feet four and a half. And lean. His physique was a direct consequence of hauling around roof trusses and eighty-pound bags of Quikrete all day long.
She flipped on the outside light. The switch for the kitchen light was right next to it. She flipped that on, too.
“Hey,” Clay said. “I know you asked me to leave you alone. Give you time to think.” He was talking very fast, the spurts of his breath visible in the super-chilled air. “But I need to say something, okay? If you want to throw me out after that, then fine.”
Bell pulled him inside by his jacket sleeve. The jacket was stiff with cold. “It’s freezing out there. Come on.” She shook her head. “I can’t throw you out. I’d face charges for reckless endangerment. Was that part of your diabolical plan?”
He was surprised by her jocularity. She could see it on his face. The last time they had spoken, here in this very kitchen, Bell was trembling with anger, with outrage, laying down the law: Leave me alone. I have to decide—decide if I can have you in my life. Don’t call. Don’t come by. Don’t text. For God’s sake—I have to process things, Clay. I have to find out if I can deal with this. Or if I just need you to go away for good. So—please. I’ll call when I’m ready. Not before.
What had changed?
Nothing. Nothing had changed.
Only that it was a cold night, and some time had passed, and she cared about him, and even though he’d ignored a direct request to give her space, she was not going to shut the door in his face. God, no.
“Coffee?” she said.
“I’d pay a million bucks for a cup of coffee right now.”
“Sounds like a yes.” She went to the cupboard to get the fixings. The moment was emotionally charged, and she tried to defuse it. “I’ll take that million in cash,” she said.
“My check’s no good?”
“Only if you’ve got ID.”
She turned around. She had not realized how fast he had come up behind her. He gathered her in his arms and gave her a driving, passionate kiss. His mouth was cold, but the cold did not last.
He let her go. “Will that do?”
And then he stepped back, more embarrassed at what he had said than at what he had done. It was a corny bit of banter from a usually serious man. Under other circumstances, she would have groaned and asked him which Hallmark TV movie he had swiped the line from. But she was still reeling from the kiss.
She sat down at the table. He took the seat beside her. He reached for her hand. She shook her head, drawing her hand away.
“That was never our problem, Clay. That part, we did just fine with.”
“Then what is our problem? Damned if I can figure it out.”
“You know.” An edge to her voice now. He was playing dumb, and he was hardly a dumb man.
“I apologized.”
“Yes. You did. And I accepted that apology. But it still happened. I’m going to need some time.”
Restless, he rose from his chair. For the first time tonight, she was aware of his prosthetic leg; mostly she forgot about it. He moved so smoothly, so nimbly, that it was easy to do. Only when he made a sudden move—like bolting up from the kitchen table—did she remember. Clay had lost his leg three years ago in a building collapse. The collapse was caused by an explosion that rocked downtown Acker’s Gap. But with physical therapy, and with the kind of determination that still left her in awe, he had fought his way back. Now he cycled, he kayaked, he climbed mountains, he supervised a crew for his father’s construction company. He was a whole man again.
She corrected herself: He had never been anything less than a whole man. But he had needed to persuade himself of that, even when no one else doubted it.
He faced her, arms spread out wide to both sides, hands propped against the counter.
“I’m asking you for a second chance, Belfa.”
She knew what this was costing him. He was not the kind of man who asked for things. He was young—fourteen years younger than she was—but he had an old-fashioned self-sufficiency about him. He was, in fact, a lot like Nick Fogelsong. He took care of himself, knew his own mind, went his own way. And no matter what he said, he really did not understand what he had done to her.
It had been an ordinary night. A regular night, the same kind of night they had spent together so many times before. Clay brought over a takeout dinner. Their plan was to eat, watch something on Netflix, and then, perhaps, he would stay over. That usually only happened on weekend nights, when neither one of them had early morning work commitments. But he would be leaving town the next day for a builder’s convention in Richmond, and after that, he had some business in Virginia and Maryland. He would be out of town for ten days. Bell was going to miss him. She did not realize just how much until she thought about it, and was surprised to feel an intense, almost overpowering yearning for him, even though he was still here, and would not leave until morning.
Missing someone even before he left: That was new. And unsettling.
But it was a rocky night. They quarreled. She didn’t remember why. She’d be willing to bet that he didn’t, either. Something silly, trivial. It didn’t matter. Even before dinner was over, the tenor of the evening had changed. The mood shifted. Both of them brooded, unwilling to say what was really going on: After four years of casual good times with each other, the relationship had suddenly heated up. Things felt too serious. She was apprehensive about the age difference. And he worried about how much he loved her. Needed her. She knew that, because he had told her: He hated to be dependent on anyone, even someone he was in love with.
And that’s when it happened.
She had risen from the table. It was time to clear their plates. He stood up, too, to help her. They were arguing. She said one thing. He countered it. She was moving past him. He reached out and grabbed her arm, harder than he meant to. Startled, she stumbled. The dishes smashed against the floor and she almost lost her balance, lurching against the table as her world turned black.
All he wanted to do was to get her to listen. To slow down and hear his point. But at the sensation of a hard hand clenched around her upper arm, the power in that hand fueled by anger and frustration, Bell panicked. Something sprang up inside her like an animal snapping its leash.
“Get the hell out of my house,” she had cried, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. She twisted her arm, freeing herself from his grip. Then she lunged at him, almost knocking him over because he was not expecting it. She pounded on his chest with her fists. She was sobbing by this point. Her words came in ragged gasps, in the breaks between the sobs. “Don’t you touch me—don’t you ever fucking touch me again—Don’t you—Don’t—”
Clay had tried to catch her flailing hands, hold them still, not to protect himself but to settle her down. To no avail. She pounded and she sobbed. He had triggered something in her, something so immense that it could not be tamped back down again. He knew the general outline of her life—they had divulged a great deal of personal information to each other, the way lovers tend to do in the perfect security of a shared bed and the sweet languor after lovemaking—but he did not know the true power of those memories, the way they waited inside her, secretly furious, smoldering, like a campfire with red embers still hidden under the ash, needing only a slight sifting and the right wind to flash into flame again.
He knew about her father, a nasty piece of work named Donnie Dolan, and about the night when it all reached a terrifying and definitive climax. The night when Shirley rescued ten-year-old Belfa from him forever by slashing his throat.
But Clay did not know about the other times. The ordinary times. He did not know about the daily swats and smacks and pokes and random punch
es, the routine kicks and sideways wallops. The times when Belfa would be rounding the kitchen table and, for no apparent reason, Donnie Dolan’s arm would dart out like a snake’s tongue and snatch her arm, pinching it, yanking her back toward him. She had bruises constantly on her arms. Purple marks, elbow to shoulder. It was one of the reasons her father withdrew her from third grade: He was tired of answering questions about the marks on her arms. None of your goddamned business anyway, he would mumble into the phone, jerking her back and forth in rhythm with his words, holding her arm, shaking her like a mop. She did not fight back. She couldn’t.
Now she could. She was all grown up, and when those fingers closed once more around her upper arm, she felt the massive force of a sense-memory. The present dissolved. She did not see Clay; she saw the blackness that was Donnie Dolan, and she felt all over again the nightmare of her childhood. She felt threat and menace.
That night, Clay had continued trying to soothe her, center her. He apologized, over and over again. Which only made it worse—because that was what Donnie Dolan had done as well, a muttered, kneejerk, insincere iteration: Sorry. Yeah. Sorry ’bout that. Clay was wrong, he knew he was wrong, and all he could say to her was: I’m sorry. There was no other vocabulary to use in the wake of such a shattering betrayal, and it wasn’t enough.
Tonight, though, he was trying again.
“You have to forgive me, Belfa,” Clay said.
“I do?”
“Yeah. You do.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I don’t want to lose you. I can’t lose you.”
“What if you already have?”
He pondered the question. “You warned me about this. When I first got back.”
A year and a half ago, Clay had left Acker’s Gap for graduate school at MIT. It was a longtime dream of his. Then he returned. He had helped Nick Fogelsong recover from a bullet wound and he had resumed his relationship with Bell, whereupon a mildly pleasant romance had accelerated into a fierce mutual passion. A passion not just for sex—although that part was, as Bell did not mind conceding, especially delicious—but also for their conversations. She loved Clay’s mind, the way it solved mechanical and mathematical problems with the same creative rigor that her own mind brought to legal and moral ones. She wondered how she had ever thought she could spend her life with another lawyer, much less a lawyer like Sam Elkins. No. She wanted a life with a builder. Not with someone who, like her, just moved words around on a page. Just argued over clauses and sub-clauses.
“You told me,” Clay went on, “that as good as this was, you were afraid you’d do something to screw it up. Sabotage it. Because you really don’t believe that you deserve happiness. Remember?”
“I do. And you said I was just frightened.”
“I think the phrase I used was ‘fraidy cat.’” He smiled.
“And I think I told you to quit psychoanalyzing me—or I’d bust out the headlight of that truck of yours, which everybody knows you love more than you could ever possibly love any woman.” She smiled back at him, a saucy, playful smile.
“Empty threat.”
“Don’t dare me, Clay Meckling. You’ll be sorry.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He had, she realized, gotten her to a better place, a calmer one. He had restored her to herself. He had a knack for that.
“Look,” he said. Serious again. “I want this to work, Belfa. Whatever it takes. No matter how long I have to wait.” She could tell from his eyes that he knew they were not out of the woods yet. They might never be out of the woods—not with her past sharing every damned moment with them.
At some point, she knew, Clay might decide it wasn’t worth it, having to fight back against that past, the past with its torments and its open wounds. And she might decide that it was not worth it, either, watching him try and fail, and try and fail again, to lift her out of the dark place where that past had left her.
But right now, here in this moment, it was worth it. She could see that in his eyes, too. That, and his keen desire for her that provoked an answering vibration in her own soul. And in other places, places that had nothing to do with her soul.
“No excuse for what I did,” he said. “Just wasn’t thinking. It’ll never happen again. My word on that. I was careless and I was stupid and I’d never hurt you or—”
She put a finger on his lips. Then she removed her finger, and kissed him.
“I heard,” he said, “that Carla’s back. Is it okay if—”
“Yes.” Standing so close to him, she could feel the chill that still came off his body. He had been working outside all day. Well, she would warm him up. She unbuttoned the top three buttons of his flannel shirt. She kissed his chest. He moaned. “Just for the record,” she murmured, “this won’t change anything. It can’t. Not for a while. Not until I figure out how to protect myself.”
“From me?” he said. He leaned away from her. He was troubled by that idea, and it showed on his face.
“No. From the memories.” She rose up on tiptoe and kissed him again. Then she turned around to face forward and, still holding his hand, she led him out of the kitchen and through the hallway and slowly up the staircase.
Chapter Nine
Wow, Carla thought. There it was—alive and kicking.
She had not known if the place would still be in business. She would have guessed not. Seven years was an eternity in the world of dive bars. A month was often long enough for a place to open and close. In the back of her mind, she had fully expected to come upon the usual residue of a once-lively, now-moribund nightspot: an abandoned building tattooed with copious graffiti; busted windows; waist-high weeds stalking the place; a faded piece of orange cardboard stapled to the disintegrating door, its words shouting at you in bullying black capitals: CLOSED BY ORDER OF WV ALCOHOL BEVERAGE CONTROL ADMINISTRATION.
But the Driftwood Bar out on Old Route 37 near the Raythune-Muth county line was still a going concern. And this being Friday night, it was hopping. Everything looked roughly the same as it had four years ago: same sign. Same crude white cinder-block building. Same unpaved parking lot, now crusted and rutted with frozen snow. Same crummy cars, mostly compacts and stripped-down pickups, the fenders pocked and bleached from road salt. Same loud music, blasting from the doorway each time somebody walked in or stumbled out, music produced by a second-rate sound system that ground the songs down to static, and then wrapped that static in a pounding bass beat. Nobody minded, though, because nobody came here to actually listen to the music. You came here to hide in it. To use it as camouflage. You came here to lose yourself in the loose folds of that music, slipping in between the notes, hoping to disappear. Maybe forever. But at least until closing time.
The Driftwood was where Carla and her high school friends had come when they were feeling bored and reckless, when they were about to climb out of their skins with discontent. The ID check was a joke. That made it perfect. She’d gotten drunk for the very first time in her life right here, when she was fifteen years old, after which Kayleigh Crocker had taken her back to Kayleigh’s house. For all Carla’s mom knew, she and Kayleigh were watching American Idol and giving each other pedicures; in reality, Carla had spent most of the night in the Crockers’ bathroom, puking her guts out while Kayleigh held her hair and dabbed the back of her neck with a cool washcloth. Carla could not even think about tequila anymore without a twinge of nausea.
And here it was, same place, same compellingly disheveled mess: the Driftwood.
She parked the Kia and walked with mincing-stepped caution across the icy lot, grabbing the occasional side mirror so that she wouldn’t slip. It was very cold. Cold permeated the world; it was a force unto itself, almost prehistoric in its bluntness and lack of nuance. This was a deadly, no-nonsense cold. If you miscalculated, if you were trapped outside without protection, it would kill you without a second thought. Or a first one. That gave Carla an odd solace: This cold was a reali
ty that didn’t mess around. It was direct. It couldn’t be bought off or bargained with.
Somebody had thrown up right next to the front door. The stiff puddle of orangey-green vomit had frozen solid. It was, Carla decided, the ideal welcome mat for this place. She took a deep breath and reached for the wooden door handle—dark from decades of groping by other people’s greasy hands—and entered.
The place was packed. She hit a headwind of darkness and swirling, raunchy smells: beer and sweat and Tommy Girl and aftershave and a sort of clinging, moldy odor that even winter could not dispel. Carla fought her way forward. She glanced around. Some people sat at the small round tables, some danced, some just stood there, trying to look cool. She didn’t know a soul, which was just what she’d hoped for. She wanted to be by herself, but not in a quiet place. She wanted distraction. She wanted loud noise and a lot of pointless motion. She wanted chaos. Seething chaos—to match the seething chaos inside her. To balance herself out.
By now she was aware of another level of smell, too, suspended slightly above the alcohol and the body odor and the cologne, a smell that was harder to describe but always present in places like this: the smell of raw human need, mostly sexual but sometimes not, sometimes just the desire not to be alone.
“Hey.”
Her path was abruptly blocked by a short, portly man with a big grin and a bad toupee—it was blond, and it lapped down on either side of his face like a pair of fuzzy saddlebags. Carla had been heading to the bar, a long one that ran across the rear wall. Behind it was a tarnished mirror. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mirror read: NO SHIRT, NO SHOES—COME ON IN, COUSIN!
“Excuse me,” Carla said. She tried to go around him. He stepped to the right, blocking her way again. She went left; he did, too. His grin got bigger.
“Come on,” Carla muttered. “Give me a break, mister. Okay? I just want a beer.”
“Lemme get it for you. Happy to.” He waggled his eyebrows. As noisy as it was in here, as closely packed as the crowd was, she could hear him perfectly well.
