by Alana Terry
“Moving?” He licked his lip. “Wow, that’s ... Well, I mean, that sounds like an adventure. When?”
“The end of summer,” she answered.
His smile was forced, but it didn’t waver. “What are you going to be doing?”
There was a reason she didn’t know her plans yet. It was so she couldn’t give him any clues. She couldn’t have him following after her. Some people used the word uprooted to talk about moving. With Lacy, it was more like splattering paints onto a canvas until there was no way to tell what hid beneath all the layers.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Why had she thought she could get through this? He was right there, with just a foot between them. She could reach out, sob the entire story into his shoulder. He was strong enough to take that burden from her. But she couldn’t ask him to. It was impossible.
As impossible as good-bye.
“I might go back to school.” It wasn’t a lie. She had thought of giving college another try. Had thought about it for the past four years.
He swallowed. “That’s ... that’s amazing. Good for you. I always told you that you could be anything. Do you know what ...”
“I can’t see you anymore.” She blurted out the words as fervently as she would have clutched at a life saver if she were drowning in the Copper River. She let the words topple out of her, gaining momentum as they spilled out. She watched her message snowball and take force, gaining speed until full realization punched him in the face.
Kurtis scrunched up his nose. His expression revealed shock, everything except for his eyes. There was no surprise there. No anger. Just the sadness. The incurable hurt of Lacy’s betrayal.
“Is it him?” he asked. “Is it Raphael?”
Lacy regretted ever telling Kurtis about him. She should have known better. “No. It has nothing to do with him.”
In a way, that was true. But in on the other hand ...
Kurtis took a slow sip of cider. She wanted to jump up from the table and refill his glass. Anything so she wouldn’t have to see his reaction. From down the hall, chipper music from Madeline’s movie waltzed uninvited into the dining room.
“I’m sorry,” Lacy whispered. If only she could tell him the truth. He would understand. The temptation to reveal everything clung to her limbs, like dead weight in a marshy bog.
He stood up.
“What are you doing?”
He punched buttons on his phone without responding. She wanted to stand, too. Wanted the memory of being with him one last time. Feeling his strong arms surround her. He was a trooper. A protector at heart. She shut her eyes, remembering the feel of their first embrace. Stinging hot memories mingled in her gut, and she wanted to run to him. Forget life had existed before they met.
But she couldn’t. Instead, she sat motionless while Kurtis scowled into his phone.
“What are you doing?” she repeated.
He held out his cell. “I want you to see something.” His voice was still soft, but there was a restrained tremor behind it. “Do you know what this is?”
Lacy averted her eyes as soon as she saw the picture. This wasn’t really happening. This couldn’t be happening.
“Do you remember when I went to Anchorage a few weekends ago?”
“I remember.”
No. No, this couldn’t be. This wasn’t real.
“I didn’t tell you what I was shopping for.” He brought the phone closer to her face. “This is for you. The jeweler is resizing it. I just have to go pick it up.”
She shook her head. No. If she could have disappeared by sheer force of will, she would have.
“I love you, Jo.” He dropped to his knee in front of her chair, still holding out the screen to show the glistening white gold band in its black velvet case. “I was waiting for the Fourth of July, for the salmon feed. Now hear me out. I know that your mind is set to move, and you know I’d rather die than try to stand in the way of your goals. I’m not going to beg or anything. But listen. I’ve only got six more months until my placement in Glennallen is up. That’s not very long. Then wherever you are, I want you to let me join you. Start a new life together.”
A single hot tear slipped down her cheek like melted crayon wax, searing her skin. She didn’t wipe it away. How many times could her heart break before it shattered into a pile of shards, never able to heal again?
“I don’t need an answer now.” He put his hand on her knee. She wanted to grab it, wanted to beg him to whisk her away to an imaginary place where pain from the past could never reach her.
She remained immobile.
“Promise me you’ll think about it.” He tilted up her chin and gave her a small kiss as he stood. He cleared his throat. “Munchkin!” he shouted down the hall.
Madeline scurried toward them, looking adorably plump and squishable in her pink pajamas. “Time for dessert?” she piped.
Kurtis didn’t meet Lacy’s gaze, didn’t acknowledge her silent pleading. Forgive me.
“Give Miss Jo a hug good-night.”
Lacy knew the sound of Kurtis’s tight voice would haunt her dreams.
“But my movie isn’t over,” Madeline whined.
“You can watch another one at home,” he mumbled. It was enough to mollify his daughter. Madeline spread out her arms so Lacy could pick her up for a hug.
Please forgive me. The words stuck in Lacy’s throat. She caught Kurtis’s eyes for a fleeting second, recognized the piercing pain that stabbed searing hot into her heart as well.
“Thank you for dinner.” He was either braver than she was or a better actor, because he managed a faint smile.
“Wait,” Madeline protested. “You haven’t kissed her yet.”
Kurtis glanced awkwardly at Lacy. Slowly reached his hands out. Lacy’s feet steadily closed the distance between them. He wiped her cheek with his thumb and brought his lips close. “Good-bye,” he whispered.
She didn’t have the breath to answer back.
“That wasn’t a very good one,” Madeline announced with a pout.
“Come on, Munchkin.” Kurtis caught his daughter and swung her into his arms. “Let’s go home.”
CHAPTER 2
It took half an hour for Lacy to clear the dishes off the table. If she were younger, she would have been surprised she wasn’t crying. But she had learned four years ago tears were a luxury that rarely came in the midst of a crisis. They tarried, refusing to let you lose yourself in the bittersweet rush of grief, forcing you to walk through fire with your dry eyes wide open.
Her foster parents would tell her to forgive. She could almost hear Sandy’s voice in her mind. You can hold on to anger, or you can let it go and let God make the best of your situation. It was a simple premise, really, and it probably worked for good Christian folks like the Lindgrens, folks who took in foster kids and raised them up and helped them graduate high school and saw them through community college. But Sandy would never live through what Lacy had.
It wasn’t fair.
She couldn’t think of Carl and Sandy, or grief and homesickness would charge at her like an angry moose, knocking her breath out. A tsunami wave far too strong to withstand. Besides, what was the point of dwelling on the Lindgrens? It wasn’t as though she would ever see them again.
She hosed herself down with mosquito spray and threw on her shoes. It was almost nine o’clock, but that didn’t matter. It never grew fully dark this time of year. She stepped outside, where it was as bright as it had been at noon when she stood out and watched the preschoolers climbing on the daycare jungle gym. At the beginning of summer, she and her co-worker Kim had complained until their boss finally broke down and purchased a propane-operated mosquito trapper. The gizmo was awkward to lug around and cost the daycare five hundred dollars plus gas, but it kept the bugs manageable. Madeline had helped Lacy count the bites on her arm earlier that afternoon.
Only seventeen.
If ever there was a night for ice cream, this was it. Puck’s grocery
store was only a five-minute walk away. Lacy hardly drove anywhere in the summer except for her monthly four-hour trip to Costco in Anchorage. Lately, she had been tagging along with Kurtis, who was used to driving long distances since he was one of five troopers covering an area the size of Ohio.
Kurtis. Lacy sighed. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. She knew it had been a mistake to go on that first date. But it had been winter. She had been lonely. And bored. And if any man could manage to get Lacy to stop aching for Raphael, it was him.
Now she realized she had expected the impossible. What else could she do but cut him loose? He was still young. Good-looking. Rustic enough to appeal to tough Alaska girls, civilized enough to speak to their romantic whimsies. And Madeline ... Over the past few days as Lacy had been preparing tonight’s dinner, she had wondered who she would miss more, Kurtis or his daughter who smothered her with kisses and asked Lacy almost every day to become her new mommy.
Lacy hurried through Puck’s parking lot, eager to get inside and away from the bugs. Eager for her ice cream. She stopped short when she saw Kurtis through the window. He was pushing Madeline in a cart. She didn’t study his expression, didn’t try to guess how well he was handling tonight’s news. She scurried around the corner without going into the store. One good thing about summer in Glennallen was all the small shops stayed open to cater to the numerous tourists who drove through. She would grab herself an ice cream at the Brain Freeze. She deserved that much, at least. She just hoped she’d make it there before Kurtis came out of the store and spotted her.
She sprinted across the street. She hated running away like that. Of course, there was no way she could avoid him indefinitely. Glennallen was just too small a town. She was still an East Coast girl at heart, really, fond of the fast pace, the crowded streets, the bright lights, the dazzling skylines. But that life was closed to her now.
She had lost track of how many times she and Raphael had daydreamed about their future. She was finishing up a few classes for her associates and wanted to pursue an undergrad degree in theater. He would set up an art studio in Boston or Cambridge. New York was always their end goal, but for now she wanted to stay near Carl and Sandy, the closest thing she had to family after a childhood spent in and out of foster care. Raphael often told her how proud he was of her, how she had risen above all the negativity in her past to forge a better future for herself. She loved the way he talked to her, the way he encouraged her. She would have never made it to where she was if it weren’t for him.
Not that it mattered now, anyway. She couldn’t even transfer her credits from the community college. Two years of grueling work had been a total waste. No use dwelling on the past, Sandy would tell her. Simple adages, like Don’t cry over spilt milk that did nothing to address the horror, the loneliness Lacy had lived through. Why was she thinking about Sandy so much lately? If she could just pick up the phone, talk to her. Tell her about Kurtis. But that was impossible, too.
She stepped into the Brain Freeze and glanced around, thankful she didn’t see any of the daycare families. She was tired. All she wanted was to forget. Go back in time, never get in the car with Raphael that night.
She ordered a small sundae. It would be about half the size of what she could buy in Anchorage and cost her twice as much, but that was Glennallen for you. People had to pay the heating bills some way. At least the Brain Freeze was bug-free.
Mostly.
She chose a seat by the window and stared outside. Would she see Kurtis’s red truck drive by after he left Puck’s? Had she really done the right thing? It wasn’t fair to him. But did she have any other choice?
A bicyclist spun down the sidewalk. Funny how Alaskans could ride or jog or hike all night long if they wanted and only have to worry about mosquitoes and an occasional grumpy moose. She thought about the weekends when she and Raphael would ride the Boston trails for miles. She let her eyes follow the cyclist. There was something familiar about the way he held himself. Something about his posture ...
He glanced up. Their eyes met as he whizzed past her window.
Raphael?
She whipped her head to follow him. He didn’t slow down, didn’t look back. It had been her imagination, that’s all. A silly mind trick. Even if Raphael were alive, what were the chances ...
She couldn’t see him anymore. Had he circled around the back parking lot? Had he recognized her, too? How many times had she fantasized about this very moment, bumping into him again after so many years?
Too many years.
Their last night together was supposed to be a celebration. Lacy had just finished her spring semester of community college. Raphael told her it was a big surprise. She didn’t admit it to anybody, not even Sandy, but she wondered if this was it. The night he’d propose. They’d talked about it enough, hadn’t they?
She didn’t know why he brought her so deep into the North End, but she never questioned him. It was a surprise, he told her. The dock he drove toward looked mostly abandoned. It was dark. Nobody was around. It sounded like Raphael’s idea of something romantic. Creative Raphael, never content to do anything the traditional way.
“Are you sure you’re not lost?” she asked, and he smiled that sideways grin he only got when he was nervous. That’s when she knew. This really was it. The Night. She tried to remember every image. Every detail. Then one day when they had a family of her own, she could tell her daughters about the night Daddy asked her to marry him.
Only that’s not what happened.
Raphael’s whole body tensed behind the wheel the minute the two men appeared. Lacy had been holding his hand, and his fear rushed through his body into hers. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He turned off his headlights and reversed the car. “Nothing. I just made a wrong turn.”
That’s when she saw the body, tied up, struggling. Afterward, she could have sworn she heard the man yelling, but the victim had been gagged and Raphael’s car was too far away, so the detective said that was impossible. Still, she heard the sound of muffled pleas even in her dreams, just like she could hear the splash when his murderers dumped his body into the water below.
“Go, go, go,” Raphael whispered, coaxing his car. At the time, Lacy still hadn’t processed what she had seen. It couldn’t be real. Her eyes were playing tricks on her.
“Go, go, go.”
Raphael’s last words were interrupted by the squeal of tires. He maneuvered the car around and pushed down on the gas. He made it back to the main road before their pursuers caught up. Lacy didn’t remember screaming when the gunshot shattered the back window. She sometimes had a vague memory of the airbag exploding into a burst of dust, but she couldn’t be certain. Maybe her brain was just trying to fill in the pieces.
She woke up in a dim room, surrounded by three somber police men shooting questions at her as soon as she opened her eyes, pausing only for a moment when a nurse came in to check her vitals.
“Where’s Raphael?” Lacy croaked.
The men exchanged awkward looks before one of them declared what she already knew.
“He’s dead. I’m terribly sorry, miss.”
CHAPTER 3
Lacy thanked the Brain Freeze waitress who brought her the sundae. The ice-cream was ho-hum, definitely not worth the six and a half dollars it cost her. She hated worrying so much about money. She wished Drisklay had given her a different witness protection identity. The daycare couldn’t afford to pay her more than minimum wage. The problem was year-round jobs were hard to find in a tourist trap like Glennallen, where weeks straight of negative-thirty temperatures kept all but the hardiest of long-term residents away.
It was the perfect place to hide, really, at least according to the witness protection folks. Four hundred residents, most of whom kept to themselves in typical Alaskan style. She had come in the spring. At least, it was spring in the rest of the world, but here there were still two or more feet of snow on the ground and several weeks of gray mud and
gush before it thawed.
It wasn’t just the climate she had to get used to. They gave her a whole new name, a new identity. Jo. So brusque, so unfeminine. Sure, she had sometimes wished her birth mom had come up with something unique, something more memorable than plain old Lacy, but Jo? That took longer to get used to than the continual daylight in the summertime or the depressing bleakness of the drawn-out Glennallen winters.
She stared out the window at the place where the bicyclist had disappeared. She knew in her heart it couldn’t really be Raphael. The police, the detectives, the press, everyone said he died in the crash. She was left alone. Alone to mourn him in silence. Alone to hide until the two murderers who had chased them went to trial. Alone to testify against the people who wanted her dead.
She thought the witness protection program would be temporary. Detective Drisklay said he’d keep her safe until the trial, and after that she’d be as free as a bird. Then it came out that the murderers boasted a web of Mafia connections. Things got increasingly complicated from there.
Still, she had held on to naïve dreams. Maybe the police knew the Mafia would come after Raphael and helped him fake his death for his own protection. She couldn’t get over the impossibly thin thread of hope that he was alive, suffering a trapped, anonymous life in witness protection in some secluded area. She hadn’t gathered up the funds or the courage to travel yet, but if she did, maybe she would run into him one day. Reunite at an airport. Catch his eyes on a crowded subway. She couldn’t count how many nights she had fallen asleep picturing his face when his eyes met hers. She rehearsed the hug, the kiss, the tears that would mingle on both their cheeks. Crying together over the lost years, vowing to never spend life apart again.
But deep in her heart, she knew her hopes were nothing more than foolishness. Wishful thinking. Impossible dreams she clung to because the pain of reality was too hard to accept.
