by Meg Donohue
“I was there. Later. I wanted Rei to help me find you.”
“So you saw her.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“I know. I believe you. Of course I believe you.” I swallowed. “I was devastated when you left. Everything you just said . . . about feeling as though your world was ripped away from you, doubting everyone and everything . . . I felt that, too.”
“Oh, Merrow.”
I looked into his brown eyes and felt all the emotions of those years well within me. “You broke my heart.”
His face twisted. He put his arms around me. “I wish I could go back. I wish I’d known.”
For a moment, I felt myself sinking into his embrace. Though I longed to remain there, I pulled back. If Will stepped onto our bedroom’s balcony and looked down toward the beach, he would see us. I hated the thought of hurting him.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“I hitchhiked north. I’d sleep in the woods and wake up and hope for another ride. I kept going until I found a farm that needed an extra hand.”
“And that’s where you’ve been for all this time?”
“Yes and no. After a few years, another farm up north—a school, actually—offered me a job.”
“A school?”
He nodded. “A farm school. They teach farming skills to people of all ages. They heard that I knew about dry farming and asked me to speak to their students. Next thing I knew, I was living there full-time, teaching in their program. I’ve snuck some whittling into the curriculum, too.”
“Amir. My dad would be so proud of you.”
He blinked, ducking his head. “I hope so.”
“I know so.” I was aware still of our arms, touching.
“I never spent Rei’s money, you know. Well, I spent some of it. Just at the beginning. But eventually I opened a bank account and the money has been sitting in it for years. I don’t know what to do with it now.”
I realized that he had never learned about Rei’s will. “A third of that money is yours. She gave her house to the Osha Conservation Fund, but she left all of her money to you, Bear, and me. In a way, you took the money from Bear and me, not from Rei.”
As Amir listened, I could see surprise and relief wash over him. I realized how heavily, and for how long, taking that money from Rei had weighed on him.
“You know, I visited Japan a few years ago,” he told me. “I took a cooking class there from a woman who spoke English with Rei’s voice.”
“Japan? How did you end up there?”
“The farm school has a cross-cultural mission. Teachers come from all over the world and travel all over the world.”
I was astonished. “Where else did you go?”
“Costa Rica. Ireland. France.”
Amir, who had never wanted to leave Horseshoe Cliff! “Well?” I prodded.
His grin was bound by invisible thread to my heart. “It was wonderful. The history, the stories . . . everywhere I traveled, I thought of you.”
After a moment, I pulled my eyes from his. “I’ve been teaching, too.” I told him about the children with whom I worked. “Many of them come from families that are struggling. We give the kids food, a safe place to spend their after-school hours, academic tutoring, art classes, the consistency of a familiar face.”
“You’re their Rei.”
I leaned my head on Amir’s shoulder. No one had ever known me as deeply as he had known me. “I suppose so. Yes.” I remembered Will and shifted away again. “Do you think I should go up to Horseshoe Cliff? Maybe if we give Bear the money that Rei left him and we tell him the truth—that neither of us had anything to do with Rei’s death—he’ll finally leave me alone.”
Amir’s expression darkened. “You don’t need to worry about Bear.”
“What do you mean? Have you been up there?”
He looked out toward the horizon. “The farm school was a good place for me, but it was never my true home. Horseshoe Cliff is my home. I finally went back last week. Bear is a drunk. He always was, but it’s worse now. You would hardly recognize him. The cottage is ruined. He’s living in a trailer near the road. The garden and the orchard haven’t been tended in years. I don’t think anything has grown there since we left. When he’s sober enough, he does odd jobs for people in town who have good memories of Jacob, but they’re really just giving Bear handouts.”
I felt sick. All three of our lives—mine, Amir’s, Bear’s—had changed the moment I met the Langfords. The thought that Bear was now someone I would not recognize wrenched something inside of me. I was surprised to find myself worried about him. I had tried to stop loving him, but I had never succeeded.
“I should go up there,” I said.
“Don’t feel sorry for him. He did this to himself.”
“But still—”
“He hurt us. He was supposed to take care of us but instead he hurt us. I still have trouble sleeping—I wake up with the weight of Bear on my chest, pinning me down. In my sleep, I’m a little boy who doesn’t have the strength to fight back. I wake up swinging my arms at the air, relieved that I can move them, that if I needed to I could finally stop him from hurting us. But what does that matter now?” Amir’s expression was so haunted that I longed to take him in my arms. “Have you forgotten what it was like, Merrow? Bear doesn’t deserve your kindness.”
“I haven’t forgotten. Even if I wanted to forget, his letters keep his voice in my ear.”
Amir was silent for a moment. His eyes narrowed as he looked out at the water. “Rei had a pulmonary embolism. There was an autopsy. A friend of mine looked into it for me years ago. Bear knows how she died. He knows that we didn’t have anything to do with it. He’s been blackmailing you over nothing. He knows exactly what his letters do to you.”
My heart thudded in my ears. Time would never diminish Bear’s cruelty.
Still, when I felt for it, the sliver of love that I felt for my brother needled me.
“When Doctor Clark and Rei’s lawyer came to our house to let us know that the money Rei had left us was missing,” I told Amir, “Bear didn’t tell them that you had disappeared on the same night. He could have had the police chasing you, but he didn’t. After all those years of hating you, in the end, he kept you safe.”
Confusion flickered in Amir’s gaze. He looked away from me. “Even if you go up there, you won’t find him. I told him he needed to get off my property.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s mine now. His share of Horseshoe Cliff. I won it from him in a few games of poker.”
“Amir!”
“Don’t look at me like that. Bear forced me to sleep in a shed when I was a kid. We lived in the most beautiful place on earth, and he managed to give me nightmares. Believe me, taking that land was the most peaceful of the retributions I’ve considered.”
“But you said he’s a drunk—”
“He wasn’t drunk when he signed this contract.” He pulled a folded paper from his pocket. Bear’s signature was scratched at the bottom. “I made him sign it when he was in the middle of painting someone’s house in town. He was sober enough to know what he was doing. He didn’t even argue with me. So now I own two shares, and you own the third. Horseshoe Cliff is yours and mine.”
I hardly knew how to respond. “Was he drunk when you won the card game?”
He slipped the contract back into his pocket. “It wasn’t just one card game. I stayed there for three nights, and every night he wanted to gamble another piece of his land. He kept losing, but he insisted we keep playing. He knew what he was doing. He could have stopped the whole thing, and he didn’t.”
If time had mellowed my hatred of my brother, I could not expect that Amir’s feelings would always match my own. We were not the same person, no matter how often it had felt like we had shared our thoughts when we were children.
“So this is why you came back,” I said. “For revenge.”
> Amir held my gaze with his velvet, dark-rimmed eyes. “No. I’d like to never think about Bear again. I’d like to find a way to move past the way he treated us. No, Merrow, revenge is not the reason I came back.”
“Then why?” I asked, though of course he did not need to respond. I could feel his words traveling through me even before he spoke them.
“I came back because I want my body to be where my heart has always been.” He reached for my hand.
“But Amir,” I said gently, and with some trouble. “I’m with Will. We’re engaged.”
“You’re not married yet. You’ve known him a long time. What have you been waiting for?”
I didn’t have an answer. “Why do you want Horseshoe Cliff? Everything Bear put you through . . . didn’t it poison the place for you?”
Amir gave me a sad smile. “No. I had you, my antidote to every poison.”
Tears stung my eyes. “How is that possible?” I asked. “How can we feel that way when it was always so hard? When there was never enough to eat? For so many years, we were alone with Bear and his rage. There was no one to look after us or love us the way a parent would.”
I watched, almost as though in a trance, as Amir lifted my hand. He pressed his lips to my skin. “It’s possible because we had each other.”
Yes. Without Amir, I would have looked back on my childhood and seen the gaping loss where love should have been. Instead, I thought of how we built towers made of smooth gray stones. I thought of running through a veil of fog in the eucalyptus grove. I thought of swimming beside him in the icy sea, each of us daring the other to go farther, to be stronger. I thought of lying on the dirt floor of the shed, under the gaze of the red birds we had made, laughing and sharing stories. I thought of us singing together in a cave that glowed at sunset.
Who would I have been without Amir? I had no interest in knowing. My love for him was as surprising and nourishing and true as the plants that broke through the soil my father was told could never sustain a garden. Our love was a sprout of green, a burst of wild and unexpected beauty.
And yet—this knowledge pained me. What could I do with my love for Amir, and his love for me, when I also loved Will? I pulled my hand from Amir’s.
“You’ll pay Bear for his share of the land, won’t you?”
Amir’s face clouded. He released a sharp laugh. “You don’t pay for things that you win.”
“But where will he go?”
“I don’t care. As long as he’s not at Horseshoe Cliff.”
It was as hard to think of Horseshoe Cliff without thinking of Bear as it was to think of Horseshoe Cliff without thinking of Amir.
“Drive up there with me,” he said. “It’s our land now. You must want to see it.”
He was right. I longed for Horseshoe Cliff. I wasn’t sure if I could have faced it again without Amir by my side, but with him . . . I wasn’t sure there was anything that could have kept me away.
IN THE HOUSE I shared with Will, nothing looked quite as it had before my walk with Amir. Usually when I opened the front door and stepped inside, I felt contentment wash over me, but now I felt only unease. The smooth walnut table that held an oversized book of photographs of the Great Barrier Reef, the painted ceramic wine carafe that Will and I had bought together in Rab, an island off the coast of Croatia, even the framed photographs of the two of us that dotted the mantel, all took on a disconcertingly unfamiliar sheen. I paused in the entryway, peering into the rooms that surrounded me. I had a feeling of time folding over itself. I was fifteen years old, walking through a stranger’s house, studying her life. The jeans I wore were too big—boys’ jeans, once Bear’s—and tattered at every hem. The backs of my hands were sun-darkened, my nails dirty and gnawed short. But my heart was buoyant with the understanding that I was not alone in this life. I love, thumped its steady beat. And I am loved.
“Merrow?”
I blinked. Will walked toward me from the doorway to the kitchen.
“Are you all right? Did something happen?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I’m fine.”
He led me to the den. I had come to love that room more than I’d thought I would, considering it offered no view of the ocean. It was smaller than most of the rooms in the house, but it was always warm and dark, the perfect spot to curl against my fiancé and watch a movie.
Now, though, something in the room seemed wrong. It was the rug, I thought. I’d shopped for it with Rosalie. We’d chosen a burgundy color that now struck me as ugly. It wasn’t Rosalie’s fault; we’d both fallen in love with it at the store, running our hands over it as though it were a living thing that might feel our affection and return it.
Remembering how happy I had been to spend that day with Rosalie, a surge of sorrow rose within me.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked again, guiding me to sit beside him on the sofa. “Tell me. Did Amir say why he came back?”
“He wants Horseshoe Cliff. And he wants to make Bear suffer.” I didn’t voice the other reason that Amir had returned. “You know how awful Bear was to us when we were kids, and he always treated Amir worse than he treated me. In a way, even once Amir left, the torturing didn’t stop for him. He’s been haunted by what Bear subjected him to, the physical and mental abuse. I think he’d like to ruin Bear’s life.”
Will put his arm around my shoulders. “Oh, Merrow.”
“I don’t blame him. Most of me believes that Bear deserves whatever is coming to him.”
“Most of you?”
I swallowed. “Amir said that my brother is drunk all the time. It’s even worse than it was when we were kids. And he’s ruined what was left of our home, the garden, and the orchard.”
I knew from Will’s expression that he was wondering what was left to be ruined—in his eyes, the property was already a wreck the one time he’d seen it nine years earlier. My pride stung. But Will was unfailingly polite; he didn’t say what he was thinking if there was a chance it would be hurtful. I supposed that, in a way, he had taught me to do the same.
“Amir loves Horseshoe Cliff. When he came to live with us, he immediately felt a connection to the land. He’s like my father in that way.”
“And you, too,” Will said. “I know how special it was for you.”
I did not dare look him in the eye for fear that he would see what I was thinking: that he could never really understand what Horseshoe Cliff meant to me. “Amir says he won Bear’s portion of the land in a poker game. Bear signed a contract.”
Will’s eyes widened. “Poker? Was Bear drunk?”
“Amir says Bear doesn’t even care that he lost the land. He says there are witnesses, and that Bear isn’t fighting it.” I twisted my fingers together in my lap. “The Bear I know would have fought anyone about anything. Especially Amir.” I sighed. “And now Amir wants to kick Bear off the land he’s lived on his whole life. But the thing is, I still own one-third of Horseshoe Cliff.”
The side of Will’s jaw twitched. “So Amir’s plan is that the two of you own the land together.”
“I could let Bear stay. If I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
“And have you decided?”
I shook my head. “I can’t honestly believe I’m considering helping him. He’s a monster.”
Will’s expression, shifting throughout our conversation, settled now into one of sympathy. “But you’re wondering if maybe he was a monster, and now he’s just a drunk getting swindled out of his home.”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. I think I have to go up there. I need to see him for myself.” I looked down at the ugly rug below our feet. “Amir is driving up in the morning. I’d be back tomorrow night.”
A pause swelled in the air. After a moment, Will kissed my shoulder. “Do you want me to go with you? I don’t like the thought of you getting in the middle of something between those two.”
I almost laughed. I had been in the middle of something between Bear and Amir since the momen
t Amir stepped out of my father’s truck with his mother’s big blue coat. Bear had always been set on punishing Amir for making me happy, and on hurting me by torturing Amir. Amir and I were two parts of a braid, and Bear had always been the third.
“I’ll be fine.” I leaned into Will. He readjusted himself, settling into the sofa as though for a nap, and I stretched out beside him. I felt his chest rise and fall. Even after our late night of drinking and dancing, I was too agitated to rest. My skin felt so warm that I wondered if I was getting sick. After a moment, I stood. Will’s eyes flicked open.
“I’m going for a swim,” I whispered.
His eyes shut again. I thought he’d fallen asleep, but as I left the den, I heard him murmur for me to be careful.
I WAS STILL wet from my swim and had my towel draped around my shoulders, the cool sand below me, when I picked up my phone. I had three missed calls from Emma. Instead of returning her calls, I called Ronnie. My thoughts had raced in circles, a dog chasing its tail, the entire time I’d been in the water. Ronnie had met Amir briefly at the party the night before, and I had seen in the way her gaze moved from him to me that she was curious about our relationship. She knew a little of my childhood, but I had never spoken of Amir—she knew only that I had grown up on a farm and that my parents had died when I was young.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” she asked rather breathlessly as she answered the phone. “Back in college, I was always so sure you were pining for some mysterious guy from your past . . . and then when I met Will I thought, This is the guy! But Will isn’t the guy, is he?”
“No.”
“It’s Amir!”
“Ronnie—”
“What happened between the two of you? Why didn’t it work out?”
The cold water had invigorated me. I thought I could feel my blood pumping more strongly through my veins. “It’s complicated. I believed for a long time that he did something . . . something truly terrible . . . and then he disappeared. He’s been gone nine years. I found out this morning that I was wrong. He didn’t do it. And he disappeared because he thought I was leaving him, which I never would have done . . .” I trailed off. “I haven’t been home in all that time. But there’s something going on with my brother, so we’re going to drive up there tomorrow.”
