Light the Hidden Things (6 page)

Crow said, “I’ll agree to anything to make a man show me his best fishing hole.”

The picture of ecclesiastic innocence, the Pastor said, “The word ‘best’ was never uttered, son. Now, if you’ll be here tomorrow morning - say six-thirty - we can be on the river an hour later. How’s that sound?” He rose, sure of the response.

“Looking forward to it - Pastor.”

Nodding, the Pastor faced Lila once again. “I’ll say good night, then. Don’t let men like Lawton and Vanderkirk stampede you. Do what’s best for you, all right?”

“I will.” For one sinking moment, Lisa was sure the burning behind her eyes meant tears. She forced them back.

With Pastor Richards gone, she looked at Crow apologetically. “We shouldn’t have been talking about things that didn’t include you.”

He winked. “You know how it tears me up to be left out.”

She felt comfortable enough with him now to laugh at that.

Crow insisted on paying for both meals, arguing that it had been a long time since he had dinner with an attractive woman and it would spoil the effect if he didn’t get to treat it like a date. In the end she agreed, feeling more squeamish about it than she was willing to admit. Worse than that, she had to secretly acknowledge a guilty pleasure in saving what dinner cost. She tried telling herself it was for a good cause.

Outside, they didn’t head directly to their vehicles. Without a word, they walked together across Main street and into Lupine’s riverbank park. It was the crown of what the locals called Old Lupine, differentiating the area from the more modern area settled by the later arrivals.

Built to distance the original townsite from the Fortymile’s spring rise, the park was threaded by gravel paths spotted with benches. Clipped grass carpeted grounds between maples, cedars, firs, and oaks grown stately over the years. The river was a long arc. Boulders littered the near-bank shallows. Some hid, only the roiling water above them revealing their presence. Others jutted high, tearing the surface in swirling rents Deeper water beyond the action gleamed a mysterious black. The sound of the whole was a droned story of distant beginnings and an even more distant end.

Still unspeaking, Crow and Lila settled on one of the benches. They remained quiet for so long Lila wondered if Crow was too uncomfortable to break it. The more she thought about it, though, the more she convinced herself he was simply enjoying himself.

As she was. She found herself thinking how long it had been since she felt so at ease. Still, there was a disturbing puzzlement that his presence was part of the reason. Surreptitiously, she turned her head just enough to study his profile against the moonlight. At that angle, in that light, it was even more uncompromising than she remembered.

Only pain did that to people.

What had hurt him so much he was required to deny it every waking minute?

The little she'd said about herself relieved her. Not that she felt better, exactly. Lighter? That wasn't it.

It was close.

Close.

The word carried shock. She felt close to him, as if he'd taken on some of her burden. He wasn't simply beside her on a park bench. He was at her side.

Same words. Totally different meaning.

He got to his feet so quickly she made a small involuntary sound of surprise. He was brusque. “I have to go. Major’s been cooped up a long time. He needs walked.” He hesitated. Lila waited, tensing. Finally, he resumed. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate you and your friends. You all are kind. You think I’m probably dealing with that post-traumatic stress business. I’m not. I have my dreams, sure. Like anyone. Anyone who lives with enough stress, it'll leave its mark, but you live through it. I’m exactly the way I want to be. Don't be thinking you’ve been sitting here next to a bomb, okay?”

She put out a hand to shake his. He barely touched it. She said, “That makes us even. I was worried you were thinking you were sitting next to a basket case. I don’t understand you, but I was never afraid of that. I’ve got enough trouble trying to understand me.”

He said, “We're ok then. Thanks for a fine evening. Things will work out for you. Keep fighting, hear? And tell Zasu there’s no hard feelings.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him it was time for her to go, too. She wanted to stretch the moment, walk beside him to the other side of the street. She gestured toward the water, willing him to linger. She said, “I used to listen to this old river and imagine the bad things in my life falling in. The water’s so cold it made them too weak to escape. The current would carry them far, far away.”

Crow didn’t move. Her voice took on a child’s wistfulness. “It used to work. Not so much anymore. Once you grow up, troubles always find their way back.” Embarrassment made her suddenly hearty. She reached for his hand again for a confiding squeeze. “Goodbye, Crow, you rambling man. You’re a better friend than you know.”

*         *          *          *          *

At his pickup, Crow looked at his hand before opening the door. For a ridiculous moment he wondered - if he tried hard enough - if he could feel a lingering trace of her warmth. His mind cast back over the day and he was staggered by how easily the old memories rushed in to blast away the small, new, pleasure of it.

He pressed a fist against the window glass. Aloud, he said, “I’m not lonely. And what if I am, sometimes? It doesn’t bother me.”

He thought of Lila’s fantasy river that captured trouble and his smile was gentle.

Major was having no gentle smiles or troubled minds. In a whirl of excitement, he was barking both welcome and indignation at being left for so long. Crow climbed behind the steering wheel, fending off enthusiasm. Rolling down the street, he massaged the dog’s thick neck, saying, “I almost messed up, buddy. You’ve got to do better at reminding me; today’s all that counts. No yesterdays, no tomorrows, remember? You and me, we live in an everlasting present. Never forget. Never let me forget.”

Lila purposely didn’t watch Crow leave.

She didn’t know why. Still, it took even more will to avoid turning when she heard the drum of his pickup's engine fill Front Street’s silence.

He was merely an interlude, she told herself, a dinner partner by coincidence. There was companionship, though. Almost wary at times, it was oddly fulfilling. The fulfilling part made her uneasy. That was quickly banished by the awareness of two people finding tendrils of understanding, learning it was safe to sympathize, safe to laugh at foibles as well as jokes.

Memory had almost lost the times she’d experienced something like that.

Memory could be perverse, could forget good things and hoard pain.

Closing her eyes, accepting the comfortable curve of the bench, she thought back to Aunt Lila. “We’ll always be here,” Aunt Lila had said, “because Bake and I love you.” The words were burned in Lila’s memory. So was the sadness in the older woman when she realized that
always
was another of the well-meant fantasies we impose on children. In the pinched silence that followed the impossible promise Lila grasped mortality for the first time. The only thing that kept her from crying was Aunt Lila’s consoling caress and still another wishful assurance. “Any time you want to come here we want you.”

All these years later, Lila deplored the unaware child who’d missed the greater truth. Why hadn’t she had the wit to intuit the cancer already coursing through the older woman?

Some people told little white lies to avoid breaking a heart.

Others used deceit as an engine of destruction.

Lila wished her experience of falsehood had stopped with Aunt Lila.

Retreating from that knowledge, she sought safety in other reminiscence.

Her aunt and uncle had no children. At one time she’d considered living with them. Her youthful ignorance scorned the notion. Lupine was nowhere. Loopy Lupine.

Not that living at home was a winner.

Usually Lila didn’t dwell on home. Tonight, though, lost in river-sound, enveloped in darkness, she felt more able to confront demons.

With an unconscious grimace she thought of blithering to Crow about her secret technique for banishing trouble. That gem of childishness had been hidden for so long she’d almost forgotten it herself. At least she hadn’t told him how a sympathetic river whispered complicity, how it worked hard to prove a little girl’s belief that imaginings could be so wonderful they created truth.

Well, why not confide in him? A little bit couldn’t hurt. Anyhow, he was already planning his getaway.

Maybe Crow was laughing about her right now. Eyes open, she straightened.

What if he was? So what?

Think about Aunt Lila. Aunt Lila knew of the secret place, never asked where it was.

It had taken Lila far too long to realize how close to the edge the couple lived. The small store provided a sparse income. Bake’s outdoor skills made him a popular guide, but he always spoke of those spotty paydays as “sweetening the pot.” Aunt Lila had her own expression for her extra input; she gardened, shopped with a hawk's intensity for produce bargains, and “put things by” all summer. No wild blackberry was safe when she was on the prowl. Her jam jars glistened on the pantry shelves like jewels in a treasure cave. Her apple butter was dark brown temptation, a magical substance that Lila was sure could make angels veer off course. The words they used to describe their efforts to save a few dollars were cliche, but it was what they said, and that made it good.

Bake liked to say he and his Lila knew how to make do. He claimed if it wasn’t for coffee, sugar, and flour he wouldn’t give a whoop if the stores all closed down - except Bake’s Bait, of course. Aunt Lila would just smile when he said it. She knew it was bravado, and Lila always thought Aunt Lila loved him all the more for it. When things got really hard, Aunt Lila was the one who found a way out. She grew flowers and vegetables and sold them out in front at a roadside stall. She badgered Bake to teach her how to tie fishing flies; in short order she was one of the best. She did leatherwork and knitted scarves, sweaters, and hats during their near-snowbound winters and sold the products in the summer.

Bake knitted, too. It was the darkest secret of that old country boy’s life.

Theirs was the happiest house Lila ever saw. The best part was sharing their fireplace evenings, the couple in their huge old leather chairs, herself on a fat sofa cushion beside one or the other. Sometimes they took turns reading aloud. Behind their voices the wood fire crackled and hissed, the smell soothing as balm. Once, snuggled next to Uncle Bake, Lila watched him reach out to his wife. Neither took their eyes from the page, so a sixth sense must have made Aunt Lila aware because she reached, too. Loving hands linked in knowing communion.

It was the sort of thing that made going home bleak. Not that her parents were cruel or distant. Not exactly. They were simply preoccupied. They had careers, friends, hobbies. Sometimes Lila and Les were allowed inside that world. Not often. A son and daughter were components, part of what defined the ideal family.

Childhood was hardly a frozen sea, though. Ceremony was scrupulously observed; Christmas brought wonderful presents, Thanksgiving was a feast (never just a celebration, but a well-staged
event
), and birthdays were truly memorable productions. But neither parent ever hugged her and said, “That’s just for being Lila.” Aunt Lila did. No one else ever showed up like Uncle Bake with a big dish of freshly made ice cream in the evening and said, “I don’t much want to sit out on the porch glider and eat all this alone. You interested?”

In her own house, Lila listened to her mother’s constant complaint that her sister had married beneath her, that Uncle Bake was just a hippie. Lila’s brother, Les, agreed.

Suddenly ashamed, Lila once more closed her eyes against the weight of the night and admitted that she hadn’t thought of Les in weeks, perhaps months. Les, so attractive, so full of life. So needful of more excitement, more fun, more girls, more speed. It was the speed that finished it. Fast car, alcohol, bridge abutment. Lila wondered what it said about her that she could never think of that night without a secret gladness that Les was by himself when it happened.

At least Les had been so much in love with life he dove into it too deeply. Wasn’t it better that life end with a moment of joy suddenly transformed into an even shorter moment of explosive tragedy, rather than a grinding day-by-day diminishment?

Maybe. And maybe at the end Les realized he was a fool.

The thought turned on her, vicious as a scorpion. Les was a fool, yes, but his own fool. Not someone else’s. He destroyed himself. He didn’t wring his hands and watch someone else do it.

Rising, she headed for her car. She wasn’t like Les. He had dreams. The difference between dreams and goals was that goals had roots in reality.

She was almost to Front Street when a man suddenly stepped from behind a tree. Alarm choked her. An involuntary hand flew to her throat.

“It’s me,” Van said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Air flooded Lila’s lungs, helped steady her knees. Her words were brittle. “You should have said something. What were you thinking?”