S
am can barely see the road in front of him.The rain is coming down in hard sheets now, watery guillotines. The road is slick, muddy under his feet. It’s hard to walk without slipping. He’s carrying the shotgun, ready. If Alice’s father took them in the car, chances are they’re long gone now, but something is propelling him forward. His gut tells him to keep going. He cannot bear the thought that anything has happened to Mena. He cannot lose her. He will not let this happen. He’s going to ask Magoo if he can borrow his Cadillac. He’ll find them. He has to.
He squints against the wind and the rain, which is pounding against his jacket. He remembers the first time his dad took him hunting. It had rained then too. They’d come here, to Gormlaith, and camped out in the woods. His father had taught him how to hold the gun, how to aim, how to shoot. They’d spent an entire weekend traipsing through the wet forest. He’d shot his first pheasant that weekend. It was exhilarating. His father had patted him on the back, his large hand strong on his shoulder. Proud. Sam had never felt so proud. That night, they slept in their tent and Sam listened to the rain pelting against the canvas. The smell of the pheasant his father had cooked on the campfire, gamey and piquant, lingered in the air. Not even the rain could wash that smell away.
When he gets to Magoo’s, all the lights are out, and the Caddie is not in the driveway.
Shit
. He’s probably at his daughter’s house in town. Next-door, Devin’s truck is not in the driveway either. Not even the Bookmobile Effie drives for the Athenaeum. He starts walking back toward the cabin, trying to figure out what to do.
The cop
.
He’s going to have to just suck it up and go to the cop’s house. Pray he doesn’t discover the mountains of grass in the barn. He turns around and starts heading back the way he came. But just as he gets back to their driveway, he sees a pair of headlights coming up the road. He squints, shielding his eyes from the glare. And then he hears the sound of the muffler. He’d know that sound anywhere. His shoulders relax. They’re home. Maybe she just went out for something at Hudson’s and brought Alice with her. Maybe this was all a big mistake.
Sam walks to the middle of the road in front of the cabin and waits. He peers into the windshield and raises his hand to wave. But then he catches his breath. He can see three figures through the glass. His hand tightens around the shotgun.
When the car stops just short of him, he cocks the gun. Ready. His heart is thumping in his chest, which is swollen. He feels like he might explode.
The driver’s side door swings open, and Mena gets out of the car, running toward him. “Sam, do something. Quick.”
Sam aims the gun at the passenger side of the woody.
“Get out of the car!” he yells.
He’s got one shot. Exactly one shot.
The passenger door swings open, but the guy doesn’t get out.
“Get out of the fucking car!” Sam bellows, and peers down the barrel. He releases the safety.
The figure that emerges puts its hands up.
“Jesus Christ,” Sam says.
It’s a girl. A pudgy girl in a sundress. Her hair is disheveled. She has a gash across her forehead. She is holding a knife in her hand.
He keeps the gun cocked.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “Who the fuck is
she?
” he says to Mena.
“Didn’t you get the note I left for you?” the girl says.
“What note?” Sam says.
“On your windshield,” she says. “I thought you’d be expecting me.”
Mena is leaning into him, but she is speechless.
“Who is she?” Finn asks. He has come out of the house now too.
“I just want to talk to you,” the girl says. “To show you my work. I think if we can just talk about it, you’ll see.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” he asks Mena. “Who the fuck are you?” he says again to the girl.
“It’s me,
silly,
” she says, smiling.
“Dale Edwards.”
She lowers her arms and steps toward him awkwardly, looking as though she’s about to curtsy, still clutching the knife. Her head is bleeding. It looks like she’s been dragged through the mud. His grip on the gun tightens. “I’m writing your
biography,
” she says.
Dale
. Dale Edwards, the woman who’s been sending the letters. The one who sent those awful photos of Franny.
“I need you to leave my family alone,” Sam says. Mena clings tightly to his arm.
The girl’s face drops, and she scowls. She shakes her head. “I didn’t do anything to your family.”
“What do you want from us?” Sam asks. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
Her eyes are wild now, and she is shivering. “Can’t we just go inside?” she says.
“Are you fucking nuts?” he says, stepping toward her, aiming. He wants nothing more than to shut her up. To make her disappear.
Her lip starts to quiver and he takes a step closer.
At this, the girl’s face snarls in anger. She looks like an animal. She is waving the knife wildly. “I know your secret. I know about Franny.”
Hearing Franny’s name come out of her mouth turns his stomach.
“You told the newspapers it was a heart attack, something wrong with her heart.” When she laughs, it sounds like a gunshot. And then her smile dissolves into a frown. “I believed it. We all believed it. But it was all a bunch of lies.You’re a
liar!
” she spits.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Mena screams, covering her ears with her hands.
“See?” Dale says, pointing toward the car. Alice has slowly slid out of the backseat and is standing at the rear of the car. The taillights make an aura of red and gold around her. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, like a blond angel. If you didn’t know better, you might think she was Franny.
“See?”
Dale says again, accusing, crying and pointing wildly. She goes to Alice and yanks her arm, pulling her forward. She points the knife at Alice’s chest, sobbing and shaking. “There’s nothing wrong with her heart.
Nothing
.”
Sam raises the gun, peers down the sight.
He has one chance. One shot.
F
inn is running down the rickety porch steps to the driveway before he has time to think. It feels as though he is watching this from above, with a whirling helicopter view of himself as he runs toward the girl, the one who has Alice.
“Go,” he says to Alice as he knocks the girl to the ground.
“Go!”
and Alice slips away.
And then his knees are grinding into the gravel driveway as he wrestles with the girl, grabbing her fleshy wrist, twisting it until she is crying. Her skin smells like rotten strawberries. Her hair is plastered to the sides of her face, and her glasses are cracked. Her eyes dart back and forth behind the muddy lenses, and she’s bitten her lip. Blood trickles down her chin.
“Don’t hurt me,” she says. “Please.”
And suddenly, he is ten years old, on the asphalt playground pinning Joey Mendez to the pavement, bending his fingers back, prying the dollar he just stole from Franny out of his dirty hand. He can feel the tendons resisting, hear the joints cracking, and the high-pitched squeal of panic and pain coming out of that little shit Mendez’s mouth. It makes him hate him even more; his weakness makes him nauseous. Palm trees swaying above him and salt in his eyes.
The rain makes the girl’s skin slippery as he pries the knife out of her hand. She is sitting up now, scooching backward on her ass away from him. She holds her hands in front of her face, as if to protect herself from him. As if he’s the crazy one. When he steps back, she smiles at him.
And then Joey Mendez stands up, shaking the pain free from his hand, flipping Finn off with his perfectly undamaged middle finger.
Pussy,
he says as he starts to walk away, and then Finn is on him again, knocking him to the ground and raising his fist, ready to hit the smile right off his face.
He feels the knife’s weight and heft in his fist, and he imagines plunging it right into her heaving chest. He could kill her. He raises the knife now, ready to strike.
But now Franny is saying,
Stop, Finny. That’s enough
.
And Alice is saying, “Stop, Finn. Please.”
And then there is a sound louder than thunder, so loud and close, it startles the knife right out of his hand. Gravel and dust fly up into the air, and then the girl is running.
S
he runs. She hasn’t run this hard or fast since she was a little girl. She thinks she could run all the way back home. Her legs are moving so fast. Her heart is pumping blood furiously through her body. She could be an animal out here, she is suddenly so quick and sure-footed. Fast. She feels graceful and light.
The rain has soaked through her dress, and her hair is plastered to her face. Rain runs into her eyes, pools in her open mouth.
None of this is what she expected, what she wanted.
She can hear Sam coming behind her, and part of her hopes he’ll just shoot again. The first shot hit the ground next to her. But now, she hopes that he’ll aim that awful gun at her heart or head and end this. She thinks of deer, of rabbits. She imagines herself being hunted. And she runs.
It doesn’t take long before she loses feeling in her legs, and fears that the earth has fallen out from underneath her. It doesn’t take long before Sam catches up to her. She glances over her shoulder at him. He doesn’t have the gun anymore. He is alone. And he is calling her name. “Dale?” he says.
Her eyes sting with tears.
“Please stop.”
Her legs and feet are completely numb. But when her ankle twists, and the crack rings out like a gunshot, all sensation returns. She screams out, collapses onto the wet ground, and clutches her ankle, which feels like it has gotten caught in a steel trap.
“It’s okay,” Sam says. “It’s okay.” He is kneeling down next to her on the ground now. “It’s okay. No one is going to hurt you.”
And then he is offering her his hand, helping her up. Tears burn in her eyes, and when her wounded foot makes contact with the ground, pain sears through her entire body. She cries out again.
“Here,” he says, offering her his shoulder. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”
His arms are strong, and he smells like pine trees. Like wood smoke and cinnamon. She breathes him in as they hobble back the way they came.
“I only wanted to talk to you,” she says, tears streaming down her face. “I just wanted to meet you in person.You have no idea what your work means to me. What your words mean to me.”
She leans into him, and he holds her up. Steadies and supports her.
She knows that the police will be waiting there for her. She knows they’ll take her away. She knows that there will be doctors again, pills. She knows that soon she’ll be back inside that house in Phoenix with her mother, stuck again, working at the Blockbuster and trying to finish the stupid paper on Shelley. But none of it matters now, as Sam holds her up and they walk through the rain toward the warm light of his home.
What do you do with what’s left when a life is gone?
Nothing matters but his arm across her shoulder. She in her yellow summer dress. She looks up at him, smiling as he helps her.
Cradles her, carries her home
.
“Thank you,” she says. And when he looks down at her, she can see something close to love in his eyes.
M
ena is worried about Sam, but she needs to keep it together for the kids. She sends Finn inside to call the police, and Alice stays outside with her on the porch. She is shivering.
“Hold on, sweetie,” Mena says to Alice, and goes into the cabin to find a sweater. She grabs a soft gray cardigan from the chair in the kitchen and goes outside again, wrapping the sweater around Alice’s shoulders.
“Thank you,” Alice says, pulling the long sleeves around her. Mena touches her soft blond hair, brushing it out of her eyes. And that single gesture brings to the surface all of the grief, all of that aching awful loneliness she’s been carrying in her bones for the past nine months. She needs to sit down; she worries if she doesn’t her spine might simply crumble, one vertebra after another, like dominoes.
They sit together on the steps, knees touching. Mena puts her arm across Alice’s shoulder and pulls her in tight. “You okay?” Mena asks.
“You guys saved my
life,
” Alice says. “That was crazy.”
Mena looks at Alice’s eyes, wide and young and hopeful, and thinks about Franny.
That’s
what it is. It isn’t her face, or her mane of blond hair. It isn’t her smile, her nose, her hands. It’s not even her eyes, but rather something inside them.
Hope
. That’s why Alice reminds Mena of Franny. It’s the light. The light that was there in Franny’s eyes even when she was so sick. If there had been darkness, maybe if that light had gone out, she would have known something was terribly wrong and she could have helped her. But Franny was always so hopeful. Always so
brilliant
.
“The police are on their way,” Finn says as he comes out of the house.
Mena looks out at the gravel driveway, at the car with its doors still wide open, the headlights still on. The girl,
Dale,
dropped the manuscript during the scuffle with Finn. Mena leaves Alice on the steps and goes to pick it up. It is wet, the pages bloated and soaked. Mena thumbs through the pages. The ink runs together rendering everything,
The Life and Work of Samuel Mason
, a shivery blur.
“What is that?” Finn asks.
“It’s trash,” she says.
She knows there are some trash barrels in the barn. She saw Sam filling them with grass clippings earlier. She leaves Finn and Alice and walks to the barn. It is dark in here. Quiet. She looks up at the basketball hoop, down at the dusty floor. She takes the manuscript and tosses it into one of the barrels, which she drags outside. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and finds the book of matches she remembers putting there. Jake’s book of matches. God, what the hell was she thinking?
The rain has stopped. She soaks the clippings with some lighter fluid she found in the barn and strikes a match. There is a whoosh and then hot flames. The manuscript turns black within moments, and then the grass begins to burn.
She can see the lights of the police car twirling in the driveway, illuminating the trees, the cabin, and the sky in flashes of red and blue. The cop from down the road is talking to Sam, jotting something down on a clipboard. And the girl is sitting in the backseat of the cruiser, staring straight ahead. Smiling.
“What’s that smoke?” the cop asks Mena. “Something on fire?”
“Just some clippings,” she says. “Some trash.”
“You know you gotta have a permit to burn,” he says, scowling. “From the fire warden.You got a permit?”
“I’ll put it out. I didn’t know I needed a permit,” Sam says. He looks nervous. He’s running his hands through his hair over and over again.
“Maybe I better help you. That looks like it’s burning real good.”
“Don’t you think you should get her to the hospital?” Sam says. “I’m pretty sure she’s got a broken ankle.”
“It can wait. You don’t want that barn to go up with it.” The cop shuts the door to the cruiser, locks the girl inside.
Suddenly a scratchy voice booms from the radio on the cop’s belt. “Eddie? We got a break-in up at Gormlaith.You up there? Got a unit on it already, but they could use some help. Some guy just out of the joint looking for his ex. He tore the place up, tore himself up too.”
Alice lets out a small cry.
“My dad.”
The cop speaks into the receiver on his shoulder. “What’s the location?”
And then he’s jumping into the car. He rolls down the window, and says to Sam, “I’ll need you to come down to the station later and give a statement.”
Mena goes to Alice, who is still sitting on the steps, her head in her hands. Mena sits down next to her and puts her arm around her shoulder again. And this time, the grief and aching are gone. Now, all that’s left is that old familiar tenderness. “It’s okay, sweetie. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I hope so. I really can’t take much more tonight,” Alice says, shaking her head and smiling weakly. “I mean, seriously.”
Finn sits on the other side of Alice, and they watch as Sam walks to the barn. The air is thick and sweet with smoke. And soon, more smoke billows out from behind the barn.The smell is rich. Earthy and familiar. The smoke curls up into the sky, and only then does Mena recognize the smell of marijuana.