True Colors (29 page)

“I hear they just started dating,” Aurora said, following Vivi Ann’s gaze.

“Lucky him,” Vivi Ann said bitterly.

The band finished one song and started another. It took Vivi Ann only a note or two to recognize it: “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Vivi Ann ordered another straight shot and drank it down, but it didn’t help to get rid of this titanic sense of loss.

And then she saw Winona coming her way.

“I gotta go,” she muttered.

“Don’t—” Aurora said, reaching for her.

Vivi Ann pulled free and ran stumbling through the crowd. Outside, she could breathe again, but that wasn’t good enough. She needed to be gone from here, away from this place where he was everywhere.

She ran back to Aurora’s house and went straight to her truck, leaving Noah asleep in Aurora’s safe, memoryless house. At Water’s Edge, she hit the brake so hard she lurched forward, smacked her breasts into the steering wheel when she parked.

To the left lay her cabin and the bed she’d shared with Dallas.

To the right lay the house where she’d grown up, and inside was her father, once her safe place and idol; now, nothing. Without him and her whole family, she felt lost, but there was no help for that. He and Winona had made their choice a year ago when they turned their backs on Dallas.

Dallas
.

Vivi Ann made a little sound, a thin moan of pain. Stumbling forward, she went into the barn, down the aisle to Clem’s stall. Flipping the latch, she pushed the heavy wooden door open.

“Hey, Clem,” she said, stepping into the darkness and closing the stall door behind her.

Nickering softly, Clem limped over to her, nudged her with her graying, velvety muzzle.

“I haven’t spent the night with you since Mom died, have I, girl?”

Clem nickered again, rubbing her nose along Vivi Ann’s thigh.

And just like that, at her horse’s touch, Vivi Ann fell apart. Everything she’d been trying to hold in came pouring out. She slid down the stall wall and slumped in the cedar shavings, bowing her head to her knees.

Winona was at the stuffed grizzly bear’s outstretched paw when she saw Vivi Ann glance at her, see her coming, and run out of the Outlaw. She paused just a moment, stumbled as disappointment washed through her.

All of this was so unlike Vivi Ann. They’d always fought and made up and gone on; sisterhood was like that, a quilt made up of all the scraps, good and bad. Sighing, she walked over to Aurora, who stood there alone, staring at the open door, sipping her strawberry margarita.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” Winona said. “What are we going to do?”

“We?” Aurora’s voice was icy but dull, and in that lack of luster Winona knew there was an opening.

“You hate it, too.”

“Of course I hate it.”

“What do we do?”

Aurora turned to her. “Take his appeal. Help her.”

Why didn’t anyone understand? “I won’t be any help to him, don’t you get that? I’m a small-town attorney. I don’t know anything about criminal appellate work.”

Aurora’s gaze was steady and more than a little sad. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it, Win. We’re sisters. At least we used to be.” On that, she set down her half-empty margarita and walked out of the tavern.

Winona stood there in the smoky darkness, surrounded by friends and neighbors. Alone.

Winona and her father spent Christmas Eve together. She got to his house early and decorated all by herself. She went up to the attic, found the worn, creased cardboard boxes marked
Xmas,
and carried them down to the living room.

There, it was quiet. There were no sisters laughing together, drinking wine, and arguing about what holiday movie to watch while they decorated. No wonder Winona had put off the decorating until this late date. She’d known how it would feel.

Still, she refused to skimp on any tradition, and so she decorated the house from stem to stern, using everything in the boxes. She curled fresh cedar boughs up the banister and tied them in place with glittery gold ribbons. She put the miniature Christmas scene along the mantel: fake snow, tiny people with cars and carriages and replicas of downtown storefronts. As a girl, her favorite part had been to fit the tiny oval of mirrored glass on top of the cottony snow to make a minuscule skating lake. The girls had fought over that job for years . . .

Winona refused to think about that. Instead, she poured herself another glass of wine, put dinner on the stove, and cut herself a big piece of cake.

She’d used food to tide her over for most of the past few months. Whenever she’d felt depressed, she’d gone into the kitchen. Now she had probably ten dozen cookies in Tupperware containers in her refrigerator, and she’d gained at least fifteen pounds since Dallas’s arrest.

Don’t think about that, either
.

She went into Dad’s study, finding him there. He was holding a drink and staring out at the Canal. The view was crisp on this cold, late December day—purple mountains crowned in pink snow, steel-blue water, gray shoreline. The few docks that could be seen from here were thick with sleeping seals. Seagulls lined the railing, one after another, like yellow-beaked bowling pins.

“Hey, Dad,” she said, coming up behind him.

“Hey,” he said without looking at her.

She was trying to think of something else to say when the phone rang. Grateful for the interruption, she said, “I’ll get it,” and ran to the wall phone in the kitchen. “Hello?” she said, slightly out of breath.

“Merry Christmas Eve,” Luke said.

“Luke!” she said, smiling for the first time all day. Yanking the long cord out behind her, she sat down at the breakfast table and put her feet up. “How’s Montana?”

They didn’t talk as easily as they once had. Their conversation was punctuated with lengthy silences, things unsaid. Still, he told her about the house he’d bought a few weeks ago and how it was going with his new partner. She told him a funny story about her recent date with Ken Otter and said it was what she had expected, dating a thrice-divorced dentist. “It’s better than being alone though.”

There was a pause, then he said, “How is she?”

“Is that why you called? To ask about Vivi Ann?”

“It’s about you,” he said. “I know how much it’s killing you to be on the outs with her. Quit waiting for a chance and go up and make one. Just walk up to the house, knock on the door, and say you’re sorry.”

“Can we talk about something else, please?” Winona said, and for the next hour they talked about ordinary things, and when they ran out of topics, he said, “Well. I just wanted to say Merry Christmas.”

“You, too, Luke,” she said, hanging up.

But as she walked away from the phone, his words stayed with her, echoed. Aurora and Richard had taken the kids skiing for the holiday, probably because they knew the loneliness that would lurk at Water’s Edge this year, and so she knew Vivi Ann and Noah were up there alone.

Could she do it? Just walk up to the cabin as if it were a journey back in time? She tried to think it through, imagine it rationally, but the truth was that once she’d had the thought, she couldn’t let it go. Longing sank its hooks deep in her heart, and she grabbed her coat from the closet by the front door and slipped into it. Walking carefully, avoiding puddles that floated on the gravel road, she walked up to Vivi Ann’s cabin and knocked on the door.

Vivi Ann answered instantly, looking awful. Her hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, as if she’d been obsessively scratching her scalp, and her face was red and blotchy. Her eyes were watery and bloodshot, and she was unsteady on her feet, almost drunken. “What do you want?”

Winona was momentarily taken aback by the sight of her sister. “I . . . I wanted to talk. I know you’re pissed at me, but it’s Christmas Eve, and I thought—”

“You’re here to gloat, aren’t you? You know his appeal was denied.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You think I want to hear that you’re
sorry
?” Vivi Ann moved forward, lurched a little. “You sat in that courtroom every day, listening to the evidence, Winona. My supposedly brilliant sister. Did you question any of it? He
was
sick on Christmas Eve. I took his temperature . . .”

“You think Myrtle was lying?”

“I think she was mistaken. She
had
to be, and that hair evidence was crap. Even you can’t believe Dallas was screwing Cat while he was married to me.” Vivi Ann’s eyes were glassy and a little wild-looking, and Winona felt a flutter of fear. Something was wrong here.

In the back of the house, Noah started to cry.

“Answer me,” Vivi Ann snapped. “Do you think he was screwing Cat? You saw us together.”

Winona saw how desperately Vivi Ann was trying to convince her. She knew that all she had to do was pretend to agree, and maybe they could begin to mend their breach.

But sometimes, if you loved someone, you had to be strong, had to say the thing that needed to be said. Clearly, Vivi Ann was falling apart. Losing it. Winona might not know much about the criminal justice system, but believing in miracles within it couldn’t be good.

She moved toward her sister. Vivi Ann looked like one of those skittish abused horses of hers, terrified and ready to bolt. “This is killing you, Vivi,” Winona said as gently as she could. “Believing in something that will never happen—”

“He
will
be released.”

“I
did
sit in that courtroom and I saw the truth you’re trying to ignore. He—”

“Don’t say it, Win.”

“You know it, Vivi. You must. He’s guilty. You need to—”

Vivi Ann slapped her across the face so hard she stumbled back. “Get out of my house. We’re done talking. Forever.”

The years ground slowly forward.

1997.

1998.

1999.

Aurora tried to make peace within their family numerous times, but Vivi Ann had no room in her shrunken heart for forgiveness, and in truth, she didn’t try to make space. Her father and Winona had wounded her too deeply. Every Saturday, Vivi Ann dropped Noah off with Aurora and drove two and a half hours to the prison, so that she could sit behind a dirty Plexiglas window and talk to Dallas through a heavy black receiver. Roy filed one motion after another, each one a beacon of hope that crashed on the rocks. She felt as if she were tied to a wicked seesaw where every high and low took a little more of her soul away. And when Roy finally called to say that the last state appeal had been denied, he’d added quickly, “But don’t worry, I’ll go federal.” So she’d tried again to keep believing, and the months kept passing.

The only way she’d found to survive was to numb herself to everything else. She popped Xanax like jelly beans during the daytime, and they allowed her to move forward, to smile and talk and pretend to be in an ordinary world. Aurora was her anchor in that attempt, her steadying hand. Still, when Vivi Ann was alone at night, she drank too much and either held her son too tightly or not at all. Sometimes she just sat there, swaying to the music in her head, hearing Noah crying or calling out for her, and trying to remember how it had felt to touch Dallas, to hold him. The memories were leaking away, and without them, she had nothing to ward off the numbness, and so she gave in, falling into a deep and troubled sleep on the sofa.

On several of her Saturday visits she’d missed things—Noah’s first tricycle ride, his preschool’s winter party, even his fourth birthday. She’d told herself at the time that he was young, that if she told him his birthday was Sunday he’d believe her—and he had—but she’d seen the way Aurora looked at her, so full of pity, and Vivi Ann had had to turn away. That night, after all the party decorations were in the trash, she’d taken so many shots of tequila that she’d missed her lessons in the morning.

Now it was October 1999; a Saturday. Almost four years after Dallas’s arrest.

She sat in the prison parking lot, staring through the windshield at the gray walls. Rain assaulted the windshield, falling so hard and fast the glass seemed alive, almost flexible. Through this distortion, she could see the imposing concrete mass of the maximum-security prison. She’d seen the collection of buildings in all kinds of weather, and even in full sunlight, with the green landscape and blue sky surrounding, it looked grim and menacing. The rain made the prison look dismal and forlorn, huddled against the hillside instead of standing defiantly in front of it.

She went through the routine of checking in on autopilot, barely noticing anymore how frightening it was to be in here. All she really noticed these days was the noise—the clanging of doors, the clicking of locks, the distant hum of raised voices.

She took her usual place on the left-side cubicle, waiting.

“Hey, Vivi,” he said when he sat down across from her.

At last she smiled. For all the apathy in her everyday life, she couldn’t escape the fact that here, with him, she felt alive. As crazy as it was, she was glad to see him, to be near him, even if they couldn’t touch. She said his name and it was like a prayer, had almost become one. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the newest photograph of Noah. In it, he was a bright, shiny six-year-old, wearing a baseball cap and holding a bat, grinning.