Flutter (23 page)

Who called for Ash? My head swirled. I certainly could have misheard. Had my dad called? My heartbeat quickened. Part of me wanted to grab Jeannette and shake her, force her to repeat what she’d said, tell me the whole story.

But I didn’t.

As I looked around at this party, the Winging family, all hugging and kissing hellos to their guests, their friends, I felt a hollow spot in my chest, an aching there. I felt empty. It was hard for me to care about anything at this point.

Maybe I should just march into the Wingings’ house and call Dad. Let him come and get me, take me back to the
hospital, plug me back in, get it over with. If the fiasco on the bus had really happened, then Dad would be here shortly.

What did it all matter without Ash, anyway? The end was coming soon, one way or another. I could feel it.

It was difficult—no, impossible—to regain that sense of a new beginning, of a newfound freedom from just a few weeks ago, when I had stepped off that bus into this little blip of a town.

My eyes scanned over these people around me, all happily chitchatting and hugging, greeting each other in their Sunday best. Many of the children were dressed in their Christmas clothes—lots of greens and reds, velvet dresses, Santa sweaters. They had their own way of life here, with their
eh
s at the end of sentences, their six-month-long winters, and their slow, leisurely pace. But they seemed happy, engaged in life. A couple of weeks ago, I was inspired by these yoopers, but now I was like an outsider looking in.

I watched as Garrett and Cody picked ice cubes out of the punch bowl with their fingers. I found Mr. Crane in the crowd, realizing he was the man who owned the hardware store. I watched him as he glimpsed Mrs. Crane and her pearls from across the room. The look in his eyes, the tilt of his head, the way he gazed at her … My breath caught in my throat.

Their history, their happiness. Their love. I would never have this. I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat and told myself to stop the pity party. It would do no good.

I stayed on the outskirts of the festivities for a while, ate some cheese and shrimp, discussed bowling shoes at length with Mr. McGarry. Despite everything, I was hoping Ash would show. I couldn’t quit scanning the crowd.

At dinner, I sat with the Wingings. The food was fabulous. Double-baked potatoes and filet mignon, made by Sam’s Broken Egg, and a dessert of the most gorgeous individual rolled-fondant cakes, with tiny holly berry decorations—Jeannette had truly outdone herself.

I went to the bar for a Coke, and it was then that Mr. Crane stood up to give a toast. I didn’t hear that much of it. Truth be told, I was biting back tears from the get-go. It wasn’t until she handed me a napkin that I realized Daisy was standing next to me.

“He’s here,” she told me.

“Who?” I asked, but my heart skipped a beat.

“Your Ash. He’s here,” she said, annoyed and entertained at the same time. She gestured toward the far entrance of the barn.

And there he was, looking nothing short of otherworldly himself. My Ash. He wore a dark pair of jeans and corduroy jacket. Even from this distance, I could see that his jaw was set and clenched. But I didn’t care. He was
here
.

Garrett and Cody Winging were already all over him, pulling on his arms, dancing around him.

“Well, go get him, you dummy,” Daisy offered.

I started to move toward him, and he saw me. He did
that thing again, where he put a hand over his heart, and he stopped dead in his tracks, gave me a smile.

The band had started up, and they were playing a familiar country tune. I hugged him in greeting, and he picked me up a bit, twirled me. I nuzzled his neck, breathing in his scent, relishing his skin against mine.

“You’re back!” I said, pulling away a smidge, and I drank in the sight of him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just know that.”

We stayed like that, embracing, and it gradually turned into a dance. I clung to him. He grabbed my right hand and brought it to his heart, and we danced slowly, my head resting on his shoulder. As other couples filled up the dance floor, we stayed at the edges, on the fringe. In our own world.

“I don’t want to be someone who hurts anybody, Emery,” he whispered in my ear. “Especially not you.” His voice was low, music to my body, sending a shiver down my spine.

“Ash, I—”

“No, let me get this out. I tried to stay away from you. I tried to keep myself and my troubles away from you.…”

“But?” I looked up.

“But I can’t stay away from you.” He looked hard in my eyes. “If you only knew how I fought this, us … how I tried not to let us matter …” He let his voice trail off, and I held him close to me. “It’s like, I would have myself all steeled against it, talked myself into running to the East Coast or something, anything to keep myself out of your hair. And
then you would just slay me with …” He let his voice drift off again.

“With what?” I asked, enrapt.

“With kindness, Em.” He touched his brow. “Your courage. Your laugh. Your belief that there is still good in this world, even when things are so broken.” He smiled at me then. “How you believed in me, Emery.” He kissed my lips. “And then there’s your terrible Scrabble playing, yet your absolutely ridiculous confidence in the process.” I smiled. Ash pressed his lips to my cheek, my neck, softly.

I closed my eyes, savored it, savored him, next to me, with me. Here.

“I had to come back. At least to tell you why I couldn’t stay. So you wouldn’t think it was you. I couldn’t live with that.”

“Thank you for coming back,” I answered, feeling the frantic grip of fear in my belly, knowing that he could run off again, could spill his secrets and leave me here. But I knew that sometimes you had to let things happen, work themselves out. You had to come at things from around a corner.

He was here. In my arms. I smiled up at him. “So … you’re back.”

“So I reckon I’ve got some explaining to do. Want to get out of here?”

He grabbed my hand then and led us toward the door, snatching up our coats on the way out.

We walked back to the cabin in silence, but he held my
hand, our bodies in sync each step of the way. And when we were almost there, he let go of my hand, put his arm around my shoulders, and pulled me close to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist as we walked, and it was easy, natural to walk this way, locked together. I took this as a good sign. I was so happy to have him back. There was a part of me that really thought that he had been lost to me forever, that I would never have this chance, this one more chance.

When we got to the cabin, he led me right to the love seat and sat me down. He immediately started pacing the floor in front of me.

He paced for what seemed like forever, running his hands through his hair, rubbing at his chin.

“For starters, I killed my father.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, but Ash looked at me hard, and I knew instinctively that this was a test, and I would pass. I didn’t know what I had been expecting him to tell me, but it wasn’t this. “Tell me it all,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

He fell to his knees then beside the couch, with a heavy sigh. I reached out and stroked his cheek, but he grabbed my hand and gently pushed it away.

“Pop wasn’t always bad. He wasn’t always a monster.”

I watched him look at me, but past me, his eyes, his thoughts, traveling back. “When we were little, he was okay. He would take us fly-fishing. All the time. I try to remember him like that. Me and Frankie and him in our waders. Pop
making funny faces at us, trying to make us laugh. Us trying to be quiet, to not scare the fish away.”

Ash looked down then, put his head in his hands for a moment. “I mean, he always had his moments. He would turn. But as the years went by, he drank more and more. It ruined him. Completely. He beat my mom. Beat her on and off since I was probably nine or ten. I remember this one time, he beat her so badly she bled from her left ear for three days. I kept going back and forth, whether I would chance calling the doctor when Pop was at work, or maybe the cops. Whether or not to chance him beating the piss out of me when he got home and got drunk again.”

He stopped for a moment, and I could see the little boy that he was underneath. I could see him reliving all of this, behind his eyes.

“It was around that same time when he beat her so hard, it punctured her lung. She was pregnant, not with Frankie, with … She never … She made some excuses for him at the hospital. No one ever pushed. No one could ever believe that Pop … He was just so damn good at hiding it, and I suppose he had a lot of friends. The sheriff was his friend. And Mom never wanted to give him up. I reckon she was waiting for the old Pop to come back, that same old smile, the guy we loved. I guess I was waiting too, for a while.…”

Ash pinched the bridge of his nose then. “I could tell you a million stories about him, Emery, each one worse than the last. By the time I was probably twelve, the real Pop, the one
who taught us how to fish, the one who taught us how to hammer a nail, ride a horse, he was gone. Replaced by the drink. By this monster. Mom could rarely leave the house, she was so bruised.”

“Oh, Ash,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. But there’s more. I’m also responsible for my brother’s and my mom’s death.”

I sat quietly, struggling with all this. My Ash? Responsible for these deaths? Taking someone’s life? I found this hard to swallow, hard to believe.

He looked up and challenged me. “Do you still want to hear the rest?”

I nodded, unable to fathom the lifetime of horror and pain that Ash had to confront on a daily basis.

We have the choice to be more than our DNA
, I remembered Dad telling me.

“I was fourteen, it was in April. A couple of friends of mine, we lifted some fireworks out of my friend Pauly’s garage, and we were shooting them off on the baseball fields. We broke into the sprinklers, had them all going. Typical kid thing to do.”

Ash stopped himself then and shook his head, visibly sick from the memory. “Somebody called the cops. We got in trouble. They called our parents, and the cops made examples out of us.”

“My mom comes to pick me up at the police station, brings Frankie. I don’t know why, probably because he
wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t want to be left behind. Probably she didn’t want Pop going after him. Anyway, it happens very fast. One moment we’re driving home, the next I hear that terrible scrape of metal on metal, hear the glass shattering. And the next thing I know, I wake up in the ambulance.”

“You were with them?” My hand went to my mouth.

Ash nodded, swallowed hard. “The drunk driver died. Mom died. Frankie died. I had a concussion, a gash on my scalp. Sixteen stitches, that was it. That was the extent of my injuries. I survived.”

“Ash.” I reached for him, but he shook his head. I finished, “You’ve got to know that it wasn’t your fault, really, Ash.”

“I know, Emery. I know. My head knows that. But in here …” He pounded on his chest. “In here, I’m not so sure.

“Last April, the anniversary of their deaths, about seven hundred beatings from Pop later—’cause once Mom is gone, there’s just me—anyway, I realize that I’m as big as he is now. And I stand up to him. I clock him one right in the jaw, catch him square. He’s drunk, of course, telling me over and over how it was all my fault. I mean, he beat her senseless, bloody, for years and years, but I’m forever the one who killed her,
killed them
, you know?

“Anyway, the old man can’t handle that I hit him back, because, I don’t know, for years, I just didn’t fight back. I didn’t want to be
him
, you know? I just took it. I guess I thought I deserved it.”

His chin quivered at this sentence, and it took everything in me not to reach out to him, not to pull him close to me. But I knew he wanted to finish, so I let him go on. He needed to go on.

“So the old man is pissed out of his mind, and he comes at me like an animal. We’re on the back porch. He’s like I’ve never seen him before. Worse. And before I know it, I’m on the ground and he’s on top of me, and he’s got a knife, a kitchen knife, and I grab it from him, right in the palm of my hand.” And he held up his hand, the scar I remember. His hand was shaking violently.

“We scuffled. He kept telling me that he had warned me—’cause after they died, he would always tell me that once I had suffered enough, he would just kill me too. That’s what he told me, when he was drunkest. Anyway, it all happened so fast.” He stopped then, and looked at me, square in the face. “I stabbed him. I left him there, dying. I left him there, Emery. Just ran. I killed him.”

“Ash, oh God, Ash.” I reached out then, and he laid his head in my lap, heaved a sigh so heavy with heartbreak. I stroked his head. “I’m so sorry, Ash.” So this was the weight on Ash’s shoulders, on his heart. It hurt me for him. It was difficult to reconcile these atrocities, this crime, with the Ash I knew. But I realized this was a gray area, a horrible, nightmarish gray area.
It must have been self-defense in some way
, I told myself. “Ash, you had no other choice.” It was almost a question.

Ash cleared his throat. “The worst thing is I was glad when I did it. To finally be rid of him. And …” He pulled himself away from me at that moment and bowed his head low.

“I wanted him to die, Emery.”

I took my hand away from his cheek, just for a second so I could climb down on the floor beside him and hold him. But when I took my hand away, in that moment, in that flash of a second, Ash looked up at me. And I could see the fear in his eyes, the fear that I would be repulsed by his ultimate confession, his ugly truth, his story.

When he saw me climb onto the floor next to him and open my arms to him, his face softened, he let out a sigh. I stroked his hair, kissed the hollow of his throat.

“The moment after, I just ran. Left the farm, left Pop, left school, left my dog. Stopped a few other places, finally wound up here. But I’m sure they’re after me. The cops’ll find me.”

“Ash, I don’t care. And you can explain—”