Fury (5 page)

We’d walked briskly and in silence, so I was surprised when she turned toward me at the water’s edge. A single tear fell down her face that reflected in the moonlight. It surprised me how tender Finley could be yet how strong she was as well. She was a dichotomy of marvelous.

“I’m sorry, truly sorry,” I told her in earnest.

She sucked in a ragged breath and nodded, then turned her head toward the stock-still surface of the water. The moon mirrored in its round face.

The lake was stunning. Surrounded by staggered mountain peaks, the back of the water was enveloped by a sharp ridge of rock that cascaded down the sides of the lake and peppered with fresh, emerald forest that rounded to the beaches and met us where we stood. The water was so clear even in the moonlight, we could not only see through to bottom of the shallows but also at its deepest in the center of the lake.

“I can see why you would come here as often as you do,” I told her.

She turned her face toward mine once more. “Let me have them,” she said.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“The knives.” She swallowed. “Let me have them.”

I closed my eyes briefly in shame and guilt before lifting the back of my shirt and sliding my blades out, then handing them over to her. She took them in her hands and examined them, running her fingers over the blades.

“They’re warm,” she told no one.

              “They were laid against my skin.”

              She looked up at me sadly. “I know, Ethan.”

She laid one blade over the other and set them together on the bit of rocky beach we stood upon.

              Finley wrapped her arms around herself and slowly began to rock from side to side. I’d seen her do this so many, many times for years but it wasn’t until that moment did I realize it was a coping mechanism for her. She swayed slowly as her eyes glazed over, seemingly staring at nothing.

I looked on her, really studied this young girl willing to help me, willing to risk my unpredictable behavior and discovered something.
Finley was a victim
. It practically smacked me in the face now that I’d been willing to pay attention to her. She emanated something. Something terrible. Yeah, she may have been strong as hell but even the strong fall. They’re human, after all.

              “What happened to you, Finley Dyer?”

              She stopped swaying. “Nothing at all,” she answered, looking at me with a secret smile, implying that those words meant something else.

              I narrowed my eyes at her. “What is ‘nothing at all’? Why is that significant?”

              She faced the wilderness. “It means I have nothing to say.”

              I drew closer to her, stood beside her and stared into the same dark abyss. “Your words, they meant something to you. Explain them to me?”

              She sighed and faced the beach below our feet. “I was told that phrase very often as a kid.”

              “Why?” I prodded, interested to know what it all meant.

I surprised myself then because I suddenly realized I hadn’t cared about anyone else but myself for a very, very long time. I wondered in that moment whether it was because she took the time to care for me. I wondered if she’d impressed upon me a sense of empathy, despite my attempt at fighting any such human emotion other than the hate I wanted to hold so closely. I could tell she’d influenced me, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

              “The first time I heard it or rather, the first time I remember it,” she began in an almost whisper, “was the day I turned five years old. The school keeps records of the student’s birth dates and all that, right? Well, my teacher marked on a big calendar at the front of the classroom each kid’s birthday. If it hadn’t been for that calendar, I believe I wouldn’t have ever known my birthday.

“I can still remember every detail of that thing like it was yesterday. A big green apple with the months all staggered in rows of three. Mine was right at the end. December third. I remember quietly counting the days until I got to the little worm marker that read
Finley
.

“That day, my teacher placed the big button she put on everyone on their birthday on the front of my yellow gingham dress. It was my best outfit. The girl in the trailer next to mine grew out of it and her mother asked mine if she wanted it. My mom said she didn’t care, so the woman placed it in my hands.

She shook her head at the memory. “God, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, that hand-me-down. I took it in my hands and lovingly examined every seam, every pleat, every inch. The front had two feminine little pockets sort of like what you’d see on an apron.

“It was my most cherished possession. I’d put it on when I was all by myself and pretend I was the president,” she related, making me smile to myself a bit. Of course Finley wouldn’t have been the kind of girl to pretend anything else. “I’d made a makeshift oval office,” she continued, “out of the ironing board and an old sheet. Anyway, I put this little dress on knowing that the day was going to focus on me, and I just couldn’t wait.

“She placed the button on my dress and I just beamed. Most kids’ moms made cupcakes for the class but I guess my teacher knew that wasn’t going to happen for me so she brought some herself.” A little tear escaped and ran down her cheek. “They were strawberry,” she choked, “with cream cheese frosting.” She looked at me earnestly and smiled through soft tears. “She even put a tiny candied number five on the tops of each one.

“It was the happiest day of my life. After school, I came bounding up the rickety stairs of my mom’s aluminum trailer, eager to tell my mom all about it, but she was gone as she so often was.

“Instead, I hung up my little dress, did my homework, cleaned the trailer because it was expected of me and made a dinner of peanut butter and crackers I’d stolen from the school when I thought no one was looking. The water had been turned off so I went out back and used my neighbor’s hose. I washed myself as best I could and went back to the trailer only to discover that my mother had returned home and she was not sober nor alone.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“I contemplated,” she spoke softly, “just leaving and staying the night at that same neighbor’s house but being little as I was, I wanted to tell her about my day.”

“Finley,” I said, turning toward her and grabbing her forearm.

“It’s okay, Ethan. I promise,” she reassured me, but I still didn’t let go of my friend’s arm. “She sat at the plastic veneer table we had with all but one broken chair and as soon as she saw me, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.”

I squeezed her arm gently.

“She stood up quickly, tipping her chair back onto the torn linoleum and almost fell over she was so intoxicated.” My skin heated uncomfortably at the thought of the times Finley had seen me shit-faced and I cringed knowing what her memories probably did to her. “She lunged for me but landed on her face, which just incensed her further. She stood and grabbed me and asked me where I’d been. I told her about my pseudo-bath and she slapped me across the face, yelling something about how she thought I was trying to embarrass her in front of her new friend. I frantically tried to soothe her but, of course, it did no good.

“She dragged me to my room and threw me to the floor before walking over to my closet and yanking my little dress off the hanger. She held it in front of me, ripped the pockets and tore it to shreds all the while laughing while I pleaded for her to stop, but she didn’t. When she was done, she tossed the dress to the side of the room and staggered a bit on her feet.

“I cowered there on the floor, afraid she would wail into me like she normally did, which made her laugh uncontrollably. She yelled at me to get up so I obeyed. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, tears streaming down my face and said that I meant
nothing at all
to her and I better be careful or she’d sell me and I’d have to go live with the bad men.

“I was five. Barely five, really, and wanted so badly to stay with her despite how awful she was to me because, well, because she was my mother. I had no idea the other children in my class didn’t live exactly as I did. Besides, even people who hate their mothers love their mothers.”

She shook her head once more. “The first time I’d ever spent the night at someone’s house was when I was in second grade. I spent the night at Holly Raye’s.” Holly Raye. That was the girl at the bar. Our classmate. “She was the nicest girl I’d ever met and her mother was no different. I remember sitting at her dinner table practically shaking in my boots when I spilled milk all over their table. When her mother stood to clean it up, I cowered in my chair.

“The woman looked at me with such pity. She cupped my cheeks and kissed the top of my head and said, ‘No use crying over spilled milk, my darling.’ That’s when I figured it out. That not all mothers were like mine.

“When dinner was over, Holly Raye’s mama fed us two huge pieces of chocolate cake and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. She let us stay up late and watch movies and talk. And soon enough, within a few hours I’d forgotten about my mother and my situation. I’d considered Holly Raye my sister that night. I still do, in fact. Needless to say, I practically lived there after that.

“That’s what I did.”

“Did what?” I asked softly.

“Stayed at people’s houses as often as they’d allow just so I could feel like I was part of a family. So I could learn, teach myself how to be normal, really.”

“Jesus, Finley,” I breathed, turning her toward me.

I brought her to my chest and hugged her, wrapping one hand around her neck and the other around her lower back. I held her tightly against me, but she didn’t cry or sink into me with any sort of vulnerability as I thought she would. Instead, she hugged me back fiercely and I realized she wanted to support me just as much as I wanted to support her and I loved her for it. As much as I hated to admit it, I pitied her for it.

Finley Dyer was as selfless and brave an individual as I could imagine, and even though I could tell she’d only tapped the surface of her past, of her tortured soul, she wasn’t going to let that past define her. I don’t think I’d ever respected someone as much I had grown to respect Finley.

We broke the hug and faced the water once more.

“Thank you,” I said as loudly as my rough voice would allow.

“For what?” she asked.

“For saving me from making a horrible decision. From being the horrible person I’ve become.”

She nodded her head once. “I’ve been around horrible decisions before, Ethan. If you were as you say you are then it wouldn’t have been so easy to defuse you. When you mix alcohol, though, with a perfectly kind individual, that kindness can dissolve quickly. It’s toxic in so many ways.”

              I nodded, letting the shame of her words sink into me. The reality of what I was going to do that night hit me like the atom bomb and my hands began to tremble in fear of what I’d almost done.

              “You’ll be okay, Ethan Moonsong,” she said simply and turned her eyes toward the water once more.

              After a few minutes of silence, she started a playlist on her phone and set it on a rock near the shore then removed her sandals and waded into the water. When the water reached the bottoms of her knees, she turned to me and signaled for me to follow her. I removed my own boots and socks but took my shirt off and met her side, soaking my jeans but I didn’t care.

              “It’s tepid,” she said, running her fingers over the surface.

I nodded.

              She stepped farther into the lake then began to float.

              “Come on,” she said to the sky, so I obeyed. When I drifted close enough, she hooked her arm with mine. “We’re otterific.”

              “What?” I asked, not able to stifle a laugh.

              I could see from the corner of my eye her mouth turning up. “In the water, sea otters latch paws when they sleep so they don’t lose track of one another.”

              “Seriously?”

              “Yeah.”

              I smiled. “When?” I asked after a few minutes of silence, not needing to embellish further.

              “Two weeks, three days.”

              “For how long again?”

              “One year.”

              I thought about that. “That’s an incredibly long time. What type of work will you be doing?”

              “The toe-curling kind.”             

              A lump formed in my throat. “I’ll respect the vague. Just tell me one thing, though?”

“Depends on what it is,” she countered.

“Finley, is it dangerous?” I asked.

She was quiet, too quiet, making me nervous, but when enough time passed, I knew she wouldn’t be responding, so I had my answer anyway.

              “
Finley
.”

              “Please, let’s change the subject, Ethan.”

I sighed. “Why Vietnam?”

“Because I can. Next.”

“Where in Vietnam?”