Hold Fast (4 page)

Those losses almost killed my mother, but the fire of a twisted, misplaced faith sustained her through it. The worst part of it, though, is that she doesn’t blame him, doesn’t see that he’s an impossible tyrant. She blames
herself
for being incapable of giving him the boys he so desperately wants. She’s convinced herself that she’s failed him. That she’s failed The Lord. You may not blame him, Mom, but I sure as hell do. And I blame you, too.

On a normal day, I’d save this cluster of hives for last, but this has not been a normal day. I need peace, I need to think, and that means I need to go to my hillside first. The crest of the hill is covered by trees, and my hives are just at the edge of the woods, hidden from the view of the miserable little cluster of buildings by a large boulder. I set it there not only because it’s a perfect spot for my bees – the shallow slope is covered with wildflowers - but also because it’s my favorite place in the compound. From there, I can see far away, and with my eyes lost in the horizon, dream of better days.

Today I dream about my mother deciding to run away with me. She should want to do that if she is as horrified as I am by the very idea of my marrying Satan’s son.

How would it happen? Would she just wake up one day and realize that this was
wrong?
That handing me over to that sadistic monster was
wrong?
I sigh. I’d best just gloss over that part of the daydream. Get to the part where we leave, and Daniel and Joshua come with us.

Of course, there’s the question of where we’d run away to.

For a long time, I dreamed about just going home. Even if my father was dead, the house hadn’t vanished. It would have passed on to Mom and me. After the second time I was forced back, during the long healing, I learned otherwise. Father Emmanuel showed me a printout from a title search. My home was gone, repossessed by the bank. Could it have been fake? Perhaps. I don’t know. I have no idea what a genuine title search would look like.

If I knew where Sean was, I’d go to him in a heartbeat. When we were little, he was my protector. When my dad came back from war with only one leg, there were kids that made fun of me for having a cripple for a dad, or who asked how many babies my father had killed. Thanks to Sean, none of them did it more than once. Would he still stand up for me today? It’s been so long since then.

Where is he now? What is he doing? Is he even still in the Navy? Lying on the grass in the shade of my boulder, I look up at puffy white clouds overhead. White, like a sailor’s uniform. I have to giggle at the thought of oh-so-serious Sean Pearse, coming home to me from work all dressed up in a sailor suit. It seems fun and silly, but then a whole different idea hits me: what about Sean coming home from his ship to me, and I meet him at the door wearing his uniform?

In my mind, I see his eyes light up as my hips sway to a beat only the two of us hear, and I slowly discard each piece of the uniform, one at a time, leaving a trail of white fabric all the way to our bedroom. And when my beloved can’t wait until we get to the bedroom? Well, truth be told, neither can I.

Living on a farm for all this time has left me a solid working knowledge of the mechanics of the act. I’ve seen the cows and the sheep and the goats, and I’ve helped in birthing calves and lambs – but anything beyond the physical side? A woman married five years should have no mysteries or curiosities left in the bedroom, but then, very few women have had a marriage like mine.

What would he like? What would make him happy? What would make him want me most? I don’t even know anymore, but I try to guess in my daydream. But that’s all it is: just a daydream. It’s not real. In my mind, he comes home to me every day, and I have nothing to fear with my protector there. In my imagination, there is no pain when I walk, and when I dance for him, I do it on two perfect, straight legs. Two legs I can wrap around him and …
mmm.

Oh, Sean. Where are you now? I hope you’re well, and happy, wherever you are. I miss you so much.

He’s not here, but I won’t let that bring me down. No. I’m twenty-three years old. I still have an entire life ahead of me. It doesn’t really matter if I don’t know precisely where my next home will be. What really matters is that I know it’s somewhere out
there
, because one thing is absolutely certain: it has never been and never will be here in this godforsaken community.

* * *

M
om’s gone to
work by the time I get up in the morning, and I’m alone in the house with my new stepfather.

I’ve known William Dwyer my whole life. He and his wife Heather—ex-wife now, I guess—were our neighbors. I babysat for their daughter Courtney when I was in junior high and high school.

Bill and my dad grew up together, went to high school together. They joined the Army together. They got out together, bought houses next door to each other. They got jobs at the shipyard, repairing and refitting the McGuire Line’s ships. After 9/11, they both signed up for the Maine Army National Guard with the 172nd out of the Brewer armory. They volunteered for active duty augmentation, and they went to Iraq. They got blown up together in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004.

But they didn’t come home together. Bill Dwyer went to Landstuhl in Germany where the docs patched him up enough that he could go to Walter Reed Medical Center, then back to Maine. Dad made it home a lot faster than his best friend. He was a week in the ground in the Togus National Cemetery before Bill was airlifted to Walter Reed.

I come downstairs, drawn by the smell of coffee. Bill’s in the kitchen – I hear dishes clinking.

“Morning, Sean. Welcome home.” Bill’s graying now, and smaller than I remember. When I was a kid he was a bear of a man – hugely strong, solid. Tough. A dark haired, bearded lumberjack’s reflection of my dad’s clean-shaven blond runner’s build. He’s wasted away now, scarcely bulkier than I am. The prosthetic left leg he earned in Fallujah sticks out below the hem of his shorts, and he walks over to me with a cane.

“Hey, Bill. Congratulations. On the wedding, I mean. I wish I could have been there.” He nods, his face serious.

“Thank you, I appreciate it. I wanted to come with your mom last night to pick you up, but I had to work.”

“What do you do now?”

“Pretty hard to drag a toolbox around a shipyard with this leg. I’m still working for McGuire, though. I supervise the night shift security where the tankers unload. Pay isn’t spectacular, but with the VA check, it’s not too bad, and your mom’s still a nurse at Maine Med, of course.”

“Huh.” No idea what to say, there. “I’m glad you’re doing well.”

“Well enough. Better than some of the leading alternatives, I guess.” He reaches into the cupboard for a coffee mug and passes it to me. It’s my dad’s mug. On one side is the United States Army seal, on the other, old English letters spell out my father’s rank and name: SSGT KEVIN PEARSE. Bill fills it about three-quarters full. “What do you take in your coffee?”

“Nothing, thanks. Just black.”

“I wasn’t talking about cream and sugar.” He hooks a thumb over at the counter where a bottle of Jameson’s rests. “This is nighttime for me, remember? There’s the Irish, and I’ve probably got some bourbon around.”

“Ah. Yeah, Jameson’s works. What the hell, I don’t have anything big to do today.”

“Yeah, I was gonna ask about that, see what your plans are.”

“Don’t have any, right now. I haven’t taken any time off in the last four years, so I’ve got sixty days of terminal leave and the other sixty days of leave cashed out. Got some time to figure things out. Hadn’t really counted on the whole job search thing just yet, y’know? I’d planned on doing my twenty, at least. Military’s drawing down now, cutting troop strength. They offered me a medical retirement. I asked what my other option was and they said wait until the end of my enlistment and go home without anything. So, here I am. Medically retired at age twenty-five.”

“At least you’re home alive. Melissa worried about you so much. Every single day you were gone she was over at Immaculate Conception lighting a candle for you.”

“Really? She stopped going to mass after Dad died.” Bill shrugs.

“She didn’t want to lose another man.”

“Huh.” We drink our coffee – and whiskey – in silence for a time. I’m comfortable around Bill. I always have been. Now there’s another level to it; he’s been there, done that, got the scars. He gets it. Bill breaks the silence first.

“Your truck. You might want to put some new tires on it, but I’ve kept up the registration. Insurance is good to go. It’s got a new inspection sticker. Oil’s fresh, got a tune-up last week. Tires were too expensive though, I’m sorry. Couldn’t afford them. I’ve driven her around a little bit, just a few miles a week to keep everything lubricated and running right.”

“I appreciate what you’ve done, Bill. It means the world to me. Not just what you’ve done for me, but for Mom, too.”

“Your mom’s a good woman, Sean. I love her dearly.” I nod. “Brings up another point. Just because your mother and I got married ... what I’m trying to say is …” I wave my hand at him.

“Don’t worry about it, Bill. It’s cool. I’m glad you’ve both got someone. Speaking of which though, what happened? With Heather? That was all long after I was gone.”

“Heather didn’t want me to go back to the Army. That was one thing.” Bill finishes off his coffee, and after a long look at the pot through narrowed eyes he skips the caffeine and goes straight for the Jameson’s instead. “After I came back from Iraq like this--” he waves a hand at his prosthetic “--she put up with it for a while. A few years. She up and left about a year after you enlisted.” He cocks his head to the side. “How much do you know about Heather? About before we got married?”

“Nothing, I guess.” I shake my head with a shrug and Bill nods.

“Right. She’s a lot younger than your mom and dad and me. Heather was a runaway. She grew up in one of those fundamentalist splinter group things, but she never really talked about it much. They had a compound, some kind of a farm thing, but she wouldn’t go into details, didn’t ever tell me where it was.” My new stepfather frowns down at the table, tapping a finger as he considers how to tell the rest of the story.

“Anyway,” he finally continues, “Heather couldn’t ever get her head really straightened out, never dealt with it. She threw herself into being a wife and mother, but something was always, I dunno, just not
right
. She wanted to be happy, wanted it
so
badly, but something was missing inside her, or broken. She tried. God knows she tried, but it didn’t work.” Bill sighs, raps the table with his knuckles once then turns his head away as if he can’t bear to look at the table or the mug in his hands any longer.

“
A
fter Iraq
, after I came back a cripple, Heather started to fall apart. She stopped going to mass, but she spent hours and hours every day with her head buried in a Bible. King James Version, the Protestant thing, not the Douay-Rheims or one of the other Catholic versions. She got obsessive, ‘the wages of sin is death,’ right? So, your dad and I were sinners, obviously. I was spared because of
her
. Because she was working to
redeem
me.” Bill snorts derisively. “This leg, well, it was a warning. Anyway, I tried to humor her. We started going to church, but it just wasn’t going to work. It took a while for it all to finally come crashing down, though. She finally left about a year after you went off to the Navy.”

“Sorry, man.”

“Is what it is, Sean. It is what it is.”

“How’s Courtney? Do you ever get to see her?”

“Fuck if I know.” He shrugs fatalistically. “I haven’t seen her since Heather left. Heather drove me up to the VA hospital again. It was supposed to be a two-day thing, more work on my leg, but soon’s I got checked in, she hands me this thick yellow envelope, tells me she’s leaving me. She’s not willing to stand by and let my- how did she put it? Oh yes, my
obstinate sinfulness
drag her and Courtney down too. So, divorce papers. And she drove straight home and picked up Courtney and they were in the wind. I’ve never seen them again.”

“Not once?” I’m incredulous. “Nobody can just disappear completely. And you’ve got rights, don’t you? I mean, what happened during the divorce?”

“Well, as for the divorce, she never showed up for court. Judge asked me what I wanted, and of course, I was hurt and angry and so I said fine, gimme the divorce and I wanted everything. Judge ruled her in default and gave it to me. So, I had full custody technically, but it’s awfully difficult to exercise your custodial rights when you have no idea where your child and her mom are. Even the cops couldn’t find them. That’s … actually sort of the start of how your mom and I got together.” Bill smiles faintly, fidgeting with his mug, intently studying the pattern on the tablecloth. “That was actually the one bright spot to come out of the whole mess.”

“How’s that?” I’m uncomfortable prying, but I have been curious.

“I spent every penny I had on private investigators, trying to find my daughter. Every single penny and then some. Mortgaged the house and lost it. Your mom gave me the spare room here, helped me get back on my feet. No matter what I’ve done for her, what I’ve done for you, it can’t ever even start to make the smallest dent in the debt I owe her.” Bill’s face is carefully expressionless, his voice is matter-of-fact. Only his eyes give away any hint of how deeply he feels the truth of what he says.

“Did you ever find anything? Any trace of Courtney?”
Best to change the subject.

“Couple hints, here and there. Heather grew up on some sort of church farm, a cult compound sort of place, so that was the first thing I tried to find. There was some talk about a farm somewhere back in the beginning, maybe some sort of Jonestown thing. Couple investigators thought it was over in Vermont, maybe upstate New York or over the border in Canada, but nothing ever panned out. I even sent people out west, poking around Arizona and Utah, out where some of the polygamist groups are.”

“And nothing since then?”

“Heather’s off the grid. Totally.” He pauses. “There was … one thing. It’s just a maybe, and at this point. Courtney’s been an adult for a long time now, Sean. She’s, what, twenty-three? Couple years younger than you are. She’s free to come and go as she pleases now.” He shrugs, staring down into his coffee mug morosely. “If she wanted anything to do with me, I can’t believe she wouldn’t have reached out to me by now.”

“What was it? The ‘one thing’ you got?” Bill stands with difficulty, and using the cane he limps heavily to the china cabinet and pulls a folded sheet of paper out from under a stack of plates.

“This is it. Seven years, just over seven years now. This is the only sniff.” He slides the paper across the table to me and I unfold it. It’s a picture printed out on an inkjet, probably taken with a cell phone camera. It shows a table at what looks like a farmer’s market. There’s a variety of early produce on the table – rhubarb, mushrooms, green onions, some tomatoes and cucumbers that probably came from a hothouse. Wild fiddleheads.

“Looks like springtime stuff at a farmer’s market? Fiddleheads, you can only get those in what, April? May?”

“Yeah. Saw this picture in the Press-Herald back in early May, and yeah – the article was about farmers’ markets. Went to the website, printed it out. But look here.” He taps on the paper. There’s an indistinct, slightly out of focus view of the next table over. Two women are standing there. I haven’t seen Heather or Courtney in eight years, so I can’t really say if it’s them or not.

“I don’t really remember Heather all that well, Bill. Courtney… It’s hard to make out details, especially when they’re facing away from the camera.”

I remember Courtney vividly, though, the shape of her, the feel of her in my arms, of her body pressed against mine that day at the bus station. Every day for the past eight years, I’ve remembered that.

The girl in the picture is facing away from the camera, I can’t see her face. She’s got the right blond hair, though.

“I know. Just, something about the way this one’s standing. It makes me think it’s Heather. Looks thinner’n I remember, but it could be her. Can’t see their faces, but if that’s Heather then … is the girl my daughter?” I look again, trying to reconcile the girl in the picture against my memories of the bright, funny girl I grew up with. At seven, eight years old she’d been a precocious little terror tagging along after me, and by the time I’d left for the Navy, she had developed a fearsome intellect and a heartbreakingly beautiful set of curves that eight years of war couldn’t drive out of my thoughts.

“I can’t tell, man.” I fold the picture again, give it back to Bill. “Where was it taken?”

“I talked to the reporter about it, but he didn’t know who they were, what farm they were with. He couldn’t even remember much about them at all, other than what market he’d taken it at.”

“Sounds like a pretty lousy reporter,” I observe. “Didn’t he keep notes or something?”

“Well, yeah, but the guy wasn’t talking to them,” Bill tells me. “He was talking to the people running the next booth over, those two were just in the background.”

“Right,” I say. “Makes sense. So, where was it?”

“Greenville. Up north, near the southern end of Moosehead Lake.”

“Huh.” I don’t want to pick at old scabs, pry at old wounds, but at the same time, I don’t really have anything planned for the next couple of months, and I do know the area. My dad and I, and my grandfather when he was alive, used to camp around Moosehead for hunting and fishing, though I haven’t been since Dad died. Maybe I could take a run up to Greenville and have a look. Can’t say anything about it though. Don’t want to get his hopes up. I’ll have a talk with Mom about it after Bill’s gone to work.

“Well, lad, that’s about it for me for the day. I’m off for bed, I think.”

“Yeah. I’m going to check out my truck, go have a look around Portland. Get some new tires, maybe.” Another idea perks me up. “Also, they don’t have a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts in the shitholes I’ve been visiting lately, and I’ve got this odd urge for a cruller.” Bill laughs at that.

“You’re a Mainer, right enough.” We both stand, and he clasps my forearm. His thumb lands on the gnarled ridge of scar tissue that runs from my wrist nearly to the elbow of my left arm. “Shit,” he says, looking at it. “What was that one?”