Home Another Way (31 page)
“It was an accident. Your mother and I ran to the study and found a shattered window and Luke with a gun to his head, and I wrestled with him, trying to take the gun away. It went off two more times. The last bullet caught me in the shoulder, went right through. And when I pulled away, I saw Helena, bleeding on the floor. She’d been hit twice. Once in the thigh, once in the neck. She bled out before I could do anything for her.
“Afterwards, when I was in the hospital, the police came to question me. But it was just a formality. Luke had already told police he’d found Helena and I together and, in a rage, shot us. He’d agreed to a second-degree murder plea and would be sentenced to twenty years, out in seventeen with good behavior. And that was that.”
I heard only the clock ticking, and the flames, consuming the birch logs in the hearth with relish. Night rubbed against the windows. I shifted in the chair, back stiff, spine crackling as I recrossed my legs.
Doc stared into his glass, clutched it, as if it had some sort of redeeming power. I’d sat in questionless silence during his story, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth. I wiggled it around, running it over my teeth and gums. “You didn’t tell them it was an accident.” My voice sounded wooly, uneven.
“No.” He unscrewed the bourbon cap, filling a clean glass halfway, no ice this time, and stood leaning on the mantel. “I’m a coward.”
“He didn’t tell them it was an accident,” I said. “Why didn’t he tell them? He let them put him in jail, and made me believe—I mean, we could have been . . . I could have had a father. He didn’t even think about me.”
“He wasn’t thinking clearly, Sarah. About anything,” Doc said.
“And didn’t you care about what would happen to me?”
“Sarah—” Doc stopped, turned away. “I cared. More than you could know. The guilt, it made Luke and I both do irrational things. Stupid things.”
He splashed the last sips of liquor into the fireplace, onto the burning logs; the flames flared for a second, then retreated. My anger did the same. I tried to find the words to shout at him; there were none there. I felt wrung out, twisted like a dishrag, all my rage squeezed down the drain by Doc’s confession. And I found, incredibly, I didn’t want to be angry with him. I was tired of it all. “How’d you end up here?” I asked.
“After everything, I quit my hospital job, packed up, and went to Mexico. I traveled between clinics, searching for atonement. All I found was dust and poverty, and desperate parents who’d do anything to get their kid a shot of penicillin. I hid down there nineteen years, until the parole board letter finally caught up with me, informing me that Luke had been released. It had been forwarded at least ten times.
“So here I am. I didn’t intend to stay. I thought I’d beg Luke’s forgiveness and disappear again. But when I got here, I couldn’t go to him. I started my practice and settled in. I’m sure he knew I was in Jonah, but he didn’t seek me out, either. It took five months before our paths crossed. He was walking down the sidewalk in one direction, I was walking in the other. I remember he was with Maggie Watson, and she was chattering on and on. He kept his eyes on me the whole time, and I . . . I had to look away. The sidewalk was narrow enough that our shoulders brushed as we passed.”
He sat again, picked up the bourbon, but set the bottle back down on the tray with an uncertain hand. Put his glasses on. “People always think they’re going to have more time than they ever do. Maggie called me one day, just about a year and a half ago. She’d found Luke at his cabin, and he wasn’t moving. I thought he was dead. Turns out, he’d had a stroke. He was almost completely paralyzed. Couldn’t talk, but there was nothing wrong with his mind.
“Maggie refused to let him be put into a nursing home, which was what I recommended. She brought him back to the inn, and the first day he was home, I went to see him. I’d been rehearsing what I’d say to him for twenty-five years. But when I got there, I just knelt beside his bed and wept against his hand.
“He died a few days later.”
I poured myself a drink now—seltzer water—and swished it around in my mouth before swallowing. The tasteless bubbles grazed the back of my throat, and I coughed, choking on my disappointment. The story ended there, without any of the answers I needed. “You don’t know if he forgave you, then.”
“No. I just hope he did.”
After dropping his glass on the mantel, Doc opened the closet and kicked a stool into it. He reached for the top shelf, moving luggage and file folders before pulling down a cardboard boot box. He opened it—I saw his name printed on the cover in thick magic marker—and, dust scattering, removed a metal lockbox, key taped to the top. “He left this for you.”
He gave me the lockbox, scratching at the corner of the tape and peeling the key off, but I covered the lock with my hand. “Wait.”
I fished through my coat pocket and removed the little gold key Rich gave me, still attached to the ring with the others. I held it against Doc’s key.
They matched.
“I need to do this alone,” I said.
He nodded and left the room.
Apprehensively, I slid the key—my key—into the lock, twisted it. The lid opened, only a crack. I thought for a moment—what did I expect to find? Nothing inside the box could change the past twenty-seven years. I had long ago stopped believing in magic wands and happy endings.
Still, I wanted
something
.
I lifted the lid and saw handprints. My handprints, in white paint on blue construction paper. I’d made that in nursery school, when I was four. Under my hands, a poem read:
Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls
But every day I’m growing—
I’ll be grown some day
And all those tiny handprints
Will surely fade away
So here’s a little handprint
Just so you can recall
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small
Sifting through the other papers, I removed crayon drawings of ponies and rainbows, and four-fingered people with square bodies and noodle legs. There were tempera paintings and seasonal crafts. Handwriting worksheets and various tests—math, spelling, history—from different grades.
I found orchestra programs from junior high, my name underlined in the list of participants, or circled when I’d had a solo. There were newspaper clippings. One indicated I’d made state orchestra, another lauding my acceptance to Juilliard, and yet another—a tiny square—announcing my marriage, because David’s parents insisted on putting it in the local paper.
And photos, at least a hundred of them. School pictures of me, sitting in front of a blue background, wearing hand-smocked calico dresses when I was younger, teased hair and too much eye shadow as a teen. Photos of me at awards assemblies and orchestral performances. The prom. And various candid shots—in the bath as a toddler, on the swings, at Christmas with bows stuck in my hair, at birthdays and building snowmen.
Sarah, age 5, getting off the bus
after her first day of school,
Aunt Ruth wrote on the back in her loopy, girlish cursive, or
Sarah, age 11, playing summer tennis.
There was one with more creases and fingerprints than the others, a black-and-white photo taken for the all-state orchestra program. Fourteen, gawky, my face not yet grown into my nose and lips, I cradled my violin against my stomach, the way a child holds her favorite teddy bear, and gazed beyond the camera, trying to look disinterested and sophisticated all at once.
I crammed the papers back into the lockbox and, suddenly drained, watched the box slide down my outstretched legs, bouncing over my knees and to the floor. I felt like a pumpkin that had its pulpy innards scraped out. Empty. All the emotions that had ruled me for so long evaporated from my goose-pimpled skin, and there was nothing left of me. And, in that instant, I was frightened. Without the hatred, the thirst for revenge, the bitterness, I didn’t recognize myself.
What would fill me now?
Doc returned some time later—an hour? Two? I didn’t know—with a steaming mug. Coffee. I could smell it. I sat on the floral-print rug, chin on one knee, my other leg tucked under me, organizing the ephemera into tidy, chronological piles.
“I figured you might need this.” He gave me the mug. “The floor can be drafty.”
My reflection shuddered in the black liquid. My face. My father’s face. “There’s nothing here,” I said.
“There’s twenty-five years there.”
“Of me. All of me. There’s nothing of him. I thought there would be a letter, at least.”
“Maybe he hoped he would have the opportunity to tell you in person. Maybe he simply ran out of time,” Doc said. “But he got you here, didn’t he?”
“So what?”
“This town, the people, they’re his letter to you.”
“Well, then, why did he waste seventeen years in prison? Why didn’t he do everything he could to . . . to be with me? No one here can tell me what I want to know.”
“No, they can’t. But there isn’t a soul in Jonah who wouldn’t give you hours—days—of his life to tell you about Luke. About what he did for them. Who he was. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that your father was good for this town, and everyone in it was good for him. And you. They were good for you.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I saw you when you got here. I see you now,” Doc said.
“It’s not enough.”
“Sometimes not enough has to be enough.”
I bent over and scooped up the paper stacks and relocked them in the box. “I’m leaving on Friday. That’s five days away. You could have given me this the first week I was here—” I stopped, looked at him through squinted eyes. “Why do you have this, anyway?”
“Maggie found it in the cabin, saw my name on it.”
“But why you, I mean.”
“I know what you mean. And I can’t tell you I know, though I imagine Luke thought this would be fitting penance, for me to confess it all to you.”
I picked up the lockbox by the thin wire handle. “If I hadn’t found that clipping, would you have told me?”
“Probably not,” he said, taking off his glasses, folding the arms and sticking them in his shirt pocket. He scratched the bridge of his nose with his index finger. “I told you, I’m a coward, Sarah. Fortunately for both of us, the decision wasn’t mine.”
“One of your miracles, I suppose?”
Doc let out a long, tired breath. “You tell me.”
I left Doc’s house, drove to the skating pond, and sat there with my headlights on, staring at the melting ice, my body numb from the neck down, my mind grappling with all I’d learned. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Doc said to me after Hiram Dennison died. “
One man’s coincidence is another
man’s miracle.”
How many coincidences had it taken for me to be here, right here, contemplating popping the gearshift into neutral and letting the truck roll into the pond. Not to hurt myself, but so I could feel something. Cold. Wet. So I could focus on those familiar, finite things instead of the strange rumblings in my head.
What if my car hadn’t been stolen? What if I had successfully seduced Rich the Mushroom into giving me my inheritance early? What if Memory hadn’t died, and Jack never told me about Allison after the memorial service, and Adele hadn’t been smoking on the Grange hall steps as I walked out of the building?
What if I pulled the books off the shelves on the left, instead of the right?
Something snapped inside me and, exploding like a shaken bottle of Diet Coke, childhood recollections fizzed in my brain—scraps of Bible verses, catechism, lessons from Sunday school classes—things I probably couldn’t remember if I wanted to, and wouldn’t have wanted to, even if I could. But they were there, mishmashed and haphazardly stacked one on another, and I wasn’t able to stop thinking of them.
I went to the inn, charged through the front door, into Maggie’s living room, through the kitchen and down the hall, to Beth’s bedroom. Hesitating only a second, I knocked and heard rustling from within. Dominic opened the door, eyes thick with sleep. “Sarah? It’s past midnight.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But I really need to talk to Beth.”
He closed the door, and after some murmuring Beth appeared. “Sarah, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to know. How can you tell if something is just a coincidence, or if it’s—” I swallowed once, twice. “Or if it’s more?”
“More? Sarah, I don’t—”
“God.” The word sounded almost heretical in my voice. But I said it again. “Or if it’s God.” Beth’s lower lip trembled, and her eyes welled with tears. Then she laughed, hugging me. I stood there, straight as a stick bug, wondering if I should sting or play dead, if I should scamper away or, finally, relent.
“This might take awhile,” she said. “How about some tea?”
I nodded and turned to follow her to the kitchen. Maggie waited in her bedroom doorway, crying silently. She reached out, her cool hand against the back of my neck, pulling me close so our foreheads touched and our noses pressed together, her tears dampening my cheeks.
“Go on,” she said, wiping her eyes and giving me a little push down the hall. “The Lord’s waiting on you.”
Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, I stayed at the inn three days, asking, seeking, knocking. Beth sat with me the entire time, answering each one of my questions, sometimes three or four different ways, never tiring of my green persistence. Maggie hovered over us while we studied. She’d give her opinion on rare occasions, but mostly contented herself with attending to us—making us grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch, baking brownies for snack, and keeping us hydrated. In the evenings, Dominic would join us in the living room, reading mechanic’s manuals in the wing chair while Beth and I sat on the couch, feet on Maggie’s coffee table, Bibles open across our thighs. But he went to bed each night at nine; Beth said he couldn’t sleep past sunrise, even with the thick bedroom drapes hiding the morning. Then she and I would be alone again until our eyes burned from too much reading and too little light.
