Miracle Beach (25 page)

“How ’bout Uno?” he asked. After buying
Nowhere Bound
that afternoon, Jack had stopped in one of the downtown shops to pick up a deck of cards and saw a used game of Uno that he paid two loonies for, thinking that would be just the thing to do with Glory.

“Huh?”

“Uno—you know, colored cards and numbers. Haven’t you ever played Uno?”

“Nope. Is it hard?”

“Where’d you grow up, under a rock?” Jack teased her.

Glory’s face went hard. She set her jaw. “I lived in a house. It was nice,” she said.

“I was just kidding with you,” Jack said.

Like all women, Glory was a mystery to him, a child who at times seemed like she was either eight going on twenty or eight going on five. There was so much Jack wanted to know about her.

“I think I want to go home soon. My mom probably misses me,” she said.

Jack didn’t want to tell Glory that her mother had all but vanished. That every one of their calls to her had gone unanswered. That she hadn’t returned even one of the by now hundreds of messages they had left for her. That they had given up trying to reach her themselves, and had turned things over to the authorities in LA. “I’m sure she does,” he said.

“Did my dad like this game?”

Jack had to remember back. “I think so.” He shuffled the cards and started to deal, his thoughts lagging behind on Glory’s mom, wondering how she could leave her child. This child.

“But how could you not know? Was he adopted?” Glory asked.

“Who’s that? Nash?” Jack asked.

Glory nodded.

“No, not at all. Why?”

She shrugged. “Dunno. Just thought you’d know, being his dad.”

It wasn’t an accusation—she was eight, after all—but Jack reeled as if she had punched him.

“I worked a lot, and I guess I missed things that way. Moms and dads don’t always know their kids as well they’d like, or as well as they think they do. I’m sure there are things about you that your mom doesn’t know.”

“Bet your ass. My mom’s a piece of work.”

Jack tried not to laugh. “Glory,” he said sternly. Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked, “Do you miss her?” That she nodded surprised him.

“We’ll get this all sorted soon, see what’s what. But for now, how about we play some Uno?”

Glory smiled a toothy, gapped smile. “Game on,” she said.

He dealt seven cards to each of them. Glory organized them into a lopsided fan. It took two of her hands to hold them all.

“I want to play cridage after this—the one my dad liked,” Glory interrupted him.

“Aw, we can’t.”

“Why?”

“Well, for starters, little one, it’s called cribbage, and it’s a game that you need a special kind of board for, to keep track of the score. And second, it’s kind of a big-people’s game. It’s all about counting and adding.”

“Okay. But can you teach me—when I’m big people?”

“Yes.” Jack laughed. “When you’re older, I’ll teach you.”

“Pinkie swear?” Glory stuck her tiny hand out, pinkie extended.

“What’s that?”

“Pinkie swear. You know, you lock pinkies and it seals the promise you made? Pinkie swear?”

That was a new one for Jack. Nash’s thing had always been “Scout’s honor.” Perhaps this was the girl version. He hooked his pinkie around hers.

“Even when I go home?” she asked.

“Even if you go home,” he said, conscious that he had changed his echo to her question. “Your mom will come get you, I’m sure. And when she does, you’ll come back and visit all the time.” It hurt him, physically hurt him, to say those words.

“You can come visit us, too!” Glory said. “I’ll show you my room, and the park where Jilly and I go to play, and my school, and Jilly’s house, too.”

Jack hoped he never had to make that trip. He hoped that his granddaughter could stay right there, with him. Jack felt a pang of guilt jolt through him. But was he really so selfish to wish that for himself? For Glory? “Sure, baby girl,” he said. “I can’t wait.”

Glory turned her attention back to the cards, ordering them in her hands. Jack explained the rules and they played a practice hand. He was amazed by how quickly she caught on. Even more amazing, though, were the little glimpses of Nash he caught in her. The way she cocked her head to one side when she was thinking, or how she drummed her fingers against her chin when waiting. Her lopsided smile. The same shoulders, in miniature, rounded in concentration.

And try as he might, he couldn’t seem to peel his eyes away.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, MACY HAD NOWHERE TO BE and nothing to do.

She was a person prone to perpetual motion, one who drowned herself in its rhythms and flow. But all around her, the house sat defiantly still. Jack and Sophie had taken the girl camping under the pretense of whale watching, but Macy knew the real reason was to get them all out of her hair. With her collarbone still on the mend, she had to admit that getting anything out of her hair had literally been an effort in futility. She had long ago tired of wrangling her barely combed locks into a ponytail, only to have it look like a bird’s nest attached at an odd angle to her head. Now she tamed it under a baseball cap whenever she needed it out of her face.

Macy didn’t know what to do with herself, not riding. She could take not showing. Fine. But she at least had to saddle up, feel the reins in her hands, the bundled will of a half ton of horse underneath her, working with her—and she with it. She had once heard “to ride a horse is to borrow freedom.” But after she and Gounda had crashed at Spruce Meadows weeks ago, Macy’s freedom, borrowed or not, had been stripped from her. Gounda had come up lame with an avulsion fracture in his hock, and even though the veterinarian had started him on shock-wave therapy, little more than rest, time, and patience would be able to heal him. And Macy.

Unfortunately, none of that played to Macy’s strengths.

Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t yet eaten. She thought maybe she should try cooking something for dinner. That would take time, stretch the hours until she was tired enough to slip into sleep. Though everything she thought to make required two hands, a working set.

She had stopped going out to dinner or getting takeaway months ago, after one too many awkward conversations. Campbell River was a small town, and running into someone she knew was the norm, not the exception. People either didn’t know what to say to her, and so avoided saying anything at all, or they gushed to her about how sorry they were and what a great guy Nash was, and wondered how she was getting along. They were never people she knew well, and although she was sure they were well intentioned, Macy didn’t want to update every single one of them on how she was holding it together. Or not. Besides, those conversations turned even a quick pickup into such a span of time, she might as well have sat down at a restaurant.

She wished right then that she had someone to call to have dinner with, a buffer between her and the rest of the world. She had always wondered whether pregnant women minded having strangers place a hand on their swollen bellies, unbidden. She was now sure she had an answer: They minded. If they were like her, they minded a hell of a lot.

So when Macy climbed into her truck and started toward town, she pointed it toward Thrifty Foods in the Ironwood Mall. They had a hot Asian deli right at the front of the store—easy in, easy out—and it made a mean sweet-and-sour chicken that used to be Nash’s favorite.

Nash.

The girl.

Nash.

Nash and that damned little girl. Nash’s daughter.
Daughter
. The word sounded as foreign rattling inside her head as the word
widow
. How had she gotten to this place? To a place where she had to use such words, apply them to her life?

Macy wanted to know everything about the girl’s mother (or, more specifically, Nash and the girl’s mother). At the same time, she didn’t want to know a damn thing. Now and then, sticking her fingers in her ears and closing her eyes and chanting, “La-la-la-la-la,” at the top of her lungs seemed as good a plan as any.

It was what she had done before—four years before. When she had picked up the phone in the barn at the same time Nash had picked up the house line, and heard a woman’s voice say, “Well, hello, there, handsome,” in a breathy, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” sort of way. It was what she had done since then, because, had she asked, she would have known more. And there would be no way to unknow any of it.

Macy had held fast to not knowing, even as it chewed at her from the inside out over the past weeks. But driving up on the DD—pronounced “the Double D” by locals—a dive bar with passable burgers, she felt the tires of her truck turn almost of their own will. Before she fully realized what was happening, she had pulled into a parking space and grabbed the keys from the ignition.

She shut the truck door behind her and started across the parking lot, only slightly ahead of her own feet. Her mind barely contained a complete thought. She stared down at her red flip-flops meeting the pavement with each step. First one, then the other. Step. Step. Slap, slap. Things had gotten that basic.

Macy heard men’s voices, and glanced up to see a trio walking toward her. It was a trio she recognized—teammates of Nash’s.
Former teammates
, she reminded herself, then wondered if that was really correct, since Nash was the “former,” not them. Not Walzy, Jonsey, and Pratter. Their last names were actually Walz, Jones, and Pratt, but there was something about hockey players calling one another by only their last names, and always adding a -y or -er to the end to form the guy’s anointed nickname. Rarely did they get more creative. Nash’s teammates had called him Allen Edmonds, but Macy assumed that stemmed more from desperation about how to alter a name like “Allen” than any sort of true desire to branch out on nicknaming convention.

“Macy? That you?” one of them said.

She looked up at them and tried to smile. She knew she failed, but they walked right up to her anyway. Jonesy leaned in as if to hug her. Macy stepped back. He dropped his arms and shuffled sideways, like he had meant to do that.

“Are you—”

“How are you—”

“I’m so sorry—”

The three of them talked at once, tripping over one another’s words. Tripping over what to say to her. This was the part she hated: having to be the one to put them at ease. She had come to appreciate those who ignored the elephant leering over her shoulder. The ones who didn’t make her tragedy the centerpiece of every conversation. Most people chose not to say anything about Nash and looked just as uncomfortable as the threesome standing in front of her, but at least they didn’t make
her
uncomfortable right along with them.

After Nash died, Macy had tried to tighten the already small circle of people she enjoyed having around her. “You can’t run from it,” Mama Sophie had told her. She was right, but Macy had learned to minimize it. When she absolutely had to face the rest of the world, she had developed a stump speech that she would recite nearly word for word: “I’m doing okay. Hanging in there. Good days and bad. Kind thoughts and prayers help so much—I really appreciate it. I have my moments, believe me, but I have a lot of help and support, and good friends to get me through.”

She would smile a thin smile at the appropriate places and purse her lips into a sad, solemn look at others—most often when the other person began listing Nash’s many good qualities and how much he’d be missed, which they almost all did. Often, the “good friends” bit, strangely enough, was what helped end most conversations. Maybe it made people wonder if they were a good friend, and if that was a role they played in her life; yet no one would ever feel comfortable asking that. Or maybe it sounded to them like, “I have friends who are helping me through this and they are not you.” Either way, Macy hardly cared as long as her words had the effect they so often did, like just then.

Walzy, Jonsey, and Pratter wished her well, told her to call them if she needed anything at all—also something everyone said—and walked off, muttering, as most people did, about what a “stand-up guy” Nash was and what a shame it was for her.

She breathed a sigh of relief—that run-in had gone much more quickly and smoothly than many—and turned to head inside.

The Double D was a study in dingy. Cracked black leather booths in the shape of horseshoes skirted the perimeter, and a smattering of tipsy cocktail tables dotted the area in front of the bar. The place smelled of stale beer and bleach and broken dreams, and was owned by Nash’s best friend in Campbell River, Tommy Morgan. They had played men’s league hockey together and shot pool on a weekly basis. Macy hadn’t seen Tommy since the funeral, though it wasn’t as if she ever saw him all that much to begin with.

She looked around at the mostly empty bar and didn’t see Tommy.
What am I doing here?
she thought. She felt jumpy and sick and disoriented. The problem was, the bar wasn’t to blame. Her life was. Those feelings would follow her right out of there. They’d follow her right back home. And then they’d move in with her, put down roots. Unless—