Down River Part 47

"What about the money he owes?"

"He'll refinance, leverage more acreage. Whatever it takes."

"Can he do it?"

"I trust your father," he said, and the statement had layers of meaning.

I walked with Dolf to his truck. He spoke to me through the open window. "n.o.body's seen Jamie," he said. "He hasn't been home." We both knew why. Miriam was his twin, and our father had shot her down. Worry filled Dolf's eyes. "Look for him, will you?"

I called my broker in New York and arranged to transfer funds to a local branch. When I went looking for Jamie, I had a cashier's check for three hundred thousand dollars in my pocket. I found him at one of the local sports bars. He sat in a booth in the back corner. Empties stretched from one end of the table to the other. As far as I could tell, he had neither shaved nor bathed in days. I limped to the table, slipped in across from him, and propped the crutches against the wall. He looked destroyed.

"You okay?" I asked.

He said nothing.

"Everybody's looking for you."

When he spoke, he slurred, and I saw in him the kind of anger that had all but destroyed me. "She was my sister," he said. "Do you understand?"

I did. As different as they had been, they were still twins.

"I was there," I said. "He had no choice."

Jamie slammed a bottle on the table. Beer shot out and spattered my sleeve. People stared, but Jamie was oblivious. "There's always a choice."

"No, Jamie. Not always."

He leaned back, rubbed giant, callused hands over his face. When he looked at me, it was like looking into a mirror. "Go away, Adam. Just go away." He put his head in his hands and I slipped the check across the table.

"Anything you need," I said, and hobbled out. I turned once at the door and saw him there. He held the check in his fingers, then put it down. He found me across the room and raised his hand. I would never forget the face that he showed me.

Then he looked down and reached for another beer.

When I went to see Grace, it was easier than I thought. I did not see my mother when I looked at her. In that, at least, my father had been right. It was not her fault, and I loved her no less. She looked worn, but the truth rested more lightly on her than it did on me. "I always thought my parents were dead," she explained. "Now I have two, and a brother."

"But Dolf's not your grandfather," I said. "You lost that."

She shook her head. "I couldn't love him any more than I already do. Nothing will change for us."

"What about you and me? Is that weird?"

I took her a minute to answer. When she did, I felt the confusion in her. "Hope dies hard, Adam. It hurts. I'll get used to it because I don't have a choice. I'm just glad you didn't sleep with me."

"Ah. Humor."

"It helps."

"And Sarah Yates?"

"I like her, but she abandoned me."

"Almost twenty years, Grace. She could have lived anywhere, but chose a place three miles upriver. That was no accident. She wanted to be near you."

"Near is not the same."

"No, it's not."

I guess we'll see where it goes."

"And our father?"

"I look forward to walking that road." Her gaze was so level that I had to look away. She put her hand on mine. "Don't leave, Adam. Walk it with me."

I withdrew my hand, moved to the window, and looked out. A canopy of trees spread above the neighborhood behind the hospital. I saw a thousand shades of green. "I'm going back to New York," I said. "Robin's coming. We want you to come with us."

"I told you before. I'm no runner."

"It's not running," I said.

"Isn't it?"

CHAPTER 36.

They buried Miriam on an unseasonably cool day. I went to the funeral and stood with Robin at my side. My father was there with Janice, both of them looking sleepless, weathered, and bleak. Dolf stood between them like a rock. Or a wall. They did not look at each other, and I knew that grief and blame were chewing them down. Jamie lingered on the fringe, sunken, with splotches of red on his cheeks. He was drunk and angry, with no forgiveness in his face when he looked at my father.

I listened to the same preacher who buried my mother, buried Danny. He wore the snowy vestment and spoke similar words, but they brought me no comfort. Miriam knew little peace in life, and I feared that her soul might share the same predilection. She died a killer, unrepentant, and I hoped that she'd found a better place.

I looked across her grave.

I prayed for mercy on her wounded soul.

When the preacher finished, my stepmother folded herself against the coffin and shook like a leaf in high wind. George Tallman stared into nothing as tears slipped off his chin to stain his dress blues dark.

I moved away from the small gathering and my father joined me. We stood alone under a distant sun. "Tell me what to do," he said.

I looked at what remained of my family, and thought of Miriam's prophetic words. The family had torn itself apart.

Cracks all over the place.

"You haven't called the police." I was speaking of the postcard.

"I burned it." He looked down and repeated himself. "I burned it."

Then he, too, began to tremble.

And I walked away.

CHAPTER 37.

I discovered something over the next year. New York with someone you love is better than the same city all alone. Ten times better. A thousand. But it wasn't home. That was fact, simple and pure. I tried to live with it, but it was hard. When I closed my eyes, I thought of open s.p.a.ces.

We had no idea what we would do with the rest of our days, only that we would spend them together. We had money and we had time. We talked about getting married. "One day," she said.

"Soon," I countered.

"Kids?"

I thought of my father and she recognized the pain. "You should call him back," she said.

He called every week. Sunday night. Eight o'clock. The phone would ring and the number would appear on the handset. Every week he called. And every week I let it ring. Sometimes he left a message. Sometimes, not. We got a letter once. It contained a copy of his divorce decree and a copy of his new will. Jamie still had his ten percent, but my father left control of the farm to Grace and me. He wanted us to protect its future.

Us.

His children.

Grace and I spoke regularly, and things got better with time. The relationship began to feel normal. We asked her to visit, but she always refused. "One day," she said, and I understood. She was walking blind on a new road. That took concentration. She spoke, once, of our father. "He's hurting, Adam."

"Don't," I said, and she never raised the subject again.

Dolf came twice, but did not care for the city. We went out to dinner, hit a few bars, told some stories. He looked better than I thought he would, but refused to talk about what the doctors were saying. "Doctors," he'd say, then change the subject. I asked him once why he'd taken the blame for Danny's murder. His answer did not surprise me.

"Your dad had a fit when I told him that Danny hit Grace. In all of my life I'd never seen him that angry. Danny went missing right after that. I thought maybe your father killed him." He shrugged, looked at a pretty girl on the sidewalk. "I was dying anyway."

I thought about that often: the power of their friendship. Fifty years and more. A lifetime.

His death almost broke me.

I didn't see it coming, and I wasn't there when it happened. I went back to Rowan County for one more funeral, and my father told me that Dolf died with the sun on his face. Then he lifted his arms and asked me to forgive him, but I could not speak. I was crying like a child.

When I came back to New York, I was not the same. Not for days. Not for weeks. I dreamed three times of the white deer, and each dream came with more power than the last. His antlers were as smooth as bone, and a gold light shone between them. He stood at the edge of the forest and waited for me to follow, but I never did. I could not face what he wanted to show me, and was wary of what lay beyond the hard, black trees.

I tried to explain the dream to Robin, the power of it, the sense of awe and fear that all but choked me when I bolted up in the dark. I told her that Dolf was trying to tell me something, or maybe my mother; but she shrugged that off. She wrapped me up and said it meant that good still moved in the world. Plain and simple. I tried my best to believe her, but there was a hole in me. So she said it again, whispered with the voice that I loved, Good still moves.

But that's not what it meant.

There was something behind those trees, some secret place, and I thought I knew what I might find there.

When my mother killed herself, she killed my childhood, too. She took the magic with her. It was too much for me to forgive, too destructive, and in the absence of forgiveness, the anger filled me up, twenty years' worth, and only now was I beginning to understand. She did what she did, but hers was a sin of weakness, as was my father's; and while the repercussions of his misdeed were enormous, the sin itself was one of human frailty. That's what Dolf tried to tell me, and I knew now that his words were not just for my father's sake, but also for mine. My father's failing is where the anger started, that's what set the gla.s.s spinning, and every day it seemed a smaller thing. So, I held my woman close, and I told myself that when next I dreamed, I would follow a flash of white. I would walk the dark trail, and I would look at what I feared to see.

Maybe it was magic.

Or forgiveness.

Maybe it was nothing.

At dusk the next Sunday, Robin said that she was going for a walk. She kissed me hard and put the phone in my hand.

I stood at the window and looked at the river. It was not the one I loved. Different color. Different sh.o.r.es. But the water moved. It wore things down and it restored itself, emptied into the same vast sea.

I thought of my own mistakes and of my father, then of Grace and of the things that Dolf had said; how human is human and the hand of G.o.d is in all things.

The phone would ring in ten minutes.

I wondered if tonight I would pick it up.

The End.