His Other Life

Chapter 14

FOURTEEN

ISLA

Present day

Mav picked Isla up shortly before noon on Tuesday, March 13. The date seemed an omen, but Isla had yet to decide whether it was good or bad. Mostly, she was eager to get the leaving part over. Mav had taken longer to get on the road than planned, which meant Mom had had more time to flutter around Isla with well-meant advice for how to keep tabs on Mav’s driving, and how not to get her hopes up too much.

“I just don’t know how much people will remember this long after,” she’d said. “I don’t want you to be disappointed, Birdie.”

But Isla already knew it was a long shot and had told her mom so repeatedly over the weekend, adding that it was also, at this point, her only shot.

When Isla and Mav finally rolled away from the house, Isla’s bags tucked safely onto the covered truck bed, Mom waved until they couldn’t see her in the mirror anymore. Then Isla rested her head against the headrest and closed her eyes briefly.

“We’re off,” Mav said at her side. “Are you ready?”

Isla adjusted her seatbelt and glanced at him. Her driver sat straight-backed, hands at ten and two as they cleared the neighborhoods and entered the more sparsely populated outskirts of town. Traffic was light, the world around them still beneath heavy clouds.

“Yep,” Isla confirmed. “The truck sounds good.”

Mav patted the wheel. “Good as new.”

They would take Route 101 south along Hood Canal to Olympia and planned on stopping “somewhere scenic” along the way per Mav’s request. Isla had packed a thermos of coffee, several sandwiches, and a couple of Mom’s cinnamon rolls. Mav had contributed a family-sized bag of hard butterscotch candy and a twelve-pack of water bottles for the road.

The radio was set to a seventies station, and as the dense woods of the Olympic peninsula engulfed them, the immersive chords of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” filled the air in the cab. Mav hummed along atonally, and together with the muted evergreens passing by the wayside, this had an almost hypnotic effect on Isla. Her thoughts wandered aimlessly on the cusp of something she couldn’t quite describe yet. Somewhere ahead was a plunge, but for now, she could pretend it was just the two of them and the road.

They’d been driving for a half hour when Isla’s phone rang, interrupting the peace. She lowered the volume on the radio and accepted Louise’s call.

“So, did you get it?” her friend asked by way of greeting.

“Get what?”

“The bird. It said the auction ended.”

Isla’s head whipped up. The auction . In the midst of getting ready for the road trip, she’d completely forgotten about it.

“Hold on.” She opened the app and checked. Sure enough, at noon, the bids had been cut off and… she’d lost. “Fuck!” She dropped her hand to her lap and ground her jaws together.

Mav glanced her way. “What’s going on?”

“Dammit all the way to…” Isla stared unseeingly at the green blur out the window. She hadn’t seen Nana’s hummingbird since she was a teenager, so losing this one was like losing the opportunity to reunite with a cherished friend.

“Hello?” Louise’s faint voice coming from the phone seeped through Isla’s disappointment.

She picked it up and put it to her ear. “I didn’t get it. Damn.” To her surprise, tears stung behind her eyelids as she pictured the delicate figurine. It’s just a thing, for God’s sake.

The truck had slowed, and now Mav pulled off the road into a rest area.

“Oh no. I’m sorry.” Louise sounded genuinely upset on Isla’s behalf. “I thought for sure you would have.”

“Not your fault,” Isla sighed. “There’ll be others.” She willed herself to believe it. This one had been rare, but you never knew. She pressed her lips into a tight smile. “We’re on the road now,” she told Louise. “I should go. Talk later?”

“Later,” Louise confirmed.

Isla hung up. “You didn’t have to stop,” she said to Mav. “Just got some bad news.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Not unless you own a Coalport porcelain hummingbird.”

“Ah, the auction.”

“Yeah.” She opened the app again. Closed it.

“Is that why your mother calls you Birdie? Because you collect them?”

Isla turned her head fully his way and leaned back. “No actually. It was my nana’s name for me for as long as I can remember. She said it was because birds were her favorites. All kinds of birds. But then she gave me one of her hummingbirds and…”

“The rest is history.”

Isla nodded.

“Would you like to take a break here. Have some coffee?” Mav gestured to the bed of the truck that held all their things.

“We can drive a little farther.”

“Sounds good.” Mav put the truck into gear and merged back onto the road. After a few minutes, he glanced her way again. “It sounds like you were close with your grandparents growing up. That’s nice.”

“I was. Or at least with Nana Embeth and Pop-Pop Neil. My mom’s parents lived in Illinois, so we rarely saw them. Nana and Mom worked together—they were both social workers—and that’s how my parents met. Nana thought her son and Mom would get along, so she set them up.”

“Ah, so Nancy knew your grandmother—Embeth—before she knew your dad?”

“Yup. No mother-in-law tropes there. Everyone liked each other.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

Isla smiled as the memories flooded her. “They had a big property not too far from Olympia actually, with a small lake where Pop-Pop would take me fishing in the summer. He was handy too, so we’d build huts, and pedal cars, and tons of birdhouses that I got to paint with whatever scrap paint he had in the shed. Nana was the one who’d point out and name all the animals we spotted—where they lived, what they ate. She always knew in what tree to find owls and in which birdhouse there were babies. And she had a whole wall of books in her bedroom so I spent a lot of time in the window seat in the kitchen with my nose in whatever I could find.”

“You’re an only child?”

Isla touched her heart. “Once my greatest sorrow. I was convinced I’d be the best big sister, and I couldn’t understand why my parents would deprive me. Truth was, they were both only children and liked it like that.”

Mav slowed as they closed in on a semi taking care in a particularly sharp turn. “Neither of them had siblings?”

“Nope. Unlike Jonah’s family—he had so many aunts, uncles, and cousins… My first Christmas with his family, I was completely overwhelmed.”

Mav chuckled. “I can see that.”

The holiday joys of the past filled Isla with a warmth she’d long been estranged from, but just as quickly, the feeling dissipated, taking with it her smile as the photos from Jonah’s last Christmas forced their way into her consciousness again. And then there were holidays going forward. Mom was going to be out of state. Isla hadn’t considered that before.

Mav glanced at her. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Oh, they’re hardly worth paying for. Same old questions.” No need to burden him with the extent of her talent at worrying.

Thankfully, Mav didn’t press it.

“Lilliwaup is coming up,” Isla said after a while. “I think there’s a convenience store there that might have a bathroom. Coffee break?”

Mav agreed that was a good plan, and a few minutes later, they pulled off the road and into a parking space next to the old cedar-shingled building.

While Mav used the facilities, Isla dug out mugs that she balanced on the tailgate and filled with coffee. Her stomach rumbled at the scent of wheat and mustard from the sandwich bag, and it felt good to stretch tall even though they’d been traveling less than an hour and a half. It had been a long time since she’d spent more than fifteen minutes in a car.

“They’ve got a bit of everything in there,” Mav said when he returned. “In case you’ve thought of something you forgot to pack.”

Isla’s mouth was too full of bread to respond, so she nodded and gestured for Mav to help himself to some sustenance.

The cups drained and the food gone, Mav inhaled deeply in satisfaction and rolled his shoulders back. The movement straightened his shape and gave Isla a sudden glimpse of the striking figure he must have cut in his youth. “Thank you for letting me come along,” he said. “I’m already invigorated.”

Isla stacked their mugs and tucked them back in their bag. “That’s all it took?” she asked with a smile. “Well, you know—I literally couldn’t do it without you.”

“Now that’s a watered-down word if I ever knew one—‘literally.’”

Isla resisted the urge to roll her eyes at how much he sounded like her teacher dad. “Okay, fine. How about I wouldn’t have done it without you?”

“That’s better.” He closed the tailgate. “And yes that’s all it took. I’m old.”

“Ha! According to Nana, age is nothing but a number, so there… I’m going to run to the washroom too. Be right back.”

“Wise woman,” Mav said.

On her way back, Isla picked up a couple of chocolate bars and some sour gummies, not sharing Mav’s predilection for butterscotch. She was in line to pay, browsing the shelves near the windows, when a movement outside caught her attention. A tall man with a baseball cap pulled low hurried past, toward the old gas pumps on the opposite side of the building from where Mav and the truck were waiting for her. She blinked, dumbstruck, as he disappeared from view. She could have sworn it was the guy from Mav’s building again. But there was no way. Port Townsend was sixty miles away.

Someone nudged her elbow. “Excuse me—it’s your turn.”

Isla looked over her shoulder, and the woman behind her nodded toward the cashier.

“Oh, sorry.” Isla cast another glance through the window, but the man was nowhere in sight. She paid then hurried outside.

The only vehicle by the gas pumps was a large red pickup truck with a blond woman behind the wheel. Isla frowned. Had she imagined the guy?

She returned to Mav, shrugging off the odd coincidence, and dumped her sweets on the seat between them. She looked out the windshield, to her side, behind her. A young couple in hiking gear, the woman from the store, a dad with a little boy who, judging by his squirming, also needed a restroom. No tall, dark, and handsome stranger.

“Everything okay?” Mav asked, hand resting on the key in the ignition. “Did you forget something?”

“No…” She pulled on her seatbelt. “Did you happen to see a man in a baseball cap over here when I was inside? Tall? Black coat?”

Mav’s forehead creased. “No, can’t say I did. Why?”

“I thought…” She gave a little shrug. Had staying at home for so long made her paranoid? That wasn’t a flattering look. “Never mind.”

“Bigfoot probably.” Mav started the car. “Lots of sightings in the Olympics, I hear. Ready to go?”

“Bigfoot. Funny.” She smiled, tension easing. “I didn’t take you for a believer. Yeah, let’s go.”

“I think we both know there’s more to this world than meets the eye, no?” He signaled then eased back into the sparse traffic.

“True. But seeing is still believing, so the skeptic in me reserves the right to doubt monsters walking among us until proven otherwise.”

“That’s fair.”

Or to imagine seeing people in places where they shouldn’t be , Isla thought. Good grief .

But when she glanced back in the mirror just then, her back stiffened. Because previously hidden from view in front of the red pickup was a small blue sedan, and while she watched, it too pulled back into the road.