Chapter 29 No More Darkness
No More Darkness
MITCHELL
I’d gone to therapy for a while, when I was starting up LoupTeq and found myself unable to get out of bed on the days I needed to be most involved. It had helped, and I’d at least learned that truth I just told Winona. I didn’t stick with it, once I was able to function again. Maybe now I would.
Winona climbed off me, and for a moment, I thought I’d ruined it all. But she didn’t leave. She wrapped her blanket tighter around herself and settled onto the step next to me. She took my hand, slipping her fingers through mine.
“His name was Adam,” she said.
I forced myself not to demand Adam who? A last name and date of birth would be all I needed to track him down.
“My mom had me young. Really young, and of course was on her own with me. She said I was the only thing that kept her from floundering. We were on our own for a long time—until I was eleven. We were poor, but happy. At least, I was. I didn’t know she used the food bank, or that the library was our second home because it was free.
But then… Adam found her. She was a part-time housekeeper at one of his properties.
He was older. Rich. The richest man we’d ever met. ”
She glanced at me briefly, and I knew she was thinking until now.
I was quiet, willing her to continue, wanting to know even as I didn’t.
“He was nice at first. He spoiled her. Me too. Bought us gifts. Set me loose in the bookstore and told me I could buy as many books as I wanted.”
I thought about the box of books I’d bought her, feeling ashamed at my inadvertent callousness. But I kept quiet.
“He started paying our rent, and then within a couple of months… we moved into his house.”
She took a deep breath and I saw the pain in the clench of her fists on the blanket.
“You don’t have to...” I started, but she shook her head.
She needed to tell me as badly as I felt like I had to know. It was a part of the fabric of who she was. Fuck this fucker for how he’d wormed his way into her identity.
I squeezed her hand.
She took another breath. “They started fighting maybe six months in. He’d get mad at her when she did nothing wrong. Then I only ever heard him yelling.” She swallowed. “Mama started wearing make-up, then.”
I gritted my teeth, forcing my hand not to squeeze too hard.
“In the beginning, he’d apologize. Flowers were her favorite. So he’d bring her these huge bouquets of lilies, even though he knew she loved roses. One more little power trip, I guess.” She gave a brief smile with no humor. “I can’t stand them now. The smell makes me ill.”
Winona hugged our entwined hands in her lap.
“The first time I saw a bruise, I called the cops. The boys were there by then, only babies, and I’d come to tell Mom Ryan had woken up and was hungry. I only saw because I walked in on her looking in the mirror. She quickly pulled her sweater up, said it was nothing.”
Winona drew her thumb over our joined knuckles. The expression in her eyes was haunted.
“So yeah, I called the cops. But they never came. They knew Adam; their brothers and uncles worked for him in the pulp mill. They were scared of him. After that…” she swallowed again. “He tried to go after me.”
I had to work to keep my hand steady. While a moment ago it had been sorrow, rage ripped through me now. I reached for the railing again, squeezing so tight I felt my knuckles pop.
“He didn’t get me though, at least not physically.
The night he tried, Mama and I fought back.
We ran, the boys in our arms. We were heading to her brother’s place.
They hadn’t spoken since she and Adam got together, and he had next to nothing, but he’d put us up, we knew he would.
But on our way, Mama fell. Just collapsed on the street.
I had to catch Ryan so he didn’t hit his head. ”
Winona bent down, head on her knees. “When I tried to help her, I saw what I’d been trying not to see for so long.
She was so frail. Her hair was thinned to nothing.
That’s what pains me the most now, Mitchell.
That day I saw her bruises, I couldn’t believe how skinny she was.
She’d been hiding everything from me, but I’d seen. I could have—”
She choked.
“No,” I said, cupping her face. “We won’t blame ourselves for abuse perpetuated by others. I won’t let you blame yourself, Winona.”
That was more therapy talk. But it was what I’d needed to hear then, and what I needed her to know now.
Winona’s chin wobbled.
“I mean it, Winona.”
She nodded. Logically she understood. But I knew what it was like to not want to listen to logic. Especially when you’d done such a great job of ignoring it for so long. I released her face, forcing myself not to pull her onto me again. To keep anyone from hurting her again.
“She had an illness that could have been treated,” Winona said. “But Adam wouldn’t let her see the doctor. Between that and the… the bruises he gave her, she never stood a chance.”
Winona ran her hands over her hair. I told her she didn’t have to continue, but she shook her head once more. Told me she’d gotten her mom to the hospital, but only saw her once. Adam said he’d take the boys, and her mom had told Winona to run. Run and never look back.
“My dad was American,” she said. “So we came here. He had this aunt here in Quince Valley who’d gone into a home, but left her house empty. We moved in and I made it livable until I could figure out the legal stuff.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“I was fifteen when I left with my brothers to stay with my uncle. He didn’t even want those boys, but he still tracked me down. I was sixteen the day we crossed the border. It’s a miracle I got through without question.”
Winona had been a child. And she’d lost everything because of this man.
“Where is he now, Winona?”
“You going to put a hit out on him for me?” She laughed, though it wasn’t funny.
“I’m sure I could figure it out,” I said. I had no idea what that would entail, but money could get you pretty much anything. Hell, maybe I’d take care of it myself. I wasn’t a violent man, but nothing surprised me about myself anymore. Not when it came to Winona.
“Well, no need. He went away for embezzlement at the mill he ran soon after we left. He screwed over enough people there that it caught up to him in prison. My uncle told me he got the tar beat out of him, and when he got out, he got caught in some other scheme and went back to prison again, where to this day, I hear he rots.” Winona rubbed her forehead with her palm.
“He didn’t get a single slap on the wrist for what he did to us.
Or the other women I learned about later. ”
She looked at me, her eyes filling once again.
“It’s because of her I can’t drop what I’m doing.
I made a promise to her that I’d live my best life and never uproot it for a man, no matter how…
charming.” She laughed, but there was no smile in her voice.
“Heartbreaker Trades is my dream. But it’s for her.
Mama always wished she could have done more with her life for me.
Make better choices. I need to show her I’m changing things for all women.
To show her”—her voice cracked—“that she did good with me.”
My heart clenched. This woman. She was so fucking strong.
Winona glanced at the lone window in this room, a tall and narrow rain-streaked sheet of floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out onto the woods.
“That life we had together, back home, that’s how I try to remember her. The only thing I’d trade it for is to spare her what she went through.”
For a few minutes, we both watched the water slip down the glass, the soft way of the dark trees outside.
“Would you move back to Newfoundland?” I asked. “If Adam was gone?”
“No.” She answered without hesitation. “My life is here now. This town and the people in it—they’re my family now.
But a visit. God, b’y what I wouldn’t do for a visit.
To feel the sand in my toes and smell the ocean.
To hear people who talk like me. To sing a sea shanty in one of those corny bars in St. John’s. ”
She laughed. She looked so beautiful, my heart hurt.
Then Winona smiled, but it wasn’t steady.
I pulled her against me, my chest pounding; a tumult of everything. Fury at men who took what they wanted and bullied and beat anyone in their way. Pain, that she’d crossed paths with one of the worst. Honor, that she’d confided in me.
Later, as we lay in bed, the first rays of the sunrise spilling onto the floor of my space upstairs in the pool house, sleep making us drowsy and heavy-limbed, Winona whispered, “Tell me something about you, Mitchell. Something real. Something you’ve never told anyone else.”
I considered. I could tell her any number of things. I could tell her some surface fact that didn’t matter; something about the research LoupTeq was doing we hadn’t released yet. I could tell her all the places I’d been and people I’d met.
But none of that was right. Not with her. She’d opened up her soul to me.
I didn’t want to give her more pain.
I thought about the spaces in my childhood that were good; the places where I loved life. Where I had fun and played games, and acted ridiculous because it felt good. Before my father snuffed it out of me.
“We had a cabin,” I said. “I guess we still do. On an island in the San Juans.” The water there is as deep and bottomless blue as your eyes.
I held back on the bad poetry.
“It’s an unserviced island, so there are no ferries, and no power.
We had to take this little dinghy with an outboard motor over there, and pack all our food with us.
There were only a handful of other cabins there, so it always felt like we had the whole island to ourselves.
It was the only place I remember my dad being only marginally relaxed.
The only place he didn’t constantly criticize what me and my brothers were doing.
It was like he could let go of that persona, just for a little bit.
It wasn’t like he played with us or anything, but he just… let us be.”
I lay back against the pillow, Winona tucked into my arm.
It felt like the most natural place to be in the world.
She’d be leaving. She had to. But for now, I took her with me, back to Giller’s Island, with its sound and scent of the ocean and the little cabin where I shared a room half the size of my closet with my two older brothers.
I told her how we only slept in that room half the time when we were there because we liked to set a tent out in the grass outside.
We’d stay up late by the fire pit telling ghost stories, and when we went to bed, we’d keep the fly off and just stare at the stars, the sounds of the surf a constant backdrop.
“There were so many stars there. Billions, and whenever I look up at the night sky today, no matter where I am, I still hear the soft sound of the ocean crashing way down on the rocks the way it did back then.”
She sighed, closing her eyes. “The stars over the sea are unparalleled.”
I squeezed her shoulder, kissing the top of her head.
“My father, he didn’t have an ounce of humor in him,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive him for how he kept us down, and how he treated our mother, but I know he didn’t speak to his own family.
Mom said he never thought he’d have a family of his own, and never had anyone tell him the right way to bring up kids.
But the best thing he ever did was leave us alone at that cabin. ”
“What’s your favorite memory from there? Out of all of them?”
I took in a breath. A clear image popped into my head, right away. I didn’t want that to be the memory, not when I had so many that seemed better.But it shone as if desperate for Winona to see it.
“Once, when I was maybe eight or nine, I made my brothers put on a play with me. A full on sword-fighting, dragon-slaying thing. We waited until nighttime to perform it, because we needed the fire in the fire pit out back. For effect.”
She laughed softly.
“We’d learned early on never to ask Dad to join us for anything like that. For anything at all. He’d never come, and if he ever did, he’d tell us it was nonsense and that we needed to get our damned heads out of the clouds. So we only invited Mom.”
I shifted so I could stroke Winona’s hair as I felt myself back in that cool evening, with the scent of the ocean mingling with the woodsmoke of the fire, my chest giddy with excitement at my brothers playing along to my script.
“It was Mom who always believed in me.”
Mom, who’d tried to fish the smoldering ruins of my notebooks out of the fire after she’d seen me yelling, trying to get them out myself.
“Mom cheered along at all the right parts. Conrad made sound effects. And when I killed the monstrous dragon—Blake, wearing garbage bags—I remember looking up, and there he was.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah. He looked… kind of like a little boy himself. I think he wanted to be there with us. I think he wanted to sit beside my mom and cheer us on but didn’t know how.”
I’d never told that story before. I think I worried I’d imagined it.
And maybe I did. Maybe it was a hopeful, fabricated memory.
Maybe I’d just wanted him to believe in me the way Mom had.
But even if the memory wasn’t real, it existed now, outside of me.
Winona had heard it, and that made it real enough for me.