Chapter Twenty-Two
Wade grabbed Helen around the waist. These were hands that had touched her countless times—warm, sensual, and plenty of practical
touches—and now they were being used to drag her toward the front door.
She didn’t feel fear so much as anger. She struggled against him but didn’t shout, didn’t want Isaac to hear them, so it was
wordless and it was red-faced as he hauled her outside the farmhouse. When she felt her feet leave the ground, Helen thrashed
about and slipped free almost immediately, but he grabbed her arm and tugged her onward, down the two front porch steps. She
twisted and hit him on the shoulder, hard enough that he grunted in pain. She didn’t swing at his face but a part of her wanted
to, and he grabbed her around the waist again and said, “Helen, stop!” as if she were the one being irrational.
Halfway to the truck, she pulled completely free and fell to the ground. She couldn’t keep quiet anymore and shouted, “What
is wrong with you?!”
Wade stood over her, breathing hard, a different kind of horror registering on his face. He knelt beside her, his aggression
gone.
“Helen, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not. None of this is okay.”
As she sat there on the ground, catching her breath, it occurred to her that she didn’t really know her husband. He’d lied
to her, told her that he was an only child, never made mention of a tragic accident. Behind his silences, secrets lurked.
As she looked into his eyes, she realized that if Tyler had ever told her they needed to flee because a man that appeared
as flesh and blood was a ghost, she would have immediately followed him out the door.
“Everything all right out there?” Isaac was leaning against the frame of the open door to the farmhouse.
Wade’s voice was tight with anger. “Fine, Isaac. Just fine.”
Helen suddenly wanted to know which brother would win in a fight. Wade was burlier than Isaac, but she’d seen Isaac with his
shirt off and saw that he was strong too. Longer-limbed and lean, but solid. A man who’d survived a fight with a tractor.
Wade touched her arm, soft and apologetic now, and spoke low so Isaac wouldn’t hear. “Let’s just go to a motel for the night.
We can come back tomorrow.”
She wiped at the sheen of sweat on her brow. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You aren’t in your right mind.”
Wade lowered his head. He couldn’t argue with her on that point, and he wouldn’t force her. “I can’t leave you here with him.”
“Then I guess you’re staying too.”
Helen stood and brushed herself off. She knew the seat of her dress had dirt on it. She had felt the give of the earth beneath
her as she’d fallen. This dress had been perfectly clean when she’d put it on this morning, and now she needed to wash the
damn thing by hand again.
She looked to the farmhouse where Isaac still stood and wondered if he’d lingered there in the doorway and watched them struggle
before he’d called out.
Helen turned to Wade. “Are you coming inside?”
In the bedroom, Helen leaned against the dresser and crossed her arms. “Do you want to tell me about the accident?” she asked Wade.
Her left arm throbbed a little from the struggle, but she hadn’t told him that and she wouldn’t.
Wade sat down on the bed. He looked defeated, as if the events of the night had wrung everything out of him.
His shoulders sank. He knew there was no getting around it. Finally he said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. But I’m
afraid of what you’ll think of me if I do.”
“It’ll be okay. Just tell me,” Helen said, as if it were that simple, even though she knew from her own experience it wasn’t.
If Wade knew what she’d done in Seattle the day she’d walked three blocks with a gun in her right pocket and hate spilling
out of every other pocket, he might feel differently about her.
“Isaac and I didn’t get along,” Wade said. “We fought, and I can’t deny that. But I’d never intentionally hurt him. Not bad.
Not in any real way.”
“Of course not. I know,” she said in a soothing tone, but she actually found Wade’s words worrying instead of reassuring.
“That day, we were on the tractor—a real big one—and an old net got stuck on the blades. We were having one of our arguments.
Shouting at each other. Isaac got out to pull it free, and when I started it up again, I thought he was done. His feet got
caught in the net and he got pulled in front of the tractor. It happened so fast.”
The image swept into Helen’s mind. It was a horrifying thought, and she was an authority as far as those things went. She
cringed for both Wade and Isaac, and a little bit for Tyler too.
Wade dropped his head into his hands. Then he said the awful thing she had already imagined. “It was too late. I was already
driving forward, and he was pulled into the blade.”
“Wade. I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That must have been horrible.”
“It was.” His voice was muffled against his hands. “It was.”
“I wish you would have told me this before.”
He lifted his head. “I know. I just never wanted to think about it again. I couldn’t stick around and work the farm, see the
very spot he’d died every day. So I put it up for sale and left.”
Exhaling heavily, he turned his hands palms up, as if that’s all there was to it.
Helen exhaled heavily too. There was so much to talk about. “After the accident, what happened? Was he taken to the hospital?”
Wade rubbed his temple in silence for several moments before he finally said quietly, “No. There was nothing the hospital
could do.”
She didn’t want to force him to relive it, but she needed more details to understand how he could have arrived at the extraordinary
conclusion that Isaac was dead. But before she had a chance to ask anything more, Wade said, “I need to get some sleep.”
He stood and started rummaging through the canvas bag he’d packed for their escape.
“Really?” she asked, stunned by his abrupt turn.
“Yeah, really.”
“A minute ago, you wanted to leave.”
“Yeah, and you won’t. So I have no choice but to figure this out here. And I’m exhausted from this whole thing.”
In disbelief, Helen watched Wade change into his flannel pajamas and push the bag onto the floor as he got into bed.
He pulled the blankets up to his chin. “Turn out the lamp, please.”
Helen was still standing in the middle of the room in her dirty dress, so no, she couldn’t turn out the lamp and plunge the
room into complete darkness. But she also couldn’t go into the kitchen and spend the night wandering around listening to the
coyotes and reading poetry with his brother staying in their house.
So after a moment, she removed her dress and put on her nightgown. She would have to skip her bedtime routine in the bathroom
tonight. She climbed into bed beside Wade and turned off the lamp. None of this made any sense.
Wade’s apology broke the stillness. “I’m sorry. I haven’t handled things very good, but I’ll figure it out.”
She turned to face him, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dark. “It’s been stressful.”
“That’s for sure.”
His hand found hers under the blanket. She felt the bones in her fingers press together when he squeezed too hard.
“Let’s just say, theoretically, Isaac did die,” Helen said, trying to reason with Wade by first acknowledging his story as
possible. “Then he knows it was an accident. So it doesn’t mean it’s bad that he’s here. We all dream of seeing our loved
ones after they die.”
Tyler. Tyler. Tyler. His name, the metronome.
She continued, “Maybe Isaac came back to make up with you. Maybe it’s a gift.”
“No, the look in his eyes when I first walked in . . .” Wade shook his head at the memory of it. “No, it was something else.
Maybe he’s something else now.”
“So what do you want to do? You want us to sneak out in the middle of the night, and then what? Live in the truck? Abandon
the land?” There was no way Wade would leave the land. She knew that, he knew that.
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Wade sighed in tired contemplation. “And I think he’ll find us wherever we go.”
“He only knew you were here because of the letter you wrote your aunt.”
“I never wrote a letter. We don’t even have an Aunt Sue.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” Helen pressed.
“Am I sure I don’t have an Aunt Sue, or am I sure I didn’t send a letter I never wrote?”
“Sorry.”
“Because I’m sure about both things.”
Helen didn’t know what to say. Perhaps what was happening right now wasn’t one thing or the other.
Perhaps both of them were right: Wade was traumatized by the accident and thus erroneously believed Isaac was dead, and Isaac was messing with Wade.
It certainly seemed plausible that Isaac might blame Wade for the tractor accident, and his
anger could be coming through in these twisted mind games.
“Maybe you should go to your parents’ while I deal with this,” Wade said.
It was the first time in the year and a half they’d lived there that he’d suggested such a thing. Helen felt a small burst
in her chest—it was the little girl inside her thinking about her mother—but just as quickly, she felt the heavy weight of
impossibility. She couldn’t imagine the woman she’d become showing up at her parents’ doorstep in Seattle. Was she just supposed
to throw all her clothes in their washing machine and flip on their TV? Eat takeout food and carry on conversations about
the late husband she wished were still here and the replacement husband that sometimes she wished was not?
“I don’t want to go to the city.” And as Helen answered Wade, she realized a part of her wanted to stay to see this drama
unfold. The upheaval of Isaac’s arrival was the most exciting thing that had happened to her since her life had been resurrected
into this endless winter.
Wade’s voice turned gentle. “I’ll protect you.”
After a pause, Helen nodded, and Wade leaned in closer. He wanted to kiss her, so she closed her eyes and let him. When he
deepened the kiss and rolled on top of her, she opened her eyes and stared distantly at the ceiling, escaping the moment.