Chapter 36 Red
Red didn’t believe Bridget’s story.
She’d been looking down her nose at him since she’d handed him her purse at the Depot. Why would she change now? And either way—if Claire was leaving him or if she was helping Beth—he needed to find her. Pete wasn’t somebody to cross.
“This isn’t my car,” Bridget sputtered. “How far is it to Ennis? I have to get it back before—”
“Not far,” he said. He pushed the car over the speed limit and the cool night air whipped past them.
Bridget crossed her bare arms. Red juggled the wheel and shrugged out of his jacket. She put it on with a grateful look and shoved her hands in the pockets.
Immediately, he realized what he’d done.
Bridget pulled the letter from Claire out of the jacket pocket. “What’s this?”
He gritted his teeth and didn’t answer.
“It’s from Claire,” she said, peering at the envelope in the moonlight. “What does it say?”
He shrugged. It might say she was leaving him. Or it might not. He couldn’t bear to know. He tapped the brakes as a coyote appeared out of the darkness and dashed across the road.
She turned it over and frowned. “You haven’t even opened it. Why on earth not?”
Red clenched his jaw. It wasn’t her business.
“Red?” she asked again in that huffy way she had.
He pushed down on the accelerator, the headlights eating up the road in front of him.
He might as well tell her. If—when—he got Claire back and brought her to Willmar, everyone would know his shameful secret, including Daniel Reilly.
And anyway, what did his pride matter now?
“I can’t,” he rasped, the words sticking in his throat.
“Can’t what?” she asked.
He threw her a glare. Was she really going to make him say it? But her expression was truly bewildered.
“Can’t read.” A wave of shame rushed up his neck and into his face as he waited for her scorn. For the mocking like the kids at school. Stupid Red Wilder.
“That can’t be,” she said in disbelief.
Did she think he’d make something like that up?
“You wrote letters—you and Claire—that winter after you met.”
He jerked his chin. “I didn’t write.” Not really.
After she left him to go home to Minnesota, Red couldn’t eat.
He hardly slept. Everything he saw reminded him of Claire.
She’d left him her address, and he mailed her bits and pieces he picked up on the trail or at the river.
A blossom of pink bitterroot just the color of her cheeks when she blushed.
A hawk’s feather. A sprig of fragrant sage.
He even bought a cheap Brownie and took a picture of the place they’d fished on the Madison the day she caught her first trout.
He put an X on the spot and sent it to her.
He carefully copied her address onto the envelopes, but he didn’t write any words of his own.
“But she wrote to you,” Bridget continued to object. “Didn’t you read her letters?”
Red remembered the day he got that first letter from Claire.
He’d put it in his pocket and walked the streets of West Yellowstone for an hour until he found himself standing at the back of Our Lady of the Pines Catholic Church.
The church was small, with peeled pine benches and a single stained-glass window behind the altar.
Nothing fancy, but Red felt something expand in his chest—the same feeling he got when he saw the colors of the Grand Prismatic or a sky full of stars.
Or Claire Reilly. It was something he couldn’t put into words, but in the silence of that little church he felt a measure of peace he hadn’t had since she left.
“Father Donahue read them to me,” he admitted to Bridget.
The old priest hadn’t asked his name or what Red was doing in his church.
He walked right past Red and disappeared out a side door, came back a minute later with two bottles of root beer.
Red thanked him and they sat in silence on the front step of the church, soaking in the last of the September afternoon.
Red took the unopened letter from Claire out of his pocket and looked again at the neat address, her perfect handwriting.
“What’s that you have?” the priest asked.
“A letter from a girl.” He wanted to say his girl, but he didn’t think she was that. “She came out for the summer.”
“Afraid to read it?” the priest asked.
Red nodded. That was part of it. Maybe Claire would tell him to stop mailing her reminders of Montana. Or that she was getting married to that Luke fellow he’d heard Millie tease her about.
“I’ll do the honors,” the priest said, holding out his hand.
“Sometimes it’s easier that way.” Claire’s letter wasn’t very personal, but she didn’t tell him to stop sending her gifts.
And she didn’t say anything about marrying Luke Charpentier.
Red thanked the priest and left the church feeling twenty pounds lighter.
He wasn’t going to tell Bridget that the next time he saw Father Donahue, it was in the county jail.
He spent three months up in Bozeman after the conviction on the Lacey Act.
The priest brought him his mail every week and read Claire’s letters to him.
He glanced over at Bridget and she wasn’t eyeing him with the disgust he’d expected. “Can I read it to you?” she asked.
Humiliation swamped him at her gentle tone and he wished she’d stay bossy and aggravating.
Anything was better than her pity. He didn’t want to hear through Bridget that Claire had given up on him.
But . . . what if Bridget was telling the truth and Claire wasn’t leaving him?
He jerked a nod, cursing that flame of hope that refused to die.
Bridget stuck a finger under the seal and popped it open.
He steeled himself for whatever would come.
“Dear Red,” she began, then her voice halted. “Oh, no,” Bridget said softly. “Oh, Claire.”
An iron band clamped around his chest. “Out loud,” he said, his voice rough. He watched the road but he didn’t see the white lines or the dark trees flashing past.
“Dear Red,” Bridget said again, her voice quivering, “I’ve always thought it didn’t help to dig up the past, that it was better to keep it buried. I think now I was wrong. I should have told you about my mother.”
Red sent a sideways glance at Bridget. Her mother? What did their mother have to do with Claire leaving him?
Bridget cleared her throat and continued.
“Mother left us when I was eight years old. I didn’t understand at first. I hoped that she would come back. For years, I hoped. I hoped for me—and for Bridget and Frannie and Dad. She didn’t come back (not even once). I stopped hoping, because hoping hurt too much.”
Bridget’s voice broke and she took a gulping breath.
Red gripped the steering wheel hard. Claire had let him believe her mother had died. Why hadn’t she told him what really happened?
“Then I met you, and Red, you have so much hope. You hope every time you go fishing (even if they aren’t biting), every time you deal out the cards for solitaire (which you always lose). You hoped every time you asked me to marry you (even when I always said no).
“I’m not good at hope, Red. I gave up on us at the end of that summer. Putting you out of my mind and out of my heart felt safer than hoping. But you didn’t give up. You hoped so much that you bought me a horse and showed up at Tara with a ring.
“Red Wilder, you had enough hope for us both.
“On our wedding day, when my dad refused to walk me down the aisle, I decided Claire Wilder would be a new person. One who was stronger. One who left her past behind. You know what happened then.”
Bridget paused, and Red remembered that moment in the church, and what it had meant to him.
She went on. “But I couldn’t leave Claire Reilly behind, Red, even though I wanted to. That little girl is still a part of me.”
Bridget let out a little sob and opened her handbag for her handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Red,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Keep reading,” he ordered, then softened his tone when he saw the tears glinting on Bridget’s cheeks. “Please, Bridget.”
She blew her nose, then started again with a ragged voice.
“When I sold Marigold, you were so angry.
Is that why you left? Or did it have something to do with Dell?
All I knew was that you had turned into a stranger.
You were so far away from me, even as we slept beside each other that last night.
It was all so terrible and when you left for Libby, I was afraid you were leaving me forever, just like Mother.
“I didn’t know how to talk to you or even if I could trust you.”
Red’s hands tightened on the steering wheel as the words hit him like arrows in his heart. She didn’t trust him. She couldn’t tell him.
Bridget sniffed and swiped at her eyes. “It felt safer to push you away. I told you I didn’t need you—that we didn’t need you—but Red, nothing could be further from the truth.
I need you. I’m not fine without you. I want to trust you with my secrets, and I need you to trust me with yours.
Please come back, Red. Don’t give up hope for us. All my love, Claire.”
Claire wanted him back. She wasn’t leaving him. He blinked hard, the road in front of him blurring. He slowed down to bump over the bridge across the Madison. He’d kept secrets from her, and she’d hidden things from him. But they could fix it.
“There’s a postscript,” Bridget said. “I’m sorry about Marigold. It was the only way to prove to my sister (and Dad) that we were happy.”
Red pressed down on the gas pedal. Marigold didn’t matter anymore. They were almost to the turnoff to Hebgen Lake and the road that would take them to Ennis. He’d find her there and tell her everything.
The headlights illuminated a vehicle on the side of the road and Red jammed on the brakes. “What—?”
Bridget put her hands on the dash to stop herself from lurching forward. “Is that your truck?”
Red was already out the door, running to the truck, hope briefly flaring to life. Claire and Jenny. He wrenched open the driver’s side door but even as he did so, he already knew.
The truck was empty. His wife and child were gone.