Chapter 9 Kane #2
"Of you looking at me and seeing him not come home in my place.
Every day since that courtyard has been time I shouldn't have, Callie.
I knew Danny would have done more with it than I have, and the thought of walking into your house, the proof in flesh that he wasn't coming back, was a weight I never figured out how to carry.
I couldn't be that to you. I couldn't add my face to the loss you'd already taken. "
The room holds.
"Look at me, Kane."
I turn.
She's pulled herself up against the headboard, the sheet at her collarbone. Her chin is set, her eyes wet without spilling.
Her voice has gone hard.
"You were a fucking coward, Kane. Say it out loud."
"I was a coward, Callie."
She nods. Once. Slow. The first tear goes without her wiping it.
"There's one more thing you should have. I didn't lose track of you. I had a man in your town. He looked in once or twice a year, told me you were alive, told me you were getting through. I told myself that was enough."
"You had eyes on me for eight years and you stayed away."
"Yes."
A long beat.
"And what happened last month?"
"Thorne moved. I'd known for years that if his people ever found out the letter existed, they'd work the chain backward to you. Last month they did. They had your address. I picked up the trail. That's the day I broke the promise. That's the day I called you."
She is very still.
"You called me because he was coming for me."
"Yes."
"Not because eight years had been long enough."
"No."
"You would have kept the promise forever."
"I think I would have."
Her chin jerks back. The breath she'd been holding goes out of her in a sound that isn't a word. She presses a hand flat to her sternum.
Then she comes at me harder.
"For fuck's sake, Kane! I was fourteen at his funeral.
The pew had three of us. My grandmother and two Army friends I'd never met before.
I was falling apart, fourteen, at the bottom of the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
The entire service the only thing in my head was the note in my coat pocket.
Find Kane. That was the last instruction my brother ever gave me.
But I was a kid. I had no idea how. You should have come to me. You should have helped me."
I sit still and let her have the room.
Every word she's saying is true. I've been a piece of shit for eight years. There is no kinder word for what I did, and I'm not going to look for one. The shame I should have been carrying since her brother's funeral hits me all at once.
"At sixteen I wrote to the Army for a forwarding address.
They wrote back twice telling me they couldn't release it.
Two years later I phoned a man named Garcia I'd found a number for, said I was Danny Walsh's sister, asked if he could put me in touch with anyone from the team.
He hung up. Then my grandmother got worse and I stopped looking. "
"Callie."
"I'm not finished, Kane."
I close my mouth.
"I buried her the summer after I graduated high school.
Seven people came to the service. After that I built a life out of cheap rooms, night shifts, one chapter of a psychology degree at a time.
Four years of figuring out how to be alone.
I came to Blackwood Falls last month because you called me from a number I didn't recognize and told me you'd known my brother.
The entire eight years before that call you knew where I was and how to reach me. "
"Yes."
"While I was wiping the corner of her mouth, signing her papers, standing alone at her grave, you were here. Choosing my grandmother's word over Danny's. Choosing the picture you had of yourself over the woman his last words were about. Choosing anything but me."
Her shoulders drop a fraction.
"Danny told you to come. My grandmother told you to stay. You picked her. You watched me build a life from wherever you watched it from and you decided I was managing without you. Eight years and not one person in that decision was me."
"You're right."
"You should have told me this the day I walked in here. Not nine days later."
"I know."
"You let me sleep down the hall for nine nights thinking you'd just decided I wasn't worth the trip."
She breathes out. Comes back at me harder.
"Do you know what I needed at my door, Kane? Not a clean man. Anyone who'd known my brother. That was the entire ask. Danny put it in writing for you because he knew. And you didn't come."
"No."
"You tell me now it was Thorne, contamination, the man you couldn't carry through my door. That's the long story. The short one is that you were afraid of one thing, and the price of you being a coward was me being alone."
She lets her shoulders settle.
"I can't be in this room with you right now."
"Callie."
"Don't."
She gets off the bed. The sheet falls at the corner. She crosses to the door without touching me. I hear her in the guest room. Cloth on cloth. The dresser drawer open and shut.
She comes back through the hall and stops in the doorway. Jeans. The long-sleeved shirt she wore Sunday at Lou's. Her hair loose. Her jacket folded over her arm.
"I'm going to walk down to the creek. Don't follow. I'll come back when I can be in a room with you and tell you what we are. Right now I can't look at you without wanting to break things."
"It's cold out there."
"Don't add the weather to your fucking excuses, Kane."
She holds my eyes a beat. Then she turns.
I hear her boots in the hall, then the door.
I get up and cross to the window.
She comes off the porch with her hands in her jacket pockets, cuts across the grass to the line of pines, and doesn't look back.
I sit on the edge of the bed where she'd been. The pillow still holds the shape of her shoulder.
The envelope is on the nightstand where I set it down. I pick it up, open it once more, and read the last line.
I love you both. Go live.
He'd been asking me to be there for eight years, with or without the letter to put it in writing.
Every one of those years I could have come, and I didn't. Last night I let myself believe for a few hours that one night was enough to cancel what eight years of silence had built.
It isn't. And I'm a fool for thinking it could be, even for the few hours I did.
I fold the sheet and slide it back into the envelope. I don't put it on the nightstand. I tuck it into the breast pocket of the shirt I'm going to wear today.
Then I get up. There's a fire to lay and a pot of coffee to put on.
She'll come back through that door and when she does, the house she steps into is going to be warmer than the one she left. That much I can do for her now.