13. Wick
WICK
Wick had had a number of bad moments in his life. The worst of them, up to now, had involved the scar on his face. But the brand new worst of all was the instant he saw the tree start to come down on Doreen.
He couldn’t seem to keep her hands off her now. As they started back down the path, she leaned on him—more for comfort than support, he figured. He could feel her shivering. A close call like that would do anyone’s nerves in.
“Why are you naked?” she asked after a couple minutes of picking their way through the water coursing down the path.
“No point in clothes, just get wet anyway. I figured if I got too cold, being naked would make it easier to turn into a beaver.”
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “Beavers aren’t very good for covering long distances, I would imagine.”
“No, you’re right about that.”
After another minute or two, Doreen asked, “Do you know where we’re going?”
“Yeah,” Wick said.
She didn’t ask for clarification, seeming content and trusting him to lead the way.
They rejoined the road nearly at the bottom of the hill. By that point she was holding his hand rather than leaning on his shoulder, but she kept her hand locked into his, fingers interlaced, as they made their way through the sideways-blasting rain and, finally, to the warm sanctuary of the cabin.
Wick let out a sigh of relief as they stumbled into the interior. They were both shivering by now, and in spite of having exerted a constant effort to crank his shifter metabolism as high as possible, he knew he was on the edge of hypothermia. He had left the stove stoked, and the cabin was comfortably warm.
He passed Doreen his only clean towel and took a blanket to dry himself off. One thing he did have a lot of in the cabin was spare blankets. With that draped around his shoulders, he put the coffeepot on.
Doreen hesitated only a moment before stripping out of her wet, muddy clothes. When she turned her handbag upside down, water ran out. She sighed deeply through chattering teeth. “My poor phone.”
“Worry about that later. Get warm now.”
She didn’t argue, nestling into the blanket he handed her. Wick sat on the floor beside the stove and pulled another blanket into his lap. At his openly inviting look, Doreen joined him, toweling her hair. Wick wrapped the second blanket around them both. He wasn’t sure if she would hold back, but with a little sigh, she leaned on his shoulder.
“It was pretty stupid, me going out there, wasn’t it?”
“Pretty stupid of me to make you want to.”
Doreen sighed again, ruffling the blanket under his chin. “I shouldn’t have pushed. You had a right to say no.”
“I did,” he agreed. “But maybe not like that.”
Under the blankets, Doreen found his hand and squeezed it. “It’s your life. If you don’t want to share parts of it with me, I respect that.”
“It’s not just my life,” he said slowly, feeling his way around the concept. “It’s ours. Or it could be. And yeah, I can say no. But I’ve been letting the past run my life for a long time now. Maybe you’re the thing that’s going to make me stop.”
Giving her hand a squeeze, he got up and made coffee for them both, piping hot with lots of sugar. After placing Doreen’s coffee cup by her feet, he went and got the envelope.
Doreen watched him as he sat down again beside her and adjusted the blankets around them. One corner of her blanket had slipped down from her shoulder, revealing a luscious expanse of lightly freckled bare skin. “Wick, you don’t have to do this. You don’t need to prove anything to me, not after you came out in the storm after me.”
“It’s not proving anything. It’s just doing something I should have done a long time ago.”
He turned the envelope over in his hands. The square, clear handwriting still hurt after all these years. Dad . He wasn’t sure if he was prepared to see more of it.
Holding it in his hands, looking at it rather than her, he said, “You haven’t asked about the scar on my face.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Doreen said. “Honestly, I stopped noticing it a while back. It’s just your face, and I like your face.”
Wick glanced at her, but she seemed to be serious. “It’s all tied up with this,” he said. Turning his attention back to the letter and the oh-so-familiar handwriting, he slit the sealed flap with a thumb.
Doreen gave a little intake of breath. “Wick, you really don’t have to.”
“I want to.” The further along he got, the more sure he was of the rightness of this course of action. “So the scar ... I got it in the Army. Not a bomb or anything. Just a stupid fire in a supply depot. Gave me some bad burns and a discharge. Some other guys died.”
He hesitated, taking a breath. Did he really want to talk about this? Yes, he found. He did.
“I didn’t go into the Army alone. My little brother served with me. Four years younger. Mom walked out on us when I was a little kid, and Dad made me promise to always look out for Andy—that was my brother’s name.”
“Was?” Doreen murmured. Her hand found his again and squeezed it.
“Yeah. The fire. He was on the crew working to put it out, but some stuff started blowing up. I tried to help. I ...” He took a few calming breaths, but this was easier than he’d thought. He wasn’t panicking or freaking out. Hard to believe all of this was ten years back now, he thought. Maybe time really did heal all wounds.
“Anyway,” he went on after a moment. “Andy had this premonition that he wasn’t going to make it back from our tour of duty. He wrote a letter for Dad and made me carry it for him. I hated all of that gloomy crap. Kept telling him if anything was gonna do it for him, that attitude was. In the end, though, he—” His eyes prickled for the first time in the conversation. He blinked the tears back. “He went out fighting. He went out a hero. Saved other guys. I just couldn’t save him.”
Doreen was stroking his hand, rubbing her thumb back and forth across the side. “You both did your best.”
He had never really thought about it that way. “I guess we did. Anyway, I was pretty bad off. Not just the burns on my face, but I inhaled some chemical smoke and was in the ICU for a long time while my lungs healed. In all of that, it took me a while to remember the letter. I was going to deliver it to Dad personally.”
“Was going to?” Doreen echoed quietly.
“Yeah.” Wick inhaled deeply, feeling the ghostly phantom of the old pain and scar tissue in his lungs that had dogged him for years after the burns. The pain this time was completely nonphysical. “He had cancer, it turned out, and he hadn’t told us because he didn’t want to worry us. Wanted us focusing on stuff over there, not back home. I don’t know if he would’ve said something in the end, because while I was in the hospital over there, Dad slipped away back home. I made it back for the funeral.”
“Wick,” Doreen whispered, putting her head on his shoulder.
He held her hand for a little while until he could go on. “Anyway. I almost put the letter with—with him, but in the end, I couldn’t let go of it. I’ve been carrying it all this time, feeling like letting go would be letting go of Andy, and of Dad.” Firmly, deliberately, he placed the opened envelope in her hands. “After all this time, I don’t even know if I want to know what it says. Not sure I can look at it. But you can read it.”
Doreen gave a startled little gasp. She looked down at the envelope in her hands. “Wick, I—are you sure? Do you want me to read it to you?”
“No. Just read it. Someone should. I want it to be you.”
After a long moment, she took out the paper inside and unfolded it. It wasn’t much, just a couple of folded sheets from one of the small notepads that Andy—a corporal assisting a supply sergeant—used to scribble on all the time. Even seeing it from the back, the blue ink bleeding through the thin, cheap paper gave Wick a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Doreen read in silence, turned the paper and read the second page. She kept hesitating, and when she looked up, her eyes were bright. “Are you sure you don’t want to read this?”
“Just tell me,” Wick said.
“It’s mostly about you, actually. He says you’re a good big brother and took good care of him, and he wants your dad to know that.” Doreen looked back down again. There were tears on her cheeks. “That’s the gist of it, really. He says he loves both of you, you’re a great big brother, you took good care of him, and he wants you both, you and your dad, to be happy and live good lives if he doesn’t make it back. Whatever happens, he says, don’t get hung up on it. Move on and be happy.”
Wick closed his eyes. When he opened them, he felt the dampness of tears. “That sounds like him. He was always such a cheerful kid, so upbeat and positive, which is why I couldn’t understand that conviction he had that he was going to die.”
“Sometimes you know, I guess,” Doreen said quietly. “Was he a shifter too?”
“Yeah.” Inside him, his beaver was finally still and calm, as if things were, at last, right. “It’s true. Sometimes we just know things.”
“Sometimes we do. I’m glad you did tonight.” She smiled at him and reached into the envelope. “Oh, there’s something else in here. A picture. Do you want to look at it?”
He didn’t, but when she turned it a little, he found himself reaching out to tilt it so he could see. He recognized it immediately. It was a photo of him and Andy, arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing their gear. It was overexposed and sun-bright, and their faces didn’t show up too well, but they were both laughing.
“I remember this picture,” Wick murmured, running his thumb over it. “Never could figure out what happened to it. I figured it just didn’t make it back with the rest of our stuff.”
“He wanted your dad to have it. And you, too.” She passed the photo to him along with the note.
Wick looked down at both items. Doreen had refolded the letter, although he could still see the ghostly blue lettering bleeding through from the front. Ghosts of the past.
He kept the photo out and put the pages back in the envelope. Then he turned swiftly. Before he could second-guess himself, he opened the door of the stove, thrust the letter inside, and closed it again. The photo he kept in his hand.
“Wick!” Doreen gasped. She made a move as if to do something, open the stove, rescue the letter. But Wick knew from experience that it was much too late. Fire was too quick.
“It’s okay,” he said, taking her hand. “That was never meant for me to read. I’m glad you got to, and I’m glad I know what it says. And that’s all I needed. The actual words don’t matter so much.” He added thoughtfully after a moment, “Maybe Dad will read it now that I’m no longer hanging on to it. Maybe we can all move on now.”
He got up again and placed the photo carefully on the table, propped up against the jar of flowers. He’d get a frame for it, he thought. Maybe make one. It would look good on the wall. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and abruptly realized he was starving.
“You want to eat something?”
“Yes,” Doreen said. She wiped her eyes on the edge of the blanket and smiled shakily. “I would love to.”