Chapter Twenty-Six
It poured for hours. Sidewalks would be slick with wet leaves in the morning, the creek swollen against its banks.
Unable to sleep, Bailey held the Polaroid above her as she lay in bed.
It was amazing how a single frame could hold a lifetime of longing.
She could always remember feeling a lonely presence in the house, particularly when it rained like this.
She used to think the house was haunted.
But it turned out that she was just so attuned to Mim that she was feeling Mim’s memory of the man she loved.
It was hard to reconcile the Mim she knew as a child with the one she knew now, the one who couldn’t even entertain the possibility that the man she loved had taken her grandmother’s money.
But in an odd way, Bailey thought she understood.
That possibility would have given Mim a reason to hate him.
But if he was dead, then he would always be the man she remembered.
She finally set the photo aside and grabbed her phone.
“Hey, Cinderella,” Theo answered.
“Is this a bad time?” she asked.
“It’s a perfect time. I can’t sleep, either. The rain is so loud on this tin roof that it sounds like I’m under fire.”
“That thing about my thinking I’m still a witch, it’s true.”
“It doesn’t always have to be that way.” When she didn’t reply, he asked, “So how’s your grandmother?”
“I actually have her to thank for this call.”
“Do tell,” he said, curious.
“She had a tragic love story I knew nothing about until recently. It devastated her, and it ruined every relationship she had with her family afterward, all the way down to me.”
“That’s awful.”
“It is. But at the same time, for all the hurt he caused her, I get the feeling she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
She said true love destroys you, but it makes you grateful to be destroyed.
Sometimes I think I want to feel that way, that it would be worth it.
But then I look at her now and I think, would it, really? ”
Theo paused. “I don’t mean any disrespect to your grandmother, but her story has the same problem fairy tales have.
They teach us that the hard thing is always the right thing, like a happily ever after is contingent on misery.
But you don’t have to suffer to be happy, Bailey. Sometimes it’s not hard at all.”
Coming from him, she could almost believe it. “I got married when I was eighteen,” she said.
“I got married right after college,” he parried back.
“I was drunk. It was annulled. We’re still friends.”
“Mine lasted two years. She blocked me on Facebook and friended my mother on the same day.”
Bailey laughed and adjusted the pillow behind her neck. “I wasn’t in love with him.”
“I wasn’t in love with her, either.” He sighed. “The love of my life was in middle school.”
“Wow. You peaked early.”
“I’ll never forget the moment Dakota Doss walked into class the day after she cut her long hair. I’d always had a crush on her, but that morning it was like the world around me burst into color. I was never the same around short-haired women again.”
Her smile was so sudden and wide that it made her cheeks hurt. She felt giddy. She was actually talking to a boy on the phone in her room, like the normal, decent teenager she never was. “So you have a type.”
“I definitely have a type,” he said, his voice low. Then she heard a thud on his end, followed by an ouch.
“What are you doing?”
“I was walking to the refrigerator and tripped over a gnome statue.”
“They’re sneaky like that.”
“Are you anywhere near your kitchen? Do you want to have a midnight snack with me on the phone?”
She immediately stood. “Let me go downstairs. My dad has been thera-cooking a lot lately.”
“So you have a dad?”
“A good one.”
When she got to the dining room, she glanced out the French door windows and stopped. Theo was saying, “Do you have any idea why Ruby would keep geodes in her refrigerator? I’m too afraid to take them out, like maybe it would be bad luck.”
But she didn’t hear him. The man was back. If he wasn’t real, maybe her memory was haunting her, just like Mim’s memory of Jack.
She’d known intrinsically, from a lifetime of knowing Mim, that the story she’d told today wasn’t the whole story. Mim only gave things in pieces. And just like in her childhood, Bailey had to fill in the gaps.
Mim had said, Don’t be like me. But she had never let Bailey know the real her.
She’d said, Move on. But she hadn’t done that herself, for more reasons than she was letting on.
She’d said, Clutch is nothing to worry about. But the man was still out there. So until Bailey faced this, until she faced him, nothing was going to change.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said, lowering the phone even as she spoke. “I’ll have to call you back.”
She set the phone on the dining room table and opened the doors. She had to fight them, the wind and rain pushing back as if warning her. They slammed shut behind her as soon as she was outside.
She was immediately drenched, her sweatshirt becoming weighted and her Converses filling, giving her a wet-sock shiver. She stared across the yard, raindrops on her lashes. Lightning shone in the distance like the sweep of a flashlight, and it illuminated him more clearly than ever before.
It was Clutch. But it was the Clutch from eight years ago. Torn jeans, ripped T-shirt, the side of his face a strawberry rash of road burn. He was smiling that same smile that lived in her nightmares.
She took off in a sprint, taking him head-on, images coming to her as if on a screen.
The woods.
The music on her phone.
The fog on the water.
His arm on her throat.
The sound his body made when she hit him.
She suddenly slid on the grass and fell hard. It took her two tries to get up because her shoes kept slipping. She finally stood again, and he was gone. She turned in a circle.
“This ends now!” she yelled into the rain.
She listened for a reply. There was none.
She went to the edge of the lawn and looked down the hill.
It was ominously dark. Only the white caps of the water could be seen as it splashed downstream.
“You don’t have any power over me anymore!
I’m not afraid of you! I used to think I was the coward, but it was you! ”
She felt a shifting under her feet, and she thought for a split second it was the universe finally righting itself. But then the ground started to depress. She was too close to the precipice, where the heavy rain was eating away at the bank. She felt herself slipping—down, down toward the water.
Then someone grabbed her arm and jerked her back.
Tasha, her nightgown plastered to her body, was standing there. Her open plaid umbrella was on the ground several feet away, as if she’d dropped it and run to Bailey the moment she realized she was about to go into the water. She still had a tight grip on Bailey’s arm. She looked terrified.
Bailey tried to shake her off. “Go back inside, Tasha,” she said, struggling to be heard over the rain.
“Who were you yelling at?”
“No one. Myself. This has nothing to do with you. Go back inside.”
“We need to talk. Come with me.” She tried to lead Bailey away. Bailey held her ground until Tasha said, “Are you really going to make a pregnant woman stay out in the rain?”
With one last look at the water, she let Tasha take her to the back of the Tillbury house, into a beautiful laundry room with pin-striped wallpaper and navy-blue appliances.
Once Tasha closed the door against the storm, it was so quiet it was like being encased in cotton. Bailey pushed her hair out of her eyes.
Tasha took two towels off the shelf. “Here,” she said, handing one to Bailey.
Bailey shook her head. “I’m just going to go home.”
Tasha looped the towel around Bailey’s neck anyway. “Not until you hear what I have to say. The night I threw your car keys and left you in the church parking lot, my mother picked me up as I was walking home. And Clutch was with her,” she said. “He’d caught a ride into town.”
Bailey started to say something, but Tasha held up her hand.
“Let me finish. She dropped him off, and then she came here to this neighborhood, because she liked driving around it when she got manic. That’s when we saw Clutch again.
He was coming to your house, because he’d obviously figured out that it was you who’d hit him.
But my mother, in her infinite wisdom, thought he was here to rob you, so she got out of the car and chased him behind your house, toward the creek. Only she came back, completely wet.”
Tasha opened a drawer below the laundry folding station and rifled through it. She finally brought out something and handed it to Bailey. It was an old barrette with Bailey’s name on it.
“My dad gave this to me for my ninth birthday,” Bailey said, turning it over in her hand. “I don’t remember how I lost it.”
“I found it on my property years ago. The creek current is always carrying things from town out there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m trying to tell you that Clutch isn’t out there.
He’s dead. But you didn’t kill him. When my mother chased him, they both fell down the hill into the creek.
” Bailey gave her a funny look, which Tasha seemed to find infuriating.
“Do I have to spell it out? He died in the creek behind your house that night because of my mother, and the current took him downstream to our property as some sort of karmic retribution.”
“Tasha,” Bailey said gently, “didn’t you get my message after I left town?”
Tasha made an annoyed sound. “I got a message. I didn’t listen to it. I deleted it.”
“Jesus, Tasha.” Bailey took one end of the towel and wiped her face before saying, “When I finally found my keys and made it home, I saw Clutch beside my house. He had obviously made it out of the creek and had already been to see my grandmother by that time.”
“What did he want with your grandmother?” Tasha demanded.
“Blackmail is my best guess. She won’t tell me. She just sent me away and told me to never come back.”