Chapter Eighty-Eight. Melanie
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
MELANIE
By the next afternoon, the ground outside is slushy with mud and the remnants of snow as I trudge out to pack our things into the back of the van. Waylon is here now, and he takes my hand so we can walk back to the Amenity Center together.
He’d been worried. He had a front-row seat to the damage—live oaks splintered by the wind, power lines sagging under ice, low water crossings glazed slick as glass.
In twenty-four hours the storm had paralyzed the whole state.
Highways shut down. Families huddled without heat in stone ranch houses built to trap cool summer air, not keep out the cold.
He heard about people sheltering in cars to stay warm, about the pileups on the interstates, about fires sparked when space heaters tipped.
He heard about the gunshot too, heard about Abel.
He said he flew over the roads, that he white-knuckled the wheel, as soon as he was able.
That made me swat his arm. Waylon Campbell, you could have got yourself killed.
But he didn’t care. He burst through those double doors with such force you’d have thought they were made of paper, and he beelined straight for me, Hannah, and the boys, and gathered all of us up in a big bear hug.
He didn’t even pester Hannah about her hair—though I’m sure he’ll have a mouthful to say about it once the shock of all this dies down and regular life settles back into us like sand.
Inside the Amenity Center, only a few of us remain.
Most people went home the minute the roads were declared safe to travel.
The dressing room and that whole back corridor has been blocked off with crime scene tape, though I guess there wasn’t really a crime, just an old man who chose to leave the world.
Mark is up on a ladder, tugging the sequined curtains from the Miss Lone Star stage, and passing them down to Emily.
She catches each length and folds it neatly into a box.
They work quietly, efficiently, but something’s missing.
Normally, Mark can’t go five minutes without reaching for her—an arm around her shoulder, a brush of his hand at her back, some small sign of affection.
Now there’s nothing. Just silence, just fabric sliding from his hands to hers.
I hope they can find their way back to each other, because I know that underneath all this ugliness is love.
Emily’s reasoning for hiring the PI, however misguided, came from her love for Olivia, from wanting to protect her.
And Mark will always put Olivia first. If anything can hold those two together, it’s her.
I’m glad Olivia has them, two parents who care deeply about her. She has me too. She’ll always have me.
And, of course, she has Hannah. I look to the girls now, Hannah, Olivia, and Sarah Lynn, over in the corner, wrapping power cords over their arms. I was all wrong about Sarah Lynn.
The three of them now, heads shaved, necks long, and chins held a little higher, look like they’re lighter without all that hair weighing them down.
It was an act of friendship, of reckless boldness that comes from being together.
I think of Cat standing up for me in the cafeteria.
I think of the time we jumped from that high boulder into the well of The Hollow.
Me, scared to leap. Cat, grabbing my hand.
The two of us free-falling and the cool, thrilling reward of the water swallowing us whole.
I was never as brave as those three girls were, stepping onto that stage, heads bare and not a flinch from any of them.
But I do feel braver today than I ever have.
It’s a scary thing, thinking about the past, dredging it up, speaking any part of it out loud.
It still fills me with such an awful shame.
Everyone has been so sweet to me, though, fussing over me.
I’m not comfortable with all the attention, to be honest.
I find Iggy stacking up chairs in the storage closet.
I grab a pair of chairs and bring them over as well. “Cat was the one who sent you that invitation,” I tell her.
She stops and looks at me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We never knew for sure it was Abel.
Just had our suspicions. Cat always felt guilty about it.
And, I guess I always felt like she was my responsibility because of it.
” Guilt is a terrible thing to live with.
It’s a slow-acting poison, a cancer that spreads to every part of your body.
She looks at me a moment, and then her face falls. “God, Mel, I’m so sorry. For what we did. For everything we did.”
I pull her into a hug. I want to tell her that it’s all right or that she has nothing to be sorry about, because that is comfortable to say, because that is a reflex. Instead, I say, “I forgive you,” because what I really want is for her to forgive herself.