Chapter 42
SASHA
After we eat, Chester says he wants to go out on the porch to look at the stars.
There must be a new moon, because I can’t see it, but the stars are brilliant and bright on their own, casting a bluish light on us as we sit down in the rockers we bought for just this purpose.
It’s crisp outside, but beautiful. I bundle myself up in my coat and bring out a blanket for Chester, tucking it around his legs.
He tsks when I tuck it in, but I can tell he likes being fussed over.
I didn’t bring up his grandfather’s things during dinner. I shouldn’t bring them up now, either. But it’s been gnawing at me. Now, as we rock in easy silence on the yet-to-be stained boards, the chickens bedded down in their coop, I badly want to bring him up.
I also look over at the third chair, wishing badly Griffin was here with us.
A snap in the woods makes me glance into the darkness. We’re surrounded on all sides, with the patch of open grass between here and the path to Griffin’s behind me.
“Plenty of raccoons around here this time of night,” Chester says reassuringly when he sees me peering over my shoulder.
Then I hear the flick of a lighter.
I whip around to see Chester’s face lit up as he lights a giant cigar.
“What the hell, Chester?”
“Don’t you even think about telling me to put this out,” he says. Then he hoots like the Chester I first met, and all I can do is shake my head and laugh along with him.
We’re silent for a few minutes, and I relax into the creaking of the rockers under us, along with the soft puff and crackle of Chester inhaling his cigar smoke.
I really should text Cass—I told her I was going to Chester’s for dinner, but it’s half past nine now.
She’s bound to be worried, especially after what happened with Sam today.
“Did you remember to charge your phone?” I ask him now. He was supposed to go and do that after dinner, not dig up an old stogie.
“What do you take me for?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, I did. It’s in my room. Didn’t know I had to charge the damn thing when I don’t ever use it.”
He’s got the same flip phone as me, but when I asked to borrow it, it was dead.
I roll my eyes, a smile on my lips. But it falls as I think of Sam. Despite my vow not to think about him, the longer the night’s gone on, the more I’ve started to worry.
He looked genuinely concerned for me.
But I can’t tell what’s real or fake with him anymore.
“You feel like sharing with the class, honey?” Chester asks.
I laugh softly. “Just family stuff.”
Then guilt twists my gut. Chester doesn’t have family. Not anymore.
All the more reason he should go through his grandfather’s things before it’s too late.
I clear my throat, opening my mouth to tell him I saw the open door, when he speaks first.
“I suppose if I’m not long for this world, I ought to make my confessions now.”
I blink at him in the dark. “You want to see a priest, Chester?”
That makes him hoot again, and despite the fact that he’s laughing at me, I love the sound too much to interrupt.
“A priest wouldn’t know what to do with me,” he says finally, knuckling his eyes. “Nah, to you and Griffin. But seeing as he’s not here, it’ll just have to be to you.”
I angle the chair his way. Behind him, the woods are a black mass, the tops of the trees cut against the starry night sky.
Behind me, Griffin’s house is quiet and locked up without me.
I feel all alone in the world right now with Chester, but just like when it’s only Griffin and me, it doesn’t feel like it used to.
I feel like that one other person is all I need.
And even sometimes, that just being me is okay, too.
Chester taps his fingers on the chair. “I never knew my dad.”
I stop my rocking. “What?”
“I glorified the story a bit when I first met you. ’Cause the real one’s too blue for a ray of sunshine like you.”
“I’ve known my share of clouds, Chester,” I say softly.
I remember what Griffin said that day I met Chester. How he took forever to open up to him. I’m so touched I feel my throat grow thick. But I swallow it down. “I’d be honored to know the truth, Chester.”
“There ain’t much to it. I was born in a motel off the freeway in Northern California. I think I told you my mother was a housekeeper—she was, for the motel. But she didn’t pass with my dad.” He looks down. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Sasha.”
I place a hand on his. It’s trembling slightly. “You don’t have to talk, Chester. If it’s too hard.”
He takes his hand out from under mine and pats the top of mine, then grips his knee.
“Well, I guess if it’s the first and last time I tell someone the truth about it, it ought to be you.”
My heart twists. I keep quiet to let him talk.
“Mama got knocked up by an older man she worked for when she was a teenager. A traveling salesman, she always said.”
“Joseph’s son.”
He looks at me with guilt-stricken eyes, though I’m not sure why. “She didn’t know who he was. Didn’t even know his last name, and he was gone before she knew about her little problem.”
Did he grow up thinking about himself this way?
Chester brings his cigar to his mouth, flapping his bottom lip a few times on it before looking at it like a foreign object.
He rests it in his hand on the arm of his chair.
“She took care of me best she could, but the boyfriends she found—they didn’t much like her having a little kid around.
” He looks down at his arm. It’s covered by his shirtsleeve and coat, but I remember the scarring there from that day by the swimming hole.
“Anyway. I wasn’t a welcome addition to the equation.”
My stomach roils at the thought of what must have made those scars.
He must see the anger in my eyes, even in the dark. “Hey now, it don’t matter anymore. It was a long time ago.”
“It matters to me.”
“Anyway, she was young, and she left me when I was around seven years old. I just woke up one day with a note next to the little bedroll I slept on that said I’m sorry. Manager took me to an orphanage, just like the daughter of your Eleanor Cleary.”
Tears stream down my cheeks. “Oh, Chester.” Still, I’m surprised he remembered the detail about Clea when he was so out of it that day I told him.
“I never got adopted, so when I was old enough, I just left. Thumbed my way across the country. I thought I was a musician back then—had a guitar and all, but I was never much good at it. I came this way ’cause the fishin’ was good.
In the summer, I could sleep in the woods and not bother anyone.
One day I stumbled across this place, purely by accident.
There wasn’t even a road up here back then.
I’d been fishing along the river and hiked up on a deer trail through the trees.
I thought I was far enough out of town not to come across no one, but ho-lee shit, here was a little cabin.
I knew there was someone here, ’cause there was wood on the back porch.
But when I stepped outta the trees to look closer, Joseph nearly shot me off his lawn.
” He chuckles again. “I was a stubborn kid, though. I thought he was livin’ the Shangri-la lifestyle out here all by himself.
I slept out in the woods and tried again the next day.
Told him I was good with the chickens, stuff around the yard.
Said I didn’t even need a paycheck, just a place to lay my head. ”
He rocks again. “Joseph let me stay one night, then two. After that, he stopped mentioning me leavin’, and I just never left.”
Chester’s contemplative for a bit. He stares out at the stars.
“Joseph was a quiet old guy. Though he was in his sixties when I met him, so younger than me now.” He guffaws, then coughs hard.
When he recovers, he says, “He barely talked to me for the first whole year I was here. I thought he was just a run-of-the-mill hermit. But after a while, I started to think maybe he didn’t really want to be alone the way he ended up. ”
He puffs on his cigar again, and for a moment, there’s a lull in the crickets. His cigar smoke permeates the air around me, smelling almost woodsy.
“He loved it when I brought him a newspaper from town. Read it front to back. Looked especially hard at the pages about local goings-on.”
I think about what Chester told me about his father that first day.
“It was Joseph who had his heart broken, wasn’t it?”
Chester meets my eye. “That’s exactly it, sweetheart.”
He looks like he’s waiting for me to get something, but I’m still trying to process everything he’s told me.
After a moment, he puffs on his cigar. Then he goes stiff, his eyes squinting at something over my shoulder.
It’s then I see the flicker in his eyes. Not something internal, but a flash of light. It’s a reflection…
I turn around, and what I see makes my blood run cold. “Chester,” I say. “Is that—”
“Fire!” he hollers.
At first I think it’s a forest fire. Then I realize it’s contained to a single point.
“Oh my God!” I leap up. It’s Griffin’s cabin.
I take off at a sprint.
“Sasha! No!” Chester yells after me.
“Call 911!” I yell over my shoulder at him. Then I tear across the grass and onto the path.
Except I didn’t account for how dark it would be. The last time I came through here at night, it was with Griffin, and we had a flashlight.
And Griffin.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no…” There’s a glow in the distance, but where I am, it’s pitch-black.
I should have taken the truck. I reach for my pocket, but I don’t have my phone to light my way.
My toe hooks on a root, and I nearly fall.
I hold my hands up after that, waving them in front of me so I don’t smash into trees.
It’s a fifteen-minute walk between the two properties.
Running, I could probably make it in a third of that.
But I can’t run. I trip every other step, on roots and stones and who knows what.
At one point, I trip hard and can’t stop myself from falling flat on my face, pain zinging up from my knees and hands.
My chin whacks the ground, too, and I bite my tongue.
Blood fills my mouth, but I hardly notice.
I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do showing up there. Maybe I can get the hose on—and what, put a house fire out with a garden hose? The light grows bigger, and now I can hear it. It’s loud, roaring and crackling and popping.
Finally I emerge from the path into the yard and gasp out loud.
Flames fully consume the cabin, so bright and hot as I stumble toward it I have to hold my hands up in front of my face.
But my hands up are why I don’t see the hulking figure step from the shadows behind me until I catch movement from the corner of my eye.
I don’t even have time to scream before something hits the side of my head so hard I’m knocked sideways, stars obscuring my vision before everything falls into blackness.