25. I know
Chapter twenty-five
I know
OWEN
Six forty a.m. Same morning.
Tater runs me back from the mill to his place, where my truck's been sitting in the yard since the party. Nose-in by the fence, dew on the windshield, like the whole world didn't change while it sat there.
He tells me to come in and eat something. I tell him I can't sit still. He looks at me a long second and lets me go.
So I drive to Juniper Lane with the smell of the mill still in my hair.
I don't know what I think I'll find. She's gone. Debbie said it at the tape line and the words haven't quit saying themselves since. She left for Millbrook tonight. My hands turn the wheel anyway. My hands don't believe it yet.
The cottage sits there in the early light. Porch swept. Curtains open. Her car gone from the gravel.
The key's under the frog planter where she always leaves it. I let myself in.
I knew it would be empty. Knowing doesn't help.
Not messy-empty. Nellie-empty. Counters wiped. Floors done. The bed stripped; sheets folded square on the mattress like a hotel waiting on the next guest. She cleaned the place on her way out of my life.
Of course she did. You don't leave a mess if you're never coming back for it.
The whiteboard's still on the kitchen wall.
Blank. Every med time gone. The cheating tally gone. Two months of us, wiped. I stand in front of it and my chest does the thing it did in the smoke last night, tight and small, and I'm about to turn away when I see it. One corner. Down low. Letters so small I have to lean in.
angry sunshine was a good look on you
Her handwriting. She erased everything else and she couldn't erase that.
I put my hand flat on the wall next to it and stand there. The clock on the coffee maker changes twice before I can move.
Then I go sit on the porch steps, because a man needs somewhere to fall apart and the steps are as good as anywhere. Elbows on my knees. Head down. Let it come.
And that's when I see it.
A curl of paper under the bench. Glossy. White edge catching the light. Half hidden by the bench leg like it crawled under there to hide.
I pick it up because you pick things up. That's all it is. Housekeeping.
Then I turn it over.
Black background. A gray cone of light. And in the middle of the light, a small dark circle with a smaller circle inside it. A ring, floating in the dark.
My hands know before my head lets me. I stood in a Chicago kitchen once with one of these pinned to the fridge under a pineapple magnet, Claire's hands over my hands, and I have never forgotten the shape of that dark.
My eyes go to the corner. Print stamped in white.
KERRVILLE. A clinic name. A date from three weeks back. Three weeks. While I was standing on this porch with grocery-store flowers getting the door shut soft in my face, she already knew.
And a name.
GREER, N.
The morning goes quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The quiet inside a mask when the radio dies.
Grief hits first. It comes up my throat before I can name it, because the last time I held one of these, everything I loved was still alive. My eyes burn and I let them.
Then fury, fast and hot. She knew. She stood in that doorway with her hand on the frame and told me not to make it harder, and she knew.
Then something else. Something that lifts, right through the middle of all of it, and I don't have any right to it and it comes anyway.
A baby.
Nellie's carrying a baby.
Our baby.
Terror lands on top, big and cold. And underneath it, stubborn as a pilot light, the last one.
Hope.
I'm off that porch before I decide to be.
***
Debbie Sue answers her door in the same clothes she had on at the tape line, hair still smelling like the fire. She hasn't slept either. Behind her the twins are fighting over cereal and Tater's telling them a lie about how firefighters share.
She sees my face. Then she sees my hand.
I don't yell. I want to. I want to take the fence apart with my bare hands. Instead, I hold the photo up between us at eye level, steady as I can make it.
"How long have you known."
Her mouth opens. Closes.
"Owen—"
"How long, Debbie."
Tater appears behind her with a dish towel over his shoulder, reads the porch in one look, and herds the twins out the back door with a promise about the hose. Good man. Best man I know.
Debbie folds in stages, like a chair.
"A few weeks." Her voice is already wet. "She made me swear. On the twins, Owen. She made me swear on my babies."
"She's pregnant." Saying it out loud does something to my knees. "She's pregnant and she got in a car and left."
"Yes."
"Why."
The flinch. Right there on her face, the thing she's been holding since the tape line, and now I get to watch it break loose.
"You should sit down."
"Debbie."
"It's my fault." Cracked straight down the middle.
"She was scared, Owen. Scared of what the news would do to you.
The nightmares. That morning on the porch with the ring.
She saw that, did you know that? She saw you out there at dawn holding Claire's ring and shaking, and she decided right then she'd never make you choose between a ghost and a crib. "
"That's not what that was." I have to stop. Breathe. "That was me thanking her. That was me saying goodbye."
"She didn't know that." Debbie wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "And then I made it worse. God help me, I was trying to talk her into telling you and I made it worse."
"What did you do?"
"I told her about Rosie."
The name hits like a beam coming down.
"She knows Claire was six months along. A little girl you never got to meet. That you buried them. I thought if she understood how much you'd lost, she'd see why you deserved the truth. Instead, she went white as that door and said, if I tell him, I put him back inside that fire."
Debbie's crying for real now, ugly and honest.
"She wasn't protecting herself, Owen. She never does. She was willing to be the villain of your whole story if it kept you standing."
I look down at the photo in my hand. That little ring of light in all that dark.
And here's the thing that guts me. I understand it. Every inch of it. Two years ago I'd have done the same. I'd have carried anything alone, lied to anybody, burned my own life down to the slab before I let one more ounce of hurt land on somebody I loved.
She learned that from watching me sleep.
"Where is she." My voice comes out sanded flat.
"I don't know. Check-in at Millbrook isn't till Monday.
" Debbie's already moving, digging through the junk drawer by the door, shoving a torn envelope at me with an agency name and a number scrawled across it.
"She's stopped somewhere. She has to be.
She was dead on her feet when she pulled out, and Nellie doesn't drive tired. She'd write herself up for it."
Tater comes back around the side of the house. He doesn't ask one question. He looks at the photo in my hand, then at me, and he's already pulling his keys off the hook inside the door.
"Two trucks cover more road than one. You run the interstate south, toward Millbrook.
I'll take 87 north in case she doubled back.
I see her car; I don't do a thing. I park, I sit, I call you.
" He grips the back of my neck, one hard shake, the way he's done since we were seventeen.
"She's yours to talk to, brother. Not mine. Now go."
Debbie follows me down the steps, barefoot on the gravel, tears running past her chin.
"She loves you! Owen! She loves you so much she left, do you hear me? FIND HER!"
***
The truck eats Route 9 while the sun comes up over the smoke still hanging on River Road.
I call. Voicemail. Call again. Voicemail. Third time it doesn't even ring, and I can see it like I'm standing in the room. Her phone face-down on some nightstand, buzzing itself in circles, and her staring at the ceiling pretending she can't hear it.
Eleven calls. I count them on the screen at a red light in the middle of an empty town and I hate every one of them, because eleven calls is a man begging, and begging never opened a door in Nellie Greer's life.
Begging is what her mama's men did on porches in eleven different towns while Nellie packed the boxes.
She won't answer begging.
The light turns green. I don't move.
Think, Peterson. She runs when she's scared.
She's scared because she's carrying something she thinks will break me.
So right now she's forty miles gone or four hundred, holding her secret in both hands, telling herself she got away clean.
Any minute she shuts that phone off for good, picks a new town, and becomes somebody I never get to meet.
Unless she knows the secret's already out.
Unless there's nothing left to run with.
I pull up the message window. Her name at the top. Every text under it unanswered since Wednesday, little gray bubbles like stones down a well.
I type two words. I look at them until my eyes sting.
Then I hit send.
I know.
The screen says Delivered. I sit in the middle of the road, gripping the wheel, watching that screen like a man watching a doorway in the smoke.
Three dots appear.
Vanish.
Appear.
Vanish.
My whole life is three gray dots on a five-inch screen at a country crossroads. I'm not breathing. A hawk drops off a fence post outside the window like the world's got the nerve to keep on being ordinary.
The dots come back one more time. Hold. Hold.
Gone.
Then the phone buzzes in my hand, and it's not words at all.
It's a map.
A red pin, dropped on a spot up the highway. Lakeview Motor Lodge. Forty miles ahead.
No message. No name. Nothing else.
She's letting herself be found.
I pull up Tater's name and send two words of my own.
Found her.
His reply lands before I set the phone down. One word.
GO.
I put the truck in gear.