Chapter 19 #2
“Oh, gosh.” A wet laugh. “That long? Jesus, I should have reached out sooner. I should’ve.
But after you and Melissa split it just got so quiet, and then we moved, and money was tight for a while there, and the girls were so—” She stops.
“It was a lot. It was just a lot, Cal, and I don’t know.
I’m sorry. I should have found you and—”
“Hey. Hey, now.” I’m shaking my head at a wall. “I called to apologize to you. I wasn’t there. After. I wasn’t there and there’s no version of that where I’m not the one who owes you.”
“Cal, it’s okay. You were healing. You went through hell and back. We don’t have to… I know you don’t like to talk about it.”
“It’s time to talk about it.”
Silence.
“When you have time,” I add.
She’s crying. I can hear her doing it quietly, the way women do when there’s a room full of people twenty feet away and she’s already wearing her best party dress.
“I’m here right now,” Hollie says. “I have time.”
“It sounds like you’re at a party.”
“Jeffrey freaking Callen just called me.” That drawl. Eight years and the sound still scoops up my heart and cradles it. “They will understand. Theo can hold down the fort.”
“Theo. New guy?”
A beat, then she’s quick to fill it in: “Well. Sort of. Couple years now. I mean, he’s not a replacement, he’s not—”
“Hollie,” I stop her. “It’s a good thing. Jimmy wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone.”
I say it with certainty, as if Jimbo told me exactly what to say to his widow. Except, the hypocrisy hits me squarely across the face.
Jimmy wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone, either.
Ten years.
Ten years I have eaten dinner standing over a sink. Ten years of a life so small I could have kept it in a box with the tags, and I have called it penance, and I have called it discipline, and here I am handing his widow the exact absolution I have refused to accept from anyone including myself.
I press the heel of my hand into my eye until I see colors.
“I was, though,” she says. “For a long time, I was. And I don’t want you thinking I forgot him. I need you to know that. I loved that man in a way I will never love anybody else in this life. Theo knows that. Theo accepts that. I still love Jimmy. I always will.”
“I know.”
My fist closes around his tag until the stamped letters print themselves into my palm.
“I’m sorry, Hol. He was my best friend.” My voice is doing things I can’t control. “And I should have been there. For you. For the girls.”
“Oh, Cal.” She sniffs hard. “We’re okay. They’re grown. You would not believe how big they’ve gotten. Daisy graduated high school in May. With honors, if you please.”
“Honors?”
“Oh, she’s sharp as a tack. She gets that from her daddy. I’m not a book girl, you know that.”
“Jimbo was a nerd. Too smart for his own good.”
“He was a nerd, wasn’t he? A hot nerd though. That’s how he got me.”
We laugh.
We laugh, both of us, out loud. It turns wet halfway through and comes out sounding like something else entirely, and it is the worst and best sound I have heard in ten years.
It’s a mix of pleasant and painful. Something alive and ignited and I don’t know which way it’ll lean.
Because I’m remembering his goofy smile, the way Hollie scolded him when he taught the girls how to make fart sounds with their armpits.
It’s hard to remember. It hurts dreadfully, but it also feels good.
All this time.
All this time, the good stuff was crammed behind a locked door, and I was the one with the key. All I had to do was unlock it. Face it.
“I still watch Frozen,” I tell her.
“You do not.”
“I do. All the time.” I wipe my face on my arm. “It helps me remember.”
She makes a small broken sound.
“All those times… Remember Lyss and I told you two to get out of the house? Go be men. Go do man things.” She’s laughing again.
“And you’d stay. You’d sit right there on my floor and watch cartoons with my babies.
You’d cook with us. You’d eat my pie, every time, the whole thing, so my feelings wouldn’t be hurt when the girls only wanted popsicles. ”
“I finished your pies like a pig because they were delicious, Hollie.”
“Liar.”
“Peach. The peach one was my favorite. No, wait. The buttermilk one.” I’m smiling at a wall in the dark. “I’d go back to war for that pie.”
The metaphor hits a little too hard, and neither of us says anything for a while. Yet, I don’t feel rushed. I trust her to wait for me.
“Hollie.”
“Yeah, honey.”
“There’s something I have to tell you.” I roll Taylor’s tag between my fingers. “I want you to hear it from me and not from anybody else.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The crash.” I say it plainly. There’s no soft way in and I’ve spent ten years looking for one. “The one that killed Jimmy and the boys. I don’t think it was an accident.”
The party noise goes on behind her, but she doesn’t say anything. I continue.
“I don’t think it was equipment failure.
I don’t think it was any of what they put in that report.
I’ve spent ten years ignoring my suspicions because the truth was too hard.
I wanted peace.” My jaw is aching. “I’m with an organization now.
The kind that can open things back up. I’m going to get to the bottom of it, Hollie.
I’m going to find whoever did this and I’m going to hold them accountable. I promise you that.”
The silence stretches so long I check the screen.
“Callen.” Her voice has changed. “Are you okay?”
That is not the question I expected.
“Yeah.” I scrub my arm across my face and the hair on it comes away soaked. “It’s long overdue, is all. I should have started this years ago, but I wasn’t strong enough to do it.”
“You do whatever you need to do.” A pause. “But, Cal, intentional or not, it doesn’t change anything.”
I sit up. Ears perked. Slightly triggered.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t change anything?” It comes out harsher than I mean it to, but my undisciplined emotions are steering the ship. “Hol, it changes everything.”
“Does it?”
She gives me space to absorb the simplicity before she elaborates.
“He’s still gone, right? However it happened.
Whoever did it. Jimmy’s still gone.” She takes a breath.
“I hope you find your truth. I do. I hope you find it for all of us, and I’ll help you any way I can.
But justice isn’t going to bring him back to my kitchen.
It’s not going to put him at Daisy’s graduation.
It’s not going to bring a single one of those boys back to life, Cal, and I need you to hear me say that before you go do this. ”
I can’t speak.
“I was in therapy a long time,” she says. “Years. And you want to know what actually brings them back and keeps them alive?”
“What.”
“Phone calls like this one.” She’s crying again and she doesn’t stop talking through it.
“Memories. People in a room together saying their names out loud. Community, Cal. That’s the only thing that ever worked.
” Her voice drops. “And you’re the only one of us who did this by himself.
The whole way. Alone in some apartment somewhere, for years…
We should have come and got you. We should have driven up there and put you in a car and forced you to heal. ”
“You were grieving, Hol.”