The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole
situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.
His dad used to have a horde of cousins in the area. They’d spent their adolescent years together, toe-to-toe, as Uncle Darren used to say. Were they still alive? Should he reestablish contact with the tribe? Maybe his dad just needed to be part of a community again. Yeah, right. Whatever his dad needed went way beyond socializing and probably involved a retirement home upgrade from independent to assisted living. From stage one to stage two.
Will eased open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms. A twenty-four-hour crash course in the care of the elderly had taught him that the old man’s balance was seriously off-kilter when he woke up. The shortest possible distance to the nearest toilet had been the deciding factor in the bedroom allocation—unless he wanted to start cleaning up his dad’s shit. Literally.
The old man had collapsed onto the bed like a battery-operated toy run out of juice. A very large, very broken toy. Jacob Shepard used to have such presence—his height, his ability to say a great deal with a handful of words, his snippets of self-made philosophy.
Even now, Will could hear his dad’s voice teaching him to hunt rabbit. Got your bow, Willie? Don’t get excited now. That rabbit, he’s under the wheat straw, but he’s gonna zig and zag. Will didn’t believe him, and when the rabbit performed as predicted, Will fell on his butt. His dad had howled with laughter.
Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.
Uncle Darren had said, “Your daddy, he loved your mama his whole life. Like she cursed him. He waited for her to grow up. He waited through her mistakes with other men. He waited with nothing more than the faith that, one day, Angeline would love him. And one day she did.”
Once upon a time, Will had applied that philosophy to his feelings for Ally. For so many years, she was the only good part of his life. Such a fierce friend, Ally was the one person he trusted, the one person who—until the lie about Freddie’s Great European Adventure—knew Will’s every secret. But somewhere along the way he’d found hard cynicism. Or maybe he’d just been smart enough to realize she would never love him as more than her best friend. He’d dated other women, never seriously, but then Freddie had entered his life and filled the hole Ally had left in his heart. And now? Now it was as if he were slowly bleeding to death.
A small thought escaped: he should have brought Freddie’s ashes. Death had finally granted Will full parental rights, and he didn’t need a headstone. He carried Freddie in his heart. Maybe Freddie’s spirit could be happy here. The few times they’d visited, he’d loved the forest.
Will glanced around the sparsely decorated room that ran the width of the cottage. Two smaller windows on one wall looked directly into the main house; a huge pinnacle-shaped window at the back held a perfect view of Saponi Mountain. Through it, a wall of dark green was splattered with bursts of foliage the color of dried blood. The dogwoods were turning, which meant every morning his dad would wake to what was about to become a symphony of fall.
The headache tightened. Now that he’d brought the old man back to the forest, how would he ever persuade him to leave?
A small glass vase of horribly familiar greenery sat on the dresser. Hauling himself to his feet, Will reached out and ran his fingers up one of the stalks. Hesitating, he raised his palm to his nose and sniffed. Freshly cut sage and the memory that reeked of madness.
A herb renowned for its healing properties, sage had become a popular bedding plant. Will had seen beautiful sage flowers of red and purple in private gardens—had even admired them from a distance. But get too close, and sage could blister his mind the way poison ivy blistered his skin. Sage was the smell of powwows; sage was the barbed remembrance of his mother dancing half-naked and disgracing them all; sage was the symbol of Uncle Darren warding off evil.
Will staggered downstairs and out onto the porch swing. The headache was waiting to roar, waiting to tear him apart. Even the fading daylight burned his retinas. He closed his eyes and let his head droop to his chest. Blood pounded; pain pulsed through his brain in leaden waves.
The smell of sage clung to his nostrils, leached his brain with the slow-moving film playing in his head. It must have been winter, since he was in his footed pj’s, similar to the ones Freddie had owned. Will was supposed to be asleep, locked in his tiny bedroom off the porch. Uncle Darren was outside yelling, waving his bundle of dried sage, demanding to come in and smudge the shack to banish diabolical spirits. The old man refused and there was another blowup about his mom. Had she been laughing outside the bedroom door, or had Will invented that last part?
Pressure on his knees. Soft and gentle. Human touch.
“Will?”
Where had Hannah come from? He didn’t hear her approach. She smelled of hay and lavender. Mild country scents warped into sensory overload by his exploding brain.
He opened his eyes and tried to look at her, but he couldn’t raise his head. She had beautiful hands with long, healthy fingernails—surprising for a vet. No nail polish. One ring on her right index finger—silver, engraved. Native American.
“The headache still bad?” Hannah said.
He moaned.
“Give me your hands.” Her voice was low, soothing, the voice on the phone from the night before. “This won’t hurt.”
He obeyed, ignoring the intuition that murmured, Of course it’s going to hurt. You’re a woman.
“Do you trust me?”
“Why not?” What did he care if she stuck a thousand needles in his hand when ten times that many pierced his heart every minute of every day?
“Give me your right hand. Good, now splay your fingers.” She ripped open a small packet and took out a long, thin nail partially covered in copper coils. “I’m going to slide one needle into the webbing between your thumb and index finger,” she said, “into the LI4.”
“LI4?”
“Large Intestine 4. An acupuncture point for the head and the face.”
“In my hand?”
“In your hand.”
Will closed his eyes. This, he preferred not to watch. He felt a small amount of pressure but no pain.
She stroked his left hand, her fingers lingering.
“How did you get this scar?”
“Which one?”
“Oh,” she said. “You have several. Some nasty accident?”
“Ripped flesh. From rock climbing.”
“Interesting sport.”
“More like a religion.” He swallowed through the pain. “Are you going to do that hand, too?”
“Already done.” She placed both his hands in his lap. “Now sit for an hour, try to relax, then remove the needles. I’m leaving a bag of dried feverfew. Pour boiling water over it and drink it.”
“If I get blood poisoning, I’m suing for medical malpractice.”
Was that a laugh?
Everything went quiet, except for the tree frogs croaking through their nightly social. He didn’t hear Hannah leave, but he couldn’t sense her anymore. A random act of kindness. Wow, that was the stuff of folklore.
Will kept his eyes shut to avoid confronting the fact that his hands had become pincushions. They felt a little odd, a little tight, but there was no pain from the needles. Maybe, just maybe, if a stranger could pierce his skin with foreign objects and he could feel nothing, then a five-year-old could die by lethal impact and feel no pain.
His