The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole
vapor in what would, no doubt, be another beautiful, dangerously dry day. “And I’ve promised he’ll never have to return to another mental hospital.”
“I know, girl. We’ll keep him safe. So. We standing out here till the next millennium, or are you offering me coffee?” Poppy brushed past Hannah and jogged up the front steps. The dogs, except for Rosie, followed.
The screen door slammed, but Hannah stood still in the dark and listened for the sound of falling leaves. A reminder that cooler weather was on the way, that eventually the oppressive heat would break.
Ghosts stepped out of the shadows—memories of Galen and Liam riding bikes and falling out of trees. Well, Liam was the one who fell out of the tree, while he was grounded and attempting an escape. Galen, always the big brother, had tried to cover up the misdemeanor with a lie. Not a very good one, either.
Hannah smiled.
Lie to me and your asses are mine, she’d told the boys when they were old enough to understand. She had never elaborated, preferring to let their imaginations construct a suitable punishment. Liam had decided this meant Mommy would smack him with a wooden spoon—a threat she had issued once. But Galen’s mind had drawn an elaborate scenario that involved Mom locking him in the crawl space where he would be bitten by a brown recluse spider and die in excruciating pain.
Honest to God, she used to believe Liam would end up in Sing Sing. Constantly seeking to be high on life, his wild streak far exceeded hers, and she’d lost her virginity at fourteen. But Galen? The worst thing he ever did was stay up till 3:00 a.m. on a school night writing poetry.
Through the darkness, a flush of blooms hovered over her mutabilis rose like brightly colored butterflies. How wrong she had been to assume all roses were high maintenance. This old-fashioned plant had thrived in her parched garden, and now it burst open with a second round of buds and flowers the color of apricot, baby pink and crimson. As petals unfurled in drought and sometimes opened at dusk, hope grew in unexpected places.
Hannah shoved her hands into the front pocket of her UNC hoodie and stared toward the tree line, wishing on miracles and ignoring the whisper of concern that told her wind in a bone-dry forest was never a good sign.
Three
Needles of rain softened to a drizzle as Will slipped on his Ray-Bans and became another B-list celebrity walking through Central Park. A bag lady ranted about the Apocalypse, and a beautiful young woman pushing a double stroller smiled at him. Or maybe she was appreciating the ridiculously large bouquet of flowers he had bought for his overworked publicist.
The path climbed steeply toward Dene Rock, and Will followed. He would perch on the outcrop and find the solution to unraveling this mess with his dad. Lying once about Freddie’s death had been an unforgivable lapse of judgment, and yet Will was now stuck in the middle of that lie—a spider caught in its own web. The old man had hooked up with the substitute art teacher, and the two of them were tracking Freddie’s trip with an energy previously reserved for circumventing the rules at Hawk’s Ridge Retirement Community. The first time Will had lacked the patience to deal with his dad’s memory loss, the first time he’d thrown out some comment that was meant—meant—to be forgotten, and his dad had glommed on to it. How could the old man recall a brief, late-night phone conversation but erase the evening Will had told him about Freddie’s death? Some cruel cosmic joke that wasn’t funny. And it had spun out of control. Time to bring the charade to a close.
Tucking the bouquet under his arm, Will scrambled up the slick rock behind the rustic summerhouse. As he sat, his iPhone vibrated in his pocket.
“Hey, Dad. How did you sleep?”
“Good, good. Had a great day, son. Had a great day.”
“Had? It’s only nine o’clock.”
“Been to Walmart and bought a map.” The old man chuckled. Chuckle was a verb Will hated, a word he would never use in his writing. His dad, however, was definitely chuckling. “Bought me a huge world map, son. To track Freddie’s trip.”
“I know, Dad. You told me yesterday.”
“I plan on showin’ it to that new guy, Bernie, down the hall. His grandsons visit every Sunday. Take him to that fancy diner on Main Street for blueberry pancakes. Wait till I tell him the whole cotton-pickin’ story about Freddie. Hell. Five years old and he has a passport. I never owned one, son. Never been outside the state.”
Will flopped onto his back. Droplets of mist fluttered to his sunglass lenses, but in his mind a slab of grief was falling from heaven, crushing him into dust. Three months and nine days, and each hour the grief took on a more solid form.
“Willie? You still there?”
Will positioned the bouquet across his chest like an arrangement of funeral lilies. “Dad, Freddie isn’t—”
“Able to contact us. Yes, yes, you told me yesterday. Shame on you, son. Just ’cos Freddie’s out of reach don’t mean we should give up on him, do it?”
“Dad—”
“Sorry, son. Poppy’s here with some more of them colored markers. Got to go.”
For real? His dad had hung up on him? Will stared at a flock of gray pigeons moving silently through a gray sky. Always he forced himself to look up, never down, forward never backward, and yet these days his mind lingered in places he didn’t want to visit: the last game of tickle monster; Freddie pumping his legs on a swing and singing “The Wheels on the Bus”; Freddie standing alone on a crowded street because the woman who should have been holding his hand had wandered off to look at a pair of five-hundred-dollar shoes in a boutique window.
If only he’d paid as much attention to Cass’s personality as he had to her ass, then maybe he would have figured out that she was a total psycho and self-medicating with alcohol. You’d have thought, given his childhood, he’d be able to spot crazy—despite the disguise of a well-cared-for body poured into sexy, couture clothes. Unlike his mom, Cass could’ve afforded the best treatment. When Will was sixteen, he’d found a psychiatrist who would take Medicaid patients, but always his dad had the same answer: “I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, son. Besides, your mama’s just high-strung. That’s the price we pay for her beauty.” As if his dad were really that shallow.
Will breathed through his nostrils, panting like a beast.
He’d spent three decades praying he didn’t have a dark side, since that concept came with seriously twisted DNA. Retreat was his strategy for relationships; anger was a soul-sucking distraction he had learned to push aside...and yet. And yet. If he allowed himself to think of Cassandra, the person who had murdered his son, who had turned his baby into a statistic, another kid killed by a drunk driver with a blood alcohol level of point two-six, Will would have to admit that he was capable of violence. How could he wish two people were still alive for such different reasons—Freddie so he could hold him and never let go; Cassandra so he could kill her himself?
Will jumped up and scrambled down the rock. There was only one thing left to do.
* * *
The light would be fading and the temperature dropping as he down-climbed, but he wanted to feel air on his back, on his exposed skin; he wanted to strip away his layers. If he could climb naked, he would. Will tugged his T-shirt over his head and tossed it into the trunk of the Prius along with his iPhone.
He pulled back his shoulders and stretched into a swan dive without leaving the ground. The clutter in his brain floated away, disappeared into the blue sky above the Shawangunk Mountains like a handful of balloons set free.
Nothing existed beyond the challenge ahead: the mastery it would take to scale Shockley’s Ceiling; the choreography of his body moving across the horizontal cracks; the euphoria of standing above the world and looking into the face of God.
He was going unroped.
He would ride doubt and push aside fear, and trust