This last photo Bradley removed to examine in the light from the window. The boy was pool-hall handsome, his long hair bleached by the sun. His lips, viewed in quarter profile, offered just the faintest hint of a smile.
Bradley wondered at that smile—at what, exactly, it foretold. Cockiness? A shared joke? A kind of easy familiarity? He wondered if this had been Addie’s first lover. Or, worse somehow, was about to be. He wondered also if Addie’s father had been the photographer and if that were the case how the boy had managed even half a smile under Logan Decker’s wilting gaze.
He replaced the photo and re-crossed the room to the window. A gravel walkway bisected the lawn as it ran in back of the house, the lawn’s flat expanse ending at the bank of a narrow streambed. There, some forty yards distant, stood a modest log cabin, vaguely lopsided, the glow from its lone facing window framing in sharp cameo the two seated figures within.
One of whom, he realized, was Addie.
“Just like I figured.”
Bradley jumped, nearly banging his head on the window frame. He turned to see Logan Decker in a robe of plaid flannel filling the doorway behind him.
“I was only—”
“Saying goodnight. I know.”
The taller man advanced, hands in pockets, to join Bradley at the window. Together they watched as the two backlit silhouettes conversed across a small kitchen table.
“Well, professor. Looks like you ain’t the only one couldn’t wait until morning.”
3
Lying in darkness, listening to Waylon’s ragged breathing, Logan Decker had things on his mind.
He was not a bad person; of this he was fairly certain. On the other hand, what man actually knows his own true nature? If such a thing were possible then who among men would choose cruelty, or vanity, or ignorance? And yet the cruel, the vain, and the ignorant seemed to him in no short supply. No, it was a simple fact of the human condition that life was a rearview mirror and that a man could only see himself, his pure and honest self, in that which had already happened. And that, Logan decided, was the source of his disquiet.
That was better advice than any parent had ever given me.
Should it surprise Logan that his Adelaide was stubborn? Wasn’t that a word, stubborn, that others applied to him? That he himself had applied to Jess and Vivian both? That they, in turn, had applied to Carole? The fact was that Addie was third-generation stubborn. Stubborn on both sides of the ledger. And if that was one of the things Logan saw in his own life’s reflection, well, it certainly wasn’t the worst.
Still there were times he wanted to shake her. To tell her, Wake up, dammit! To show her that life isn’t some empty book in which you take up your pen and start scribbling on page one. That life is just a chapter in a volume that’s part of a whole shelf of books that goes back generations. That he’d all but finished his own chapter, and even if the words he’d written weren’t those she chose to live by, it was a by-God chapter just the same, and in it were notions and stories and lessons that could help her and guide her and that she could accept or reject however she saw fit just as long as she had sense enough to quit her own scribbling long enough to sit down and give it a read.
Take that man. That professor, or whatever he was. Old enough to be her damn uncle. Gold wristwatch and new penny loafers and pressed khaki slacks. A man Logan pictured sniffing the garden every fall and plucking the freshest bud, the prettiest blossom, and pinning it to his lapel. Then come the next year and a new crop to choose from and he does it all over again. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Addie by then just another wilted bloom on a path of faded flowers he’d trampled underfoot, and not a one of them ever sticking to those shoes.
This he could have told her. This and other things. Things you don’t find in textbooks. Tales of grit and courage. Lessons about character. Whole passages on duty and honor and family. A life full of lessons he’d learned the hard way and for no useful purpose but to share with his own flesh and blood. His and Carole’s. Lessons that, okay, maybe he hadn’t always got around to sharing, busy like he was putting food on her plate and clothes on her back. Busy playing father and mother, cook and nursemaid, all while running a goddamn ranch.
I’m sure you could empathize with what he was going through.
This too was in Logan’s mirror. The fact that sometimes even now he could feel his Carole right there beside him. And not just her memory—not some fading echo of her voice or her laugh, although there certainly was that—but her actual physical body. The actual thing. In bed it was, mostly, where some nights he’d roll in his sleep and drape an arm on her hip or bury his face in her neck. Feel the tickle of her hair. The smell of it. Hear her breathing, soft and steady, right there beside him. He’d smile to himself on nights like those, the feeling no longer a wish or a dream but something more than dream, more even than memory. Lying in darkness and daring not move for fear of losing her all over again.
Lord knows, he’d wanted to tell somebody. How many hours had he and Jess ridden together on horseback or on ATVs or in old pickup trucks talking beef or water, hay or horses? Mostly not talking at all. Mostly just looking sideways, as if Carole’s death was some kind of sleeping bear they both knew to tiptoe around. Some hornets’ nest that once kicked would only unleash a thousand painful stings.
I seen her last night, he could’ve told the old man a hundred different times. I honest-to-God touched her!
But he never did tell, not even once. Because somehow he never could. Just as Jess never could, the two of them jawing about this or that, about one thing or another, but never about the one thing—the one true and honest thing—they actually shared in common.
Choriocarcinoma. Logan had written the word on a strip he’d torn from a waiting room magazine and gone straight to the public library. A rare form of cancer, the textbook said, caused by pregnancy and childbirth. Caused, in other words, by Logan. The doctor had called it a blessing Addie’d been born at all; a miracle Carole’d survived for as long as she did. Except that miracles—another one of those lessons—don’t always come clouded in stardust.
And now Vivian. So what do you say to a man like Jess who’s outlived his wife and his daughter both? I’m sorry for your loss? You’re in my thoughts and prayers? Because that was bullshit, plain and simple. What you do, Logan decided, is you shut your mouth and you give him the time he needs to brush himself off and get his ass back in the saddle. Give to him, in other words, the very gift he gave you.
Logan knew a man once, a rancher who’d been a guard down at Huntsville back in the gas chamber days where he’d witnessed over a dozen executions. And the damnedest thing, the man told him, was that when the gas started to rise those condemned men all did the exact same thing. What was that? Logan asked, and the man’s answer was that they all held their breath, every last one of ’em. After years of caged misery and strapped like they were to a hard wooden chair, they’d all held their breath in the hope of hanging on for a few extra seconds. Which just goes to show, the man said, how precious life is.
How precious life is. So maybe Jess at that very moment was feeling Vivian beside him; the weight of her in his bed. And then tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever things got back to normal around here, maybe Jess and Logan would sit down and talk about that. Talk themselves blue, and have a good cry, and maybe a laugh or two.
But probably not. Most likely they’d just cinch it up tight and get back to it, keeping to themselves whatever it was that troubled them on nights like these, alone in their beds in the dark.
This too, Logan knew, was written on Addie’s ledger.
4
They saddled the horses at daybreak.