The men hugged, thumped each other on the back and got inside the car. “Welcome back, man,” John said, and in that moment, Adam experienced something unsettling and unusual for him. A huge wave of homesickness washed over him. He couldn’t remember that ever happening to him before, even as a kid. He’d always looked beyond the horizon.
Until now.
Adam murmured, “I appreciate the ride.”
“Glad to do it,” John said as he swung the cruiser out into traffic.
“Did you really have business in the city?” he asked, eyeing the man’s dark uniform, which looked rumpled from prolonged wear.
“Of course I had business in Santa Fe. Besides, I like having good company when I make this trek.”
They had barely gone a few blocks before Adam’s cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and glanced at the ID, expecting it to be work or even his mother. But he did a double take. The call was from his kid brother, Gage, and that surge of homesickness came again.
“Hey,” he heard over the line after he answered the call. “What are you up to?”
“Just off a plane in Santa Fe and heading for home.”
Gage didn’t sound surprised by that statement. “Good, Mom’s looking forward to it.”
“Mom called you about me coming back now?”
“No, actually. John did,” Gage answered. Adam was confused.
He turned to look at John, who was staring dead ahead out the window. “You called Gage about me coming early?”
John glanced dark eyes at him and nodded. Without saying a thing, he went back to his driving.
“Why?”
No hesitation. “Jack.”
Adam closed his eyes. There were no secrets in Wolf Lake. Everyone knew the Carson family’s history and circumstances, especially their good friend John. “Go on,” Adam said into the phone.
Gage spoke quickly. “I’m real busy here.” Where that was, he didn’t say. Gage’s design and construction company worked all over the globe, and Gage, who was a hands-on owner, went wherever the jobs were being done. “I won’t be home for Christmas, so I was glad to hear you would be.”
There was a commotion almost blotting out Gage’s voice. “Hold on,” he said, then, “Listen, Adam, I have to go. Just call me when you get there and see Jack.”
Adam barely had time to say “Okay” to his kid brother before the line went dead. He put his phone back into his pocket and looked at John again. “Why did you call him about Jack?”
John shrugged. “Worried.”
Adam was worried, too. He was worried enough to not only come home early, but block out a month of sick leave with the police force to give himself time to figure out what he needed to do to help his older brother.
John kept talking. “He’s not himself, although, I understand that after what he’s gone through. But he rides off for days alone into the high country. He’s at work on and off, mostly off, but he’s still living in the apartment above his law office. Going to tell me why you’re here early? What got to you to make you do that?”
Adam noted the landscape changing as they left Santa Fe. The old-world charm of the city, with its adobes and pueblolike housing clusters, morphed into vast, sprawling land, cut here and there by massive buttes and towering mesas. Home. He swallowed hard. “I talked to Jack. He was at Mom and Dad’s place, and he answered the phone when I called.”
“He asked you to come home?”
“No, he’d never do that. It wasn’t even anything Jack said, not really.” Adam remembered his brother talking about anything and everything except himself. His voice was different, flat and uninvolved in what he was saying. “When I asked him about some things, I could tell he’s not doing well.”
“He’s grieving, Adam.”
“I know. But it’s been a year and a half since Robyn was killed in the accident, and he’s not moving on. You said he’s staying by himself mostly. He lets Maureen take care of his cases, and those rides alone...” He thought of Jack going to law school, leaving the town for an extended time, then coming home, falling in love with Robyn and making a life with her that looked perfect.
They had lived in the loft over the offices in the center of town, everyone expecting they’d start building on Wolf land when they had kids. But there had been no kids, and not because they didn’t want them. They couldn’t, and they had been searching for answers, undergoing treatments. Robyn had taught on the reservation while they waited for their own children. Then, without warning, she was gone in the blink of an eye, in a single-car accident on her way home from work.
Adam closed his eyes for a moment. But he opened them as quickly as he’d closed them. He couldn’t take the images that came in the darkness. That night at the hospital, Jack, his face twisted with grief, the loss of Robyn so great that Adam had almost been surprised when Jack had gone on living.
By Christmas last year, Jack was back at his practice. He was doing what he’d always done, but the old Jack was gone, and the new Jack, left in his place, seemed numb and lost. On that Christmas, Gage and Adam had both been home, and they’d both told Jack that all he had to do was call, and they’d be back in Wolf Lake for him. He’d never called them on that promise. He never would. But Adam was calling himself on it now.
“There’s no time limit on grieving,” John said, snapping Adam away from the past.
“I know.” But he didn’t know at all. He’d been told that by others, as the only major loss in his life, his grandfather, made sense. His grandfather had lived eighty-four years before quietly leaving in his sleep three years ago. He missed the man so much, but he’d had a wonderful life. Robyn’s death made no sense to him at all—she’d been barely thirty with her whole life ahead of her. Adam had no idea about the hurt that Jack experienced.
“He’s lost, Adam. He’s breathing and walking and talking and even working some, but he’s not living.” Adam felt John’s eyes on him as he asked, “So you’re going back to do what?”
He didn’t know. He only knew he had to be there. “I’ll know that when I see Jack,” he replied honestly.
“I think when we get there, we should get Jack to come hunting or fishing or just plain old camping with us, maybe Moses, too, up in the high country where we used to go as kids.”
Adam agreed. The five of them—Jack, Gage, Moses, John and himself—had been inseparable when they were young. Now Moses Blackstar was the head of the local hospital, the driving force behind it being built and the one who kept it going. “Getting away from everything, maybe we can talk how we used to back in the day.”
“He’s turned down Moses’s invitations right along,” John said, “But if all of us do it, it could happen. It’s worth a try.” Without warning, John pulled off the highway and into the parking lot for a fast-food place next to a motel and gas station. “I’m hungry,” he said. “We can sit and talk for a bit, maybe make some plans, get them in place, then speak to Jack.”
Adam didn’t want to stop anywhere. He wanted to be in Wolf Lake. “Get it to go, and we can talk while you drive,” he said. He wasn’t even sure he could eat right then. His stomach had tightened painfully at the idea of what he’d find when he got home and saw Jack. He wasn’t at all certain what that would be. Not at all.
* * *
FAITH WAS EXHAUSTED. She’d been on the road for two weeks,