Текст книги "Everything I Left Unsaid"

Автор книги: Molly O'Keefe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Oh, what an incredible comfort that would be! To go lie down on that bed, curl up in those sheets that smelled like Dylan and let him make a few phone calls.

But it was comfort I did not deserve, and could not take. Not if I had any intention of being able to look myself in the mirror with any kind of pride.

I had to go home.

I took a deep breath and began the painful process of removing all but what was necessary of Dylan Daniels from my life. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “For lying.”

“I understand why you did.”

“You…seem so calm.” I thought that if I’d found out that everything I believed about a person was a lie and that I’d been sucked into something as filthy as adultery, I wouldn’t be quite so forgiving.

“Baby, I’m fucking furious. I’m…crazy pissed, and if I ever have the pleasure of getting my hands on this Hoyt asshole, I will end him. But I’m not mad at you. You were protecting yourself. And that I understand.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For…all of this. For…” calling me. For letting me call you. For keeping me safe. For the pleasure you showed me how to give to myself and the even greater pleasure you gave to me. For making me tell you this secret. For…for helping me now, when I feel so alone. “For everything.”

I sobbed again and pressed my hands to my face. It was over. This was goodbye and I couldn’t believe how sad I was. How grief had carved a hole in my stomach. I wanted to walk away from him with my head held high and perhaps a lying smile on my face, but I couldn’t even manage that.

“Shhhh,” he said, pulling me into his chest. I soaked him in as best I could. His scent. His touch. Everything. I memorized as much as I could for the Dylan Daniels–free days ahead of me. All of them. “Shhhh. Why don’t you go lie down for a while,” he said. “You got about twenty more hours on that birthday wish.”

No. I didn’t. I had about twenty more minutes.

I wrapped my hand around his shirt, feeling his heart pound under my fingers.

“I can’t stay.”

“Come on, now,” he said against my temple. He put his arms around my shoulders. “You haven’t slept much in two days. Take some time.”

I’d taken all the time I could. I’d been greedy. A liar. So much so I didn’t recognize myself. Now that the secret was out, I couldn’t look back at the things I’d done and see any of it that wasn’t desperate and selfish.

I’d played at being Layla and I allowed myself to use this man in a pretty unconscionable way.

“I’ll take your lawyer’s phone number, but I won’t be going to Charleston—”

“You’re going to Charleston.”

“Dylan, please, don’t make me more indebted to you than I already am.”

“It’s not a debt, Annie. It’s help.”

“I used you, Dylan. To make myself feel better. To allow myself to forget that I was married.”

He shook his head, and those sleepy hooded eyes were so sad. So serious. “I used you too, Annie. I have things I’d like to forget too, and for a while, being with you let me.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It is exactly the same.”

“Then…I need to go home for both of our sakes.”

He watched me for a long time and then, maybe, he agreed with me. Or maybe he just saw that despite my tears and my grief I was more than serious. “I’ll get the car.”

I shook my head. “You’re not going to take me. Margaret can take me. Or the man who brought me here. Not you.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“A clean break. For both of us. Nothing has changed, Dylan. We still need to end this. And I think it’s better to end it now. Like we’d planned before I told you about Hoyt.”

“Everything is different now, Annie. Everything.”

“No. Nothing is different. Not one thing. You just know who I really am. This is how we end, Dylan. The only way for us to end.” He looked like he was going to argue. “Are you forgetting that Ben is down there?”

“I don’t give a shit about Ben,” he snapped.

I lifted my eyes to his and told him what I didn’t fully understand yet, that despite Ben’s crimes, the ones I knew about and the ones I didn’t, I still cared. “I do.”

And I care about you, too much to drag you off this beautiful mountain into my swamp. Even for a minute.

He stepped back, rubbing his hands through his hair. “This is what you want?”

“This is what I want.”

“Fine,” he said, stepping back again. “I’ll get Margaret. But you’re keeping that damn phone. And when I call you’re going to answer. It’s nonnegotiable.”

“Thank you,” I said.

For one long moment the attraction between us, the connection, the desire and all that lust, tied us together in a bond so strong I had no idea how we were going to break it. Maybe it couldn’t be broken. Perhaps for the rest of my life I would feel this way for this man I could not have.

Or maybe, in time, things could be different between us. I could stand up on my own two feet. Divorce Hoyt, see him punished for what he’d done, and then come back here to this mountain. To Dylan. I could pay him back the money I owed him.

I smiled through my tears, pierced by a bittersweet ache.

“There are things you still don’t know,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts. “About me. I’m still not a man to be building fantasies around.”

I shook my head, because there was nothing I could find out about him that would change how I felt. “It wouldn’t matter.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know you,” I breathed, putting my hand out to touch him, but he shrugged away. Flinched. My heart squeezed at his rejection. My eyes burned.

“No, baby. No. If I touch you,” he said in a voice like a gravel road, “you won’t leave, not for a while. So I’m not going to hug you. Or kiss you. But I want to. Leave here knowing that. I want you.”

I’d never been wanted. Maybe somewhere deep in the recesses of my mother’s heart she’d wanted me, but Hoyt certainly never had. But I believed Dylan when he said that and I held onto his want as hard as I could.

“I want you too,” I said. He nodded once, giving a heavy jerk, and then he headed for the front door. “I’ll get Margaret.”

I knew when he walked out that door he wasn’t going to be back. And that was good. Better. Easier.

My stomach churned. Feeling like I might throw up, I ran into the bathroom. But there was nothing in my body but nerves and regret and half a bottle of champagne. I splashed water on my face and washed my hands. My body smelled like sex and Dylan and I wasn’t ready to wash that away, so I resisted the siren song of the shower.

When I came back out of the bathroom, Margaret was there. Putting all the food in big Ziploc bags. And then putting the Ziploc bags in another bag.

“You all right?” she asked, watching me with narrowed, knowing eyes.

I nodded; words were really beyond me.

“Ready?”

“Yes,” I breathed. She stuck two of the bottles of wine from the fridge into the bag and some other things. Strawberries. Melon. More cheese. “Here you go,” she said, holding the bag out to me. “You got some cookies and cinnamon rolls. Some of the wine. The good prosciutto. I gave you all the fruit—you’re going to want to eat that soon, before it goes bad. Some of that cheese and a bunch of crackers.”

“I don’t…That’s…”

“Oh, it will only go to waste here, honey. You just take it.”

“Margaret—”

“Please. He’s going to lock himself up in his garage and tell people he’s fine, when we can all see he’s not. He’s always been that way, hiding himself away when he’s hurt. It’s how we all ended up on this mountain.”

“Because of the accident?”

“He was hurt long before that. And he won’t let anyone take care of him. So, let me take care of you. Just a little. Just…so I can feel like I’m doing something.”

I was extraordinarily glad that Dylan had Margaret up here on this mountain with him. Someone who cared. I took the bag of food because I wasn’t sure if anyone down at that trailer park was going to care at all about me and I would take whatever care, comfort, and cinnamon rolls came my way.

I wanted to believe that Joan, Ben, and even to some extent Tiffany would care. But I had my doubts. Life was pretty threadbare down there and we all had our hands full.

So, I took the food.

And when I got in the car my phone buzzed and I read Dylan’s text message with the contact info attached.

This is the lawyer. His name is Terrance, he’s a good guy and he’s expecting your call. I am expecting you to call me if you need me. But I am also expecting that you are tough and strong enough to do this on your own. And you are.

And I took the comfort of that. I clung to it, holding it against my chest so it would give me strength for the days ahead.

Margaret insisted I sit in the back of the black Mercedes sedan.

“So you can stretch out,” she said. “We got a drive ahead of us.”

I couldn’t remember from the frantic middle-of-the-night drive up to this mountain how long it took, but I settled into the plush backseat, exhausted yet wide awake.

The first of the leaves were turning up here, and in the dense green of the forest, there would be one bright blaze of color. Red or orange. The sign that change was coming.

We drove down a gravel road and I saw the other buildings. A charming house set back in the forest that must have been Margaret’s. And a little farther, what looked like an airplane hangar. There were trucks parked in front.

That must be his garage, I thought, turning as we drove by until I was looking out the back window.

He was there, standing in the shadows, and as we drove by he stepped out into the road, watching us as we made our way off his mountain. He wore a black fleece with his jeans, and the late afternoon sunlight slashed across his face.

I pressed my hand against the glass as if I could touch him. Desperately I wanted to believe this wasn’t goodbye.

But I wasn’t lying to myself anymore.

The Flowered Manor was entirely the same, but somehow completely different. What had appealed to me before when I’d been scared and looking for a place to hide now seemed utterly astonishing. Repellant in a way.

It was so small. A tiny island of RVs and double-wide trailers in a wide sea of forest and kudzu. The rain and the darkening sky made everything seem sad. Fragile somehow. As if the metal and plastic walls people lived behind were a laughable attempt to keep everyone safe.

A solid wind would blow all of this away.

“I’m leaving you here?” Margaret asked, clearly horrified.

I smiled, weary. I nearly said it was my home, but my home was a thousand miles away from here. A two-story white farmhouse surrounded by soy and cornfields and wide, white-blue sky as far as the eye could see.

I had not missed it and I couldn’t say that I missed it now, but I felt very keenly that it was mine.

“You can stop here,” I said, just as we drove up to the office. Looking at it now I realized it was a modified garden shed, not unlike the one where all the tools I’d been using were kept.

“Are you sure, honey?” she asked.

“I’m sure. And thank you…for the food and the ride.” For taking such good care of Dylan.

“My pleasure and,” she sighed, “I love that boy to death. Like he was my own. But he’s not easy. And he carries a burden so heavy he’s getting crushed under it and doesn’t even realize.”

I knew that; perhaps that was part of what we’d been attracted to at the beginning. Both of us knowing, somehow, that we were carrying impossible loads.

“And sometimes,” Margaret continued, “I wish he would meet a girl. Someone like you. Someone who doesn’t care about his money and his scars. Or what he’s done in the past. Who cares about him. Who makes him smile and pulls him out of that garage where he’d spend every living moment of his life, and then I think…no. If he met a girl who loved him, she would get crushed under that burden too.” She turned to face me. “Don’t come back, Annie.”

I blinked, stunned.

“It hurts me to say, but you’re a good girl. Find yourself an easier man and don’t come back.”

I stumbled out of the car, my goodie bag of gourmet leftovers banging against my legs. She lifted a hand in a wave and the car pulled away, flinging mud up everywhere. My eyes burned. My throat hurt and my body was sore from Dylan’s hands.

Instead of going to my trailer, where I would do nothing but lie there and think of Dylan, I walked toward the office. Toward distraction.

The bell rang over the door as I stepped into the office. Kevin was playing solitaire in front of the blasting air conditioner.

Exactly the same. Like I’d never left.

I appreciated Dylan’s offer of the house, but if I was going to divorce Hoyt, I had to stand on my own two feet. And that meant staying here. Working here. Living here. The luxury of my hours with Dylan was a dream. A beautiful dream. But it was time to wake up.

“Hey there,” Kevin said, glancing up from his game.

“Just checking in on the storm damage,” I said. “You need me to do any work?”

“We got a shit ton of fallen trees in the back lots. One of the trailers nearly got crushed. We’re going to need a chain saw.”

“We don’t have one in the tool shed,” I said, jumping with great relief onto the idea of work. Physical hard work would clear out my head. Get me right. If nothing else, it would fill up the empty hours.

“Yeah, I’ll need you to go into Cherokee and rent one. Come back in the morning and I’ll get you some cash.”

“Thanks, Kevin,” I said and walked back out the door, the bell tinkling all the same. Coming, going, it didn’t matter. I found the consistency comforting. I paused in the doorway and thought for a second that I should ask him about Dylan. What he knew about us. But in the end it didn’t matter.

There was no more us.

I walked back through the trailers with the families, where a few people were clearing branches out of their driveways or away from their cars. Tiffany was in the playground with her kids picking up branches, or at least she was picking up branches. The kids were in a stick sword fight.

“Stop it now, kids,” she said. “Someone is going to get hurt.”

“Hey,” I said as I walked by.

“Hey,” she said, pushing her long hair off her face. She seemed startled to see me. Like she hadn’t expected me to come back. “You’re here!” She wore men’s work gloves that made her wrists and arms seem so fragile. More fragile than the sticks she was carrying. “You weathered the storm someplace else?”

“Yeah, a friend’s. It was bad here?”

“Scary. A little,” she said. “Kids were freaked out, but Phil was here and he kept us all in the bathroom. Made it seem safe.”

I absolutely tried not to react, but my eyebrows hit my hairline anyway.

“No one is all bad, Annie,” she said, her eyes blazing, her lips pinched. She looked sour and mean and old. Older than she should. A million years older.

“Some people are bad enough,” I said. I thought of how I’d used Dylan, lied to him and pulled him into my misery. That was something bad enough that the good—the pleasure and the kindness—was invalidated. “Bad enough that the good shit doesn’t matter. We both know that.”

I would never have had the courage to say those words to her before. To stand there, holding her eye contact until she flinched away.

“I’ll be here,” I said. “When it’s bad again.”

Her cheeks were bright red and the kids were watching us, the ends of their stick swords dragging in the dirt.

“Mom?” the boy asked, stepping forward like he would use that stick to stop me.

“Hey, baby?” Those familiar words in a man’s voice made me start. Made longing open up in my stomach like a giant pit. But it wasn’t Dylan. Dylan wasn’t going to be calling me “baby.” Not for a long time. If ever.

It was Phil, coming across the road to the playground. “You ready?” he asked. He smirked at me, his eyes taking in my pajamas and hoodie. The slippers Margaret had given me. He made me feel naked, despite all my clothes. That’s what guys like Phil specialized in, making a woman feel vulnerable.

I straightened my spine and stared right back at him.

“Yeah,” Tiffany said with a bright smile. “Let’s go, kids. Daddy’s taking us out for dinner.”

The kids dropped their sticks and ran back to the trailer. Tiffany tossed her own sticks in the big pile she’d made on the far side of the slide.

“I’ll see you later,” I said, watching this strange scene of family happiness. The rot underneath it. Yes, it was safety and dinners now, but Tiffany knew it was going to turn again and this man would raise a hand to her. Or to her kids.

Inevitable.

Dylan was right. Some things were just waiting for us out there in the dark.

I turned away, heading toward my own trailer.

“Annie,” she said, stopping me. Panic laced her voice. Her eyes skittered over my shoulder to the rhododendron. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Tiffany!” Phil yelled and Tiffany ducked her head and headed back to her own trailer. The blue muscle car waiting beside it.

Past the rhododendron my trailer sat closed up and dark. Beyond that Ben was in his garden, cleaning up from the storm.

I took my bag of treats over toward him. “Hey,” I said when I got close.

His head shot up. He had his color back and looked infinitely better than the last time I’d seen him—old and frail and gray, pushed aside by…Max. His son. Big pieces of the Ben puzzle slowly fell into place. One of those people he regretted hurting was Dylan.

“You all right?” I asked, looking him over for signs of harm. For signs that Max had hurt him.

“Fine. Just fine.”

“Last night—”

“An argument. That’s all. Where you been?” he asked, retying the strings for his runner beans despite the fact that they were ruined. He’d clearly tried to replant some things that had been uprooted in the storm. But the beans looked smashed beyond repair.

“With Dylan,” I told him, point-blank.

The string fell from his fingers, which were suddenly shaking.

“Did you know he lived nearby?” I asked, and he nodded, his throat working as if he were swallowing something big. Something hard.

“Did you know he owned the trailer park?”

“Yeah,” he breathed. “I know. It’s not a secret. Half the people living here know Dylan Daniels owns the park. Phil, the asshole, just got fired from his shop a month ago.”

I nearly reeled under the information. Phil was the guy Dylan fired?

“Did you know I was watching you? That’d he’d asked me to keep an eye on you?”

“I figured,” he said. “He’s had a spy on me for a while. None of them like you, though.”

“What does that mean?”

He smiled at me. “None of them made me pasta sauce.”

“He told me to stay away from you.”

“Well, you didn’t listen to that, did you?”

“He said you were dangerous.”

Ben sucked on his cheek. “Makes sense he would say that—it’s all he’s ever known from me. You two a thing now?”

I shook my head.

“That’s for the best, I imagine.”

“Why?”

He looked at me for a long time and then shook his head.

“Because he’s my son,” he said. “And some apples don’t fall far from the tree.”

“Dylan’s not dangerous.”

“If you honestly think that, then you don’t know the whole story.”

“I know Dylan.”

He looked at me for a long time like he was trying to talk himself out of something. Or into something. “You can’t go walking around thinking he’s something he’s not. You can’t keep thinking he’s…tame.”

“If you’re going to tell me something, Ben, just do it. I’ve kind of had a long few days.”

Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He was arrested when he was a kid. Sixteen. He and his brother got into trouble for stealing cars. Illegal racing. Dylan went to jail. Juvie. It was supposed to be a short sentence; he…he was a good kid. Never in trouble. But in jail he changed. He was fighting. A lot of it. More and more violent. Until he stabbed a kid—”

“You’re lying.” I held up my hand as if I could get him to shut up. As if I could shove those words back down his throat.

“I’m not. I’m not lying. And he didn’t tell you, did he?”

“Shut up, Ben! Shut up, you’re just…this is a game you’re playing. Some awful way to punish Dylan. To get me not to care. Something—”

“I don’t give a shit if you care for him. I’m telling you not to trust him. Not to trust…yourself with him.”

I wanted to yell and scream that Ben was lying. That I knew Dylan, I knew what mattered, knew the soul-deep goodness of him. Dylan and Ben might both be closed up, locked down, hiding a kindness they didn’t entirely trust within themselves.

“He’s not like you. He wouldn’t do what you have done.”

Ben was watching me, with those eyes that I recognized in Dylan’s face. Deep-set, heavy-lidded. Eyes that saw everything.

“Ask me,” he said. “I know you’ve wanted to for a while.”

“Did you know about the little girl? In the house?”

He slowly shook his head. “I didn’t.” A long, ragged breath sawed out of his chest. “I wish I had more than anything else in my life—I wish I had known that girl was there.”

I understood that I had a will to believe the things that made my life easier. That fit the way I needed to live in my world, and yes, it was easier to believe that Ben—a man I liked, Dylan’s father—did not kill an innocent girl in cold blood. And I should have, perhaps, doubted my belief. My faith.

But I didn’t. I believed Ben was telling the truth.

Did that also mean I had to believe Ben about Dylan?

I was torn in half. My head pounded. My heart ached.

“Dylan said he didn’t think you knew the girl was there,” I said, wondering if the words would bring him any peace. Or me.

What would bring me peace?

“You look so tired you’re about to collapse,” he said. “Go lie down.”

“But—”

“Go. We can talk later.”

Right. Okay. It was too much. The last few days were too full and I was officially overwhelmed. I turned slowly, the bag of food banging into my leg. “Oh,” I said. “I brought you some stuff. Would you like—”

I pulled out half a cantaloupe covered in Saran Wrap. A small piece of Dylan’s world in this unlikely place. I offered it to Ben.

“No, girly. You take that stuff. I got all I need.” Those were nearly the exact words Smith would have said, and I nodded, my throat swollen. Why, I wondered, thinking of Smith and Dylan and Ben, were the men in my life so good at self-denial? So good at holding at arm’s length the things they wanted?

Even Hoyt, to some degree. There was something really awful in him and he just tried to keep it covered. Deny it. Until it came leaping out.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said and walked back over to my trailer. I stopped at Joan’s and knocked on the storm door. But no one answered. Maybe she was working tonight. I wasn’t even entirely sure what day it was. Sunday? Monday?

It hardly mattered.

It hardly mattered.

Perhaps it was my exhaustion. Perhaps it was finally telling my secrets to Dylan. Perhaps it was finally hearing the truth from Ben.

Or maybe under the shock I realized…I knew…what I had always known about myself, about Dylan, about life.

When we were pushed to the edge we were capable of anything. Surviving was the only thing that mattered.

I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Dylan. But he survived.

I stumbled to a stop in the middle of that dirt track between my trailer and Joan’s and pulled the phone out of my back pocket. Its weight and heft had grown so familiar. I liked the way it felt in my hand, how it centered me, in a way. Connected me, to a version of myself I wanted to be. To Dylan.

To the future.

Quickly, I texted:

I know about jail. I know what happened. It doesn’t change anything for me. It doesn’t change who you are. When this is done, when I am done…I’m going to come back to you. To hear the story from your lips. To finish what we started.

I bit my lip. Somehow, after all that had happened between us, now I felt the most brave. The most vulnerable. In this moment.

If you’ll have me.