Blue Moon Bay (15 page)

Opening the truck door, I stepped back so that Roger could exit.

“C'mon, Rodge, scooch over,” Clay ordered, hooking an arm around Roger's neck and pulling him into the small space behind the gearshift.

“We're taking Roger?” Surely Roger was not on the guest list for Ruth's birthday party.

Clay stretched, so that we could converse over Roger's head. “Yeah, if you leave him home, he eats stuff.”

“Too bad we didn't think of that before he eviscerated my FedEx.”

Clay shrugged in acquiescence. “Yeah, but just look at all the entertainment we would've missed. Family bonding and all.”

Shaking my head and trying not to laugh, I climbed into my seat and closed the door so that Roger and I were nicely snuggled in. I had the odd thought that Clay was right about the family treasure hunt. All of us tromping around the yard with flashlights and gardening shovels was a postcard moment, the kind of insane family-visit story you'd tell your friends about when you got back home—great fodder for coffee conversation. But who would I tell? I couldn't picture Mel and me chatting about the homeplace while we prepped for a presentation, Trish was always busy with the kids, and who knew what would happen with Richard?

Strange . . . I'd hardly thought about Richard since arriving in Moses Lake. Too much else on my mind, I guessed. But even that seemed wrong. You shouldn't be fantasizing about making a life with someone one day and forgetting about him the next, should you? If a relationship mattered, it wouldn't be so easy to put it out of mind, would it?

What was wrong with me? Was I so screwed up, so damaged that I'd never be able to make the kinds of connections normal people made? Would I always be living in my own private space—running like a hamster in one of those plastic exercise balls, a see-through shield around me, so I could look at the world but not touch it? Would I always be that person Reverend Hay talked about—standing there looking in the mirror, only feeling safe with my own reflection because it didn't challenge my priorities or my choices?

“You've got to admit our impromptu treasure hunt wasn't
that
bad.” Elbowing Roger out of the way, Clay put the truck in gear, and we rumbled up the driveway, the Ladybug singing a cheerful song of squeaks and squeals as it bounced over chugholes. “Kind of nice just to chill with everybody for a little while, right?”

I felt the sting of an open wound, and I closed off the tender place as we rolled along the rural highway to Gnadenfeld. “Sorry to kill the fun, but somebody has to take care of business.” Deep inside Clay's happy-go-lucky exterior there was a guy with a perfect ACT test score who had to know that what he was doing was wrong. He didn't want me around because he didn't want to hear it.

He shook his head, then rolled his gaze upward in a way meant to indicate that I was totally off base. “Sometimes it's not all black-and-white, you know. Sometimes there're people involved, and you can't just run it all through some spreadsheet. You're just like Dad. You're just like he was. It's all about whatever makes the most money.”

I drew back, stunned that his feelings about Dad were so different from mine. How dare he say that. How dare he even think it. Sure, our dad had worked hard—even overworked a lot of the time—but he kept a roof over our heads. He kept our family together. He took care of us when Mom was too busy doing her thing, and he never complained about it. He held down the fort while she flitted off on every passing whim, leaving us to fend for ourselves while she indulged in self-obsessed ramblings in a spiral notebook.

Dad didn't deserve this from Clay, and neither did I.

I felt Reverend Hay's armor of love crumbling piece by piece, clattering through the floorboards and bouncing noisily in our wake as we drove along.

The vulnerable place inside me opened again, bled a little. I turned away and looked out the window, wishing I were anywhere but trapped in a car with my brother. “You know, Clay, why don't you give me a little credit? I'm trying to do what's best for everyone.” A lump rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard, overwhelmed with a tangle of emotions I couldn't identify, much less catalog or control.
Stop here
, I wanted to scream.
Let me out. Now.
But if I said anything more, if I opened my mouth, I knew the dam would break and tears would rush forth, draining a lake that had been filling for sixteen years. There was no way of knowing what would be left afterward.

Silence descended over us, leaving an impasse, a broad, dark chasm between us. I focused outside the window, watching pastures drift by, the winter-brown fields dotted dusky green by live oaks and cedars. Roger wiggled around and lay across my lap, his head on his paws. He licked my hand. Maybe he sensed that I needed it. His fur felt soft beneath my hand as he nuzzled underneath it.

Finally I let out a long breath, took in another, and thought about Trish and all the secondhand advice from her therapist.
Deep breathing slows the heart rate. Think of something beautiful and pleasant to produce beneficial endorphins. . . .

Why did everything have to be so hard? Why couldn't the property sale be quick, clean, painless? Just a business deal with a side benefit of putting the past squarely in the past, now and forever? Why did everyone have to keep bringing it up, to keep harping on it? My dad was a great guy. He died too early, instantaneously, without suffering. A gunshot victim. We would never know if it was accidental or intentional, or what my father was doing with the old shotgun in the first place. The gun had been my grandfather's, used for hunting. My dad could simply have decided to clean it, having no idea that it was loaded after all these years.

Or, his taking the rifle to the basement could've had something to do with the packed suitcases in the master bedroom, the man I saw my mother sneaking around with, and the change in my father's demeanor during the last week of his life. Clay didn't know about the suitcases and the man, and I wasn't going to tell him. What possible good could come from causing someone pain over events that couldn't be changed? Clay was better off writing his own version in his memory book and turning the page.

I wished everyone else would let me do the same.

The Ladybug chugged and jerked, coughing like a chain smoker as we rolled along the rural highway, now ten or twelve miles out of Moses Lake. I turned to Clay. He was frowning at the console, his lower lip pooched over his top one. He tapped the cracked plastic covering over the gauges. “Aw, shoot.”

My anxiety perked up. The calming voice of Trish's therapist vaporized and more pieces of the armor of love flew out the window. “What? What's
Aw, shoot
?”

The truck lurched, and Roger slid forward, his front half landing on the floorboard. He turned and eyed me with a frown, as in,
Well, look at what's happened to me.
I pushed the other half of him onto the floor, so that he was sitting on my feet.

Clay downshifted. “Yeah, we're low on gas.”

“We're what?” I pictured being stranded in the cold on the side of the road and missing Ruth's birthday gathering, which I was looking forward to.

“The gauge sticks,” Clay said, as if that were an explanation.

I sat up straighter in my seat, gripping the armrest on the door, though I wasn't sure why. A bailout wouldn't help at this point. Roger whined, indicating that he, too, was worried. Perhaps he remembered the bike trip, when Clay stranded them both in the mountains. “Well, if the gauge sticks, don't you keep some kind of track of how many miles you've driven since you filled up?”

Clay shrugged. “I knew we'd be going past the farm. I figured we could pick up some gas there, if we needed it.”

The logic of that was dazzling. “But . . . how do you know if you need gas, until you, like, run out?”

“It'll chug a mile or two.”

“But what if the chugging
begins
, and we're
more
than a mile or two from the farm? Ever think of that?” That sealed it. My brother would never grow up and start to think like a normal human. He would always be some strange combination of Winnie the Pooh and my mother.
Oh, bother.

“We're not.” He motioned calmly toward the window. “Look.”

I surveyed the surrounding territory, and it did look familiar. Some things had changed, but I recognized a few of the landmarks that had always told me we were nearing the family farm. While this was great luck, Clay's sense of planning still stunk.

“Have a little faith, sis,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking. Perhaps he could see my white-knuckled grip on the door handle as we chugged along the shoulder of the road, the vehicle gasping, wheezing, threatening to give up, then catching another burst of fumes and lurching forward. In the driver's seat, my brother was perfectly calm. I was envious of him, in a strange way. What would it be like to be so completely unaffected by fear? When I was with Clay, I couldn't help but feel like I was in a straitjacket, barely breathing, missing some grand adventure because I was afraid to strike out without first studying every inch of the map.

But intangibles like faith just weren't my strong suit, and I guessed they never would be. Faith was a blind journey, a path you couldn't predict or dictate. It was giving yourself over to the control of someone who might or might not necessarily agree with your plans. Faith could just as easily dictate that the chugging and the farm gate
wouldn't
occur at the same time, and that you'd end up standing on the side of the road, at the mercy of strangers. That wasn't something I wanted to experience. Clay, on the other hand, would look at it as an event that was meant to happen, an opportunity for an intended side trip of some kind. He would seek the meaning in it. He had learned that kind of thinking from my mother.

Which was exactly why I rejected it.

If you tried to erect a building based on faith, you'd end up with a mess. That was why you needed to create a blueprint ahead of time and follow it.

We ended up rolling into the farm, crawling and staggering up the dusty, gravel lane just as the gas gave out. The Ladybug came to rest in the center of the farmyard, the tall, hip-roofed barn on the left, and on the right, the two-story clapboard house my grandparents had built. Next to their house, the smaller stone house, the original dwelling on the farm, squatted silent and shadow-filled. I turned away, so that I wouldn't have to see it. I'd been there a thousand times in my dreams. My father died in that house. No one had lived in it since.

Turning toward the barn, I searched for happier memories as Clay put the pickup in park. I remembered my grandfather, a quiet but gentle man, showing me how to whittle and how to find caterpillar cocoons under milkweed leaves. I remembered playing pirate ship with Clay on the horse-drawn hay wagon that was slowly rotting in the sun.

Just looking at the barn made my mouth water for one of the RC colas my grandfather always kept in a refrigerator out there. Uncle Charley's old Ford tractor, Betty, was still sitting in the doorway, seeming to indicate that the refrigerator and the RC colas would still be there, too.

“Oh, hey, there's Betty,” I observed, anxious to distract my mind from darker things. Didn't it bother Clay at all, coming here, seeing the house where Dad had died? “I didn't know Betty was still around.”

Clay glanced my way enthusiastically, stopping halfway out the door. “You'd be surprised what's here. Want to take a look?”

“Nah,” I said quickly, wrapping my arms around myself. “I'll just wait while you gas up. It's cold out there.” The cold wasn't the problem, of course; the memories were. They were an assault of roses and arrows, some sweet, some painful. My father used to take me for rides on Betty during our visits. I loved it when he did that. Sometimes we would drive all the way to the lakeshore, through the wooded hills on the back of the farm. He'd sweep a hand over the water and talk about how the whole valley used to be filled with farm fields—cotton, sorghum, corn. There were even a couple of small towns, now buried under thousands of acres of water.

I remembered looking at the lake and trying to imagine what was underneath.

Strange, I hadn't thought about those tractor rides with my father in years. The memories came back now, fresh, sweet, and fragrant, smelling of grease and diesel smoke, dry grass and caliche mud. I rested my head against the seat and breathed in the memories as Clay fetched gas from the barn, fueled up the Ladybug, did something under the hood, then slid back into the driver's seat.

“Remember when Dad used to take us down to the lake on the tractor?” I asked.

Clay turned the key and pumped the gas pedal. “He did more of that with you than he did with me.” The Ladybug roared to life, sending out a cloud of black smoke that sailed past us on the breeze. “You were the one who liked the tractors and stuff.”

“Guess I was.” Relaxing in my seat, I smiled out the window as we circled the farmyard and left the place behind. “You were always too busy coming up with strange costumes and pretending to be a dinosaur hunter or Batman.” Even in childhood, Clay's imagination was amazing. He only lived part-time in the real world.

“I haven't changed much.” He echoed the thought I'd been forming.

I felt a rush of tenderness toward my brother as we turned onto the highway and rolled toward Gnadenfeld. Whatever else happened, however imperfect we were at loving each other, Clay and I would always be tied together by memories, a shared past, an understanding that no one else could duplicate. “Maybe change is overrated.”

He blinked, then snickered, like he couldn't believe he was hearing that from me. The words did taste a little strange coming out, but they were heartfelt. I did love my brother, despite all his impracticalities.