Snow Angels (24 page)

You can’t reason with a drunk.

And certainly not a drunk Randy.

He rang the doorbell and waited instead of barging in, so I had no way of knowing in advance that he was wasted. It was Sunday night, not his usual night to drink.

“Is he here?” was the first thing he said as he stepped through the door. Water dripped from him, the brim of his ball hat, the hem of his coat, even his fingertips.

“Randy, don’t.”

“Is he? Is he here?”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

“I’ll repeat myself. Is. He. Here.”

“I’m here,” Bax said. “You must be Randy.”

Bax walked up to where we stood there for a second. He extended his hand and Randy just looked at it.

“Are you fucking insane, man? You think I’m going to shake your hand?”

“It was worth a try,” Bax said.

“Dude, you need to clear out right now. Don’t get involved in this thing with Michelle and me. You don’t need all that trouble, do you?”

“Looks like we’ve got different ideas on what should go down here.”

“Yeah. So let me tell you what my take on this thing is…”

I cut him off. “Randy, stop it. I mean it. Stop it. You’re going to make me cry. Go outside. I want to talk to you.”

“No. I want to talk to Mr. All Reasonable Man over there.”

“At this point there’s no way I could leave her alone with you, so you see, no matter what goes down, I’m not leaving this house tonight.”

Randy hesitated, looked at his challenger a second too long and I jumped.

“Outside, Randy. Right now.”

His swagger had wilted some as he walked to the porch. I could tell he’d reconsidered his options when he saw Bax’s size and temperament.

On the porch he turned away from me as though he was ready to cry. I let him pull himself together and when he turned around he was angry again.

“So that’s Mr. Perfect in there?”

“He’s not perfect. But he is a nice person and he doesn’t deserve to be threatened by you.”

“God. You’re always so logical, so matter of fact about everything it makes me want to puke.”

“Well, it looks like you may not be too far from that.”

“I’m pissed. This is my house. You’re shacking up with some guy in
my
house. How am I supposed to deal with that?”

“You should have thought about that before you decided to abandon me.”

He shook his head and water droplets pinged down onto his shoulder. “Didn’t Friday night mean nothing to you? Hey!” he yelled toward the front door, which I had closed gently behind me. “Hey, did she tell you she was with me on Friday?”

“He knows.”

“Like hell he does. Does he know everything? Does he know how you…”

“Randy, stop it. There’s one of two ways to do this. Either you get the house or I get the house. I’m exhausted with you, so whatever at this point. Just sign the papers and I’ll clear out, okay? I want to move to Asheville anyway.”

“Asheville? Since when do you want to move to Asheville?”

“Since I made friends there. Since I got a job there. My mother’s even there, so you see, really, there’s no reason for you not to have the house. Can we make a fair settlement for it?”

“No! No!” He stomped down the stairs.

“No!” he yelled from the soggy yard.

“Hell no,” he said before he got into his truck and gunned the engine.

I wanted to return his voice, to yell, “But you promised!” But what good would it have done?

He drove away and Bax came outside.

“You okay?” he said as he laid a hand on my shoulder. I turned my face into Bax’s shoulder and he wrapped me in his arms.

I nodded, choking back tears. I was okay, but Randy’s displays, no matter how juvenile, were tugging at my heart. Why else would I have agreed to give him the house? Was I really that desperate to be rid of him or was I beginning to feel a little sorry for him?

The front doors to Laurel Gardens whispered wide at my arrival. The lobby was filled with downy-haired women in ice-cream-colored blouses and a couple of bald fellows in cardigans. They played cards and a few were enjoying cocktails. Some sat flipping through magazines, while others watched birds gathered at a massive birdhouse outside the bay window. It was practically a commercial for the place. All heads turned in my direction as I walked past.

My mother’s apartment was upstairs since she was still mobile. But the staff’s assessment of my mother’s level of independence fell short of what I had anticipated. While it hurt me to know that my mother was fading more, it had helped in the financial department for her to need care that I couldn’t provide. Dr. Johnson had helped and she had qualified for assistance.

I knocked lightly on her door, but heard no reply.

I pushed the door open and there was my mother’s thin frame silhouetted in the window, a hand held poised as if to speak. I watched her for a moment, but her hand never moved.

“Hey, Mom?” I stepped into the room cautiously so I wouldn’t startle her.

“Mom?”

She slowly turned her vacant stare to me. A questioning expression made her thin lips quiver before recognition tickled her face. She lowered her hand and stood with both her arms limp at her sides. It took her a moment to find my name.

“Michelle.”

“Look, Mom. I brought you some flowers,” I said.

“You can’t eat flowers.”

“I’ll just put them in a vase for you. How about that?”

“They’re trying to poison me in here.”

That made me stop and look at her thin frame. Did she truly believe that they were trying to poison her? Had she stopped eating? I had been so absorbed in my love life and in selling her house that I hadn’t been thinking of her.

“Are you hungry?” I asked her.

They wouldn’t let her cook for herself. They had turned off her stove and taken away the microwave.

She turned back to the window and said, “No, dear, I’m not hungry at all. The food in here is really good.”

My shoulders fell in relief. She’d been having more frequent moments of slippage. I arranged the flowers and set them in the middle of her small dinette table.

“There,” I pronounced, realizing I was speaking to her as if she were a child. “Isn’t that pretty?”

Her mind had wandered back to wherever she had been when I came into the room. I settled back against a pillow on the sofa. She was at the window for the longest time, not moving at all. She gave no indication that she even knew I was in the room.

“Mom?” I said, but she didn’t respond. “Mom, I’ve got myself into a bad situation.”

No response.

“I’m in love with a guy. A guy who can’t love me back. He needs things out of life I can never give him.” I sighed and tears burned hot and aching against the inside of my eyes. I hung my head and let them fall.

“And Randy,” I continued. “He’s coming around again. Telling me he loves me. And I still love him. I do. But I’m not sure that I was ever
in
love with him. He’s just such a burden. In some ways. Not in all ways. I mean, he’s not bad. But when Bax breaks up with me then I’ll be all alone. I’ve never been alone. I’ve always had somebody.”

No response.

“I mean, the last two weeks with you in here, Mom, it’s the first time I’ve ever lived on my own. I went directly from living with you and Daddy to living with Randy to living with you again. I’m not even sure if I’m capable of being by myself.”

I put my face into my hands and openly sobbed.

My mother’s soft touch brought me out of my tearful trance.

“Mom.”

She sat down beside me on the couch and patted my hand much like she used to do when I was young.

“Are you in love?”

I sniffled and nodded.

“Which one is it?”

“Baxter.”

“Does he make you happy?”

I nodded again and tears trickled out.

“Does he love you?”

“I don’t know. I think he does, but he hasn’t said it. His actions say yes. But maybe we’re just too different and he knows it. Maybe he knows it can’t work out.”

“Why won’t it work out?”

“Because he wants a family and his parents want him to have a family and I’m not, well, I’m not as educated or cultured as his people. And…and…”

“Those are some big things,” my mother said and leaned back as if she were thinking the most deep thoughts.

Just when I thought I had lost her again she spoke.

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“Of being alone?”

“Yes.”

Silence for a while, then she took a deep breath and said, “Pick love.”

“What?”

“Safety’s an illusion.” I looked directly into her worried eyes. “Don’t look back when you’re a little old lady and say you wished you’d gone after love.”

“But what if he doesn’t love me? The woman he really loved died in a car accident. How can I ever compete with that?”

“You can’t. Don’t try.”

I put my head in my mother’s lap and cried until I was exhausted.

The new divorce papers that gave Randy the house were ready that next Wednesday and I’d left a message on his phone that I had them and wanted to talk. I didn’t want him served by some stranger again and I didn’t want to show up unannounced if I could help it. I truly believed he would eventually give in and be reasonable.

“I’ll take you,” Bax said. “I don’t want you going alone.”

“I don’t think so. It’ll only make him mad.”

“No. I’ll sit in the car if you like, but I’m taking you.”

So that was that.

The drive down to the Chattooga in South Carolina was what I imagined heaven must be. Instead of clouds, heaven for me would be mountaintops rolling into the distance, a glimpse of waterfall down a mountainside, forest so dense you couldn’t walk through it. But it was always a challenge to enjoy the beauty of the drive when one wrong move could send you off the thin winding road and over a cliff. So I was glad that Bax drove and I could pretend I was enjoying the view when really I was pressing down a big ball of dread in my throat. Instead of taking in the distant mountains, I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I was on my way to serve divorce papers to my estranged husband while my new boyfriend waited in his little hybrid car.

We got off the artery road and cut through land with little human influence to an even smaller vein that led down to a wide creek where an outfitting company sprouted. The woods were a fierce green from all the rain, still dripping and muffled in that way that soaked up sound. I knew the river would be running high. Some of the braver boaters would be out today, but the outfitters wouldn’t take novices down on such a day. The outfitters’ headquarters was surrounded with random dusty vehicles with boat racks. The musty funk of a hundred sour life vests wafted at me as I went into the sparse plank cabin. I was right. No tourists were out today.

“Hey,” I said to Joe. I’d known Joe for almost as long as I’d known my husband.

“Shit,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“Bull Sluice.”

I got back in the car and we pulled silently away. Bax had said he would stay in the car if I wanted him to, but I knew how far away from the car I would have to walk to get to Bull Sluice. That meant if things did go wrong, Bax wouldn’t be around to help me. I gave directions when necessary and we didn’t speak otherwise. We parked and walked a narrow path through thick forest. At places we climbed down by roots as land fell away. And there he was, standing sentry on the edge of a boulder surveying the new lay of the water. The river was loud, snarling by, spray drifting downstream with the white churn.

I walked all the way up behind Randy. Like magic he sensed me and turned.

“Whoa,” he said.

“I called. I told you I was coming.” I had to speak loudly.

“I know.”

“So, let’s go somewhere and talk.”

“Man, do you have to do this here?” He looked at a couple of his friends who were crouched down on the boulders trying to act as though they were surveying the water and not watching us.

“Yeah. Apparently I do.”

“You brought him?”

“I gave you the house.”

“What?”

“The house. You can have it. It’s all in here. All you have to do is sign.”

“I don’t care about the house.”

“Randy, don’t do this. Just sign the papers and we can get on with it.”

He got right in my face and said, “No.”

“You’re just trying to torture me. Just sign it.”

Bax walked up behind me and Randy took a defensive stance.

I would never have expected what happened next. Bax held up his hand in a gesture of peace, but Randy didn’t see it that way. So he punched him. Right in the face. Bax was stunned for a second, then he pulled me behind him and stepped up and belted Randy right in the stomach. Fists flew and the next thing I knew Randy was standing staring into the mist and Bax was gone.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I ran toward the edge. Bax was nowhere. “Randy!” I grabbed him. “Randy, do something!”

Bax bobbed to the frothy water’s surface, but his face didn’t come up and he was sucked under the water churn again.

“Get him now!” I screamed.

Randy grabbed one of the rescue ropes that were always strewn about on the rocks. He waited, anticipating where and when Bax would boil to the top again.

Bax came up, face up and spewing water.

“Hey!” Randy yelled, but Bax was so disoriented that he failed to connect. He went under again.

“Randy! Do something! You have to save him!”

“He can do it,” Randy said calmly.

Bax emerged again and Randy and I shouted his name. Bax’s eyes fixed on us and Randy let the rope sail across the river, upriver about five feet and in less than a second the rope had washed into Bax’s hands. Randy made a motion of wrapping the rope around his arm and before Bax was sucked under I saw him emulate Randy’s movements.

He came up again and the rope was around his arm and Randy, who had already walked downstream, steadily began to pull him out of the water. Down along the bank Randy scrambled until the water petered out into flat swirling eddies forty feet beyond the falls. Randy pulled Bax close to shore and Bax stumbled out, literally quaking with exhaustion and disorientation.

“Damn,” he sat down on a log and hung his head.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Oh, man. I thought I was dead. Wow. Wow. That was a trip,” he said. He looked up at Randy. “Thanks, man. I mean it.”

“Yeah. Don’t mention it,” Randy said, but there was no sarcasm in his voice.

I looked at Randy and remembered when he’d saved me after I’d skidded off the snowy road. How he had snatched my mother from death on the highway in front of our house. And now he’d saved Bax.

And he loved me.

He was an all-right kind of guy. It was really too bad that he wasn’t going to be my husband after today.

I still had the papers clutched in my hand.

I shoved them toward him. He looked at them.

“Just tell me this,” Randy said. “Before I sign these I want you to tell me if you love him or not.”

I held my breath, hoping that Bax hadn’t heard, but I saw he was waiting for the answer as much as Randy.

“Well?” Randy said. “I’m waiting.”

I stalled, but I had no choice.

“I do. I love him.”

As if he were almost in pain, Randy slowly took the papers from my hand. He laid them on a flat rock, clicked the pen, and signed by the little yellow arrows.