Black River (27 page)

A horse's back is higher than Claire expected, and she wraps both hands tightly around the saddle horn. She knows it's a mere few feet of added height, but the house looks different from here, the trees, the pasture, the mountains. She can see the dark glimmer of the river. Dennis mounts the other horse and Rio follows him as he starts off across the pasture at a walk. Claire feels that the slightest breeze might cause her to tumble to the ground, but Rio walks steadily and Claire lets herself settle into the rhythm of his steps. (She will never tell Wesley about this; he would worry even after the fact.) Dennis takes her around the big pasture twice, then leads her through the aspens at the far end, beside the riverbank. They stop at the water's edge, the horses' front hooves just wetted.

So, do you feel like a cowgirl now? Dennis asks.

Ready for the rodeo, Claire tells him, and she is rewarded with the smile she had hoped for. She leans her head back to look up the sharp angle of the slope on the other side of the river. Do you ever ride up in the hills?

Dennis nods.

Next time we'll go up there, Claire says.

Next time, Dennis agrees, but the words grate a little leaving his throat.

Claire looks at him, and he looks at the water. She had hoped that being with the horses would keep that smoldering anger at bay, but Dennis seems unable to keep from feeding it, fanning it. She considers not saying what she means to say, but she should do it now. She must. You know I wish you and Wesley could be family again, she says.

Dennis turns to her so sharply his horse tosses its head and stamps a foot in the water, sending drops into the air. They land back in the river as widening circles that the current steals away almost before Claire can fix her eyes on them.

I won't ask you to go to him, she continues. I know you can't do that, not now and maybe not ever. But Denny, if he comes to you, will you let him?

Dennis doesn't seem to move, but his horse sidesteps one way, then the other, then turns a tight circle at the water's edge. And then he guides the horse past her and his features are set like stone and he does not look at her, but she hears the words as he passes, as faint as if they had been borne on the breeze from some distant place.

I will try.

 

On her way back to Spokane, she pulls off the road at the top of the pass, nudging the pickup into line beside the long-haul truckers cooling their rigs' engines. She gets out of the cab and walks to the edge of the road, steps just beyond the heavy guardrail. Here she can see for miles both ahead and behind. Always Claire has been aware that whether she is with her husband or her son, she is not with the other. She has tried to think of both places as her homes: Washington and Montana, Spokane and Black River, her husband's house and her son's. But instead of feeling that she has two homes, too often she has felt she has none.

Only here do both seem close. Only here are they not unequivocally divided by this landscape that magnifies and emphasizes distance. There, beyond those peaks, is her son, who does not know how to reconcile and may not want to. There, beyond those others, is her husband, who does not know how either, but (Claire has always believed and still believes) does know that it is right. Dennis, there, and Wesley, there. Both hers.

Claire stays on top of the pass for a long time, looking first one way and then the other, trying to keep both places, both men, in sight at once. To keep them together. It is not quite possible. But Claire knows that even this land—the cradle of canyon, these seemingly immovable mountains, this etched horizon—has not always been this way, and will not always be this way. What she looks upon now is a moment in history, and it will pass. Claire will not be here to see it, and she cannot say how things will be different, but she is certain: given enough time, even this will change.

 

 

 

 

There was just one motel in Black River, the sort mostly found on lonely highways in lonely towns that had been long since bypassed by interstates. This one had hung in there thanks to the prison; when Wes pulled into the gravel lot after midnight, he saw that the other vehicles all bore license plates stamped with county codes from the eastern part of the state. Folks wanting to visit inmates couldn't always make the trip in one day. The experienced ones flocked to the anonymity of the Motel 6 in Elk Fork; the rest came here and holed up in their rooms till it was time to go home again. The place was called the Sapphire Lodge, though there was nothing especially lodge-like about it, unless you counted the lone buck mounted over the registration desk, who'd had the misfortune to be stuffed by a taxidermist who seemed to believe animals ought to look surprised to find themselves dead. Wes talked the bleary-eyed owner into a discount; even so, it left him with a thinner stack of bills in his envelope than he'd have liked.

His room was clean and bland, little different from the half-dozen motel rooms he'd stayed in during Claire's transplant in Seattle. Unlike those, though, this one stood apart, its own small building separated by eight or nine feet from the units on either side. Quieter. He found himself wishing he were sharing walls. He'd have welcomed the mild irritation of others' voices, the murmurs that rose and fell but never coalesced into distinct words and sentences, the rattles and knocks of movements that weren't his own. In Seattle, he'd found that those things served as a promise that the larger world still existed, that there was something waiting beyond the fear and grief that had so totally absorbed him then, that he might someday get back to that safer and easier place.

He could think now, in this oppressive quiet, of all the things he should have said to Dennis, all the things he couldn't put voice to. That this was the second time in his life he'd been stunned by a suicide he should've seen coming. That he was angry at Scott, yes, that he couldn't explain the horror of knowing Scott had terrorized those people, absolutely, but more than that, he couldn't bear the thought of going to Scott's funeral and seeing his lips shut, his hands idle, forever. It'd be a closed casket—the train, the train, the train—but Wes would know. He'd see it anyway. Still hands. Silent lips.

He felt a familiar rending starting in his chest, small now, slight, as though his heart were tearing slowly, fiber by fiber. God, he missed her. Wes hadn't always been good about sharing his burdens with Claire. Held back too much. He wished he had all those opportunities back now, all those times he'd known she was yearning to help. Claire wouldn't have been able to make this new loss better, but she'd have known how to help him bear it.

He turned to his Bible instead and flipped through the pages, a book or two at a time. Couldn't find what he was looking for—didn't even know what that was—and he wondered what Williams looked for in these same pages. What he found. In the end, Wes read aloud from Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, and the Gospel of John. Then he read the story of the Fall, because that seemed important somehow, and about Lot's wife turning to salt, because no matter how the preachers tried to explain that one, it'd never seemed just to Wes. And finally he read the first verses of the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, over and over, because he had always understood that these were supposed to be comforting words.
When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee . . .
But though the words were familiar on his lips and gentle on his ears, they taunted him with the promise of a peace and solace beyond his faithless grasp, and they brought no comfort.

 

The week passed slowly. Wes kept the Do Not Disturb hangtag on the outside doorknob, and he left the curtains drawn. They didn't close all the way, and during the day he sat on the bed and watched the slim shard of sunlight slowly cross the carpet. He tried not to think of Scott, or Dennis, or Williams, or Claire. He tried not to think about suicides and hearings and mortgage payments he couldn't pay and how much his hands ached. He tried not to think.

Each day he went to the IGA, late, fifteen minutes before closing—the place empty, the teenage clerk glaring at him as he walked up and down the aisles—and then he went back to the dark motel and ate cold chicken or macaroni salad. There was a No Smoking placard on the bedside table where the ashtray would've been a few years back; Wes tapped his ash into a drinking glass from the bathroom. He sat and smoked, and he watched the light from the streetlamps. It was yellower than the sunlight, but duller, and it did not move.

 

Saturday morning Wes rose early. He showered and shaved painstakingly, then dressed in his best shirt, his suit, his oxfords, his tie. Took him more than an hour, but he'd given himself time. When he was ready, he sat in the chair beside the television and waited until the red numbers on the bedside clock showed him that he'd have to leave now, and then that he'd have to speed, and finally that it was too late to make Scott's service no matter how fast he drove.

The knock came several hours later. It was light, a woman's knock, and Wes knew he was paid up and had left the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, so he wasn't entirely surprised when he opened the door and found Molly Bannon outside. She wore a navy-blue dress and no coat, though Wes had to brace against the cold. Her hair was loose and the wind snapped it into and then away from her face. She was pale, but her eyes were clear, the skin below them smooth and tight, and Wes wondered if maybe she was too deep into grief to cry yet. She held his fiddle case in one hand. “Dennis told me you would probably be here.”

“Come in,” Wes said, and he brought the door wide. The sun was already below the mountains, and it had snowed without his noticing. The white dusting came halfway down the slopes, an encroaching threat above the town.

Molly shook her head. “I just came to give you this.” She nodded to the fiddle case, but made no move to hand it to him. “Scott left a note on it.” Wes saw it now, a square of white paper attached to the lid with a piece of tape. When Molly didn't say anything else, Wes leaned down and took the note off the case. The tape lifted the top black layer of the chipboard with it, leaving a pale brown patch behind. He looked down at the paper. A single line in the middle of the sheet. Cursive. He hadn't known they still taught cursive.
Please give this back to Mr. Carver. It is his.
Wes flipped the paper over. Blank.

“It's the only note he left.” Molly's voice was strong, strangely normal, but she was looking somewhere over Wes's shoulder, not really at him. “The only thing that . . . shows he meant to do what he did.”

Did she know the gun was his? Wes wondered if this was some kind of test, if he was supposed to say it first. But maybe she didn't know. Maybe all she'd been told was “stolen handgun.” He held the note out to Molly, but she looked at it like she didn't know what it was, and the wind tried to cheat it from his hand, so after a minute he took it back and put it in his pocket. “You sure you don't want to come in? There's a coffeepot. Probably ain't any good, but I could make you a cup.”

“I just came to give you this,” she said again, and this time she moved the fiddle case toward him. Their fingers touched when he took it from her.

Wes adjusted his grip on the handle, glanced down. “I meant for him to keep it.”

“I know,” Molly said, and met his eyes. “I'm not sure he'd figured that out yet, but I did.”

Another sustained gust—arctic air, bearing winter down—and Wes felt gooseflesh rise on his arms beneath his clothes. He set the fiddle case at his feet, took off his suit coat. “If you won't come in, put that on at least.”

She took the coat and held it by its collar for a long moment before draping it over her shoulders. Looked him up and down, and seemed to notice his clothes for the first time. “He tried once before,” she told him after a minute. “A month after we moved here. I found him sitting in the shower with his wrists cut. It wasn't a ‘cry for help,' either. He cut the long way. Deep.” She drew one index finger up the inside of her opposite wrist. “If I hadn't come home early . . .” Wes thought about the long sleeves, the knitted arm warmers, the ubiquitous hooded sweatshirts. The things he of all people ought to have noticed. “I should have taken him home to Miles City then,” Molly said. “I never should have brought him here in the first place. I wanted him to be close to his dad was all.”

“You were just trying to do right.”

“Maybe I wasn't. Maybe I came here because I was afraid to be alone with my son. Maybe I came here because I was trying too fucking hard to prove that I still loved my husband.” Wes didn't have anything to say to that. He knew what this was. This was Molly saying things she couldn't say to anyone who mattered, Molly saying things to him because she was never going to see him again, because she already knew his secrets. “I should have taken him home before,” she said, “but I'm taking him home now. I don't want him buried here.”