Night Road (42 page)

The question hurt so much she didn’t even try to respond.

“Do you need a ride to the bus station tomorrow?”

“No.” The last thing she wanted was to tell him good-bye again. “I’ve got it covered. I left Jenny’s suit in the conference room. Tell her thanks for me.”

“You can tell her yourself. Come to dinner tonight?”

“Okay, but there’s something I have to do later.”

“Do you need help?”

“No. I need to do it alone.”

*

Jude sat on the sofa in Zach’s quiet living room. She hadn’t bothered turning on any lights, so the lavender evening crept through the windows. A fire danced orange in the black hearth, and for once she felt warmed by it. Every now and then she heard a giggle coming from down the hall, where Miles and Grace were playing something on the Wii. Grace was like a light that had suddenly been switched on; she talked nonstop, and she hadn’t told a lie all afternoon. Jude had no doubt that the last few hours with her granddaughter would become one of the anchor memories of this new part of their family’s life. The start of After.

But even as she’d joined in, Jude had felt a rising sense of urgency. There was more to be done, she knew, more wrongs to right.

Finally, at about seven, the front door opened and Zach walked in, with his heavy backpack hanging off one shoulder.

“You’re late,” Jude said, rising to her feet.

“The last test was a bitch,” he said, tossing his backpack. He looked utterly exhausted. “I think I blew it.”

“You have a lot on your mind.”

“You think?”

“I tried calling you.”

“My phone died. Sorry.”

She got up from the sofa and stood there, staring at him. Even now, she wasn’t sure quite how to say all the things on her mind. The last few days had been so startling; she felt like a glacier that had begun slowly to melt and move again.

“I stopped by the lawyer’s office, too,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I agreed to the modified parenting plan. It’s done. I know you don’t like it, but I can’t hurt Lexi anymore. I won’t. And if she needs to have Grace by herself for a while, I’m going to say yes.” He paused, and then said quietly, “I shouldn’t have gotten drunk. If I had stayed sober—”

“Don’t, Zach, I—”

“You can’t run this thing, Mom. I know how much you care about everything, but this is about me and Lexi and Grace. I have to do what’s right.”

“I know,” she said. It was time. “And I’m proud of you.”

They were like soldiers who’d fought on a common battlefield, she and her son. There were things to say, but they were just words, and they would come in time. What mattered was that they had survived and that there was still love—between them and around them. Everything else was a postscript. There was really only one thing she needed to say to him now. One question to ask. “Do you still love her?”

Zach seemed to crumble at that. In his eyes, she saw both a fragile youth and a terrible maturity. “I’ve always loved her. I never even tried not to.”

She gathered her son in her arms and held him as she should have years ago, when he was young and hurting and afraid. She wished she’d known then what mattered most. “I love you like air, Zach.”

He held her tightly. “I love you, too, Madre.”

It was the first time he’d called her that in years, and with that little endearment, she melted more, moved just that much closer to who she’d been. She drew back slowly. “I think she’s leaving tomorrow. Going to Florida maybe.”

“Why?”

“She thinks Grace will be better off without her.”

“But that’s crazy.”

“Lexi has always tried to do what was right for everyone else. That’s who she is, isn’t it? I should have remembered that, Zach … how much Lexi meant to us … to me.”

Zach looked at her. She saw both hope and worry in his eyes: hope that she meant it and worry that she didn’t. “What are you saying?”

“Go find her, Zach. Tell her how you feel.” She pushed the hair from his eyes and smiled. “She’s a part of our family. She needs to know that.”

“She won’t care, Mom. I let her go to
prison
.”

“You can’t claim all the blame, Zach.”

“Enough of it. How could she forgive me?”

“Can you forgive me, for being such a bad mom in the last few years?”

“There’s no need.”

“That’s how we do it, Zach. We just … forgive. I used to worry that you and Lexi were too young for love, and I still think of you as young, but you’re not, are you? None of us are, and life doesn’t take the straight road.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know that.”

Zach gave her a hug and then hurried out of the cabin. She was still in the open doorway, staring up the empty driveway when she felt Miles come up beside her.

He put an arm around her. “He went to find Lexi?”

“Yep.”

“Change comes fast.”

“It can.” She turned into him, slipped her hands around his waist, and gave him a kiss.

It was a quiet miracle, really, the durability of their love.

“Nana, Papa!” Grace slipped between them like a little eel. “Let’s play Candy Land. Nana can be Princess Frostine.”

“Your Nana doesn’t play—” Miles started.

“I’d love to play Candy Land again,” Jude said.

It was strange how a sentence could free something inside of you—such a little thing.

They sat around the coffee table, in front of the fire. With the board set up, they played and talked and laughed. They were finally putting it away when the front door burst open and Zach walked in.

“I couldn’t find her,” he said, looking miserable and pissed off. He tossed his car keys on the entry table. “I don’t even know where to look.”

Grace ran to him and he picked her up, kissing her cheek.

“Hey, Daddy. Look what my mommy gave me.” She held out the ring.

Jude thought her son was going to crumple to his knees right there. “The promise ring,” he said, letting Grace slide down to the floor. “She didn’t want it anymore.”

“Daddy?”

He walked over to the window, stared out at the dark Sound. “Where could she be?”

“Who?” Grace said, coming up beside him, putting her hand in his back pocket.

“I looked at the park, at that place in the woods by her old trailer. I looked in every window downtown. I even went to the cemetery and the … place on Night Road. It’s like she vanished.” He turned to Jude. “Did she say
anything
?”

Jude tried to remember. She’d been so focused on the journal, she’d barely been listening to Lexi. Another mistake to atone for. “I think she said something about a last good-bye. Something she should have done a long time ago. I should have stopped her. I should have—”

“A good-bye?”

“Yeah, that’s right. She said she had one last thing to do. A good-bye she should have said a long time ago.”

Zach grabbed his keys and ran out of the house.

*

Lexi tried to wait until midnight, but she couldn’t do it. She was anxious, sick to her stomach about what she had to do. Finally, at about nine-thirty, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She left Scot’s warm, love-filled home and rode the bicycle out to LaRiviere Park. There she stood at the water’s edge. The sound of waves whooshing forward, reaching for her and receding, would forever remind her of first love. But finally, it was time to go.

She walked the bike up the hill and pedaled onto the main road. Even this late on a summer’s night, Main Street was full of people milling about, and Lexi dodged between and around them with the ease of a local girl in a tourist town. A faded melancholy assailed her as she passed the places that would forever define her youth. She would always remember the girl she’d been on this Main Street, the girl who laughed with her best friend and waited for a boy in a white Mustang.

On Beach Drive, she slowed down and coasted up to the Farradays’ driveway. Hiding her bike in the salal, she stayed close to the tree line until she was close enough to see that the house lights were off.

No one was home.

Breathing a sigh of relief, she walked down the driveway and around the side of the house.

Night claimed the backyard. A single porch light glowed above one of the doors, splashed light onto the glittery gray stone patio. Moonlight illuminated the waves and turned the grassy lawn blue.

She eased past the barbeque area and around the pair of chaise loungers that overlooked the Sound. Flicking on her borrowed flashlight, she pointed a beam of yellow light toward the giant cedar tree that guarded this bit of land from the encroaching water.

At the base of the tree, she scanned the ground with her flashlight, wondering exactly where she should dig first.

“We should have used a marker,” she said to the ghosts of the kids they’d been.

It’ll be a pact
.

We’ll always be friends
.

Never say good-bye
.

They should never have buried the stupid Thermos, should never have let themselves get so caught up in nostalgia.

Or maybe she simply shouldn’t have remembered it. Who could have known how heavy a pact could become, how precise a promise could seem?

She dropped slowly to her knees, feeling the shock of cold sand on her bare skin. She dug through the sand, pushing mounds of it to one side and then the other.

It wasn’t here.

She dug faster, feeling desperation rise. She
had
to dig this up, had to say good-bye to Zach …

“Is this what you’re looking for?”

She heard his voice in the darkness, and when she looked up, there he was, standing at the edge of the trees. She must have walked right past him …

“I guess you beat me to it.” She got awkwardly to her feet.

“You can’t have it,” he said. “It stays. Just like the promise we all made.”

“That promise died in a car on Night Road,” she said.

“Did it?” He moved toward her slowly.

“Stay away from me, Zach. Please.”

“Why?”

Words were impossible with him this close. She started to turn away.

“Don’t go,” he said.

He couldn’t know what those words did to her. “Don’t, Zach. It’s too late. I can’t take it again. Just … let me go. Say good-bye. Throw the Thermos in the Sound.”

“I miss her,” he said, and Lexi felt the start of tears.

How was it they had never had this conversation? She started to say how sorry she was, but he shook his head and said, “But I miss you, too, Lexi.”

“Zach…” She could barely see him through her tears now, but she wouldn’t wipe them away.

“I don’t see how you could forgive me … I can’t forgive myself, and I’ll get it if you hate me. But Lex … oh, man … I’m so sorry.”

“
You’re
sorry? I killed your sister.”

He looked at her. She saw how uncertain he was, how afraid. “Could you ever love me again?”

She stared at this blurry version of him, shadows and moonlight, and remembered the first time he’d kissed her, the first time he’d held her hand, the day he’d stood up in court and said he was guilty, too, the day he’d taken their daughter in his arms. It was all between them in this instant—the good, the exceptional, the sad, the horrific. Everything that they’d been as kids and the adults they were trying to now be. She could no more deny loving him than she could carry weights into the Sound and drown herself. Some things simply
were
in life, and her love for him was one of those things. It didn’t matter that they were young or that there were a dozen reasons for them to be apart. It only mattered that his blood had somehow found its way into her veins and without him she was lost. “I do love you,” she said quietly. “I tried to stop…”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. At the touch of his lips, so sweetly, achingly familiar, she felt as if her soul, bound in chains for years, broke free, stretched and opened its wings. She was flying, soaring. She clung to him, crying at last for the best friend she’d killed and the years she’d lost in prison and the daughter whose babyhood would forever be hidden from her. This moment was more than she’d ever dared to hope for, and the love she’d tried so hard to extinguish overwhelmed her.

She drew back and stared at him in wonder. Tears spiked his lashes, made him look impossibly young again, like the boy she’d given her heart to all those years ago on a night like this, with the lights of the highway rushing past them. “How?” was all she could say, but she knew he understood. How could they go back, really?

“I love you so much, Lexi,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

“So, what do we do? How do we start?”

He handed her the dirty Thermos as carefully as if it were an artifact from a lost civilization, which, in a way, it was. “We keep our promise.”