The Bargaining (17 page)

I brush the hairs down on my arms as I think about what Rae said:
“They have something to say. . . .”
Isn't that what she said? But because it was Rae, it could have meant everything and nothing at the same time. Sometimes she just says shit.

I lift my finger to straighten the frame.

“You're the latte, right?”

Startled, I pull my finger away too fast, hooking it on the frame and bringing the entire thing down to the wood floor with a crash of glass and plywood.

“I'm so sorry,” I groan. “I'm a total klutz.”

“Nah,” he grumbles, that richness from the first time he spoke to me in his voice again. “That nail's been loose for a while now.”

He runs to the back and returns with a broom and dust pan. He hands me the pan and I hold it while he sweeps the shards, careful not to spray any of the stray dust and coffee
grounds on me. I look up at the table where he's left me a latte I didn't even have to ask for.

“I'm glad you came back in,” he says. “Been hoping you might. I feel like I ought to apologize.”

I don't say anything because I agree.

“It's a small town, you know? Guess I'm not too used to seeing outsiders. Forgot how to behave and all that.”

I lift the newspaper clipping gingerly from the remaining shards, unfolding it to shake out the splinters of glass. While Ripp is busy sweeping, I see that indeed the rest of the headline reads North Woods. The story's dated July 2004, and there's a row of four pictures beneath it, each clearly a school headshot of a kid. And though I want to read what the story describes, I can't tear my eyes away from one of the images, the boy in the middle, the one with burnt red hair and dark green eyes. The boy from the wall. The one I'd been assuming this whole time must be Miller.

The caption beneath it reads
JACK DODSON, 14
.

Ripp takes the paper from my hand and folds it without a word, tucking it into the pocket of his apron before I can register what I've just seen.

“Coffee's gonna get cold,” Ripp says, pointing to the mug on the table without looking at me.

“Do you know what time Scoot's opens today?” I ask, but
he's ducked behind the counter again, busying himself with something I can't see.

“Not open today,” he says.

“Seriously? I thought general stores were open, like, all the time.”

“Even owners of general stores get sick.”

“Miller's sick?”

He steps into sight again, but remains behind the counter. “And contagious,” he says pointedly.

I duck under the not-so-subtle implication that I'm some kind of bad influence he's trying to keep from his nephew and decide to take a page from April's book. It seems Ripp's forgotten how to “behave and all that” again.

“Who were those kids?” I ask.

He doesn't say anything, so I know I've touched on something, though I couldn't begin to say what.

“One of them, the one named Jack? He looks exactly like Miller,” I say this part a little softer. If I'm right—if that kid is somehow related to Miller, which he clearly is if he shares the same last name—then that would make him somehow related to Ripp, too. And if he went missing in the woods with those other kids, then chances are there's some sort of traumatic story that accompanies it.

So when Ripp comes around the corner to face me with
out the counter or anything but the coffee he gave me to separate us, I'm a little surprised. Surprised and intimidated.

“What do you want to know?” he asks. “Just get it all out now. This'll be the first and the last conversation I have about any of it. Damn reporters took it out of me and the rest of the families years ago. I got no more stomach for it, so ask all you want now, and don't ask ever again. Clear?”

I search his eyes for the malevolence he is trying to level me with, but all I find is poorly concealed pain. His eyes shift between mine, searching for something in me as well, but good luck finding it, buddy. I can't even find it myself.

“Who was he?”

“Jack. My sister's oldest son.”

“Oldest?”

Ripp closes his eyes, and when he opens them, his pupils have all but disappeared they're so small.

“Jack was the oldest. Then Danny. Then Miller.”

“And Jack went missing?”

“With three others, yes. In the North Woods.”

“Near where I'm living?” I ask before I consider what it'll mean if he tells me I'm right.

But he says nothing. Instead, he crosses his hands over his chest and takes a deep breath.

“Near the Carver House?” I try again. Again, he doesn't
answer, and I think it might be time to slam this latte and get the hell out of here, but he surprises me and nods instead.

“Was he . . . were they okay? The kids who . . . got lost?”

His pupils shrink a little more. “They came back. It was a miracle, and it was a long time ago. All the kids went their own ways. Miller stayed.”

And though he continues to stand where he is, eyes trained more steadily on mine now, I know that the conversation is over. I take one more sip of my latte and pull out my wallet to pay him.

He shakes his head. “It's part of the apology,” he says, and I accept it even though I know it's also so he can get me out the door faster.

As I push the door open to leave, he offers me one last statement. “Miller's already been through enough.”

He doesn't say more, just walks back behind the counter to wipe the equipment he's been wiping all morning.

And though he's given me answers to questions I never asked, I feel more adrift than ever. And April isn't coming to get me anytime soon.

13

I
T TOOK SURPRISINGLY LITTLE FOR
me to abscond with April's car tonight. After another night of sandwiches (we're burning through our Maggie's Grocery rations at breakneck speed) and a rundown of the disappointing meeting with the plumber (who will definitely not be fixing the toilet or any other pipe “anywhere near those godforsaken woods”), I think she was still feeling guilty enough about this morning to let me meet up with Miller. She also had an ulterior motive.

“See if he knows anybody,” she said before I could shut the door. “I got the cold shoulder at the hardware store today. I can't even change a doorknob! And I've bought up all the paint supplies from Scoot's, and—” She'd stopped there to
gather herself before starting again. “Seriously, Penny. If we don't get someone to take a look at the basics, we're never going to get this project done by August. We need to get some people out here.”

Translation: I just sank a ton of money into a house I'm never going to be able to sell. Now I'm the proud new owner of a dilapidated wreck in the middle of the woods.

But while I was in a hurry to leave the Carver House, I'm not sure I'm in much more comfortable company now. It's hard to say what I thought Miller's house might look like. He looks vaguely like a medieval woodsman—or at least what I imagine a nineteen-year-old medieval woodsman might look like—so I suppose I thought he'd live in a wood cabin forged by his own hands. The Carver House is the only other house I've been in since we got to Point Finney, so maybe I figured all the houses looked like that.

But not Miller's house. Miller lives in a trailer.

“I own it,” he says.

My face goes hot, and before I can catch myself, I say, “I'm sorry.”

Now we both look sorry. Me for thinking it, then saying it, then looking embarrassed for saying it. Miller for guessing what I was thinking, then saying what he thought I was thinking, then for bringing the silence to a fresh state of awkwardness.

“My pop left it to my grandparents when he died,” he says, cracking the silence with another try. “And when my grandparents died, they left it to me. So now I don't have rent to pay. It's clean, and it's mine. Which I already said, so now I'm just starting to sound crazy.”

The worst part is that I wasn't thinking it was ugly. I wasn't thinking anything other than the place looked lonely. There's only space for one person to live here. I can see from one end of the trailer to the other right from the front door. A little twin bed at the back, neatly covered with a plaid comforter. A tiny shower stall next to a toilet and miniature sink jutting from the wall of the bathroom. A recliner by a small television, a kitchenette with exactly one cupboard and a ­coffeemaker below it. Everything made for one.

But there's no way to tell him all that now, so I take the coffee he offers me and lean against the kitchen counter so I don't claim the only chair.

From that angle, I see something I didn't expect: a tower of canvases organized on a sturdy wooden scaffolding in the one space not taken up by the efficiently arranged furniture attached to the walls and floor. The edges of the tightly pulled white canvases reveal tiny hints about what exists on their faces—smatterings and smears of navy blue and gray, red and buttery yellow.

“Oh my God, are these all yours?”

Miller's face locks up for a second behind his coffee mug, and I worry that I've embarrassed him again, but it doesn't look like embarrassment. It's that same warning that tells me I've crossed the line, the one I can't see.

But the tightness melts away behind a ripple of steam from his mug, and soon I'm looking at a more familiar expression on Miller—bemusement.

“Yeah, not exactly a fancy studio, but it works for me, I guess.”

“Seriously, Miller, there must be fifty paintings here.”

The largest canvases reside at the bottom of the tower. They're maybe four feet square, and I crouch to see what's exposed. The edges that peek out display a midnight blue sky with a crescent moon adorning its upper corner. Something in the way the brushstrokes move along the canvases makes my stomach flip, but I can't see enough of the paintings to guess why.

“Sixty-four,” he says. “I'm not the fastest, I've just been doing it for a while. I'm not trained, though. Don't look too closely.”

I smile a little at the ferocious modesty he's clearly inherited from his uncle.

I peer through the gaps between shelves to catch glimpses
of a familiar scene in almost every canvas. The top of a night sky, the silver outlines of evergreens interrupting the midnight haze. A landscape dotted by the living things of the forest.

When my stomach twitches again, I realize why.

“Miller, this is . . .” I start to say, trying to slide one canvas from its resting place.

“Let me. It's a little tricky,” Miller says, taking the edge of the canvas from my fingers and positioning his whole body against the shelf tower, pressing his hands against the canvases below it and pulling down, slowly easing the shelves off the wooden frames so as not to mar the paintings above. I try to turn away from the sight of his bicep tensing against the sleeve of his T-shirt.

Actually, I don't try that hard. That is, until Miller notices me noticing.

He falters slightly when the entire tower starts to lean toward me. He shifts his weight, and I'm no longer focused on Miller and instead am frantically searching for the best place to stand if it comes crashing down. But there's no place to go, so I back myself into the recliner, looking absurdly like I'm taking a rest while Miller overcorrects and pushes in the other direction, leans against it from the opposite side, and finally steadies the stack to a precarious but still-standing tower.

“Well, that was dramati—”

Before I can finish, the smallest canvas all the way at the top topples to the floor between us, making me yelp.

“. . . dramatic,” I say.

Miller scoops up the tiny six-by-six-inch painting, and when I look at the thin carpeting at his feet, I see tiny tufts of purple and blue, white and green sticking up from the floor. Miller is frowning at the canvas in his hands, a child that's maybe disappointed him.

It could just as easily be a mirror he's staring into. Or a framed newspaper article in his uncle's café. Even the frowns of these identical faces sag along the same arc. If not for the age difference, he and Jack could have been twins.

“Is it ruined?” I ask, my voice an interruption. I hate myself for ever trying to get a closer look. I just had to see.

“Nah.” He frowns, and I know neither of us is convinced. “That's the beauty of paint. No matter how it turns out, you can always paint over it, start again.”

We stand in silence for a moment before he seems to snap out of it and asks, “So what brings you to my humble abode?”

“I heard you were contagious,” I say, recovering a little more slowly. “I like to live on the edge.”

His face flashes red, mocking his hair. “Oh. Yeah. See, here's the thing. I don't get a day off unless I'm—”

“Sick,” I say.

He shrugs. “Sometimes I just can't take it, you know? It's not like running that store is what I signed up for.

Ripp's gravelly voice crowds my ear.
“Miller stayed.”

“I can't remember the last time I hung out with anyone, really. I mean, until the other night . . .”

I duck under the memory of my immortal meltdown and try instead to piece together the scraps of his life, what he's shared, what his uncle has revealed, even if reluctantly. I set aside mortification and think back to the other night, how he sat with me while I told him all about awful me, and he sat there and listened and drove me home when it was all over. I think about how I texted him tonight, how he responded right away with a simple yet effective, “You should come over.”

I wonder how much of his soul he's been waiting to empty.

“I think you should let me hang out with you some night.”

I thought he'd said it for my sake, that he felt sorry for me. But maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe he's just as alone as I am.