“Well, considering I’d never expect you to agree with any choice I made, I’m not too worried.”
Except I am. Jen is my Greek chorus—the voice that will never let me enjoy a moment of hubris. Every choice I make, she questions. So this should not surprise me. Should not concern me. But I expected her to walk in here and tell us we’re underreacting, being too lax. When she instead says the opposite, I begin to worry.
6
I’m lying on our living room floor, fire blazing over my head. Dalton sleeps beside me. Storm whines, and I snap out of my thoughts and give a soft whistle that brings her bounding out of the kitchen. When she was a puppy, we’d barricade her in there whenever Dalton and I needed private time. Now we only need to kiss, and she’ll give a jowl-quivering sigh and lumber off to the kitchen and wait for that whistle.
When she bounds in, I signal for her to take the exuberance down a few notches. She creeps over and sniffs Dalton’s head, making sure he’s asleep. I give her a pat, and she settles in on my other side, pushing as far onto the bearskin rug as she can manage.
As I rub behind her ears, I pick up on her anxiety. She knows something is bothering us, our stress vibrating through the air even now, as Dalton sleeps.
I don’t think he has taken an easy breath since Brady arrived. So I may have intentionally worn him out tonight. But I’m wide awake, tangled in my thoughts.
I give Storm one last pat, head into the kitchen, and pull tequila from the cupboard. One shot downed. Then a second. I’m standing there, clutching the counter edge, when I hear a gasp from the living room.
“Casey?”
I jog in, and Dalton’s scrambling up, eyes open but unseeing.
“I’m right here,” I say, but he still doesn’t seem to notice. He’s on his feet now, looking from side to side.
“Casey?” Louder now. I hurry beside him and put my hand on his arm. “I’m right here.”
He turns, exhales hard. His arms go around me, and he’s only half awake, as I lower us back to the floor. His head hits the rug, and he pulls me in, clutched like a security blanket, his heart rate slowing as he drops back into sleep.
An hour passes.
I’m still entwined with him, my head on his chest as I listen to the beat of his heart. That usually lulls me back to sleep after my nightmares. Tonight it doesn’t. It can’t.
I would get up and read a book, but if I leave, he’ll wake, and he needs his sleep. So I lie there, listening to the dog’s snores. Then Dalton’s breathing hitches. His heart thumps, and he bolts up, gasping again.
“I’ve made a mistake,” he says.
I don’t answer. I just wait.
He says it again. Not “I fucked up,” but “I made a mistake.” His voice is soft, a little boyish, a little breathless. He’s awake but with one toe in that twilight place.
I adjust so I’m sitting with him as he squeezes his eyes shut.
“With Brady,” he says. “We need to do something else.”
“Like what?”
He runs his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”
Which is exactly what I’ve been lying here thinking. He says, “This isn’t the way to handle it, but I don’t know what is,” and that articulates my thoughts as perfectly as if he’s pried them from my brain.
“Fuck,” he says, and I have to smile, hearing him come back to himself. He looks at me. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Pretty much.”
Silence. When he speaks again, his voice is low. “I keep wanting to ask what we could do differently, but if you had an idea, you’d give it.”
“I would.”
Dalton’s eyes shut. A sliver of moonlight bisects his face, half light, half dark. It’s a lie. There’s no darkness there.
Light doesn’t mean carefree or easy or saintly, though. It’s not even light so much as . . .
If the absence of light is dark, what is the absence of dark? To say “light” isn’t quite correct. Even “good” doesn’t work.
“If I knew for certain he was guilty . . .” He lets the rest trail off.
If I knew for certain he was guilty, I could kill him. To protect the town. To protect you. To eliminate any chance that he hurts someone here.
That’s what he means, and maybe it should prove that he does have darkness. But this is sacrifice. It’s a man saying he would take another life and suffer the guilt of that rather than let anyone else be hurt.
Dalton’s lack of darkness, though, means he can never take that step as long as there’s a chance that Brady is innocent.
We both know innocence is a possibility, but I wasn’t lying when I told Jen it didn’t matter. We cannot prove Brady’s innocence or guilt. We cannot even investigate his crimes. He didn’t kill here. We can’t go there. Which reduces our options for dealing with Oliver Brady to two.
Keep him.
Kill him.
We can devise the most secure prison, staffed with our most reliable and loyal guards, while knowing we cannot truly guarantee safety.
Or I can conclude that we can’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty, but I must treat him like a potential patient zero and—without equipment to test for the virus—decide he must die.
“No,” Dalton says, and I haven’t spoken a word, but his eyes bore into mine with a look I know well.
Drilling into my thoughts. In the beginning, that look meant he was trying to figure me out. Now he doesn’t need to. He knows.
“If you make that choice, Casey, you need to tell me first.”
Which means I can’t make it. I’d never allow Dalton to be complicit in Brady’s death. Nor can I do it behind his back, for the purely selfish reason that it would be a betrayal our relationship would not survive. I’m not sure I could survive it either. I’ve had my second chance at a good life. I won’t get a third.
He continues, “If it comes to that, it has to be both of us deciding.” He settles back onto the rug. “I think we can handle him. Build a cabin like the icehouse. Thick walls. No windows. One exit. Only you, me, or Will carries the key. That door never opens without one of us there. Brady gets a daily walk. We’ll do it when no one else is in the forest. At least one of us will accompany him, along with two militia. That’s the only time he comes out. We’ll gag him if we have to, so he doesn’t talk to anyone, doesn’t pull his innocence shit.” He looks at me. “Does that work?”
It’s the course of action we’ve already come up with. He’s just repeating it, like worry beads, running plans through his mind, trying to refine it and seeing no way to do so.
“It works,” I say.
And I pray I’m right.
Day three of hosting Oliver Brady in our holding cell. We’re constructing his lodgings as fast as we can. The new building will serve as a food storage locker once Brady is gone. We have to think of that—construction like this cannot go to waste. That also keeps us looking toward the time when he will be gone.
I remember reading old stories of barn-raising parties, a building erected in a day. It’s a lovely thought, but this is being built to hold something more dangerous than hay. We must have our best people on it. Which would be so much more heartening if we had actual architects or even former construction workers. We have Kenny . . . who builds beautiful furniture.
Dalton is the project foreman. Since he was old enough to swing a hammer, he’s built homes meant to withstand Yukon winters. Solid. Sturdy. Airtight. He got up at four this morning to start work, after returning home at midnight.
It’s ten in the morning now, and I’m waiting for Mathias so we can get Brady’s side of the story. Part of me would rather not; I fear it will ignite doubt I cannot afford. But that gag can’t stay on forever, and we must know what others will hear once it’s off.
Brady is pretending to sleep. That’s what he does for most of the day. He must figure the law of averages says that at some point we’ll forget he’s awake and say something useful.