Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER TEN





Melody had laid down some rules. She’d had to. It wasn’t an activity that came naturally to her, but at fifteen the kid was big and headstrong, and unless they came to an understanding about what she would allow and what she would not and what would happen if he overstepped those boundaries, the petty disagreements that arose frequently between them could turn into full-blown shouting matches. Shouting matches and—whatever, and, honestly, it was a territory she didn’t want to explore. Whatever. Like what? Like he’d take off? Join the army? Stop talking to her? Like she’d say something she didn’t mean but would never be able to take back? One second he’d be sweet and funny and considerate and wise beyond his years and a second later he’d be a million miles away, sullen and unreachable, or he’d flare up in some hotheaded display of poor judgment, or sulk over some insult she hadn’t even intended. Sometimes her hand itched just to reach out and smack him. Sometimes her hand itched to grab the front of his shirt and drag him close for a hug. Most of the time she couldn’t do either, hug him or hit him—he moved too fast. Too fast away. Ruth blamed it on hormones but Melody suspected it was contagious. He’d got it from her. When she’d been that age? Pushing sixteen? She’d been a monster. Justified by circumstance, maybe, but still way beyond the pale.

There were two rules, and they were straightforward. The first—BE NICE—was something they agreed would apply to both of them, and was subject to a margin of error of roughly fifteen percent. Either one of them could f*ck up and be forgiven as long as it fell within the tolerance. So far, the rule was a success. Backing off just that little bit brought them closer. They were learning the arts of compromise and negotiation, and maybe even the hormone thing was smoothing out a little.

The second—PASS YOUR GRADE—was more complicated. Also more simple. Len got involved. Wrecker could pass tenth grade and continue to work for him, Len decreed, or he could not pass it and find some other line of work.

Melody got out of Wrecker’s way, the day that news was delivered. The boy was out of his mind with fury. The next day he was ashamed, and that was even more brutal to watch, almost impossible for her to stay sidelined. On the third day he was morose. And then she very tentatively approached him with an offer of help, and he (bristling and insulted, and who could blame him?) rather ungraciously accepted, and together they struggled through the home-school segments he’d had trouble with.

He passed them.

Today was celebration, plain and simple. They had no need for rules today. Wrecker had finished his exams the month before and had been on a run of nice since then, with only a few fairly isolated shithead moments. She’d had a few herself and he’d forgiven her those. Today was a special day. June 30, 1981, his sixteenth birthday.

“Sweet sixteen,” Jack said, and let out a long, low whistle. “Glad you called me.”

Melody and her brother were slouched against a picnic table in the backyard behind the farmhouse. Every few years Jack would motor in unannounced, gunning his two-seater BMW over muddy washboard and ruts, half sliding down the abandoned drive to park as close as he could get to the farmhouse, and he and Wrecker would be inseparable for however many hours Jack had mysteriously allotted to the visit. Then he would disappear again. Sometimes gifts for the boy arrived in the mail. No card, no message. But who else would send a new set of handlebars to replace the mangled ones he’d destroyed in a jump?

Wrecker and his friends were building a fire in the barbecue pit, while Jack shouted random bits of bad advice from his bench seat. Jack could hardly move. He’d driven down from Seattle two days before with a bushel of oysters packed in ice in the trunk of his car and the bright idea to take Wrecker backpacking—bushwhacking, he figured—across the King Range and down to the coast. Melody found this hilarious. Jack was an urban boy whose tenting experience was limited to Boy Scout camp before they threw him out for bad behavior. He had a shiny new backpack and a bedroll still in the bag from Abercrombie & Fitch. Wrecker had done his best to protect him. As long as Jack stayed away from skunks, Wrecker had promised, he’d get his uncle home in one piece. If Jack got skunked, he was on his own.

Melody glanced at her brother. Crippled, but he’d recover. Jack got the family looks. Rangy, fine-boned—the Irish trumped everything else in him. Melody had hazel eyes, eyes the color of brackish water, but Jack’s were as blue as Wrecker’s. The skin around them was wrinkled from too many hours squinting at legalese, but even at thirty-five he had a boyish, devil-may-care expression, and a dimple in his chin that sealed the deal with women. He couldn’t make love stick any better than she could, though. Two marriages that went up in flames and a guilty conscience that resulted in alimony for both women.

Jack’s visits tended to correspond with his divorces. He’d come for the first time post-Amanda when Wrecker was ten, stayed a few days, took the boy on a wild spree in Eureka—arcades, movies, the batting cage, enough junk food to bring on gale-force vomiting and a headache that didn’t abate until Jack was gone—and Wrecker loved it. They were well matched. Jack viewed a gap in any conversation as an opportunity to rebuild the world with words, and Wrecker was a quiet boy who paid attention. Melody wished Jack would spend more time with Wrecker, but her brother had no staying power. He looked good and talked a blue streak but it took a special combination of guilt and self-interest for him to stay in the game once his initial curiosity wore off. His relationships with women proved it. His first marriage lacked that combination; his second tanked when his wife discovered he’d been supplementing their marital bliss with visits to call girls when he went away on business and one time—once only, he swore, only that once—when they traveled together on vacation. He was fastidious about work, preparing his briefs diligently and following up on contacts and opportunities, but his personal life intruded in unsavory ways. He was busted for soliciting sex with an undercover policewoman in his office during working hours. He conducted an affair with his boss’s wife. There weren’t many bartenders in town who didn’t recognize his mug, or welcome him by name when he sauntered through their doors. But there were no records of liaisons with underage girls (good, Ruth said crisply), no arrests for public drunkenness, no injuries attributed to his compromised condition. He coached a Little League team—the Tewksbury Tigers—and showed up sober. The kids loved him for his irreverence, his sense of fun, and for what they rightly felt was his acute interest in their well-being and sports prowess. He had good intentions and the wherewithal to follow through. But when the next season rolled around, the Tigers were looking for a new coach. Jack gave them one successful season and then pulled up stakes and moved across the country, an irate husband of one of the players’ moms in hot pursuit. All of this, and more, he reported to anyone who would listen.

“Gentlemen, ignite!” Jack called. He lifted his mirrored sunglasses and added, “And lady. My apologies.” He tilted his head toward Melody. “What’d you say her name was? The cute girl.”

“Sarah.” Melody found it hard to believe this girl—perky, goodhearted, dumb as a rock—would be sixteen in a few weeks, too.

“Oh!” Jack shouted, as the kindling caught and the fire roared. “Houston, we have blast-off!”

The buckeyes were small, still, the round nuts loading the branches of the backyard trees. The thermometer said 88. It hadn’t rained in three weeks. That was normal for this time of year, the grass edging toward amber, the cows lowing over the washes, new fawns, still wearing their spots, scampering with their mothers through the pool of Melody’s headlights when she drove home at night. Ruth had heard a mountain lion scream three nights in a row. A fox had made off with the last of Johnny Appleseed’s elderly chickens. Melody’s neighbors’ crops ripened in their fields and under their grow lights. There was money to be made hand over fist in the bud market, and Melody wasn’t tapped in to any of it. There was one main reason for that.

Willow was with Len and Meg at the other picnic table, fighting a breeze to lay down a tablecloth. Ruth had control of the kitchen and was running some kind of potato salad factory in there. Melody watched Willow grip the cloth edges and laugh as Len let the wind tickle his edge out of his hands. Willow was laughing more, lately. Meg laughed too, standing to one side, her fist clutched to her mouth. Meg was easy to love. Willow—she was harder. They were such opposites, Melody and Willow, stuck to each other by the shared bonds of respect and affection and property and history and antagonism. It rankled that Willow was so often right. But she’d been wrong about Wrecker, hadn’t she? Maybe she was wrong about the cultivating, too. Willow had been adamant when they’d bought the place. She would associate neither her name nor her money with Bow Farm unless Melody could assure her that there would never—under no circumstances—be illegal plants grown on the acreage. Inside or out. Hither or yon, over hill or dale, comme ci, comme ça, Melody thought—and a good thing Johnny Appleseed kept his patch well hidden when he’d been financing his covert activities that way.

“Oh, Jesus, Jack. I didn’t tell you about the time we got raided by the DEA.” Melody leaned back and laughed, rueful. “That was so f*cked up.”

“You were growing pot?”

“No way.” She nodded toward the wind-swelled tablecloth. “Willow wouldn’t let us.” It was just as well, though, maybe. Having Wrecker changed the way she looked at things.

Jack shifted to watch the others. His eyebrows rose and he gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh. He leaned closer to Melody. “Hey. When’d Willow and Len get together?”

“What?”

“Oh,” he said, backing away. “Was it a secret?”

“No,” Melody said. “What? No. Wait. What?”

“Oh,” Jack said. “Sorry.” He wrinkled his lip in amusement.

Melody snorted. Jack was full of shit. He was sure that any friendship between a man and a woman had to be sexual. Why not? he’d said. If you like somebody … and Melody had countered with the decency argument (Melody, of all people)—sanctity of marriage, blah blah—to which he nodded gravely and said, Oh. Thanks so much for setting me straight on that.

Jack, who’d made a play for Ruth when he first arrived. Out of respect, he insisted.

“You got raided?” Jack said politely. “Care to tell me about it?”

Melody looked closer. Willow and Len? Not possible.

“Uncle Jack!” That was Ryan, Wrecker’s friend who, to his father’s deep regret, stood only four-eleven at sixteen. He had the bottom-heavy look of a marsupial and a mind quick enough to outwit any adult he’d ever met.

“Yo!” Jack creaked his way up from the picnic bench and shielded his eyes from the sun.

“Tell Wrecker to go get his Frisbee.”

“Get it yourself,” Wrecker answered. He laid a shoulder into Ryan’s midsection and lifted him off the ground. They were playing a kind of rugby, Wrecker and Ryan and the kid who drove the Corvette—what was his name?—and the girl Sarah. They lacked a ball and made up for it with Ryan.

“Where’s it at?”

It was in Wrecker’s cabin, Ryan sputtered, his voice muffled by the bodies that lay on him.

“Come with me,” Jack said. “I want to hear about this raid. As your attorney, and all.”

“Yeah, right,” Melody retorted. “You’d let me rot in jail.”

“No! I’d visit you to find out where you kept your stash. Then I’d let you rot in jail.”

Melody untangled herself from the picnic bench and shouted to Wrecker. He should check with Ruth, she said. She might want him to put the oysters on soon.

Wrecker extracted himself from the scrum and faced her. He knew, he said. He was going to. His tone of voice said: You don’t have to tell me.

Melody took an extra moment to look at him, standing there. “See?” she said to Jack. “See what a pain in the ass he is?”

Beautiful, he agreed. And her heart swelled to see her boy grown tall like that, strapping, independent, still here, mouthing off, catapulting toward his future but for the moment standing shining in her sight.

Wrecker’s cabin smelled like peat with a hint of wet dog and motor oil.

“Jesus,” Jack said, stepping inside. “Something die in here?”

Melody hovered outside. Better to let Jack negotiate the mess. She had too many battles running already with her son to want to take on the condition of his cabin. Her mother had forced her to keep her room clean, make her bed every morning and run the vacuum on the weekends, and look where that had gotten her: the crowned queen of mess. It was half that—the futility of it—and half that it took too damn much effort to hassle the kid into cleaning it up. Twice a year she went at the barn with a vengeance, cleaning it down to its bones, but the rest of the time she was content to sweep sporadically and straighten here and there, knock down the dust if it had laid up thick enough to write in with a finger. Her restoration efforts had petered out once she had a place dry enough and warm enough to satisfy her comfort levels. It was good enough for government work, she told Jack. Good enough for the girls I go with, he answered gleefully. “Smells like boy.” Jack’s voice sounded hollow. He was trying to avoid breathing. “Man. Mom would’ve killed us.”

“Should I make him clean it up?”

“Hell, no.” He flashed her a sardonic grin. “Wait’ll he leaves home, then torch it.”

That was the problem, Melody thought. Half the time she thought she was too strict, laying on chores, making him pull his weight around the farm, and the other half she was convinced she was letting him get away with murder in the name of freedom. It was exhausting, really. There was no reliable scale that let her know whether she was doing a decent job or screwing him up royally. It seemed like pure luck—better luck than she deserved, for sure—that he was (she crossed her fingers, here; she knocked on wood) turning out okay. More than okay. Turning out to be a person whose company she enjoyed. At the end of most days, it was Wrecker she wanted to hang out with.

Jack emerged into the waning light with a Frisbee in his hand. “Another minute and you’d have to go in after me with oxygen.”

“That bad?”

“Pretty bad.” Jack tossed the disk into the air and caught it. “He’s a good kid, sis. How’d you manage that?”

“I had help,” she said soberly. It was the truth of the matter. Without Ruth and Len and Willow, without Johnny Appleseed when he’d been around, Sitka and the pups—without even Jack—she’d have failed miserably. Well, and maybe with a different kid. Wrecker had some rough edges but they were nothing compared to what she’d been like, growing up.

Jack draped his arm over her shoulders and they walked the path back toward the farmhouse. “He said school’s been a bitch for him.”

“He talk much about that?”

“He doesn’t talk much about anything. But I gather he’s not exactly a scholar.”

Melody shrugged. “He’s smart. Anybody can see it. He’d just rather figure things out on his own, with his hands, than learn it in a book.” She paused and ferreted a thorn from her sock. “Some of his friends board in Fortuna, go to the high school there.”

“You think you could make him go?”

“Not really. Plus, there’s no way in hell I could afford it.”

Jack grinned noncommittally and looked off to the distance. That’s how it was between them. Melody had to sweat and scrape each month to make ends meet and Jack went through life with his hand in the cookie jar. The car, the job, the house with the beach view—he had it all. Not that Melody would trade places. She’d decided early on it wasn’t worth the price. She’d had help to buy Bow Farm; that was enough. Still, the difference between them was enough to throw a dose of awkwardness into any conversation where the topic came up.

“You could ask Dad.”

Melody glanced at him sharply. “Right.”

Jack stepped to the side and paused to scrutinize her. “You’ve got a great life here, Melody,” he said. She snorted, and he shook his head. “You do. I respect it. But how are you going to send Wrecker to college? He’s sixteen, Melody. How’re you going to help him get started?”

Melody kept walking. There was a low roar in her head it was hard to think through. “He doesn’t want to go to college.”

“He might.”

Melody stopped on the path and spun to face him. “You know what, Jack? F*ck you. Dad disowned me. So don’t make it like I’m a bad mother for turning down some imaginary help for my son.” She turned again and stalked ahead. The Frisbee sailed over her head and collided with a branch. She stooped to pick it up. Then she turned and spun it at him, hard.

Jack caught the disk and shook it at her. “That shit’s in your head, sis. You think Dad gives a crap about twenty grand? The man’s a f*cking millionaire.” He spun the toy on his finger. “They’d like to see you.”

Melody laughed a short, surprised gasp. “For what?”

“Beats me. You’re such a bitch.” Jack caught up with her and nudged her in the ribs with the Frisbee. “But maybe they’d just like to help. I mean, why not? Let them be grandparents.”

“You know the kind of help I could use? Spend a little more time with him yourself. Don’t just show up and be the hero when it’s convenient.”

“Moi? I’m a hero? Oh, I like that.” Jack flashed his roguish grin. No wonder women fell for him, Melody thought. It was hard to stay mad. “But listen, sis.” His voice turned suddenly serious. “Don’t count on me. You’re the solid one.” Jack walked a few fast paces ahead and then turned and walked backward. He crowed, “The solid one who got raided by the Drug Enforcement Agency.”

“Yeah,” she scoffed, and shook her head. “I’m just glad Wrecker wasn’t there when they came.”

Jack walked beside her, then, and she told him how she and Wrecker had spent the day in Eureka shopping for new basketball shoes. Size ten and a half—he was thirteen and growing out of everything, and she had the day off from the Mercantile. “We got back to the farmhouse and Ruth was a mess. Two guys with dark windbreakers and mirrored sunglasses came in and told her they had to search the place. They ransacked it. When I got back to the barn it was pretty clear they’d been there, first.”

“They had a warrant?”

“They told Ruth they did, but when Willow showed up she demanded to see their badges, and they cleared out.”

“Shit, Mel. That’s scary.”

“Maybe. But we don’t grow, so they didn’t find anything. A*sholes took some cash from the barn, though.”

“They weren’t DEA.”

“Then who were they?”

Jack shook his head. “Couple of thugs, sounds like. Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”

Melody brushed the stray hair out of her eyes. “I had bigger fish to fry. They took the bag of cash I was holding until Monday to deposit in the bank. The drawer from the Merc.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t a ton of money. Two fifty, three hundred bucks, maybe. But I was freaked. That was way more than I could cover. So I tried to get a hold of Dreyfus to tell him.” She flashed a glance at Jack. “This is the f*cked-up thing. Nobody saw Dreyfus again. I kept the Merc open for a couple of days until his business partners sent a truck and a carpenter up from Oakland to haul out the inventory and board up the place. Everything perishable, we just gave it away.”

“And you were out of a job.”

“After ten years.” They were nearly to the farmhouse.

“They never found Dreyfus?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “I’m just glad Wrecker wasn’t there when they came. He has a thing about cops.”

“What kind of a thing?”

She glanced up at him briefly and then back down. “A pretty bad thing.”

Jack tilted his head toward her. “Yeah. You know, you never told me the whole story about him. Before and all.”

“What’s to tell?” Melody shrugged. “Shit happened. His mother couldn’t take care of him and Len knew her, so he adopted him. Meg was sick, so I got on board right after that.”

“You adopted him.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

They could smell the smoke from the fire and see Ruth through the trees. “Well,” Melody said, “I never, like, did any paperwork.”

Jack stopped in his tracks. “So you have no legal rights.”

Melody’s eyes darkened and she looked away. “I’ve raised him all this time, Jack. He’s my son.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Says you. Says Wrecker. But what if something happened to Len?” They were back at the farmhouse. “Let’s talk about this later.” Jack stepped into the yard, lithe and powerful, and sailed the plastic disk into the dusk.

The kids were playing chicken; Ryan riding the shoulders of Corvette Boy, Sarah perched atop Wrecker. The light was waning. The fire in the pit crackled merrily. Meg and Ruth were standing beside a picnic table laden with potato salad and corn on the cob and baked beans and sliced tomatoes and the box of oysters ready to be grilled. Melody stood just outside the frame of it, taking the picture to preserve in her memory: her brother, her friends, her kid, his friends, on the day he turned sixteen in the place she loved more than any other in the world, perfect, perfect, perfect, if Jack would just leave that shit alone, as the disk soared high and hovered for a moment and then turned on its trajectory and arced its way back to land.

It was headed for Wrecker. In one fluid motion he raised his arms and lifted Sarah over his head and placed her safely on the ground, and then, without a break, he dove—graceful as a porpoise, streamlined and in perfect accord with his body—to catch the disk. His hand sealed, sure, around it, and Wrecker continued his slow airborne descent to earth.

There was a boulder that wouldn’t get out of the way.

There was the moment of impact, and the sudden damping of all sounds but the one crack, the sound of his bone breaking, and then—from this boy who never cried—the low-pitched unh of pain.

And then Melody was flying, was by his side.

The cast accomplished what poor grades had failed to do: it kept Wrecker unemployed that summer. He was in a foul mood. His body conspired to return to work and fired off signals that drove his brain berserk with their force and persistence. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t drive, but he could damn well crutch, and he wore out the rubber buttons on their bottoms racing the quarter mile to the road each day to collect the mail. He made Melody drive him to the sports store in Eureka so he could buy himself a training bench and a set of free weights. His shoulders bulked out while the muscles of his right leg languished. He grumbled bitterly. He had come upon his calling, and instead of being out in the woods felling timber, he was stuck at home watching reruns of Mister Ed.

He took up fishing.

It was Ruth’s idea. Wrecker could mobilize well enough over rough ground to make his way down to the Mattole and back. Why not make himself useful once he got there? She liked fish. All of them did except Melody, who could go on eating her red beans and pumpkin seeds and pass up the nice poached steelhead with lemon butter. Ruth fashioned a creel out of an inner tube and a pair of old jeans. She bullied Len into providing a rod and reel. Every morning she made Wrecker a lunch and watched him hobble down the path toward the river. Some days he returned with a fish squirming in the creel, some days he didn’t, but his mood improved noticeably. Ruth grew suspicious. Wrecker was an independent boy, but he was not solitary by nature. He was angling, she began to suspect, for something other than fish.

She cornered him one day when he slid a speckled trout into the kitchen sink. “Nice fish,” she said. She reached into the sink and grasped the slippery body, stabilized it on the drainboard, and whacked it over the head with the wooden mallet she used to tenderize game. The fish’s mouth gaped open and its eyes grew cloudy. One more whack and the body lay limp. She looked purposefully at Wrecker. “Something new down at the river?”

It was into the second half of August and Wrecker’s hair had grown out thick and shaggy, sun-bleached, a shelf of it spilling into his eyes. Behind the hair his eyes sparkled. “New? Nah,” he said, his voice gruff but his eyes laughing.

Ruth cocked an eyebrow and determined to sleuth it out. She gutted the fish, cleaned it, dredged it in flour. She lit the propane burner and heated oil in a pan and scalloped some potatoes and baked them while the fish sizzled on the stovetop. The next morning, a fine, fresh, August day, she packed his lunch, gave him a short head start along the path, and followed behind.

Ruth was huffing by the first bend in the trail. The crutches slowed him down, but not nearly enough for her to keep up. She stopped and used her apron to dab at the sweat that ran into her eyes. By the time she reached the base of the hill, her heart was pounding—chug-ah chug-ah—like a rickety steam engine, and the boy had vanished from sight.

Ruth rested with one pudgy forearm wedged into the crotch of a tan oak. Pain radiated up her right side and she heard an unfamiliar, faintly ominous wheezing sound come out of her rib cage that scared her enough to turn around and retreat slowly to the farmhouse. She didn’t want to collapse there on the path where Wrecker could find her on his way back. The plan would need to be amended.

The next day she had her stealth on. Also a hat, a sturdy pair of walking shoes recycled from the free box at the Presbyterian church, a stripped stick that balanced her over rocky ground, and a pair of binoculars looped around her neck that she cursed every time they banged against her sternum. In her pocket she carried a Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America. If anyone asked, she was birdwatching. She had borrowed the gear from Willow. There was nothing wrong with taking up a new hobby; she could use the exercise, and this time she paced herself, trudging along the path instead of trying to keep him in her sights. True, he might veer from the river route, head deep into the trees or cut toward the road, but she would take the risk on his destination. Didn’t he bring back fish? There was something—something or someone—down at the river that had him hooked.

Exercise was overrated, Ruth decided, puffing even at the slower pace. She paused to let her racing heart slow. Every single thankless joint in her body squawked when she took them out on parade. She was sixty-eight years old and had the balance of a drunken sailor, a finicky ticker pulsing in her chest, and unreliable eyesight. There was a perfectly good chair in the kitchen of the farmhouse that offered a more sensible and comfortable place to locate her wide backside. It had to be said that bushwhacking miles through poison oak and blackberry bushes was no easy stroll. Ruth wrinkled her nose and sneezed pollen into her embroidered handkerchief. Then she shouldered her small satchel and continued along the trail.

She was sixty-eight, but she was a hell of a long way from decrepit. She still cooked and cleaned and handled the laundry, churning it in the wringer-washer and clipping it onto the line to dry. Her blunted fingers fumbled when she tried to thread a needle or repair the tiny tired guts of the vacuum motor, but she climbed ladders, weeded the garden, swore with abandon when the occasion warranted it. She surprised them all by praying. They shouldn’t be alarmed, she said. It was a precautionary measure. She’d taken a few missteps in her life and just wanted to point out the mitigating factors.

It had been a while since she’d visited a church. Not since her mother was alive, bless her tender skinny little soul, and gently herded them all, scrubbed and freshly dressed, out the door on Sunday mornings. We always have time to go to God’s house, in that voice so soft and quietly persuasive no one gave a thought to disagreeing. Even her father went along, his back bent with the weight of hauling in the nets and offloading the catch at the end of each day. He’d wink at Ruthie at the end of the pew, the tallest, the only girl in a sea of small boys. Ruth didn’t mind church. It was quiet in there, and clean, and all they had to do was listen and pray. She’d considered the convent but there were too many things she’d grown to like that weren’t allowed. Her father thought she’d stay home. And she might have, if Elizabeth hadn’t shown up on the front steps of the library that day.

The river was slow this time of year, but Ruth cocked an ear and caught its whisper. It wasn’t that bad a walk, really. Just the breakneck cliffside descent ahead of her which she’d be lucky to survive and luckier still to manage to haul her sorry butt up the face of when she was heading home. She should have just asked the boy again. Tickled him until he spit it out, or been content to stumble forward in darkness. Ha! As if there were any chance that he could keep anything important from her. From Ruth, who knew him better than she knew the nose on her own face. She creaked forward the last few paces until she had a clear view of the river beach. And then she steadied herself on the trunk of a tree that branched sideways before it climbed skyward.

Well. There was her answer.

Ruth slung the satchel from her weary shoulders and eased herself to the ground. The hot August sun baked a sweetness from the dust and pine duff, and a smile yawned across her face. Wide. Gap-toothed and sloppy and quivering and out of her control, and right behind it a clutch of unattended tears shoved and scrambled their way forward.

He was down there, all right. His blond mop shone in the sun and his plaster cast stiffened his leg straight out in front of him while he reclined on the sand, his arms bent sharply at the elbows to cradle his head. Pitched beside him like a loyal dog was a cheap nylon tent, blaze orange, staked and saddlebacked, its snout pointing toward the water. And coming out of the river was a girl. Skinny-dipped and dripping wet and headed right toward him.

Not all people were born into happiness, like Ruth was. Not all people grew up cherished and honored, as she had. Not everybody—not many at all, really—had the luck (what else could you call it? the undeserved blessing) to find the person who made them more. More themselves. More all right in themselves. Through what they shared. But Ruth was lucky. From that very first day, she had Elizabeth.

Not that Elizabeth knew it, then. Elizabeth thought this baby-faced girl—this teenager—on the library steps was no more than a distraction. Well, a sweet distraction. A confection. A surprisingly complex confection, a much richer-than-anticipated dessert, in fact a meal in herself, really, a nutritious, energizing, luscious, yes—and Ruth had her then, and for the rest of Elizabeth’s life Ruth made sure she never went hungry.

This girl down in the river, climbing out of the river, swaying loose-limbed toward Wrecker—she might not be his Elizabeth, but Ruth was certain he had found a girl who was willing to entertain the possibility. The possibility of him. And what more could she wish for him than that? To have the chance to be seen, to be known—he was built for this, this boy, this blessing, this gift, this kid saturated with love. He’d been the apple of someone’s eye. And then he’d been dealt a blow so severe he might have been made cruel by it. All these years Ruth had watched to see which way he would turn and there were times she’d held her heart in her throat, watching his anger explode. He wanted to blow up the world. He wanted to knock it all down, reduce it to smithereens, and he could—with his fists, with a word, with each choice. It was for him to decide. He could throw himself into the sea as she had done. There was no choice but that, really—to throw himself in, into life, and see what became of him.

A peal of laughter sprang up from below and Ruth closed her eyes, yielded them their privacy. With her eyes closed her heart fluttered—a large leap and several smaller ones—and she was flooded without warning with Elizabeth: the color of her skin, the daredevil glint in her eye, her devotion to books and to justice and to Ruth, the way the sunlight fell across her hair when she slept in Sunday mornings. Ruth could hardly bear it. The feel of Lizzie’s hands on Ruth’s hips, coming up behind her at the bathroom sink as she brushed her teeth. The mash of lips, the taste of spearmint and blood where tooth grazed lip. The urgent drop to the rug. The furious reach and grope—still to want, after so many years, to want so fiercely what you deeply have—and then the wave that arched her from the floor and left her sweaty, gasping, newborn.

Ruth waited for her breath to still.

When Elizabeth died Ruth did as she’d desired: she let the funeral men take Lizzie’s body away and deliver her ashes in return. And just as Elizabeth had asked, Ruth had packed them gently in the old car they shared, set them safely, comfortably, on the front seat, propped by pillows—and driven the long distance to the beach they once had loved. She’d parked the car in the lot, left the keys balanced atop a front tire.

Just shake ’em out, Lizzie had instructed, laughing. Just send ’em sailing. That way, wherever you go in this big world, I’ll have already been there. To its beaches, anyway. Waiting for you.

Ruth hadn’t meant to walk so far. She hadn’t thought she’d walk through the night, wait until morning came to sit, weary, on a drift log. Or that she’d remain rooted there until the sun caught hold of the day and burned back the fog. But then she carefully removed the lid of the box, untwisted the tie that held the plastic bag closed, and reached her trembling hand in.

Soft. So soft.

When she finished, her clothes had come off and she had waded belly-deep into the frigid water. She set the box, a merry little boat, upon the swells. And surrendered herself to the waves.

Ruth lay on the bluff that broached the river, now, and felt that day tremble through her. Her hands opened and closed like bivalves on the soft duff. She felt a rumble in her belly and recognized it as laughter. Her own. Soft and quiet, far too still to carry, but joining the laughter below.

When she woke up that day to Willow’s worried face hovering over her, she knew she’d lost her Liz. She knew she was gone. There was no following her. So she gave up then, at that. She gave up everything. Who she’d been. What she’d had. Even what she’d wished for. And then—more than a year later—Wrecker had come, with his face that switched from a fist to a shining star, and let her love him.

Sitting up now, the voices of the children rising from the river below, Ruth felt the chuckles spill painfully from the side of her mouth. Her ribs hurt. Her creaky aching muscles had tuned up their symphony of complaint. It took a ridiculously long time for her to stand up. Good Lord. She would need a week to recover from this crazy idea. If she made it home in one piece. She was still laughing. It made her side hurt worse. But she would never give that up. She would die laughing. It seemed a better way to go, all in all.

They all had secrets at Bow Farm. This was Wrecker’s, and nothing could make her give it up.