Later that night, I wrapped myself in a blanket and made a giant mug of hot chocolate before settling in on the front porch. The clouds had cleared out completely, leaving me bathed in the soft light of the moon and stars as I sat with my sketchbook in my lap. I didn’t even get to open it and attempt to work through my feelings before Momma Von appeared at the edge of my drive.
“Hope there’s something strong in that mug,” she said as she climbed my stairs. Her bangs were pinned back in a braid tonight, skin freshly tanned from a day of working outside I assumed.
“Hot cocoa. But I can spike yours, if you want?”
“Like that’s a question,” she answered with a wry smile.
I popped up and dipped inside as she made herself comfortable, and five minutes later I returned with hot chocolate for her, too—complete with two shots of Baileys.
She took it gratefully, a hum of appreciation on her lips as she took the first sip and I covered the two of us with my blanket. I loved the little bench on my front porch, the view of the mountains, the stars. I’d miss it all, more than I had words to explain.
“I think it’s time I tell you the rest of the story,” Momma Von said after a moment, her hands wrapped around her mug. “About Dani.”
I tucked my legs up onto the bench, balancing my mug on my knees. “I thought that wasn’t your story to tell.”
“Yeah, well,” she started, eyes focused off in the distance. “I’m afraid the person whose story it is to tell may never have the strength to tell it.”
“You talked to Anderson?”
She nodded. “He told me about what happened earlier. I’m so sorry,” she said, pausing for a long drink. “And I’m so happy you’re okay.”
“Is he? Okay, I mean?”
“No,” she answered quickly, shaking her head. The movement was so soft, so slight that I couldn’t even be sure it’d happened. “But it’s not you he was mad at today, Wren. It’s not you he was yelling at. It was himself.”
I sighed. “Maybe, but I think the river was just a catalyst. I think it brought all of his fears about us to the surface and he just snapped. I did the same. We both realize how careless we’ve been.”
“No, sweetie, today may have been about you leaving in your eyes, but it was about Dani in his.”
Now I was confused.
I tilted my head, unsure of how Dani was tied into anything about today. “Okay, you have my attention.”
Momma Von had this look about her when she was conflicted over something, and she wore that look like she wasn’t sure about what she was about to tell me. She glanced at her hands and then off somewhere in front of her, finding the words in the distance between the two. Her eyes seemed softer, as if they were more of the storyteller than her words were.
“You already know how Dani and Anderson’s relationship was. She was the one who kept him in line, who demanded more of him. When he would find himself in a heap of trouble, Dani would be there to bail him out of it—and then lecture him on how to be better.” Momma Von smiled then. “He told me once that she was like his angel. His outspoken, annoying, too-smart-for-her-own-damn-good angel.”
I smiled, too. He’d said something similar to me one night when we’d been between my sheets sharing the darkest parts of ourselves. It was the same night that I’d confessed I’d known I was unhappy with Keith years before I left him, and I didn’t know if that made me a fighter or a coward.
“Anderson was in a bad funk,” Momma Von continued. “He’d been gambling his money away at the casinos outside of Seattle and throwing the rest of it at pills. He was messed up, constantly in a haze, and one night he’d run his truck off the road and hit a tree.”
I gasped.
“It was here in the neighborhood and he wasn’t going very fast so he was fine,” she added quickly when she noticed my reaction. “But that might have been the worst part of it, actually. He didn’t get hurt and he knew he could fix up his truck, so he was making light of the situation, and Dani lost it on him.”
It was such a foreign concept, to try to imagine a younger Anderson who was so careless. The only Anderson I’d known was a quiet, smart, strong man with purpose and intent behind everything he did.
“And usually, when Dani would get fed up with Anderson’s antics and give him a stern talking to, he would take it in stride. Sometimes he learned from her, sometimes he joked around and made her angrier before she’d eventually give in and laugh with him. But something about this time was different. And instead of hearing her, he spoke over her, and called her out on her own shortcomings in his eyes.”
“Shortcomings?” I asked. “I’ve only ever heard him speak highly of her. I didn’t think he saw a bad bone in her body.”
“He didn’t, not really. But he was angry and defensive, and so he told her that maybe it was her who was living wrong. He called her out on never having any adventures, on living safely and by the book. It was the first time they’d really had an argument, and it ended in him sleeping on my couch that night and her going to bed with a head full of thoughts about her life.”
I could feel it coming, the part of the story she wasn’t supposed to tell me that Anderson likely never wanted me to know. I sat up straighter, hands wrapping tightly around my mug that had grown cold already.
“The next day, she called Tucker and said she wanted to float down the river. She’d never done it before because it just wasn’t her thing. She didn’t like to hike or ride bikes or run the Alder loop or any of that. She was a reader, a learner, and it was the first day she woke up and questioned if that was a good thing.”
Momma Von’s eyes welled up a little at that, and she swallowed hard before continuing.
“Tucker said he’d go with her, but it was a bad day to be on the river and he knew it. The waters were rough, the rocks more exposed because of how shallow the river was that summer. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was just her or the two of them or our entire crew.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, covering my mouth with my hands.
“They both flipped out of their tubes. Tucker made it to shore but Dani hit her head on one of the rocks.” Momma Von’s voice cracked. “Anderson was the first person Tucker saw, and he’d run to the river, finding her lifeless and wrapped around a rock near the bank.” She wiped at her nose. “He tried to resuscitate her when he pulled her out of the river, but he was too late.”
And just when I thought my heart couldn’t break any more, her words crushed it into pieces.