Campbell (36 page)

Tal knew what stuck was. Stuck had landed him on a bridge, years earlier. He also knew he was irrationally attached to Lucy, and right now, that was not good.
 

“I don’t think I can come—”

“Well, if you want to work with
her
, you’ll figure out a way.”

“Is she…okay?” he asked carefully.

“No,” Cara said simply. “She’s not.”

Tal paced for hours, trying to determine the right
 
course of action. Leaving wasn’t smart, then again, neither was staying if it meant he didn’t have strong support from Campbell, or worse, had to negotiate with the wrong Campbell. Rarely an opportunist, he saw a chance to endear himself to Lucy, to affect her in some way the way she’d affected him in their time together. He knew he wasn’t extraordinary like she was, but he did know a thing or two about loss and blame.
 

“You sure you don’t just want to move in?” Rika said brightly as he stood on her doorstep. “Really get people talking?”

“I need to go to Campbell.” Tal frowned. “Everything is falling apart there.”

“And you think you can help?” Rika wrinkled up her nose. “Really? Now?”

“I hope so,” Tal said honestly. “She’s…I think she’s important. To us, with this.”

Rika moved aside and let him in a knowing smile on her face. “I can get you a plane, but what about her friend who’s coming down?”

“Can you…?” Tal sat on the couch and shook his head. “I can try and be back by then. He won’t be here for a week.”

“Okay,” Rika nodded. “I’ll see what else I can find out about what happened to you and,” she swallowed. “Juan. I want to know who killed Juan.”

Tal wrapped her up in his arms, remembering Lucy’s attack. “I killed him already. In Missouri.”

“Oh,” she rasped. “You did?”

“With a tire iron. It was as awful a death as you could imagine. Not quick, and—”
 

“That shouldn’t make me feel better,” she said thoughtfully. “But it does.”

Rika made a call to Otis, the kid that taught Juan how to fly, and four hours later, after packing and threatening Leah with everything he could think of until she agreed to cover for him for the week, Tal boarded a plane to Campbell. At the last minute, he’d thrown something in that he thought might help, no matter how hard it was for him to look at.
 

The last family album his mother had put together.
 

The flight went by quickly, and Tal passed the time thinking about how interesting it was that people liked Rika as much as they did, for such a wide variety of reasons. Otis, with his blond hair and dark rimmed glasses, was certainly not related to her or her late spouse in any way, but apparently owed her some debt after she was able to source him a rare plane part from China for his baby, which Tal had the privilege of flying in.
 

It was well after dark when they landed in Campbell, and just as the last time, their greeting was not pleasant. A few bruises and two damaged egos later, they were deposited on the Campbell’s porch, which was flanked by a couple of kids about Bull’s size.

“Cara asked me to come,” Tal grimaced. “Is she here?”

The two boys looked at each other and one went inside. A few minutes later, Cara emerged in an apron, covered in flour.
 

“You move quickly,” she said with a grin. “Sorry your welcome wasn’t more…welcoming. I would have put the word out if I’d known when you were arriving.”

Otis grumbled something about barbarians north of the forty-ninth parallel.

Tal rubbed his very bruised arm. “We’re at war with Vegas, so we didn’t have much time to waste. Is Zoey going to come out here and kick my ass for good measure?”

Cara shook her head. “No Zoey. She and Bull left for Seattle this morning.”

The two exchanged a look that confused Tal. “Why did Zoey—”
 

“She wasn’t needed here,” Cara replied in a way that left her meaning curiously open for interpretation. “Bull opted not to tell Lucy about what you’d discovered until you had more proof, but I thought that was a mistake.”

“So if I tell her, it’ll put me at odds with Bull.”

“If Lucy had less on her mind, and you hadn’t ended up in the mix, she would have figured it out.” She moved aside and let them in. “I’m making pie. There’s roast in the oven.”

Otis responded with a nod and a grin. “Things are looking up then.”

Cara stopped Tal as they walked into the kitchen.

“Why don’t you go see her,” she said gently. “I think she just needs something else to think about for a while. Tell her about your problems. Make her feel important.”

“I’m not sure why you think—”
 

She cut him off with a shake of her head. “I don’t think anything. I feel like we’re running out of options.”

“She’s—”
 

“In her room.”

Tal reached for his bag. “Where’s that?”

Cara chuckled, either at his eagerness or his lack of knowledge, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her. “Upstairs, third door on the left.”

The staircase creaked, and as Tal walked down the hallway, he peered into a door that was open a crack. He knew in a second that it was Cole’s, because there was something about it that looked like Lucy. The organized piles, the crisp blue he’d chosen to paint the walls. He continued on, paused, and counted the doors to make sure he had the third door, and before he gave a gentle knock.

There was no reply.

He eased it open, hoping she didn’t have a knife or a gun, or a gun with a knife attached to it, hidden in her bed.

“Lucy?” he said carefully, looking around the large bedroom before his eyes settled on the blanketed lump in the bed. “It’s Tal. From West.”

Still nothing.

He eased around the bed carefully, after deciding she was facing right. When he knelt down beside where he hoped her face was, he noticed the piles of hair around her bed, long and dark.

“Lucy,” he whispered, as her sad eyes came into view. “Hey.”

Her long hair was gone, replaced with a patchy cut cropped close to her head, and her lips were cracked and chapped. She looked eerily like her brother. Tal wondered if that was what she was going for, or if she’d cut her hair at some breaking point.
 

“I don’t know why you came,” she muttered, rolling away from him.
 

Tal found himself angry with Bull for not telling her about his suspicions involving Connor, but as he stood there, he wasn’t sure that was on top of the priority list, given what happened. It was just a theory; their war with East was very real.

“East is sponsoring Old Nevada in a war against West. Connor’s fighting with them over Old Arizona right now. They armed their border.”

She rolled onto her back. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Tal muttered. “I’m sorry about your brother, but—”

“I’m done. I’m done with all of this.” She rolled back on her side away from him so he couldn’t see her face.
 

“So he died for nothing then. Great.” Tal shook his head impatiently. “Have a nice life, Lucy Campbell,” he grumbled as he slammed her door.

He stopped at the door to Cole’s room and pushed it open. The bed was unmade. A picture that sat on the dresser of the two of them from when they were maybe four or five caught Tal’s attention, and he examined it. Cole’s arm was around Lucy and she was grinning up at him, her front teeth missing. If it hadn’t been for the pink and blue t-shirts, it would have been very hard to tell them apart.
 

Maybe he’d hardened up, the older he got. Maybe desperate times called for putting reason and emotion aside for a while. Maybe he was mad at himself for seeing Lucy as someone worth aspiring to be like when really, she was no stronger than him. Regardless, she’d encouraged Tal to move on a plan that had been a far off dream wasting away in the back of his mind for almost ten years.
 

He wasn’t ready to stop believing in her yet.
 

When he walked back into her room, she’d returned to her fetal position, facing away from the door. All his anger at Connor’s betrayal and at her inactivity floated to the surface, and he let her have it.

“You’re going to let more people die because you’re done. Good to see you’re no better than my friend who you were so quick to write off as a dictator. At least he’s not laying around in bed while everything goes to—”

“You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like to be responsible—” A haggard sob escaped her throat.

Tal shook his head. “I know exactly what it’s like to be responsible. You have your minutes, days of wallowing in the shit you made, and then you move on, because people need you.”

“Nobody—”

“I need you. Everyone needs you. Now you can be this mess of a person you seem to need to be when you close your door at night, but your actions are affecting others and you are more than your mistakes.”

She sat up and looked at him curiously. “You think you can come in here and talk to me like that?”

“Talk to who? You said you’re done. You’re just some bitch who had a good idea once.”

She blinked at him, and made a sound that could have been laughing or crying.
 

“You’re mean when you want to be,” she chortled. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“And I didn’t think you had this in you.” He nodded at the bed. “Lucy—”

“I know, I know,” she muttered, pulling the blankets around her. “I just…I need a little time.”

“You don’t have a little time,” Tal said, more gently than before. “It doesn’t work like that sometimes.”

“Why did you come here?” she looked at him, her grey eyes boring into his.

“Because I wanted to try and affect you in a fraction of the way you’ve affected me.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “I need some time,” she mumbled.

“You don’t have—”

She put her hand up and shushed him in a very real Lucy kind of way. “Tomorrow. I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

“I can’t stay long. You better,” Tal said with a half grin, as he headed to the door. “You look like shit.”

“I don’t think I’ve looked not like shit since we met, have I?”

Tal shook his head thoughtfully. “You looked fine the first time.”

After Cara made sure he and Otis were fed well enough that they weren’t going anywhere, even if they’d wanted to, Tal settled into the basement room he’d slept in when he’d been there a couple of weeks earlier. Cara had taken Lucy’s dinner up to her and stayed there for a while, reappearing to give sleeping designations. Because Otis was with Tal, he was allowed to sleep in the house, on the fold-out couch in the basement. Tal hadn’t put two and two together before but that night he realized that you had to be in the good books in Campbell to stay inside.
 

He’d just turned off the lamp when the door to his room opened and Cara let herself in.

“She says you can sleep in Cole’s room if you want. Give your pilot this bed.”

“I don’t know….”

“It’s clean. I just made it up with new sheets. If she’s offering I think you should take it.”

“Where’s Paul?” Tal thought to ask.

“He’s in Montana taking care of the kids. We couldn’t both get away.” She sat on the edge of his bed. “I knew someone else had to step in. We’re all hurting over Cole, and it’s hard for any of us to tell it like it is.”

“I just told her about Vegas and East. Not the rest.”

“You will though. And then you and her will figure out what to do about it. Go upstairs.” She stood up. “Consider it a very high compliment.”

Tal grabbed his shirt and his bag, and after giving Otis the good news that he’d been upgraded to a real bed, he followed Cara upstairs, and she ducked into what he assumed was her regular room, across the hall from Lucy. He wondered what the hierarchy was with sleeping arrangements, or if there even was one.
 

He was shocked when Lucy, hair damp, in a very heavy pair of flannel pyjamas crawled in beside him a few hours after he’d fallen asleep.
 

Questions swirled in his mind about her sleepwalking, and even went so far as to question if she’d lost her mind and if he wasn’t the only one that had had the poor judgment to keep it in the family. She didn’t touch him though, instead wrapping her arms around an extra pillow as she curled up facing away from him.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“What I’ve been fighting with myself about doing since I heard you come up the stairs a few hours ago. Just go back to sleep.”

“I’m not your brother, and I don’t want to be—”

“My brother never would have talked to me the way you did.” She flicked on the lamp and her grey eyes searched his face. “Maybe he should have.”

His arm moved almost of its own accord and settled on her waist as she pushed closer to him.

“I have so much to tell you,” he whispered, thinking of all the things that happened since they’d parted.

She shook her head. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I want to pretend it was a skiing accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s three weeks after your oldest brother’s wedding, and Cole…” She reached over and turned off the lamp as her voice cracked. “It was a ski accident. At Whistler.”

Tal’s mouth twitched in the dark and his mind raced as he started to understand what Lucy saw in him.

Something apart from everything else.
 

Chapter 21

January 2003

Campbell

“We can’t keep them all,” Andrew said, surveying the herd. “And we need meat.”

“They’re so small,” Cole whined. “And look, they’re still with their mothers.”

“Small cows make veal,” he replied, rolling his eyes at his brother. “And we can’t just keep them all.”

“You said that already,” Lucy snipped. “Just fucking pick one, Andrew. Cole, we’re going inside.” She tugged at her brother’s hand.

“Don’t pick any of the small ones,” Cole insisted. “Pick one that’s lived for a while.”

“Come on,” Lucy said, shaking her head at him. “We don’t have to do this. He’ll do this.”