Crooked River: A Novel (21 page)

He rubbed his chin.

I gripped the phone tighter.

He said, “I went to your mother. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for everything. For ruining our family and for not being a better father to you and Ollie. For failing her as a husband. I wanted to tell her I was sorry and I missed her and that things were going to be different starting now. I was going to change. I was going to look after you and Ollie the way I should have been doing all these years. I was finally going to be the father you both deserve.”

He closed his eyes, and I wanted to tell him he hadn’t let anyone down, that he was a good father, the best, but the words jammed in my throat. When he opened his eyes again and looked at me, something had changed, something I didn’t understand right away.

He stiffened his shoulders and took a deep breath. He said, “You and Ollie are going to be fine now. Grandma and Grandpa will take good care of you. Better than anything I could ever do.”

I pulled back, startled, realizing what was happening, not wanting it to be true. “What do you mean? You’re not thinking of . . . you can’t stay here. You can’t let them . . . you didn’t do anything wrong!”

“I will never be the father you need me to be, Sam. I’ve tried. And I just can’t. I already had my chance. And I blew it. I belong in here.” He sighed and lowered his head, hiding his face from me. “It’s better for you and Ollie this way. It’s better for everyone.”

“No,” I said. If there hadn’t been glass between us, I would have reached out and grabbed his chin, forced him to look me in the eyes and say those words again.

“I know you’re upset now, but you’ll get used to the idea,” he said. “You’ll see I was right. Just give it some time.”

“You can’t give up now.” My voice rose louder. “You have to keep fighting. For us. For me. And Ollie. And Mom. What about Mom? She wouldn’t want this.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the guard by the door and nodded, then turned back to me and said, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Bear, don’t do this!”

He hung up the phone, stood, and walked away from me.

“Dad!” I pounded on the glass and shouted for him to come back, but it was an underwater sound, too weak to carry very far.

The buzzer sounded. The door on his side opened. And then he was gone.

Z
eb and I sat in his truck in the parking lot outside the jail. The keys were in the ignition, but the engine was off. I cranked down my window and turned my face to catch the breeze. Zeb buckled his seat belt. Then he unbuckled it again, rubbed his hands across his knees, and said, “You know, when I found your daddy in the meadow, I didn’t know what to think at first.”

A group of people came out of the jail, walked down the front steps, went to their separate parked cars, drove away.

“He was half starved and not dressed right for the winter we were having,” Zeb said. “I brought him up to the house, gave him some supper and a clean set of overalls, a nice heavy coat. Even offered him a bed for the night, but he said it’d been too long since he slept out under the stars. Said if it wasn’t too much trouble, could he just stay awhile in that old pasture I wasn’t using anymore? I told him he could stay there as long as he needed, but he’d have to give me fifty dollars a month when he had it so I could tell anyone who asked he was renting the place, not just squatting. He wanted to give me three hundred that night. Said it was all he had. I took a hundred and told him to use the rest for food and a nice warm sleeping bag.”

I propped my chin on my hand, stared out the window, and tried to imagine Bear’s first, cold night. The hard ground, the chill creeping into his bones. The shame he must have felt for what he’d done, how heavy it all must have been to keep him from coming home to his wife and daughters. I imagined him looking up, seeing nothing but black space and glinting stars after all those months in prison and beginning to feel the first sparks of freedom and stirring of possibility, a longing to start over. I’d been to the meadow enough times now to understand why he’d stayed.

Zeb said, “We all knew who he was, a’course.”

I looked at him. He was staring out the windshield, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Zeb turned and met my gaze. The hard lines around his mouth softened into a weak smile. “Well, now. The accident happened west of here, out near Suttle Lake. Your father was driving back to Eugene. The other car, coming on home to Terrebonne.”

“Did you know the other driver? The person who died?”

Zeb bit his lower lip, hesitating a moment, then saying, “It wasn’t the driver who died.”

“But you knew them?”

Zeb nodded. He twisted his hands on the wheel, his knuckles protruding sharply beneath his thin skin. “It was Billy Roth driving the other car. His daughter, Delilah, was riding along with him.”

“Travis’s sister?” I pinched the skin between my finger and my thumb, but it didn’t make the pain in my stomach hurt any less.

“Yep,” Zeb said. “She wasn’t too much younger than Ollie is now when it happened.”

I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Was it quick?”

Zeb coughed once. “Don’t know. I expect so. Those roads can get real slick in the winter, real icy. Hard enough to drive that pass sober. Papers said your daddy crossed the center line, scraped along the side of Billy’s car, and pushed them through the guardrail over the edge of a short cliff.”

I snapped my eyes open, not wanting to picture it, not wanting those dark images to form.

“They hit a tree.”

“Oh God.”

“I’m sorry, Sam. Really, I am. I know this is hard to hear.”

I nodded. “Yeah. No, it is. But it’s . . .” And I couldn’t think of how to describe what I was feeling, a sort of sinking heaviness in the pit of my stomach, and yet light and tingling at the same time, like my body was getting too big to fit in my skin.

“It’s better to know,” he said. “I would have said something a long time ago, but your mama asked me to keep it a secret.”

I leaned my head back against the seat and sighed.

“She thought she was doing what’s best,” Zeb said, reaching and taking my hand, squeezing it once, then letting go. “I never once thought your daddy was a bad man. Some people did, even I suspect your daddy himself, but not me. Not Franny. During the trial, and even after. We always just said he was a man who made a bad mistake. That’s all. And he deserved a second go at life just like the rest of us if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation. When he came around again, I wasn’t surprised. Figured he still had his own demons to fight. And maybe, too, he wasn’t done doing penance. Whatever his reasons for returning, I thought the least we could do was give him a safe place to stay until he put himself back together again, until he was ready to go home. What I didn’t figure was that he’d stay so long. Or that he’d start to feel so much like family. And I sure as hell didn’t figure on you and your little sister.”

He laughed quietly to himself, then said, “For what it’s worth, though Lord knows it ain’t worth much, I know your daddy didn’t kill that reporter.”

It was me reaching for his hand this time around and when I had it, I didn’t let go.

F
ranny was waiting for us at the kitchen table with Deputy Santos. They were deep in conversation but stopped talking when Zeb and I came through the door. Deputy Santos was in plain clothes, jeans and a button-up green shirt. No hat, no badge, no gun. We made eye contact, but I didn’t smile at her, and she didn’t smile at me.

Franny started to get up.

“Sit down, Mother,” Zeb said, resting his hand gently on her shoulder. “It’s just us.”

Franny lifted a plate of oatmeal cookies from the table and offered them to me. “How’s your father?”

I shrugged and took a cookie even though I didn’t want one.

Zeb said, “Seems to be gettin’ on all right.” He opened the cupboard above the coffeemaker. “Fresh pot?”

Franny nodded. “Left some for you.”

Zeb took down a gray mug, then glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hot cocoa?”

“Sure. I’ll get it,” and I stepped up behind him to grab my mom’s mug. I moved aside a white and yellow one, and one that said
I’D RATHER BE FISHING,
but I couldn’t find her ruby red one with white polka dots. And it suddenly seemed the most important thing. As if wrapping my hands around it would be the same as a hug. As if touching my lips to where hers had been would be the same as a kiss. As if somehow, I could be close to her again, find comfort, feel protected.

I turned away from the cupboard to look in the dish rack by the sink. Zeb finished pouring his coffee and sat down at the table beside Deputy Santos who lifted her cup to take a drink. Rounded red sides, white polka dots. My mother’s cup. The cookie I’d been holding was now a crumbled, sticky mess. I threw it in the trash before anyone noticed.

“Sam, honey, come sit down.” Franny patted the empty chair next to her. “Deputy Santos was just telling me she was able to talk to your grandparents this morning. They’re on their way to the airport as we speak.”

I sat down and leaned my elbows on the table, and even though I tried to look at something else—the knickknacks on the wall, the salt and pepper shakers in front of me—I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering back to Mom’s coffee cup, awkward and out of place in Deputy Santos’s rough hands. Her nail polish was chipped so badly it was almost gone, her cuticles shredded. There was a burn scar on the back of her left hand—from what I had no idea—but that didn’t matter so much as the plain fact that her hands didn’t belong to my mother. My chest hurt. I wanted to grab the mug and smash it on the floor.

“Sam? Are you listening?”

I looked at Deputy Santos.

She said, “They’re going to call with flight information as soon as they have it, but they should be here sometime tomorrow night. Saturday morning at the latest.”

One day. That was all I had left. To check on the bees. To pack. To say good-bye. To uncover the truth and prove Bear’s innocence and salvage the pieces of our family. All of it so impossible.

“And then what?” I asked.

“And then they’ll take you home.” Franny reached over to pat my hand.

I pulled away from her, tucking my hands in my lap underneath the table. “We don’t have a home. Not anymore.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Franny said. “Of course you do.”

“It’s their home. Not ours.”

“It’ll be a good change,” Deputy Santos said.

“How do you know?”

“Sam,” Franny scolded.

Deputy Santos tapped her thumbs against the side of my mother’s coffee cup. “You just need to give yourself a little time is all, to get used to everything.”

“What about Bear?”

Zeb coughed into his fist. Franny shifted in her chair, and the wood creaked beneath her.

Deputy Santos tightened her grip around the mug. “What about him?”

“Did you follow up on those boot prints? The tire tracks?”

“I’m sorry, Sam. I can’t talk about the case with you.”

“You did before.”

“I know. And I shouldn’t have.”

“I want to stay here.” I leaned back.

“You know that’s not possible,” Deputy Santos said.

“As long as Bear’s in jail, I’m not leaving.”

“You’re still a minor, Sam.”

“So?”

“So it’s not for you to decide.”

“Then whose decision is it?”

Franny smoothed her fingers along the edges of the place mat in front of her. When she spoke, her voice was faint and stretched thin with emotion. “Your grandparents think it’d be best if you and Ollie were with them right now. With family.”

“But you and Zeb, you’re our family, too. We were going to stay here with you anyway, if Bear hadn’t found a place by the end of September. Can’t we just stick with that plan?”

Franny gave me a half smile. “It might not seem fair to you now, but your grandparents just want to make sure you and Ollie are in the best possible place. They’re trying to protect you the only way they know how.”

“Mom would want us to stay.”

“Your mama’s not here, child,” Franny was whispering now, and her eyes dropped away from me, down to her hands laid flat on the table. “Nothing else to do but put on your best face and carry on.”

“Besides,” Deputy Santos said, “school’s going to be starting up again in a few weeks. Better to be back with kids your own age, don’t you think? Make some new friends.”

“Bear registered us at the schools here.”

“It won’t be hard to get all your paperwork to the school district in your grandparents’ neighborhood,” Deputy Santos said. “It’s not your responsibility to worry about any of that anyway.”

“But I don’t want to go.”

“Sam.” Deputy Santos leaned closer to me.

I leaned away.

She said, “It’ll be better for you to be away from all of this. Better for Ollie, too. Trust me.”

I pushed away from the table and hurried out the sliding glass door before they had a chance to say anything else. I went straight to the barn where Zeb had cleared a place for our bikes, grabbed the handlebars of the black-and-red Schwinn, swung my leg over the seat, and then just sat there, feet on the ground, not going anywhere, suspended and trying to decide.

Deputy Santos came out to the barn and stood in front of me. She folded her arms across her chest. “Joe Mancetti called me last night.”

I picked at a small hole forming in the handlebar grip. “Who?”

“Don’t play stupid. I know you called him pretending to be me.”

I bit down on my lower lip and shrugged.

“Why?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you break into my house, too?”

I stared at the rafters, where the sun was shining in through the open loft door, spreading yellow light into dark corners.

Deputy Santos sighed. “It’s an election year. Did you know that?”

I shrugged again.

“People around here haven’t exactly been thrilled with the way Sheriff Harper’s been handling the department. They haven’t been so thrilled about having a woman on the force, either. This case is high profile, Sam. We have to tread carefully, do everything by the book. If something happens that jeopardizes our investigation, if I take even one step in the wrong direction, I could lose my job.”