True Colors (46 page)

Straightening her spine, trying to simulate a strength lost long ago, she went into the hallway and walked down to his room. Even as she knocked and heard his irritated, “Come in. I can’t stop you,” she wondered what exactly she would say. Opening the door, she went inside, pretending to study the posters and pictures tacked up onto the walls. “You asked me why I don’t want Dallas to come back.”

“And you stared out the window.”

She turned to him finally. “Yes. Can I sit by you?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

She went over to his bed, said, “Move over,” and then sat down beside him. “Remember when you were little, before the electricity was done in your room? I used to sit here with you and read by flashlight. You loved
The Dark Is Rising
, remember?”

“Just answer the question, Mom.”

She leaned back against the wobbly headboard and sighed. “I never should have let you hang out with Win. You’ve learned her Doberman techniques.”

“Don’t say anything bad about her. She’s the only one in this stinking family who cares about my dad.”

“Believe me, Noah. I care about your father.”

“Coulda fooled me. You never talk about him. There aren’t any pictures of him in the house. Yeah, you really care. You’re not even
hoping
he’ll get out of prison.”

“You’re young, Noah, so hope seems shiny to you, and I’m glad of that. I really am. But I’ve learned differently over the years. It can be dark, too.”

“So? You don’t just give up on someone.”

Vivi Ann closed her eyes in pain. “That’s an easy thing to say, Noah. You have no idea what we lived through, Dallas and I.”

“Did you ever ask him if he did it?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I believed in him. I believed and believed and believed . . . then his last appeal was denied and he stopped coming out to see me. By then I was a mess. You remember that day we got in the car accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Waiting for him to come home almost killed me. I don’t want you to go through what I did.”

“I have to believe, Mom,” he said.

“A son
should
. And the man I married, the one I loved, is worth everything you’re feeling. That’s the man who is your father, not the killer you’ve heard about all your life. But try to . . . understand why I can’t stand beside you on this. I’m just not strong enough. I am ashamed of that.”

Noah reached over and held her hand. “You were alone, though. I have you.”

Winona stood at the window of her beach house, watching the road above. It was the ninth of January, a cold and blustery day that hinted at a coming rainstorm. The low gray sky matched her mood, made everything outside look faded and soggy. An inauspicious start to the new year.

The school bus came into view above the trees, stopping for a few minutes at the top of Mark’s driveway. When it drove off again, she stood there, still staring out at the bare, wintry backyard, feeling a rush of loneliness on this Monday morning.

Last night she’d lain in her lonely bed for hours, trying to figure out how best to proceed with Mark. She’d given him time to come to his senses, assuming he’d walk over here one night and say he was sorry, but it hadn’t happened. November had rolled into December, and then into a new year, and still he hadn’t walked from his house to hers. She made sure to be here a lot, to keep her lights on late into the night, and still, nothing.

Last night, for the first time, she’d wondered if he was waiting for her. She was the one who’d made the mistake (she hadn’t told him about the petition; she should have; she saw that now), so maybe he was waiting for
her
apology.

The more she thought about it, the more likely it felt.

Dressing carefully, she bundled up in her wool coat and headed next door. With only a moment’s hesitation, she went up the flagstone steps and rang the doorbell.

He answered quickly, coming to the door in his slippers and robe, with his hair still wet from the shower. “Hey,” she said, smiling uncertainly. “I thought maybe you were waiting for me to say I’m sorry.”

The smile she needed so desperately didn’t arrive. “Winona,” he said in an impatient tone, “we’ve had this discussion before. Too often.”

“I know you love me,” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“But—”

“Did you even speak to my mother? Did you warn her that this firestorm was coming down? Reporters call her every day. She barely leaves the house anymore, she’s so upset.”

“I never said Myrtle was lying on the stand.”

“Oh, really?”

“Eyewitness mistakes are common. I’ve been doing research—”

“Either way you’re saying it’s her fault, and everyone in town knows it.”

“You don’t understand.”

“
You
don’t understand. You’re hurting everyone with this crusade. Do you really expect us to just accept it?”

“I thought
you
would, Mark. You know me. I wouldn’t be doing all this for no reason. It’s the right thing. I should have done it a long time ago.”

“That’s the thing: I don’t know you. Obviously I never did. Goodbye.” He stepped back and closed the door.

All the way back to her house, in her car, and into town, Winona replayed his words:
No, I don’t
. She wasn’t sure which hurt more: the idea that he didn’t love her now or the unsettling truth that he never had. For the first time in years, she longed to talk to Luke, to sit down with him as they had when they were kids, and ask him what was wrong with her, why she was so easy to discard and so difficult to love, but in the years of his absence, their friendship had faded. He called once or twice a year and they talked mostly about his children and her career.

In town, she pulled into her garage and walked around the side of the house and through the front door.

Lisa was at her desk, typing at her computer. “Your father is in the sunroom. He was here at eight when I got in. Sitting on the porch.”

“Thanks.” Winona took off her coat and went back toward the sunroom.

He sat stiff-backed in the antique white wicker chair by the French doors, with his boots firmly planted on the floor. His gnarled, bony fingers lay splayed on his jean-clad thighs; there was the telltale tremble in his hand. His white hair was thin and unkempt-looking beneath his brown, sweat-stained cowboy hat, and even in profile she could see the tension in his jaw.

“Hello, Dad,” she said, coming forward.

He pulled his hat off and set it on his lap, pushing a hand through his hair. “You got to stop this, Winona.”

She sat down on the plush sofa opposite him and knew this was her chance to make him understand. “What if we were wrong?”

“We ain’t.”

“Maybe we were.”

“Drop it, Winona. People are talking.”

Winona got to her feet. “That
would
be what you care about. The great Grey family and our precious reputation. You’d rather have an innocent man rot in prison than admit to making a mistake. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You never have.”

He got to his feet in the gradual, rickety way that had become normal for him, but there was nothing frail in his eyes. The look he gave her was cold and dark. “Don’t you talk to me that way.”

“No. Don’t
you
talk to me that way.” She almost laughed, but was afraid it would sound hysterical. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear you say you were proud of me?” Her voice trembled on that, caught on the sharp point of a need that began a lifetime ago, almost before she could remember. “But that’s never going to happen, is it? And you know what? I don’t care anymore. I’m doing the right thing with Dallas, and if I discover I’m wrong, I’ll live with it, but I won’t spend the rest of my life thinking I made a mistake that mattered.”

On that, she turned and walked out of her sunroom and went upstairs to her bedroom. There, she went to the window and stared out, watching her father make his slow, shuffling way out to the sidewalk toward his truck. Without even a backward glance, he drove away.

The late winter and early spring of 2008 was one of the wettest on record in Oyster Shores. Rain fell almost constantly from mid-February to late March, turning the ground into a spongy, muddy mass of green and brown.

Winona’s life had changed so much in the last five months that it often felt unrecognizable. Fighting an unspoken battle had had unforeseen consequences.

It made no sense to her. To her mind, she was so clearly doing the right thing that any other view was ridiculous. Quite simply, if there was even the smallest hope that a mistake had been made with Dallas, it needed to be explored. How could the people she’d lived among for all of her life not see that?

There was support for her efforts, to be sure, but most of it was voiced quietly. Aurora and Noah were her front line; her foot soldiers in this battle. Vivi Ann was neither fully in nor fully out; that was one of the worst things about this quest. The tiny flicker of hope had burned her sister to the bone and left her once again lethargic and a little numb.

And Dad was just plain pissed off. He considered Winona’s efforts a public embarrassment. Just last week in the Eagles Hall he’d been heard to say, “She’s always needed to be in the spotlight, that girl. You’d think she’d put her family first.”

That had hurt most of all, since she was doing all of this for Vivi Ann and Noah, and at night, when she lay in her bed, emptier somehow without Mark than it had been before, she knew her desire to free Dallas was about redemption. For all of them, perhaps; her most of all.

And so she sucked it up. She accepted that many of her friends and neighbors disagreed with her choice, that her father despised it, and that Vivi Ann was frightened by it. These were the burdens Winona willingly carried as she waited for the court’s response.

By April, though, the waiting had grown difficult. She’d lost clients and often spent whole days in Seattle, researching at the University of Washington’s law library.

On Thursday, the third of April, she worked in Seattle all day and drove home slowly, in no real hurry to arrive. She passed her beach house with barely a glance at the
FOR RENT
sign. Since the breakup with Mark, she spent most of her time at her house in town; to be honest, it was too difficult to be so close to him and not see him.

Instead of turning into her own driveway, she headed for Water’s Edge. She was tired of being alone.

For a moment, when she stepped out of her car, it wasn’t raining, and the beauty of this place in sunlight hit Winona anew. The fields were lush as green felt, the fences had all recently been painted black, and the trees along the driveway—Dallas’s trees—were in full cotton-candy-pink bloom. A few errant blossoms floated on the air around them. Success had come to this ranch in the past decade and with that success came much-needed repairs. Everything, every building, was now well maintained. The parking area was a huge patch of jet-black asphalt; usually it was full of trucks and trailers, but just now, in the late afternoon pause between day and night, the place looked empty.

Winona walked toward the light she saw on in the barn.

Vivi Ann was alone in the arena, struggling with a big yellow barrel, rolling it awkwardly into position.

Winona stepped into the light-as-air dirt and called out, “Hey. You need some help with that?”

“Stay there. You’ll ruin your shoes.” Vivi Ann muscled the barrel into its place at the peak of an imaginary triangle, then wiped the dirt from her gloves and headed toward Winona. In the pale light—dimmed by dirt on dozens of overhead bulbs—she looked both immensely tired and inexpressibly beautiful. The years had taken a toll on Vivi Ann, made her leaner and hollowed out her face, but even the crow’s-feet around her eyes couldn’t deface her beauty. She was one of those women like Audrey Hepburn or Helen Mirren who would be a beauty at every age. Once, that would have made Winona jealous; but now she saw more than the perfection of her sister’s face: she saw the pain in those green eyes.

“Barrel-racing practice tonight?” Winona said.

“Every Thursday for fifteen years.” Vivi Ann pulled off her brown leather work gloves and tucked them in her belt.

As they walked up past the barn, it started to rain again. Winona felt the cool drops hit her face, blur her vision, but they didn’t walk faster. They were local girls, tougher than a little rain.

Inside the cottage, Winona took off her coat and heels and sat down on the sofa in the living room. It had been a long time since they’d been in a room together, she and Vivi Ann. Just the two of them. Since the filing of the petition, probably. Winona understood why: Vivi Ann was too fragile to talk about the proceedings and too invested in the outcome to talk about anything else, so she stayed away from Winona. As she’d done for years, Vivi Ann buried her fear and sorrow and pain in the rich brown arena dirt and kept going.

Vivi Ann stared out the window at the falling rain. The window reflected her face, softening it into a watery smile. The gentle pattering noise on the roof substituted for conversation. Winona could have let it go, said nothing and just listened to this familiar symphony, but she couldn’t stand it.