“Seriously?” she said unenthusiastically.
“Seriously. Come on.”
A few minutes later she was dressed for the weather and meeting him outside the patio door. He was wearing his snazzy new camo jacket. “Promise me you’ll leave that here when we go back to Denver,” she said.
“Deal.”
He clicked on his flashlight, and they started trudging through the driving snow toward the woodshed.
After a few steps she said, “Patrick, what was it? Whatever happened between you and Sean?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened. It’s always there, between you two. A wall. Was it an argument or something?”
He didn’t answer right away. “It wasn’t an argument.”
“What then?”
“Life,” he answered vaguely. “Schedules, work. His family and my career. Hey, I was really hoping we could talk about-”
“That’s weak.”
“Weak?”
“Every family has that stuff. You either choose to stay close through it all or you don’t.”
For a few moments he walked in silence through the night, holding his flashlight steady against the weather. “I guess we never did.”
“So you’re saying you never did, or that you both never did?”
“Tessa, this isn’t really-”
“Okay, whatever.” She waited. It wouldn’t be long.
She started counting to herself to ten, made it to six before he said, “All right.”
They reached the shed, and he muscled open the snow-sealed sliding door but didn’t enter. “When I was seventeen, Sean and I were driving home from a party one night. The roads were icy and I was dozing off. He swerved. We hit another car and”-Patrick took a small breath-“tragically, Tessa, a woman was killed.”
“Oh, my God.”
Her words weren’t glib or impudent but filled with sympathy, and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have told her the news.
On the other hand, it was probably time she knew what’d happened. I gestured for her to go inside the shed, then I followed her. “Sean always said he was trying to avoid a deer, but I, well… I wondered if maybe he’d had too much to drink.”
“Did they do a Breathalyzer test?”
“I don’t know. It would’ve made sense, but if they did, it didn’t raise any red flags.” There were no lights in the woodshed, so I handed Tessa the Maglite, then started scooping up split logs. “I’d seen him drinking at the party. When I asked him about it later, he told me he’d only had two beers.”
“So not nearly enough to get drunk-not for a big guy like him, not over the course of a whole night of partying.”
“No. Not if it was only two beers.”
The way she held the light I could see her face, and she was looking at me questioningly. “What do you mean, ‘if it was only two’? You didn’t believe him?”
“I didn’t see any deer tracks, Tessa.”
“Deer tracks?”
“By the side of the road.” Clutching the logs against my chest with my left arm, I used my right to add to the stack. “I looked for tracks, but I didn’t-”
“Yeah, well, you just said it happened at night. How can you be sure you didn’t just miss seeing ’em?”
“Tessa, it was-”
“He’s your brother. You don’t just distrust someone like that-unless, did he lie to you all the time?”
“No. Not at all.” I finished gathering as many logs as I could. “Are you going to get any?”
“Well, there you go, that’s it, then.” She picked up a few logs, but instead of carrying them herself, she added them to the heap in my arms. “No wonder he pulled away from you. You were the only one who was with him that night; he probably needed you more than anyone else to believe him.” She shook her head disparagingly. “Big surprise things didn’t turn out so peachy for you guys.”
I’d had similar thoughts at times over the years, but I’d never let myself articulate them as bluntly as she’d just done; however, that didn’t mean I was particularly thankful to her for pointing all this out.
She grabbed a couple more logs, laid them on top of my stack so that now it reached my chin, then said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get the flashlight.”
Then she picked up two small branches and left the shed.
Wow, great job there, girl. Way to blame him for all the problems he’s ever had with his brother. Nicely done.
So, she’d royally screwed up this conversation, and they hadn’t even gotten to the topic of Amber.
Tessa aimed the flashlight’s beam onto the snowdrift-littered trail to the house.
As she thought about what Patrick had just told her, she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to accidentally kill someone like that. But then she realized that she shared something macabrely significant with Sean-both of them were responsible for taking the life of another human being.
But you shot a man on purpose; he killed a woman by accident.
You shot a man on purpose.
She tried not to think of that night, of the warm spray of blood splattering the back of her neck, or the soft thud of the man’s body landing on the floor behind her, or the worst part-the iniquitous satisfaction she’d felt squeezing the trigger.
Her answer to the psychiatrist rushed back to her: “It feels like I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own… like it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again.”
A place where hope is real again.
Yeah, that would be nice.
Even now as she remembered firing that gun, she sensed it again, savage instinct climbing up through the ages and spreading through her like fingers from an outstretched hand. Something primal, that unspeakable part of human nature that feels comfortable in the dark.
A shiver ran through her, and it was not because of the storm.
“Tessa.” Patrick’s voice disturbed her thoughts. “How did you sleep this week?”
“How did I sleep?”
“Yes.”
Sean and Amber’s house had been built half into a hillside with the basement and garage on the lower level. Since the fireplace was upstairs in the living room, she headed up the hill toward the patio door. “Pretty much like always.”
“You’ve never gotten into a fight at school. Not once since I’ve known you.”
A fight?
Oh, I get it. This is about Sean. He’s mad you said that about Sean.
They reached the house, and she propped the door open. “No. I don’t get into fights.”
“But yet I can see you’re really good at beating people up.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to beat you up or anything, I was just-”
“No, Raven. It’s not me I was talking about.” With the wood in his arms, he had to turn sideways to make it through the doorway. “It’s you.”
For a moment she stood there, speechless, frozen in place by his words, paralyzed by her past.
Beating herself up?
Yes, yes, she was.
And for good reason too!
She entered, closed the door.
Sean was still shoveling the driveway out front, and Lien-hua and Amber were talking in Amber’s bedroom, so Tessa quietly followed Patrick through the vacant living room to the fireplace.
He bent to deposit his logs. “I’m just saying, I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“You think I’m being too hard on myself.”
“Yes.”
“For killing someone?”
“I was the one who shot that man, Tessa. I was-”
“Don’t do this, Patrick.” She set her branches down and helped him unload his wood onto the pile that was already waiting by the fireplace. “I told you before I’m the one who pulled the trigger of the-”
“Tessa, he turned the gun on himself. He knew it was over for him. He knew he would spend the rest of his life in prison. So he-”
“Tried to put me into another kind of prison. So you’ve said.” She let out a sigh. “Forget it.”
“No, wait-”
“I said forget it. It doesn’t matter.” She gave him back his flashlight. “Is that gonna be enough wood?”