He stamped the snow off his boots. “Well,” he said ambiguously, then headed for the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”
“Naw.”
“Can’t drink while you’re on duty?”
“Something like that.”
He went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s for himself, screwed open the top.
Absently, I picked up one of his ice-fishing poles. “Has it been a good year out on the ice?”
“Hasn’t been bad.” He watched me. “Oughta take you out before you leave. I know all the best spots in the area.”
“I’m afraid ice fishing’s never really been my thing.”
“It’s warm in the shanty. We have lawn chairs in there. A heater. Wieners. Some beer. Unless after what happened in the river… I mean, if you need to stay off the ice for a while.”
I gave him a halfhearted smile. “I appreciate that. When things settle down with this case, I’ll have to give it a shot.” I leaned the pole against the wall again.
A small pool of silence.
The more we fumbled around in the quagmire of small talk, the more painfully obvious the shallowness of our relationship was.
I decided to just go for it.
“Sean, remember how things used to be between us?”
He took a long draught of his beer. “How do you mean?”
“When we were kids.”
“When we were kids.”
“Yeah. We’d go fishing with Dad all the time. Never seemed to catch much, but-”
“I remember.”
“Trolled around the lake a lot.”
“Lake Windemere.”
“Yeah. We got to know that shoreline really well.”
“I remember.”
“I think the last time we went fishing together was that autumn before the accident.”
He regarded me for a moment. “The accident.”
“On New Year’s Eve.”
“I know which accident you meant.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No.” He took another drink. “Don’t be.”
“I mean, I’m sorry for the way things were after that. Between us.”
“The way things were?”
“The way they are.”
He lowered his beer, assessed me coolly. “Is that what you came out here to do? Go through that again? That night she died?”
“We’ve never really gone through it, Sean. Never really talked about-”
“Right. Okay.” He moved toward the door. “Hey, what do you say we head inside, see how the women are getting along?”
“Sean, I’m saying I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. About the deer. I know it hurt things between us.”
For a moment I thought he might just walk away, but then he faced me and I searched his dark eyes for understanding, for some kind of reprieve, but it didn’t come and I wondered if maybe our relationship was scarred in a way that would never heal. “I made things worse,” I said.
“No.”
“Yes,” I protested. “I did.”
“It was me.”
I shook my head. “I should have-”
“No.” He cut me off forcefully. “It was me. If we’d left that party earlier, if I’d let you drive, she never would have died. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“You can’t blame yourself.” I saw his hand tighten around the bottle. “It was an accident. You swerved to miss that-”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I do understand. You-”
“There was no deer that night.”
“What?”
He shifted his weight. “There was no deer.”
“The ice? Is that what you’re-”
All at once he turned from me and launched the beer bottle across the garage. It spun wickedly through the air, leaving a spray of suds in its wake until it smacked into the wall, sending an explosion of beer and glass splattering across the concrete.
The random movement above us in the living room stopped, and a moment later I heard purposeful footfalls moving across the room toward the stairs that led to the garage.
“I had too much to drink.” Sean was staring in the general direction of the shattered beer bottle, but he seemed to be looking beyond it to another place. “I had… I shouldn’t have been drinking.”
Footsteps on the stairs.
“You just had two. That’s not-”
“It was more than two. It was a lot more than two.”
Every time he reiterated his guilt, the words struck me harder. In many states there’s no statute of limitations on reckless vehicular homicide. If he really had been drunk that night, he could be The door to the stairs swung open, and Amber appeared. She peered at the foamy trail of beer extending the length of the garage, saw the smashed bottle, then fixed her gaze on Sean. Rather than asking what happened, she just shook her head slowly and then turned toward the stairs again.
“Wait,” he called.
“No. I’m tired of your-”
“Amber, just give me-”
“No!” There was razor wire in her voice and I couldn’t help but think of what she’d told me last night about her and Sean having their ups and downs. I could see this quickly moving into a major down.
“Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.” Sean started after her, and I followed to see if I could defuse things before they spiraled off any further in the wrong direction.
76
“It was my fault, Amber,” I said, entering the living room. “I brought up something that-”
“No, Pat.” She was standing across the room from Sean and me, fiercely rooted beside Lien-hua. “You didn’t lose your temper. Sean did. You didn’t throw a beer bottle against the wall. Sean did. And this was not the first time.”
“Okay, but the reason he was angry was-”
“Do you know what it’s like being afraid of the person you’re supposed to feel safest being around?” The words blistered through the air, and no one moved. Immediately, I knew that this was not the right time for Amber to be confronting Sean like this, not when he was already so upset thinking about his culpability in Mrs. Everson’s death.
Still, the idea that Amber feared for her safety around my brother struck me deeply.
That’s why she’s leaving him. That’s why “You’re afraid of me?” Sean asked her. “Since when are you afraid of me?”
“You’ll have to forgive us,” Amber said to Lien-hua. There was a tremor in her voice. “Sean and I… we’ve had some… rough times. Lately.”
Sean repeated more forcefully, “Since when are you afraid of me?”
There was no hesitation in her reply, no holding back: “Since drinking became more important to you than spending time with me.” Even though her words were on fire, her eyes were beginning to glisten.
“Oh. Really.”
“Listen-” I began.
Amber looked at me. “He needs to know.”
No, please don’t…
“I need to know what?” Sean exclaimed.
“Back when you and I were engaged, when I first met Patrick. We-”
Lien-hua put an arm out toward Amber. “Maybe we can find a better time to-”
“We were in love,” Amber said softly but firmly. “We fell in love.”
Oh, not good, not good at all.
Lien-hua lowered her arm.
“What?” Sean looked from me to Amber to me. “What do you mean you fell in love?”
“It’s not what you think, Sean,” I said.
“Really?” He glared at me. “Then why did my wife just say the two of you were in love?”
“We talked,” Amber tried to explain. “But it was never-”
Ignoring her, Sean fired another question at me. “Did you sleep with her, Pat?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“We talked and-”
“Talked. You talked. Well, were you in bed while you were talking? Were you holding her, hugging her, kissing her? Did-”
“That’s enough,” Lien-hua stepped in. “Let’s just-”
“We did,” I confessed to Sean. “Kiss. Twice. Yes. While you were engaged.”
“You son of a-”
My phone rang.
“We never slept together,” Amber reiterated.
“I’m speaking to Pat,” he said gruffly.
For the moment I ignored the phone and came to her defense. “Don’t take it out on her.” Lien-hua gave me a cautionary look: Standing up for Amber at a time like this is not going to help things!