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Once we arrive at Dylan’s we find Jake and Vaude huddled together in front of the fireplace where a hearty blaze licks up around the logs. The house is completely dark, except the glow cast by the fire. The sleet has snapped a power line somewhere, and it vaguely occurs to me that it was a very dark ride to their front door. What a horrible day.
Vaude leaps to her feet and comes to draw me into a motherly hug. I love her. She is so kind and good, even if she does think I’m trash. I let her fold around me, and I rest my cheeks on her chest. I accept her charity, but only for tonight—on such a horrible night a little charity is a good thing. Her chin on my head, “Darling,” she says, and I fear I will completely come apart. She smells of the cold and of the smoke from the logs before it drew out of the flue. She is warm and strong and reassuring. My anger begins to ebb in her arms. It held me rigid all the way back to their house, in the silent car, where Dylan drove slow and cautious, still keeping half an eye trained on me, waiting for me to melt. I held it together; I always hold it together . . . until this mother, this wonderful, kind, loving version of mother holds me, and I am sucking for breath, and my body ratchets against her. We fold together onto the floor, and she rocks me. Dylan at my back touching my shoulder, so unsure of what to do, how to help. I sob. I sob as I don’t believe I have ever sobbed before. I try to speak but only wail in my agony. She killed her. That nice young man’s somebody special. That good woman who was full of light and hope.
Vaude rocks with me until I am cried out, exhausted, my face slick with tears and snot. I drag my sleeve under my nose and over my eyes. Vaude keeps her arm around me, and I become aware that she is talking, low and quiet.
“She killed her,” I say, and my stomach jerks and my body convulses again. “Oh Vaude. She killed his somebody. Oh God.” I gasp and draw myself up to look at her in the flickering firelight. We are alone, I realize. Jake and Dylan have left the room. In the firelight I see the flickering trails of her own tears. Her own sadness in her life that she holds close to her heart. He had killed someone, too—Jake had. He killed Vaude’s somebody, her son, her eldest son. How has she not been poisoned against him? How has she not murdered him in his sleep? She is a better person than I am. Because that’s what I want to do. That’s what kept me silent all the way from the hospital. Planning her end. A pillow over her snorting, snoring, drink-addled head. A knife slid between her ribs and into her heart. A carefully placed burning cigarette in her bed while she is incoherent. It would be so easy. So easy to rid the world of this horrible excuse for humanity. The knife wouldn’t be easy; I remove it from my list. But the others are simply accidents waiting to happen. It is amazing that it hasn’t happened already. How I wish it had, a million times over, before she killed this somebody. Even if it had taken me, too, that would be better than this. It’s not like I’m doing such great things in the world myself. Trash. Dirty. Whore.
Vaude strokes my hair, and I lean slightly into her shoulder. “I wish she was dead. It should have been her. Instead of that woman.” I am haunted by the young man from the hospital, the way he never once looked at me. The way he crumpled to the floor, completely void of strength when the priest came for him. I am devastated by him. Where did he go afterward? I hope he is not alone.
Jake pokes his head in the door, and I feel Vaude nod, and the two of them come quietly into the room. Jake offers us both a hand up, and we come stiffly off the floor to settle around the fire. Vaude sits on the arm of Jake’s chair, and he rests his hand on her thigh, leaving the small sofa for Dylan and me. He draws me close to him. Tucking a blanket over my legs, which are folded beneath me. I lean into him. Exhausted from the events of the day. We sit, the four of us, staring into the fire, each lost in our own thoughts.
Surely this is rock bottom. Surely it can’t get any worse than this.
Sometime later I wake and find that I am alone on the sofa, stretched out, tucked neatly under blankets with my head on a pillow. The fire has burnt down, and only embers and one charred log continue to flicker. I lift my head and look around the room. Dylan is sleeping in the recliner, his feet up, his face turned toward me. The memory of the night, the memory of all that happened since the knocking on the trailer door floods back, and I draw in on myself, shuddering. I am drained of emotion and drift back into a stupor with the embers glowing in the crease of my eyelids.
***
The storm blows itself out through the night, and we wake to a world that is crystalline. Thick, clear ice coats the fence lines and blades of grass alike. I walk alongside Dylan as we slip and slide our way to the barn to check on the horses. The entire barn is coated in ice, and I’m impressed that Dylan came prepared with a hammer to crack the ice from around the door. Once inside we are welcomed by nickers and snorts and the warm smell of horses huddled together. We mix their corn and oats and give them each a quick nuzzle before leaving them to snooze the day away in their darkened barn.
I keep feeling Dylan’s eyes on me, and I know he is worried. I accidentally bounce into him as we get back out into the cold. He slides and teeters but holds his footing, and I burst out laughing. He smiles and settles next to me again. “Thanks for coming yesterday,” I say as we walk along the drive back to the house.
“Of course.” He drops his arm over my shoulder. The sky is still dark with heavy clouds, but they are beginning to break open, and sun sparkles across the ice covering the encapsulated buds on the trees, teardrops at the edge of a lash. There is no place to go today, and no way to get there if there were.