Splintered Silence

I looked at the floor and rubbed my fingers over my scar. “Gran said you came to see me.”

“I did.” He stepped closer, and as I raised my face, his eyes filled with concern as he took in my swollen nose, bruises, and blackened eyes. He gasped. “Are you okay?”

I brushed my hair forward, hating that he was seeing me this way. “It looks worse than it is.”

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “Can we go somewhere private?”

I motioned him through the front room and kitchen and out to the back steps. Wilco followed. “We can sit here.”

He yanked up his coat collar and sat down on the steps. I sat on the same step. Wilco inserted himself between us. The yellow porch light cast shadows of our three hunkered forms.

We sat in awkward silence for a few seconds, until I blurted, “If this is about the other day . . . I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

His eyes met mine. “No, you’re right. It won’t happen again.”

I swallowed hard and looked away. Wilco leaned into me. I wrapped my arm around his back and dug my fingers into his fur. Down a ways, a neighbor revved his bike’s engine, eliciting a full-out bark fest from all the neighbors’ dogs. Wilco didn’t even flinch.

“This isn’t about us, Brynn. It has to do with your mother.” Colm hesitated. I waited. “I told you that Father Don had become agitated when that letter arrived from your mother.”

“Yes. But you said that he’s not well. My grandfather’s the same way. He’s confused all the time. And has a temper. Sometimes he’s uncontrollable.” Again, I thought about those scratches on Gran’s arm. I’d assumed they’d been inflicted by Gramps. Now I knew otherwise.

“Watching our loved ones suffer is a difficult cross to bear.” He looked out over the backyard. He still held the folded paper between his fingers. “Father Don remembered something today. A package that your mother left in his care a long time ago. I wanted to talk to you about it before the police tell you.”

“The police?”

“Yes. I called them right away.” He handed me the paper. I held it up to the porch light. The handwriting was large and loopy, feminine. I looked at the signature. “My mother wrote this.”

“It’s a photocopy of the one included in the package Father Donavan was holding in his room. The box contained the video surveillance tapes from a robbery that took place years ago.”

I looked up from the paper. “The drugstore owner was killed in that robbery.”

“That’s right. It’s a confession. Your mother and her boyfriend, Billy Drake, and another man—”

“Hank Styles.”

Colm squinted. “You already knew?”

I looked back at the papers. Two long pages, front and back, and the photocopy quality was poor. I couldn’t read it fast enough. “No. Not all of it. Tell me. What do these say?”

“According to your mother, Styles worked at the drugstore. He had a key and would go in at night, take some pills, and change the numbers in the books. Then they’d sell the pills to local kids.”

Even back then, he was a drug dealer. Then again, so was my mother.

Colm was still talking. “In the letter, your mother admits that she and Billy Drake were in on the drug dealing.”

“I’m sure she was desperate for money. Her situation was impossible. A single mother, no support from home, no education, no way out.” Excuses, Brynn. Excuses.

“Styles had taken to carrying a gun. He thought it made him look tough and came in handy when kids tried to stiff him for money. He was carrying it that night when the three of them keyed into the drugstore for more pills to sell. They didn’t realize the owner was in the backroom. He caught them in the act. Threatened to call the cops. Styles panicked and shot him. They tossed the place and cleaned out the cash to make it look like a robbery.”

“The surveillance tapes?”

“Styles knew about the security cameras. He took the tapes and told Billy to destroy them.”

“I don’t understand. Why’d Billy keep them?”

“I think that was your mother’s doing.” Colm leaned forward. “Prior to this crime, when she first got pregnant, your mother was scared. I mean, a Pavee girl, pregnant out of wedlock. And by a boy outside the clan.”

“I can imagine she was terrified.” A shiver hit me. That could have been me—pregnant with Colm’s child, abandoned and alone. What would I have done?

I saw Colm swallow. Hard. Were the same thoughts in his mind as well?

He continued. “Father Donavan seemed to remember your mother quite well. I think she’d been coming by the church to visit with him for some time. Confiding in him. The details are mixed up in his mind, but he did mention a baby. I think he was trying to help her, counsel her.” He adjusted his collar again. “I’m just assuming that last part, of course. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. But he remembers that she was concerned about you.”

I blinked back the tears forming along the edges of my eyes.

Colm continued, “She explains in the letter that Styles went after Billy, and she was worried that he’d come after her too. And her family. She couldn’t confide in your grandparents because she knew it would endanger them.”

“And she couldn’t trust the law.”

“No. The letter talks about how afraid she was of the law. The prejudices the Pavees faced at that time from the settled folks.”

“Still do.”

Colm frowned. “She feared what she’d done would affect the whole clan. Especially your grandparents.”

“She must have felt desperate.”

“Yes. Disappearing must have seemed like her only choice. She left the tapes and the letter with Father Donavan as a safeguard, in case anything ever happened to her. So someone would know the truth.” He looked my way. “So you would know the truth. The truth about her. What she’d done.”

We sat in silence as I put the pieces together in my mind. My grandfather’s pending death prompted my mother to come home. She must have checked into the motel where I now worked and left behind the article I found in the laundry. Styles said she’d confronted him, wanted him to repent, wanted the truth out. But there was no statute of limitations on murder. And she had been the one person left who could point the finger at him. “And in the end, it was the truth that got her killed.”

“I believe so.”

“She wasn’t all bad.”

“No, Brynn. She wasn’t. She made a lot of mistakes, mistakes that she regretted, but she loved you. So much so that she left Bone Gap and everything she’d ever known to protect you. It must have been the hardest thing she’d ever done.” He reached out and ran his hand along Wilco’s back, his fingers briefly brushing against mine, then retreating.

Colm started, “If you’d like me to—”

“No.” The answer came fast, harsh. I wasn’t even sure what he offered—a blessing, prayer, confession, whatever—but it didn’t matter. “I mean, thank you for telling me, but . . . I just need some time.” He hesitated, then nodded, rose and stepped softly back up the porch, the screen door squeaking as he went inside.

Gran had made her peace with her sins: As for me, I’m right with God. Father Colm saw to that.

A confession away from peace? Not for me. Questions skittered like searing shrapnel across my tired life. And somewhere in the midst of all the pain and death and regrets and mistakes, the biggest questions lodged in my war-torn mind:

Had I misjudged my mother all these years? Or killed my own father? Alienated myself from everyone who mattered in my life . . . and all for what? What was my truth?

You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, Brynn.

My feet belonged to the settled world, even if at times prejudice tainted my path. Yet I lived in my mother’s world, the Travellers’ world, even when its loyalties battered our lives.

Wilco and I sat with our silhouettes outlined in the golden glow of the porch light. Wilco shifted, looked up at me with that quirked eyebrow he used as if questioning me or maybe trying to tell me something. I could never be sure. In the distance, a dog howled, but Wilco held me in his stare. He heard nothing, saw nothing but me.

“It’s okay, boy.”

I felt tears in my heart, but I couldn’t cry. My family loved me—my mother enough to leave me behind, my Gran enough to—

Wilco’s wet nose nudged my face. I leaned in, wrapped my arms around my dog, and buried my face in his fur. I knew where I belonged.

Right here.