Lucinda sat on the fireplace hearth enrapt by the fire; its heat crawled up the nape of her neck, yet did nothing to warm her. She needed to tell Dale about the letter, which she’d finally dared read just before heading home. Yet she wanted to soak up the news a bit herself first. Soak it up and let it be for her alone for a spell, before the good news brought conflict. It would blindside Dale and, as much as he would be pleased for her, it would uproot his life too. She had one week to accept or decline, to discuss it with Dale, even if she already knew her answer. The letter, folded and wedged in her jeans pocket, felt hot against her skin.
Now, instead of telling Dale about it, she said, “I feel awful about Jonah. He was always good to me. I’ve waffled all day about it, unable to focus. In the end, I feel awful.”
“It’s Jonah’s choice, how Jonah lives,” Dale said as he sat at his desk sipping his black coffee. How he could drink coffee in the afternoon and evenings and not be wired all night, Lucinda had no clue. He set his mug down and swung a desk-mounted magnifying glass in front of his peering eye, then, with fastidious precision glued a steering wheel to the aluminum replica car’s steering column. The car, according to its box, was a BB Korn Indianapolis 1930s Tether. Whatever that meant. It was smart and sporty, though; one of those old, silver, roofless one-seaters in which drivers wore round goggles like those worn by biplane pilots. The replica was remarkable in detail, composed of hundreds of pieces made of stainless steel, brass, leather, and real rubber tires. Dale had a dozen of the replicas on display in his tiny real estate office in the back of the house.
He turned on a swan-neck light above him, lighting his desk with the brightness of a surgery theater. He was always cautioning Lucinda against her worrying, and she braced for it now. She did not perceive herself as a “worrier.” But to Dale, any worrying at all got a person nowhere, achieved nothing. It muddled one’s thoughts instead of clarifying them. It wasn’t as though he didn’t care about Lucinda’s anxiety about Jonah. He just didn’t understand it. Her.
She wished he cared less and understood more. Caring was like worrying: What good did it do? It didn’t lessen pain, dull heartache, or salve grief. In the days after Sally had gone missing, every adult Lucinda had known told her how they cared for Lucinda, loved her, yet it had not comforted her, or brightened her; it had often darkened her. Made her feel more alone. Understanding, that was the more important of the two. It was what men missed in the equation, understanding. And listening. If they could only manage these two easy concepts. Mr. B., Jonah, he understood. That morning he’d followed her to the pit, helped her out of it, and sat beside her in the snow, he’d cared. Of course. Yet more importantly, he had understood. It had eased Lucinda’s heartache, if only in that moment.
Lucinda still wondered on occasion about the man in the woods, who he was and what had become of him. Had he been just a hunter or hiker, or had there been something more nefarious about his presence in the woods? Instead of diluting her memory, the years had intensified Lucinda’s clarity and certainty, that what she’d seen were a man’s boots, and that the way they had crept through the woods, the owner of them had been looking for Sally and Lucinda, or, at least, Sally.
Sally, a voice said.
“Christ,” Lucinda said.
Dale looked up from his work. “What?” he said.
That’s why Jonah had been so deeply wounded. Today marked twenty-five years to the day of Sally vanishing. With plans of remodeling the store consuming her attention, Lucinda had lost track of the days, the date, until now. Lucinda had shunned Jonah on his very worst of days. Guilt rode her, not just for how she’d treated Jonah, but for forgetting the day. I’ll never ever forget her. Ever. That’s what she’d promised the day she’d taken Jonah to the pit to look for Sally.
“If you’d seen him at the store,” Lucinda said, not wanting to broach the anniversary with Dale.
“It’s Jonah’s choice,” Dale said again.
“Still.”
“There’s no still.” Dale scrutinized the mounted steering wheel through the magnifying glass, grumbled. Tweaked the steering wheel.
“Still,” Lucinda said again.
Dale smiled. His state of Zen appealed to Lucinda most days, though at times, as now, it grated her. She wished he could just let her be upset. What her friends labeled in Dale as calm and centered, mature, Lucinda saw as impatient with her emotions. He seemed to always counter her with the other side of the coin, the positive side. He seemed at times to goad her into being argumentative by trying to bring her back to center when she did not want to be centered. She wanted to feel her anger, or sorrow or guilt, or whatever else she wanted to feel.
“You’re not responsible for Jonah,” he said.
“He’s been through so much. You don’t know.”
“That was a lifetime ago.”
“His lifetime. It’s still his life. It’s in him. In me. As if time has not passed. Sally and I. We were like—”
Dale stood and sat beside her on the hearth, put his arm around her shoulder. She slipped her hand in her pocket and felt the letter with her fingers. “I should just shut up sometimes,” Dale said.
She leaned into him. “I feel hard,” she said. “I never wanted to be a hard person. It doesn’t wear well on me. I need to get up there and find his cabin and apologize.” She wondered what had happened to the girl she’d been, the one who’d felt sorry for no longer using a tire swing, or who tried her best not to fib. Here she was in a single day shaming Jonah, faulting Dale for being patient and level, and clutching a letter in her pocket that could change her life, Dale’s life, yet she remained mute about it. A lie of omission. A fib.
Lucinda slipped out from under Dale’s arm and stood, grabbed a bottle of wine from the mantel and poured wine into a glass.
She wandered to Dale’s desk and admired his handiwork. His dedication to this precise work reminded her of her father’s birdhouse hobby, too, the hours he’d labored in the basement designing new models for varied species of birds, tinkered and perfected, or tried to perfect. Having something to focus on had been his own balm for whatever regret churned in him after the disappearances, and after her mother’s unexpected death not even two years later. She supposed now her father’s failing health had one silver lining: he was too busy dying to worry anymore about a case that had ruined his dearest friendship and had haunted him all these years as the case he failed to solve. If Lucinda were honest, her father had been slowly dying ever since it had become clear he’d never arrest anyone for the crime and had not done enough to clear his friend’s name and end the suspicion Jonah endured to this day and, it seemed, would follow him to his death, perhaps beyond.
The meticulous care and steadfast patience it took to piece together the replica of the car was not unlike what it took to reconstruct artifacts, or a skeleton from an excavation site, Lucinda imagined. Except with artifacts and bones there was no picture on a box and no diagram to guide you on how the pieces fit and what the object or skeleton looked like. And you would almost never have all the pieces, the work would almost always remain unfinished.
Lucinda sat on the couch with a sigh.
Dale sat beside her.
“It’ll be all right,” he said.
“You always think everything’s going to be all right.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Why not?” He put his hand on her shoulder.
“The world doesn’t work that way. ”
“Who says?”
Sally says, Lucinda thought and remembered being outside Sally’s bedroom door the night Sally had disappeared, thinking, swearing, Sally had made a noise behind the door just before Lucinda had opened it, only to find Sally was not there.
“Why so quiet?” Dale said. “What’d I say?”
“It’s not you.” It’s the date, and Jonah, and the demands of the store, and the letter, she thought. The letter. Dale was right; perhaps some things did work out. Just not everything. Or the ones you wished for most.
She downed her wine, her mind troubled, emotions flayed. The letter seared the flesh of her thigh from inside her pocket, branded her.
“I think I’ll hit it.”
“It’s early.”
“I’m sapped,” Lucinda said, exhausted from the afternoon, yet knowing she’d not sleep all night.