Everything You Are(92)

“What brings you out?” he asks, at a loss for what to say to this woman he barely knows.

“Same as you, I imagine. Couldn’t sleep. Too much emotional processing. I heard you moving around, thought I’d see what you were up to.”

“Just sitting here. Thinking. Not remembering.” He gets up and adds wood to the fire, sending crackling sparks up into the darkness.

“This is not the typical intervention adventure,” Jean says, her voice so quiet Braden needs to strain his ears to hear her. “Usually it’s more celebration and party. Phee didn’t tell us we’d be dragging you through the dirt.”

“Have you had an intervention?”

She shakes her head. “It’s rare with the Angels. Phee, once, not long after we started. Katie, a couple of times. You know about Dennis. And now you.”

Braden thinks about Phee relapsing, replays the story she told him about the violinist and the old man, that she blames herself for what happened to both of them.

“You’ve remembered something,” she says, scrutinizing his face.

“Written in flaming letters on my forehead?”

“Not like that. More like . . . you seem more solid. Like a piece of you came back.”

“It’s not a good piece,” he says, poking at the fire with a stick. “My memories are going to hurt people.”

“Whatever happened already happened,” she says. “So the harm is already done.”

“And if what I remember hurts them more? Things they don’t need to know, for example.”

“I think you need to trust that people are strong enough to carry the truth.”

“Seems like maybe it would be better to keep my mouth shut.”

“As your own private punishment? In which case, sooner or later, you’ll go back to drinking. I’m a bit psychic.” She glances up at him, measuring the impact of her words, then returns her gaze to the fire. “It left me wide open to people’s emotions when I was younger. I didn’t know how to shield myself. I didn’t believe what I’m telling you now, that people have to carry their own burdens, that they’re responsible for their own emotional journeys. I sank under the weight of it all. And so I started drinking.”

“But you joined the Angels, and now you give people adventures and everything is hunky-dory.” He regrets the bitterness in his voice, knowing she’s only trying to help.

“Not quite so easy as all that. I drank because of other people’s pain, or at least that was my excuse. And then I drove drunk and crashed my car and somebody died.”

Braden, even though he’s warm in the circle of the fire, shivers with the impact of what she’s telling him. Her eyes meet his now, and she holds him with her gaze. “I did prison time. But being locked up wasn’t justice for taking a life. So a month after I was incarcerated, I tried to kill myself. I failed. When I woke up in the hospital, I realized that wasn’t justice, either. It didn’t bring the woman back to her family. No possible form of punishing myself was going to make the world better for anybody.

“I came to believe that the only true recompense is to give to the world whatever I have to give. To live every minute enough for the two of us, myself and the woman whose life I stole. This is how I choose to repay her.”

Braden takes this in but says nothing.

“This thing you’ve blocked out of your memory—maybe you’re not the one who gets to say whether it will heal or hurt.”

“Doesn’t appear I have any control over it, want to or not,” he says.

For a while both of them just sit, staring into the fire, then Jean stretches and gets to her feet. “I’m too old for all-nighters. I’m going to try for a couple of hours of sleep. Go easy on yourself.”

He watches her walk away, turns back to the fire, and continues to ask himself the question he still can’t answer.

Do I really want to remember?

He hadn’t wanted to hear whatever Mitch had to tell him, all the way back then. Doesn’t want to hear it now, but he takes a breath, pokes at the fire, hears his memory self, seated behind the cello in the long-ago cabin, say to Mitch:

“Whatever it is, spit it out.”

And Mitch squares his shoulders and turns to face him. “Suit yourself. It’s about Lilian. I’d suggest you sit down, but you already are. So. Here goes. Lil and I . . . we’re having an affair.”

The words make no sense. Not Lilian. Not this.

“Look, man, I know it’s gotta be hard to hear. But I’m sick of sneaking around behind everybody’s backs. I told her we needed to have it out—”

“Do you mean had an affair?” Braden interrupts. “Past tense.” He can’t work out the logistics. It’s been years since all of them have been together; Lilian never comes out to Colville if she can avoid it.

Mitch shakes his head. “We Skype almost every day. Meet for a week together twice a year.”

Braden’s fingers tighten around the neck of the cello as the words sink in. The separate vacations. The continued education trainings Lil goes to for her nursing license, always somewhere out of town.

Still, he can’t believe it. He pictures her kneeling by their bed every night to pray. Reading her Bible, going to church.

“She wouldn’t.” But even as he says it, he feels the cold certainty of the truth.