I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(17)

“Like in Alice in Wonderland?”

“But faster. I keep looking around and thinking, ‘How in the world did I get here?’”

“How did you? Would you like to tell me?”

I looked into Edith’s dark brown eyes. In her old face, tan and pink-cheeked but crosshatched with wrinkles, her eyes were like her voice, young and crystal clear. Also sharp. Also kind.

“You know what? I would. I haven’t told the complete and unedited story to anyone, not even my mother or Cornelia, but I would really like to tell you.”

“Good. No editing allowed. Full speed ahead.”

“Okay, then. It began with Zach’s father’s dying. I don’t mean it began when his father died, but as he was dying, at his deathbed, I guess it was, although we didn’t actually spend much time in his father’s room. They had a hospice worker do the true watching over. Zach didn’t want to and said his father—who was very much out of it by the time we arrived—would have considered it an intrusion, for us to sit next to his bed and physically watch him die. Since Zach had previously told me that his father also considered hugs and text messages an intrusion, I believed it. So maybe this wasn’t technically a deathbed vigil, but it was a vigil. God, was it ever. The entire family was there. Zach. His brother, Ian. Awful Uncle Lloyd and the horrible cousins Zach loathes. I was the only woman, and everyone seemed to expect me to make food, so I did, and I was so grateful to have something to do with myself that I couldn’t even resent it properly. We waited. We kept watch, day and night. Mr. Barfield had chosen to die at their family’s lake house in Northern Michigan, and even though Zach said it was beautiful there most of the year, in February, it was just plain bleak. Freezing. And not just the weather outside the house, but inside, too. Inside was worse. I expected sadness, maybe regret, because surely the Barfield men are the type to leave the important things unsaid, but instead, everyone seemed angry. Stone-faced and sarcastic and perpetually on the edge of exploding.”

“Maybe they resented having to feel emotions they weren’t accustomed to,” said Edith.

I glanced up at her, startled. “You might be right. That’s a more generous take than my own. I thought they just resented not being in control, which doesn’t happen to them very often. Ian kept shooting out his arm and glaring at his watch like he was waiting for a train and it was late.”

“Death. So inconsiderate.”

“Exactly. But I don’t think death was the only thing they were waiting for.”

“What else?”

I remembered the way they’d all jump when the landline rang or a car drove by—its tires crunching through the gravel of the country road, its headlights sweeping an arc across the oak-paneled walls. The way they would afterward seem angrier than ever.

“Zach’s sister, Ro, disappeared from that house when she was eighteen and he was a little boy. As strange as it sounds, I think all of them were each, in his own way, waiting for her to show up.”

“She didn’t.”

“No.”

“And Zach? Was he angry, too?”

I hung my head and nodded. “He behaved just like the rest of them. I hardly recognized him. And for the five days we were there, it was like he didn’t recognize me, either.”

“I’ve heard that happens with families. You think you’ve changed and then you go home and fall back into the same old roles. But that must have been hard for you.”

“It was terrible. It got so I couldn’t stand to touch him. I felt really bad about that. It’s awful, isn’t it? To shudder at the thought of touching your boyfriend?”

“No.”

“I hated every second of being there. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called the airlines, changed my flight, called a cab to take me to the airport, had my bag packed, all before I told Zach I was going. Which was unfair of me. Thoughtless. I should’ve told him.”

“Changing your plans sounds like an act of self-preservation. Maybe you thought he would say no.”

“Usually, he tries so hard to be nice, to be everything the rest of his family isn’t. But he wasn’t himself up at the lake house.”

“What happened next?”

What happened next was the part of the story I had never told, the part I’d tried to stop telling even myself.



The lake house was a big, fancy house pretending, with its log walls and goofy, creepy antler chandeliers, plaid furniture, wood-burning stoves, and floors of worn flagstone or pine boards, to be a humble one. But as big as it was, the Barfield men seemed to fill every room. Slamming a book shut here, pounding away at a laptop there, arguing about money and politics (even though they all seemed to be in agreement about such topics), cursing the spotty Wi-Fi, the whine of the wind outside, the paucity of channels on the television. They paced the floors with their heavy feet (they never took their shoes off to the point that I wondered if they slept in them). And even though they barely took notice of me, I grew to dread running into them. When I looked up from studying to find one of them in the room, the hair on the back of my neck bristled. When one unexpectedly spoke to me, I flinched.

So after I’d made all the arrangements for my early departure, I didn’t have the energy to go out into the house and risk bumping into a Barfield. Instead, I sat on the bed I supposedly shared with Zach—even though when it came to sleeping in it, the most we did was overlap by an hour or two, which was fine by me—with my coat on and my bags at my feet and my heart in my throat, and waited for my ride.