The Familiar Dark(24)
And sure enough, his truck was parked in the woods where the trail to his fishing spot began. I sighed, pulling my hair back into a ponytail and yanking down the sleeves of my shirt before I followed him in. By the time I arrived—a twenty-minute trek that felt more like an hour—the sun was high in the sky and sweat was making a slow descent down my back. At least it was still only spring, the summer’s relentless heat only a whisper on the warming wind.
“Hey,” I said, stepping out onto the flat rock where Cal sat perched over the water, fishing rod extended into the creek. I could see three fish already resting in his ice-filled cooler.
“Hey,” Cal said without turning around. “I heard you about ten minutes ago. Always know it’s you when it sounds like a herd of elephants is tramping through the woods. You would make a crap spy.”
“Yeah, well, spy’s never been high on my career list.” I lowered myself down next to him, shoving my sleeves up and swiping a hand across the back of my sweaty neck. “How long you been out here?”
Cal shrugged. “Not too long.” He looked as terrible as I felt, dark smudges under his eyes and his eyelids puffy from recent tears I knew he’d deny shedding. “I needed a day where no one was looking at me, waiting for me to crack, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Cal adjusted his hold on the rod, reeled in the line a little. The sunlight made his hair glow gold, his eyelashes making hazy shadows on his cheeks. “Land told me about Hallie and her mom,” he said.
I sighed, tipped my face up to the sun and let it paint patterns on my closed eyelids. It felt like warm thumbs pressing against my skin, and the sensation brought the sting of tears. I opened my eyes and turned my face away. “What? Are you and Land tag-teaming me now?” I asked. “I’m guessing you’re playing good cop because God knows Land always plays the bad one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled.
Cal laid a hand on my arm, tugging slightly until I turned and looked at him. “I’m not trying to ambush you or tag-team you or whatever. I was worried when Land told me. You can’t go off half-cocked, Evie, confronting everyone who—”
I jerked my arm away from him. “I already got the lecture, but thanks.”
“Jesus, would you listen to me for one goddamn second? I’m not going to lecture you. I’m trying to apologize.”
That stopped me. “For what?”
Cal ran a hand through his hair. “For not telling you about Izzy. I promised Junie I wouldn’t.” He raised his hand in my direction when I opened my mouth to speak. “But I would have, eventually. I wanted to figure out exactly what was going on first. And help Junie see that it would be better if you knew. And Izzy’s parents, too.”
I slumped, all the fight gone out of me. I liked it better when anger was sluicing through my blood. Rage blotted out everything else. “I thought Junie told me everything. Why would she want to keep that a secret from me?”
Cal paused, and I knew he was doing that thing where he weighed how much to say. Cal was always careful that way, wanting to make sure he got the words just right before he released them. He reached over and tapped the ball of my shoulder with one finger. “You have kind of a big chip right here when it comes to the Logans. Junie wasn’t blind to it, you know. She probably didn’t want to give you any reason to cut off her friendship with Izzy.”
Welcome heat blazed up my spine, and I twisted away from him. “What are you talking about? I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about the Logans. I don’t even know them!”
Cal raised his eyebrows at me. “No, but you know the idea of them. Nice little ranch house, two cars, married, maybe some money in the bank.” I stared at him blankly, and he sighed, leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, fishing rod almost touching his forehead. “Come on, Evie, you know what I’m saying. They’re the total opposite of how we grew up. Pretty much picture-perfect compared to our disaster.”
I crossed my arms and tucked my elbows in. A shield made of limbs. “The total opposite of how Junie grew up, too, is that what you’re saying?”
“See?” Cal said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about with the chip. I wasn’t even thinking about you and Junie, and your mind automatically goes there, comparing, and always assuming you’d come up short.”
“I did come up short,” I said. “My daughter is dead.”
“Yeah, well,” Cal said after a pause, “so is theirs.”
I didn’t want to have this conversation, to be reminded the Logans had suffered a loss equal to mine. I pointed at Cal’s line. “I think you’ve got something.”
He reeled the fish in with practiced ease, slid the hook from its gaping mouth, and set it next to the others in the cooler. I’d grown up killing things, threading wiggling worms onto barbed hooks, slitting open the stomachs of still gasping fish, pulling steaming guts from barely dead deer, twisting a chicken’s neck with my bare hands. It had never bothered me before. Animals were food, and food wasn’t always easy to come by. Squeamish meant hungry, and there wasn’t much worse than hungry. But today I had to turn away from the sight of that fish, its mouth still opening and closing as it lay on top of the ice. Had to put my hands under my thighs to resist the urge to throw it back into the water, to give it one more chance to live.