We Begin at the End(17)

“Good to know.”

She turned and slowly rode back, away from him, toward home.

When she reached her street she saw the car, the hood so long it jutted from their driveway. Darke was back again.

She pedaled hard and dropped her bike to the grass, frantic, she should not have gone. She moved down the side of the house and then into the door by the kitchen, quiet, sweat rolling down her spine. She took the phone from the cradle on the wall. And then she heard it, laughing, her mother’s laugh.

She watched from shadows they could not see. A bottle on the coffee table, half gone, a cluster of red flowers, the kind they sold at the gas station on Pensacola.

She left them and stepped out into the yard, climbed back through the window and checked their bedroom door was still locked. She peeled off her shorts, kissed Robin’s head, then opened the drapes and lay at the foot of his bed. She would not sleep till the giant man was gone.





7


“TELL ME ABOUT THE GIRL,” Vincent said.

They sat at the back of the old church. Through the window was the cemetery and beyond that the ocean, each given stained colors. They’d stopped by Sissy’s grave, Walk leaving his friend alone for a while. Vincent had brought flowers, dropped to his knees and read the stone. He stayed there an hour, till Walk came and gently rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Duchess, she’s older than she should be, you know.” Walk guessed he knew better than most.

“And Robin?”

“She looks out for him. Duchess does what her mother should.”

“The father?”

Walk looked at the old benches, painted white, droplets had made it to the stone floor. The roof was high and arched and intricately knotted, the kind of beautiful that impelled vacationers to take photographs and pack the place out every Sunday.

“Nothing in it, both times. She was seeing a couple guys back then, she was out a lot, I’d see her come back in the morning.”

“Walk of shame.”

“There wasn’t shame in it. You ever know Star to care?”

“I’m not sure I know Star at all.”

“You do. She’s the same girl you took to junior prom.”

“I wrote Hal. Her father.”

“Did he write back?”

“He did.”

Ten minutes passed, Walk wondering but not wanting to know. Star’s father was hard. He had acres in Montana, the Cape too painful even to visit. He had not met his grandchildren.

“At first he told me to kill myself.”

Walk looked at the sainted wall, the depictions of judgment, and forgiveness.

“I might’ve done it. Then he changed his mind. Death was too good. He sent me a photo of her.” Vincent swallowed. “Sissy.”

Walk closed his eyes as the sun cut through and found the pulpit.

“You been into town yet?”

“I don’t know this place anymore.”

“You will know it again.”

“I had to go into Jennings to pick up some paint. I saw Ernie owns the place now.”

“Did he give you a hard time? I can talk to him.” Ernie had been one of the walkers that night. He’d been the first to see Walk raise his hand, the first to run back over then stop dead at the scene, double over and retch at the sight of the little girl.

They stood together and walked out, through the green grass and over the leaning gravestones. At the cliff edge they watched water break over jagged rock two hundred feet below.

Walk felt dizzy at the sight. “I think about it often. How we were. I see the Cape Haven kids, like Duchess, and I think of me and you and Star and Martha. Star said to me some days she still feels fifteen. We can get together, the three of us. In time, we can get things back. It was simpler, right. It was—”

“Listen, Walk. What you think you know, or might know, about what happened over the years. Whatever I was, I’m not now.”

“How come you didn’t let me visit, after your mother?”

Vincent kept his eyes on the scene, like he hadn’t heard. “He wrote me, Hal. Every year. On Sissy’s birthday.”

“You shouldn’t—”

“Sometimes it was short, to remind me, like I needed it. Other times he went on for ten pages. It wasn’t all anger, some was on change, what I could do, how I could let others live their lives and not pull them down.”

Walk got it then, it was not self-preservation of any kind, the way he’d reasoned it.

“If you can’t right a wrong, if you can’t ever do that …”

Together they watched a trawler, The Sun Drift, Walk knew it, blue paint and rust, curved lines of steel and wire. It moved silent from where they were, no waves just the carve of its hull.

“Some things just are, right. There’s a reason, always, but talk won’t change any of it.”

There was much Walk wanted to ask about the last thirty years of his friend’s life, but the scars on Vincent’s wrists told him it might well be worse than he could ever have imagined.

They walked back toward town in silence, Vincent keeping to the side streets, head down, always. “Star,” he said. “She saw a lot of guys then?”

Walk shrugged, and, for a moment, thought he had heard the slightest note of jealousy in Vincent’s voice.