Ginger's Heart (a modern fairytale) (30 page)

She got to her feet and tugged his hand until he stood up beside her. Without looking at each other or anyone else, they quietly left the room, walked through the foyer, and stepped outside.

On the veranda that surrounded the funeral parlor, there were several chairs and settees, and Ginger chose one, pulling Cain down beside her before releasing his hand.

“She doesn’t mean it,” she said softly.

“Yeah, she does,” said Cain, who hadn’t raised his head since his aunt’s tirade.

“No,” said Ginger, reaching up to swipe away tears that rolled down her cheeks. Where had they come from? She didn’t feel them gather, barely felt them fall. “She’s out of her mind with grief.”

“She’s right,” he whispered.

“No, she’s not.”

“I didn’t save him.”

“But you tried.”

“Yes.” Cain nodded. “I was too late. He was . . . trapped. I didn’t even know he’d gone in.”

Her voice sounded faraway as she brushed the back of her hand over her slick cheeks again. “It’s not your fault.”

“He was twice the man I’ll ever be.” Cain rested his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. “If one of us had to die—she’s right—it should have been me.”

No!
screamed some primal part of her from the deepest depths of her soul, jarring her, for just a moment, from her comfortable numbness.
No, no, no!

Her mind started racing, her voice—a desperate voice—narrating a story in her head:
Once upon a time there were two cousins: one golden like the sun, one dark as midnight, both owning equal, but different, parts of a little girl’s heart . . .

“No,” she said, panting as her breathing got shallow and quick.

She pressed a hand against her aching chest. That little girl’s heart was broken all over again, shriveling in her chest, drying up, dying, changed beyond recognition from the whole, boundless place it had once been.

She stood up from the settee, placing her hands on the veranda railing and looking out at Main Street, which hustled and bustled like it was a regular Saturday, like the world hadn’t ended last night.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said aloud, a thought borrowing words.

“Gin,” he said softly.

His words stirred something within her, and she turned to see him raise his glistening iceberg-blue eyes to her. They were so full of pain, it made something ache inside her, but the ache was quickly quieted, blanketed in dull, comfortable apathy. Her shoulders lightly brushed her ears in a slow shrug, and her tears dried—she had nothing left to give.

“I can’t,” she murmured, her tears ceasing as mysteriously as they’d begun.

“Gin,” he said again, standing up, gesturing uselessly with his hands. “I’m . . . sorry he’s gone.”

I’m sorry he’s gone.
A ball-peen hammer to her dried husk of a heart. Four words and it was pulverized to dust.

“He’s not,” she said softly, walking away from Cain, dazed and dull and numb all over.
He’s just away.

She loves you.

Be good to her.

Care for her.

Love her.

Promise.

Please.

Promise.

Cain shot up in his cot, drenched in sweat and shaking as the dreamy echo of Woodman’s broken voice faded.

“God,” he gasped, scrubbing his hands over his face and blinking into the darkness before lowering his forehead to his bent knees.

Since losing Woodman, almost a month ago, he woke up like this every other night: seeing his cousin’s frightened, blank, green eyes staring straight up, into the void of forever, feeling the weight of Woodman’s head on his lap, seeing the blackish-red slickness pool at the corner of his mouth and slide over his slack and cooling cheek.

And always—
always
—he heard the handful of words that had been Woodman’s dying plea. They were Cain’s constant companions—
constant torment, waking and sleeping
—and yet he had no idea how to honor them, how to make them happen.

Not that he’d really tried. He’d mostly been drunk since the funeral, and when he wasn’t, he was tearing around Kentucky on his motorcycle. Seven times he’d packed his saddlebags and headed for the border, and seven times he’d stopped before crossing over to Tennessee or Virginia or West Virginia or Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Missouri. He’d stood there at the border seven times, the adjoining state mocking his captivity. He was desperate to leave—desperate to run away and never go back to Kentucky again as long as he lived. But if he did that, he’d be turning his back on Woodman for good. He’d be taking Woodman’s sacred trust and trashing it. And he couldn’t. God help him, he couldn’t do it.

So, seven times, at seven state borders, he’d grudgingly turned around and headed back to Versailles. Well, back to Versailles after going on a two- or three-day bender wherever he found himself.

He swung his legs over the cot he’d set up in the corner of the empty office and reached for the omnipresent bottle of vodka beside the bed. He unscrewed the top and took a nice long swig, relishing the burn on his throat. He licked his lips and took another gulp before screwing the cap back on, then stood up and stretched his arms over his head. There were no windows in the small interior office, which was a good thing since Cain was buck naked. He pulled his jeans on inside out, not bothering to zip or button them as he walked across the cold floor toward the office door. He opened it, squinting his eyes at the bright light streaming through skylights into the showroom.

On one side of the room, the three motorcycles shipped to Versailles from Iceland and Virginia were still bungee-corded to the pallets they’d arrived on. He hadn’t touched them since he signed for them.

Turning back into the office, he flicked on the light and padded over to the small refrigerator, grabbing an energy bar from the top of the fridge and throwing the wrapper on the floor. The clock on the microwave read 11:46, which meant that Kennedy’s would be opening in fourteen minutes if Cain wanted to go get a cold beer and surround himself with the inanity of humanity until he returned home ten hours later and passed out in a cold stupor.

He’d done the same thing yesterday, and the day before that, after he got back from the Ohio border, where he’d turned around before crossing over, close to Cincinnati.

When he was a kid, his parents took him to the Cincinnati Zoo, and he remembered watching a wolf pace its cage. He’d asked the zookeeper why it kept walking back and forth, back and forth across the same ten or twelve feet in front of the glass, and the keeper had answered that the wolf was used to roaming a vast area to hunt and claim territory. Without the space to roam, it paced the small width of its cage in an effort to re-create its instinct to wander. It was trying to hold on to its purpose, but without the need to hunt, it had none.

He’d locked eyes with the wolf, their icy blue color identical to Cain’s, and a searing sense of sympathy made his breath catch. The wolf was useless and trapped. All it wanted was to be freed, to run back to its natural habitat and rediscover its purpose.

Cain remembered the wolf with a new sense of understanding. He also wanted to run away—from Kentucky, and Apple Valley, and his dead cousin, and his devastated family, and the promises he’d made that he had no idea how to dignify. If he could just get on his bike and ride, he felt like he could outrun the unbearable heartbreak, the oppressive sorrow, the inconceivable reality of a long life spent without his cousin, his brother, his memory keeper, his friend.

And yet running also meant disgracing Woodman’s memory.

So he was trapped, pacing in front of the glass, cooped up and purposeless.

Beside his cot, his cell phone buzzed, rattling on the cement, and Cain crossed the room to pick it up.

KW: Cain, call me.

Just as he’d been Cain’s lifeline to home during his time in the military, his father made sure to text Cain at least once or twice a day since Woodman’s funeral, checking in on him and even—several times—urging him to “come home” to McHuid’s. Cain didn’t respond, so his father had no idea whether Cain was even still in Kentucky. For all Klaus knew, Cain could be in California or Maine by this point.

He hadn’t been back to Apple Valley since the funeral. The funeral was also the last time he’d seen Ginger, though he hadn’t spoken to her since that afternoon at the funeral home. She’d hung back with her parents, as though uncertain of her place or her welcome, and though they’d locked eyes as Woodman was lowered into the ground, he didn’t recognize her. Her mother wept on her daughter’s shoulder, but Ginger stood stoic and calm, cold and emotionless. Like she wasn’t really there. Like an empty husk. Like a ghost.

This
was the girl he’d promised Woodman to love and care for.

Fuck. He could barely take care of himself.

The phone buzzed in his hand again.

KW: Cain, it’s urgent. Call me.

Sighing, he reached down for the bottle of vodka when the phone buzzed a third time.

KW: It’s Ginger.

Sucking in a swift breath, Cain Holden Wolfram, who’d thought just two seconds before that he was three-quarters dead, trapped in an aimless existence, suddenly realized that he was actually very much alive. His heart raced with fear—no, not fear, with
terror
. Had something
happened
to Ginger? Christ! While he’d been riding all over Kentucky and drinking himself into a stupor, had something fucking
happened
to her? 

Promise.

I fuckin’ promise! Josiah, I promise.

Fuck. Fuck, please no. No. No, no, no. Please, God. Please let Ginger be okay.

His hands shook and sweated as he dialed his father’s number, as he heard the phone ring once, twice—

“Cain? Bist du—?”

“Papa, sag es mir!”
Tell me!

“Gott sei Dank, Cain. Du lebst.”
Thank God. You’re alive.

“Pop,” he said, sitting down on his cot, his body taut and wired. “What happened to Ginger? Is she okay? Is she all right? What happened to her?”

“She is . . .
sehr traurig
.”

Cain exhaled a long breath, his body relaxing. If something was seriously and immediately wrong, his father would have told him.

“Of course she’s sad,” he said, running his hand through his stubbly hair as he rested his elbows on his knees, shaking in relief just as he’d shaken with fear.

“I hear from Ranger. She don’t eat. She don’t talk. She don’t leave the cottage.”

Cain took a deep breath and held it until it burned his lungs.

“Cain? You are there?”

His breath came out in an exhausted sigh. “I’m here.”

“You have known the princess for . . . your lifetime.”

A tear snaked its way down Cain’s cheek, and he reached up to wipe it away. “Yep.”

“She is hurting,
mein Sohn
.”

His knees bounced from the adrenaline rush he’d gotten from his father’s texts.. “We’re all hurtin’, Pop. She ain’t the only one.”

His father was silent for a few seconds, then said, “She is hurting . . .
more
.”

Cain looked down at the half-finished bottle of vodka at his feet and picked it up. He unscrewed the top and raised it to his lips, but his mind flashed back to her glazed face at the funeral. He lowered the bottle and walked across the small office to the bathroom, where he tipped the bottle into the sink and watched the clear liquid swish down the drain. When it was empty, he dropped it under the sink on top of an overflowing garbage can and looked up at the mirror.

He barely recognized himself.

His last buzz cut from right before leaving Virginia had grown out almost an inch, and he had a full beard that covered his jaw, cheeks, and neck with bristly, black, ungroomed hair. He’d lost weight, which made his cheeks gaunt, and his complexion had yellowed from so much drinking. Bloodshot eyes stared back him with heavy bags beneath, and his lips were chapped and cracked. He licked them tentatively.

“Cain?”

He swallowed over the lump in his throat, remembering the morning he walked into Woodman’s hospital room at Walter Reed.

You look . . . rough.

Don’t lie to me, huh?

I’m not a good bullshitter.

Since when?

He chuckled softly as his eyes filled with more tears, his heart aching from how much he missed Woodman. “Yeah, Pop. I’m here.”

“You come home, Cain? You must come to her.”

Be good to her. Care for her. Promise.

“Yeah, Pop,” he said softly. “Yeah, I’ll come home.” He took another look at his reflection and winced. “Give me a few days, huh?”

“Don’t wait too long,” said his father.

Please. Promise.

“I won’t. It’s, uh, what’s today?”

“Tuesday.”

“I’ll be there on Friday, okay?”

“
Ja. Gut.
And you stay? Stay for two week? For the Thanksgiving,
ja
?”

Cain nodded. “I’ll stay a little while, Pop.” He was hanging up the phone when he heard his father say something else. “Huh?”

“She
need
you, Cain.
Verstehst du mich
?”

He nodded. “I understand. I’ll be there soon.”

He pressed the End button on his phone and placed it on the shelf over the sink. Then he opened the cabinet, took out his shaving cream and razor, and turned on some warm water.

***

Some days—
most
days—Ginger pretended that he was just away. Like, on a business trip or out of town, on a fishing trip. Men did that, didn’t they? It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a businessman and didn’t especially like fishing. It was easier to imagine him alive somewhere than forcing her mind to accept the fact that Woodman was gone for good. And while some part of her acknowledged that it probably wasn’t healthy, she really didn’t give a shit. About much. About anything.

She picked up the remote, changed the channel from Lifetime to Hallmark, and stared at the screen. A woman was yelling at a child whose eyes were filling with tears. Yelling mother. Distraught child. Mother shaking the child’s shoulders. Child’s face crumbling.

And Ginger stared, unmoved, glazed over.

She didn’t feel much of anything lately.

She didn’t leave the cottage very much either. Not even to see Gran, whom she hadn’t visited in a month, since the day before Woodman’s funeral, when she’d cried so long and so hard at Gran’s bedside, she’d eventually fallen asleep. The nurses hadn’t had the heart to wake her, so she slept there, waking hours later in the dark with her head on Gran’s bed, disoriented and frightened. She gathered her purse and walked in a daze to her car, driving back to the cottage at two o’clock in the morning and falling into bed still clothed.

Her mother periodically left bags of groceries and fashion magazines on the back stoop of the cottage. A lone cupcake appeared on Ginger’s birthday, but otherwise her mother let her be.

Her father occasionally knocked on the door, looking disappointed when she answered it wearing pajamas with limp, greasy hair framing her thin face. She would stare at his mouth, watching his lips move as he gave her a back porch speech. Some of his words registered—“fresh air,” “talk to someone,” “can’t go on like this”—though they meant nothing, flying over her head like the autumn leaves that had started falling, blown away by chillier and chillier breezes. She would nod at the right place, he would kiss her forehead, and she’d close the door as he walked back to the manor house.

When Cain told her about Woodman’s death, she’d felt her chest crack open in agony, the feelings so potent and painful, part of her wanted to die. But it was later, at the funeral home, when she’d looked into Cain’s eyes, that she realized how very alone she was. Woodman, for all that she hadn’t loved him the way he wanted her to, had been her very best friend, her foundation, her safe harbor, her comfortable future. She’d already lost Cain some years before, but as long as Woodman was by her side, she wasn’t alone.