Leave a Trail (53 page)

As they’d done almost every year that Lilli had been in Signal Bend, the Horde had a big Thanksgiving feast for the town. The old ladies, as always, worked together, preparing the meal, managing the girls, taking care of the children—and now little Henry had joined their growing brood.

But Shannon ran things now. In truth, she was born for the role. She had changed things up a little from the way Lilli had done them, but she’d been careful and respectful of Lilli, of their friendship, and Lilli didn’t begrudge her at all.

That didn’t mean it was easy to be in this clubhouse without Isaac, to be here knowing that someone else—even Show—wore the President’s patch. She had been comfortable in her life as the Horde’s First Lady. Now, everything felt askew. She didn’t know what her place really was. So she’d been staying away from the clubhouse except for those events, like today, for which she couldn’t come up with a decent reason to avoid.

When her disquiet got so strong she thought she’d just pack up the kids and go home and have sandwiches for Thanksgiving, she’d look over to the couches, where the kids were all sitting together—Gia, Bo, Loki, Millie, and Joey—with toys spread out and a Disney movie on. Henry was just tiny and doing the crowd-surfing thing, everybody taking their turn with him.

Every time Lilli looked for her kids, there were at least a couple of uncles sitting with them and the others, playing or just watching the movie, holding one of them on their knees. Gia and Bo loved it here. She’d been keeping them away from a place they loved. She was going to have to find her way back. It was time.

Later, sitting at the table as Show stood at the head preparing to carve, Lilli felt a pang. Isaac had been furiously emphatic that his children would never spend a single holiday in a prison visiting room. Nor would they spend a holiday without their mother. Their argument about it had been so heated that a guard had warned them twice.

Isaac had assured her that if she ignored him and showed up anyway, he would not come to the Visitor’s Center. He would not be responsible for his children’s holiday memories being of a stark room with a couple of paper decorations taped halfheartedly to reinforced-glass windows.

So Lilli was missing her first visit with him. The first, apparently, of many.

When Show spoke briefly about those who weren’t able to join them but were with them in their hearts, Lilli dropped her head. Tasha, sitting next to her, grabbed her hand, and Lilli held on tight.

X

The 365
^th
Day

My love,

G. marked the 365
^th
“X” in the calendar book she and I made together. She told me she knew it was the 365
^th
, because it had been a year today since you left, and a year has 365 days. She’s a smart cookie.

Then she asked me how many more days left. I chickened out and told her we didn’t have time before bed to figure that out. I guess I’m going to have to deal with that tomorrow.

But I do know. Every day I know how many days are left, if you come home six years to the day from when you went away. 1,826 days left from today. It hurts my heart to write that number.

Lilli read what she’d written and almost set the page aside, in the drawer in her nightstand that was packed with all the other pages she’d written to Isaac and had then realized would hurt him too much to read. But this time, after a moment’s pause, instead of starting fresh, she kept writing.

All those months ago, when you told me you’d rather exchange paper letters than emails, I was a little hurt. I never told you, because I wouldn’t think of denying you something like this. Or anything, that I could give you. But email felt like a faster way to reach out to you, even if it wasn’t, really. You were right, though. I love the idea of you holding these letters as I hold yours. Close to my heart.

I’ve come to need these letters as much as I love them. Ending every night writing you helps me keep my head straight and do what needs to be done out here so that when you come home, you come to the home you deserve.

It’s become my calming ritual, writing you on scented paper, with a fountain pen. We’re like characters out of a Jane Austen novel—the dirty one she wrote when nobody was looking and hid under her mattress next to her twisted 19
^th
-century porn. Haha.

She could almost hear Isaac’s laugh at her sudden, lamely puckish burst of humor, and her melancholy returned with a vengeance. She had to stop and move the paper away before her tears fell and smeared the ink. When she could, she dried her cheeks.

Okay. I’ll write again tomorrow night and be more newsy. This is all I have tonight.

Ti amo. Ti amo, ti amo.

L—

ISAAC

X

The 720
^th
Day

For most of Isaac’s life, Christmas had never been a thing. Not until Lilli. But she had filled his life with love and light and warmth he hadn’t known was missing, and since Gia’s very first Christmas, when she was only five months old, it had been one of his favorite days of the year. Hell—more than one day. Lilli had made Christmas a month-long affair. Their home smelled of evergreen and cinnamon, and cookies and pie, for weeks. Lights shimmered all over the main rooms of the house. And the kids—fuck, they loved it.

Sitting in the prison rec room on their second Christmas inside, watching ESPN and playing a halfhearted game of backgammon with Len on a cardboard game board with plastic pieces, Isaac let himself think about sitting up with Lilli until early on Christmas morning, building some confounded contraption or another, swearing under his breath that from now on, he was going to build all of the kids’ gifts his damn self and not fight to assemble plastic bullshit from Taiwan or wherever. She’d laugh at him and bring him another beer.

Then she’d distract him from his temper in the way only she could.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of her lips on his neck. Her tongue. Her hands on his bare chest. The way her body closed tightly around him when he pushed deep inside her.

Already his memory was fading. Four more years. If they were lucky.

“Boss? You good?”

Isaac shook it off and opened his eyes. “Yeah. One of these days, you gotta stop callin’ me that, brother.”

“Nah. You know my position. Long as we’re here, it applies.” Len sighed and looked at the clock on the wall, adjusting his eyepatch. “I’m not feelin’ this game. Think I’ll do some time in the gym until next count. You in?”

His back had been acting up like crazy the past few weeks, since he’d had a run-in with an especially and habitually nasty guard. “No. I’m gonna read in my bunk. Got all those new books Lilli ordered me.” They couldn’t receive packages or gifts from family, but Lilli kept his commissary account full, and, via an online distributor, she’d shipped him about six months’ worth—even by his accelerated pace—of reading material for Christmas.

“Is it me, or is it gettin’ harder, not easier?”

Isaac had turned and sort of half-focused on the television; now, he turned back to his friend. From day one, Len had dealt with their incarceration with a kind of dark, stubborn good humor—in perfect keeping with his personality. On bad days, Isaac got broody and quiet. Len got acerbic. Rarely did he voice any kind of real impatience with their lot.

“I think today’s the wrong day to think about it. Today is hard.”

“Yeah. I keep thinkin’ about the clubhouse party. And then spending the day at yours. Damn, Lilli does it up.”—Isaac swallowed hard at the slash of pain he felt, but he didn’t interrupt his friend’s reverie—“Tasha wanted all that, too. You know, one of the things Tash was most excited about in the house I built her was that big wall of windows up front—she planned for months how she’d light it up like crazy for the holidays. Remember that big fuckin’ tree she made me wrestle into the house? And she had me doing some kind of circus stunts gettin’ lights across the top of the windows. And we don’t even have kids—fuck, we didn’t even have Christmas at our house!” He chuckled softly.

“We’ll get home, brother. We’ll get it back.”

“Yeah.” He sighed again, deeper this time. “Sorry. Got the holiday blues. I’m gonna sweat ‘em out.” He stood and left. Knowing he was headed to the cell to change into the approved sweats for the weight room, Isaac put the game away and made some aimless chat with some other inmates in the room before he went back himself. He and Len were lucky to be able to share a cell together. But the quarters were close, and they gave each other the space they could.

~oOo~

“COUNT!”

Stretched out to the extent he could be in a bunk that was not as long as he was, Isaac looked up from the new Patrick Rothfuss novel that had been part of Lilli’s Christmas gift to him. He tucked her most recent letter into the book as a bookmark and rolled to his feet, just as Len came through the open cell door. He was running sweat; his short, grey hair—he’d let it grow a little after bitching the first few weeks about the impossibility of a satisfyingly close prison shave—glistened with it. His prison-issued sweatshirt was sodden.

“You reek.”

“Yeah. Had some shit to work out, I guess. I’ll hose off fast before meal time.”

The guards walked by and peered in. One of them had become Isaac’s nemesis. At least eight inches shorter and probably a hundred pounds lighter than he, Walker had some kind of hornet up his ass over him. So far, it just seemed random hostility. His last volley had been a baton shoved hard into Isaac’s spine, out of fucking nowhere. It had driven him to his knees in the lunch line—three weeks ago, and his lower back and right leg still tingled in a hauntingly familiar way. Both Len and he had considered whether this was another move on him in retaliation for Santaveria.

There had been two so far. Both thwarted—in one case, by Len, and in the other, by some men who’d become friends because Santaveria had been their enemy. Not the kind of friends who made Isaac comfortable, but they were useful. They’d sure been useful that day.

Lilli didn’t know. Hopefully, she would never know. Nobody in Signal Bend knew. Len and he had fought that out—Len thought the Horde should know. He thought so vehemently. And he was right. But Isaac didn’t want the club to feel the need to retaliate outside. They were legit now, free and clear of cartels, and Feds, and Sheriffs, and he wanted them to stay that way. That was why the fuck he was in here. He wanted his family safe.

Moreover, he simply didn’t want Show to know. Because Show had a very hard time not telling Lilli things, even when Isaac told him not to. Lilli had a way about her, a way of seeing the truth or at least knowing there was one being hidden, and Show was a fucking awful liar when he had to lie to somebody he cared about. Lilli would see that something was being kept from her, and she would dig, and Show would fold like a cheap suit.

So nobody outside the prison walls knew that there had been attempts made on Isaac’s life. Whether Walker’s little-man games were part of another or just an asshole with a God complex, Isaac didn’t know yet. But when the guards paused at their cell and did the count, Walker smirked in a way that made Isaac’s hands twitch with the longing to become fists.

They walked on, and Len muttered, “That son of a bitch is bad news, boss. Bad news.”

“Yeah.”

~oOo~

After the sad thing the prison cook called a Christmas dinner, Isaac skipped the sad thing that they were calling a Christmas party in the rec room and went back to his bunk. Len, knowing that Isaac needed some space, and also needing some alone time, went off and found it who knew where. Very rarely, during the precious times in which their hours were their own, Len would seem to disappear. He was always back for the count, and Isaac had never asked where he went off to. For as long as he known him, Len had been a loner.

Isaac was sure, too, that Len had his back even during times like this, when he went off somewhere. The first attack had happened during such a time, and still Len had been right there, pulling the guy off Isaac and breaking the shank in two right in the guy’s hand. He was like Batman or something. They’d never seen the attacker in their block before, and, though they’d left him breathing, they had not seen him since.

It had been more than a year since an attack, though. Unless they counted Wee Willy Walker and his baton.

Shoving all that noise in his head to the side, Isaac lay in his bunk with his new book. He didn’t open it right away. Instead, he took in the photos and drawings that filled the wall space between his bunk and Len’s. Drawings from his kids—horses and flowers and dogs and bikes and people from Gia, mostly mazes and patterns from Bo. Handmade cards. Photos of his family. Gia, seven years old now, riding horses and taking archery lessons. Bo, now five, struggling a already in school, even though he was only in kindergarten. He wasn’t much of a talker, his boy, and apparently his teacher thought there was some cause for concern. Lilli didn’t agree. He would hate to be the teacher in that disagreement. But he’d love to be able to watch the fireworks.

He smiled at a photo of Gia on Matilda, her Welsh pony—a new addition since he’d been inside. Lilli sat astride Flash, horse and pony side by side. His girls were wearing matching cowboy hats and wide smiles. That photo made his heart ache ferociously. It was good to see his Sport smile like that. He never saw that smile when she came here. The smile he got was tinged with loss.

A photo of Bo, his eyes wide, holding a little goldtone trophy and a certificate for a ‘Young Writers Program’. With his mamma’s help, he’d written a story and drawn pictures for it:
If I Had a Lion for a Pet
. Lilli had sent him the book as a series of photos. At the bottom of each page, in Lilli’s precise handwriting, Bo had dictated such creative insights as
If I had a lion for a pet…his litter box would fill a WHOLE ROOM
. For that page, he had drawn a room full of sand, with a giant turd smack in the middle. He was a sharp little artist, even when he wasn’t making fractals. And the awards committee clearly had a sense of humor.