One of Us (29 page)

He left no instructions regarding a funeral other than the location of his burial plot. He had no family or friends who cared about his eternal rest. Tommy found a priest who came to say a few words as his body was lowered into the ground. He and Rafe were the only ones there. I was still in the hospital and unable to attend.

Some people have been worried for me that I wasn’t able to properly say good-bye to him. I can’t make them understand that I did, but in a way that only my father and I could appreciate.

Against his own wishes, Rafe gave me the crime scene photos. I pored over them one night sitting in my apartment listening to the city sounds outside my window and knowing no matter how late the hour, it would never be completely dark here.

I was able to distance myself from them at first, regarding them as clinically as I would similar evidence from my work. It wasn’t until I came to the full-length shot of my father hanging out of my childhood bedroom window at the end of a noose that I finally felt grief.

All I could see were his feet. They were bare. He wasn’t wearing shoes or slippers. They dangled pale and harmless, reminding me of some kind of vulnerable newborn creature. I realized I’d never seen his actual feet before, just what covered them. They were flesh and blood underneath.

I knew at that moment that I would never be able to make peace with his actions, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make peace with him. In order to do it, I’ve had to keep my emotional distance and regard him as a man and not my father, but I’m okay with this. I don’t need him to be my father.

I have a father. He’s sitting next to me, offering me a piece of candy.

BACK AT TOMMY’S HOUSE,
Mom is busy in the front room fluffing pillows on the couch and adjusting Fiona’s portrait. The coffee table is set for a tea party.

She’s changed her clothes four times but has finally settled on a white eyelet dress that wouldn’t look appropriate on anyone over the age of eight except for her.

Max is assisting her. He’s wearing the neon pink hat she began knitting for him when she first met him in my hospital room. The sequins spell out
MOXIE
.

He refuses to take it off. He’s even color-coordinated the rest of his
outfit. His shirt and shorts are the same alarming color, although the Birkenstocks at the ends of his surprisingly skinny legs are black. The comparison to a flamingo is almost too easy to make.

He’s taking us to the airport. Brenna and Moira Kelly are going to take turns staying with Mom while Tommy and I are gone.

Max didn’t have to do this, but since the shooting, he’s become clingy. I wasn’t able to return to work for a month and then only in a limited capacity. Now that I’m back to operating at full capacity, he’s started accompanying me everywhere I go. I was self-conscious at first, but I’ve begun to enjoy the bewilderment on people’s faces as they try to figure out who the quietly possessive, uniquely attired, iPad-tapping individual is: An avant-garde personal assistant? A gay bodyguard? My genie?

Rafe is at the kitchen table using the new laptop I bought for Tommy. I’ve also upgraded his Internet capabilities.

Since the airing of the
Ghost Sniffers’
wildly popular Lost Creek episode and Tommy’s ascendancy into pop culture social media superstardom, the NONS website has devoted an entire page just to Tommy, and he’s considering starting a blog. Of all the incredible happenings around here recently, this might be the most unbelievable.

“When you get to be my age, you end up seeing a lot of things you wished you hadn’t lived to see,” he says to me when I join him where he’s hovering behind Rafe.

I follow his gaze to the computer screen, where Rafe is Skyping with Wade Van Landingham, who’s sitting poolside in a Hawaiian shirt and tiny bedazzled Ray-Bans.

Velma sticks his head into the picture, too.

“Wade misses Guy in Charge. He’s insisting on coming to spend a few weeks with him this summer even if it means pushing back his usual month on Johnny Depp’s yacht.”

Rafe flashes us one of his inscrutable grins. I know he has big plans for the little dog’s visit. I’m having a vision: I see camo waders and a fluorescent orange ball cap in Wade’s future.

“All the attention Wade’s received from the Lost Creek episode has
been fabulous for his career. He’s been offered a part in a Tom Cruise movie. He’s going to play a dog.”

“Pshaw,” Tommy snorts.

Outside the front window I see a silver sports car pull up and park across the street. I tell Tommy, Rafe, and Max we need to get going.

They say their good-byes to Mom while I leave them and go to greet Gwen Dawes.

Like my mother, she has dressed for this occasion in a lilac sheath, matching pumps, and a rope of pearls. She carries two boxes: one is plain cardboard, the other has an elaborate fleur-de-lis pattern and is topped with a red foil bow.

She gives the plain one to me.

“Thank you for agreeing to this,” she says.

“My mom wanted to do it.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow to begin serving my sentence,” she tells me. “I’ll also finally receive help for my drinking problem.”

A legion of Dawes’ lawyers worked out a plea agreement where Gwen Dawes will serve two years in a minimum-security prison for the shooting death of her daughter, Scarlet.

Considering her age, wealth, the mountain of extenuating circumstances, and the fact that she did save my life, she could have fought the charge and might have been able to avoid incarceration altogether, but it was obvious from the few times I talked to her that she wants to go to jail; she feels she deserves it.

“Once I’m released, I’m going to live near Wesley and his family.”

“I think that’s a good idea. I met him earlier today. He seems like a good man.”

“I wonder what she would’ve been like? My Scarlet?”

I know the question isn’t directed at me. It’s meant for the cosmos. I assume she’s coping as best she can. The truths she’s had to face have been every bit as awful as the ones my own mother has had to endure.

I don’t know this woman at all. Certainly not well enough to judge her. I do know she has a conscience. She had begun her own campaign to expose her husband. She put the note in Tommy’s mailbox.

“And Walker?” I ask her.

She leaves her reverie of the daughter she never knew.

“He has to live with himself.”

I take her inside where my mother is waiting and introduce them to each other,
a wild rose and a hothouse orchid who have both managed to survive in the same scorched earth.

“This is Gwendolyn Dawes,” I tell Mom. “And this is my mother, Arlene Doyle.”

Gwen’s eyes are damp with tears as she hands Mom the box.

Mom takes it from her and eagerly opens it. Inside is a collection of tiny pastel-colored cakes adorned with candy petals.

“Your son told me how much you like sweets.”

“Thank you,” Mom says. “And, here, I have something for you. I made it.”

She gives Gwen one of her purple
TOLERANCE
hats.

Gwen begins to cry.

“It’s okay,” Mom tells her.

She rushes off and returns with a box of Kleenex. Gwen takes one and dabs at her eyes.

As I turn to go I hear Gwen tell my mother she has one more gift for her.

She reaches into her purse then asks for my mother’s hand.

“This belonged to your daughter,” she says.

I watch as she slips the Dawes ruby onto my mother’s finger.

Mom holds up her hand, delightedly tilting it this way and that, watching the sparks of fiery light in the stone’s depths.

She has no idea of the value men have placed upon it and that makes it all the more precious.

ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO
with Max’s Toyota. The trunk is packed. Max is behind the wheel. Rafe is in the backseat. Tommy’s riding shotgun.

“Is that it?” he asks me, staring at the box.

“Yes.”

He reaches out his hands to me through the open window.

“We can put that in the trunk,” I tell him.

“No.”

He opens it and takes out a carved rosewood urn sealed with a golden lid and places it on his knees.

This is how he will make the entire drive, with the ashes of his granddaughter sitting in his lap.

twenty-nine

O
N A WINDBLOWN IRISH
hillside surrounded by humped grazing land crisscrossed with stone walls like a sloppily stitched blanket, we finally find her grave.

The name was worn away by the elements long ago, but the three of us agree this one belonged to Jimmy McNab’s mother. We can easily picture her young son sitting here beside the bleached headstone, battered now by the winds until it’s as smooth as glass, discussing his future with her. He was going to America, the land of danger, progress, and prosperity.

Tommy stares hypnotically out at the wild gray sea. We can smell the salt from here and hear the thunder of the waves.

The sight of the three of us in our dark suits and impractical Sunday shoes tromping through the fields and up the hill to the little cemetery has brought out a small knot of onlookers gathered at the bottom of the road. All of them are men. I can make out various caps and walking sticks and one bicycle. A border collie keeps running up to join us. Each time he circles us, sniffing, and returns to the men where he reports back with several sharp barks.

Without saying a word, Tommy moves on, gripping his own stick, away from the little graves, toward the nearest cliff face. Rafe and I follow, him holding a bottle of whiskey and me carrying Molly’s ashes.

He stops only a few feet away from the edge. The wind is fierce
here. It fills up his suit jacket and whips it around his skinny frame. His tie flaps behind him like the tail of a kite.

I fear he might be blown off the island but if it happens, I know he’ll spread his arms and smile and whoop and fly off happily to his own death.

“This is the place,” he says.

I give him the wooden urn. He takes off the golden lid and without saying a word, shakes her ashes over the ocean.

The wind catches them and blows them back onto land. We turn and watch the cloud of her remains dissolve over the snail-gleam of the road behind us and the green of the hills.

Each of us takes a shot glass out of our pants pockets. Rafe pours.

A few of her ashes still float in the air. I watch them drift and fall and land on the back of my hand and in my drink. I think of Prosperity, not so many years after the conversations he had here with his mother, as dawn broke on his last day on earth. He would have been lying on a wooden bed a world away in Lost Creek jail watching the ever-present flakes of black soot twirl in the gray light of dawn looking the same, like snowflakes dressed in mourning.

Tommy raises his glass.

“The one who has suffered the most isn’t here. I feel this is the way it should be. We, as the men in her life, should be able to take care of at least this one crushing task for her.

“To Arlene,” he says.

We drink. Tommy drops his head and I can tell by the shaking of his shoulders that he’s crying. Rafe goes to him. I’ve never seen Rafe hug anyone, not a wife, not a grandchild, not the teammate who hit the double that scored the winning run when the police department played First National Bank.

Watching the two of them
I suddenly understand that a man’s life story is written before it even begins, all of his choices made for him by a history he’s helpless against yet he believes is of his own making.

I know now what Tommy has always known and why he has always felt such affection for his ill-fated ancestor. Prosperity McNab’s decision to band with the organization that would bring about his infamy and his
death had nothing to do with the various reasons history likes to claim. He joined their ranks not because he had an interest in bettering conditions in the mines, or a desire to wreak vengeance on the rich and the racist, or even a wish to impress the woman he loved with his patriotic zeal for the
ould sod,
but because he couldn’t help feeling drawn to a group of men who fought in the name of a mother who had committed an extraordinary act for her son.

acknowledgments

I’M FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT
I’d still be working on
One of Us
and might be doing so for the next twenty years if it weren’t for my agent, Liza Dawson, who once again saw me through the doubt, panic, and bouts of self-loathing that always accompany the writing of one of my novels. Thank you, Liza, for your unflappable encouragement and magical ability to get me to do what needs to be done without actually telling me what it is that I need to do.

The greatest gift a writer can receive is a smart, passionate, intuitive editor who seems to have an immediate understanding of her work. I received such a gift earlier this year in the form of Karen Kosztolnyik at Gallery Books who turned out to be a lovely incarnation of the nagging voice inside my head that tells me I’m not done yet. Thank you, Karen, for your insight and care. Every suggestion you made was dead-on except for your original thoughts on Wade but don’t worry; we both forgive you.

Thank you, Mom, for always being there for me; Roy, for your unwavering support and elbow grease; and Molly Meghan, for your rock ’em sock ’em spirit and steadfast devotion to me. And to Tirzah and Connor, my sweet babies who are now amazing adults, without you my life would be a dull, plodding thing with no shine or sizzle to it: thank you, Fate, for giving them to me.