Still Mine (28 page)

“Is that true?” Shayna asks.

“I swear,” Clare says. “Every word.”

It takes effort to speak. Clare’s breaths are pinched and painful. The smell of this place. Earth, staleness, sweat, blood. Under the cot, next to Wilfred, she sees large bottles of water and a scattering of empty prescription bottles. A bucket tipped on its side. She looks to Shayna again. Though her hair is messy and her cheeks smeared with dirt, she is no longer as gaunt as in the photos. There is a brightness in her eyes. Three weeks under her father’s lock and key. It makes sense.

“You were trying to help her,” Clare says to Wilfred.

Wilfred says nothing. Clare looks to Shayna, who takes her cue.

“You’re right,” Shayna says. “That’s what he was doing. Helping me.”

“And you’re better now, aren’t you, Shayna?”

“I’m better. Much better. And Dad? You said this wasn’t to punish me. That you’d let me out when I got better. When I didn’t need to be here anymore.”

“That’s why he locked you in here,” Clare says. “To give you time. He gave you time to recover.”

Shayna knows what to do. Talk Wilfred down, reason with him. She looks to Clare and wipes her eyes with her bare forearm.

“He took care of me,” Shayna says. “He gave me what I needed. He told me to write. It was all unclear. He kept me focused.”

“You disappeared from the gorge,” Clare says.

“I remember I woke up there after the party. I walked the creek to get home.”

Just as Jared said you did, Clare thinks. Woke up and walked the creek home.

“You were waiting for me, Dad. On the porch. You told me Mom had disappeared and we needed to go find her. We got in the truck and then we were walking. I was begging you to take me home. I was so mad at you. You dragged me across the creek. Dragged me.”

She would never have crossed it on her own, Jared said. Shayna is crying again.

“Then you brought me in here. I thought we were looking for Mom. I was so out of it. ‘Why is there a cot in here?’ I’m asking you. Then you locked the grates.”

“He was trying to help you,” Clare repeats.

“Right. Right, Dad? You were here, giving me the pills, making me drink, pouring water down my throat. And then you’d be gone. For hours.” Shayna coughs and looks at Clare. “He talked to me about withdrawal. It’ll take two weeks, he said. Maybe a month. Right, Dad? You dragged me outside and dumped cold water over my head. You wrapped me in blankets. I’m trying to count days. I think it’s twenty days, but then I think, it can’t be twenty days. I can’t have been here for twenty days.”

“Three weeks,” Clare says. “And you’re better now. It worked. Just like you promised Louise, Wilfred. That you’d take care of it.”

At the sound of her mother’s name, a wail escapes Shayna.

“Wasn’t she looking for me?”

“Yes,” Clare says. “Yes. Just not in the right places.”

“No one was looking,” Wilfred says. “You hear me? No one. Your mother can’t keep it straight. They want us dead. We remind them.”

Shayna drops her head in her hands. “Don’t say that. Please.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Wilfred says.

“That’s not true,” Shayna says, the anger bubbling up. “Do you want to die here, Dad? Is that what you want? To die in the mine?”

“There’s nowhere else to go.”

“Stop saying that!”

Shayna picks up a clump of earth and hurls it at her father, then drops her head and wails again. Nowhere to go. What Wilfred means is that everything is lost, that there is no going back, no starting over. Clare understands. The last time Jason locked her in the cellar, Clare found a length of rope and secured it to the underside of the cellar stairs. For hours she sat and watched the noose dangle, unsure of what kept her from snaking it around her neck and kicking free the tackle box she’d placed underneath it. Clare has known it, that deepest point of despair. Nowhere to go.

Wilfred looks up at them. “You know what I said? I said, ‘If we open it, we all die.’ That’s what I told them.”

“What?” Shayna says.

“I told them, you have to come in here
now
. There’s no way out. Once we secure the hatch, it’s a done deal. I told those Merritt boys, ‘Don’t listen to your father! You listen to me!’ ”

“He’s talking about the mine,” Clare says. “That’s what you said, right, Wilfred? To the men? You were trying to save them.”

Wilfred’s eyes are frantic. “There was no air. Just gas. It was poison.”

“You knew that,” Clare says. “Jared told me the story. He said you stood your ground. That you all would’ve died if you’d opened the hatch.”

Shayna cranes wide-eyed at the sound of her husband’s name. Then she drops forward to her hands and knees and creeps across to her father. He tightens his grip on the shotgun. When Shayna touches his knee, Wilfred flinches, dropping the flashlight. The way the light from the lantern falls, Clare can see Wilfred’s face but not Shayna’s. He looks alert, afraid.

“Give me the gun, Dad.”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

“I’m done with this. It’s over. She’s bleeding. Give me the gun.”

When she reaches for it, Wilfred jolts, taking hold and firing. The blast fills the tunnel. Shayna tumbles and knocks over the lantern, snuffing it out. Only the straight, white beam of the flashlight stretches across the floor. Coughing. Shayna. The pain in Clare’s shoulder stabs her as she bears weight on the arm, crawling along the dirt. She cannot see Wilfred, not even his silhouette. He makes no sound. Clare touches up against Shayna’s body.

“I’m not hit,” Shayna whispers. “I’m okay.”

Clare finds her hand and squeezes it. From the other side of the tunnel she hears fumbling. When the flashlight reveals him, Clare lunges and takes hold of Wilfred’s shirt, hugging herself against him. He must’ve dropped the gun because both his hands are on her, working to grab her neck, and Clare presses her weight into him, pinning him against the wall. When Shayna picks up the flashlight and shines it on them, Clare sees the shotgun dropped against the cot. She takes it by the stock and jams it into Wilfred’s ribs. He buckles.

It wells up in Clare all at once. Her stance adjusted, Clare swings the shotgun like a baseball bat at Wilfred so that the stock cracks against his skull. He crumples forward onto all fours. Clare lifts the gun and swings it again, and it cracks again, and in the light of the flashlight beam Clare can see the blood in veiny trails down Wilfred’s forehead.

Clare did not run, did not give up everything and run to die here in this tunnel. She will not die here.

“Don’t kill him,” Shayna howls. “Please stop!”

Her senses return to Clare. Wilfred Cunningham is flat on his belly, sputtering for breath. Clare feels a hand on her leg. Shayna raises the flashlight to Clare’s face, blinding her. Stop. The words come to Clare as a whisper. If this were Jason, this man bleeding at her feet, Clare would take proper hold of the shotgun and fire the last bullets into his heart.

But this is not Jason. Clare steps over Wilfred to the grate and pushes the barrel of the gun through it. Her shirt is wet with her own blood, the wound on her shoulder open. Clare sees stars. She must steady herself and take aim. Behind her Shayna’s voice is a mumble, slow and deep. Clare pulls the trigger. A spray of daylight appears where the pellets pierce the wood door. She pumps and fires again, but the chamber is empty. Shayna’s words run together. Clare drops the gun and tries to grasp the grate to stop herself from falling. Too late. She is on the ground. She turns her head to one side. The door is speckled with tiny dots of light, and Clare watches it as the sound fades, watches the door for some movement, something, as if someone might know to come.

You will say he is a monster for doing this to me. You’ll see this place with its dank dirt walls and you’ll say he had no right. He of all people.

I’ve thought of you every hour of every day in here. I think you’ll call him a monster because he did what you couldn’t do. You handed me over to strangers. You couldn’t take care of me yourself. He doesn’t ask me to make promises like you do. He knows it won’t change anything for either of us. You never understood that part of it. Neither did my mother. She called us serious, like that’s all it ever was.

He won’t confine me here forever. It’s hard to breathe. He did not have the right to lock me in this cage, that’s what you’ll say. But in the light of it, I see what he’s done. He saved me. He did what no one else could do. That’s what I’ll tell you when he finally opens the door and lets me go.

A
hospital room. Clare wears a blue gown. There is a needle in her wrist, tubes leading to an IV. Her arm is wrapped and slung across her chest, her shoulder bandaged. Clare pats at her aching cheek. Her left eye is swollen to a squint. When she wiggles her jaw, it clicks. The door to the room is open, a chair pulled up next to her. Voices in the hallway.

“Malcolm?” Clare speaks to the empty room.

Nothing. She rests her head on the pillow. What does she remember? The egress doors being pried open. Faces over her, people and darkness, the tunnel. Someone carrying her. A stretcher. A van. Or was it an ambulance? Shayna beside her, wrapped in a blanket, shivering. A man next to Shayna. Jared. Not Jared.

Derek.

After that, nothing.

There is light out the window. It must be morning. Did Clare wake last night? Is she remembering this room in the dark? She can’t be sure. Was Malcolm here? Sitting in that chair beside her bed? Watching her? That might have been a dream.

Her shoulder. The pain. Clare digs around for the bed controls and uses the button to raise herself to seated. The voices in the hallway are gone. She drinks the cup of juice from the tray overhanging her bed. It tastes sugary and cool down her throat. Her phone is on the tray too. She peels back her gown and pushes the sling aside to assess her shoulder, the black and blue of the bruising. If she runs her fingers over the bandage, she can feel the hollows where the pellets from the shotgun pierced her. She reaches over her shoulder to feel her back. No bandages. No exit wounds.

There is a quiet tap. The door opens fully. Jared stands at the threshold of her room. Clare rearranges the blanket over herself.

“Look at you,” he says. “Bullet-ridden.”

“Not just a gash anymore.”

Jared maneuvers the door to half-closed and sits at the foot of her bed, his hand resting on her leg, the heat of it through the blanket.

“You look awfully banged up,” he says. “But it could have been a lot worse.”

“I don’t remember much. Do you know how I got here?”

“From what I hear a crew of guys made it down to the mine. They saw the smoke all the way from town. When they got there, Steve told them where you’d gone. I guess they could hear Shayna yelling. Saw the bullet holes in the egress door. Probably took an hour to get you out.”

“Is Shayna okay?”

“She is. Better than when she went in. She’s got color in her cheeks, so I hear.”

“Have you seen her?”

“No.”

“What about Wilfred?”

“He’s one floor up, under police guard. Apparently a helicopter’s coming to get him. I guess they’ll take him to town and book him.”

“Charlie?”

Jared doesn’t answer.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That’s what I’m hearing.”

Clare leans back and closes her eyes. “Poor Wilfred,” she says.

“You’re not the only person in town saying that. Reporters were already showing up last night. Women in pantsuits. I heard the motel’s open again, flooded or not.”

“And Louise?”

“She’s here too.” Jared shakes his head. “All I can say is I hope she doesn’t understand what’s happened. I hope Shayna keeps the worst of it to herself.”

There are voices in the hallway again. Jared edges up the bed so that Clare must nudge over to make room for him. His fingers lace through hers, the needle from the IV shifting in her vein, tugging. Clare withdraws her hand and slips it back under the blanket.

“Will you tell me who you are now?” he asks.

“I came here to find Shayna. That’s all I can say.”

“I asked you that. If that’s why you were here.”

“You asked me if I was a cop.”