A Place to Heal, page 14
“These people are your neighbors,” she gasped as she yanked her arm back out of his grasp. It made Mason wonder if he’d voiced his earlier thoughts without realizing it. She flung the arm in Arthur’s direction. “Your friends. He talked like you were throwing the town off a cliff.”
“I don’t get how he did it,” Theo said, shaking his head in astonishment. “He must have spent every hour since the breakfast pitting people against you. I didn’t think he’d get to the committee like that.”
“He got to the crowd, and the crowd got to the committee,” Mason muttered. Whether or not it was true, Mason felt personally broadsided by the opposition. As if they were against him, not just what he was trying to do. What he and Dana were trying to do. If someone had asked him three hours ago if he loved North Springs, he’d have said yes. He’d kept to himself lately and kept the town at a distance, but it was still his home. His father’s home. His grandfather’s home.
Now? The betrayal was so sharp and fresh he didn’t know what to feel. Were it not for Charlie, Mason couldn’t rightly say he wouldn’t point his truck out of town right now and keep driving. The words he’d heard hurled at him tonight would never leave him. He could never, ever remember feeling about North Springs the way he did right now. Why on earth had God led him down this incredible path, only to meet with what he’d seen tonight?
The one and only blessing—and slim blessing it was at that—was his choice to leave Charlie at home. Mason hoped his son would never hear what had been said tonight. “How am I going to tell Charlie?” he said as much to himself as everyone in the room.
The look on Dana’s face at that question sliced through Mason’s heart. No one answered the question because there was no answer. No way to tell a little boy how fear had turned his neighbors ugly. And that was the word for it: ugly.
“We’ll appeal.” Theo’s declaration was angry and urgent. “We can do that.”
The huff Dana gave in response voiced all the doubt Mason currently felt. There seemed little hope now that Nicholson had ignited such opposition to Camp True North Springs. The name felt darkly ironic now: North Springs had shown its true colors tonight. Mason was heartsick at what he’d seen. He was beyond tempted to just throw his hands up and walk away. When he met some of these people on the square tomorrow—if he dared to venture into town, that is—Mason couldn’t predict what he’d say. Actually, he could, and it wasn’t anything Charlie should ever hear.
“It’s not over,” Theo insisted.
“Of course it’s not over,” Bart said, coming up to clasp Mason’s arm. “We won’t let it be over.”
“How?” Dana asked, futility drawing the one word sharp and tight.
Bart drew in a deep breath. “Well, I don’t know that yet. But we will figure it out. I don’t want that man to have the last word on this.” Bart furrowed his eyebrows and threw Arthur a dark look.
Paul Summers walked by. Up until last night Mason had completely forgotten Nathan’s father sat on the zoning committee. “Sorry things didn’t go your way.” He didn’t sound like he was sorry one bit. “It’s just not a project for a town like ours.” He had said “ours,” but Mason could hear the “mine” Paul was surely thinking. You’re not going to put something like that in my town.
“Funny,” Mason let himself fire back, “I thought it was exactly the kind of project a town like mine should have.”
“I doubt your dad would have seen it that way. There are other ways to save your land, Mason. Not this.”
Paul could not have struck a lower blow. It stomped on the raw nerve of Mason’s recent lean years. The man in front of him could not possibly know the struggle to survive under the weight of Mason’s loss. How easy it was to judge from the comfort of his shiny, happy family. Ashamed as he was of it, Mason understood the brutal urge to throw something that had been Charlie’s undoing two weeks ago.
Nicco’s grip came on his hand, one Mason hadn’t even realized he’d balled into a fist. “Not worth it, amigo. Stand down.” Nicco stepped between Mason and Paul. “Good night, Paul. Go home and see if you can sleep easy after what happened here tonight.”
Mason felt as if it would be years before he could sleep easy again. Numb was so much better than the whiplash of rage coursing through his body right now. It was like being yanked back to the injustice of Melony’s accident all over again. A wickedly unfair world had him in its crosshairs, shooting down any hopes for happiness.
Dana was packing up her battalion of file folders as if she were picking up bodies on a battlefield. He ought to talk to her, talk with her about the defeat they’d suffered, but how? What was there to say? “Dana...” he managed to blurt out.
“Don’t,” she said, her eyes still wide in shock. “I need to get out of here. Now.”
She was right. Even in his own distress he could see that she was strung so tight if anyone said the wrong thing to her, it would be disastrous. “I’ll come over later,” he said, not caring who thought what about how that sounded. He needed to sort out the aftermath of this with her, not alone, and knew she needed the same. The only way through this was with each other.
“No,” she said even as he could see an overwhelming loneliness in her eyes. “I... Don’t.”
Some part of him thought walking her to her house would be the polite thing to do, but who was he kidding? Dana was a police officer. She trained to protect and defend.
Not from this, he thought to himself as he watched her push through the lingering crowd to get out of the auditorium. Not from anything like this.
* * *
Dana was glad Marion’s house was close enough to the square that she had walked tonight. Driving anywhere—except maybe clear out of town—felt beyond her. She stomped at high speed across the square toward the house, her tote bag of carefully organized files whacking against her chest as she clutched it. The air stretched too thin, and the moonlight washed sharp and harsh through the clear summer night.
She cut across the grass past the quaint gazebo. Had it only been four days since she felt confident telling her stories, gaining momentum as the town seemed to embrace the idea she’d brought? All that charm felt like a false veneer as she dashed past the circular structure. North Spring’s pretty shell was just that—a shell. And now it seemed everyone feared she was here to crack that shell. Some rule of perfection existed, and she had violated it in coming here with the idea she had. It was on her. She’d done that.
Dana had faced horrific confrontations, urban battles with guns drawn and murderous shouts, and not felt the fog of dread that seemed to cloud her thoughts now. The sense of personal failure was something new and unmanageable. Only one thought came sharp and clear in all the noise clanging everywhere in her mind: I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined it for Mason and Charlie.
She’d started a war. Truly, that’s what it felt like. To sit in that room and watch people she knew claimed to be neighbors say horrible, mean-spirited things to each other and to Mason? When the opponents hadn’t shown up at the breakfast—and then again, why would they?—she’d made the terrible mistake of assuming they didn’t exist. That only Arthur was their adversary. Tonight had shown how wrong she was.
It wasn’t hard to guess how things would go from here. Mason’s face told it all. He wouldn’t fight it. There was no hope of finding a way through the conflict she’d seen tonight. No, he would retreat back up the mountain and stay there. All the financial challenges would continue to mount. Someday—all too soon—he would throw up his hands and surrender to them. Charlie would slide further into his emotional valley, finding new ways to grow into an angry soul. People would reach out to the two of them the way they’d been reaching out since Melony died, and their efforts would fall on deaf ears.
Dana fought back the tears as she thrust her key into the house’s front door, grunting when it battled back. It seemed a particular torture that she was locking herself in a house full of fragile objects. So much of her wanted to yell and thrash and pound things.
She tossed the bag of files onto the only safe place in the house: the kitchen table. The pile slid a bit from the force of her toss, knocking the hymnal onto the floor. It seemed a fitting symbol for the utter lack of victory tonight had been. She left it lying on the tiles, despite how disrespectful it felt.
Charlie. Dana’s heart broke at the thought of how this would hit him. He deserved to see Camp True North Springs come to life in front of his eyes. He deserved to see the good of Franco’s little pond ripple out into the large-scale good that the camp would have been. Would have been. It would be hard to find three sadder words in the world tonight. Could those four committee members have voted the way they had if Charlie were in front of them? Nicco’s words to Paul Summers echoed in her ears: “Go home and see if you can sleep easy after what happened here tonight.”
Her phone rang in her coat pocket as she headed toward the bedroom. She didn’t even look at it. She wanted to fall onto the bed and yell into the fussy mountain of pillows Marion piled on the bed. Scream her anger and disappointment into the mounds of fringe and ruffles. She dropped her coat thoughtlessly at the bedroom door and let her knees buckle to bring her to the floor next to the bed. It was too much effort to climb onto the high mattress. Down on the floor felt where she ought to be. Dana pulled her knees up, let her head fall onto them, and cried. Hard. And long.
You knew it could end this way, she lectured herself. This was a wild risk from the beginning. You let yourself forget that. Trouble was, this wasn’t a case of things going back to the way things were. There was no going back. Years of witnessing conflict told her there’d be no healing the divide that split open in town tonight. At least not for Mason, perhaps not for anyone. She’d started to believe the lie that she could help to heal him, maybe had even been sent here to heal him, and had only succeeded in deepening his wounds.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed to the empty dark room. “I’m so, so sorry.” She grabbed one of the pillows leaning off the mattress above her, a velvety maroon rectangle with gigantic tassels on every corner. She held it to her chest as she let the tears come again. This burned worse than the bullets, cut more than the surgeon’s knife, ached more deeply than the long weeks of recovery. Before, she had lost the ability to be a mother. And that was awful, wrenching. Now, she’d lost hope of ever making a difference. And there didn’t seem to be anything more awful than that.
What now, God? It was more of a soul cry than any kind of prayer. A desperate plea for wisdom she surely didn’t have. You’re going to have to show me where to go from here.
At some point she must have fallen asleep because the chime of an email message woke her from a fitful doze. She fumbled for her coat on the floor across the room, reaching into the pocket as the device chimed again. She’d meant to simply shut it off, but managed to see the notifications for two voice mails and a pair of texts from Mason. Dana squinted her eyes shut. She couldn’t. It’d hurt too much to hear how he was feeling, how much he must resent the attack he’d received tonight. She put the phone back down on the ground, face down. Unable to look, but unable to go so far as to turn it off.
A second chime came five minutes later, one for a text this time. Maybe there was no avoiding this. Pulling in a deep breath, Dana turned the phone over and tapped the icon to bring up text messages. There were two from Mason, yes, but there was another text, a more recent one: You have received a high-priority email from Anthony Derrick. Captain Derrick?
Dana almost laughed. Captain Derrick’s high-priority emails were a standing joke in the department. To Derrick, every email was a high priority. The man wrote dozens of them, all long and many of them unnecessary. Why was she still getting one of those—or more precisely, why this one?
Curiosity—or the impulse to avoid reading or listening to anything from Mason right now—got the better of her. For no good reason, Dana pulled up the email on her phone. Maybe it was a long description of some required paperwork she no longer had to submit. Maybe it was photos from the department cookout she’d missed back in Denver.
It wasn’t any of those things. It was one of Derrick’s long emails, to be sure. Dana skimmed it, sure her sadness was clouding her thinking because it read like the last thing she’d expected.
She sucked in her breath at the last sentence, sitting on its own at the bottom of three long and wordy paragraphs: There’s a spot waiting for you if you’re ready to come home.
Chapter Sixteen
Come home?
The words no longer made sense. Somehow in the past few weeks Denver had stopped being home. This odd, figurine-filled little house that belonged to someone else had somehow become more like home than any apartment she’d ever had in Denver. Almost all her things were stuffed in Marion’s garage and still this little house on the town square felt like home.
More than any of that, the house on the side of the mountain, the one with the silly little pond and ceramic frog, felt like home.
Come home? No. Run back to Denver? Retreat back to Denver, actually. Hadn’t she prayed for God’s wisdom on what to do next before she fell asleep? Was He showing her? Sometimes retreat really was the only safe way to live to fight another day.
Derrick would take her back in a heartbeat. He’d been so reluctant to let her leave in the first place. She had old colleagues back there, like Sawyer Bradshaw, who were still friends. Why leave that? And really, who was she kidding? This never would have worked. She had no credentials other than her own experience and persistence. Even if she somehow managed to buy the land, to overthrow Nicholson and his army of naysayers, she needed materials and counselors and psychologists and a bunch of other skilled people.
How had she ever kidded herself this could work? When had she become the kind of person to buy into such a pipe dream? Dana couldn’t tell if her abdomen ached from fatigue, from injury or from sorrow. Did it really matter? She hugged the pillow to her midsection and sat on the floor waiting for the agony to go away.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when the carousel melody of Marion’s doorbell pierced the darkness of the house. She heard pounding on the door, and a voice she recognized as Mason’s calling her name. Her eyes squinted shut at the realization. How could she face him? How could she look at him knowing she’d pulled and pulled and dragged him into this project only to meet with what had happened tonight?
“Dana, let me in.” Mason’s voice was pained and tired.
She dragged herself downstairs and to the door. Pulling it open felt as if it took superhuman effort. Every inch of her ached, most especially her heart. And if it wasn’t already broken, Mason’s face crushed what was left of her heart. “I’m... I...” She needed a hundred ways to say I’m sorry and couldn’t even find the words for one.
He said nothing. He simply closed the space between them and pulled her into his arms. The moment defied description, a flood of emotion and regret and raw disappointment combined with aching wonder of being held by him. Because she had, in fact, been aching to be held by him. She, the battle-hardened warrior, the tough-love mother figure to some of the force’s fiercest officers, just wanted to be held. It didn’t matter that it was the man she’d wounded, the man whose life she’d upended for her own misguided Pollyanna dream.
“I’m sorry,” she wept into his shoulder. “I should never have come here. I came for all the wrong reasons.” Suddenly a flood of words gushed out of her. “It’s your land, it’s your family, this is your town and I just came here and...”
Mason pulled back. “And changed everything.” He gave the word an emphasis she didn’t deserve.
“For the worse,” she insisted.
He offered a defeated shrug. “Feels like it at the moment.” He smoothed back a lock of her hair. “I’m not sorry.”
“How can you say that? The things people said...” They’d stopped just short of accusing him of selling out the town to a shady cause in order to save his own skin. Someone had even used the word “contaminate.” How could he look at some of these people as neighbors ever again?
She should step back from his embrace, but she couldn’t bring herself to it. It felt as if his arms were the only thing holding her upright, the only thing keeping her whole self from falling to dust.
“I’m not sorry,” he repeated. “It’s not turned out anything close to how I wanted. How I expected, even. But I can’t say I’m sorry that you’re...here. That you’re in my life. In Charlie’s life.”
Mason held her gaze, and Dana’s legs felt unsteady beneath her for a whole different reason. It seemed impossible to her that he could feel what she felt, what she saw reflected in his eyes. She had to be wrong, had to be seeing only what she wanted to see. “Mason...” she began, but couldn’t find a way to say more. She’d come here to find a way to make a difference, and all she’d done was make a mess. A terrible, ugly mess for two people she’d come to care so much about.
“I’ll admit, this is hard.” His tone was weary and disappointed, but he still did not release his arms from around her. She couldn’t make sense of it.
“But my life’s been only an empty kind of hard for way too long,” he went on. “Tonight was the first time in a long time I drove down that mountain wanting to be in town. Wanting to be part of life again. I was ready to fight for this wild idea. An idea the pushiest woman I’ve ever met kept insisting I had to be part of.”
Mason kept touching her hair. So softly. Dana thought if he touched her cheek with that much tenderness she might melt on the spot. Her, melting. Who could have ever seen this coming?
“I’m not ready to let that go,” Mason continued. “No matter how ugly this gets. I’m not ready to let you go. And I’m sure Charlie isn’t either. The camp’s not dead, it’s just hit a snag.”
