The Blue Iris, page 29
He had her to his bedroom in what felt like two strides, like she weighed no more than his clothes. Tessa took over, yanking wildly at his shirt, then her own, pressing her every surface fiercely to his as he fell backwards on the bed, grinning in surprised surrender. Her hair fell in a curtain, the spaces between them fusing into a knot of giggles and whispers as together, over and over again, they tumbled out of the plane.
White Violet / Viola Albus
“Take a chance on happy.”
SAM
He patted the old mini fridge in apology for its new contents. Darryl meant well, but why call it beer at all? Alcohol-free booze was like Russian roulette with foam bullets, or fucking without penetration. It only fooled the onlookers.
Sam leaned back in his chair, surveying the rainbow-lit festivities. Offing himself had prompted widespread improvement around here—in as little as eight months! He was a bloody Hair Club for Men commercial.
Two days ago, the whole crew celebrating in the middle of the day, he’d nearly booked it all over again. Was he still so hopped up on his own bullshit to think Charlie would be sitting around waiting? That she hadn’t found herself a nice dentist, maybe an accountant, someone without priors who came home to grill lean meat for dinner and swirl wine in one of those idiotically huge glasses? Sam had no business showing up now, killing off new growth like a rogue frost in June.
He turned to leave, then he heard his mother’s voice, clear as the clink of a bottlecap. Buck up, Sammy-Baby. Did you come this far to only come this far? Then, his father’s. Quit being a little bitch. If Charlie wanted to tear out his heart and piss on it, well, she’d earned her due. What he hadn’t properly considered was how holes-in-his-chest-with-her-eyes fuming she’d be, like his disappearance was some deliberate, all-time dick move.
But then, they always were spectacularly good at assuming the worst in each other.
When Sam disappeared from her porch on New Year’s, he was dead, and had every intention of staying that way. For her. Darryl, too. They’d turned saving him into a lifestyle, but it was no use. The Sam who dove headfirst into the kitchen that night Iris died was never coming back.
Maybe the coke had gone off the night he went to the cabin, or maybe he really was a little bitch. He’d dipped south towards Manitoulin by snowmobile countless times in the dark; he should have made it.
Clef, ex-military, was ice fishing in the frostbitten dawn when he spotted Sam sputtering a hundred yards off the tip of Drummond Island, just inside the Michigan border. Sam, long flipped-off by gods of every denomination, took in the whitewashed sheets of rock all around him, the icy guillotine edges sparkling along the surface, and found no earthly explanation for how he was still breathing. His resolve teetered.
He opened his bag and tossed Clef twenty grand in exchange for food and a place to hide while he worked up the nerve again, even though Clef’s handshake said he’d have done it for free. For eleven weeks, Clef fed him vegetable soup and bottled water by the caseload, didn’t leave so much as a sip of rum extract lying around. Sam screamed until his larynx emptied of sound and the hallucinatory carpet of spiders around his cot had dissolved into the floorboards. Then, he waited, but for what he wasn’t sure. Scent-tracking dogs? A SWAT team to blow Clef’s rough-hewn door off its hinges?
Turns out, a fortysomething not-so-recovered addict of no fixed address doesn’t command much search-and-rescue.
Weeks passed. Months. Sam was clean for the longest stretch in memory, jogging six miles a day through the woods, fitter than he was in his twenties. His thoughts, never more than a tangled fishing line begging to be snipped, began to flow with unprecedented clarity.
What could his life be if he were to finally let it all . . . be? What if his young daughters overseas could still grow up knowing more of their father than the bitter slices fed by their mother? What if he could be the man Charlie once hoped for? But he’d be dead to them by now. Until he was absolutely sure, he had to stay that way. He wouldn’t put them through it twice.
Back on the corner, Sam had done a double take; a flourishing parkette had sprung from the rot of tears and rust. The Darryl he’d left behind would have just as soon blown up the place. If only Sam and his brother talked years ago, instead of just the other night at Charlie’s. To think Darryl blamed himself all this time, as if a different song that New Year’s would’ve changed their parents’ dance? No wonder the kid turned into such a powder keg.
Tonight, though, Brick was laughing. Charlie’s glow under these trees was an aurora, calling him a fucking slob for the beer foam spouting down his shirt. It was magic, all of it. Rowan, who really packed a smile when he stopped chewing those nails, had claimed a chair instead of a bucket. Antonio Suave had a girl in his lap, which spelled actual relationship, no-grenades-in-the-beer-garden being Sam’s number one rule. And Luke, his beautiful Lukey-boy, had finally dropped the vendetta against womankind.
Indeed, Sam’s favorite apprentice was grinning electrically, no doubt thanks to Tessa, over there giving him enough fire-eye to melt a candle. Any second, he’d be making some lame excuse to sneak her back to Sam’s old room, and Charlie would be gloating for weeks.
As for the newbie with the smart mouth and tumbling hair, something wouldn’t quit tugging. The way she talked? Her facial expressions? Like one of those snotty bits in the egg white, Sam couldn’t grab hold of it. He took another phony swig and quit trying; after abusing his brain like a rented mule for decades, it was riddled with fugue patches.
Right on cue, Luke gave Tessa the nod, signaling they’d put in an acceptably long appearance at Sam’s Not-Dead shindig. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming of screwing each other’s brains out. They stood to leave.
“Going so soon?” Sam teased.
“My flight leaves first thing,” Luke said. “Tess is . . . helping me pack.”
“You’d better hit the road then, son. Be sure to leave extra time getting to the airport.” Sam grinned; twenty minutes ago, he’d slipped away and chalked everyone’s tires with bruised apples from the cooler. He pulled Luke into a near headlock. “Leafs game after I’m out of the slammer, yeah?”
Sam had stolen twenty-four unbroken, unbreaking hours with Charlie, then called his probation officer. The emergency hearing was scheduled for tomorrow, and while the judge would look favorably on his progress, his failure to submit to random alcohol testing all these months guaranteed some amount of jail time.
“Goodnight, Tessa,” he said. “And hey, thanks for helping hold down the fort. Sounds like my brother would’ve melted the Clock without you.”
Tessa waved off the accolades. “Sure thing, chicken wing. We had a blast, right Darryl?”
Sam looked at her, his brow a progress tab during a very large download as Tessa said her goodbyes, pressing her cheeks to theirs like royalty in running shorts.
Sure thing, chicken wing.
The red shirt in Charlie’s bedroom.
No. It wasn’t possible.
Was it?
Sam had been with more women than he could ballpark, and truthfully, few besides Charlie stood out. But there was one whose translucent image had passed through his mind on occasion like a porcelain ghost-doll, part déjà vu, part hallucination. He’d never been able to forget her, exactly, nor place her. Until right now.
Holy fuck.
Sobriety had finally lifted the fog.
Instantly, he smelled the chives on the potato skins, floating in grease. Overhead, Don and Ron were duking it out over a bad icing call during the penalty kill. Charlie had been away at university over a month, no guarantee she’d return. Sam, miserable and sick of Darryl chucking shit about it, started hanging out at a dive on Morrow after work, where the bartender broke more glasses than she filled, but with a breezy resignation, like the objects themselves were being unruly. He remembered thinking Charlie would like her; she was also a wiseass, and her pastel gaze was this giant opposing magnet; when it landed on you, all your inner black filings shoved aside.
One night, her heel caught in a floor plank, and she dumped a full tray of chicken wings on herself. The only spare uniform shirt was a triple-XL that hung like a red barrel past her knees, the bar’s wacky logo vanishing into her armpit. But in a classic stroke of female ingenuity, she used her ponytail elastic to cinch the waist, cuffed the sleeves, and POW—crotch-socking minidress. The patrons cheered their slurry approval as she twirled self-mockingly, head thrown back in laughter, hair falling in chestnut waves.
Sam decided to stay until closing.
“Rough day?” she asked as he helped her flip up the chairs.
“Yeah. Unless by chance you’d like to buy six carts of fresh-cut American bittersweet at triple the market price?”
She leaned on the broom handle. “Again?”
“It is shockingly easy to bid on the wrong clock. Someone should really look into it.”
“Well, I’d take them off your hands, but I left all my money in Europe.”
So that’s what she was doing here. Paying for a past adventure. She asked if wiping down her bar top was some kind of community service requirement, or was he going to buy her a drink already. Sam teased in reply, “Sure thing, chicken wing.”
She swatted him with the bar towel, then fetched two lowballs and shimmied onto the stool beside him. On this, the sad side of the counter, smoke-filmed potlights and the TV gone black, Sam saw a loneliness that rivalled his own. But then her gaze met his and set off the most wonderfully naked feeling, like she was painting the best parts of him into a much bigger installation.
“This is going to sound like a line,” she said, tipping her glass, “but I never do this.”
“Then you should know up front . . . I do.”
“Does it help?”
He shrugged. “For as long as it lasts.”
She bit her lip. The pinch landed square in his own gut, followed by a spreading of heat down his legs as she threw back her whisky. “In that case, I should probably get your name.”
Sam introduced himself, chuckling when she did the same, as if the letters on her nametag weren’t already etched into every wretched soul to set foot in that bar.
“Good to meet you, Sam. I’m Beth.”
EPILOGUE
Winter
Snowdrop / Galanthus Nivalis
Hope.
Outside the window, row upon row of white-capped evergreens were lined up according to size and species, and snow was a meandering waterfall against the pewter sky. Along the curb, wooded heaps tingled the sinuses: gold-studded British Columbian cedar dripping like chandeliers, pine boughs oozing sap, prickled blue fingers of Douglas Fir.
“Hello?”
(TAP-TAP-TAP)
“HELLO?”
(Deafening microphone clatter)
“It’s not working.”
“Give it a second.”
“What the . . . ? I can’t see a goddamn thing!”
“Turn the camera around.”
“I don’t . . . how the hell? For fuck’s sake, Spider, can’t we use the phone like normal people?”
“Just give me that thing, please . . . ”
(More muffles)
Charlie’s face, stamped with the red outline of a snorkel mask, filled the screen. “Merry Christmas everybody! Whoa, look at the snow!”
“Hasn’t let up since we left for the terminal,” Tessa said.
“Calling for another ten to twenty overnight,” Rowan added.
The door crashed open. Darryl rushed a tray of poinsettias in from the cold like he was transporting a trauma victim.
“I kind of miss it,” Charlie said. She and Sam had jetted off shortly after he completed his sixty-day sentence, before the snow began to fly.
Sam’s face squeezed in beside hers. “Says the woman with a grand total of two Canadian winters under her belt.”
“Seriously,” said Ainsley, climbing the stepladder, canvas in hand. “I’d trade a white Christmas for the Seychelles with Tony any day.”
Darryl dropped the tray, sending half the poinsettias crashing to the floor.
“Jeez, Brick,” Sam said. “Would you like a hammer?”
Darryl flipped his middle finger at the screen. That Toronto’s most sought-after holiday plant detested cold weather summed up everything he’d never wanted to know about indoor stock. “I thought you were in Kenya?”
“That’s next week. Sam wants to have breakfast with the giraffes.”
“Who doesn’t?” Sam said with a wink. “How did auction go today, Tess?”
Tessa sighed. “Ask your brother.”
“A know-it-all, this one, just like her old man,” Darryl said. “Sitting pretty with her lightning fingers, acting like I can’t spot a decent poinsettia.”
Tessa’s hands flew up. “The one time he’s supposed to load up on red, and he’s all about salmon!”
Sam’s laugh crackled through the speaker.
“Forget it, girlie. He’s color blind, I’ve been saying it for years.”
“That explains a lot about his kitchen reno,” Rowan teased.
“You keep yukking it up in here,” Darryl said. “Some of us have work to do. Mele Kalikimaka, lovebirds. Try not to get eaten by sharks or lions or whatever the hell you’re spying on today.”
“Same to you, brother. See you in a few weeks.”
“Love you, Brickie!” Charlie sang.
“Yeah,” Darryl mumbled as he headed for the door.
“I should get out there, too, Tony’s probably . . .” Tessa trailed off, distracted by an incoming call. She flashed her phone at Ainsley, who arched one eyebrow at the sight of Will’s name. Tessa blew a kiss at the tablet, heading for the door. “I’d better take this. Have a blast, you two. Merry Christmas!”
“I’ll call you tomorrow, hon,” Sam called after her. Tomorrow, she would be with her grandparents, who had warmed to Sam considerably since Tessa introduced him, if confused at first by the missing Greek accent. “Don’t forget to send pics from tonight!”
Olivia scuttled in from the cold. She’d left the last of the holiday hampers with Eleanor to distribute so she could swing by the shop on her way to check on the caterers; she needed a few more boughs. Tonight had to be perfect.
Tessa, on a call, waved as she passed. Olivia watched from the doorway as Rowan panned his tablet over the latest phase of renos; a new washroom and storage closet. He caught her eye, looking almost relieved to see her as usual. And happy. For the first time in ages, Olivia was starting to feel the same.
The women’s outreach center, founded with the gluttonous divorce settlement Peter Westlake quietly secured, was already impacting more clients than imagined, thanks to Olivia’s silent partner. By fronting the operation as an upscale wellness spa, they’d been able to usher it into their own ritzy postal code without the usual not-in-my-backyard objections, ensuring even women like Olivia could access help if needed. Eleanor showed up daily and rolled up her sleeves, but mayoral photo ops were strictly forbidden. She’d refused even to put her name on the door. At the end of the day, what Mrs. Westlake really needed was someone to fight for.
Olivia smiled back at Rowan, eyeballs floating in watery bliss as they so often did lately. Finally, she’d gotten it right. Rowan was a good man, and he’d unearthed the good in herself.
That’s why it had to be tonight, at dinner. Technically, it was a touch too soon, but he’d want everyone there, and what better way to mark their first Christmas together? Besides, she wasn’t sure she could hide it much longer. She’d read it was still only a tiny cluster of cells, barely bigger than a poppy seed, yet somehow, her insides already felt so different.
Will took a long look out the window as the cabin pressurized, committing snow to memory. He pulled out his phone, open to the same thread all morning.
In a few hours, he’d step off this plane a different man entirely; it felt wrong to leave without saying something. The engines below him grew louder. With eyes squeezed shut, he tapped the call button, stomach lurching with every ring.
She’d texted a few times after he was conspicuously absent from the mayoral swearing-in. Then, a few weeks later, when he dropped from the firm’s website. To date, Will hadn’t responded; he was too angry. At her, himself.
The Will-and-Tessa-shaped hole in the campaign plan triggered a fair bit of panic in Peter’s war room, until Eleanor tabled the masterful pivot no one could oppose—an end to drunk driving. Peter took a hard line out of the gate, pledging a wall-to-wall crackdown within city limits for as long as he was in office. Support among the coveted low-to-middle income demographic pushed through the roof, and no one cared what the mayor-elect’s family got up to, least of all his friend Bradley Thornton, now under permanent, legally-binding contract with a chauffer company, purportedly on account of his packed schedule.
“Merry Christmas, Will.” Her voice was a song lyric you strained to recall, until those first notes brought every word back.
“Merry Christmas, Tessa.”
“Is everything okay?”
“It wasn’t. But yeah, I think now it will be.”
She exhaled. “I’m glad.”
“Thanks, for . . . you know.”
In her last voicemail, she’d complained that she still couldn’t recall how she ended up with the scar on her face. Will understood; she’d never tell a soul. She felt the weight of his guilt, his shattered heart. A lesser burden than he deserved, but more than she wished him to carry.
“You’re welcome.”
A pause.
“Rowan’s lawyer found a missing file. Copies of all the paperwork we needed to keep Trucks open.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Turned up out of nowhere. All the fines have been dropped.”
“Wow. Lucky break.”
Will heard the soft click of her lips and knew she was grinning. An overhead voice instructed him to power down his device. “I have to go.” Love you, he started to add, purely out of habit, before ending the call on a garbled syllable instead.
