007

There were places that changed with the times and others that remained stubbornly the same. Seattle, for example, had become all but unrecognizable to locals in the past decade. The combination of dot.com ingenuity and designer coffees had turned the once REI-garbed, nature-loving inhabitants of that beautiful big town into honest-to-God urbanites. The sound of construction was ever-present; huge orange cranes dotted the changing skyline like giant birds of prey. Every day there was a new high-rise shooting up into the gray underbelly of the sky. Restaurants with flashy fusion menus and unpronounceable names lined the boomtown streets, creating instant neighborhoods where before there had been only buildings and street signs. The famed Space Needle and the once-renowned Smith Tower, now the bookends of the city instead of its proud twin masts, looked smaller and older each day.

Vivi Ann had grown up, too. She was thirty-nine years old, and most of her youthful optimism and energy had been lost. A few times a year, when she felt especially alone, restless, and edgy, she drove into the city. With a cover story firmly in place—buying tack at an auction or looking at a horse for sale—and babysitting secured, she tried to find solace in dark bars, but on the rare occasions when she let a man take her home, she ended up feeling dirtier and more unhappy than when she’d begun.

And always, she came back to Oyster Shores, where nothing ever changed. Oh, houses had been built, property values had risen, but it was still relatively secret, this hidden patch of warm water in a cold-water state. A few years ago Bill Gates had built his summer compound on the Canal and the locals had been abuzz with worry that other millionaires would follow and tear down their old, comfortable houses to put up McMansions along the shore, and it had happened—was happening—but slowly.

Many of the same stores lined the same streets, albeit with better signs, thanks to all that summer money. There were a few more restaurants, a few more bed-and-breakfasts, and a new three-screen movie theater, but other than that, not much had been added. Flowers still bloomed in window boxes along Main Street and hung from baskets on the streetlamps along Shore Drive.

The biggest difference in town was actually Water’s Edge. The ranch had grown more successful than she’d ever imagined. Two ranch hands worked full-time on the place, and the arena was rarely empty. It had become the social heart of the town, so much so that Vivi Ann had to work hard to schedule time with her sisters.

Now she sat at the diner, at her favorite booth, with Aurora across from her. They were surrounded by the usual pre–Memorial Day lunch crowd; locals sitting here and talking quietly among themselves. In a week’s time, when the holiday hit, this place would be packed with tourists.

“I heard there’s a new banker in town. Not bad-looking is the word,” Aurora said, tucking a lock of newly blond hair behind her ear. In the past months, she’d chosen Nicole Kidman as her personal fashion icon, which meant she ironed her dyed wheat-blond, chin-length hair, and wore enough sunscreen to be safe in the event of a nuclear blast.

“Really?” Vivi Ann answered. They both knew she didn’t care. “Maybe you should go after him.”

“It’s been twelve years,” Aurora said, meeting Vivi Ann’s gaze head-on.

As if she didn’t know exactly how long it had been since Dallas’s arrest. There were still nights she couldn’t sleep and days when she beat herself up over signing those divorce papers. Sometimes, in the still of the night, she wondered if he’d been testing her; if he’d wanted her to prove her love by refusing to give up. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Sure.” Aurora paid the check and they walked out together, into the sunlit day. “Thanks for meeting me for lunch.”

“Are you kidding? I love playing hooky. Next time I’ll dress up.”

“You? Ha.”

“I know how you hate to be seen with a woman wearing fifteen-year-old jeans.”

“It’s a small town. My choices are limited. If I weren’t with you, I might have to join the Women’s Auxiliary again and hear how stupid I was to let Richard go. Like I was supposed to not care that he was screwing his nurse.”

Vivi Ann linked arms with her sister. It had been four years since Aurora’s acrimonious divorce, but no one knew better than Vivi Ann how long some wounds could take to heal. She knew Aurora felt foolish for failing to see her husband’s infidelity. “How are you doing? Really?”

“Some days are better than others.”

“I know that song,” Vivi Ann said. She, of all people, knew that a thing could be talked about only so much. Then, finally, you had to let it go. Everything that needed to be said about Aurora’s divorce had been. So she said, “How’s work?”

“I love it. I should have taken a job a long time ago. Selling jewelry might not be curing cancer, but it keeps me out of the house.”

Vivi Ann was just about to say more when her cell phone rang. Reaching into her purse, she pulled it out, flipped it open, and answered.

“Vivi? This is Lori Lewis, from the middle school. Noah is in the principal’s office.”

“I’ll be right there.” Vivi Ann snapped the phone shut with a curse. “It’s Noah,” she said. “He’s in trouble at school.”

“Again? You want me to come with you?”

“No, thanks.” Vivi Ann gave Aurora a quick hug and then hurried over to her new truck. Jumping in, she drove three blocks and parked on the street.

At the secretary’s desk, she smiled tightly. “Hey, Lori.”

“Hi, Vivi,” Lori said, leading her toward the principal’s door. Opening it, she said, “Noah is in with Harding now.”

“Thanks,” Vivi Ann said, stepping past the secretary.

Harding rose at her entrance. He was a big man, with a paunch that strained the buttons of his short-sleeved white dress shirt. Baggy brown polyester pants rode beneath his protruding belly, held in place by taut suspenders. His fleshy face, folded by distress into basset hound lines, was showing signs of emergent beard growth. “Hello, Vivi Ann,” he said. “I’m sorry we had to pull you away from the farm. I know how busy you are these days.”

She nodded in affirmation and glanced over to the corner, where her almost fourteen-year-old son sat slumped, one booted foot stretched forward. A column of jet-black hair fell across his face, obscured one green eye—the only trait he’d inherited from her. Otherwise, he was the spitting image of his father.

When she got closer, he tucked the hair behind his ear and she saw the black eye it had shielded, and the cut along his jaw. “Oh, Noah...”

He crossed his arms and stared out the window.

“He got in another fight at lunch. Erik, Jr.; Brian; and some other boys. Tad had to go to the doctor’s for an X-ray,” Harding said.

The lunch bell rang and the floor beneath them shook with movement. Raised voices bled through the walls.

Harding pressed the intercom, said, “Send Rhonda in, please.” Then he looked at Noah. “Young man, you’ve run out of rope with me. This is the third time you’ve been involved in a fight this year.”

“So it’s a crime to get beaten up around here, is that it?”

“I have several students who say you started it.”

“Big surprise,” Noah said bitterly, but Vivi Ann knew him well enough to see the hurt beneath his anger.

Harding sighed. “If it was up to me, I’d suspend him, but Mrs. Ivers seems to think he deserves one last chance. And since there’s only two weeks of school left, I’m going to agree with her.” He looked at Vivi Ann. “But you need to get a tighter leash on this boy, Vivi Ann. Before he hurts someone like his—”

“I can do that, Harding.”

The door behind them opened, and Rhonda Ivers walked into the room.

“You may go, Noah,” Harding said, and Noah was on his feet in a flash.

Vivi Ann grabbed his arm as he tried to pass her, yanked him around to face her. He was now eye to eye with her; tall and gangly. “You come straight home after school. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred bucks. Got it?”

He wrenched free. “Yeah, yeah.”

When he was gone, Harding said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Rhonda.” Giving them each a pointed look, he added, “Have your meeting here. I need to keep an eye on the lunch crowd.”

Rhonda waited for him to leave and then took a seat behind his big metal desk. Amid the piles of paper stacked on top of it, she looked frail and birdlike. She wore the same hairstyle and type of clothing she had some twenty years earlier when she’d tried to teach Vivi Ann to appreciate Beowulf. “Sit down, Vivi,” she said.

Vivi Ann was so tired of this; it felt as if she’d been battling one invisible foe after another for twelve years. Ever since Al had asked Dallas what he’d done on that Christmas Eve night.

“We all know Noah’s story,” Mrs. Ivers said when Vivi Ann sat down. “And his problem. We understand why he’s acting out, why he’s unhappy.”

“You think he’s unhappy? I thought... I hoped it was just normal teenage angst.”

Rhonda gave her a sympathetic smile. “You know the kids make fun of him?”

Vivi Ann nodded.

“He needs a friend, and perhaps some counseling, but that’s for you to decide, of course. I’m here because he is going to fail Language Arts this year. I’ve done the calculations and there’s no way he can make up all the lessons he’s missed.”

“If you hold him back a grade it will just compound his problem. Then they’ll think he’s stupid as well as... different.”

“Such was my analysis.” Mrs. Ivers pulled a black and white bound composition book out of her bag and slid it across the desk. “That’s why I’m giving Noah this one opportunity to save his grade. If he’ll fill this journal with honest writings this summer, I’ll pass him on to high school.”

Vivi Ann felt a wealth of gratitude for this woman she’d once called Mrs. Eyesore. “Thank you.”

“Don’t be so quick to thank me. This will be hard work for Noah. I’ll require eight pages a week all summer. I’ll meet with him each Monday to give him that week’s topic. We’ll begin next week before school. Say seven-fifty in my classroom? In late August, I’ll grade his work. I will not read his personal entries except to ascertain that it’s his own original work. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly.”

Mrs. Ivers smiled at last, a little sadly. “It can’t be easy on him.”

The past was always close in a town like this, like a layer of new snow on deep mud; noticeable. “No,” Vivi Ann said, reaching for the empty journal. “It’s not easy.”

By the time Vivi Ann returned to the ranch, it was almost time for her afternoon lessons. She passed her dad in the arena, where he was roping with a couple of buddies. The hired hands—day workers now; no more live-in help for Water’s Edge—were working the chutes. Waving, she went into the arena office and began creating flyers for next month’s cutting series.

In the past years, Water’s Edge had grown financially successful, but beneath the overhead lights inside the barn, little had changed. The arena still boasted rows of wooden bleachers and a series of gates and chutes for roping; three big yellow barrels were pushed to one side; they’d be pulled out and positioned for tonight’s barrel-racing jackpot. Inside the barn, horses had chewed down the wood wherever they could, leaving the slats scalloped. Cobwebs hung thick in the corners and flyers studded the walls with color, advertising stuff for sale, classes and clubs to join, and veterinary and farrier services. The arena schedule had been set for a long time now, too. She still ran a few jackpots a month, as well as a longer barrel-racing series; still taught lessons and trained horses. In addition, several clubs rented out use of the place regularly—drill clubs, 4-H Clubs, and horse shows. Once a month, kids with special needs came to ride. The only real difference was Vivi Ann herself; she no longer barrel-raced. She’d never been able to bring herself to replace Clem.

For the next four hours she worked nonstop. After school, the 4-H Club showed up, and she surrounded herself with girls still young enough to love their horses more than any boy and committed enough to practice what they were taught. She felt like a rock star around them, idolized and adored. Soon, she knew, these girls would grow up, sell their horses, and move on. It was the circle of life in these parts: horses came first, then boys replaced them and took the lead. At some point later on, those girls came back as women with daughters of their own and started the cycle all over again.

At the end of the day, she turned off the overhead lights, checked the horses one by one, and then went down to the farmhouse, where she found her father sitting in his favorite rocking chair on the porch. As usual lately, after a long day spent working the ranch, he was sitting on the porch, drinking bourbon and whittling a piece of wood.

He had aged in the past decade, remarkably so. His face, always craggy, had hollowed out, and his once-wild hair had thinned to a cottony fuzz. Bushy white eyebrows grew in tufts above his black eyes.

He was seventy-four, but he moved like an even older man. They never spoke of what had happened all those years ago, he and Vivi Ann, never brought up the arrest that had broken their family’s spine and split them in half.

They spoke of ordinary things now, sometimes barely looking at each other; it was as if part of their lives had frozen over and couldn’t be found. But Vivi Ann had learned that things didn’t always have to be talked about to be resolved. If you pretended long enough and hard enough that everything was fine, in time it could come to be true, or nearly so.

No one in town spoke of what happened all those years ago, either, not to Vivi Ann. There was a tacit agreement made by all to forget.

Unfortunately, it was Noah’s life that everyone in their farm-house and in town ignored so pointedly. The adults, anyway. The kids had obviously made no such pact.

“Hey, Dad,” she said, coming up the stairs. “We need another load of hay. Can you call Circle J?”

“Yep. I sent that new hand over for bute, too.”

“Good.” She went into the house and cooked dinner for him and the hands, leaving the meal in the oven on low heat. The three men ate catch-as-catch-can these days; Vivi Ann cooked in the farmhouse, but rarely sat down to eat with the men. Her life was up in the cottage these days, with Noah. When she was done, she returned to the porch.

She was about to walk past her father when he said, “I hear Noah got in another fight today.”

“The busybody express,” she said, irritated. “They tell you who started it?”

The past was between them now, as visible as the wide white planks at their feet.

“You know who started it.”

“Your dinner is in the oven. Tell Ronny to wash his dishes this time.”

“Yep.”

She walked out across the parking lot and driveway (paved since 2003) and stopped at the paddock behind the barn. Renegade whinnied at her approach and hobbled toward her, his knobby, arthritic knees popping at each step.

“Hey, boy.” She rubbed his graying muzzle and scratched behind his twitching ears. It flashed through her mind suddenly: Does he still dream of riding Renegade?

Pushing the thought aside, she headed up toward her house. Renegade followed on his side of the fencing, limping and struggling until the start of the hill, where he gave up and stood there, watching her go.

She was careful not to look back at him as she went up the final rise to her cottage. When she opened the door, she knew that Noah was home. A pounding, pulsing beat of music rattled the knotty pine walls. She drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. Lord knew anger wouldn’t aid her now.

At his bedroom door, she paused and knocked. It was impossible to hear an answer above the music, so she opened the door and went inside.

His room was long and narrow, a recent addition to the cabin. Posters of bands covered his walls—Godsmack, Nine Inch Nails, Korn, Metallica. He had his own computer in the corner and a television hooked up to an Xbox.

Maybe that was the problem; she’d given him too much and asked too little in return. But she was always trying to make up for what he’d lost.

He was sitting on his unmade bed, with a wireless controller in his hand, making some animated biker-looking chick kick a guy in the balls.

“We need to talk,” she said to his back.

When he didn’t respond, she went over to the TV and turned it off.

“Damn it, Mom. I was just about to beat that level.”

“Don’t swear at me.”

He gave her a sullen look. “If language is such a big deal, maybe you and your sisters could start setting a better example.”

“You aren’t going to turn this around,” she said. “Not this time. What was the fight about?”

“Gee, lemme think. Global warming?”

“Noah...”

“What do you think it was about? What’s it always about? That puke-for-brains Engstrom called me Injun boy and his assface friends started doing a rain dance. So I punched him out.”

Vivi Ann sat down beside him. “I would have wanted to clean his pimply clock, too.”

He glanced at her through the curtain of his greasy hair.

Vivi Ann knew how desperate he was for someone to take his side, to be his friend and support his actions. It broke her heart that she couldn’t fill that role. Once, she’d thought they’d be best friends forever; that youthful naïveté was no more. He was a fatherless boy; he had to have a mother who made the rules. “Every time you hit someone, you prove them right.”

“So what? Maybe I am just like my old man.” He threw his wireless remote at the wall. “I hate this town.”

“Noah—”

“And I hate you for marrying him. And I hate him for not being here...” His voice broke on that and he stood up, moving quickly away from the bed.

She went to him, took him in her arms the way she used to, but he shoved her away. She stared at his back, saw the defeated slope to his shoulders, and knew how wounded he’d been by those ugly words in the schoolyard.

“Believe me, I know how you’re feeling.”

He turned. “Oh, really? You know how it feels to have a murderer for a father?”

“I had one for a husband,” she said quietly.

“Leave me alone.”

Vivi Ann took another deep breath. They’d been down this road before, talking around Dallas. She never knew what to say. “Before I leave, I have to pass along the good news that you’re going to flunk English, which means you won’t go on to high school in September.”

That got his attention. “What?”

“Lucky for you, Mrs. Ivers has agreed to give you a second chance. She’s going to let you write in a journal for her this summer. You’ll meet with her Monday morning before school to discuss the details.”

“I hate writing.”

“Then I hope you enjoy eighth grade better the second time.”

She left him alone to mull that over.

Who Am I?

Only a totally whack old lady like Mrs. Eyesore would give such a stupid assignment. She thinks I care about passing Language Arts. Like I’m going to need THAT after I graduate from high school. Yeah, right. Screw her and her last chance. I’m not gonna do it.

They suspended me.

Fuck.

Who Am I?

Why does Mrs. I. think that’s such an awesome question? I’m nobody. That’s what I’ll tell her. Oh wait, I don’t have to tell her because she’s not going to READ MY PRIVATE STUFF. Like I believe her when she says she’s just going to skim over it to see if I’m not copying other people. Yeah. I so totally believe that.

I should tell her. Blow her mind. I DON’T KNOW WHO I AM.

How could I?

I don’t look like anyone in my family. Everyone says I have my mom’s eyes, but if I ever look that sad I’m gonna blow my brains out.

That’s my answer this week, Mrs. I. I don’t know who I am and I don’t care. Why should I? No one else in this town does. I eat all my lunches alone at the table with the other dorks and losers. No one ever talks to me. They just laugh when I go past and whisper shit about my dad.