True Colors

  “I can’t stand this anymore,” Winona said. “What are we going to do?”

  “We?” Aurora’s voice was icy but dull, and in that lack of luster Winona knew there was an opening.

  “You hate it, too.”

  “Of course I hate it.”

  “What do we do?”

  Aurora turned to her. “Take his appeal. Help her.”

  Why didn’t anyone understand? “I won’t be any help to him, don’t you get that? I’m a small-town attorney. I don’t know anything about criminal appellate work.”

  Aurora’s gaze was steady and more than a little sad. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it, Win. We’re sisters. At least we used to be.” On that, she set down her half-empty margarita and walked out of the tavern.

  Winona stood there in the smoky darkness, surrounded by friends and neighbors. Alone.

  Winona and her father spent Christmas Eve together. She got to his house early and decorated all by herself. She went up to the attic, found the worn, creased cardboard boxes marked Xmas, and carried them down to the living room.

  There, it was quiet. There were no sisters laughing together, drinking wine, and arguing about what holiday movie to watch while they decorated. No wonder Winona had put off the decorating until this late date. She’d known how it would feel.

  Still, she refused to skimp on any tradition, and so she decorated the house from stem to stern, using everything in the boxes. She curled fresh cedar boughs up the banister and tied them in place with glittery gold ribbons. She put the miniature Christmas scene along the mantel: fake snow, tiny people with cars and carriages and replicas of downtown storefronts. As a girl, her favorite part had been to fit the tiny oval of mirrored glass on top of the cottony snow to make a minuscule skating lake. The girls had fought over that job for years . . .

  Winona refused to think about that. Instead, she poured herself another glass of wine, put dinner on the stove, and cut herself a big piece of cake.

  She’d used food to tide her over for most of the past few months. Whenever she’d felt depressed, she’d gone into the kitchen. Now she had probably ten dozen cookies in Tupperware containers in her refrigerator, and she’d gained at least fifteen pounds since Dallas’s arrest.

  Don’t think about that, either.

  She went into Dad’s study, finding him there. He was holding a drink and staring out at the Canal. The view was crisp on this cold, late December day—purple mountains crowned in pink snow, steel-blue water, gray shoreline. The few docks that could be seen from here were thick with sleeping seals. Seagulls lined the railing, one after another, like yellow-beaked bowling pins.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said, coming up behind him.

  “Hey,” he said without looking at her.

  She was trying to think of something else to say when the phone rang. Grateful for the interruption, she said, “I’ll get it,” and ran to the wall phone in the kitchen. “Hello?” she said, slightly out of breath.

  “Merry Christmas Eve,” Luke said.

  “Luke!” she said, smiling for the first time all day. Yanking the long cord out behind her, she sat down at the breakfast table and put her feet up. “How’s Montana?”

  They didn’t talk as easily as they once had. Their conversation was punctuated with lengthy silences, things unsaid. Still, he told her about the house he’d bought a few weeks ago and how it was going with his new partner. She told him a funny story about her recent date with Ken Otter and said it was what she had expected, dating a thrice-divorced dentist. “It’s better than being alone though.”

  There was a pause, then he said, “How is she?”

  “Is that why you called? To ask about Vivi Ann?”

  “It’s about you,” he said. “I know how much it’s killing you to be on the outs with her. Quit waiting for a chance and go up and make one. Just walk up to the house, knock on the door, and say you’re sorry.”

  “Can we talk about something else, please?” Winona said, and for the next hour they talked about ordinary things, and when they ran out of topics, he said, “Well. I just wanted to say Merry Christmas.”

  “You, too, Luke,” she said, hanging up.

  But as she walked away from the phone, his words stayed with her, echoed. Aurora and Richard had taken the kids skiing for the holiday, probably because they knew the loneliness that would lurk at Water’s Edge this year, and so she knew Vivi Ann and Noah were up there alone.

  Could she do it? Just walk up to the cabin as if it were a journey back in time? She tried to think it through, imagine it rationally, but the truth was that once she’d had the thought, she couldn’t let it go. Longing sank its hooks deep in her heart, and she grabbed her coat from the closet by the front door and slipped into it. Walking carefully, avoiding puddles that floated on the gravel road, she walked up to Vivi Ann’s cabin and knocked on the door.

  Vivi Ann answered instantly, looking awful. Her hair was a rat’s nest of tangles, as if she’d been obsessively scratching her scalp, and her face was red and blotchy. Her eyes were watery and bloodshot, and she was unsteady on her feet, almost drunken. “What do you want?”

  Winona was momentarily taken aback by the sight of her sister. “I . . . I wanted to talk. I know you’re pissed at me, but it’s Christmas Eve, and I thought—”

  “You’re here to gloat, aren’t you? You know his appeal was denied.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You think I want to hear that you’re sorry?” Vivi Ann moved forward, lurched a little. “You sat in that courtroom every day, listening to the evidence, Winona. My supposedly brilliant sister. Did you question any of it? He was sick on Christmas Eve. I took his temperature . . .”

  “You think Myrtle was lying?”

  “I think she was mistaken. She had to be, and that hair evidence was crap. Even you can’t believe Dallas was screwing Cat while he was married to me.” Vivi Ann’s eyes were glassy and a little wild-looking, and Winona felt a flutter of fear. Something was wrong here.

  In the back of the house, Noah started to cry.

  “Answer me,” Vivi Ann snapped. “Do you think he was screwing Cat? You saw us together.”

  Winona saw how desperately Vivi Ann was trying to convince her. She knew that all she had to do was pretend to agree, and maybe they could begin to mend their breach.

  But sometimes, if you loved someone, you had to be strong, had to say the thing that needed to be said. Clearly, Vivi Ann was falling apart. Losing it. Winona might not know much about the criminal justice system, but believing in miracles within it couldn’t be good.

  She moved toward her sister. Vivi Ann looked like one of those skittish abused horses of hers, terrified and ready to bolt. “This is killing you, Vivi,” Winona said as gently as she could. “Believing in something that will never happen—”

  “He will be released.”

  “I did sit in that courtroom and I saw the truth you’re trying to ignore. He—”

  “Don’t say it, Win.”

  “You know it, Vivi. You must. He’s guilty. You need to—”

  Vivi Ann slapped her across the face so hard she stumbled back. “Get out of my house. We’re done talking. Forever.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The years ground slowly forward.

  1997.

  1998.

  1999.

  Aurora tried to make peace within their family numerous times, but Vivi Ann had no room in her shrunken heart for forgiveness, and in truth, she didn’t try to make space. Her father and Winona had wounded her too deeply. Every Saturday, Vivi Ann dropped Noah off with Aurora and drove two and a half hours to the prison, so that she could sit behind a dirty Plexiglas window and talk to Dallas through a heavy black receiver. Roy filed one motion after another, each one a beacon of hope that crashed on the rocks. She felt as if she were tied to a wicked seesaw where every high and low took a little more of her soul away. And when Roy finally called to say that the last state appeal had been den
ied, he’d added quickly, “But don’t worry, I’ll go federal.” So she’d tried again to keep believing, and the months kept passing.

  The only way she’d found to survive was to numb herself to everything else. She popped Xanax like jelly beans during the daytime, and they allowed her to move forward, to smile and talk and pretend to be in an ordinary world. Aurora was her anchor in that attempt, her steadying hand. Still, when Vivi Ann was alone at night, she drank too much and either held her son too tightly or not at all. Sometimes she just sat there, swaying to the music in her head, hearing Noah crying or calling out for her, and trying to remember how it had felt to touch Dallas, to hold him. The memories were leaking away, and without them, she had nothing to ward off the numbness, and so she gave in, falling into a deep and troubled sleep on the sofa.

  On several of her Saturday visits she’d missed things—Noah’s first tricycle ride, his preschool’s winter party, even his fourth birthday. She’d told herself at the time that he was young, that if she told him his birthday was Sunday he’d believe her—and he had—but she’d seen the way Aurora looked at her, so full of pity, and Vivi Ann had had to turn away. That night, after all the party decorations were in the trash, she’d taken so many shots of tequila that she’d missed her lessons in the morning.

  Now it was October 1999; a Saturday. Almost four years after Dallas’s arrest.

  She sat in the prison parking lot, staring through the windshield at the gray walls. Rain assaulted the windshield, falling so hard and fast the glass seemed alive, almost flexible. Through this distortion, she could see the imposing concrete mass of the maximum-security prison. She’d seen the collection of buildings in all kinds of weather, and even in full sunlight, with the green landscape and blue sky surrounding, it looked grim and menacing. The rain made the prison look dismal and forlorn, huddled against the hillside instead of standing defiantly in front of it.

  She went through the routine of checking in on autopilot, barely noticing anymore how frightening it was to be in here. All she really noticed these days was the noise—the clanging of doors, the clicking of locks, the distant hum of raised voices.

  She took her usual place on the left-side cubicle, waiting.

  “Hey, Vivi,” he said when he sat down across from her.

  At last she smiled. For all the apathy in her everyday life, she couldn’t escape the fact that here, with him, she felt alive. As crazy as it was, she was glad to see him, to be near him, even if they couldn’t touch. She said his name and it was like a prayer, had almost become one. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the newest photograph of Noah. In it, he was a bright, shiny six-year-old, wearing a baseball cap and holding a bat, grinning.

  Dallas stared down at it, touched the glass as if for once it wouldn’t stop his hand.

  Vivi Ann knew what he saw: a boy. The years of Dallas’s incarceration could be seen on the changing face of his son. Noah was taller, thinner; he’d left babyhood behind this year. And he’d stopped asking about the daddy he didn’t remember.

  “He misses you,” Vivi Ann said.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “We don’t have much left. Let’s at least be honest.”

  She should have known better than to lie to him. They were separated now, kept apart by razor wire and Plexiglas and concrete, but the connection between them was as strong as ever. “If you’d let me bring him to see you—”

  “We’ve had this discussion. He doesn’t need to see me like this. It’s better if he forgets me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  They fell silent after that, staring at each other through the dirty plastic, holding on to big black phone receivers, with nothing to say. She wasn’t sure how long it went on, their quiet, but when the end-of-visiting-hours alarm buzzed, she flinched.

  “You look tired,” Dallas said finally.

  She wanted to pretend not to know what he was talking about, to lie to him again—this time with a confused smile—but she knew he saw the truth on her face, in her weary eyes. In the years of his imprisonment it had grown increasingly difficult to pretend there was a different future waiting for them. They had both lost weight; Roy said last month that they looked like a pair of walking skeletons. Dallas’s face, always sharp, had grown hollow and gaunt. The veins and sinews in his neck were like tree roots protruding just beneath the soil.

  Time had left its mark on Vivi Ann’s face, too; she could see the changes in her mirror every morning. Even her hair had grown dull and stringy from too few cuttings and too little care. She was thirty-two, but looked nearly a decade older than that.

  “It’s hard,” she said softly.

  “Are you still taking those pills?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  She looked at him, loving him so much it was a physical pain in her chest. “How do you get through it?”

  He leaned back. They rarely did this, rarely left the path of pretend and stepped onto the hard cement of reality. “When I’m out in the yard, I find a place that is empty, and I stand there and close my eyes. If I’m lucky, the noise will sound like hoof-beats.”

  “Renegade,” she said.

  “I remember riding him at night . . . that night.”

  Their eyes met; the memories were vibrant, electric. “That was our first time . . .”

  “How do you get through it?”

  Pills. Booze. She looked away, hoping he didn’t notice. “Out on the porch, I have one of the wind chimes my mom made. When she was sick, she gave them to me and said that if I listened closely, I’d hear her voice in their sound. And I did. I do.” She looked at him again. “Now I hear you, too. I wait for the wind sometimes . . .”

  She fell silent. That was the thing about memories; they were like downed electrical cables. It was best to stand back.

  “Have you heard from Roy?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “We’ll hear soon,” she said, wanting to believe it, trying to. “The federal court will hear your case. You’ll see.”

  “Sure,” he said. Then he stood up. “I gotta go.”

  She watched him hang up the phone and back away.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He mouthed the words back to her, and then he was gone. The door clacked shut behind him.

  She sat there alone, staring at his empty cubicle for so long that a woman came up and tapped her on the shoulder.

  Mumbling an apology, Vivi Ann got up and walked away.

  The drive home seemed to take longer than usual. As one mile spilled into the next, she tried to remain steady. There were so many things she couldn’t think about these days, and if she really concentrated, she could hold back the fear. During the daylight hours, at least. The nights were their own kind of hell; even overmedicating herself only worked some of the time.

  In town, she eased her foot off the gas and slowed down. All around her, she saw proof that while she’d been suspended in the gray-black world of the criminal justice system, life here had gone on. The trees along Main Street were riots of autumn color; the first few of the dying leaves had begun to fall. The Horsin’ Around Tack Shop was advertising their yearly sale and the drugstore had a window display full of ghosts and pumpkins.

  Trick or treat, Mrs. Raintree?

  She flinched and hit the gas. The old truck coughed hard and lurched forward.

  At the ranch, she pulled up into the trees and consulted her watch. It was three o’clock. That gave her one hour to feed the horses and be at Aurora’s in time to pick up Noah.

  Noah.

  There was another truth she tried to avoid. She was becoming a useless parent. She loved her son like air and sunlight, but every time she looked at him another piece of her heart seemed to fall away.

  She would have to change that. Tomorrow she’d stop taking the Xanax and get back to the business of living. She had to, whether she wanted to or not.

  Feeling a tiny bit better with this goal (s
he’d made it before, but this time she meant it; this time she’d really do it), she headed for the loafing shed, where they kept enough bales of alfalfa for a week. Opening the door, she pulled out the wheelbarrow and stacked it with flakes of hay.

  In the barn, she snapped on the lights and began feeding the horses, going from stall to stall. Here, she found a measure of peace again, and she was very nearly smiling when she un-latched Clem’s stall door.

  “Hey, girl, have you missed me?”

  There was no answering nicker, no whisper of a tail whooshing from side to side.

  Vivi Ann knew the minute she stepped onto the fresh shavings.

  Clementine lay crumpled against the stall’s wooden wall, her massive, graying head lolled forward.

  Vivi Ann stood utterly still, knowing that if she tried to move she’d fall to her knees. It took work just to breathe. In that moment, in the cool, shadowy familiarity of this barn that had always been her favorite place in the world, she remembered everything about this great mare. Their whole lives had been lived together.

  Remember when you stepped in that hornet’s nest . . . when you jumped the ditch and I landed in the blackberry bushes . . . when we won State for the first time?

  Swallowing hard, Vivi Ann moved forward and dropped to her knees in the pale pink shavings at Clem’s belly. She reached out and touched the mare’s neck, feeling the coldness that shouldn’t be there. There were so many things to say to this great animal—her last real link to her mother—but none of that was possible now. Vivi Ann’s throat felt swollen; her eyes stung. How would she go on without Clem? Especially now, when so much had been lost?

  She scratched Clem’s graying ears. “You should have been out in the sunlight, girl. I know how much you hate this dark stall.”

  That made her think of Dallas and the cell he was in, and loneliness and grief overwhelmed her. She lay down against her mare, curling into the fetal position against her comforting flank, and closed her eyes.