Shooter let the paper settle down onto his lap. “He’s talking about all of us, Wesley. He’s saying we ought to know we’re all doing the best we can.”
Brandi had read The Diary of Anne Frank while she’d been on bed rest, and the part about believing that people were good stuck with her. After she’d written that down for the ad, she told Ronnie to just speak from his heart.
“What do you want to say to folks?” she asked.
He thought for a minute. “I want to tell them we all mess up and do things wrong. Things happen and we can’t go back and change them. All we can do is try to be better. Something like that.”
“Keep talking,” Brandi said. “We’ve got all night. I’ll help you say it just the way you want.”
At that moment, when she lifted the pen from the paper, the frayed friendship bracelet that Hannah had woven for her fell from her wrist.
“Looks like I get my wish,” she said.
“What did you wish for?”
“This. All of this right now. You and me and the girls.”
They were alive to him now more so than they’d ever been. Everyone who mattered to him was more alive — the girls and Brandi and Pat and Missy Wade and Shooter and Captain, and, yes, Wayne and Lois, even the woman Della had been in his last days with her, the woman who loved having a baby in the house. They were more alive to him because of the part of the story he swore he’d never tell, the part that left him knowing in a way he never had how scared they all were, how broken.
He hadn’t told Ray Biggs and his deputy everything about the night the trailer burned. He hadn’t told it all to Brandi. He wished he could. He especially wished he could say it to Captain, the one who most needed to hear it.
Ronnie wanted to tell him that when he first pulled away from the trailer that night, he glanced up to his rearview mirror, and he saw Captain standing at the edge of the trailer looking after him as if he expected him to change his mind and come back.
Just a shadowy figure out there in the cold, but it was enough to remind Ronnie of how he’d felt all the times he’d been the new boy at a foster home, how all of the other foster kids knew one another, and he was too shy to try to be their friend. How he waited for them to come to him, to treat him with kindness, but that rarely happened. More often than not, they thought him standoffish and weird, and they left him to the misery he nursed in his heart.
“If you’d just smile more,” a helpful boy said to him once, “maybe people would like you.”
He’d been that boy, the one who wouldn’t smile.
When Ronnie saw Captain standing there in the moonlight, he almost stopped the Firebird, almost threw it in reverse and went back to the trailer, but he couldn’t imagine what he’d say to explain why he’d returned. He had no words for what he wanted, no words at all. He only knew that deep down he wanted to stand there again with Captain, who refused to judge him, who knew from experience that people were mostly just who they were and all you could do was try to love them for that. But as much as Ronnie wanted to give himself over to Captain’s goodness, he was too ashamed to admit that he needed it. He was too ashamed to admit that he’d needed it all along, that Captain, a boy he’d only thought he was humoring with his attention, had mattered to him much more than he’d known, had been the one who could have saved him.
So he kept his foot on the gas pedal. He put his eyes on the dark road stretching out ahead of him.
He glanced back only once, and, when he did, Captain was gone.
Ronnie went a good ways up the blacktop before he turned on his headlights, and when he did, a quick picture came into his head and he wondered whether just before he’d looked away from Captain in his rearview mirror, he’d seen a spark of light flash behind the trailer. He slowed down. He almost turned around. Then he told himself, no, he was only imagining things. He was only afraid of what he’d almost done. He was afraid of himself.
That’s when he punched the Firebird, worked it through its gears, gave it full throttle, in a hurry now to make his way back to town.
That was the moment that would haunt him forever, the moment in which he almost knew there was danger, when he almost went back. The fire wouldn’t have been raging just yet. He could have done something to stop it, and even if he hadn’t been able to do that, he would have been there when it became clear that his family was inside, and he would have gotten them out.
He wanted to tell Captain that there was that moment when he convinced himself nothing was wrong, that moment when, eager to escape his own shame, he drove up the blacktop, choosing to be ignorant. Captain wasn’t the stupid one. He was.
Remember that, he wished he could say to Captain. Your father was right. He was right all along. I was the stupid one. I was selfish and stupid, and now here I am, too much of a coward to tell you any of this.
Brandi tapped her pen on the paper, and Ronnie remembered he was supposed to be telling her what he wanted to say in the newspaper.
“Keep talking,” she told him.
His voice was soft, but in their rooms, Angel and Hannah and Sarah and Emma almost came up from sleep. He never spoke loudly enough to completely rouse them, but the murmur of his voice was something they felt just at the edge of waking. In that twilight, they listened long enough to know they were hearing their father, a fact that brought them comfort as they sank back into sleep on this cold winter night. They were all there in the house. They were warm beneath their covers. They had tomorrow waiting on them and the day after that. A baby was coming, and they were all doing what they could to help Brandi make her way to July.
“Do you want me to write it like this?” she asked Ronnie.
She wrote another line and then let him read it.
“Yes,” he said.
People were asleep in Goldengate and Phillipsport, and out the blacktop into the country. Snow was falling — a steady snow that would cover the fields, settle over the roofs of the houses where Wayne and Lois Best slept, where Shooter and Captain slept, where Missy and Pat Wade slept. A snow that would blanket the graves behind the Bethlehem Church. An all-night snow coming down on what was left of the trailer after the fire. Coming down to cover, at least for a while, the charred scraps of furniture and bedding and dishes and toys and clothing and photographs and everything that had once made the trailer a home. The last big snow of winter, but Ronnie and Brandi took no notice.
“Go on,” she told him, and he did.
Acknowledgments
This book wouldn’t exist without the faith and effort of my agent, Allison Cohen. I’m forever grateful for her encouragement, support, and her sharp editorial eye. Guy Intoci made this book better, and I’m indebted to him and everyone at Dzanc Books for welcoming me into the fold. There were people who knew things that I didn’t, and they generously shared their expertise with me. Thank you, Philip Grandinetti, Dale Perdue, and Ruth Ann Zwilling. Thanks, too, to the Ohio State University for their continued support. Above all, thank you to Cathy Hensley for the love she gives me every step along the journey’s way.