“I’ll go,” I said eventually.
“He’s in there,” Oscar said, “he’ll have the legal right to shoot you as soon as you step on his porch.”
I reached for my gun and remembered that it was in the custody of the police at the same moment my fingers touched an empty holster.
I turned to Devin and Oscar.
“No way,” Devin said. “Nobody’s shooting any more cops. Even in self-defense.”
“And if he draws on me?”
“Find the power of prayer,” Oscar said.
I shook my head, parted the small saplings in front of me, raised my knee to step forward, and Angie said, “Wait.”
I stopped and we listened, heard the engine as it purred toward us. We looked to our right in time to see an ancient Mercedes-Benz jeep with a small snowplow blade still attached to the front grille as it bumped up the road and pulled into the clearing. It parked by the steps, the driver’s side facing us, and the door opened and a round woman with a kind, open face stepped out. She took a sniff of the air and stared through the trees, seemed to be looking right at us. She had marvelous eyes-the clearest blue I’ve ever seen-and her face was strong and bright from mountain living.
“The wife,” Oscar whispered. “Tricia.”
She turned from the trees and reached back into the car, and at first I thought she’d come back with a bag of groceries, but then something leapt and died at the same time in my chest.
Amanda McCready’s chin fell to the woman’s shoulder, and she stared through the trees at me with sleepy eyes, one thumb in her mouth, a red and black hat with ear flaps covering her head.
“Somebody fell asleep on the ride home,” Tricia Doyle said. “Didn’t she?”
Amanda turned her head and nestled it into Mrs. Doyle’s neck. The woman removed Amanda’s hat and smoothed her hair, so bright-almost gold-under the green trees and bright sky.
“Want to help make lunch?”
I saw Amanda’s lips move but didn’t hear what she said. She tilted her chin again, and the shy smile on her lips was so content, so lovely, it opened my chest like an ax.
We watched them for another two hours.
They made grilled-cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, Mrs. Doyle over the frying pan and Amanda sitting up on the counter handing her cheese and bread. They ate at the table, and I climbed up a tree, feet on one branch, hands on another, and watched them.
They talked around their sandwiches and soup, leaned into one another, and gestured with their hands, laughed with food in their mouths.
After lunch, they did the dishes together, and then Tricia Doyle sat Amanda McCready up on the counter and dressed her again in coat and hat, watched with generous approval as Amanda placed her sneakers up on the counter and tied them.
Tricia disappeared into the rear of the house for her own coat and shoes, I assumed, and Amanda remained on the counter. She looked out the window and a sense of agonized abandonment gradually filled her face, pulled at it. She stared out the window at something beyond those woods, beyond the mountains, and I was unsure whether it was the marrow-sapping neglect of her past or the crushing uncertainty of her future-one I’m sure she had yet to believe was truly real-that tore her features. In that moment, I recognized her as her mother’s daughter-Helene’s daughter-and I realized where I’d seen that look on her face before. It had been on Helene’s face the night she’d seen me in the bar and promised, if she ever had a second chance, that she’d never let Amanda out of her sight.
Tricia Doyle came back into the kitchen, and a cloud of confusion-of old and new hurts-drifted across Amanda’s face before being replaced by a hesitant, warily hopeful smile.
They came out on the porch as I climbed down from the tree and there was a squat English bulldog with them, its coat a patchwork of brindle and white that matched a swath of hillside behind them where the ground was open and bare save for a ridge of frozen snow anchored between two rocks.
Amanda rolled with the dog, shrieked as he got on top of her and a gob of drool dripped toward her cheek. She escaped him, and he followed her and jumped at her legs.
Tricia Doyle held him down and showed Amanda how to brush his coat, and she did so on her knees, gently, as if brushing her own hair.
“He doesn’t like it,” I heard her say.
It was the first time I’d heard her voice. It was curious, intelligent, clear.
“He likes when you do it better than me,” Tricia Doyle said. “You’re gentler than I am.”
“I am?” She looked up into Tricia Doyle’s face and continued brushing the dog’s coat with slow, even strokes.
“Oh, yes. Much gentler. My old woman’s hands, Amanda? I have to grip the brush so hard, I sometimes take it out on old Larry here.”
“How come you call him Larry?” Amanda’s voice turned musical on the name, riding up on the second syllable.
“I told you that story,” Tricia said.
“Again,” Amanda said. “Please?”
Tricia Doyle chuckled. “Mr. Doyle had an uncle when we were first married who looked like a bulldog. He had big, droopy jowls.”
Tricia Doyle used her free hand to grip her own cheeks and pull the skin down toward her chin.
Amanda laughed. “He looked like a dog?”
“He did, young lady. He even barked sometimes.”
Amanda laughed again. “No suh.”
“Oh, yes. Ruff!”
“Ruff!” Amanda said.
Then the dog got into it as Amanda placed the brush aside and Mrs. Doyle let Larry go and the three of them faced one another on their haunches and barked at each other.
In the trees, none of us moved or spoke for the rest of the afternoon. We watched them play with the dog and play with each other, build a mini-version of the house out of old numbered building blocks. We watched them sit on the bench set against the porch rails with an afghan pulled over them against the gathering cold and the dog at their feet, as Mrs. Doyle spoke with her chin on Amanda’s head and Amanda lay on her chest and spoke back.
I think we all felt dirty in those woods, petty and sterile. Childless. Proven, as of yet, inept and unable and unwilling to rise to the sacrifice of parenting. Bureaucrats in the wilderness.
They had gone back in the house, hand in hand, dog squirming between their legs, when Jack Doyle pulled into the clearing. He climbed out of his Ford Explorer with a box under his arm, and whatever was in it made both Tricia Doyle and Amanda shriek when he opened it in the house a few minutes later.
The three came back into the kitchen and Amanda perched on the counter again and talked nonstop, her hands pantomiming her brushing of Larry, her fingers gripping her cheeks as she aped Tricia’s description of distant Uncle Larry’s jowls. Jack Doyle threw back his head and laughed, smothered the small girl against his chest. When he raised himself up from the counter, she clung to him and rubbed her cheeks against his five o’clock shadow.
Devin reached into his pocket and removed a cell phone, dialed 411. When the operator answered, he said, “West Beckett Sheriff’s office, please.” He repeated the number under his breath as she gave it to him, then punched the numbers into his cell phone keypad.
Before he could press SEND, Angie put a hand on his wrist. “What are you doing, Devin?”
“What are you doing, Ange?” He looked at her hand.
“You’re going to arrest them?”
He looked up at the house, then back at her and scowled. “Yes, Angie, I’m going to arrest them.”
“You can’t.”
He pulled his hand away from her. “Oh, yes, I can.”
