I was—this is not an excuse—very young.
14
The night before the groundbreaking of the new resort, Alvin finds me in the parlor, drinking whiskey alone and staring into the fire. Pea is upstairs, sleeping. Waiting for me, yet still keeping her distance. I feel very alone, more than I have any right to, in this house with her just upstairs. But then Alvin taps on the French windows and it is with relief that I open them.
“She’s not here, right?” he asks, looking around before he pulls himself over the sill.
“Sleeping,” I say. “You’re letting in the cold.”
He gives me a hard look and then latches the windows behind him.
I taste another mouthful of whiskey. “Would you like some?” I ask. He doesn’t seem as young as the last time we saw one another on the road. Rougher. Stronger, like he doesn’t have time to care where he’s cracking.
Alvin nods. “I need to ask you something.”
I gesture to the couch, but he sits on the floor. Possibly to be closer to the fire, possibly because he’s considerate of the state of his blue jean overalls.
I pass him a tumbler with a thumb of whiskey. He takes it with his left hand and holds out his right. I stare at it. Touch him, now, after all this? But I am tipsy, flushed with heat and hunched with cold, and my secrets do not seem like such a bad trade anymore.
I take his hand. It is a brief meeting. Two strands of uncanny luck sniff one another like unfamiliar dogs and separate. Junior Bell wants to kill him, but he didn’t need my hands to know that. I peer at him through amber fluid, waiting for what of mine he will drag into the firelight.
“You should have left her that first time,” he says, at last. “You wanted to use your gift for good. You knew what she was. Why didn’t you leave her?”
“But I did.”
He frowns and shakes his head. He looks down at his feet. “That ain’t leaving. You watched her. You stayed in that devil’s business. What did you think would happen? A righteous man has got to keep righteous company.”
I just laugh.
“The rest of it … Don’t know what you were so scared of. Think such a little thing will stop her from loving you? A woman like your angel? She was born in blood.”
“As are we all,” I say softly.
He falls silent. Finishes his whiskey. I pour us both more. I feel purged, my insides mercifully silent.
I watch him gather his courage. “Dev,” he says, “she’s got something in her that’s going bad. She’s sinned and sinned with them and now they’re turning against her. They’ll get you, too, if you stay.”
“Your hands don’t tell you that.”
“You’d be surprised what they tell me. Leave her, Dev. Save yourself.”
“Is that your question?”
He puts his head down again and presses his palms against his temples. Whatever burns him, I don’t believe he really cares about Pea and my resigned compromises.
His voice, when it comes, is high and anguished. “Why not? Why not? If you save yourself, at least one of you survives.”
I am surprised, at last.
Unthinking, I put a hand on his trembling shoulder. “Alvin,” I say, “and what will I do with that survival, when I have betrayed her? What good will my hands do, when my heart has turned on me?”
After a few more minutes, his sobbing subsides. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. Takes a few shaky breaths.
“Go to the groundbreaking tomorrow. Both of you. If you see me, help me. If you see my ma—”
“Help her?”
His nostrils flare. “Stop her.”
And now I’m starting to understand. “What is she planning?”
“I’m not sure. Just … come.”
“Thank you for warning us, Alvin.”
He shakes me off. He wobbles a bit as he stands and then straightens his back. “Your angel is pregnant. Didn’t tell you before because I wanted a clean answer. But you might as well know now.”
I don’t hear when he leaves. I only feel the gust of chill air, the smoke that blows in from the flue.
I lie beside her and she makes room for me. I hold her through what might be a nightmare, or might be another dream flowing through those hands that Alvin says are turning bad inside her. A little after dawn, she shakes me awake.
“We have to leave,” she says. She’s been crying.
“To go to the groundbreaking,” I say.
She stares. “How did you know?”
“Alvin told me. How did you?”
She takes a breath and lets it out in a laugh. “Our baby told me, honey.”
I dress and follow her to the car. I watch as she straps on her knife holster. I get my gun.
“How long?” I ask.
“Three months.”
“How can she tell you anything?”
“She’s got something like the hands, but different. I can’t explain it. Dreams don’t come down for her, Dev, they’re inside her. So they’re inside me, too, you see? She can’t stop it.”
I take her shoulders and kiss her forehead gently. Then I get behind the wheel and we start racing down River Road. The trees smudge like charcoal in my peripheral vision.
“There were guns,” Pea says, white knuckled. “And fire. Do you know what he’s planning?”
“Not Alvin,” I say. “Mae.”
“Oh.” Pea closes her eyes. “Oh, goddamn it.”
She reaches for me when we park behind a line of cars along River Road.
“Follow me,” she whispers.
“To hell,” I tell her.
We run. A ribbon of braided yellow and blue separates the press and public. The crowd is standing and squatting and balancing equipment on the crumbling gravestones. I don’t see Alvin or his mother anywhere, but I know they’re here. Pea elbows her way to the
