TJ.”
He nodded. I walked into the kitchen and took an orange from the bottom drawer of the dark refrigerator. I sat TJ on the kitchen island and cut a small piece off the top of the orange with a kitchen knife, then pulled it in two and handed TJ a section before beginning to peel off the skin from the rest. He worked the orange section into his mouth, nursing out the juice, watching with interest as I peeled. His legs swung in a carefree way. It occurred to me that he was as oblivious to my anger and fear and sense of betrayal as I had been to my own mother’s suffering that day, but I loved him no less for it. I was glad he didn’t know, glad he could sit and eat an orange in the calm of the eye of the storm, and if I could have held things that way for him forever, I would have. For the first time since my mother’s death I forgave myself a little for walking past that television. I understood then that if her spirit could have guided me it would have marched me away from that scene, sent me about my business to keep the peace in my soul as long as possible.
And then a gust of air blew across the kitchen, light filtered in and I looked up to see the front door open. Cade racked the gun and stepped outside. The screen banged shut, and as I gathered TJ into my arms with a sense of great caution, several loud pops ripped the air. I dropped to the floor with TJ, holding him against my side as I crawled with the other arm toward the corner beneath the table. Shouts rang out, a chaos of voices peppered with more gunfire. I curled beneath the table, enveloping my son with my body in an embrace that all but crushed him. Boot steps crashed into the house, voices, the sudden sense of exposure and broken boundary. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and breathed in the cold smell of the stone floor, the muscles of my back steeled against the world beyond me.
That this was a rescue did not enter my mind. These were only strangers, Cade’s adversaries, invading our home.
A gloved hand fell against my side, and then I was dragged back against the stone, not moving from my position around the baby. TJ, his mouth no longer stilled by my sleeve, twisted his head upward and let loose with a furious cry. So close to my ear, it filled my mind. My thoughts and his scream became one and the same.
It was that cry that shook away my fear and thrust me forward into the next of what life held for me. The cry was the punctuation that acknowledged the terribleness of what had gone before, and gave it a stopping place past which I might believe things would be better.
I got to my feet, planting them against the stone. Someone had me by the arm. I shifted TJ to my hip, and as if to declare the Olmsteads had never claimed me, said, “I’m Jill Wagner.”
Chapter 33
For the past couple hours especially I’ve had some time to think about my regrets with regard to the current situation. When they put me on the phone with this guy, Dave Robinson, he said to me, “Don’t you think Jill’s been through enough the past few years, losing her mom and all, without you making threats on your own life now? That’s kind of selfish, don’t you think?” I gave that some real thought. I knew Dave had her best interests at heart and had helped her a lot previously. Jill had told me all sorts of wild stories about the kinds of people they taught at that camp, crazy paranoid types who live in the woods in their vans, and it irked me to think Dave might think he was dealing with that kind of individual when he was talking to me. I’m not like that at all. I’m a reasonable person. So in talking to him I tried to kind of meet him halfway, because after all this is over I hate thinking he’ll be talking to Jill about what happened and have negative things to say about me.
When he said that about her mom, though, what came into my head was this: the thing I pity Jill over, more even than what happened with her mother, is that she’s an only child. I mean, every family has its issues, its sad circumstances and crises they never saw coming, but there’s also people you can look in the eye and know that they’re carrying it with you. Whatever happened in my own family, I could sit with Elias and know he thought the same of it as I did. Candy, she’s added her own share to that whole pile, but at least I knew the Olmstead business was her burden, too, whether she liked it or not. Jill never had that. The whole thing with her mother dying, she had to deal with it all on her own. They say no man is an island, but Jill pretty much
My regret is that it’s looking as if I won’t get the chance to give my son a brother. I can’t really put to words the ache that comes with just thinking about that. If they burst into the house and kill me, or if I do it myself, or if I step out that door and start shooting down the driveway so I at least go out in a battle instead of cornered in my own home—any way this ends, TJ’s going to have to carry it, and there’s no way around that. Only a brother could make that any lighter.
So I’ll put it out there as my final statement, these two messages to those two people I love most.
Thomas Jefferson Olmstead, if you take away one noble thing from the deeds I did on this earth, let it be that I chose to stand in opposition to the full crushing force of the Government of the United States of America—its history and rule of law and sheer power to enforce its will—to right a roaring injustice done to my family. I would have done the same for you. For you I would have stood against the entire world.
And Elias Olmstead, for the wrongs I did you, and for the love I cost you, know that I always believed that among family we struck the bargain with our loyalty. I’m paying up now. And if I see you on the other side of this, I hope you’ll call it even.
Epilogue
Nobody had told me about the magic of a toddler’s first spring. Through the long months of winter TJ grew used to the skeletal trees, the fractured shapes they made against the sky, the clearness and plainness of looking up. And then all at once, in April, they burst out into a great banner of shimmering pale green, as suddenly as all the fans in a stadium rising to cheer. At first it frightened him. He stared up distrustfully at the new canopy, listened to the rustle of animals he could no longer see. When we stepped out the door of our little cabin at Southridge, even if only to walk the twenty feet to his grandmother’s cabin next door, he hid his face against my shoulder and muttered, over and over, his most powerful word:
On the morning I put Leela on a train back to New Hampshire—a week’s visit to see her grandsons at Randy’s, Eddy at the nursing home and possibly Candy, if she had earned visiting privileges—I decided it was time to take TJ on a hike. I tied his winter cap beneath his chin to block the April wind and strapped him into the backpack carrier Dave had given me as a welcome-home gift. Before Dave could see us, I hurried down the trail behind our cabin and into the woods. I knew he would insist on coming—fearing bears, twisted ankles and all sorts of hazards that might befall a lone hiker with a special burden. But the walk wasn’t far, and I wanted TJ to know I was not afraid.
Without a blanket of thick and heavy snow beneath my feet, the journey went much faster. Dry twigs cracked beneath my boots, and the last fall leaves, worn thin and lacy from the storms of winter, shuffled to the edges of the path. TJ chattered about the birds, piping his two-word sentences punctuated with mimicked animal sounds; his feet patted my sides as if coaxing a racehorse. Since his ear surgery the previous fall, he had begun imitating all the sounds around him with an enthusiasm that delighted me. To TJ, Frasier had been a quiet, muffled place, but all the music of this forest belonged to him now.
In a short time we arrived at the clearing, and I stopped near the campfire pit, turning to face the mountains whose ski trails the spring had reclaimed.
“You see that, buddy?” I said. I twisted my neck, looking up to catch a glimpse of my son. “It’s
I eased off the backpack and set TJ loose. For one long moment he stood and surveyed the land around him,
