JEWEL LAKES BOOK FOUR: TWICE BURNED – DELETED PROLOGUE
22 Years Ago
HANK
I couldn’t stop staring at the girl by the grave.
I flipped the coin around in my pocket, running my thumb over the familiar edges of its etched sides. It was an absent gesture—a mindless thing to occupy my hand. If only I could take it out to distract my eyes, too.
But all I could see was Casey Mitchell.
I barely noticed the cold rain falling on the brown patches of grass at the Jewel Lakes Cemetery. Spring was coming in early this year, with only a few hunks of dirt-tinged snow remaining on the broad slope of land at the edge of Barkley Falls, the smaller of the county’s two towns.
My dad had gotten me the coin—a buffalo nickel—on a day we had spent on our own together only a few days before. Dad was a reserved man who seemed perpetually displeased, though he rarely expressed any comment about what, exactly he was unhappy about. He didn’t spend much time with any of his three children without our mom, so our recent trip together had already taken on the sheen of a legend in my mind. Dad stood next to me now, under an umbrella with my mom and little sister Stella. My older brother William stood on my other side, at the edge of our family.
I couldn’t see Dad’s face, but I knew what it would look like. His eyes would have that faraway cast. He wouldn’t notice I was there.
But today, for what felt like the first time in my life, I didn’t care.
I was focused on her.
Even with the icy rain seeping into my shoes and the deep somberness of the occasion, looking at the girl by the grave I thought of spring flowers and soft sunlight. What would that girl look like skipping through the grass? Picking flowers in a different, happier field?
My friends would have a field day if they knew I was thinking about a girl this way. Most of them were still more interested in video games than the opposite sex. And so was I, normally.
But not today.
I already knew Casey from the halls of Barkley Falls Middle School, though we’d never had occasion to say more than a word to each other. Even though she was in seventh grade, a year below me, I found her hard to miss: a bubbly, laughing girl with a mouth full of braces whose long blonde hair flowed behind her in a soft yellow wave. She was like a piece of sunshine, and she made me feel weird whenever I looked at her.
But today, the sunshine was gone. Though she stared at that hole next to her, her eyes were unfocused, like they might never see anything properly again.
I knew that look. I’d seen it in the rare photographs of my dad when he was a kid, and occasionally, when I caught him staring into space. It was the same look his eyes had taken on when the story about Casey Mitchell’s parents—the ones in the boxes by the hole’s edge now—broke.
When Casey closed her eyes, a single tear ran down her cheek. Just the one. My chest felt cramped, like there wasn’t enough room for my heart to beat inside.
Half the town was here today, sniffling and shifting under their umbrellas and tightly cinched coats. The air around us was cold, thick with mist, frigid enough to make my fingers on my umbrella go numb.
Ron and Victoria Mitchell had been beloved members of the community. Ron was a carpenter who’d worked in practically every community in the county and volunteered as the local hockey coach. Victoria was the high school drama teacher; she’d also served as a councilwoman a few years back. Their tragic and early end in a car accident last week had sent shockwaves through all of Barkley Falls. All of Jewel Lakes County.
Pillars of the community struck down on Rte. 29 the local paper said. My mom had sobbed when she’d read the story. She hadn’t stopped sobbing since. My dad meanwhile, had disappeared into himself.
I watched Casey as her older brother Graydon, a junior in high school and the star of the football team, made his way up to the podium. The crowd was silent, the only sound the pattering of rain on umbrellas. I watched her look at him as he began to speak, only tearing my eyes away when the older boy began to speak. He had that look in his eyes too. But there was something hard in his expression too. Something stiff.
It wasn’t until after, when the boxes were lowered in the ground, when everyone began walking away, and when I saw the gray-haired woman pleading with Casey to come, that I knew I had to go to her.
“I’ll meet you at Murphy’s,” I told my mother. Murphy’s funeral home, where the reception was being held, was only a five-minute walk down the highway from the cemetery. My mom nodded, but my dad was already walking away, not noticing—or not caring—that I had hung behind. My chest pinched but I brushed the hurt away, too focused on my need to talk to Casey.
She stood by the side of the grave, looking in. The older woman’s fingers—Casey’s grandmother—shook as she tried to grasp the girl’s hand. I wondered if this was who Casey was going to live with now.
I walked over, my heart pounding. “Hi,” I said, when I reached her.
Casey and her Grandma jerked their faces up. I had the sudden sinking feeling I’d made a terrible mistake. I should have just stayed out of it, gone to the receptions with my parents and gone home and organized my baseball cards or something.
But my mouth moved as if operating on its own.
“I’m… I’m sorry about your parents.”
It was stupid, but I didn’t know what else to say.
Casey stared at me for a minute, unmoving. Then she nodded and looked back to the holes.
“Casey,” said her grandmother softly, “It’s time to go.”
Casey said nothing.
“Casey!”
“I’ll take her,” I blurted.
Her grandmother looked at me, and I took in her eyes for the first time. They weren’t lost. They were filled with pain. Agony. She’d just buried her own child.
Then she blinked. “No, she should come with us.”
I noticed Graydon, then, standing stiffly by a pink-cheeked girl I recognized as his girlfriend, and an impossibly huge flower wreath. Graydon was staring right at me.
I was going to get beat up by the football hero. I ran my thumb over the coin in my pocket, as if it were some kind of magic token that might help me disappear from this scene I’d created.
Then Casey spoke, her voice so quiet I could barely hear her. “I want to go with Hank.”
She knew my name.
Her grandmother leaned in as if she hadn’t properly heard.
“I said I want to go with him, Grandma.”
My chest grew warm.
It took some convincing. It was Graydon coming over, hooking his grandmother’s arm through his, and giving me an older brother look that threatened bodily harm if I misstepped, before the older woman finally acquiesced, though her expression remained laced with unease.
After her family left, Casey and I stood. The priest packed up his things, giving us a small, sad wave before walking away.
Then we were alone. Suddenly, I had no idea what to say. Sometimes this happened—I had so many thoughts I was overwhelmed and couldn’t distill them into words. So I either said something that was a poor representation of everything I wanted to convey, or nothing at all. This time I chose the latter. I felt the coin in my pocket, cupped it in my palm.
Luckily, she spoke first. “Why did you come over here?” she asked.
The question surprised me so much the coin slipped through my fingers. I prodded through the depths of my pocket, wanting to hold it, before answering. For courage.
I considered lying, saying I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to have this day marred by a lie. “I thought you shouldn’t be alone,” I said, which was true. But it wasn’t all of it. I couldn’t tell her it was her that made me come over here.
“My friends won’t talk to me,” she said. It’s like they’re scared of upsetting me.”
“But you’re already upset,” I said.
She smiled, a sad and beautiful thing. “Exactly.”
I don’t know what came over me, what was making me so bold. Especially not now, with a girl who’d just lost her whole world. But maybe that was it. I was drawn to her. I felt like I wanted to keep her from drowning. I pinched the coin again.
I knew I would probably regret this, but I said it anyway. “Do you want to get out of here?”
We didn’t go to Murphy’s.
Though it put me in Graydon and Grandma Mitchell’s bad books for a good amount of time, we walked in the opposite direction down the highway, towards Opal Lake. I took her to a farm off the lake that had been abandoned years ago—Clayton’s Orchards. The Clayton family had fallen onto hard times and moved on years before. The sign still hung above the gate, and the farmhouse still stood too, though it was boarded up and surrounded by thick, nearly impenetrable brush.
At a rise on the edge of the property, there was a sprawling oak tree with a limb at its lower reaches that stretched out like an arm. The rain had let up in the fifteen minutes it had taken us to get over here; the clouds thinning to pale white. We ran up the slope to the tree, then I gave her a boost to get onto the branch.
We sat huddled together under the dripping leaves that day and talked about everything a twelve and thirteen-year-old might talk about under normal circumstances. Our teachers. The latest blockbuster movie. Our favorite lake to swim in in the summer. The kinds of things kids on the cusp of teen hood—who are still kids—love. We talked about all those things not to distract from what was really going on, but in defiance of it.
Finally, after I don’t know how much time, we lapsed into a soft silence. And after a few minutes of that, Casey Mitchell cleared her throat.
“Am I going to be okay?” she asked me.
She asked me this as if I knew the answer. As if I could tell her her future.
I pulled the buffalo nickel out of my pocket.
“My Dad gave this to me the other day,” I said. “On my birthday.”
It wasn’t ice cream or the movies, but I’d thought it was better. Dad had taken me to a piece of property at the edge of the county. There was an old post by the edge of a driveway, where I imagined a mailbox must have once stood. The post was splintered at the top, as if someone had knocked it off. The driveway ended in a patch of nubby grass.
Dad cut the engine and stared at the space in front of us.
Finally he’d said, “Come on,” his voice low and stiff.
I followed him out of the car and we stood, looking at the space. He pointed at the far side of the patch.
“That was Benny’s and my room.”
The realization of where we were standing hit me. This was Dad’s childhood home. There was almost nothing left: the line of a retaining wall. A pile of bricks on the far side where a fireplace had once stood. The rest was hidden under overgrown grass and brambles.
Benny had been Dad’s older brother. Benny and Dad’s parents, my grandparents, had all perished in a house fire on the spot we stood, when Dad was thirteen years old. Mom told me Dad had survived only because his bed was next to the window. He’d woken up to his older brother shaking him. Benny had shoved him out of it, telling Dad he was going to get their parents and to run for help. Dad had run as fast as he could, but the nearest neighbors were a half mile away. by the time the fire trucks came, the house was engulfed, his whole family gone.
“I was your age when it happened. I haven’t been back here except one time, the day before I was going to marry your mother,” Dad said as we stood there. “I don’t know what for. To…” my dad’s voice cracked and I held my breath. He was the definition of tight-lipped—he’d never once shared anything about his personal life before. It was only mom who doled it out to us when we asked—what little she knew.
“I guess I came here to tell them about her.”
I’d looked up at him, a lump in my throat at the thought of him at exactly my age, running through the dark, his house in flames behind him.
“I found this, in our room,” he said. “It was Benny’s.”
He dropped the buffalo nickel in my hand without looking at me. “You can have it now.”
I don’t know why he hadn’t given it to my older brother. Maybe because he’d already given up on Dad. But I didn’t say anything. I just held the nickel in my hand as Dad drove us home like it was a precious diamond. It was the only special, personal thing he’d ever given me.
I held that nickel once more as I sat next to this girl whose world had been crushed the way Dad’s had. Over the dilapidated farmhouse across from us, the clouds had thinned, revealing a smudge of brilliant blue.
That nickel meant everything to me. But in that moment I knew Casey needed it more.
“I don’t know how your life is going to go,” I said. “But you’re going to be okay. This is proof you can survive anything.”
I pressed the nickel into her palm. She stared down at the coin for a moment, then closed her fingers around it and rested her cheek on my shoulder.
I’d found the right words, and done the thing that felt right, too. It was a dark and gloomy and devastating day. But it was the first moment of my life with Casey in it. And for that, it was the best day, too.
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