One of Us Read online

From my seat on the dais along with Rafe, Wesley Dawes, and the other eight founding members of the NONS besides Nora and Tommy, I have a good view of everyone in attendance and it does seem to be everyone. I start picking out the people who played a role, no matter how small, in the strange and wonderful week of my homecoming three months ago that almost ended in my death.

  According to the EMTs who accompanied me in a Life Flight helicopter, I was briefly dead. A four-day coma would follow. When I finally opened my eyes, I was greeted by the sight of Tommy asleep in a chair and Brenna and Moira Kelly watching Jerry Springer on a TV mounted in the corner of my hospital room.

  Moira’s face loomed over me for a moment. I thought I detected the beginnings of a smile but it was quickly replaced with a frown.

  “Some people will do anything to get attention,” she said.

  Moira is here along with Brenna and easily sixty members of their clan including Rick, his wife, and their children. Alphonse sits on the dais next to Birdie, smiling and waving and occasionally shushing all the cries of “Hi, Grandpa!”

  The widow Husk and her family occupy a prominent place up front. Marcella Greger’s niece and the rest of the Greger and Tully families stand next to them.

  All four of Rafe’s ex-wives are here, his five daughters and their spouses, and his nine grandchildren ranging from eighteen-year-old Heather to newborn Henry, who’s already been christened Wee Hen in a family dominated by women, a nickname I fear he’s never going to shake.

  I see Tommy’s doctor, who made the call that brought me home in the first place; the girl from McDonald’s who wouldn’t let me use their Wi-Fi unless I ordered meat; Matt and Shane from the UPS store, who were finally able to put a name to their fembot; Dave Rosko and an entire crew of firemen complete with truck; Herm Chappy, the undisputed king of gravy; my mining buddies Todd, Jamie, J. C., and Shawn; Parker Hopkins, looking unusually alert and dapper befitting the fact that he is no longer a volunteer but is now a paid groundskeeper; and even the manager from Carelli’s Furniture has put aside her earlier trepidation and decided to embrace the bloodthirsty Nellies.

  The only noticeable absence is my mother. She didn’t want to come and Tommy and I didn’t encourage her. She doesn’t like crowds.

  There’s really no reason for her to be here. It seems like the entire town has stopped by these last few months to offer their sympathies and apologies one and two and three at a time. She barely makes it through the conversations but is always happy to have company.

  I can’t tell what she’s feeling inside. It’s impossible to know how all of this will ultimately affect her, but in her own way, I think she’s better equipped to deal with the inconceivable than the rest of us.

  I’ve consulted with other psychologists and psychiatrists while trying to decide what my course of action should be, but I think the best advice has come from Rafe, who told me to “leave her alone.”

  He’s sitting beside me now in an actual suit where the pants and jacket match, a solid-colored dress shirt, and a Bottega Veneta tie I gave to him as a gift for solving the crime of the century and vindicating my mother.

  He keeps tugging at the knot, trying to loosen it, as if he’s afraid silk is a live thing that might try to strangle him.

  Thundering applause welcomes Tommy to the microphone.

  He tries to appear unmoved but I see tears glimmering in his eyes.

  “If we can get this many of you to come out for a statue, you better believe I’m counting on all of you being at my funeral.”

  Laughter erupts from the crowd.

  “As you all know, I’m a shy, retiring man who tends to keep his opinions to himself.”

  More laughter, clapping, hooting, and hollering.

  “My grandson, Danny, is the public speaker in the family.”

  I receive my own round of applause.

  “I was going to let him say a few words, but I knew we wouldn’t be able to understand half of them.”

  More laughter. For once I don’t take offense. I glance at Brenna, who smiles back at me. I take it for what it is: good-natured ribbing.

  “I’m not going to bore you with a speech. Everyone knows my feelings on the Nellies and my grandfather, Prosperity McNab, and if they don’t by now, I’ve done so many interviews lately, it’s easy enough to find out. I’m even on . . . what’s it called, Danny?”

  “YouTube.”

  “That’s right. I’m on the YouTube.”

  The crowd bursts into laughter again and cheers riotously.

  “During one of those interviews I was asked, What do you consider yourself to be first: Irish or American? I said I consider myself to be a retired coal miner.”

  More applause.

  “When you get to be a relic like myself, people are always asking you for words of wisdom,” he continues once everyone calms down. “It gets annoying.”

  More laughter.

  “The reason why is because you can’t grasp at thirty or fifty or even seventy what becomes blindingly obvious to you in your nineties. I can try and explain things to you. I can advise you. You can listen politely and nod your head, but you can’t truly understand.

  “But I will tell you this much: no matter what age you are, the amount of satisfaction you’re going to take from life all depends on your perspective.

  “It can be a terrible day when you reach your ninety-sixth year and realize this is all there is, or it can be a wonderful day when you realize that yes”—he pauses and gestures at the people gathered around him, the town, and the hills beyond—“this is all there is.”

  Nora gives Tommy a pat on the back and waits behind the microphone for the applause to die down before introducing Wesley Dawes.

  I was able to meet with him alone before the ceremony. He was nothing like his father. Relaxed, unpretentious, empathetic: the kind of man who would probably prefer having a beer at the Red Rabbit over having cocktails at the Dawes’ mansion.

  We talked briefly about our shared sister. He said he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t afraid of her, yet he was never absolutely sure why he felt this way. She never abused him. She didn’t even torment or tease him the way children were expected to behave in a normal sibling relationship.

  Without comment, he then showed me a photograph of his wife and two daughters, aged five and three. I’m glad Scarlet didn’t live long enough to dispose of them.

  We don’t talk at all about his mother. I’ve met with her several times since she shot and killed her daughter and saved my life.

  Only one person knew Gwen Dawes owned a gun and it wasn’t her husband. Not long after the gruesome death of her children’s nanny she decided she wanted some protection. She knew it didn’t make sense. It was a suicide after all. The young policeman she consulted agreed with her but said he didn’t blame her for wanting to feel safe after something like that happened in her own home. So Officer Rafferty Malloy found her a gun and filled out the paperwork for her permit.

  “This was an unfortunate moment in our shared history,” Wesley proclaims. “I say ‘our history’ because the Dawes family and the residents of Lost Creek are irrevocably intertwined. My ancestors could not have existed without yours and your ancestors could not have existed without them.

  “I’d like to think we’ve finally come to a moment in time where we no longer have to draw lines, where we no longer have to think of each other as the employer and the employed, the user and the used, but as people who share a love for this place, who have made a commitment to stay here through thick or thin, and who will work together to find a way to have more thick than thin.”

  This suggestion is met with shouting and clapping. I hear Rafe unwrap a Jolly Rancher and the clacking begins.

  “It’s my pleasure on behalf of the Dawes family to officially donate the land on which the gallows and jail stand to the town of Lo
st Creek in all perpetuity complete with a yearly income to maintain the property.

  “And now, Mr. McNab, I’m supposed to give you this bottle of champagne to use to christen the memorial statue.”

  Tommy takes the bottle and walks down the dais stairs to where the cloaked statue and the artist who created it stand in the middle of the town square.

  Everyone is dying to know what the NONS finally decided on. They managed to maintain an uncharacteristic level of secrecy about the project, but Tommy was only too anxious to share the submitted designs with me.

  It’s true the purpose of the statue was to immortalize a great tragedy, possibly a horrific miscarriage of justice, but even so, the proposals all seemed too dark and grim for me.

  One was a Nellie waiting to be executed, wearing his hood, his wrists and ankles shackled, the noose already around his neck. Another showed several miners toiling at their jobs, expressions of agony on their faces with flames licking at their feet. Yet another was done in the style of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., only instead of names set against a coal black background, the Nellies’ faces were carved into the wall like the faces in the recurring nightmare from my youth.

  The veil is dropped to an appreciative round of gasps then cheers.

  A solitary miner walks to the pits with his young son on his shoulders. The boy smiles down at his dad who appears to be whistling.

  I’m sure it’s not supposed to be anyone in particular, but to me it’s Prosperity and his son, Jack, at the same age I was when I first began to understand how I was related to them. It was also the same age when I began to question if my own father’s treatment of me wasn’t okay.

  I haven’t been back to my father’s house since he was murdered there. I stayed true to my earlier decision to have it torn down. Beforehand, I had no interest in wandering through the rooms where I grew up, and where he sat for decades with his terrible knowledge, and going through his personal effects searching for answers or shreds of sentimentality. Some of the Kelly sisters volunteered to dispose of his belongings and furniture for me, and in return they kept whatever they wanted or any profits from selling it.

  He left no instructions regarding a funeral other than the location of his burial plot. He had no family or friends who cared about his eternal rest. Tommy found a priest who came to say a few words as his body was lowered into the ground. He and Rafe were the only ones there. I was still in the hospital and unable to attend.

  Some people have been worried for me that I wasn’t able to properly say good-bye to him. I can’t make them understand that I did, but in a way that only my father and I could appreciate.

  Against his own wishes, Rafe gave me the crime scene photos. I pored over them one night sitting in my apartment listening to the city sounds outside my window and knowing no matter how late the hour, it would never be completely dark here.

  I was able to distance myself from them at first, regarding them as clinically as I would similar evidence from my work. It wasn’t until I came to the full-length shot of my father hanging out of my childhood bedroom window at the end of a noose that I finally felt grief.

  All I could see were his feet. They were bare. He wasn’t wearing shoes or slippers. They dangled pale and harmless, reminding me of some kind of vulnerable newborn creature. I realized I’d never seen his actual feet before, just what covered them. They were flesh and blood underneath.

  I knew at that moment that I would never be able to make peace with his actions, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make peace with him. In order to do it, I’ve had to keep my emotional distance and regard him as a man and not my father, but I’m okay with this. I don’t need him to be my father.

  I have a father. He’s sitting next to me, offering me a piece of candy.

  BACK AT TOMMY’S HOUSE, Mom is busy in the front room fluffing pillows on the couch and adjusting Fiona’s portrait. The coffee table is set for a tea party.

  She’s changed her clothes four times but has finally settled on a white eyelet dress that wouldn’t look appropriate on anyone over the age of eight except for her.

  Max is assisting her. He’s wearing the neon pink hat she began knitting for him when she first met him in my hospital room. The sequins spell out MOXIE.

  He refuses to take it off. He’s even color-coordinated the rest of his outfit. His shirt and shorts are the same alarming color, although the Birkenstocks at the ends of his surprisingly skinny legs are black. The comparison to a flamingo is almost too easy to make.

  He’s taking us to the airport. Brenna and Moira Kelly are going to take turns staying with Mom while Tommy and I are gone.

  Max didn’t have to do this, but since the shooting, he’s become clingy. I wasn’t able to return to work for a month and then only in a limited capacity. Now that I’m back to operating at full capacity, he’s started accompanying me everywhere I go. I was self-conscious at first, but I’ve begun to enjoy the bewilderment on people’s faces as they try to figure out who the quietly possessive, uniquely attired, iPad-tapping individual is: An avant-garde personal assistant? A gay bodyguard? My genie?

  Rafe is at the kitchen table using the new laptop I bought for Tommy. I’ve also upgraded his Internet capabilities.

  Since the airing of the Ghost Sniffers’ wildly popular Lost Creek episode and Tommy’s ascendancy into pop culture social media superstardom, the NONS website has devoted an entire page just to Tommy, and he’s considering starting a blog. Of all the incredible happenings around here recently, this might be the most unbelievable.

  “When you get to be my age, you end up seeing a lot of things you wished you hadn’t lived to see,” he says to me when I join him where he’s hovering behind Rafe.

  I follow his gaze to the computer screen, where Rafe is Skyping with Wade Van Landingham, who’s sitting poolside in a Hawaiian shirt and tiny bedazzled Ray-Bans.

  Velma sticks his head into the picture, too.

  “Wade misses Guy in Charge. He’s insisting on coming to spend a few weeks with him this summer even if it means pushing back his usual month on Johnny Depp’s yacht.”

  Rafe flashes us one of his inscrutable grins. I know he has big plans for the little dog’s visit. I’m having a vision: I see camo waders and a fluorescent orange ball cap in Wade’s future.

  “All the attention Wade’s received from the Lost Creek episode has been fabulous for his career. He’s been offered a part in a Tom Cruise movie. He’s going to play a dog.”

  “Pshaw,” Tommy snorts.

  Outside the front window I see a silver sports car pull up and park across the street. I tell Tommy, Rafe, and Max we need to get going.

  They say their good-byes to Mom while I leave them and go to greet Gwen Dawes.

  Like my mother, she has dressed for this occasion in a lilac sheath, matching pumps, and a rope of pearls. She carries two boxes: one is plain cardboard, the other has an elaborate fleur-de-lis pattern and is topped with a red foil bow.

  She gives the plain one to me.

  “Thank you for agreeing to this,” she says.

  “My mom wanted to do it.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow to begin serving my sentence,” she tells me. “I’ll also finally receive help for my drinking problem.”

  A legion of Dawes’ lawyers worked out a plea agreement where Gwen Dawes will serve two years in a minimum-security prison for the shooting death of her daughter, Scarlet.

  Considering her age, wealth, the mountain of extenuating circumstances, and the fact that she did save my life, she could have fought the charge and might have been able to avoid incarceration altogether, but it was obvious from the few times I talked to her that she wants to go to jail; she feels she deserves it.

  “Once I’m released, I’m going to live near Wesley and his family.”

  “I think that’s a good idea. I met him earlier today. H
e seems like a good man.”

  “I wonder what she would’ve been like? My Scarlet?”

  I know the question isn’t directed at me. It’s meant for the cosmos. I assume she’s coping as best she can. The truths she’s had to face have been every bit as awful as the ones my own mother has had to endure.

  I don’t know this woman at all. Certainly not well enough to judge her. I do know she has a conscience. She had begun her own campaign to expose her husband. She put the note in Tommy’s mailbox.

  “And Walker?” I ask her.

  She leaves her reverie of the daughter she never knew.

  “He has to live with himself.”

  I take her inside where my mother is waiting and introduce them to each other, a wild rose and a hothouse orchid who have both managed to survive in the same scorched earth.

  “This is Gwendolyn Dawes,” I tell Mom. “And this is my mother, Arlene Doyle.”

  Gwen’s eyes are damp with tears as she hands Mom the box.

  Mom takes it from her and eagerly opens it. Inside is a collection of tiny pastel-colored cakes adorned with candy petals.

  “Your son told me how much you like sweets.”

  “Thank you,” Mom says. “And, here, I have something for you. I made it.”

  She gives Gwen one of her purple TOLERANCE hats.

  Gwen begins to cry.

  “It’s okay,” Mom tells her.

  She rushes off and returns with a box of Kleenex. Gwen takes one and dabs at her eyes.

  As I turn to go I hear Gwen tell my mother she has one more gift for her.

  She reaches into her purse then asks for my mother’s hand.

  “This belonged to your daughter,” she says.

  I watch as she slips the Dawes ruby onto my mother’s finger.

  Mom holds up her hand, delightedly tilting it this way and that, watching the sparks of fiery light in the stone’s depths.

  She has no idea of the value men have placed upon it and that makes it all the more precious.

  ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO with Max’s Toyota. The trunk is packed. Max is behind the wheel. Rafe is in the backseat. Tommy’s riding shotgun.