Page 74 of Revelry
I sighed. “Maybe, but I think the river was just a catalyst. I think it brought all of his fears about us to the surface and he just snapped. I did the same. We both realize how careless we’ve been.”
“No, sweetie, today may have been about you leaving in your eyes, but it was about Dani in his.”
Now I was confused.
I tilted my head, unsure of how Dani was tied into anything about today. “Okay, you have my attention.”
Momma Von had this look about her when she was conflicted over something, and she wore that look like she wasn’t sure about what she was about to tell me. She glanced at her hands and then off somewhere in front of her, finding the words in the distance between the two. Her eyes seemed softer, as if they were more of the storyteller than her words were.
“You already know how Dani and Anderson’s relationship was. She was the one who kept him in line, who demanded more of him. When he would find himself in a heap of trouble, Dani would be there to bail him out of it—and then lecture him on how to be better.” Momma Von smiled then. “He told me once that she was like his angel. His outspoken, annoying, too-smart-for-her-own-damn-good angel.”
I smiled, too. He’d said something similar to me one night when we’d been between my sheets sharing the darkest parts of ourselves. It was the same night that I’d confessed I’d known I was unhappy with Keith years before I left him, and I didn’t know if that made me a fighter or a coward.
“Anderson was in a bad funk,” Momma Von continued. “He’d been gambling his money away at the casinos outside of Seattle and throwing the rest of it at pills. He was messed up, constantly in a haze, and one night he’d run his truck off the road and hit a tree.”
I gasped.
“It was here in the neighborhood and he wasn’t going very fast so he was fine,” she added quickly when she noticed my reaction. “But that might have been the worst part of it, actually. He didn’t get hurt and he knew he could fix up his truck, so he was making light of the situation, and Dani lost it on him.”
It was such a foreign concept, to try to imagine a younger Anderson who was so careless. The only Anderson I’d known was a quiet, smart, strong man with purpose and intent behind everything he did.
“And usually, when Dani would get fed up with Anderson’s antics and give him a stern talking to, he would take it in stride. Sometimes he learned from her, sometimes he joked around and made her angrier before she’d eventually give in and laugh with him. But something about this time was different. And instead of hearing her, he spoke over her, and called her out on her own shortcomings in his eyes.”
“Shortcomings?” I asked. “I’ve only ever heard him speak highly of her. I didn’t think he saw a bad bone in her body.”
“He didn’t, not really. But he was angry and defensive, and so he told her that maybe it washerwho was living wrong. He called her out on never having any adventures, on living safely and by the book. It was the first time they’d really had an argument, and it ended in him sleeping on my couch that night and her going to bed with a head full of thoughts about her life.”
I could feel it coming, the part of the story she wasn’t supposed to tell me that Anderson likely never wanted me to know. I sat up straighter, hands wrapping tightly around my mug that had grown cold already.
“The next day, she called Tucker and said she wanted to float down the river. She’d never done it before because it just wasn’t her thing. She didn’t like to hike or ride bikes or run the Alder loop or any of that. She was a reader, a learner, and it was the first day she woke up and questioned if that was a good thing.”
Momma Von’s eyes welled up a little at that, and she swallowed hard before continuing.
“Tucker said he’d go with her, but it was a bad day to be on the river and he knew it. The waters were rough, the rocks more exposed because of how shallow the river was that summer. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was just her or the two of them or our entire crew.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, covering my mouth with my hands.
“They both flipped out of their tubes. Tucker made it to shore but Dani hit her head on one of the rocks.” Momma Von’s voice cracked. “Anderson was the first person Tucker saw, and he’d run to the river, finding her lifeless and wrapped around a rock near the bank.” She wiped at her nose. “He tried to resuscitate her when he pulled her out of the river, but he was too late.”
And just when I thought my heart couldn’t break any more, her words crushed it into pieces.
Momma Von took a deep breath, shaking her head. “Nothing was the same after that. Tucker blamed Anderson, Anderson blamed Tucker, then they both blamed themselves. And where Tucker eventually let go and learned to live again, Anderson never did. Well,” she added, soft gray eyes finding mine now. “Until you, that is.”
My hand still covered my mouth and all I could do was shake my head, eyes blurring along with Momma Von’s. “And when he watched me fall into the river earlier today, he saw her, didn’t he?”
Momma Von nodded. “He hadn’t been able to save Dani, but he was there to save you. And when he finally got you on the shore, he couldn’t control his emotions. He lost it because he was scared of losing you, Wren.”
I bent at the waist, abandoning my mug on the coffee table so I could wrap my arms around my middle. I wanted to run to him, to hold him, to rock him and tell him I’m okay and he’s okay and everything would beokay. The urge was almost strong enough to lift me from my seat, but then reality crashed in again.
The truth was that though his fear was sparked from Dani, it still came back to losing me. And that fact wasn’t changing, even if it wasn’t the river that was taking me.
“Do you understand now why he acted the way he did?”
I nodded, arms still wrapped around myself and eyes on my sock-covered feet. “I do.”
“But?”
My eyes squeezed tight, and two tears slipped free. I didn’t even know how it was possible to still have tears left to shed.
