Chapter Five
The inside of the trailer is dark, even with the shutters pulled open. There's a thick coating of dust on the windows that stops much of the summer light coming through, and even the beams that do manage to end up in here don't find much to illuminate. The place is small and cramped and untidy, with things piled up on the countertops. At the side of the sink, I can see a drying rack still covered in plates; once washed, now covered in dust yet again. Jim Fischer obviously hadn't been expecting company when he died.
It feels less like a home and more like a time capsule – a moment trapped and left, forgotten about, for the world to pass it by, like the rooms in old colonial houses, set out the way they would have been three hundred years ago. A snapshot of a life lived.
And yet some things are new: unmistakeably Hale's. There's a duffel bag on the floor, fastened up tight. On the counter sits a six-pack – now a five-pack – of beer, waiting for us.
‘Sorry it's not colder,’ he says as he hands it to me. ‘The place doesn't have power. Probably got turned off years ago. I should probably see about getting a generator. I meant to when I was in town, but–’
He lets his words hang in the air, unspoken.
But then I met you.
Is it wishful thinking, to dream that I might have had such an impact on him? That I might have flustered him enough to make him forget what he came to town for? Hale doesn’t get flustered, is the thing – or at least, he never used to. Sure, he used to bubble over into anger sometimes, but that’s all it ever was: a slow build, like a pot of pasta on a stove. Before, he was able to control it; after, it was like nothing had ever happened, but in those moments when he really got a fire lit under him…
Well, I’d never seen it, but I’d seen the damage to his knuckles when he had to defend himself. Hale wasn’t a boy who pulled his punches, that much was clear. Not when the red mist set in.
But that was one thing; being distracted was quite another. That was unheard of. His quiet intensity had always made him seem in control of the situation, like it grounded him, somehow. Even when he had walked out of the diner, I got the impression that his final words to me had been carefully chosen – although to what end, I couldn’t have said. To hurt? To maim?
Don’t dwell on that now, I think. There are more important things you need to be focusing on.
‘I heard about your dad,’ I say, opening the beer and taking a sip. Lukewarm suds do little to fight my nervous cottonmouth. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ There’s a flash of disgust across his face. ‘Not on my account, anyway. I don’t have any sympathy for him. You know what kind of man he was.’
I do know. I saw the scars he left on Hale, emotionally and physically. I saw the damage that was left.
There’s an awkward pause between us. I take another sip of the beer, but it can only distract me for so long. Ask him, a little voice in my head says. If you want answers, you’re going to have to ask. Hale’s not going to volunteer them willingly.
Begin at the beginning, then. It’s the only way. But after a decade, how do you even remember where the beginning is?
‘So why are you back here?’ I say. If I start small, I figured that maybe we can build from there. Perhaps that’s the only way we’ll be able to do this without it overwhelming me.
One look at him, though, and I can see that I’m not the only one in danger of being overwhelmed. Hale has been standing this whole time, propped up against the counter in what passes for the kitchen, but I see his body slouch a little. ‘I don’t know,’ he says at last. ‘Not really.’
‘That’s not really good enough.’
‘It’s all I’ve got. I wish I had a better reason, but…’ He shrugs. But I don’t. But it is what it is.
Neither one of us says anything for an age. Glaciers form and retreat back in the silence – because what else is there? I want to push him – need to push him – but Hale is the ultimate immovable object. He won’t be pressured to reveal things he doesn’t want to, least of all when they’re so close to his chest. Not by anyone. Not even by me.
I wait for him to be ready, but I stand my ground. I’m not going anywhere until I get what I want.
‘My dad owned this trailer,’ he says at last. ‘Just about the only honest thing he did own, probably – and even then, I think he won it in a poker game. But either way, it was his. And now he’s dead, it’s mine.’ He doesn’t say it gloatingly, although there’s no love in his eyes. Jim Fischer lost his right to his son’s affections a long time ago.
‘You’re not thinking of moving back in, are you?’
Hale give a harsh bark of laughter, like a dog caught off-guard. ‘Oh, fuck no. I just wanted to fly under the radar a little bit. You know what Eden is like. Roll into town in the morning, and everyone and their dog will know about it by the lunchtime rush. Who needs that?’ He has a point. The Chambers Street Guest House might have fresh, clean sheets and hot running water, but Polly Kimble has got a keen eye and a sharp tongue and a prime view of what goes on in town. If you want to keep something on the down-low, that isn’t the place to do it.
But even with that in mind, there’s no way this is a better option.
‘You can’t stay here,’ I say. ‘It’s filthy.’
Hale smiles, warm but sad. ‘It ain’t so bad, Carrie. It was worse when I lived here. If anything, Pop’s a lot more houseproud now he’s dead. I figure someone came in and tidied the place after he died, looking for anything worth taking, and he wasn’t around to muss it up afterwards.’ I can’t wrap my head around how blasé he is about the whole thing; in Hale’s world, of course people would go through a dead man’s trailer looking for what they could steal. ‘Besides, it’s just for a couple of nights. No big thing.’
‘But –’ I start… but what’s the use? Hale won’t change his mind. He’s never been one for acts of charity. It was hard enough getting him to take a bowl of soup without being offended. If I offered him my couch, there’s no way he’d accept it, just on the principle of the thing.
If you offered him your bed he might, that spiteful, hateful little voice in my ear chimes up again. Your bed and everything that’s in it. Maybe part of him came back to get a taste of what you held out on him all those years ago. And the worst part is, I don’t think you’d mind that. Not one little bit. After all, how long has it been now?
Too long – far too long – but I refuse to let myself think like that. The situation is confusing enough as it is.
‘So what are you going to do with it?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. Sell it? Give it away? Let them tear it to the ground for all I care. I spent most of the last ten years thinking I’d never set foot in this goddamn shack for all the money in the world. That was all I wanted, to never see it again.’
I can’t say that I blame him.
‘Are you glad you did?’ I ask. ‘Come back again, I mean.’
‘I don’t know. It’s all still a bit… new. Seems a lot smaller than it did when I was a kid. Back then, it was all I knew.’
‘Are you still talking about the trailer?’
He cracks a smile, but barely. ‘I don’t know. Eden too, I guess. God, I used to think that this was the whole world. I figured I’d end up living and dying here. Didn’t even cross my mind that there was anything else. Even when I used to talk about us…’ He pauses. ‘I mean, about getting away. I don’t know how much I ever thought that was possible. Crazy, right? How things can change?’
Sure. Crazy. Heartbreaking. Call it what you like.
On the one hand, I’m happy for him – really, I am. He’s Hale 2.0, more than he ever was when knew him. But on the other… what? Jealousy? A realisation that I’ve missed out?
‘But why now?’ I ask. ‘I mean, your Dad died last year. If you didn’t come back then, why are you here now?’
Hale shrugs. ‘No real reason. It felt like time. Time to put it all to rest, I guess. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but… well, I figured I needed to see it one last time. Clear out the ghosts. Move on. Is that stupid?’
I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I get it. I don’t think it’s stupid at all.’
‘It’s my last tie to Eden. To Texas, even. I belong in New York now. Once this whole mess is dealt with, I can put my old life behind me, completely.’ He sounds almost happy about that. I wonder if he can tell that it’s a knife in my heart.
The thing is, I don’t think I ever expected Hale to come back – at least, not really. Maybe a little, in the first couple of weeks after he left. I was sad that he was gone, of course, but I viewed it as… a break? I don’t know. I guess I thought that he’d spend a few days away, realise that he couldn’t survive out there in the big, wide world, and then come back to me – to us – and we’d work through it together. I was sad that he wasn’t there, but I knew he’d be back. Then, when he didn’t come back, it ruined me. When weeks and months passed by without any word from him, any phone call, any email or letter, I realised that he was really gone, and for good. I’d never see him again. What we had was over.
I got better, obviously; no one can stay a pining teenager forever. But it took time, and effort, and a whole lot of tears. It’s not a time I like the idea of going back to. Whatever happened, happened – and the same is true of what didn’t. Hale’s joy at the idea of going back to New York is enough to make that clear to me. I’m a fragment of his past, and nothing more.
Best off forgotten, if he hasn’t already.
‘So why did you come to the diner?’ I ask. ‘Was that just you clearing out some old ghosts too?’
Hale pauses as the realisation hits him, and I can see him treading carefully. ‘Carrie, I didn’t mean –’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ I snap. I hate how childish my voice sounds, but I can’t help it. One afternoon with Hale, and I can feel myself reverting back to sixteen years old, with everything that entails. If you ever really left, an unpleasant voice says in my ear. After all, Hale made a new life for himself. He grew up. Why didn’t you?
Why didn’t you, Carrie?
Hmm?
Hale fiddles with the tab on his beer can, bending it back and forward over and over again. I recognise the motion. It’s something he used to do in the old days, a way of calming himself down when he got stressed. When Aaron and his little troop of trained monkeys started riding his ass, trying to get a rise out of him. When his dad was in one of his black moods. Whenever he felt his adrenaline pumping, and he had to consciously try to suppress that fight-or-flight reflex.
I’d seen it before, but I’d never been the cause of it until now.
‘Jesus Christ, Carrie,’ he says. ‘Do you really want to do this now? Really?’
I snort. ‘No, no, you’re right,’ I reply. ‘Let’s wait another ten years to get it all out in the open. After all, what’s a decade between friends?’
He doesn’t answer, but I’m surprised to see a faint wounded look on his face. I run back through what I just said, wondering what I said to cause him discomfort – perhaps even wondering if I can use it again, if I need to protect myself from the memories of him – and then I realise. Friends. We were never friends, Hale and I – not before we started dating, and not afterwards. We went from strangers to a couple to nothing at all, all in the space of a few hot summer months.
Perhaps he’s a little hurt by the implication that friends is all we were back them. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a warm, vindictive feeling in my chest at that. Good, I think. Maybe it’s your turn to have no idea where you stand. How do you like that, you son of a bitch?
‘You know what? This was a stupid idea. I shouldn’t have come here.’ I stand up and make for the exit, but I’m stopped in my tracks.
‘Carrie, wait.’
Jesus, for a man as physically imposing as he is, Hale can move fast. He’s standing between me and the door in an instant, one of his perfect hands holding it closed. I can see it close up, immaculately clean up to the palm and the fingers, and then the calloused tips from his guitar, just like I remembered. He used to play his fingers raw. I wonder if he still does.
No, I tell myself. You’ve got to stop thinking like that.
‘Let me go.’
‘Not until I’ve said what I have to say. I reckon I’ve waited long enough.’
You’ve waited? I think. What the hell do you know about waiting?
‘You want to know why I came to the diner?’ he asks. ‘No bullshit? Fine. I know you want to hear that I went to see you, but I didn’t. Not at all. I didn’t go to see if you were there so we could catch up and shoot the shit like old times, and I sure as hell didn’t go just because I wanted a plate of fries either.’ He pauses, as though he’s not sure how I’m going to react to what he says next, as though he’s reluctant to uncork the bottle and let the genie loose. ‘I went there to check to make sure you weren’t there. That’s why.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
Hale looks at me like I’ve gone nuts, as though he shouldn’t need to explain it. ‘You had all these big dreams, Carrie. You were always the smart one. You were always the one with a plan. You were going places when you got old enough. That was what was supposed to happen, not…’
‘Not what?’
He sighs. ‘Not you working in your folks’ diner, still. Not a life spent pouring coffee and bussing tables. You were better than that.’
Were. Not are. But then again, can I blame him? Hale’s probably the worst person to be any judge of what or who I am right now.
‘What was I supposed to do, go with you?’ I hiss at him. ‘You were seventeen, Hale. You didn’t know where the hell you were going. You just upped and ran, and…’ I feel the pinch of my fingernails in my palm again. Calm down, I tell myself, but I can feel that familiar hotness growing in my chest. There’s a fight brewing.
It will be our second, ever.
‘I wanted to know that you’d managed to get out too,’ Hale says softly. ‘It was… important to me, I guess. It was just about all I thought about on the drive down here. All I had playing through my mind, the entire time. I wanted to rock up at the diner and to have your Mom or Dad tell me that no, you’d gone years ago. That you’d gone to college. That you’d settled down out west and you had… shit, I don’t know. A family of your own or something. Just something more than this.’
‘So what? I’m a disappointment now, is that it?’
He shrugs, and I could slap him. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, Carrie,’ he says again.
‘You keep saying that,’ I say. ‘But don’t you get it? It’s nothing. It means nothing. And I sure as shit don’t need your judgement on whether or not my life is a mistake. You ran away and did your own thing? Well, great. Good for you. I’m happy for you, Hale, I really am. But some of us have families back here who needed us. Some of us have lives and people we couldn’t just walk away from. I did what I had to do to keep my family going, and that meant sacrificing some things. So don’t you dare tell me that staying was a mistake. Don’t you dare. Do you understand me?’
I’ve never yelled at Hale like that before. I didn’t know I had it in me, but ten years is a long time for rage to fester. It’s been building up inside me for so long that I didn’t even notice it was there – but it’s never gone. No matter how over the indignity of it all I thought I was, I plainly wasn’t.
But now the boil has been lanced. I wish I could say I felt better for letting all of that poison out, but I can’t. The look on his face is blank, expressionless. Unreadable. He’s giving me nothing.
Typical Hale.
‘I think you got the wrong end of the stick, Carrie,’ he says quietly.
‘Oh yeah? Well how about you set me straight? Or if you don’t have the decency to do that, at least get the hell out of my way.’
‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean you made a mistake by staying. I was talking about me. I wanted you to understand that when I left that night, I didn’t mean for things to go down the way they did.’ He pauses. ‘That was my mistake. Not leaving; I had to leave. I couldn’t have stayed even if I wanted to, or me and Pop would have ended up killing each other. But leaving you behind? Not getting in touch after the fact? Yeah. That was my mistake. The biggest one I ever made.’
I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that, and so I say nothing. His enormous hand lifts off the door, releasing me after he’s said his piece, but I can’t give him any sort of a response. Too many things are swirling around in my head for me to be able to think straight.
And so, this time, I’m the one that leaves him.