Merit
Monterey, California
Present Day
“It’s me, Bug.” Eli’s voice is broken.
Something’s seriously wrong.
My heart hits my feet. “Is it Pop?”
“No.” He coughs, trying to clear away his tone. “It’s Ryan.”
The silence on the line feels like lead. It’s heavy, dark, and thick. I’m terrified to continue the conversation. My lips become too numb to speak. My fingers barely hang on to the phone, and my insides run hollow as my heart begins to hammer against my chest, banging for a way out. I don’t ask what happened because that’s not important right now.
From Eli’s tone, I can tell that things aren’t all right, so I ask him the most important question, “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. He’s been shot.” I hear the groan on the other end of the line. A groan of terror, one he’s trying to hold back but can’t.
“Where’s Alex?”
“On her way.”
“Where are you?”
“Ryan’s house.” He stops and chokes back a sob. “Merit,” he whispers, “I should have gotten here sooner.”
“Eli, listen to me right now. You can’t protect everybody. Not everybody, all the time.” My voice is strong, not full of fear even though it’s vibrating in my bones. Even though, so badly, I wish Eli had been there earlier, too—whatever that means.
Get control, Mer. Get control.
“Alex just pulled up, Mer.”
“Go to her. I’m catching a flight back home.”
“Mer,” Eli stops. “Come home for good.”
“I will. Where’s Ryan?”
“Taken by ambulance.”
“Who shot him?”
“Ronan Fields.”
“Why?”
“I don’t fucking know, Mer.”
“Is Ronan still there?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in police custody?”
“The threat has been neutralized.” His voice is robotic. As if he’s repeated this statement time and time again.
“I don’t speak game warden, Eli. What does that mean?”
“I killed him.”
Oh, fuck.
It’s quite amazing what the human brain can do. It shuts out distractions when you hear your loved one is in pain. It makes you jump into action, ask the right questions, and once your loved one is taken care of, that’s when you fall apart.
As soon as Eli and I hang up, I slide down the wall of my bedroom and fall apart.
Get up, I tell myself. Book a flight. Pack your shit. Move forward.
But what is different now from the other times this has happened?
When tragedy looked me in the eyes and said, I’m sorry, but …
The difference is, I kept moving. And here I am, once again telling myself to move when maybe I shouldn’t. I’m not sure, but I let whatever that looks like pour through my body all at once. I let it live in the dark caves, the big fractures of my body. I let it move and stretch and just be.
I allow this to happen until there’s a calmness to me. Until there are no tears left. Until the fear is done pushing through my mind.
Worst-case scenarios:
Ryan’s brain dead.
He’s paralyzed.
He’s dead.
I sit with this last thought. Ache fills my heart, my chest, with regrets. The things I never told him that I wish I had.
I’m in love with you, Ryan. I always have been.
I want to grow old with you.
I want to share my life with you.
I want to tell you my fears.
These past seventeen years was me living in hurt and pushing every goddamn person away because I didn’t want to hurt again. I thought it was easier to live like that. Thought it was the right choice.
My mind shifts to my brother.
How is he?
How bad is he hurt?
I should go to him.
They both need me.
He’s never killed anyone before. But Alex has. I’m glad she’s there with him.
Alex took down Clay Mahoney. He’d messed with the wrong woman.
A piece of me feels relief when this thought sits in my brain. A shared experience between Eli and Alex. Unity. Joint feelings. Collective trauma. It’s easier to experience it together than be in the dark, fumbling, running. Alone.
Timing in the world can run in perfect order if we let it. Things fall into place as they should if we get out of the way.
After the shock has worn off and the feelings that keep coming my way are felt, I pull myself from my bedroom floor and book a one-way ticket back to Granite Harbor.
It’s Pop who picks me up from the airport.
When I see him waiting at the Granite Harbor Welcomes You sign where he usually picks me up, I turn into a little girl. First, I walk fast and then jog. Then, I flat-out run to my dad. When my head meets his chest, I wrap my arms around him as tight as I can. I take in the same scent I did as a little girl. The scent of safety. The scent that told me everything would be all right. After my mom passed, it was Pop’s scent in the morning that put my feet into action for another day. I never told him that.
I guess that was hope that I buried away deep for so long. Maybe it was the same hope that kept me pushing one foot in front of the other, unrealized.
“Oh, Bug.”
I feel his arms tighten around me and his breath in my hair. He doesn’t ask what this is about. He doesn’t need to. Sometimes, there aren’t words to explain what touch feels like. It can just be experienced, but more importantly, it is understood. We stand here, holding on to one another, holding our experiences in our hands as if a sack of treasures in tow. We bring them to the table, unwrap them, and feel through them.
Gently, I finally pull away, and when I look into Pop’s eyes, I see the tears.
I’m caught off guard. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen my dad cry. Not once. At least, from what I remember.
“Pop, what’s wrong?”
He holds his finger up, a silent gesture for me to give him a moment. He coughs to clear his throat. “Never once have you relied on me like that.” His eyes fill with tears again. “Never once have you asked for help. Asked me to hold you up. Asked for love, Bug.” His bottom lip quivers. “You’ve always been my tough girl. The one who gets me and Eli through. And never once did I think I needed a daughter who needed her father.” He shakes his head. “Not till now.” He gently pulls me in by my neck and kisses the top of my head. “Thank you.”
My father, put together at all times, always knows what to do in situations, except when Mom died. He got lost. Though he always showed up even if it was just with his presence and not his mind.
I’ve never thought Pop needed me to rely on him. The same father who pulled children from lakes. An empty shell of who they had once been. He saved lives. Recovered bodies. The same father who lost his best friend, my mom. The same father who put his children first. The same father who never remarried—for us.
I think we’re more alike than we think.
We pull apart and he opens the truck door for me.
I’m terrified to ask the question, one I wouldn’t have asked a week ago, but the only way through is through.
I ask about Ryan as I hop in.
“Stable,” he says with a sigh as he drives toward Granite Harbor. “He had his bulletproof vest on, Mer, or he wouldn’t be. He took a direct shot to the chest.”
I nod as my eyes trace the ocean line of the East Coast, trying to process the scene in short seconds of thought. Of what could have gone wrong. Of what went right. The magnitude of my gratitude for keeping all three of my men on solid ground doesn’t begin with words; it begins with a feeling.
“Shit,” I whisper, wiping my nose with my sleeve, knowing Pop doesn’t carry tissues in his truck, knowing I used the last of my own tissues on the flight.
My dad reaches over and rubs my shoulder. “You okay?”
“Of all the things that have gone wrong and all the things that could have gone wrong, I’m so grateful I still have you, Eli, and Ryan.” I untangle my fingers. “There’s something I need to tell you about Ryan and me.”
A slow smile spreads across Pop’s face, one hand on the wheel.
I tell him the story about us. I tell him about Destiny and her passing. But I don’t tell him about what Ryan said to me that day. It’s not my story to tell. Sometimes, people say things and do things in the moment, solely out of fear, and I can understand that. I lived in fear for a long time. Too scared to get close to anybody, for fear that they’d break my heart. Besides, if I’ve forgiven, there isn’t a part to tell.
“Pop, I’ve always loved Ryan. I always have.”
“I know. I could tell when you guys were young, when you didn’t know what love was.” But his eyes fill with sadness, not tears. “But I’m sorry you felt you had to go through losing Destiny alone. That you didn’t tell anyone. Why not, Bug?”
“I didn’t want to burden anyone, I guess. Just thought I could do it on my own.”
He watches the road, a road he’s driven a thousand times in his line of work. “I asked myself where I’d gone wrong. What would keep you all the way out in California, away from your family. I questioned myself as a father. Where I’d messed up along the way.”
“It wasn’t you, Pop; it was me. I was in the way of my own self.”
Pop lets a big breath out. “I don’t tell you this out of pity, Bug. I tell you this out of the realization that every father wants his daughter to be happy. To rely on him for everything—until, of course, she gets married. Hell, even then, Dads still want to be the heroes for their daughters.”
“I know this now, Pop.”
We weave next to the coastline, around trees, big bodies of water. We knit the road home.
It dawns on me. Maybe, if Eli had died instead of Mom, he wouldn’t have been there to save Ryan.