BECAUSE HE hadn’t returned her call, she’d worried endlessly over him, had booked a ticket to come back, but when he didn’t call her again, she wondered if he still wanted her. “Around,” she quickly added, to dampen the weight of the question that she’d hung in the air. It fluttered in the swirl of silence between them.
“I want you around,” Darren said softly, feeling an exquisite ache in his chest, hot and sharp, a pang that almost sang to him. “Randie, I want you always. In every day, in every way. I want to make a home with you, girl. Texas, Chicago, wherever the hell you are right now —”
“Photo shoot in Marfa.”
He heard the smile in her voice before Marfa registered. She hadn’t left the state, then. Instead, she’d taken a job that kept her tethered to him. It gave him the courage to say, “I want to marry you, Randie.” He heard and felt the throaty gasp on the other end of the line, and for a moment he didn’t know if it was shock or disgust or glee. He took a deep breath himself and told her he knew he’d fucked up. It was the liquor, but that wasn’t his excuse, because there was none. Not for the way he’d spoken to her. He’d been ugly, cruel even. And he’d had enough days now to consider the ways in which he’d too greatly owned the narrative of his life: as a boy, and then a man, unworthy of love because his own mother hadn’t wanted him, couldn’t be bothered to raise him.
“I haven’t had a drink in a week. Four days, actually,” he corrected, because he didn’t want to start whatever might be repaired with half-truths.
“Okay,” she said, a thinness in her tone. Darren couldn’t tell if it meant she didn’t believe him or that she thought this was business he needed to handle on his own and not for her sake. She would require no check-ins. She wasn’t interested in being his minder. “If you feel good,” she said. That’s all I need sat in the air behind it.
“You really scared me, Darren. I thought to call Lisa again, but I don’t know, much as I wanted to make sure you were okay out there, I wanted us to work through some of this on our own.” She sighed. “Darren, what’s between you and me, that’s ours.” Her impulse to erect a sacred wall between the two of them and the rest of the world so moved him that he fell back in his chair in wild wonder, as he looked out at the bluebells coming up through the bed of the old pond. He felt like singing. He felt like putting on a Joe Tex album. He felt like drinking.
It came up on him like a snake.
Strikingly fast and deadly.
He counted eight breaths. He looked down for what he could do with his hands. Finding nothing else he could hold on to, he reached for a different anchor. “I love you,” he said into the phone, hearing her soft breath in his ear.
“Darren, the things I said about your mom —”
“Yeah,” he said gently. “You were definitely wrong about her… because I’m pretty sure she testified in front of the grand jury. I just got out of lockup this morning.”
“What?!”
“It happened when I was with her in Nacogdoches, when I was look —”
“Jesus, Darren, are you okay?” He felt her alarm through the phone and was embarrassed by how much it pleased him to know she cared. “You were indicted?”
“I will stand trial, yes,” he said. “But listen, you were right about the other thing. The missing girl, there was a story there, a reason to drive up to Nacogdoches County.”
Only he wasn’t so sure anymore what that story was.
He told her about the past few days chasing down every lead on Sera Fuller, the mixed messages from her family, the oddness of Thornhill and them seemingly blocking his investigation, Lieutenant Wilson telling him in no uncertain terms to back off.
But Randie was stuck on the indictment and what it meant, what his lawyers were saying, and was Frank Vaughn really trying to convict him on an insanely flimsy case. “Obstruction on a murder case that’s been solved for years. It’s ridiculous.”
She was coming home, she said. There was no way he would do this alone.
He heard home, and his breath caught, a thousand butterflies waiting to take flight. “The proposal, Randie,” he said. “Marriage, I’m serious about —”
She took a breath and let out a low humming sound that did not enough resemble a tune of joy to Darren’s ears. “Let’s just talk when we see each other again.”
He felt his insides seize, felt a hot stab of fear.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said.
As they said their goodbyes, Darren admitted he felt he’d made a wrong turn somehow. “I still don’t know where the girl is, if I maybe misread this whole thing, and now the lawyers want me down in Houston to talk about the case and strategy.”
The reality of standing trial hit him all over again.
“I’m just glad you tried, Darren,” Randie said. “You made enough noise, talked to the girl’s mother, that someone is going to send this up the chain, and maybe hearing it from someone else…” Not a disgraced former Ranger, he thanked her for not saying. “Maybe they’ll listen to her mother if she starts asking questions about finding her kid.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Though he still felt he was dragging a weight behind him, felt the heft of work undone. A young girl, possibly sick, not anywhere he could name.
“But I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Okay,” Darren said on the back of a sigh. Because there were nearly ten hours between Marfa and San Jacinto County, and it seemed at this moment the distance between Mars and Mother Earth. The whole conversation had a dreamlike quality. Would he wake tomorrow alone to find that Randie had never even called him, that he was actually already drunk now, dreaming up how things could have gone if he’d held on tight to any wagon that would keep him dry? He heard her say his name through the cold device in his hand. “It is not my intent to be proposed to over the telephone.”
It had a lilt in it, her voice.
It held a teasing joy.
“Yeah?” he asked, a bigger question in that one syllable.
“Yeah.”
Before they hung up, she said his name softly, then, “I love you too.”
The favor she had bestowed on his soul cut through the gray of the past few days.
He looked out over the back acres of his family’s land that God and circumstance had allowed them to lay claim to for a century when really the swath of rolling green and the thick stands of pine, scrub oak, and hickory trees belonged only to itself. By grace, Darren had been born to these Texas woods. By a twist of fate, a few messy knots of history, he and his family had made a life on this land. The yields too many to name. Family and home, soft breezes making a heated day worthwhile. Music and meals out on the back porch. Books and schooling. This land had given him everything. He hoped whenever his time came, he could report he’d been a good steward, that he’d done his piece to make the land of his birth a place of beauty and possibility. He owed the earth beneath his feet that much and more. Lemon-yellow rays of sunlight striped the back of the property, and Darren felt warm. Brand-new. He was safely pinned in place at home. Still, he used an old trick, tossing the keys to his truck in the freezer — this time not to make him think twice about driving after a drink but to discourage driving to get one in the first place. Inside, he poured himself another cold glass of water from the sink and then made himself a sandwich with the butt of a loaf of bread folded over salted tomatoes from the garden and one of his sweet peppers.
Plate in front of him on the old Formica kitchen table, he looked up more about the super PAC Keep America Working. They’d registered themselves in 2013, the same year Thornhill had opened, and were dedicated, their website said, to “making labor work for everyone.” There were quotes from Henry Ford and Ray Kroc and Sam Walton, all platitudes about the virtue of hard work, the untapped power in America’s men. And women, Darren supposed. Keep America Working had a fundraiser coming up soon, the same fundraiser at which Joseph had told Carey-Ann Thorn he still wanted to give a speech. Still suggested a change in original plans. Because of a missing member of Thornhill’s model family? Tickets were available on their website, starting at one thousand dollars, tables for ten grand. Held not at a Hilton in Dallas or the Four Seasons in Austin. Not a Marriott or a Radisson. No, the fundraiser was being held in the gymnasium of Thornhill High School, which further cemented the connection between Thornhill and the Keep America Working political action committee.
He finished eating and took a call from his lawyers’ office, setting a time to come in next week. He wondered how soon they could get a trial on the books. Nothing would be gained by giving Vaughn more time to look into Bill King’s confession.
