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Chapter 20 - Freesia

Charlotte checked Alex's bedroom first.

Freesia knew Alex wouldn't be there. She spent most of her time at home battling sleep—sometimes succumbing on the sofa; increasingly as the nights warmed, wrapped in a blanket near the fire pit. The dawn when Freesia found her beside Bear on the dining room rug had proven more the rule than the exception. Freesia didn't know how Alex could sustain on a steady diet of deprivation and disappointment.

As Freesia headed back inside, having checked the grounds and the trailer, Jonah pulled up in his truck. He told her the wheels in town had greased with news of Alex's dog and that he'd come to check on her after repeated attempts to call her cell phone went unanswered.

Lightning strobed the late-afternoon bank of sooty clouds, chasing them both inside. The rumbling answer shook the land and rattled the shutters. By the time they reached the kitchen, its ample windows usually offering the brightest spot in the old house, the approaching storm cast the room into advanced dusk and emptied itself like a faucet.

Storms elicited abandonment in Freesia. During bad weather, her mother donned a rain slicker and headed up the beach to open the restaurant and feed radio operators who used the café's backup generators as a command center. Invariably, loved ones whose boats had yet to return to shore gathered. This ritual of communal coffee and flapjacks almost never ended happily. The ocean was a merciless assassin. Freesia found she preferred being alone to the haunting wails, like sirens without end.

While Charlotte and Jonah discussed what Alex likely had on her and what she had left behind, Freesia roamed the house. Living with Alex gave clues to her psyche. The haunting of aligned papers and reaffirming sticky notes covering her walls. Jewelry laid parallel on the dresser, shoes rarely kicked off at angles. The minimalism to which she had stripped her childhood bedroom. The alphabetical alignment of fragrances on the bathroom shelf so contrasting to the messy mathematical formulas scratched out on the medicine cabinet mirror in brow liner.

Freesia gravitated to the bathroom, the place where Alex took showers long enough to empty the tanks buried outside. A long pink and blue box in the trash can caught her eye, Alex always preferring to keep the can tidy, bagged, visually clean. Freesia picked up the can to get a closer look: New Beginnings Pregnancy Test.

The violation rested bitter on her tongue, but the compulsion overcame her. She shook the stick free of the box.

Two lines.

Pregnant.

Freesia recalled the spilled beads, the World's Greatest Dad mug. Her mother came to mind, how she had found out about a baby girl that was coming outside of a marriage into love but little else. The desperation of signing away the child with papers, only to rip them to shreds before the swaddled infant reached the door in the arms of a better couple, a better life.

Lightning pulsed past the window's half-curtains. She closed her eyes and braced herself through the rolling that followed, the end crescendo more like a lion pounding its paws on a drum inside her, a banishment of the sort she knew intimately. She put the trash can under the sink and raced to the kitchen.

"We have to find Alex."

Jonah said, "I'm sure she's safe from the storm somewhere."

"Rain this hard is like quicksand when it mixes with that red clay—" said Charlotte.

"This can't wait." Freesia's words punched through their complacency. She grabbed Charlotte's elbows and leveled her with a stare, an ending punctuation that left no room for indecision. "Where would she go?"

Charlotte's gaze tracked up and around the ceiling as if the answers hung from the rack like pots ready for stew. Her hands shook. "I don't know."

"Taffy's?" suggested Freesia.

Jonah shot that down immediately. "No. Too many people mentioning the dog. She'd want to be alone."

"Unless she was at your place," said Charlotte.

"I left there ten minutes ago."

They divided up calls: the sheriff, Stella Irene's clan, a friend of Jonah's who worked at the last gas station north because Freesia said the tank was nearly empty, the vet to see if Alex had mentioned finding a place to bury Bear. Nothing netted a clue until Charlotte spotted Alex's laptop on the table in the darkened dining room.

Freesia followed, jiggled the mouse to awaken it from sleep. What was on the screen wasn't the find. Beneath the laptop, Alex had left her journal.

"The envelope is gone," said Freesia. "The letter from your—our—father. She kept it in here since the day she got it."

Charlotte was inert, unsure.

For the second time that day, Freesia pushed past boundaries to read it.

Jours Parfaits.

Whatever that meant. For all of her travels, Freesia hadn't picked up a lick of French. Black marks slashed through every entry, the thick lines so angry, unlike the precision in the rest of the journal.

July moon, swimming hole

Acceptance letter, Daddy's tears

podium, stadium, audience after commencement speech

George Street Gate @ Brown, first snowfall, 9 pm

Something covered in correction tape.

Every line crossed out but one.

Jonah – ruins.

Freesia called Jonah into the room.

The next page was folded, a preview of what was to come, a pen-ink sketch, stiff and faded with time: architectural ruins, a grand staircase to nowhere against a forest of pines. It was familiar in a way Freesia couldn't place. She flipped the fold and stretched the drawing's span just as Jonah joined them.

Freesia knew immediately when the drawing landed in Jonah's recollection. The seam of his lips parted. His breath stopped exchanging the humid pull of stormy air for what he had trapped in his lungs. His body stiffened, all but a shift of his Adam's apple, a slow swallow. And his eyes roamed the page, far deeper than ink.

"Kingsley."

His voice was even, assured, doubtless. Freesia barely knew the man at all, but he stepped inside the heavy raincoat of that place, that memory with Alex.

The name was familiar, but Freesia was an outsider, no help here but the impetus to push for them to leave, to find the ruins, to find Alex before she did something about those black lines.

"How far is it?"

Jonah gave a slight shrug. "Twenty miles."

"We have to go."

Her voice came out piqued, insistent. Always pushing.

"I'll drive." Charlotte was already at her purse, digging out her keys.

"Better let me," said Jonah. "Might need four-wheel in this mud."

On their way out, Charlotte passed them raincoats from the hooks in the foyer. The driving rain had its own ideas. Little time spent buttoning and fastening left them nearly soaked by the time they scrambled into Jonah's cab. Water deluged the windshield like they had driven into a carwash and gotten off-track. But Freesia had never felt more on-track. For the first time since coming to Devon, maybe ever, she felt part of things, like she was making a real difference past empty answers on a map or a pretty sewn dress someone would wear once and put away for safekeeping. Alex needed Charlotte's kindness and Jonah's history, but Freesia was certain Alex needed something else: honesty.

Freesia hadn't known why, until this moment—pushing, pushing, pushing until she reached her desired effect, a connection no longer repellent. She had spent a lifetime in her jungle—roaming, searching, orbiting an authentic connection to someone, something—when all she really needed was to realize she no longer wanted to hold the tree. This time, in Freesia's new story, she was the lion.

"Go, go, go," she urged from the backseat, the dogged rain drowning her words.