Lone Wolf

27

LAWRENCE PATTED ME on the shoulder. “Everything’ll be fine,” he said. “You worry too much about things.”

“Oh,” I said. “You noticed. You think those bozos aren’t going to run right back and tell their step-daddy what happened? You think there won’t be some fallout from that?”

Another pat. “Maybe. Maybe not. And if there is, maybe that’ll be a good thing. It’s like shaking the trees.”

I was less sure. I was okay with doing things to the Wickenses that they didn’t find out about, but beating the snot out of two of them, that was kind of out in the open.

Lana popped her head out of cabin 1 again. “Zack? You wanna come over? Orville just called and said he’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Lawrence said quietly, “You go have fun. It’s still a few hours till it’s dark, can’t start watching the Wickens place till then anyway.”

So I went over to Dad’s cabin, Lana Gantry still holding the door open for me, and stepped inside. Dad was at the kitchen table, Leonard’s backpack in front of him.

“Guess I owe you an apology,” he said.

Well, I thought, at least we’re getting off on the right foot.

He held up one of the cans of bear spray we’d bought in town back on Tuesday. “I’d offered one of these to Leonard and figured he hadn’t taken it, but it was right here in his backpack. You know how I blamed you, said he’d left himself undefended because you’d convinced him there was no need to take this along?”

Slowly, I said, “Yeah.”

“Well, turns out he had it after all, tucked in here. Musta never had a chance to get it out when he got surprised by that bear.”

“I guess,” I said. “Can I have that?” I was thinking ahead, to the hours I would be spending sitting in the woods at night with Lawrence. A can of bear spray might be handy to have along.

Dad handed it over, and I left it on the kitchen counter right by the door so I’d remember to take it when I left.

“Sit down,” Dad said.

“Yes, please,” said Lana. “I’ve made some coffee.”

I sat down.

“This is, uh, this is kind of hard for me,” Dad said. “Telling you what I’m about to tell you.”

Lana put cups and cream and sugar and a pot full of coffee on the table.

“Maybe, if you hadn’t sent that picture to Sarah, and she hadn’t pointed out the resemblance, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Dad said. “But I’m not blaming you. This always stood the chance of coming out.”

I spooned some sugar into my coffee, poured in some cream.

“Let’s wait till Orville’s here,” Lana said.

“Sure,” said Dad. “But I just want you to understand, Zack, that yeah, part of what you’ve suspected is true. You and Orville, you’re, well, you’re sort of related.”

“Sort of related,” I said.

Lana sat down.

“But I’m not Orville’s father.”

Wait a minute, I thought. This was how it was going to go? They were going to start with denials? I cocked my head. “Well, hang on. Then-”

“And Lana here, Lana is not Orville’s mother.”

I’d only been sitting down for a minute, and already I was getting a headache. What kind of cock-and-bull story had the two of them concocted? Here they were, years later, boffing their brains out in Dad’s cabin, and they thought I was going to believe that they weren’t up to the same thing years ago?

What other possible explanation could there be?

There was a rapping at the door.

“That must be Orville,” Lana said, and got up to see. She opened the door, and said, “Oh, hello.”

I looked around. It was not Orville.

It was Timmy Wickens. This is it, I thought. We’re all going to die.

“Won’t you come in?” Lana said, and Timmy did. He nodded courteously at Lana, my father, and then at me.

“Good day,” he said. “Is the other gentleman around?”

“Lawrence?” I said.

“I believe so. The, uh, the black gentleman.”

“I’ll go get him,” I said, and bolted. I found Lawrence in the cabin, examining the rest of his surveillance equipment. “It’s Timmy,” I said. “Wants to see you.”

“Okey doke,” Lawrence said, closing the case.

“Aren’t you going to get your gun? You’re gonna bring a gun, right?”

Lawrence brushed past me on the way out, walked over to Dad’s cabin, and stepped inside. Timmy nodded at him when he came in, although he didn’t offer a hand to shake.

“I believe,” said Timmy, “that my boys may have caused a bit of a kerfuffle here a few minutes ago.”

Dad and Lana looked questioningly at all of us. Had they missed something?

Lawrence and I said nothing. Timmy continued. “Anyway, I’d just like to offer my apologies on their behalf.”

Now Lawrence and I really had nothing to say. “Sometimes,” Timmy said, “they get a little carried away, and I suspect that’s what happened.” He looked right at Lawrence. “That was very thoughtful of you, getting those toys for my grandson.”

Lawrence nodded.

“Anyway, I’m sorry if I interrupted anything here.” And he did a little bow, and let himself out.

Lawrence and I looked at each other. “What do you make of that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s bad news.”

“Hold on,” Dad said. “The man apologizes and you think it’s bad news? What the hell happened, anyway?”

“Why bad?” I asked.

“He doesn’t want to rock the boat,” Lawrence said. “Because he’s already up to something, and he doesn’t want to screw it up. He wanted to smooth this over so it wouldn’t mess up his other plans.”

“Is anyone going to tell us what the hell you’re talking about?” Dad asked.

Before either of us could reply, there was another knock at the door.

Orville Thorne had arrived.

The four of us were seated at the table. Lawrence had excused himself. Orville was annoyed before a single word had been said. It might have been for the reason he gave, that he was very busy hunting down Tiff Riley’s killer. But I suspected it had more to do with the fact that he was having to sit at the same table with me.

And I was thinking, I know something you don’t know.

But then again, how much did I know, really? Dad and Lana had turned my assumptions upside down when they claimed not to be Orville’s parents. But Dad had still said we were “sort of related.” How could that be?

“Aunt Lana,” he said, “whatever this is about, could we make it quick?”

She pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Up to now, I hadn’t even known she smoked. She lit one, took a long drag on it, and blew the smoke out. “We might as well start there, Orville,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that you don’t know, that I haven’t explained to you. And the first thing is, I’m not, I’m not technically your aunt.”

Orville shook his head. “What do you mean, you’re not my aunt? What’s that supposed to mean? Is this a joke?”

My thoughts exactly.

“Your uncle Walter, my dear husband, he, he wasn’t your uncle, either.”

“What in the hell are you talking about? Why are we talking about this? And whatever it is, why are you talking about it in front of these two?”

“Because it involves them,” Lana said gently.

“So you’re saying what? That you and Uncle-that you and Walter, that you’re not even related to me? That I’m not your nephew?”

“Not exactly. I love you very much, Orville. You’ve actually been more to me than a nephew. You’ve been like a son to me. But we’re not really related.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “But you and Walter, that’s different.”

Wait a minute, I thought.

“Well, but, if,” Orville stammered. “If Walter wasn’t my uncle, but he was related to me, then what was he?”

I had it half right, I thought. But I had it backward.

“He was your father,” Lana Gantry said.

Orville looked stunned. If I’d had a mirror, I could have checked to see whether I did, too. The room was quiet for a moment.

“But,” said Orville, “you’d always said my father was Bert Thorne, that my mother was Katrina Thorne. That they were killed in a car accident right after I was born. If Walter was my father, what about Katrina? Was she my mother?”

No, I almost said.

“No,” Lana Gantry said. “She wasn’t. I’m sorry, Orville, we had to tell you things that were not…It was a different time…People were much more secretive about indiscretions… I’m so very sorry.”

Orville’s eyes were turning red. “Then who is my mother?” he asked.

Lana turned and looked at Arlen Walker, my father. He said, very quietly, “Your mother was Evelyn Walker.” He swallowed. “My wife.” He paused again. “Zachary’s mother.”

Orville looked across the table at me, stared, the realization sinking in. And it was sinking in for me, as well.

“They had an…affair,” Dad said to Orville, but he was saying this for my benefit, too. “Lana’s husband and my wife. She became pregnant. And there were people who knew it couldn’t be my child. After Zack was born, I’d had, you know, the snip. It was…it would have been a scandal, I guess. In our neighborhood, we’d been friends, the four of us…”

The cabin seemed to be spinning.

“William,” Lana said, “wanted you. He wanted a son. We had no children.”

“And Evelyn, she…did not want another child,” Dad said. “She went away, for six months, she lived with her sister in Toronto, she had you. We got a lawyer, he did the paperwork, and Lana, and Walter, they took the baby, and they moved away, to another part of the city where no one knew them, knew their history, and they raised you.”

“But there were still people we saw,” Lana said. “Coworkers of your father’s, we didn’t know how to explain your sudden appearance, so we came up with a story. That you were our nephew, that Walter had had a sister, and a brother-in-law, who’d been killed in an accident. And that we had agreed to raise you.”

Orville said, “I don’t believe any of this.”

I said, “Look at us.”

“What?”

“Look at us. Look at me. Look at my face. When I first got up here, I felt I knew you from someplace. There was something familiar about you. And then I sent your picture to my wife, Sarah.”

“My picture? Where did you get my picture?”

“I took it. When I was taking pictures of the fish. And I sent it to my wife. And she spotted the resemblance immediately. I couldn’t believe it at first, but I started putting things together, how my parents and the Gantrys had been friends, how my mother had left home, although I had the reason for it all wrong.”

Orville said, “My whole life is a lie. The person I am, that’s a lie.”

No one said anything. He was right.

I said, to my father, “I don’t understand. How did this happen? Why, how did you and Mom stay together?”

Dad looked down at the table. “I was a bastard,” he said.

“What do you mean?” The use of the term, in these circumstances, threw me.

“I was a prick. A miserable son of a bitch. Always finding fault, always picking on her. I drove her away. I drove her into the arms of another man. It was as much my fault as hers. I realized one day, I saw myself for what I was. Thank God I had the sense to see what kind of person I’d been, and to try to do something about it.”

“You actually forgave her?”

“Like I forgave Walter,” Lana said. “It took a long time, but that boy, you, Orville, that baby was part of my husband, and I still loved him. And because I”-her voice became very quiet-“wasn’t able to have children of my own, I decided to put the best face on the situation that I could.”

“It was a rough time for us, I won’t kid you,” Dad said. “But we got through it. Maybe it was easier for us, because your mother gave her child away. But there was always a part of her, for the rest of her life, that was missing. Part of her died when she gave you up, Orville.”

I recalled Mom’s faraway looks, how she would sit and stare out the window. Maybe she was looking for that other son that she knew would never show up.

“And the two of you,” I said, indicating Dad and Lana. “Today.”

Dad shifted in his chair uncomfortably as Lana reached over and touched his hand. “We didn’t keep in touch. It really was a coincidence. When Walter retired early, we moved up here, with Orville, and bought the café. I kept it after Walter died. It was my own retirement plan. And then, years later, your father buys this camp, and he comes in for breakfast one day, and well, there he was, sitting there. I couldn’t believe it. I wondered if it was some kind of a sign.”

“We had a lot in common,” Dad said. “Our spouses had a child together. Our spouses had both passed on. We both learned to forgive. And we were both looking for someone in our lives.”

“Jesus Christ,” Orville said. “This is just, this is too much to deal with.”

“And Orville here,” Dad said. “When I see him, I see your mother in him. And I think about how I still love her.”

I had to get up and walk around the room. I was having as much trouble taking it all in as Orville.

“Orville,” Lana said. “Orville. The thing is, Orville, you have a brother. A sister, too, Zack’s sister, Cindy. You and Zachary share a mother. You’re half brothers.”

Orville was on his feet now, too. He backed away from the table, shook his head again. His eyes went from Lana, then to Dad, and finally landed on me.

“All these years, never having a brother or a sister,” he said. “And so now, it turns out I actually have a big brother.”

I felt a lump in my throat.

“Imagine. All your life, you wish you had a brother, and then, you finally find out you’ve got one, and he’s the biggest asshole in the world.”

Orville turned and left.