matches from the shelf where they’ve been kept as far back as he can remember, pulls on his jacket and shoes, and eases out the back door.
It’s not quite pitch-dark, the snow-covered lake and trees creating what he’s always thought of as snow light, and he’s able to make out dim shapes. The barbecue. The deck table and chairs. He takes care with his footing. The stairs that lead down from the deck are steep and can be icy and slick this time of year. Using the railing, taking his time, he works his way down to the firepit.
Firewood is neatly stacked and covered to keep it dry. The kindling box is full and also contains old newspapers wrapped in plastic. He pictures Jo out here replenishing the wood supply. Making kindling. Skills she was always better at than he was. His mother hadn’t let him use the axe at all until he was old enough to defy her. He didn’t do Boy Scouts, he went to summer music camp. Everything in his world was music until suddenly it wasn’t.
Back then it was Jo, not his father, who taught him how to make a fire. Who spirited him off from his mother’s hovering and taught him how to fish and shoot a gun. It was Jo who took him hiking in the woods on the long summer days. And look how he has rewarded her.
Braden crumples a couple of sheets of newspaper and sets them in the center of the firepit. He adds kindling and tops it all off with two bigger pieces of wood. Then he strikes a match and holds it to the paper, the small flame quickly transferring itself to the edge of the paper, blossoming into light, licking at the kindling.
Now he can clearly see the chairs around the firepit, lightly dusted with snow. Mitch sat right there, across from where Braden is standing now, his back to the dark expanse of snow-covered lake.
The memory flash hits him again.
Snow drifting down.
Rage and grief and loss flooding his body.
Mitch’s face, alternately shadowed and illuminated by the crackling fire.
The two loose ends of the flashback flail, loose in the breeze, connected to nothing. Braden watches the firelight, ironically amused at himself. On the trip here he’d fought a giant inner battle about whether to allow himself to remember, as if his psyche is a take-out window where he can order at will.
One memory to go, please, supersize the fries.
And now, nothing.
“Talk to me, Mitch,” he murmurs out loud.
“Mitch is not the talkative type.”
Braden startles at Jean’s voice. He’s been so lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t hear her descending the stairs and coming toward him.
“Mind if I join you?” She sits before he can answer, across the fire in the place where Mitch sat so very long ago.
“Allie’s fine,” she says before he can ask. “I checked the loft before I came out. All three girls, sound asleep.”
“What brings you out?” he asks, at a loss for what to say to this woman he barely knows.
“Same as you, I imagine. Couldn’t sleep. Too much emotional processing. I heard you moving around, thought I’d see what you were up to.”
“Just sitting here. Thinking. Not remembering.” He gets up and adds wood to the fire, sending crackling sparks up into the darkness.
“This is not the typical intervention adventure,” Jean says, her voice so quiet Braden needs to strain his ears to hear her. “Usually it’s more celebration and party. Phee didn’t tell us we’d be dragging you through the dirt.”
“Have you had an intervention?”
She shakes her head. “It’s rare with the Angels. Phee, once, not long after we started. Katie, a couple of times. You know about Dennis. And now you.”
Braden thinks about Phee relapsing, replays the story she told him about the violinist and the old man, that she blames herself for what happened to both of them.
“You’ve remembered something,” she says, scrutinizing his face.
“Written in flaming letters on my forehead?”
“Not like that. More like . . . you seem more solid. Like a piece of you came back.”
“It’s not a good piece,” he says, poking at the fire with a stick. “My memories are going to hurt people.”
“Whatever happened already happened,” she says. “So the harm is already done.”
“And if what I remember hurts them more? Things they don’t need to know, for example.”
“I think you need to trust that people are strong enough to carry the truth.”