“I don’t know that it is,” Will says, shrugging. “Not by rights, anyway. You could make the argument that Bill promised it to you long after he told me to stop thinking of myself as his son—there’s a lot of people, I think, who’d hear this story and say it was yours.”
“Well, regardless, you stay as long as you like. As to your argument—” Casey chews his lip for a minute, considering, and then says, “I think we should talk to some chainsaws about this, really. See what they have to say about it.”
Will grins brightly back at him; the truth is, Casey was right earlier. His coworkers back in Chicagoshouldbe jealous about the chainsaws. “What a trulyexcellentidea.”
Around noon, Casey steps away a few feet to the nearest apple tree, a Fuji with a branch hanging out over past the fence. He plucks two apples from it and tosses one to Will, calling, “We’ll go back for lunch soon, but until then!”
Will catches the apple, and leans up against the nearest fencepost to eat it. Fuji has never been his favorite—mealy sometimes, and too sugary—but this one is good and crisp, plucked just at the right moment, the punch of honeyed sweetness welcome after so much physical strain. As he chews and swallows, he lets his gaze dance across the nearby third orchard, and cut back to what little he can see of the first and second, beyond it. Even the younger trees have been alive longer than Will has, and some of them have been here long enough to see every William Josiah Robertson come and go—or, in Will’s case,come and go and come back again. He wonders, knowing even as he does it that it’s inane, unknowable, what they think of him.
“You wanna go back?” Casey asks, coming over to join him. “Track down some real lunch? We can finish this up later.”
“Yeah, all right,” Will says, though it pains him a little to leave a job half-finished, especially here; even now, as sure as he’s ever been than Bill’s stone-dead, Will half expects to find himself in trouble for walking away from something undone. In some ways, he thinks it’s what drove him to science, where the whole point is often to walk away from something while it’s still in progress, and see what it does on its own.
Still, as Will follows Casey back across the property, he finds himself relaxing, soothed by the now-familiar sound of his footfalls. What’s past is past; what’s here, now, is a sunny day, and a strapping man, and, if he’s lucky, time enough for Will to do what he likes with both.
It’s a good feeling. A singular one. Will folds it up small and careful, like a paper airplane, and places it, for safekeeping, in one of the lesser-used rooms of his heart.
As they approach the farmhouse, he jogs a little and catches up to Casey. Will’s opening his mouth to ask Casey what he wants to do for lunch when he notices the little gaggle of people standing on the porch.
Mere Gunderson he places first; he waves at her, his mouth dropping openly slightly when he recognizes the person next to her as her husband, Sandy. So he knows what she’s going to say even before she opens her mouth and calls down, “Will! There you are! We came to tell you they fixed the bridge, and Sandy wanted to say hi, and thanks, and?—”
“Casey, my dude!” The speaker is a tie-dye-wearing young woman of approximately college age, who is unfamiliar to Will, but Casey is sighing a resigned, knowing sigh even as she says, “I was trapped on the other side of the bridge, you see, andanyone you might have seen these last two weeks who maybe could’ve looked kinda like me in the right light was just?—”
“Samantha, I made direct eye contact with you at Mike’s like three days ago,” Casey says wearily. “And I know itwasyou, you don’t have a twin, there wasn’t a hologram; let’s not do this. You can just work your next scheduled shift, which is, I believe, in twenty minutes. Okay? But Will’s reorganized some stuff in the back so it works better, might be good if he took you through that first, assuming he doesn’t mind walking someone else… Will?”
But Will’s not listening to Casey, or to Meredith, or to Samantha’s vaguely entertaining excuses. He’s looking past all of them, to where Catherine Rose is standing, slightly apart from everyone, arms crossed over her chest, tightly tapping one foot.
There’s always a moment for Will, right before his brain pitches him into a real panic attack, where everything goes…still. For some years, he’s operated under the belief that this is, ultimately, nothing more than the obvious result of many millennia of compounded human evolution: If panic is his body being flooded with adrenaline for survival, then surely these moments of frozen horror serve an equally salient purpose. In the event Catherine Roseweregoing to, say, jump off the porch like a prehistoric predator, with every intention of eating Will for lunch, then the moment of frozen horror certainly would be helpful. He’d have a chance to come up with an exit strategy, at least, and the best way to execute it.
Catherine Rose is not going to jump off the porch and eat him; Will knows this logically, rationally. Illogically and irrationally, however, he knows that Catherine stands as a glowering beacon of every decision he’s not ready to make yet, every complicated angle cutting into his conscience, every pressuring force bearing down on him like a lowering blade. If Will’s not careful here, he’s going to put himself through the woodchipper,or Casey, or both of them, and he finds abruptly that he can’t bear the thought of it, the waste of it, the shrapnel of yet another needless interpersonal tragedy woven into the bones of this place. How many of those can one place hold? Is it so much to ask that Will have a chance to think about this, reallythinkabout it, with more information to hand and a clearer sense of the picture? Is it so terrible to want a little breathing room, a single minute to parse everything Casey’s told him, and everything he’s told Casey, and whether or not he even wants to sell the stupid place, and?—
Oh. Will finds, a bit embarrassed by it, that heisrunning away, without having quite decided to. His feet, impatient with the decision-making process and certain that they wanted to be anywhere else, have simply taken off without him.
“Will!” Two voices call it in unison—Casey sounds concerned, and Catherine sounds like a bloodhound who’s just caught her first scent in days. He ignores them both, except to pick up the pace, hurrying as quickly as he can towards his rental car.
Will should stop. He should say something—he should explain himself—he owes them more, these people, than to turn tail and run away the second things get real. But a little part of him, old and bitterly cold, can’t help but mutter:Ah, but that’s all you know, isn’t it, Will? The worn, familiar pattern? And it feels good, doesn’t it, a little? To feel bad in such a comfortable way?
The thought’s an upsetting one, so he tries to ignore it, too. As he approaches the car, though, he is painfully aware that the number of things he’s trying to ignore is reaching a critical failpoint, and any second now, one of them might slip through and?—
A warm, calloused hand encircles Will’s wrist only two steps from the car door. Damn, damn, damn.
“Will, wait.” It’s Casey when Will turns, because of courseit is—he knew it the second Casey touched him, familiar already with the way the fluttering veins of his wrist feel against one of Casey’s broad, steadying palms. Will looks up at him with all that he’s feeling naked on his face; it must look as much like animalistic desperation as it feels, because Casey winces, drops his voice low, like he’s soothing something dangerous and wounded he found in the forest. “Okay. Okay, I can see you’re—maybe freaking out a little, right? But you don’t have to do this, I promise you don’t. Take it from me: You can try to run from your problems, but your average problem moves quicker than your average person, so it’ll just beat you wherever you’re going more times than it won’t. Just stay, okay, like we talked about? You can think; we can tell Catherine Rose to screw off. You don’t have to panic?—”
“Oh, I don’t have topanic, well, great, thanks so much,” Will snarls. He tries to jerk his wrist back out of Casey’s grip, but somehow can’t quite bring himself to do more than half-heartedly pull his arm in towards himself; Casey doesn’t let go. “That’s easy for you to say, isn’t it!Youdon’t have to make any decisions here,youaren’t going to disappoint anyone, andyouprobably have a single objective thought left in your skull, too!Youhaven’t been living at the mercy of someone else’s hospitality, away from home, without a single thing you own or any way to get out!Youhaven’t spent the last two weeks walking around either in yourdead father’sclothes, or the clothes of a man you werealreadyhalf in love withbeforeyou slept with him?—”
Will slaps a hand over his mouth, realizing what he’s said half a second too late. Humiliation and horror rise like bile in the back of his throat and then?—
God, and then Casey is stepping forward, and letting go of Will’s wrist, and pulling Will’s hand away from his mouth, and—oh, and then Casey is kissing him.
Will’s mind goes briefly, blissfully, beautifully blank, every iota of agita abruptly and utterly wiped away. He is a clean,clear river that has never known the churn of silt; he is a new tree in strong soil, roots relaxing luxuriously down into the earth; he is folded piece of paper that somehow sails, anyway, further and faster than anyone would have expected, a miraculous agreement between sharply defined angles and the unknowable whims of the wind.
He would have expected himself to freeze, if he’d been expecting it. He doesn’t freeze. Will throws himself into the kiss like it’s his last chance before death takes him, like he’s been drowning nearly thirty-five years and Casey is his first taste of air. He kisses Casey with an abandon that will embarrass him later, like he’s never known the sick humiliation of heartbreak, like—like a teenager, Will realizes, flushing, as he and Casey pull apart. The last time he kissed someone like that it was…well, here. Notrighthere, in this parking lot, but around the corner, in Brandon’s ancient Pontiac, right up until the minute Bill came knocking on the window.
Will stares at Casey, startled and breathing hard and caught between panic and something a lot closer to ecstasy. Casey’s looking at him like he did last night, like he thinks this is one of those problems that you don’t solve with talking. But even if Will let Casey sweep him up in another kiss and take him back to the attic, or the truck bed, or the hayloft, orwherever, it wouldn’tchangeanything about his objectivity or his life in Chicago or need for some timeaway, somewhereneutral. He can’t be expected to think clearly, to make smart decisions, in such an inherently vision-clouding situation.
He opens his mouth to say as much to Casey, but before he can, Catherine Rose rounds the corner and points at him, her stilettos clacking ominously against the pavement. “I saw that!” she calls, stalking over to them. “And I tell you what, if some ill-conceivedromanceis really why you’ve been ignoring my calls for the last two weeks?—”
“God, I can’t,” Will says. He’s so overwhelmed it comes outstrangled, nearly sobbed; he backs away from Casey, unlocks the car door, and opens it, as he repeats it loud enough for Catherine to hear it, too: “I can’t, I can’t, Ican’t.”
