“Are you drunk?” she asked bluntly.
“No.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Down t’ the pub,” he replied.
“I thought you said you weren’t drunk.”
“Jaysus, Katie. I didn’t even finish my second beer. I hardly think it qualifies.” He turned and plunked down on the top step.
Katie approached and sat at the opposite end. She swallowed, trying to tamp down the unpleasant feeling of helplessness lurching around in her gut.
“You don’t really think the people who care about you are going to stand idly by and watch you kill yourself, do you?” she asked.
“I’m not trying to kill myself,” he muttered. “All I want is to be left alone.”
“You’re self-destructing, Rill.”
“I’m living alone because I choose to. I pay
rent. I’m not breaking any laws by getting myself good and ossified once in a while. I can’t see how you have a say in it one way or another,” he said, frustration heavily lacing his tone.
Katie bit off her aggressive reply. She took a deep breath and stared up at the night sky. A low cloud cover obliterated the light of the stars.
“How did you ever end up in this place, anyway?”
For several seconds, she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“My plane got grounded in St. Louis during a storm on a trip from New York to Los Angeles,” he said quietly after a moment. “I got off the plane, rented a car and drove.” She saw the shadow of his hand going up in a vague wave. “This is where I ended up.”
“An eighteen-month-long layover?”
He shrugged.
“You said you’d been coming from New York. Had you been visiting Eden’s grave in New York?”
Katie saw him tense.
“She was my friend in addition to being your wife, Rill. I’m not going to go around refusing to say her name. That’s no way to honor her memory. Is that where you’d been? Before you came to Vulture’s Canyon?”
“Yah,” he replied, almost inaudibly, after a moment.
Katie had been to the cemetery in the Hudson River Valley where Eden Pierce had been buried. Eden had been visiting her parents while Rill was filming in London. She’d been driving home from a meeting with an old school friend when a sleeping truck driver veered across the centerline, hitting Eden’s car. She’d spun out of control and flipped into a deep ravine at the side of the road.
They said she’d still been alive for several minutes, but pinned against the seat and the steering wheel. The bloody fingerprints on the window, the smashed door and the handle indicated she’d been trying to get out before the air in her collapsed lungs ran out.
“I miss her, too,” Katie said softly.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Katie. You don’t know what’s happening inside me.”
Her chin tilted up defiantly, but inside, she felt herself wilting. His grief seemed insurmountable at that moment. Was she delusional, thinking she could actually help him when he obviously didn’t want it? She suddenly knew that the unbearable burn she felt in her chest—an explosive, frightening feeling—was precisely what Rill experienced in the silence; it was a sympathetic pain.
She was a little horrified when a thought struck her and laughter popped out of her throat. Rill glanced over at her sharply.
“What?”
“I was just thinking . . . she would have hated this place. Eden. Remember how you were filming in that pitiful little town outside of Dublin and she and I flew over to visit? She took one look at the accommodations and insisted we stay in the city and drive to the town every day.”