Miles Lindgren's Arc

Chapter 8 of 13

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Marlene stood on the far curb with her grocery bags hanging heavy in each hand, and Miles sat frozen in the passenger seat, the engine idling low beneath them, the whole street holding still in that particular way winter afternoons did right before the light went blue and flat. Then she started walking again, toward her house, and something in Miles's chest lurched at the thought of just letting her go, of driving past like he hadn't seen her, like twelve years of avoiding this exact moment could stretch into one more day. "Pull over," he said. Chase glanced at him. "You sure?" "Pull over." Chase eased the car to the curb a little further down the street, and Miles was out before it had fully stopped, boots hitting packed snow, his heart going hard and fast in a way it hadn't during any of the actual interviews they'd filmed all week. He caught up to her halfway down the block, and she must have heard him coming, because she turned before he said anything at all. Up close, the twelve years showed even more plainly. Deep lines around her eyes that hadn't been there before, her hair gone fully grey, thinner than he remembered in a way that made him ache. But her eyes were the same. Dani's eyes, exactly, and it hit him like something physical. For a moment she just looked at him, and something moved across her face, disbelief, maybe, or the particular shock of seeing a ghost that turned out to be flesh and blood after all. "Miles." Her voice cracked on his name, just his name, nothing else needed. The grocery bags slid from her hands, forgotten entirely, hitting the snow with a soft thud neither of them registered. "Oh, look at you." And then she was crossing the last few feet between them and pulling him into her arms, hard, both hands fisting in the back of his jacket like she was checking he was real, and Miles felt something in his chest crack wide open, twelve years of bracing for this moment collapsing all at once. "I'm sorry," he choked out into her shoulder. "I should have come sooner. I've been in town for days, and I kept telling myself I'd come, and I just—" "Hush." She pulled back just enough to hold his face in both hands, the way his own mother did, the way she used to do when he was a boy trailing in and out of her kitchen alongside Dani. Her eyes were wet, tracking over every inch of his face like she was cataloguing everything the years had changed. "Look at you. All grown. God, Miles." "I'm so sorry." "Stop that right now." Her voice wavered but held firm underneath it, the same steel he remembered from her, softened but never fully gone. "I don't want to hear you apologizing to me. Not for coming, not for anything. You hear me?" Miles nodded, throat too tight to speak. Marlene held his face a moment longer, then let her hands drop, though she kept one resting against his arm, like she wasn't quite ready to lose contact entirely. Her eyes moved past him, toward the car, toward Chase standing a respectful distance back near the front bumper, hands in his pockets, giving them space. "That your Chase?" "Yeah." "Handsome." She said it warmly this time, a flicker of her old self showing through. "Your mother's told me about him. Says he treats you like gold." Something in Miles ached at that, complicated and unspoken, and he let it pass without answering. "I heard about the ice-cutting operation," he said instead. "What they found out there." The warmth in her face dimmed, replaced by something older, heavier. "Everybody's heard." "I don't know what to say to you. I've had twelve years to figure it out and I still don't." "Nobody does." Marlene reached down slowly to gather her dropped grocery bags, and Miles crouched to help her, both of them working in silence for a moment before she straightened, studying him properly now, the way she used to study report cards and skinned knees and every small thing about him that mattered to her once. "You blame yourself. I know you do. Your mother's told me, over the years, how it sits with you." Miles's throat closed up entirely. "I don't blame you," Marlene said, quiet, even, though her voice shook now, the effort of holding steady clearly costing her something. "I want you to hear that, whatever else you came over here expecting me to say. I never did. Not once, not for a single day of these twelve years." Tears slipped freely now, and she didn't bother wiping them away. "You loved her, Miles. I watched you love her, fierce and constant, the whole time you two were growing up right under my nose. You were sixteen. You had a fight with your best friend, the way sixteen-year-olds do, and you didn't know it was going to be the last conversation you ever had with her. I know what that's done to you. I've known for twelve years, and it's broken my heart every single day, watching from a distance, that you carried that weight all alone." "I could have gone to meet her." "And maybe nothing would have changed, or maybe something terrible would have happened to you too, and I'd have lost both my children instead of one." The words landed heavy, and Miles felt them land, felt the full weight of what she'd just called him. "I've turned that night over more times than you have, sweetheart. Trust me on that. I don't have room left in me to blame a sixteen-year-old boy for something none of us could see coming. I never did." Miles felt something break loose entirely in his chest, and he didn't fight it this time, let the tears come, standing in the middle of a snowy street with a woman who'd once made him grilled cheese after school a hundred times over, who used to sing along badly to the radio while she drove him and Dani to the movies, who had loved him like her own long before any of this happened to any of them. "They think it might be her," he managed. "The remains. They don't know yet. But they might be." "I know." Marlene's voice had gone very quiet, the tears still falling, steady now instead of sudden. "Sheriff came by last week to tell me himself, before it hit the papers. Said it could take weeks to know anything for certain." She was quiet a moment, staring somewhere past Miles's shoulder, somewhere far off. "Part of me has spent twelve years hoping. A very small part, these days, if I'm honest. Most of me made peace with the likely truth a long time ago. But hope's a stubborn thing. Doesn't care much what's likely." "I'm sorry," Miles said again, because he didn't have anything else, because every other sentence felt too small. "Stop apologizing to me." Her voice sharpened, just slightly, not unkind, just tired, worn thin by years of carrying this. "You didn't do this to her. Somebody did this to her, and it wasn't a sixteen-year-old boy who missed a conversation. Whoever it was, they're the one who owes an apology. Not you. Never you." They stood there a moment in the cold, and Marlene reached out again, cupping his face once more, thumb brushing gently under his eye where a tear had caught. "I'd like to come see you properly," Miles said. "If that's alright. Not for the show. Just to see you." "I'd like that more than you know." Something in her weathered face softened fully now, warmth breaking all the way through the years of carefully held grief. "You come by whenever you want, Miles Lindgren. My door's never been closed to you. It never will be." "I'll call first. Or just come by. Whatever's easier." "Either's fine." She squeezed his arm once, then bent to gather her bags again, waving off his attempt to help this time. "I should get this inside before the milk goes bad standing out here." "Right. Of course." She turned to go, then paused, looking back at him one more time, her eyes still shining. "It really is good to see you, Miles. So, so good." She smiled, small and real, the first real smile he'd seen on her since he'd arrived. "Dani would be so happy, seeing you standing here." Her gaze flicked past him, toward the car, toward Chase, and something almost mischievous flickered through the grief in her expression, some ghost of the woman she used to be. "And she'd never let you hear the end of it, either, that boy of yours. She'd have teased you mercilessly. Handsome as that, and yours. She'd have made it her whole personality for a month, the way she did with everything." Miles let out a sound that was half laugh, half something closer to breaking. "She really would have," he managed. "Oh, she would have." Marlene's eyes glistened, warm now instead of just heavy. "You know that girl never did anything halfway. She'd have had the whole wedding planned out by now, her maid of honor dress already picked, probably three years before either of you even got around to actually proposing." Miles didn't have an answer for that at all. He watched her walk the rest of the way to her door, watched her disappear inside, and stood there a long moment in the cold, chest heaving, before he made himself turn back toward the car, toward Chase, who was watching him with an expression that had nothing performed in it at all. "You okay?" Chase asked, quiet, once Miles was back inside, door shut against the cold. Miles didn't answer right away. He stared out the windshield at Marlene's house, lights coming on inside one window at a time. "She called me her own," he said finally, voice completely unsteady now. "Twelve years, and she still calls me hers." Chase reached over, slow, giving him every chance to pull away if he wanted to, and rested a hand on his knee. Miles didn't pull away. He turned into it instead, and for the first time since they'd arrived in Cutter's Bend, he let himself fall apart completely, right there in the front seat, Chase's hand steady on his knee the whole time.