Page 10 of Little Bird
Now, back in said truck and heading for the Adirondacks, I’m wondering if I made the right call. Gunner is an iceberg, craggy and radiating sub-zero temperatures, and I’m starting to feel like this might have been a colossal mistake.
Maybe Gunner doesn’t want me any more than my mother does.
A sudden phone call interrupts my thoughts, and when Gunner hits the button to let the truck’s audio answer the call, a woman’s voice rings through the cab.
“Gunner! Where the fuck are you?”
She sounds nearly hysterical and definitely mad, and I find myself shrinking back into my seat, automatically trying to protect myself.
“Gabby,” Gunner answers, sounding both tired and annoyed. “It’s 5 in the morning. Where the fuck do you think I am?”
“Not in your bed, that’s where,” she snaps. “Where are you, and where’s your truck?”
Gunner’s eyes slide toward me and I remember for a moment how we used to share inside jokes about my mother, both of us laughing while the steam poured out of her ears. I think I see a glint of amusement in Gunner’s eye and nearly cast him a grin, but then catch the frown on his face and stop myself.
Right. No inside joke, then. Whoever this Gabby is, we evidently don’t make fun of her.
Noted.
“I had a family emergency,” he says gruffly. “Had to come down off the mountain.”
“And you didn’t think you needed to let me know?” she asks sharply. “You just left your house and drove to God knows where without saying anything to me?”
This time when Gunner looks at me, I’m positive I can see something in his eyes. Not humor, necessarily, but something. A dislike of the situation and the need to find... what? Why does he keep looking at me like he expects me to save him from this woman I’ve never met?
“You aren’t my wife, Gabby, much as you like to play one. And I left at midnight. I assumed you’d be asleep. I’ll be home in a couple hours. We’ll talk then.” He jabs the button to hang up and then goes back to his dead quiet driving, re-erecting his walls brick by very quick brick.
Christ, this man is thorny. What the hell happened to him since I last saw him? What hurt him so much that he can’t even look at me?
Aside from my mother, I mean.
Does he blame me for what my mother did? Hate me as much as he must hate her? The last time I saw him, my mother had decided she was done living in Hawke’s Wood, with a lumberjack-slash-professor-slash-furniture-maker who insisted on having family dinners every night. She hadn’t liked living on the mountain, and whatever sparks she must have felt for Gunner at the start had turned into cold, dead ashes. She forced me to pack all my things in the middle of the night, telling me we were going back to the city where things made sense, and had told Gunner and his son about it as we walked out the door.
I was sixteen. Old enough to know that I loved the Hawke men like they were family. Old enough to want to stay with them.
Too young to have a choice in the matter, though. Incapable of doing anything more than letting my mother move me from place to place without asking my opinion.
Again.
Still.
“Does Gabe know I’m coming home?” I ask suddenly, remembering that Gunner isn’t the only one I had to leave behind.
Gunner pauses for a long, heavy moment, and I bite my lip. Does he want me to just keep quiet? Or forget that Gabe exists? I can’t do either, if I’m being honest. I’ve never been the sort to keep my mouth shut when I have something to say. And Gabe was my best friend when I lived in Hawke’s Wood.
My only friend.
A stream of images rush through my brain, and I nearly smile at the pictures I see. Gabe and me meeting on that first day, when I was only twelve and he was thirteen. The awkward knowledge that our parents were married and we didn’t even know each other and tentative attempts at friendship in those first weeks. Pancake breakfasts that we cooked ourselves when Gunner and Helen were too busy for us and nights spent on the roof of the porch, staring up at the stars. Stuttered questions as we tried to figure each other out. He was tall and gangly then, still half boy and half man and not yet sure of who he was. He’d had sandy blond hair that hung in his eyes and blue eyes that sparkled when he laughed.
He hadn’t liked having a new woman around, though, at least not at first. His own mother had died three years earlier and he’d been furious with his father for bringing my mother into the house. He’d told Gunner repeatedly that Helen wasn’t his mother and that he’d never accept her.
But me?
He’d loved me. We’d danced around each other awkwardly for months, until one day when he found the neighborhood boys backing me into a thick copse of trees, intent on making trouble. Gabe had come in swinging, his axe in his hands and his face furious, and made short work of them. He’d driven them off the property, screaming at them that I was his sister and they’d better watch themselves around me from then on.
After that, we were inseparable. He never let me go anywhere alone, and if I needed to learn something, he taught me. Cutting down a tree. Taking care of a hurt horse. Finding the right path through a snowy meadow.
Kissing a boy.
