A Beautiful Fall (4 page)

They looked at each other for a moment without speaking. She knew she needed him and that it would be better if he stayed. She also knew the sacrifice he would be making.

“Well, thank you,” Emma finally said.

Noel Connor’s friendly gesture wasn’t merely a small-town custom, although it was in a small town that Noel had learned to practice the art. Noel’s kindness sprang up from the marrow of his bones. Character had been fused into his DNA.

“I’m just going to the waiting room to collect my thoughts for a while,” Emma said. Noel nodded, the brim of his hat tipping as he watched Emma walk off.

The rest of the day was a slow haze. Emma sat for hours in the wooden chair next to her father’s bed. She held hands with the sleeping man, sharing a one-sided conversation with the man who had raised her. Finally, Emma herself had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.

o o o

In the fourth-floor waiting room, Noel Connor sat, still reading his book, settled into the same chair where Emma had last seen him.

“You’ve been here all this time?” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.

“It’s a good book.”

“I owe you big-time, Noel, and don’t try to talk me out of it.”

Noel closed his book.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s awake, and seems to be doing a lot better. Says I’m the one who needs to be getting some rest.”

“You ready to go to your dad’s house?”

“Yes, I’d really like to get settled in.”

They left the hospital the way that they came, past Beverly’s welcoming center, now dark and vacant for the night. Outside, the orange sun was descending behind the tree line with a faint smoky pink sash trailing behind in the clouds.

“My mom left your dad’s house keys with me,” said Noel. They seemed to have taken care of everything. Conversation was easy with him. The day’s events bonded them into kindred spirits. “She didn’t know if you’d have any, so I’ve got some for you.”


“Yes, I’ll be needing those,” she said, feeling like someone who’d needed assistance at every turn.

“She’s the one that found him, you know.”

Emma felt like a sleuth picking up details here and there about what had happened that morning. “How frightening for her. I’m just glad she was there checking up on him.”

Noel’s Dodge hummed down Junction Road as the last ounce of daylight dripped into night. Emma gazed out the window, exhausted and hungry.

Twenty-four hours earlier, she’d been preparing for trial. She left the office late for a steak dinner with Colin at Abe & Louie’s before going to bed on the third floor of her townhouse where the muted sound of taxis lulled her to sleep.

Somewhere in her weary mind, a thought rattled again in its little tin cup. Who would be the first to ask her,
“Why didn’t you come back?”

Noel switched on his headlights to drive the rest of the dark country two-lane. Soon, he pulled onto the gravel horseshoe drive and shifted the stick on the steering post to Park.

“Here are the house keys. Do you want me to help you get some lights on?”

“The porch light’s on. I think I’ll be okay,” Emma said.

She swung open the truck door, and Noel got out to unload her luggage. The evening moon gave the farmyard a silvery tint. It reminded Emma of all the nights in high school when she, Christina, and Noel’s mom, Samantha, had packed up or unloaded their cars in this drive. Always off on some new adventure, or coming back late from a sunny day at the lake.

“Noel,” Emma said, turning around from her route to the front door.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

He gave her one more nod of the plain straw hat, and Emma dragged her bags up the grassy walkway illuminated by the truck’s high beams. At the top of the stairs, she pushed open the heavy oak door and waved Noel on.

Emma walked in and clicked on the entryway lights, peering up the red-carpeted staircase of the hundred-year-old house. It looked weirdly the same as it had when she was in high school. The same family pictures on the walls, younger faces in outdated clothing, looked out through glass and frame. She climbed the long staircase to her old bedroom, toting both suitcases, keeping her mind off the thing she feared most about being alone in the house.

Emma switched on the golden bedside lamp in her old bedroom and sat on the checkered quilt. She barely possessed the strength but managed to shower and change into her pajamas before crawling into a familiar canopy bed. She hadn’t eaten much that day, just some pretzels and orange juice on the plane, but Emma felt too exhausted to care.

Emma snuffed out the bedside lamp and lay in the still beam of moonlight stenciled across her comforter. In the murky twilight before sleep, she chased away the absurd feeling that she wasn’t alone in the house and thought of the question one last time: Who would be the first to ask,
“Why didn’t you come back?”

~ Three ~

I’m just a small town girl
And that’s all I’ll ever be.

—K
ELLIE
P
ICKER

“Small Town Girl”

Twelve years had passed since Samantha Connor had seen her cousin. More than anything, she wanted to be there for Emma like she’d been there for Will on the morning of his heart attack. She considered her discovery of Will in his kitchen that morning more than just an accident of good fortune.

Emma’s and Samantha’s mothers had been the closest of sisters, like families often are in small-town America. Emma had been too young to remember anything about her mother’s funeral. Samantha, who was five years older, remembered many things, and had many unhappy pictures from that desolate afternoon when her mother broke down crying. She remembered the tears shed behind closed doors, the strangers who came by the house after the service and spoke in low voices. She even remembered the black leggings her mother made her wear to the funeral.

Samantha had always thought her strong maternal instinct had grown out of that day, a flower from dirt, and given her both cause and capacity to watch over Emma. Samantha couldn’t imagine a world without her own mother, and seeing Emma grow up orphaned from the love of a mother troubled her. Samantha had filled in missing gaps whenever she could.

She watched over Will, too, when it became clear with the passing years that Emma wouldn’t be returning from Boston. That’s how she’d happened to find him that morning, sitting at his kitchen table in a white T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms unable to move or speak. Beads of sweat had dotted his forehead on a chilly morning in September. That’s what scared her the most. Seeing his right hand clench the front of his T-shirt, his mouth half open but barely able to speak, and the broken coffee mug scattered on the kitchen floor.

Samantha responded quickly, calling 911 from the wall phone mounted in the kitchen. She stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. Two quick-thinking EMTs immediately transported Will to Wellman Medical rather than treat him on his kitchen floor, a decision that may have saved his life.

Samantha called Emma using the phone number she found under E in Will’s address book on his work shelf next to the paper-towel rack and her aunt’s yellowing Betty Crocker cookbooks that Will refused to throw away. She sent Noel to pick Emma up from the airport because she knew it was the most efficient thing to do. Samantha was just that way and always had been. She cared for everybody, but she cared for Emma most of all.

Samantha would have liked to have picked up Emma or followed the ambulance to the hospital or stayed at the hospital with Will. And she would have, if not for the doctor’s warning of keeping away from all excitement until after the baby was born.

At nineteen, Samantha married her high school sweetheart, Jim Connor, and a year later, gave birth to their first child, Noel. As a freshman, Emma often joined the Connor family dinners or helped with babysitting or spent the night when her dad had to travel.

Christina Herry had moved to Juneberry from Phoenix, Arizona, in the sixth grade. She and Emma were locker neighbors and quickly became the best of friends, bonding over their wholehearted agreement that Mrs. Holstead, the science teacher, was psychotic. It was the start of a beautiful friendship that deepened through junior high and high school, and included Samantha as often as not.

After graduation, Christina went on to pursue her four-year undergrad degree at Clemson, a short fifty-mile hop from Juneberry. Emma applied to Boston University, and four busy years later, was accepted to Harvard Law School. Trips to Juneberry became fewer and fewer as her schedule grew more demanding. Inevitably her big-city success pulled Emma away from her small-town past. Like red taillights driving away at night, Emma’s presence ebbed in their lives, becoming smaller and smaller as time went by. Even phone calls between the three best friends faded as the years passed, until only Samantha and Christina were left to wonder what had happened. Why had Emma let their friendship slip away?

“Do you think she’s changed?” Jim asked, unbuttoning his pale blue shirt.

“Noel said when he picked her up she looked very professional, but that she was friendly. He said they talked a lot.”

Jim draped his shirt on a hanger and hung it in the closet. He continued talking to Samantha in his T-shirt and boxers.

“What time are you planning on seeing her tomorrow?”

“Why? Do you think you could join us?” Samantha asked, half hoping Jim would say yes, yet realizing somehow it would probably be better if he didn’t.

“I think you need to see Emma by yourself,” he said.

Jim pulled on a pair of navy blue sweatpants and a silver Clemson sweatshirt. Samantha watched her husband and smiled an easy, contented smile.

“How is it I never grow tired of your looking after me?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “Guess you’ll have to answer that for yourself. I just know you’re always the one looking after everyone else. Gotta have somebody watching your back.”

Samantha caught her reflection in the bedroom mirror. After two kids and another one on the way, Samantha felt far removed from her high school figure. She drew closer to Jim and laid her arms over his shoulders.

“Do you ever wish you would have married someone else?”

Jim slid his arms around Samantha’s waist and pulled her closer, gently closer. As close as a nine-month pregnancy would allow.

“Shhhh. We have to keep all this a secret,” Jim flirted with her in a whisper.

“Keep what a secret?”

“That marrying the love of your life at eighteen, having two-and-a-half kids, and living in an old house in a small town is the key to happiness.”

Samantha sighed her contentment. Jim lightly rubbed Samantha’s back.

“Do you really feel that way?” she asked.

“You always ask me that like you don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you,” she said. “Maybe I just like hearing you say it over and over again.”

Samantha closed her eyes and kissed him.

“Mmm, you taste good.”

“See, that’s just what I mean,” Jim said. “You know you’ve got something special when just the taste of toothpaste is a turn-on.”

Samantha laughed, then Jim kissed her again.

“I’m going downstairs to watch TV with Beth and get a snack, but I’ll be up in a little while to massage your back. How are you feeling?”

“A little sore,” Samantha said, putting her hand on her lower back. “I might take a bath or just relax awhile. It’s been a long day.”

“Okay. I’ll come up in a little bit. Want me to bring you something to eat?”

“Not now, thanks.”

Jim jogged down the stairs, and Samantha moved over on to the bed to relax. She didn’t mind being pregnant, mostly she enjoyed it. But by the beginning of the ninth month, she was easily tired.

Around eight thirty, the phone rang.

“Hi, it’s me. I just had to call and ask if you’re feeling as weirdly thrilled as I am that Emma’s back in Juneberry.”

“I haven’t thought about how I’m feeling, Christina,” Samantha confessed. “I feel like Emma’s coming back is an answer to prayer. One minute she was in Juneberry, and the next she was gone.”

Samantha propped an extra pillow against the headboard and lifted her feet up on the bed.

“Maybe this is our chance to find out why,” Christina said, always optimistic.

“We can only hope,” Samantha laughed. “I keep thinking back to all the things we did and how close we all were. I just can’t believe how quickly time flies and how everything changed. It never made any sense.”

“I know, and I’m sorry she’s coming back under these circumstances, but I’m glad she’s back just the same. How’s her dad doing?”

“I guess he’s doing lots better. I’ve been worried about him though too. I think it’s their estranged relationship that’s taken the toll on him.”

“They talk sometimes, right?”

“Yes. He’s been up there to visit her a couple of times, and they talk on the phone around the holidays, but they’ve been living with a bubble in between them ever since high school. I think she just decided one day to cut herself off from her past. Speaking of high school, do you think Michael knows she’s in town?”

“I doubt it. Bo hasn’t mentioned anything to me.”

“Hmm, I don’t know why,” Samantha said, “but he’s been on my mind today too. You probably know him better than I do these days, but I’ve wondered what he’ll think of her coming back. He’s such a good guy. I’ve always thought the world of him, wondered why he never married. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but … do you think it might have something to do with Emma?”

“You’ve really put a lot of thought into this!” Christina laughed.

Samantha got up from the bed, laughing too, and waddled down the hall.

“Well, I knew Michael a lot better when he and I were in school together. I know he had feelings for her back when she was a senior and he was just out of high school. Then they dated that summer before she went back for law school, so it’s not all my imagination.”

“I don’t know if Michael’s marital status has anything to do with Emma,” Christina said. “I think, like a lot of us, he’s just busy.”