A Place to Call Home (25 page)

“He walks hard for an accountant.”

“Maybe he’s carrying tax returns.” I set my beer down. “Look, your ex won’t find you here. He has no idea where you are.”

The footsteps grew louder, faster. “It’s him, Claire,” Terri said frantically. I dutifully went to my small kitchen, brought back the loaded pistol I kept in a drawer by the sink, and flipped the safety off. The footsteps stopped. Someone pounded on my front door. “I know you’re in there, you little cunt!”

Terri leaped up. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Fear produced an odd, icy calm. I planted myself between
her and the door, the pistol held in front of me. “Pick up the phone,” I ordered in a soft voice. “Call 911.”

The door shook with blows. “I told you I’d find you! Little whining liar! Open this goddamned door!”

“He’ll get in. He’ll
get me
.” Terri was frozen behind me.

“He won’t get in this apartment. I’ll shoot the bastard if I have to.”

The door vibrated with a flurry of violent thuds.

“Call the police,” I repeated. Terri fumbled for the phone on a lamp stand. “Nine one—” An earsplitting blast cut me off. My door spewed flecks of wood. A shard stung my arm. I stared at the ragged hole he’d shot in the middle of my door.

Terri snatched my Jeep keys from a dish on the coffee table, then ran for the back door to the fire escape. I yelled for her to stop. Her ex-husband rammed a shotgun barrel through the hole.

I pictured Terri blindly plowing my Jeep into the flock of kids who played basketball at night under the streetlights of the parking lot. I ran after her, hearing the final crash behind me as her ex burst through the front door.

I should have shot him. Running was our worst mistake.

Terri crouched on the Jeep’s passenger side, wild-eyed, peering over the seat at the stream of headlights behind us on the old Florida highway. Pines and palmetto grass flashed by on either side under street lamps casting white shadows on the shell-speckled concrete. The air was muggy and oppressive, the dank smell of swampy ditches pouring through my open window.

My pistol lay on the console between us. I threw my car phone in her lap. “Call the police,” I repeated uselessly, because she clung to the headrest of her seat with both hands and continued to search the traffic behind us. I wove through slower cars at a hundred miles an hour.

“There he is!” she screamed. I glanced in the rearview
mirror and saw an old sedan dodging wildly from one lane to the other. Other drivers flashed their headlights. Horns shrieked. The sedan was closing fast.

A pair of gas tankers lumbered ahead of us, blocking both lanes. I curled the Jeep onto the emergency lane and passed them. We whipped by a string of convenience stores on the right. The city’s skyscrapers gleamed against the night sky.

Suddenly the sedan loomed beside me. I glanced over and recoiled. Driving with one hand and lifting the other, Terri’s ex-husband pointed the shotgun at me. Everything telescoped into eerie slow motion: I slammed on the brakes. “Oh, Jesus,” Terri moaned. My half-raised window exploded. I threw up a hand instinctively as glass sprayed me.

Chaos.
Tumbling
. The world turned inside out. I was grabbing, yelling, “Got it, got it, got it,” until everything collapsed around me. Silence. Bright lights. My right leg in a vise. The Jeep’s steering wheel inches from my throat. I stared weirdly at the bent steel power pole that bit into the Jeep’s mangled front end like a flexible drinking straw; a cloud of radiator steam hissed hideously. We were tilted in a ditch. A neon sign flashed green from the parking lot of a gas station.

Terri slumped in her seat, twitching, her blood spraying the dash. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the young woman I’d promised to protect. Pain swept over me in dark, nauseating waves. I sank under, lost, my thoughts swirling in loose patterns like water cycloning down a drain.

Death and failed intentions came back to Roan, to me, to us. I had brought them like a curse again.

“Who do you want us to call?” they asked me at the hospital. I was in a panicky stupor punctuated by blurred faces that appeared by my bed—doctors, nurses, cops, a fellow
Herald-Courier
reporter who slipped into the emergency
ward and began making notes. “Who do you want us to call?” they demanded. A female surgical resident methodically assured me that I wasn’t going to lose my right leg. I was numb—didn’t know, lying there drugged on some morphine derivative, if I even had a body attached to my thoughts. I was one large
mind
, churning out half-formed fears, failures, confusion, horror.

“The leg,” I echoed. “What about Terri?”

“Please try to understand. Ms. Caulfield was shot. She didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

I was told later that her ex-husband stood beside the Jeep, his sawed-off shotgun wavering at me, before he changed his mind and put the tip of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Didn’t make it
. Understatement. Terri was dead in the Jeep a second after the shotgun blast hit her. All my fault. What a dangerous fool I was. Tilting at other people’s windmills. Just like before.

“Who do you want us to call?” the surgical resident asked patiently.

Who was I? Who had I always been?

“Maloney,” I said.

“Family,” the surgeon noted. “Who exactly?”

I couldn’t reconnect to myself, but I had never been disconnected from my people. Not really.
Mama and Daddy. Marybeth and Holt Maloney in Dunderry, Georgia
. I mouthed the phone number. “Tell them I’m okay. Don’t scare them.”

I was awake that night when Mama and Daddy arrived. My father gathered me in his arms and my mother sobbed bitterly with her cheek pressed to mine. I wanted my family, desperately and without judgment, for the first time in twenty years.

Claire
,

Writing this on a plane headed east tonight. I thought I’d lose my mind if I didn’t try to “talk” to you even though of course we can’t really talk. Two hours ago I heard what happened
to
you from an investigator I hired in Florida. Hired him last year when you started the series on Terri Caulfield. Dangerous situation, I thought. My sixth sense. Men like her ex-husband remind me of my old man. Couldn’t stand to just read about it. Worried me, goddammit. Goddammit. God—

I let you down. Should have been there for you. Should have done something before now. All these years, trying to stay away, for good reasons—what difference does any of that make right now? Nothing matters but seeing you again. Making certain you’re going to be okay. Then it’ll be up to you. I can’t throw the truth at you until you’re stronger, though. Too many people could get hurt
.

Please be all right when I get there. Please be all right. Please
.

A
s I recovered after surgery—awake and fully alert for the first time in two days—irrational ideas moved through my mind.

“… torn ligaments, torn muscles,” the surgeon was explaining to Grandma Dottie, who sat beside my bed. “A minor fracture of the femur … reconnected the soft tissues … some nerve damage … recovery in about six months, though her leg won’t be the same for a long time after that. A year at least.”

“Was anyone here?” I asked after he left. Grandma Dottie was still sturdy, but white-haired and arthritic. A copy of the Wall Street Journal lay in her lap. She folded it carefully as she watched me. “Was I alone at night?”

“We were all here,” she answered gently.

“All the time? Every minute?”

“No, not every minute, honey. But we’ve been watching over you like hawks. Half the family has come down to Florida to take turns.”

“No one saw anyone … strange?”

She peered at me through her bifocals, bewildered, obviously, and a little alarmed. I was alarmed, too, secretly. “You think somebody strange was here?” Grandma ventured.

“I … don’t know.”

Mama and Daddy came in, carrying more flowers and fruit baskets to add to the dozens of arrangements around the room.

“She thinks some stranger visited her room last night,” I heard her whisper to Mama and Daddy. “I suspect she was just dreaming while the anesthesia wore off.” Mama took one look at me, saw that I was finally alert enough to talk, and began crying. So did I, but not for the same reason.

Because I thought I’d had a long conversation with Roan.

When I was younger I’d cultivated a fantasy that one day I’d look up and Roan would be standing there. He’d walk up to me with a glow of more than recognition in his eyes. He’d study me, up and down, amazed, and he’d say, “You’re beautiful. I always knew you’d be beautiful.”

Or he wouldn’t say anything at all, but I’d know, from the look on his face, that nothing about me disgusted or disappointed him, that he’d forgotten that battered little girl on the floor of Big Roan’s trailer with her overalls pulled down.

But what happened that night at the hospital had to be a drug-induced dream. I was floating in and out, I didn’t remember parts of it later, and parts I remembered word for word, like an overwhelming physical bath of details.

The light in one corner was never turned off. Nurses came and went; I’d been checked more often than a holiday turkey. I was caught up in nightmares—the car, the accident, Terri’s head sagging bloodily against the crumpled dash, the blank stare in her eyes—and older nightmares, too—Big Roan lurching over me, his head flowering red when Roan shot him. The panicky horror and violence, the sadness and fear were all objective in my mind—it was as if I were idly watching closed-captioned videos.
And here I felt sick and there I felt terrified
.

I heard footsteps on the room’s hard, antiseptic floor—
soft clicks, then the settling of a hand on rustling sheets, then its careful pressure on my shoulder. Blinking, I opened my eyes. I was down in a warm tunnel—looking sideways from my dark place into the light, the way the big barn used to feel when Roan and I sat inside the hay loft on a bright day.

A hand—fingertips—brushed my hair from my forehead then feathered over my cheek. I looked across the pillow without moving my head. I saw silvery eyes glittering with tears inside a weathered face that had achingly familiar features—yet different—older, harder, settled forms on granite bones, all hooded by ruffled dark hair. A handsomely rugged man in a pale leather jacket and an open-collared shirt. The lingering scent of tobacco was burned into his fingertips.

My heart contracted. That mental picture was captioned with relief and adoration. “Claire,” he said in a low, deep voice.

Time was confused. It had never passed us by. I was pleased. “They’re not going to leave you at that boys’ home,” I told him. “They know they were wrong. Don’t worry. Oh, Roanie, I love you so much.”

“I thought,” he said as he bent close to my face and stroked my hair, “that you’d forget. That you’d want to forget.” His voice was hoarse.

My concentration faded, then returned. The mental channels changed. Twenty years had gone by. “Roan,” I murmured thickly. “I’m the reason Terri died. Like Big Roan. I’m sorry.”

“My God,” he whispered. He moved his head closer to mine. Those gray eyes shimmered in my dream, fierce and anguished. “I know all about you,” he said. “What you write, what you’ve done. It wasn’t your fault. Not then. Not now.”

And then he sat down in a chair he pulled close to the bed and he talked to me—for minutes, hours, or days, or
years—I couldn’t be certain. I watched him from my dream-soaked dimension, hearing his voice, not the words but their essence was soothing. Finally I said, “You don’t need help with your grammar anymore,” and he bent his head in his hands and said nothing for a while. I talked to him while he sat there—about what, I couldn’t be sure.

I felt fine and certain and serene because I hadn’t completely failed him; he’d drawn on our memories to come back to me. I’d understand it all later, somehow, and he’d understand that no one had meant for him to hate the family, to disappear out of shame and betrayal. “I still love you,” I repeated.

He got up, carefully ran his hands over the cast that covered my right leg from hip to ankle, then kissed me on the mouth. His breath was warm, as if he were real. “I still love you, too,” he said. “And when you see me again I’ll prove it.”

I insisted on attending Terri’s funeral. Mama and Daddy gathered the family from Jacksonville hotels. We arrived at the cemetery in a caravan of rental cars, under an overcast Florida sky that pushed heavy, ocean-scented air down on us, and my father rolled me in my wheelchair across the grassy grounds with a wedge of my relatives around me.

“Oh, my God,” I said groggily. The crowd at the graveside service numbered at least a thousand people. Picket signs rose around the edge of the throng like strange flowers.

The Jacksonville police were directing traffic. A news helicopter hovered overhead. Camera crews from several Florida television stations prowled the scene; a reporter
spotted me and headed my way at a trot. A couple of cops recognized me and opened a path.