A Place to Call Home (28 page)

“You could make a down payment on it with the money your grandpa willed you. Your mama and I’d invest. So would your brothers. And not just because we want you to stay around here. Because we’d be proud to do it.”

I squeezed his hand. “I’ll think about it. You know what? I love you. You and Mama. Everybody.”

I studied the relief on his face, and my misery sank down deeper inside me. He squinted up at Dunshinnog. “When you get married someday, you and your husband can build a fine house up there.”

I doubted I’d ever get married. I was beginning to doubt I’d ever leave home again.

I had a promotion and a raise waiting for me at the Herald-Courier. In late May I told my editor I wasn’t coming back.

So
you quit your job. I have sources for this kind of information, so I heard. I’m trying to analyze you, Claire. Are you running scared? That’s not like you. I’ll be back there soon—everything’s almost taken care of—and I hope you’ll explain it to me
.

Watch the mountain at night. God, I’m telling you as if you’re reading this. I’ll have a hard time talking to you face-to-face at first
.

It’s all I can think about. Seeing you again
.

I
heard loud voices in the living room. I struggled into my robe, hobbled in there on a pair of crutches, and found Mama and Daddy embroiled in a shocked conference with Hop and Evan.

“Wilma’s daughter put Ten Jumps up for sale,” Evan repeated for my sake. “And it looks like she’s got a buyer. We don’t know who, but we heard she’s sold the property.”

Wilma was the Minnesota relative who had inherited Ten Jumps. Her daughter had inherited it from her.

“She swore she’d do it someday,” Mama said ruefully. “We should have believed her.”

“Somebody has to take me out there.” My voice sounded thin and distant. Stares. I wobbled closer, absorbing them. Bold talk for an invalid recluse. “Why?” Daddy asked with anxious gentleness.

“I just have to go out there. Hop? Evan?”

“If you want to go,” Evan answered slowly, eyeing me and stroking his beard, “I’ll get my Land Rover. Rained last night. We may end up pulling ourselves out of a gully with the winch.”

“Good. We’ll need a pry bar and a flashlight, too.” And with that mysterious show of bravado, I teetered
back into my bedroom, hoisted myself into my hospital bed, and stared, dry-eyed, at the ceiling.

We made it to the lake, Evan and I and Evan’s unshakable wife, Luanne. The Land Rover’s running boards dripped mud by the time we reached the lake cove, where the cabin sat, surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briars that grew in ten-foot-tall mounds the closer they were to the lake’s edge.

“Amazin’,” Luanne said. “How come that cabin hasn’t fallen down after all these years?”

Evan nodded his appreciation. “Logs a foot thick and a double-tinned roof lined with teak planks. And the stonework’s strong enough to hold up Buckingham-damn-Palace. Look at that chimney. Look at those columns under the porch.”

“Good lord. This isn’t a cabin. It’s a two-room boat that beached on high ground. It’s a little-bitty Noah’s Ark,” Luanne said.

“It’s a shack with a pedigree,” I countered.

We got out. I sat in the Land Rover’s open door while Evan fetched my crutches. “It’s pretty here,” Luanne noted. “Wild and quiet. I like the lake.”

Evan helped me perch on my crutches. “All right, sis, you’re here. What’s this all about?”

“I’ll show you when we get inside. Maybe it’s full of termite holes. Maybe it’s fallen to pieces. Just let me look first.”

I struggled through the briars as Evan and Luanne held them aside.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” Luanne said, surveying the cabin’s musty, rain-weathered interior. She knocked on a wall, then stamped her sandal heel on the thick teak floor. “Solid.”

“Lots of bugs,” Evan added, slapping at a spiderweb. He flashed the light across deserted wasp nests and shards
of acorn shells left by squirrels. The summer wind moaned in the deep maw of the chimney.

“Back there.” I nodded toward a doorway. “The back room.”

With Evan lighting the way, I thumped into the second room on my crutches. “There.” The beam of light fell on a narrow opening with shreds of some dank cloth still hanging from the top. “You came to see a closet?” Evan grunted. He ripped the cloth down. Dust flew. He shone the light into a tiny space, peered inside briefly, then looked at me with morose expectation. “Yep. It’s still a closet, sis.”

I angled past him into the space, leaning heavily against the cool log wall behind me. I twisted. “Flashlight.” Evan handed it to me and, holding my breath, I raised the light to a section of plank just above my head. “This is what I want,” I said.

Evan shouldered in beside me, craned his neck, and looked. “My God, sis,” he said gruffly.

Carved on a board, hidden in the dark recess of a place no one had bothered with for many years, the simple inscription said:
Roan and Claire
.

“Roan carved it,” I explained. “I found it after he left.”

I took the board home and put it in my dresser drawer.

No one said a word.

“You’re going to live here from now on, aren’t you?” Amanda asked during a Sunday gathering as we hid out on twin wicker lounges in the garden room. “Aren’t you?” she repeated. “Going to stay here forever?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll be here quite a while.”

Amanda twiddled with a soft pink flower on the potted impatiens between our chairs. “But I can count on you being around to do stuff with me, huh? ’Cause Grandma’s always busy with her pottery and Papa’s gone all the time. And Aunt Luanne and Aunt Ginger and Aunt Simone, they’ve got jobs and their own kids and stuff. But you don’t
have a job anymore, and you don’t have any kids, so … so we can do stuff together, can’t we?”

“You betcha. I’ll always do
stuff
with you, and when I’m an old lady, I’ll come live with you and kids can pretend I’m an extra grandmother.” I swept cupcake crumbs off my jeans. My fingers splayed over the deep gouge of a scar hidden under the denim. “And when I die, you can have my money.”

“
Okay
!” She grinned. “I don’t even care if you have any money. Great-Aunt Arnetta says you won’t be worth a penny unless pigs learn to fly. What’s that mean?”

I just shrugged. “It means I need to practice my
oink.
”

“Papa says we gotta be patient with you. I heard him talkin’ to Grandpa about it yesterday. Papa is kinda mad ’cause you hurt Nana’s feelings.”

My mother is “Nana” to all my nieces and nephews.

“I didn’t mean to,” I answered. “Your Nana has a chest full of baby clothes for babies I don’t have. I told her she should get rid of them.”

“Why?”

“Ohhh, let’s talk about something else.”

Amanda frowned as she licked the filling from a piece of apple pie. We’re eaters, both of us, usually gnawing off more than we can chew. “I’m not supposed to eavesdrop on Papa,” she whispered to me, “but I couldn’t help it.”

“So what else did he and your grandpa say about me?”

“Grandpa said we gotta make allowances for you. ’Cause a sad thing happened to you when you were little and you never got over it. And you’re a whole lot worse now, he said. I gotta know. How sad was it? What happened?”

An emotional ambush. I tightened all over and felt two decades burning in my chest like hot coals. “It was only sad because of the way it ended.” I gauged my words carefully. “It was wonderful before that.”

I told her about Roan. From the St. Patrick’s Day carnival to the day he was sent away. About the good Christmas
we spent together and the necklace he gave me. About Big Roan. About Sullivan’s Hollow, which is grown over with pine trees and doesn’t exist anymore, the way Roan doesn’t exist. I left out the harsh details. I didn’t tell her Roan disappeared because my parents, her kindly, beloved Grandpa and Nana, had shipped him off to a church home. She wasn’t old enough to understand how good-hearted people can commit terrible mistakes in the heat of the moment.

“Roan moved away,” I told her. “And that was the last time we saw each other. When your grandpa says I never got over it, well, it’s like what you tell me about your mother sometimes. How you dream that she’s on the other side of a canyon and you can’t
quite
jump far enough to reach her? That’s what happens when somebody you love goes away. There’s always a little part of you that’s whispering ‘Jump’ even though you know it’s too far.”

Amanda stared at me with her mouth open and her eyes dewy with romantic grief, the way little girls look when they’re watching
Camelot
for the first time and have just realized that Guinevere isn’t going to get to keep Lancelot.

“Oh, Aunt
Claire
,” she whispered. “Roan Sullivan
will
jump back over for you. I just
know
he will.”

That’s what I get for sharing. A kick right in the solar plexus. Firefly lights in front of my eyes. And then, with a deep breath, sanity returned. “No, sweetie,” I said calmly. “Sometimes people change. They grow up and move farther away from each other, until they forget how to jump.” I didn’t mention the obvious. I couldn’t jump if I wanted to. “I’m not a jumper,” I concluded. “I’m a sitter.”

Her blue eyes flickered. She looked at me as I would have looked at me when I was young and obstinate and sentimental. “Sometimes I think you don’t try very hard,” she accused softly. “Don’t get old and strange on me, Aunt Claire.”

My throat closed up and I couldn’t say another word.
Wait until I started talking to tomato plants and knitting sweaters for cats.

I jerked awake that night, not just crying but
yelling
, and beating the bedcovers with my fists. I hobbled to the closet and dug through a small, lacquered wooden box I’ve had for years. I store mementos in it, the kind I can’t bear to look at but can’t bear to throw away. I pulled my old, faded shamrock pendant and its chain from a tiny cloth bag. I wore the pendant for so many years the green rubbed off and the chain lost its gold plate and turned the color of a tarnished nickel.

I couldn’t count the hours I’ve spent in public places gazing intently at men walking by, the birthdays and holidays when I sorted hurriedly through my mail, thinking, This year there’ll be a card from him. All the times the phone rang, the doorbell rang, and I thought, for just an instant, It might be Roan.
It might be
.

I had nearly forgotten the girl who had been tough enough to stand up for a boy no one else wanted.

I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the dark by my bedroom window. Dunshinnog was encased in thick clouds that scudded across a full moon and the mountain disappeared into inky black night as devastating as my own thoughts.

I saw a light. Small and flickering at the summit of the mountain. I blinked and it was gone. I wasn’t imagining this. There it was again.

Somebody was up there on my mountain, dammit. By the time I woke the household and marshaled their attention, the trespasser might have vanished. There’d be a new round of worried whispers about my emotional stability.

I threw a windbreaker over my nightshirt, then crawled out the bedroom window. It was more painful than any physical therapy session, and by the time I landed in a heap behind a row of camellia shrubs, clutching my crutches, I was panting for air.

I made my way around the house, gazing up at Dunshinnog
as I did. The light remained. I levered myself into a battered old farm truck parked beyond the barns, cranked the engine, and drove awkwardly, using my left foot on the pedals.

When I got to the meadowy gate at the top of Dunshinnog along an old, rutted logging road that winds up the mountain’s southern flank, the truck’s headlights glanced off an unfamiliar car with a rental tag. Flames leaped from a small pyramid of brushwood and tree limbs on the stone ledge overlooking the valley.

Astonished, I struggled toward the fire, glancing around wildly. I saw no one around it, no hint of who had dared wander onto my property during the night. The moon and stars had disappeared completely behind thick clouds laced with heat lightning. I smelled rain in the air.