A Place to Call Home (29 page)

“Who are you?” I yelled. “Where are you? This is private property! Private!”

I tottered barefooted among the foxgloves, offspring of those Grandpa and I had planted twenty years before. Watching, listening, swaying. I suddenly hated the foxgloves for surviving, for making promises they hadn’t kept, for letting some stranger wander up here. I began smashing them with one crutch like some furious, wooden-pronged animal. “Come out of the woods!” I screamed toward the forest on either side.

Rain began to fall—cold, dense, a torrent that poured down on me. The fire sizzled and coughed billows of white smoke. I slipped on the ledge and fell down.

The next thing I knew, a pair of thick, strong arms were lifting me into the air.

I didn’t know who had me or
what
had me. It was dark, and cold rainwater flooded my eyes, and I was dizzy from the fall, floating, shivering, against a foreign wall of clothed flesh and bone. It was too much like a nightmare. I began to struggle.

“
Claire,
” a deep voice said raggedly.

That was all it took. I swung my drenched head toward
it, lightning snapped above the mountain, and I saw his fece carved out against the night, his eyes boring straight down into mine, holding me.

“
Roan,
” I whispered in the middle of booming thunder that shook the air out of my lungs.

Roan.

I
lived through that night as if I were drowning, and many of the details may never come back to me except in foggy symbolism, trying to see through a glass darkly.

The rain whipped us. Lightning split the torrent and thunder reached across the valley in deep bellows of celebration. The fire—a signal? some kind of primal claim for attention?—sank inside billows of smoke that floated around us as Roan carried me to the rental car. I didn’t ask where we were going; I didn’t care at the moment.

He drove and I braced myself against the passenger door, studying his profile as best I could during the lightning flashes. An airline ticket folder was crumpled on the floorboard; a sleek leather portfolio had been jammed into the crevice between the driver’s seat and the center armrest console. The cold half of a long cigar lay in the open ashtray.

My voice was frozen inside my throat. Rainwater slithered down my face and plastered the bottom of my nightshirt to my legs beneath my windbreaker. My bare feet were muddy; I didn’t know where my crutches were.

He’s alive. He’s come home. He didn’t forget me
.

Not long afterward I realized the car was struggling over rough, unpaved terrain, bucking and fighting his guidance. Limbs whipped the roof and muddy water sprayed up
on the windshield, washed aside in wide streaks by the slap of the wipers.

“Are you kidnapping me?” I asked.

He glanced my way. I couldn’t read his eyes, but I saw the flash of his smile. “Hell, yes.”

“
Roan.
” It was both plea and thanks.

He jerked the car to a stop suddenly, then vaulted out into the rain and came to my side. In short order he lifted me in his arms again, then carried me through a thicket of some kind, on uneven ground. A lightning flash uncurtained the darkness and I glimpsed the old cabin. Ten Jumps. He’d brought me to Ten Jumps. I wound one hand in his shirt. His skin and hair smelled like summer rain. His chest felt hard and deep against my side.

Nothing made much sense. He climbed the sagging porch steps, caddied me sideways through the doorway that had lost its door before either of us were born, into that tough shell of teak and shipwood. Wet wind sang through the square hole where a single window had been, but the overwhelming sensation was of having ducked into a protective cave.

He put me down on the floor, though something beneath me had give to it. I couldn’t see him; I heard him moving. I leaned askew, the bad leg and the good one haphazardly tucked, bracing myself on my hands. There was a sizzling sound, then a flood of light. Roan squatted beside a camping lantern. I was sitting on an air mattress. An ice chest and a bulky duffel bag shared a dusty corner of the small, bare room.

Over the years I’d fought restless dreams in which a faceless stranger reached through fire for me; intuitively I knew he was Roan, but because I couldn’t see his face, I couldn’t take his hand. All solid evidence of him had disappeared, reduced to stories others told.

You’ll be thirty years old before you’ll really understand who you are
.

And there I was, with all that history behind me, thirty
years old, my heart aching, waiting to see what prophecy had brought Roan back to me.

He dropped to his heels beside the mattress, one hand bent against his chin; in the eerie white light of the camping lantern he looked like weathered marble except for those gray eyes as intense and quick as mercury. There was no point in talking; shock took up all the words. Like wild animals we gauged the dangerous situation with unblinking scrutiny.

Finally, after twenty years of unexplained absence, he said with more sorrow than sarcasm, “Home sweet home.”

I looked into the face of the boy I remembered, now a grown man with scalding eyes hooded in a man’s features, dark hair slicked back wildly from wide cheekbones and high forehead. “Yes,” I said softly. He raised his hand to my face. His fingertips smoothed rainwater from my eyes, my mouth, curved under my chin, focusing me. “I know you,” I whispered, dazed. “I still recognize you.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”

Thunder shook the cabin. In my fevered imagination the world was ending and beginning again, past and future colliding with wild pressures that shoved the only truths up from bedrock.

He jerked a red and white blanket from beside his knees and swooped it around my shoulders. I finally realized I was shivering. But he moved too fast, with the unsettling grace of lean, male muscles. Maybe he saw the startled reaction in my face; he frowned, sat back on his heels, then glanced around my ancestor’s cabin as if regretting some idea. “I bought this place,” he said.

Silence again. I needed time to mull over the fact that somehow he’d made that much money, that he used it in secretive ways, and that his purpose had to do with me.

Rain beat on the roof. I imagined the lake rising, flooding up beyond the blackberry briars and shaggy oaks, until
we floated away. The Cherokees’ stepping-stone turtles might come in handy.

He sat down, drew one knee up, and propped his arms on it. My leg had begun to ache. Suddenly I was exhausted and dizzy. The fall on the ledge had left a fresh, sore throb on one side of my face. I was so incredulous, I felt numb. “I have to rest,” I admitted.

“I don’t want to take you back to the farm tonight,” he said. The words took the gentleness off his face. “Do you want me to take you back there?”

He wouldn’t assume
want
; he phrased my family as a duty. I couldn’t begin to explain my complex retreat and return to him; he owed me explanations, too. “No. I’m not going to let you out of my sight. I’m not even sure you’re real yet.”

He reached out, carefully, and I stayed still with marginal willpower. He laid his hand along my cheek for an instant. “As real as you are,” he whispered.

Twenty years
. I didn’t have to say that out loud; his eyes darkened; he nodded. Keeping the blanket firmly around me, I lay down on my side as gracefully as possible, which wasn’t too graceful. From somewhere he snared a thick pillow cased in fine blue linen. He laid it within my reach like a mating present. Everything seemed symbolic in my state of mind. I tugged the pillow under my head. Feathers, plush downy feathers. On an air mattress in a cabin with no amenities, in the woods, without another soul but him knowing where I’d gone.

He turned to the lantern, silhouetted; his hand moved in slow sequence, twisting a knob. Inky darkness, scented with the rain and damp earth, enclosed us. For a split second I was disoriented. “Talk to me,” I said quickly. “Tell me anything that matters to you. I want to hear your voice.”

“I’m sitting beside the mattress,” he replied in gruff tones. “Listening to the rain. Listening to you breathe. This is the most peaceful moment I’ve had in years.”

A contented fog began to slide over me in the wake of his voice—strange, because I already knew that deep down I was bitterly angry with him. He had been watching me all these years and never let me know. “I dreamed you came to the hospital,” I whispered finally.

“I did.”

Early morning sunshine whitewashed the cabin’s spartan interior. A pair of hummingbirds were fighting over the fluted orange flowers of a trumpet-creeper vine that had latched on to the ledge of the broken-out window. I heard the rustle of fragile wings colliding in dive-bombing swoops. My mood was a strange mixture of despair and excitement.

Roan
.

Clutching the walls and the door frame to steady myself, I half staggered onto the porch. My crutches lay propped against a broken section of porch rail. I hadn’t realized that Roan had brought them with me the night before.

Roan stood in a small clearing fifty yards away with his back to me. Older, thicker, prime. That uncanny stillness he’d had as a boy, predatory but also defensive, gave me an impression of spiritual strength now. He seemed engrossed by the blue morning sky and the platinum surface of the lake.

He’s here. He’s really home
.

I studied the terrain between Roan and me. Clods of sopping-wet weeds, a narrow deer trail through briars, the sturdy clumps of young pokeberry. Grandpa had always boiled poke greens to eat in the spring; the rich, fibrous greens gave him his spring cleaning, he swore. Later in the season they matured and turned poisonous.

I pushed myself step by step. Roan’s blanket slid down my arms. I shoved at briars, balancing wildly. I was wearing a nightshirt with a flaking appliquéd palm tree on the chest, a yellow windbreaker, and no shoes. Panting, cursing under
my breath, I lurched into the clearing. Roan pivoted at the sounds and held out his hands. At the moment of victorious arrival I stubbed one tip of my left crutch on a rock.

He caught me as I started to fall forward. I was livid with embarrassment until I noticed the dark circles under his eyes and forgot my own awkwardness. “Nice catch,” I said hoarsely.

“Glad to break your fall. I wish I’d been there for you two months ago.”

“You were. Everything I’ve done for other people has been a substitute for what I couldn’t do for you twenty years ago.”

“Then we’re alike. I’ve tried to live my life in a way that could make up for what happened.”

All the unanswered questions, all the years, so many changes, and yet so few. “I can’t think straight right now,” I offered. “I just need to look at you.”

This seemed to please and worry him. He hunched his shoulders and watched me with chin tucked, his hard, pewter eyes boring into me. “Why don’t you tell me what you see?”

I could sum up the parts but miss the point. He had texture: rough khaki trousers, hiking boots with black laces, an old gray cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves. And he had context: a heavy gold wristwatch, thick dark hair that was slightly longish, drying into unruliness, his hands looked callused, and he had a fine peppering of dark beard shadow on his jaw and over his mouth.

“You’re perfect,” I said. Instantly aware of the pale, thin leg with surgical scars, I pulled his blanket closer around me. His gaze slipped down to the hidden leg, then back to my stare. We guided each other with invisible signals.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said quietly. “Let’s get that point settled right now.” There’s power in a man speaking like that, not just in the words but in the music of tone and depth. I studied
him intensely. Everything about us, every small discovery, was like water puddling on hard-baked ground; it took time to sink in, to soften and find the old channels.

“I was always afraid,” I said slowly, “that one day I’d see you somewhere—in a shop, a restaurant, someplace public. And I’d recognize you. I’d walk up to you and say your name and you’d look at me without the slightest idea who I was. I’d have to explain. You’d be polite but edgy—maybe even cold—because the last thing you’d want was to dredge up ugly memories. I’d try to tell you how much you meant to me when we were kids, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. And that’s when I’d realize how much of it had been a little girl’s sentimental fantasies about an older boy.”

“The way I pictured it,” he said slowly, “I’d walk up to you and say your name and you’d step back. You’d ask me what the hell I wanted. You’d ask me why I wanted you to remember. You’d look at me but see my old man.”

I sagged a little. He pulled a folding chair from beside a camp stove, where a kettle bubbled over blue-gold flames. I sat down weakly. He poured me a mug of coffee.

I set the mug aside, then rested my head in my hands. “How have you been?” I asked. Almost polite. Like a stranger. It was painful and absurd.

“When I saw you at the hospital, when I knew you needed me, that was all I cared about. I just wish, for your sake, it had gone a little different.”