Chicory Up: The Pixie Chronicles (35 page)

Dick squinted his red-rimmed eyes and stared at Hope. “Oh, my God! Are you the reason Hannah Fleming told me I needed to contact Sandy? You really are her daughter.”

Hope returned his stare, mouth agape and more tears streaming down her face. “I didn’t know your name until that last day at home. Mom said I was as big a liar as my father. That’s the first time she ever said your name that I heard.”

“Your mother moved away the summer before senior year. She never wrote or called. She never told me she was pregnant, so how could I lie to her?”

“You told her you loved her,” Juliet reminded him. “I heard you on the phone. “You loved her, but not enough to talk to her when she was alone and hurting because you had an essay to write for your early admission college application.”

“Oh, God, did I really do that?” Dick sat in the chair across the table from Hope and buried his head in his hands.

“You most certainly did. I wondered at the time if that
was why she left town in such a hurry. Her parents moved to California the next year. I lost track of them after a holiday card came back with no forwarding address.”

“I was in college by then. Sam got a better job offer or something.”

“But?” Juliet asked. “What haven’t you told me, Benedict?” She stood up and faced her son. Chicory could see the effort she made to control her emotions. A lot of emotions that swung back and forth like the pendulum in her long case clock in the parlor. “Are you this girl’s father?”

“Um—what’s your mother’s phone number, Hope. I think I need to call her,” Dick said, looking more awake than a moment before.

Chicory guided his hand toward the cup of tea Hope had left cooling on the table. His friend needed it more than anyone in the room at the moment.

“W
HY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME, Sandy?” Dick asked after the awkward introductions had been made over the phone. Damn. He wanted to have the woman in front of him, face-to-face, to ask all the questions that piled up in a fathomless jumble in his mind.

“She’s safe? Tell me again. Is Alessandra safe?” Sandy screamed hysterically over the cell phone airwaves.

“She calls herself Hope now. But there is a fourteen-year-old girl huddled in my mother’s kitchen who said you are her mother.” He spoke each word firmly and crisply.

“Thank God. I’ll drive down tonight, right after I get off work. Don’t let her run away again.”

“Hold on, Sandy. Not so fast. I need to know why you didn’t tell me you were pregnant. I need to know that if you come and get
our
daughter, that she will be safe with you and not run away again. Why didn’t you tell me?” He nearly screamed the last sentence.

A dozen Pixies appeared in his doorway, hovering anxiously. He kicked the door shut.

The little critters retreated with an “Eeeepp!” sound.

Within seconds, a dainty white-and-green one peeked through the gap between the door and the floor.

So much for privacy. By dinnertime the entire town would know about his daughter the runaway.

“I tried to tell you. You said you loved me but were too busy with college essays or something, anything so you didn’t have to talk. You lied. You threw me away as surely as my parents did.”

Dick ran his hands through his hair, heavy greasy hair that desperately needed shampooing, exhausted from the emotional storms of losing Thistle and now this. His gut twisted.

“I’m sorry, Sandy. Truly sorry I didn’t make time for you when I knew you’d been crying.” He wasn’t even sure he remembered that phone conversation. He had been busy, getting ready for his senior year, applying to colleges, planning extra science and math classes to qualify for premed. His future was on the line that summer.

He had no idea that Sandy’s was too.

“I was a selfish idiot.” What else was new? “You should have tried harder. Come talk to me face-to-face and not relied on the phone.” Like now.

“What would you have done if I had gotten through your thick head, Dick?” Sandy sounded coldly angry now, instead of hysterical. “We were seniors in high school, for God’s sake. You didn’t really love me. Did you even once think about the consequences?”

“Did you?”

A long silence followed that thought. They both needed to take responsibility for those madly passionate moments when they were too young to think beyond that moment. To think with their brains instead of their hormones.

“You probably haven’t even thought about me in all these years.”

That hit too close to home. How often had he used the L word over the years to get sexual gratification and nothing else out of a relationship?

But he hadn’t lied when he’d told Thistle he loved her. He clung to that tiny morsel of truth, praying she knew he hadn’t lied that time.

“I… I don’t know what I would have done. But I had a right to know. I had a right to help even if we didn’t get married.” He dropped heavily into the armchair by the window. Reality began to creep into his tattered brain.

He was a father. Hope was his daughter. Hope… she’d been so scared when he first found her hiding in Mabel’s dining room, and he hadn’t made time for her, hadn’t taken an interest in her. Just like he’d treated her mother. Guilt dominated his anger and confusion.

How could he have not known she was his daughter!

“Would you have finished college, gone on to medical school if you’d known?” Sandy asked. She sounded so bloody logical. “I decided I had to take care of myself. I couldn’t trust anyone else to take care of me, not my parents and definitely not an eighteen-year-old
boy
.”

“It’s been fourteen years, Sandy. I have a good job. I could have helped with money, with time, with something!”

“Hannah told me you dropped out of med school after two years.” Now she sounded guilty. “But by then I’d finished my courses to become a dental hygienist.
I
had a good job. Alessa and I were living with my Aunt Ruth, helping her through her last illness. I didn’t have
time
to think about you.”

“Not even in the wee small hours of the morning when you couldn’t sleep?”

“I was afraid.”

“Afraid of me?”

“Afraid you’d take her away from me. Like you are trying to do now.”

“I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that I have a fourteen-year-old daughter who found life on the streets preferable to living with her stepfather.”

“You have to understand, Mike and I have only been married a year.”

“Hope… I mean Alessa doesn’t like him.”

“I don’t think she’d like any man I brought into the family.”

“Why is that? She says he didn’t hurt her. But he made it clear he wanted her gone.” He couldn’t help the sarcasm that colored his voice and his thoughts. “Just another territorial male clearing out the nest of unwanted offspring to make room for his own?”

“No. It’s not like that. I… I…”

“You what? Didn’t have time for her anymore? Just like you didn’t have time to give me a choice about the raising of my daughter?”

“No! I made time for her. Just her and me. But… but… there was just the two of us for so long, I may… I may have
spoiled her a bit. She was always so good and helpful, I didn’t have to enforce rules and curfews. She started acting out when Mike and I became serious. He wouldn’t let her get away with breaking the rules.”

The picture started to clear a bit in Dick’s mind. “Before Mike, she didn’t have any rules.”

“Not many. We didn’t need them.” Sandy was crying again.

“She’s as headstrong and secretive as you,” he said. A smile crept across his face as he remembered some of the arguments he and Sandy had. They’d fought about everything, the color of his shirt clashed with her dress, who would drive on dates, where they should go, whose homework was more important. Until finally he’d given up calling her.

He hadn’t heard from her in three weeks when she called that hot August night while he pounded away at his college application essay.

But a lot of those fights had ended in searing kisses, long make out sessions, and then finally a naked romp in the back seat of his mother’s car on prom night, and a few times afterward.

“Sandy, Hope—I mean Alessa is safe, warm, and fed. She’s starting to bond with my mother, her grandmother. Which is more than your parents did.”

“Yeah, I know. When I refused to abort, they sent me to live with Aunt Ruth so their reputations wouldn’t be tainted. Aunt Ruth never married and lived her life according to her own rules, not those set down by a church or country club.”

“Can you give us a couple of days to straighten out Alessa’s head before you come get her?” Dick pleaded.

“This is Thursday,” she said. Then she breathed so deeply he thought she’d inhale his phone from two hundred miles away. “I’ll come get her Sunday noonish. I don’t need directions, I remember the way. And if you take her through the haunted maze Saturday night, don’t lose her. She’s good at slipping away and hiding. I couldn’t take her to a mall until she was eight.”

“I’ll see you Sunday.”

How was he going to explain all this to Thistle? If he could find her.

Was that why she’d run away? Because she’d seen Hope approach him and recognized the truth long before he did?

Thistle found a perch in the lower limbs of the Patriarch Oak. She didn’t want to go any higher, or remember the time she’d climbed up with Alder. From here she could see most of the tribe as they searched for last-minute stores of berries and nuts before hibernating. Not much longer before the first frost sent them all deep into the bower where they’d snuggle and keep each other warm, tell tales of favorite pranks when the sun warmed them enough to awaken, love each other freely, and bless the birth of new Pixies in the spring.

A part of her wanted desperately to recapture that feeling of belonging and sharing, the dropping of rules, the bliss of forgetting and not worrying about tomorrow.

Another part of her watched carefully for signs of intrusion by humans and how they might damage the bower.

Already Dusty’s volunteers had marked paths with orange-and-black ribbons for the festival. Bows that Thistle had tied and made special with extra loops and dangling beads.

The sun passed noon and began a rapid descent toward the horizon across the big river.

Alder flew into the clearing. He took a stand upon the flat rock across the pond from her, hands on hips, feet spread, a deep frown on his face.

She couldn’t see his aura in the flat light. Now that she knew what to look for, though, his mixed bloodlines were obvious, especially in the deep darkness of his eyes that slanted upward on the outside edge, nearly colliding with the ragged green hair at his temple. His extra large and sharply pointed ears stuck through the hair as well. She wondered how he’d hidden them for so long.

Alder whistled sharply. No one paid him any attention.
They were too used to his meaningless bluster to bother abandoning their essential chores.

“Listen to me!” he screamed.

Foxglove and six Dandelions looked up.

A satisfied smile creased his face. The contempt in his posture robbed him of the handsome charm she’d once seen. Or had he cast a glamour on her so that all she saw was what he wanted her to see?

From her perch, she could almost see the waves of magic radiating out from him. She was too far away to feel more than a light tickle. But she wanted to like him, to listen to him, to let him make all the decisions, knowing they would be right.

No, they wouldn’t be right. Not for her or for the tribe.

Deep inside herself, she found a bit of human resolve to push away his manipulation.

“Milkweed has left The Ten Acre Wood. She has broken the marriage treaty,” he announced. “We must no longer have any dealings with her tribe in the valley. Her name will never again be mentioned by any of us.”

“About time,” Thistle muttered.

Obviously, the tribe agreed with her. They went back to storing their treasures inside a hollow tree north of the clearing.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Alder called, not at all pleased with the easy dismissal of his tribe.

“I heard you,” Thistle said. Deliberately, she reclined against the rough bark of the oak.