Dream Country (9 page)

Louisa Rydell stood on the wide porch, drinking a cup of coffee as she watched a line of antelope climb the side of the mountain. She tried to count them, lost track after twenty-five. She watched the big clouds billow over the valley. They were purple, biblical, like cups of blood. Dalton was calling for rain. She knew how badly the ranch needed rain, and she hoped they’d get it—only not yet.

Not with Daisy and James’s daughter out there. Louisa hadn’t seen Sage in years, but there had been a time she had considered her her own grandbaby. She had baby-sat the twins every chance she had, letting Sage sit on her lap and play with her big earrings and beads while they watched Jake toddle around the grass between the house and paddock.

Back then, they’d all been one happy, crazy, extended western family. Louisa and Dalton, though not married, had been matriarch and patriarch of the whole clan—Rydells and Tuckers on the same ranch. Louisa’s father would never have believed it. She’d watched Dalton hire her nephews Larry and Todd as hands; she’d seen Dalton escort her daughter Ruthie to the father-daughter square dance.

Even James had come around. After a decade of despising Louisa for—as he’d probably put it—taking his mother’s place in Dalton’s heart, he suddenly seemed to respect her. A woman good enough to be liked by Daisy was good enough to be tolerated by James. Louisa certainly missed that younger woman’s presence on the ranch.

Louisa sighed. One of the cow dogs had smelled her breakfast roll, and he came nosing up the porch steps.

“What do you want?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

The dog licked her hand, then rolled onto his back so she’d scratch his belly. Louisa thought of all the kids she’d sat with on this porch, all the cow dogs whose bellies she’d scratched. Clouds covered the sun, and she heard the far-off rumble of thunder. She shook her head. The only moisture this side of Gannet Peak was in her eyes, and she hated what crying did to her mascara.

“Damn it all,” she said, and she meant it
all.

She wished they could go back to a happier time. There had been so much love on this ranch. The couples, the babies, the growing generations.
Back when this family wasn’t falling apart,
she thought. That had started thirteen years ago, the day Jake had wandered off the face of the earth.

The more she tickled the dog’s belly, the more he wanted. His left leg was kicking the air like a jackrabbit’s. Louisa tried to laugh, but that just made the pain in her heart feel bigger. Her eyes were going to puff up, and that was going to be hell. She and Dalton were supposed to meet friends for supper down at the Stagecoach, and Louisa harbored a secret hope the manager would tempt her up on the stage. Although she wasn’t booked for a show, she loved to be asked.

No, tickling this old dog wasn’t doing the trick. Louisa straightened up. She wore a flowing blue dress, the color of mountain gentians. Her eye makeup matched. Around her neck hung “Bear Mother,” the necklace Daisy had made for her. It came from the bones of a dead grizzly, shot by James one summer night when it had attacked the tent where he, Daisy, and the kids were camping.

Louisa held the necklace in both her hands. It hung between her breasts on a chain of gold. The beads were polished jasper, turquoise, and bear bones. Teeth and claws hung around the medallion, guarding it. When James had seen it, he’d made the comment that it looked too aggressive and wild, like nothing Daisy had ever done before.

Louisa had understood that his words were directed at her, that James had been suggesting that no one less out-there than Louisa could have inspired the delicate Daisy to make such a violent piece, fanged and clawed. But Louisa hadn’t cared. She and Daisy knew and loved each other, and they understood there wasn’t a more aggressive creature in the world than a mother. A mother would do anything to protect her babies; they both knew that.

The medallion told another story.

It came from the bear’s rib, closest to her heart. Daisy had cut a smooth slice, carved it with the grizzly’s face. It was the visage of death, not attack. The expression was peaceful, restful, loving, of the spirit. For after the attack, after James had shot the bear dead, he had found the cubs waiting down the hill. The mother had sensed her babies were in danger, and she had done what she had to do.

Daisy had understood. She had wept for the bear, and for weeks afterward, she had made James ride into those northern hills to search for the cubs, make sure they were surviving on their own. He’d spotted them twice, but after that he’d seen only one. The other had disappeared.

Louisa’s necklace was meant to symbolize the mother bear’s great spirit. She reigned over the ranch, the mountains and canyons, protecting the young of mothers everywhere. Daisy had intended for her to protect Louisa’s daughter Ruthie, Daisy’s own children Sage and Jake, all the Tucker and Rydell children from here to Dubois.

Having worn it every day since Daisy gave it to her, Louisa had taken it off after they lost Jake. It had seemed futile to wear an amulet of protection that had failed to protect. But this morning, thinking of Sage, Louisa had put the necklace on again. Just in case. That little girl would be sixteen by now, growing up without her father. She was the spitting image of Daisy. And Louisa knew the bad things that could befall a fatherless young woman in her first bloom.

Some of them had happened to Louisa herself.

With that in mind, she let out another great sigh. It dissolved into the heavy air as more thunder drummed down the canyon. The first drops of rain fell: big and fat, hitting the ground and raising dust.

Shooing the dust-covered sheltie off the porch, Louisa knew what she had to do. Sometimes young families needed all the help the universe could offer, even coming from a spurned quasi stepgrandmother. She walked inside, ready to make a telephone call that wasn’t going to be easy.

Chapter Nine

W
rapped in a shawl, Daisy huddled in her workroom. Five days after Sage’s disappearance, it hurt to breathe. Detective LaRosa had just called and reported that Sage wasn’t on the train. Ben had told them a story about how she’d gotten off in Chicago.

Although the police had not believed him, they hadn’t found her yet. Sage hadn’t been kidnapped, nor was she a criminal: Therefore, the FBI had not been called in. The investigation depended on the efforts of many small jurisdictions, none of whom considered a pregnant runaway their top priority. Daisy had called the Davis home every day since the kids had run away.

Paulina had been frantic, but now she was just cold. She told Daisy she’d have Ben call her when he could. Daisy had lost it then. “Look,” she’d said, her voice rising, “I know you blame Sage for this, but I don’t care. You have him call me the minute—the second!”—by now she was screaming—“he gets home. Do you hear me? The
second!
”

The telephone rang.

Daisy stared at it with red eyes. Sitting on a rocker, arms wrapped around knees drawn up to her chin, she got tangled up in the shawl as she lunged for the receiver. Maybe it was Ben, maybe it was Hathaway calling back, maybe it was James, maybe it was bad news. But as she fumbled the phone to her ear, Daisy shouted the name:

“Sage!”

“No, darlin’, it’s me,” came Louisa’s low western voice.

“I thought you might be her,” Daisy said, her heart falling even farther than it had before.

“Have the police called yet?”

“They can’t find her.” Daisy squeezed her eyes shut. Her intuitive sense that Sage was headed for the ranch had grown into a conviction, but that didn’t sway the police. “I don’t even know how hard they’re looking. If only she’d call . . .”

“Yes, yes,” Louisa said. “That’s a hope I’m harboring myself—that she’ll pick up the phone and call you and just get herself home.”

“God, I hope that’s what happens,” Daisy said. “That she calls me or James. I just know she’s on her way to him . . .”

There was silence on the line, and in those few seconds Daisy had a vision of what life would be like if Sage didn’t come home. It would be like a black hole, so vast and terrible she wouldn’t want to go on. If she thought it had been bad before, with Jake, this time her despair would be unbounded.

“Daisy, ever since you called James with the news, I’ve been thinking,” Louisa said. “We were close, once upon a time, you and I . . .”

Daisy gripped the receiver. The older woman’s voice was thoughtful; full of affection and something like nostalgia. But Daisy didn’t have time to get sentimental. Sage was missing. She was trying to keep the line clear, and Louisa wanted to talk about old times?

“I . . . I can’t talk right now,” she said.

“But I—”

“Louisa!” Daisy screamed, lurching forward so hard she sent a bowl of unpolished garnets flying to the floor. “I’m waiting for my daughter to call!”

“I want you to hear me out,” Louisa said, her voice suddenly so stern it shocked Daisy.

Hathaway must have just arrived, because she came running into the back room, still wearing her plaid jacket. Daisy felt that her face had gone pure white, and she thought she was going to faint. Hathaway put her arms around her, eased her back into her chair.

“It’s Louisa,” Daisy said, looking into Hathaway’s eyes.

“Okay.” Hathaway looked as if she’d aged ten years in the last few days.

“Is that your sister?” Louisa asked from half a country away. “Good. I’m glad she’s there. You shouldn’t be alone right now, and when you hear what I’m about to say, you’ll want to run it by her. You might want to rip my eyes out, too, and I’ll be glad to have her there to talk you out of it.”

“What do you want to tell me?” Daisy asked hesitantly, holding Hathaway’s hand.

“It’s this,” Louisa said. “I want you to come to the ranch.”

Daisy felt the blood pounding in her ears. Had Louisa said what she thought she had?

“You’re joking.”

“This is no joke, young lady. If you think that I’d speak lightly at a time like this, you don’t know me as well as I thought you did.”

“I can’t go to the ranch . . .” Daisy hadn’t set foot on the DR Ranch in more than a decade. It was the site of her worst nightmare. She wouldn’t be able to see those jagged rocks, smell that sage-scented air, without thinking of her little boy. James lived there now, and with all that had happened between them, there was nothing but bad blood. Besides, what did this have to do with Sage? “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”

“Don’t you want to help your daughter?” Louisa asked.

Daisy felt her blood boil. “Help my daughter?” she said. “Is that what you said? How dare you!”

“That’s right, help your daughter,” Louisa said. “You heard me right.”

“Louisa.” Daisy’s voice was shaking. “You were my friend once, and I loved you. You were part of our family, and now you—” She’d been holding Hathaway’s hand, but now she yanked it away to hold the phone steady. Hathaway looked worried.

“Settle down,” Louisa said. “You’re out of your mind, Daisy, and don’t think I don’t know it. I would be, too. I’m wearing the ‘Bear Mother’ you gave me, thinking on that old grizzly James shot, trying to imagine how I’d feel if life ever ripped me away from my cub.”

“Both of mine,” Daisy wailed, bowing her head. “Both of them!”

“Hang up, Daisy.” Not understanding what was going on, just seeing her sister’s unimaginable distress, Hathaway tried to take the phone out of her hand.

“Oh, God.” Daisy shuddered.

“I know, sweetheart,” Louisa said. “Oh, I know.”

“Both of them,” Daisy said again.

“That’s why . . .” Louisa began, but Daisy hardly heard her. She was thinking of her two babies. She would rock them to sleep, one in each arm. Jake always took longer to fall asleep than Sage, and he would talk and coo, staring into his mother’s eyes, while his sister slept against Daisy’s other breast.

“What?” Daisy asked. “That’s why . . . what did you say?”

“That’s why you have to come out here.”

Something inside Daisy had just broken like a dam, and all her anger flowed out of her, like a river to the open sea. She felt washed out, completely empty. The memory of her babies had been so strong her breasts and arms ached. Hathaway rubbed her head, but all of Daisy’s attention was on what Louisa had to say.

“Why?”

“Because this is where you belong right now. Not forever, but for this waiting time. This ranch is where you had your babies. It’s the first home Sage knew. Something’s pulling her here, something powerful. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t believe she’s going to stop—or be stopped—until she gets here.”

“So many things could happen to her before that.”

“I know, sweetheart.” Louisa’s voice was steady, sure, and warm. “But they won’t. She’s a strong woman, just like her mother. The world has handed her some hard times already, and look how she’s stood up to them.”

“I want her back home.”

“I know you do, and she’ll get there eventually. But she’s coming here first, and I want you to be here when she arrives.”

“I can’t stand the ranch.”

“That doesn’t matter much, does it,” Louisa asked, “when it’s Sage we’re thinking about right now?”

“What good will my going there do?”

“It’ll show her she’s worth it.”

“Worth it?” Daisy asked, confused.

“That you and her father can set your differences aside for now. Put Sage first. Be at the ranch waiting for her with open arms when she comes walking through the gate. She’s a troubled little girl, and she needs her parents. Both of them.”

“She’s pregnant,” Daisy said, the words spilling out along with the tears. She had wanted to keep it secret, to protect Sage’s privacy till they had the chance to talk, to decide what she should do; but Louisa’s tone was so calm and maternal, Daisy could almost believe she was talking to her own mother.

“Well, I figured that might be the case,” Louisa said. “Her running off so fast and dramatic. It’s just what I did.”

“What you did—?”

“When I got pregnant young.”

“Young?” Daisy asked, trying to remember the details of Louisa’s life.

“Just a girl. Barely older than Sage—seventeen.”

“I hadn’t known . . .”

“My father had died a few years back. I’m not saying that fact alone made me get pregnant, but it contributed. I missed him so, wanted his love so badly, I went running off with the first boy who came along. I just needed to be filled with love, if you can understand that.”

“But you were married when you had Ruthie,” Daisy said, remembering the story about Louisa’s husband, Earl, how he had died right after the baby was born.

“That’s just what I told people.”

“But you said Earl died—”

“In my heart he died,” Louisa said. “I killed him off in my heart when it came clear he wasn’t going to marry me and give our baby a name. When I realized he didn’t want any part of her life. Guy’s dead as a doornail to me.”

“But—”

“Daisy, my lying about Earl’s neither here nor there. I just did it to protect Ruthie. The point is, I got pregnant when I was seventeen years old, and all I wanted was to go home. My daddy was dead. My mother’d remarried an oilman in Cheyenne, but their house wasn’t a refuge to me. All I wanted was home.
My
home.”

Daisy thought of Louisa’s father being dead, of Sage missing her own father so much she kept a shrine to him in her bedroom. She closed her eyes and pictured James’s picture hanging from the elk rack, right where Sage had placed it.

“The ranch,” Daisy said. “Sage’s first home.”

“The only home where you all lived together as a family.”

“Us all . . .”

“You and Sage, her daddy and her brother.”

The Seth Thomas clock across the room chimed the hour. Daisy and Louisa had been tying up the phone a long time. Confused and hurting, Daisy shook her head. Some of what Louisa said made sense, but still—how could Daisy go back to the ranch? Daisy’s gaze fell on the new piece she was working on: “Lonely Girl.” She thought of all the love she had for it, and she realized why she had chosen that title.

There was so much in what Louisa was saying, the hidden truth about Sage needing her larger family. Sage had been a twin. She had had a loving father, grandfather, and Louisa. When Daisy had moved them back east, she had ripped Sage away from everyone who loved her most. How that must have felt to Sage . . . Daisy had been so busy trying to stay alive, to survive her own grief, she had made some selfish decisions. Needing to keep her only living child away from the ranch, she had kept her from her father.

“Thank you,” she managed to say. “For being so honest with me. I’ll think about it. I really will.”

“That’s all I’m asking you to do,” Louisa said kindly.

“Louisa, will you keep this between us? I mean, don’t tell James about Sage being pregnant.”

“Never, Daisy.”

Carefully, Daisy hung up the phone. She turned to Hathaway, and suddenly the ranch melted away.
This
was home; this was where Sage belonged. Daisy would be waiting right here on Pumpkin Lane when the police finally found her.

“Louisa thinks I should go to Wyoming,” Daisy said, waiting for her sister to laugh, scoff, shake her head in disbelief.

Hathaway waited. She touched Daisy’s shoulder, tilted her head as she listened for her to say more. Today she wore a red western shirt, turquoise beads, silver earrings, a Sioux beaded bracelet: the stuff she sold at the Cowgirl Rodeo.

“She thinks Sage misses her father so much, it’s what this is all about,” Daisy said.

“All about . . .” Hathaway said, trailing off.

“Getting pregnant, running away, everything.”

“Missing a father’s a very big thing,” Hathaway said slowly. “I haven’t stopped missing Dad, not even after all this time. That smile, his sense of humor, the way he’d read to us. Oh . . .”

“Dad . . .” Daisy said, thinking. She and Hathaway had lost their own father to a heart attack. She could hear his good-natured laugh, see him perusing his books with half-glasses perched on the end of his handsome, aquiline nose, remember the distinctive scent of his library: leather, furniture polish, the flowers her mother always arranged on his desk. She missed him so much, her eyes filled with tears, and she understood a little more about Sage’s journey.

“I’ve never doubted Sage loved James,” she said carefully. “I’m positive that she’s on her way to see him. The thing is, I just don’t understand what my going out there would do. I just don’t get that part.”

“That part’s for you,” Hathaway said, her eyes liquid with warmth and love.

“For me?”

“You see,” Hathaway said gently, holding both Daisy’s hands, “I agree with Louisa.”

“But why?”

“To be waiting at the ranch when Sage gets there. You already know she’s on the way. She has her reasons for going back there, and so do you.”

“Me?” Daisy asked. “I can’t imagine what they are, what you’re thinking. I was born in Connecticut and I love it here. You’re here—”

“I’m with you wherever you are,” Hathaway said. “You must know that by now. We’re in each other’s hearts.”

“I don’t want to go to the ranch,” Daisy heard herself say, the words sounding like echoes in a deep canyon.

“But I think you’re going to go anyway.” Hathaway squeezed Daisy’s hands as she smiled into her eyes.

Daisy had always felt lucky to have a sister, especially an older sister like Hathaway.

“Really?” Daisy asked.

“I do,” Hathaway said. “I think that.”

“Tell me why again.”

“Because it’s meant to be. Because you love the West much more than you ever let on. You think New England’s in your blood, but you’re more cowgirl than Annie Oakley.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m the oldest sister,” Hathaway said, smiling widely, kissing Daisy on the top of her head. “I know everything.”