Farthest House (3 page)

4

The bleeding stopped, but Willow needed longer to accept Papa wasn’t coming and she hadn’t been fixed. Finally, she stepped off the stool, shuffled back to her room, and dressed. When she returned to the main room with its sofa, television, and the desk where Papa wrote out checks and licked envelopes and stamps, he was waiting for her by the front door. He hadn’t made himself coffee or her a slice of melty peanut butter toast. The
I Dream of Jeannie
book bag she carried to school dangled from a strap in his hand. It looked puffy. Not book puffy, the school year had just ended.
Clothes.

Now she knew why everything about the morning had been different. They were going someplace she wouldn’t like. To see another doctor? Was that why he packed clothes for her and wanted her dressed nice on a Saturday and thought she needed to learn to get along without him? She wanted to hear his thoughts again, but the thoughts in her own head shouted
doctor, doctor,
and
hospital, hospital.

She ran for Doll.

Julian made the toy for Willow when she was two, balling together a couple of pairs of his socks and tying them into the center of one of her old baby blankets. The socks created a head, and with Willow beside him at the kitchen table, he’d drawn on eyes and red lips. The rest of the blanket hung soft and empty, and though Doll didn’t have shoulders, Willow could see arms and legs. She knew how to work a finger under the string around Doll’s neck so that they didn’t become separated at night. She also knew how Doll’s fading eyes cried real tears whenever Papa wanted them to see a new doctor.

With his longer strides, Julian followed, walking to her run, letting her reach her toy. He was thankful she remembered and would have the familiar object with her. He swung her and her doll into the air. “Come on, Little Bird. We’ll get through this.”

In his arms, she could almost quit worrying, except that
he
was worrying. “I need my sweater,” she cried.

He grabbed it, and because she loved to swing, he carried her slung under his arm like a bedroll, across the porch and down the steps. At the curb, he put her down and opened the passenger-side door of his black Ford. The odor of stale cigarette smoke rushed her nose, but she didn’t mind the stink; it meant him: a match. Still, she couldn’t relax. She remembered doctors and nurses in white clothes and smelling of soap and medicine pulling her out of his arms and carrying her down long hallways to cold rooms where machines, ceiling-high, whirled and hissed. Because she was afraid and kicked and screamed, they wrapped her in tight blankets and held her down. With her arms and legs bound, she screamed louder, her heart pounding in her chest. Both times, the doctors shook their heads at Julian. No brace would correct the shoulder, and shaving off the burl was impossible without weakening the bone too severely.

Climbing onto the seat of the car, Willow looked back at him. “You don’t have to take me to any more doctors. I’m starting to grow pretty.”

Lines etched between his brows, and he looked over the top of his car to the empty street. He sighed, “Willow.”

Her name sounded far away or spoken from inside a bottle holding too many other things. When he got into the car, she leaned her right shoulder forward, pressing both hands flat on the dashboard. “See, Papa, my arms are the same long. They match now. You don’t have to take me to any more doctors.”

“Quacks,” he said. “Every one of them.”

She believed she’d convinced him. She sank back against the seat, smiling. “They can’t make me pretty, can they?”

He reached, cupping her chin, touching his thumb to her cuts, and for the first time looking hard at them. Thankfully, she didn’t need a stitch or two. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “My mother, your grandmother, wants to see you.” He tapped the bottom of the pack against the heel of his hand and pulled a cigarette free. “I promised her. She’s right, too. Every time I see you with that little friend of yours, I know you deserve more family than just your old man. If something were to happen to me…my line of work…,” he didn’t finish.

The thought of a stranger, even a grandmother, made Willow put on her sweater, just in case. She hadn’t known she had a grandmother. There was a voice on the phone, and sometimes Papa instructed her to say, “Hello.” And from time to time, there’d been an old woman standing in the living room, a woman who even tried to hug her. But Papa never made the woman coffee, never asked her to sit awhile. “How come she isn’t dead?”

The sudden set of Julian’s mouth made her regret asking. His scapula was flat; his mother didn’t have to die.

5

The drive back to Farthest House, to the place where my body lay buried, as did the body of my husband, and where Tory and Luessy still lived, filled me with heavy emotion. I struggled to keep my attention on the farms we passed with their flat acres of newly planted corn and hilly pastures with herds of cows and spindly-legged calves. Mile after mile, Julian’s cigarette smoke lifted and slipped out through the top inch of the car window he’d cracked. As the long white exhales trailed away, my memories drifted in.

I was seventeen when my savior arrived in the form of a tall, American photographer traveling through France. He, Thomas, helped me escape, stealing me out of the villa, across the Atlantic, and finally to Nebraska. He built us a small place with logs that he cut and the rocks he found strewn over miles. Both materials needed to be hoisted onto a wagon and drawn up the hill with a four-horse team. The big draft horses with their stomping and blowing air were powerful animals, but Thomas pushed them together with his shoulders, harnessed and commanded them. I thought him a god. I called our home
Peu de Nid
: Little Nest.

I loved him for who he was and the sacrifices he made for me, and I tried to be happy. I owed him that. Putting away the past, however, wasn’t as easy as just getting my body free. He never pressed me with questions about my childhood, or my night terrors, or how young I’d been the first time, or how often it happened. Did he pray that one day I would come to him, trusting him enough to speak my story? He asked no questions either, when only a year-and-a-half into our marriage, I asked him to help me return to France and kidnap, no
rescue
, my infant niece, Luessy.

He risked his life, certainly imprisonment, doing so. He understood this better than I; I was blinded by my need to have Luessy with me.

I never bore a child of my own. Thomas and I raised Luessy within those safe and solid walls of Little Nest. Luessy an infant, toddler, little girl, young woman, and still she kept her pure emerald eyes, the same emerald eyes of her mother, my sister, Sabine.

As Thomas’s wife and Luessy’s mother, my past was for years a shadow that squatted and cowered at night beside the ashy and cold hearth. With Thomas asleep at my side and Luessy sleeping across the room, I watched the dark and trembling silhouette and kept the blankets high under my chin lest it try to crawl into the bed and consume me. In the morning, I stood and put on a woman’s dress, tended my cooking and washing, wifed and mothered, and when I had the time, I painted flowers from our yard. As best I could, I kept the hearth swept of the shadow being’s tatters and loose hairs.

Thomas died years later, and Luessy grew to become a mystery writer, something I never fathomed for her, though her whole life must have seemed mysterious. In her late twenties, when she’d sold a couple of books, the local banker let her sign a note to add to her monies. She wasn’t leaving me, though. On the same hill as Little Nest, she built Farthest House with three stories, more porches than folks to stand on them, five bedrooms, a library, and even a glass turret reaching out greedily for sunshine and starlight. Later, she hired Jonah, her gardener, and the wide Nebraska hilltop became even more of an Eden: cobble stone paths, flowerbeds, blooming shrubs, ornate trees, and roses. Everywhere, there were roses. How Luessy and I loved them. Damask mostly. The wood Thomas planted before he died matured: burr oaks, red maples, and walnut trees. Over the decades, his ten-acres of forest became a place of enchantment with cottonwoods seeding themselves amongst the other varieties and a host of wild and flowering plants taking root. And for those who knew the recipes, many of those native species made deadly poisons.

Julian, motioning for Willow, brought my attention back. She slid across the seat and pressed herself against him. Her legs stuck out over the edge of the seat, her scuffed Keds rubbed against his denim jeans. “Are we almost there?” she asked.

He swung an arm around her. Then, slowly, “Little Bird, you’re the prettiest girl in the world.”

She pulled her right hand, which she didn’t think was a
right
hand, but a
wrong
hand, up into her sleeve. Sometimes Papa lied. “Where does she live?”

“We just drove through Greenburr. Her house is up ahead.”

“Is it in Ebraska?”

“Yes, we’re still in Nebraska. With an ‘n’.”

“I know,” she gave him a stern look. “I like saying Ebraska.”

He glanced down at her, slowing the car and turning up the long drive of Farthest House. “Sure you do.”

The tires hummed on the brick. Huge oaks, grown even larger in our six years away, still lined the sides of the drive, the branches lacing overhead like giant threaded fingers.

Willow watched the limbs and the magical spray of sunlight poking down through them. “I’ve never been here,” she said.

“You were born here.” Julian ground the tip of another cigarette into the ashtray, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and tried to put the memory of that night out of his mind. “You’ll be all right. I’ll be back for you tomorrow.”

“You have to stay, too. I don’t want to stay alone.”

He couldn’t answer.

She pulled Doll to her chin, and her eyes filled. “I don’t want to stay.”

Again, he didn’t answer, only stopped the car at the top of the drive, stepped out, and waited for her to slide under the steering wheel and exit using his door. The sight of the four wide stairs leading up to a massive porch, and his plan to leave her, made her scoot back across the seat away from him.

Farthest House seemed looming even to Julian, and he ached to please Willow by getting back in the car and driving them straight home to Omaha, but they’d come this far. His mother waited, and he’d promised her. He did want to see her, and he was uneasy about the cold distance he’d kept all these years. Phone conversations, an occasional short visit from Tory or her, it hadn’t been enough. He’d only avoided facing the place where Jeannie died; she was still dead. But her bleeding out, the blood running no different than it did from a thug dying in the street, made no sense. If he just understood, but what? What did he need to see that he wasn’t seeing?

“It’ll be all right,” he said, the words as much for himself as Willow. She needed women, some feminine influence. He’d drop her off, and when he returned tomorrow, he’d step inside the house and spend an hour or two.

She saw his patient face, his tired face, his sad face, and even his wanting-away face all at once. “How come you don’t want to stay?”

He took her bag from the back and bent down to look in at her. “Suit yourself, but I’m going up there.” He turned as if to leave.

Despite her fear of being abandoned at the strange house, the safest place in the world was at his side, and though she knew she was doing exactly what he wanted, she didn’t want to be left alone. Using her heels to help pull herself, she worked back across the seat, hurrying to where she didn’t want to go. “I’m not staying, and anyway, how come you don’t want to stay?”

Following him, she’d taken only a few steps before she stopped and stared at the house. She counted up the three rows of windows, a house as tall as her school, Our Lady of Supplication, and on that third floor was a small porch tree-top high. At the other end of the house, a wide glass turret like the turrets of picture-book castles rose from the ground to the roof. The sun broke partially through clouds, and the glass reflected a brilliant splash of light, sky, and shadow. In the moving reflection, Willow saw a silver and blue dragon climbing the turret.