John Riley's Girl (11 page)

This had obviously been Liv’s. He stepped inside. A bulletin board hung on a side wall, one end crooked as if the nail had slipped down in the old drywall. He shone the light on it. A school lunch menu. An acceptance letter from the University of Virginia, where they had planned to go together. A photo of Liv and him at a football game.

He thought about the young child who had lived here. The teenage girl he had loved. A chest sat against the wall. He opened a drawer. It was full of clothes. Dusty but neatly folded. Shorts. T-shirts. One said: Go Summerville High. State Football Champions. Another said: Orange County Cutting Horse Competition. He’d given it to her.

He opened the drawer beneath it. Full. And so was the bottom one. He went to the closet. Opened the door. Except for a few empty hangers, it was also nearly full.

Why wouldn’t she have taken her things with her when she’d moved away?

He crossed the room and sat on the bed, trying to make sense of it. Why would Liv have left here and not taken her things with her?

A nightstand sat by the bed. He pulled open the drawer on the front and sent up another cloud of dust. Inside was an assortment of pens, pencils and
loose-leaf paper. He started to slide it shut, but it stuck and he gave it a tug. It didn’t budge and he yanked again. The drawer gave with a groan, popping out of the stand. The contents toppled to the floor.

He leaned over, upended the drawer and began picking things up. Something on the bottom caught his eye. He pointed his flashlight at it. A packet of letters tied together with a red ribbon. Like the ones Liv used to write him. They were held in place with a piece of wire that had been tacked to the wood. Alarms sounded inside him.
Put it back, John.

They’re not yours to read.

Piece by piece, he retrieved everything from the floor and put it all back inside. Including the letters. He closed the drawer. But he sat there, feeling the pull of them. Wondering if they held any answers to what had gone wrong between Liv and him.

As a grown man with an entire life between then and now, he should have been able to let it to go. But there was enough of the hurt boy still left inside him to need to look.

He opened the drawer again and pulled out the bundle. A heart had been drawn on the back of the paper with John and Olivia written inside. He untied the ribbon. Started to tie it back. Then yanked it off. He unfolded the letter on top of the stack and began to read.

The letter ended there. He flipped open the next one.

An ache set up in John’s chest. He opened the next letter.

Stunned, John opened the last of the pack.

John refolded the last letter, not sure what to think, too numb to feel anything.

He remembered now how she’d always had a bruise somewhere. Had her father hit her? Had it been because of him? Was that why she’d left Summerville? Why she’d been so scared?

He tried to separate the mass of what he felt into individual pieces, take each of those apart one by one. Rage. Tenderness. Terror. Longing. Regret. But suddenly, the walls of the space inside him where he’d long ago sealed away his feelings for Liv Ashford strained at their beams and frame, pushing upward and outward until all the nails holding them popped free, and emotion flooded through him.

With the letters still in his hand, he vaulted off the bed and ran from the house, certain if he stayed a moment longer, he would drown.

A
SHORT WHILE LATER
, John opened the door to his daughter’s room, stood just inside, saying a silent
prayer of thanks for the child curled up on the pale green sheets, a Mickey Mouse night-light sending off its yellow glow of reassurance on the wall just below her. Charlie lay at the foot of the bed. She raised her head and gave him a sleepy, questioning look. He motioned for her to stay where she was. The dog put her head back down and closed her eyes.

It was late, and he didn’t want to wake Flora, but the need to see his daughter burned inside him, so he crept quietly across the thick rug to the bed. He sat down on the corner beside her, reached out and smoothed her soft hair from her cheek, tucked it behind her ear. She made a snuffling noise and curled up a little tighter under the sheet.

John’s gratitude for this child went beyond thankfulness. Her unconditional love for him was one of the greatest gifts life would ever give him. To abuse that love, not respect it for the cherished thing that it was, went beyond anything he could ever imagine.

Anger at Liv’s father roared inside him. He let it burn, while he thought of the young Liv he had known and the lengths to which she must have gone to keep what happened in her house a secret. How many times had he questioned a bruise on her arm, her wrist? They came back to him now and he saw them for what they were.

Each one sickened him.

Had anyone else known? Somehow, he knew the
answer was no. She had managed to keep it a secret from everyone. A child who spent her life trying to hide such a secret from the world had no childhood.

He reached out and pulled his sleeping daughter into the curve of his arms, rested his chin on her soft hair, reached for the stuffed monkey that had been on the bed beside her, and stayed there with her until the ink of night dried to day.

Back Roads

O
LIVIA AWOKE
the next morning aware that something was different.

Lying there in the early-morning stillness, she felt the change inside herself. It was as if she’d been cut loose somehow. Freed. As if some hard, cold place within her had warmed. And inside it was peace. As if by going back to her old house last night and confronting the ghosts there, she had acknowledged the hold they had once held over her, but at the same time, had seen that they no longer had any power.

She should have done something with the house long ago, but it had been easier just to leave it alone, let the weeds grow up around it and her memories of it as well. Maybe after she got back to D.C., she would call a real estate agent and put the place up for sale.

It was time. Past time.

Maybe, though, it was past time for a lot of things. For so long, she had imposed rules upon her
self. Staying single. Keeping her life free of commitment. Of risk. Not considering the possibility of ever being a mother.

She thought of Flora and of Lori’s four beautiful children, and something painful echoed inside her. Long ago, she had never imagined living her life without children. And yet here she was. Thirty-three years old and single with no prospects of being anything different.

Had she done this intentionally, too? Was this one more way, conscious or not, she had found to punish herself for not preventing the loss of her child, John’s child? Would she spend the rest of her life repeating that same punishment? Or was it time to let the blame she had leveled at herself go?

The question was still with her an hour later when she left her room at the bed-and-breakfast to go for a run. The change this morning was in her physical self, too, in her step, her stride, her whole demeanor. She felt lighter, as if she’d been released from the anchor of memories to which she’d long ago chained herself.

Even at this early hour, the air held enough stickiness to predict the humid summer day ahead. But the sky was already that deep Virginia June blue, not a single cloud in sight.

A little after eight o’clock, the town was up. From the bakery on the corner of Main and Fourth came a tantalizing waft of fresh bread. Old Mr. Carlyle
still ran the place. He was outside sweeping the sidewalk, making neat little piles of the scattered leaves and candy wrappers to scoop up with his dustpan. “Morning, Mr. Carlyle,” Olivia said, jogging by.

He glanced up, pausing in mid-sweep, his smile wide and genuine. “Morning, young lady. Looks like a beautiful day ahead.”

“It sure does,” she said.

A block down, Jim Carter was opening up the corner drugstore. A sign in the front window blinked Fresh Squeezed Lemonade. A fluffy, gray cat sat beneath the sign on the stone sill.

If things hadn’t changed, the Saturday-morning rush would take place around ten o’clock when everyone came into town for weekly grocery shopping at Singleton’s, which sat just ahead on the corner. Olivia and her mother had driven to town every Saturday and bought their groceries there. She had always let Olivia push the cart and pick out a still warm-from-the-oven peanut butter cookie from the bakery counter.

So far, the town had not succumbed to the huge discount and mega stores sprouting up in America’s small towns, leaving their centers to dry up and die. She had forgotten, perhaps deliberately, how much she had loved this place. The thought of D.C. on this beautiful summer morning felt like a sweater that had gotten too tight and would never be comfortable again.

Ten minutes into the run, Olivia had broken a good sweat and was glad she’d left her running jacket behind in favor of the sleeveless white tank top. She followed Main Street out of town where it turned into Route 121 and led out into the country.

There was plenty to look at along the way. Dairy farms with their black-and-white cows heading back out to pasture single-file after being milked, an orchard whose trees were loaded with tiny peaches, a beautiful old farm house someone had long ago abandoned that now stood in sad neglect with round bales of hay stacked across the front porch, shutters drooping.

A truck engine rumbled up from behind. She glanced over as it went past. John? His truck had an empty stock trailer hooked to the back. Her heart kicked up. The brake lights flashed, and the rig slowed then stopped altogether in the middle of the road. Olivia kept running, not sure whether she should just wave and go on or stop. Awkwardness gripped her in a vise usually reserved for sixteen-year-olds.

She slowed to a walk just before she reached his window. It was rolled down, and he threw up a hand, accompanied it with a nod. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses, the small square kind that wouldn’t have looked any better on Tom Cruise than they did on him. A dark-blue baseball cap with AQHA stitched across the front sat low
on his forehead. “You’re out awfully early this morning,” he said, his voice still uneven at the edges, as if he’d just gotten up or had endured a night as short on sleep as hers had been.

“I could say the same for you,” she said.

“I called Lori to see where you were staying. Mrs. Stanley at the bed-and-breakfast said you’d headed down Main Street to go for a run. Thought I’d see if I could track you down.”

A response completely eluded her. He’d deliberately come looking for her this morning? Why? “Is everything all right?” she asked.

He held her gaze for a long moment while two crows on the fence by the road started up a shouting match. “I just wondered if you might like to ride with me out to Cleeve’s. I was headed over there to pick up some calves.”

Olivia wasn’t sure what she had expected him to say, but that would have been close to the last thing.

“Probably not the most exciting offer you’ve had this weekend,” he said, when she failed to respond. He smiled, not a full-fledged smile, but a halfway, uncertain one, as if he really wanted her to say yes, but thought she probably wouldn’t.

That arrow went straight to Olivia’s heart. To hide her own fluster, she reached down and retied a running shoe that didn’t need retying. Why not? One weekend out of the rest of her life. Not to go would
be to give herself a case of permanent regret. She stood and nodded. “I’d love to come along.”

His smile deepened, and she caught a glimpse of the old John. Color rushed to her face and stole whatever response had been making its way to her lips. “I better get this thing out of the middle of the road though, before somebody runs over us,” he said.

“Okay.” She jogged around the back of the trailer, fifteen emotions jostling for prominence all at once. John reached across the seat and opened the door, his gaze meeting and holding hers, the moment brief but meaningful in some way she could not explain.

He shifted gears, and the truck moved out with a low roar.

And all she could think was
I must be dreaming this.
She turned her gaze to the summer green of the trees, the grass that had grown nearly waist high on the shoulders of the road. They passed a field where two horses, one black, one gray, stood head to tail alongside the fence, swatting flies for one another. In the next pasture up, a group of butter-colored cows loitered beside a big blue metal container, licking molasses from a conveyor belt. The scenes were familiar. They filled her with the kind of homesickness that felt bone-deep and made her dread the thought of going back to the city.

“So what’s it like, living in D.C.?” John’s question echoed her thoughts.

“Trying at times. I miss all this.” She looked out the window again. “I’ve never let myself think too much about the differences. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“I remember one time when I was about seven or eight telling my dad that when I grew up I was going to move somewhere flat. That I was sick of all the hills and mountains around here. That flat was prettier. And he said he guessed that could be so, but someday I was going to realize that it didn’t really matter whether the land around me was flat or hilly, what mattered was whether it felt like home or not.”

“I think I’d have to agree with that,” she said. “Lori told me your father passed away a few years ago. I was really sorry to hear it.”

“He was a good man. He lived a good life. Tried to set the right example for me. I don’t know that we can ask for more than that.” He looked at her then, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses. “Liv. I owe you an apology for being such a jackass the last couple of days.”

Her name on his lips, that old nickname only he had ever called her, raised goose bumps on her arms. She looked down at her lap. The truck rolled over a pothole in the road, and the stock trailer behind rattled in complaint. “John, you don’t have to—”

“No, I do.”

“Apology accepted,” she said.

They drove on for a little while, something shifting between them, the silence comfortable in a way that stirred up old feelings inside Olivia, beckoned a yearning for the way things had once been between them. She remembered how they’d be riding along in his first truck, and he would reach across and take her hand, his thumb thumping out the beat to some song on the radio.

He looked at her again, glanced down at her hand resting on the arm of her seat, and she knew, just knew somehow, that he was remembering the same thing.

She jerked her gaze back to the road and sought neutral conversation. “Is Cleeve still running his family’s dairy?” she asked too quickly.

John nodded. “Yep. He takes a lot of pride in that farm.”

“Is he married?”

“He is. Not all that happily, but married.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He’s a good man. He just hasn’t found the right woman.”

“I’m glad you two have stayed friends.” It would have been hard to explain why if he had asked, because it had something to do with her knowing that Cleeve thought of John as a brother, and he’d always
made it a priority to watch out for him. To Olivia, there was something comforting about that.

“Have you had breakfast?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“There’s a little place up ahead where I stop sometimes when I’m out this way. Nothing fancy. But the coffee’s respectable, the food’s good.”

“I didn’t bring any money with me.”

“How about I pay and you can load the trailer out at Cleeve’s?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I may regret this.”

The sign came up on the left within a half-mile or so. Pearl’s. Fill Up With Good Food And Gas Before You Leave.

“The wording has been questioned more than once.” John smiled. “Pearl’s canned answer is ‘I’m not wasting good money on another sign when everybody knows what I meant.’ I think she actually printed it up and taped it to the cash register.”

Olivia pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. She was still smiling when he hit his blinker and slowed down, easing the truck and trailer into the gravel parking lot where there were enough cars to prove the sign hadn’t hurt business. John pulled into a space at the edge of the lot and cut the engine. It was amazing to be riding down this country road with him on a beautiful summer morning, laughing about Pearl’s sign. Amazing and yet right. Scary how right it felt.

“Nice morning. Any interest in eating outside?” John asked once they were out of the truck.

“Sounds great. I’ll get us a table if you’ll order for me.”

“Deal. You want to go in and take a look at the menu first?”

“No need. Just pick me out something with real fat in it,” she said.

He smiled. “You’re definitely at the right place.”

Olivia headed for the picnic tables in the grass to the side of the store, her stomach doing a muffled rumble at the aroma of bacon and eggs wafting out the front door. John had stopped just short of the entrance to talk to someone. His back was to her, and her gaze caught and hung on the sturdy width of his shoulders, the curve and indention of the muscles in the arms folded across his chest as he laughed at something the man next to him had just said.

Olivia had no idea what she was doing here. Or what had caused the change between them this morning. Normally, she would have taken the situation apart, dissected it for bits of evidence to support whichever argument seemed most likely. But this morning, she just wanted to be here. And to enjoy it while it lasted. That was enough.

John turned just then and caught her gaze, as if he’d known she was looking at him. For the life of her, she could not look away. Some well-submerged feminine instinct rallied and wanted him to know
she’d been looking, that she still found him overwhelmingly attractive.

It was a moment cut away from the others surrounding it. He had taken his sunglasses off, holding them in his right hand. She was glad, because she recalled then how it was never the color of his eyes she remembered when she thought of them. It was this, the look in them when he saw her, in that initial moment before he had time to censor his response: untethered gladness, appreciation, attraction. She remembered this because no one had ever looked at her with that combination of intensity, before or since. Until now.

The moment couldn’t have lasted more than three or four seconds. And yet everything inside her shifted and moved. Like platelets in the earth whose movement permanently alters the landscape above.

Shaken, she dropped her gaze and headed for a table.

Ten minutes later, John came back out with their food in a brown paper bag. “Sorry,” he said. “They’re a little busy this morning.”

“It was nice just sitting out here,” she said, her former bravado now gone altogether. She kept her gaze focused just short of his, chattering on about how good the food smelled, how warm the sun already was, and then she stopped, hearing herself.

Olivia had never been one to chatter.

John wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking
at her with an intensity that melted something deep inside her. “Hope you like this,” he said, glancing down then and pulling out of the bag some bundles wrapped in white paper.

“If it tastes as good as it smells—”

John handed Olivia one bundle, along with a plastic cup of orange juice.