The Scent of Lilacs (9 page)

It was already dark, but the car lights would hit the porch as they pulled up. She’d be able to see if Zeb was there waiting for her. She scooted up on the edge of her seat again and peered through the windshield toward the house. There was a light on the front porch. Not the porch light. More like a flashlight with the batteries running down. Or a jar of lightning bugs. Or a candle flickering in the breeze.

“Look, Dad.” She pointed past his head toward the porch. “What is that light?”

Aunt Love woke up with a little snort. “Light? What light?”

“It looks to be a candle,” her father said.

“A candle? How odd.” Aunt Love sat up straighter and peered out of the window.

“Somebody is on the porch,” her father said.

“Who?” Jocie asked.

“I can’t see who. It’s too dark,” her father said.

Jocie strained to see, but all she could make out was the shape of a person in the rocking chair on the porch. No shape of a dog was anywhere in sight. “I can’t see Zeb. You don’t think he’s gone, do you?”

“Don’t worry, Jocie. That dog knows a good thing when he’s found it. He’ll be here,” her father said.

Jocie touched the sack beside her that held the bone she’d begged from Mrs. McDermott, and she suddenly had a terrible thought. “What if it’s Zeb’s owner come to claim him?”

“Nobody in their right mind would come hunting that dog,”
Aunt Love said shortly. “It’s probably just Wes with something about the paper.”

“I don’t see his motorcycle. And Wes never walks anywhere,” Jocie said.

“His motorcycle could have stripped a gear or whatever motorcycles do besides make an unholy racket,” Aunt Love said.

“We don’t have to do the five guesses game. We’ll find out who it is as soon as we get there,” her father said.

“But, Dad, somebody on our porch this time of night with no car anywhere around and with a candle lit? Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, who sits on anybody’s porch and brings a candle to light?”

“Somebody afraid of the dark who doesn’t have a flashlight?” her father suggested.

“But it’s too late to come visiting or anything normal,” Jocie said.

“Unless they’re bringing bad news,” Aunt Love said. She too was leaning forward trying to get a better look at the mystery person on the porch.

“Hush, you two,” her father said as he parked the car in front of the garage. “It’s probably just somebody who knows I’m a preacher and needs to talk. Or somebody who’s lost and needs a ride home.”

“Carrying candles in their pocket?”

“People carry all kinds of things in their pockets. Or pocketbooks. Who knows? Aunt Love might be able to pull a candle out of her purse.”

“No candles,” Aunt Love said. “Matches, but no candles.”

Paws hit against Jocie’s door, and Zeb stuck his nose to her window. Jocie pushed open the door and let Zeb lick her face. For some reason her heart was banging around inside her. And it didn’t have anything to do with the dog. It was whoever was on the porch. In spite of what her father said, it wasn’t normal.
Something was up. The dog prayer had been answered. The father getting a call to a church prayer was being answered. Maybe God had just decided this was the week to answer all the Brooke family prayers.

People from California probably carried candles in their pockets. Jocie had seen pictures on TV of teenagers in wild clothes with candles everywhere. Hippies. Not something you’d find in Hollyhill. Here you might find birthday cake candles and candles for when a storm knocked the electricity out. Nothing anybody would carry in a pocket, but who knew what people in California carried around with them.

Jocie rubbed Zeb’s head and gave him the bone. He plopped right down in the middle of the driveway to start chewing on it. Jocie trailed after her father and Aunt Love to the porch.

The person on the porch stood up, and the wicker chair rocked back and forth. The candle flame flickered and went out in the slight draft. The candle hadn’t given off much light, but the night suddenly seemed intensely dark in spite of the bright glitter of millions of stars above their heads. The moon was in hiding. Somewhere far away an owl hooted, and chills shot up Jocie’s back. She moved closer to her father and touched the back of his shirt. She held her breath and waited. It seemed as if the night was doing the same. She couldn’t even hear Zeb chewing now.

Her father stopped at the bottom of the steps as if they were the visitors and the person on the porch the homebody. “Can we help you some way?” he asked.

The person on the porch stepped closer to the edge of the porch above them. The woman’s voice was timid, almost afraid. “Hi, Daddy. I’m home.”

Jocie’s breath exploded out of her. “It
is
her. It’s Tabitha!” she shouted. She pushed past her father and Aunt Love to run up the steps and grab her sister.

“You can’t be Jocie,” Tabitha said as she held Jocie out away from her. It was still too dark to see faces. “You’re so tall.”

Together they turned to look at their father, who was still standing in the same spot. Beside him, Aunt Love was clutching her chest and quoting Scripture. “O give thanks unto the L
ORD
; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

“Say something, Daddy,” they both said at practically the same instant. And then Tabitha went on, “You are glad to see me, aren’t you, Daddy?”

David stared at the two girls, his two girls, looking down at him from the porch and felt as if someone had sucker punched him. One as familiar as his own hand, the other strange and unknown. He struggled for breath to answer Tabitha. How could it be possible that this tall, slim young woman peering through the dark at him could be Tabitha? He had carried the thirteen-year-old Tabitha in his heart all these years without letting her grow, as if he could stop time and not miss any of her life. Now here she was in front of him, years of her life totally lost to him, and he couldn’t say a word.

“He can’t talk. I’ve never seen Daddy not able to talk.” Jocie tugged Tabitha down the porch steps toward David.

“Praise God,” David finally said as he put his arms around Jocie and Tabitha and fought back the tears that threatened to render him speechless again. “I can’t believe you’re actually here. Welcome home, sweetheart.” He gently touched his lips to her forehead.

Aunt Love was still quoting Scripture beside them, and Jocie’s stray dog had deserted his bone to dance around them, his thunderous barks at full volume.

Tabitha suddenly started laughing. “This is crazier than anything in California.” She peered at Aunt Love and said, “Who are you?”

Aunt Love quit quoting Scripture and stepped up to Tabitha. “I’m your Aunt Love.”

“Oh yeah. Mama Mae’s sister. I remember Dad writing that you were living here now, but I forgot. Sorry,” Tabitha said. “What is that you were saying? A hymn or something.”

“No, dear. It was Scripture. Psalms mostly,” Aunt Love said.

“Oh. Well, I haven’t been to church much lately.” Tabitha glanced at her father and then at the ground. “Well, any lately.”

“Don’t worry. Now that you’re home, you’ll get plenty of chances to make it up,” Jocie said. “Every Sunday and then some.”

“Let’s go inside,” David said. “I want to see how you’ve grown up.” It was still too dark to see more than a shadow of her face, but in that shadow was Adrienne. “You are alone?”

Tabitha let David turn her toward the porch steps and the front door. “Sort of.”

He heard echoes of the child’s voice he remembered, but it was strange and new at the same time.

“Mother’s not here?” Jocie’s words sounded tight.

“Oh, no,” Tabitha said. “DeeDee will never leave California. She belongs there. Says she should have been born there.”

“But how did you get here?”

“On the bus. Man, it’s a long ride from California.”

“We don’t have a bus stop in Hollyhill,” David said.

“Tell me about it. I had to get off in Grundy and catch a ride with this truck driver,” Tabitha said. “He was delivering potato chips to the restaurant where I was trying to call you from, and I guess he thought I looked lost or something, so he gave me a ride over here. Don’t worry, Dad. He was nice. Said he had a granddaughter my age. I was beginning to think I was going to have to sleep in the park or something since I couldn’t hang out in the bus station, seeing as how there wasn’t one. The bus driver just fished my stuff out of the bottom of the bus and let me off at the corner by the courthouse and went on. I mean, that’s what I asked him to do,
but I never expected the town to be so dead. Nobody anywhere. I was lucky to find a restaurant open so I could try to call you.”

“You should have let me know you were coming, and I would have met you in Williamsburg, where there is a bus station.” David didn’t like to think about her alone, at the mercy of whoever came along.

“It was no big deal. I’d already spent a lot of hours hanging out in bus stations waiting to make the next connection. Another night somewhere wouldn’t have been a problem. As long as somebody didn’t want to share my bench and their life story. I’ve heard more life stories on the way cross country. Yawn city. You’d think that occasionally somebody would have something exciting happen to them, but no. Nothing but ruptured appendixes and long stories about their Einstein grandkids.”

“I like hearing people’s life stories,” Jocie said as she went in the front door ahead of Tabitha and switched on the light.

“Well, I wish you’d been there to be my ears, little sister,” Tabitha said as she shielded her eyes from the sudden burst of light. “Then I could’ve snoozed coast to heartland.”

“You should have come on in and made yourself at home. The door wasn’t locked,” David said.

“Yeah, I know. I started to, but I got to thinking. What if you didn’t live here anymore? I mean, it’d been a while since we got a letter and there wasn’t a name on the mailbox and this dog was trying to bark us deaf and I didn’t remember anything about a dog. I mean, I knew Stumpy got done in after I left. So I told Grandpop Jack I’d better wait on the porch. He would have waited around with me, but he had to get home and we decided that even if you had moved, nobody would get too excited about me staging a sit-in on their porch. He gave me a couple of bags of chips before he left. I finally got the dog to quit barking by pitching him some of the chips. Then I ate some. Too many, I guess, because I got sick and had to puke. I sure was glad to see your lights coming up the road.”

The poor girl looked tired. Worse than tired, exhausted. She was too slim and too pale, with dark circles under her eyes. A painted rose adorned her upper left cheek. At least he hoped it was painted on. Her wrinkled, faded red top hung loosely over bright green pants. She had a red and green strip of material tied around her forehead like a farmer’s sweatband. Her long hair, the same honey brown as Adrienne’s, was caught at the nape of her neck in a plain rubber band.

Even mussed and in desperate need of a shower she looked so much like Adrienne the first time he’d seen her that David lost his breath again for a moment. She’d always been like Adrienne, from the six-month-old baby he’d first met when he got home from the war to the thirteen-year-old who had disappeared in the night with her mother.

But it was even more than the same color hair and the green eyes with thick dark lashes and the high cheekbones. Adrienne had always had secrets she’d never shared, and now Tabitha had that same shielded look to her eyes, as if there was more than she’d be willing to tell in spite of the way her words were streaming out practically tripping on one another.

She was looking around the living room. “I can’t believe this. It’s all exactly the same. The old piano in the corner with our school pictures on it and the books. Surely you’ve gotten some new books.” She ran her hands over some of the bookends.

“Lots of new books,” Jocie said. “And new pictures too. My school pictures.”

“Well, sure, but it’s still the same.” Tabitha ran over to pick up an embroidered throw pillow off the couch. “Mama Mae made this. She let me pick out the colors of the threads and poke the needle through on some of the stitches.” She hugged the pillow to her. A couple of tears slid out the corners of her eyes. “I keep thinking I’ll see her too.”

“She died a few years after you left,” Jocie said, the only one
of them besides Tabitha who seemed to be able to talk. “Daddy wrote and told you that.”

“Yeah, I know. But I guess when you’re not here, it’s easier to keep somebody alive in your head. I just kept imagining everybody doing the same things. Mama Mae planting flowers. Daddy at the paper. You playing in the dirt. You were always playing in the dirt. It drove DeeDee crazy. She’d scream at you if you got close to her with your dirty hands.”

“I don’t play in the dirt now except when I have to help Aunt Love plant the garden.”

“Well, of course not. You’re all grown-up. What are you now? Eleven? Twelve?”