True Colors

  “That’s because she needs words, and he can’t do that.”

  Aurora sighed. “Vivi, you have a different dad than I do, that’s all I can say. To you, he’s like one of those horses you rescue.”

  “He is like that, Aurora. He loves us.”

  “If he does, Vivi, it’s a pathetic, watered-down version, and God help any of us if we ever need him to show it.”

  “I saw him cry once,” Vivi Ann said. It was a memory she’d never been able to share before.

  “Dad?”

  “That last night, when Mom’s hospital bed was in the living room and we slept in sleeping bags on the floor.”

  Aurora’s smile was unsteady. “She wanted us with her.”

  Vivi Ann nodded. “I woke up in the middle of the night and saw Dad sitting by her bed. Mom said, ‘Take care of my garden, Henry. Love them, for me,’ and he wiped his eyes.”

  My garden. The fragile moment bound them; they were Bean and Sprout again, a pair of little girls sitting at the kitchen table with their mom, making seashell-encrusted Kleenex boxes for the bathroom.

  “What did you say to Dad?”

  “Nothing. I pretended not to be awake. And when I woke up again, she was gone.”

  “It could have been dust in his eyes.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Aurora sat back.

  Vivi Ann looked down at her swollen belly. “I miss her lately all the time. I want to—” She gasped in surprise as a cramp squeezed her abdomen. Hard. She had just gotten her breath back when another one hit; this one hurt even more.

  “Are you okay?” Aurora asked, leaning forward.

  “No,” Vivi Ann gasped. “It’s too early . . .”

  Vivi Ann had never been one of those people who thought about the bad things that could happen in life. When she heard people say, Life can turn on a dime, she usually smiled and thought: Yes. It can always get better. On the rare occasions when morbid thoughts did cross her mind, she pushed them away quickly and focused on something else. She’d learned early on that optimism was a choice. When asked about the buoyancy of her outlook she replied jauntily that good things happened to good people, and she believed it.

  Now she knew why people often frowned at that answer. They knew what she had not yet learned: Optimism was not only naïve. Often it could be cruel.

  Bad things did happen, even when you did everything right. You could get married when you fell in love, conceive a child in the bed of that love, give up every habit that endangered your child, and still give birth six weeks early.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  Vivi Ann roused herself enough to open her eyes. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying here with her eyes closed, replaying it all in her head. “Have Dad and Win come by yet?”

  Aurora stood by her bed, looking sad. In the last few hours her sister’s poufed-out bangs had fallen flat across her face and her makeup had faded. Without all that, Aurora looked thin and worn-out. “Not yet.”

  Vivi Ann smiled as best she could. “It means a lot that you’ve been here for all of this, Aurora. I forgive you for stealing my birthday tiara.”

  Aurora brushed the still-damp hair away from Vivi Ann’s face. “I never stole your stupid tiara. You’re the princess in the family.”

  “I wish they’d let me see him again. He’s so tiny.” That last word broke a piece of her control away; fear rushed through the crack. She reached over to the bedside table and picked up the pretty pink scallop shell she’d kept in her purse for years. It was as close to her mother as she could get.

  “Don’t go down that road,” Aurora said. “You’re a mom now. He needs you to be strong for him.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of course you’re afraid. That’s what parenting is. From now on you’ll always be a little afraid.”

  “Couldn’t you lie to me? Tell me it’s a bed of roses?” Vivi Ann closed her eyes, sighing tiredly.

  All this honesty was crippling. The truth kept banging around in her head: thirty-four weeks . . . undeveloped lungs . . . complications . . . we’ll see if he makes it through the night.

  She heard the doorknob turn and opened her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? For how long? She looked around the room for Aurora or Dallas, but they were gone. The room was empty. They’d given her a private room, which would have been great if she didn’t know why. They wouldn’t put her in a room with another new mother because Vivi Ann’s son might not make it. She knew this without being told.

  Then Winona and Daddy walked into the room. Vivi Ann felt tears well in her eyes. The fear she’d been holding back spilled over when she looked at Winona. No matter what had happened between them, Win was still her big sister, her mom in a way, the one who always made things right. Vivi Ann hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d needed her. “Have you seen him, Win?”

  Winona nodded, coming over to the bed. “He’s beautiful, Vivi.”

  Dad’s big, rough hands curled around the bed’s metal rails, looking like old roots against the shiny metal. Up close she could see how hollow his face looked; how tightly he was controlling his emotions.

  It was a look she’d seen on his face all her life, or at least since Mom’s death. “Hey, Daddy,” she said, hearing a catch in her voice.

  The change on his face was as subtle as cold butter turning soft around the edges on a warm day, but in it, she saw everything that mattered. It was how he used to look at her, back when she was his favorite little girl who could do no wrong, and he was the ground beneath her feet. Winona would have wanted words to go with that look, and Aurora wouldn’t have noticed the change at all, but Vivi Ann knew what it meant: he loved her. And it was enough.

  “He’s too small,” she said, starting to cry. “They say he might not make it.”

  “Don’t cry,” Winona said, but she was crying, too.

  “He’ll make it,” Dad said, and his voice was firm now, the voice of her youth, gone in the years since Mom’s death and suddenly back. It reminded her in a painful flash of who they all had been with Mom between them.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He’s a Grey, ain’t he?”

  Vivi Ann smiled at that. A Grey. There were generations of strength behind that name. “Yeah,” she said quietly, feeling hopeful for the first time.

  It meant so much to Vivi Ann that they were here, that even after all that had happened, they were a family. She talked for a while and then closed her eyes just for a minute. When she opened her eyes again, the room was dark and they were gone.

  She hit the bed control and angled up to a seated position. Shadows darkened the room, but a shaft of moonlight came through the window, illuminating her husband, who lay slumped in an uncomfortable plastic chair. In the ethereal, uncertain light, it took her a moment to see his face.

  “Oh, Dallas,” she said.

  He got up slowly and walked toward her, pushing a hand through his long hair as he moved. “You should see the other guy.”

  At her bedside, he stopped.

  She was glad for the shadows suddenly, wished it were even darker in here. As it was, the contrast of pale light and shadow only highlighted the damage: his cheeks were pale and hollow but for the dark, bloody gash right above the bone; one eye was swollen shut and looked to be a sick, yellowing color. He lifted his right hand, showing her his battered knuckles, how caked they were by dried, black blood.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Cat’s.”

  “Who started the fight?”

  “I did.”

  Vivi Ann looked in her husband’s eyes, and saw how damaged he’d been by his father, and how scared he was about being a father himself. There was so much about him she didn’t understand, like what you were left with after being beaten with electrical cords or locked in a dark closet or after watching your father murder your mother. But she knew about going on, and she knew about love. “Aurora tells me that from now on we’ll
always be afraid. Apparently it’s part of parenting.”

  Dallas said nothing to that, just stared down at her as if he were waiting for something.

  “You can’t go beating people up every time you’re scared; I guess that’s my point.”

  “What if I’m not up to this?”

  “You are.”

  “Lots of people . . . cops, judges, shrinks . . . they said I was like my dad. Ask Winona. She dug up my record, and she’s right about one thing: it isn’t pretty.”

  It was the clearest picture of his past she’d ever gotten: she imagined him as a young boy, abused for a long time and then suddenly alone in the world, being told by adults that he was bad to the bone. Abuse can make an animal mean. Had they dared to say that to a little boy who’d been hurt?

  She reached up, gently touched his wounded cheek. “You love me, Dallas. That’s how you’re different from him.”

  It was a long time before he nodded, and even then, he didn’t smile.

  “So no more beating up strangers because you’re scared, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now take me to see our son. I’ve been waiting all day for you.”

  He helped her into a wheelchair and tucked a blanket around her, then rolled her down to the neonatal intensive care unit. There, they spoke to the night nurse, who made an exception to the rules and showed them to the tiny incubator where their son lay sleeping.

  Emotions overwhelmed Vivi Ann. Love. Terror. Grief. Hope. Joy. Love most of all. She thought she was too full to feel anything else, but then she looked up at Dallas.

  “My grandfather’s name was Noah,” he said quietly.

  “Noah Grey Raintree,” she said, nodding at the sound of it.

  “I didn’t know it would feel like this,” Dallas whispered. “If anything happens to him . . .” He didn’t finish the thought and Vivi Ann didn’t try to help him.

  There was nothing to say. She reached out for her husband’s hand, hoping together they could find the kind of hope that once she’d taken for granted.

  On the fifteenth of July, people began showing up at Water’s Edge, uninvited. Each person came with a specific task to do. The 4-H chapter cleaned out the horses’ stalls; the Future Farmers of America helped Henry feed the steers; the Women’s Equestrian Drill Team took over Vivi Ann’s lessons. The word had gone out last week: Noah was coming home at last. And the town rallied to help out Vivi Ann.

  She was stunned by her neighbors’ help and grateful for their prayers. In the last six weeks, she and Dallas had been living separate lives, making sure that one of them was always at the hospital. Although she hadn’t told people how difficult it had been, obviously they knew.

  “It’s time,” Aurora said, coming up beside her.

  “Are you ready?” Winona asked, following close behind.

  Vivi Ann hugged them both tightly. Her emotions were so close to the surface right now she was actually afraid she would start crying. “Thank everyone for today, will you?”

  “Of course,” Aurora said.

  Just then Dallas’s primer-gray Ford truck came out from behind the barn and drove slowly through the parking area toward them. It was an old, rounded model that had seen better days, but the engine worked perfectly. He pulled up in front of them and parked.

  Vivi Ann thanked her sisters again and opened the truck’s heavy door. It screeched and rattled, then slammed shut behind her. On the ripped leather bench seat, the robin’s-egg-blue car seat looked bizarrely out of place.

  “You ready, Mrs. Raintree?” Dallas said, giving her the first true smile she’d seen in more than a month.

  “I’m ready.”

  For the next two hours, as they drove down the twisting, tree-lined highway behind a steady stream of RVs and campers, they talked about everyday things—the new school horse that was giving the kids problems, Clem’s aching joints, what to award for prizes at the next barrel race—but when they finally arrived at the hospital, Vivi Ann reached over the car seat and held his hand, unable to think of anything to say.

  “Me, too,” he said, and together they walked through the parking lot and into the bright white lobby of Pierce County’s biggest hospital.

  In the past weeks they’d become like family within these walls, and they stopped and talked to plenty of nurses, volunteers, and orderlies along the way to the pediatric wing.

  There, Noah was waiting for them, swaddled in a blue thermal blanket and wearing a teacup-sized cap over his shock of wild black hair.

  Vivi Ann took him in her arms. “Hey, little man. You ready to come home?”

  Dallas put an arm around Vivi Ann and drew her close. They stared down at their son in silence and then carried him out of the hospital.

  It took Vivi Ann a ridiculous amount of time to get him into the car seat, so much that she was laughing by the end of it.

  All the way home, she found herself cooing to him, talking to him in a high-pitched voice that bore no resemblance to her own. He responded by spitting up all over himself.

  “Note to self,” she said, laughing. “Keep diaper bag handy.” Looking for a tissue or a wad of drive-in napkins, she clicked open the glove box.

  She heard Dallas say, “Don’t!” sharply beside her, but it was too late.

  The glove box lid flipped open and she saw what he’d wanted to hide.

  A gun.

  She started to reach for it, but he said, “It’s loaded,” and she drew back as if stung.

  “Why in the hell do you have a loaded gun in your truck?”

  He pulled over to the side of the road and parked. They were just past Belfair, at the rounded end of the Canal, where the low tide exposed hundreds of feet of oozing gray mud. Docks jutted out into it, waterless on either side. Boats lay angled on the ground, waiting for the tide to lift them up again.

  “You don’t know what my life was like before you.”

  It scared her, that simple declaration of a different world; she’d known it all along, but in her naïveté, she’d thought of him as a wounded, abused child. Vulnerable. This was new. This reminded her that he hadn’t been a kid for a long time; that he’d grown into a man that sometimes she hardly knew. Against her wishes, she remembered the fight he’d started at Cat’s, and the steely look in his eyes when a fight had almost started at the Outlaw. And the criminal record he’d told her about. Stealing cars had sounded almost romantic, reckless, but now she wondered. “Okay, but I know what it’s like now and you don’t need to keep a loaded gun in your car. Jesus, Dal, a kid could find it—”

  “The truck is always locked.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “I am who I am, Vivi Ann.”

  “No,” she said. “That may be who you were. You’re different now. Get rid of it. Promise me.”

  He released his breath; she knew then he’d been holding it, waiting. Leaning past the car seat, he reached out and closed the glove box. “You’ll never see that gun again.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the two years since Noah’s birth, the gossip about Vivi Ann and Dallas died down. Not away, of course; it was simply too entertaining to release altogether, but other transgressions by other lovers had come along to replace it. The only people who seemed determined to hang on to the old animosities were Winona and Dad, and Vivi Ann understood their concerns. In time, though, she knew it would be forgotten completely.

  Tonight, beneath a twilight sky the color of a bruised plum, she stood at the paddock fence, watching kids chase after a greased piglet at the annual Water’s Edge Halloween party. Noah was in her arms, dressed for the party in an orange pumpkin outfit. Aurora stood on her left side; Winona was on her right. A pirate and a witch, respectively.

  “Remember the first time you and I went after a greased pig, Winona?” Aurora said. “All the rest of the kids were behind us by a mile.”

  “I’m sure people said to one another in awe: ‘Wow, that fat girl sure can hang on to a pig,’ ” Winona said
.

  “Ooh,” Aurora said. “Someone is feeling sorry for herself tonight. I thought it was my turn.”

  “You always think it’s your turn,” Winona said, sipping her beer.

  “Have you spent any time with Rick and Jane lately? They’re the Children of the Corn. And Richard is losing his hair so fast I need to bring a vacuum to the dinner table. Top that, Miss Town’s Best Attorney.”

  Winona turned to her. “You actually think it’s better to be fat, childless, and single?”

  “Uh. Duh. Again, I point to my offspring and husband. It’s not like I’m married to that hot tattoo guy.”

  Vivi Ann laughed. “He is hot. And you’re not fat, Win. You’re big-boned.”

  “Lies and pretense,” Winona muttered. “The new family motto.”

  Vivi Ann recognized the irritation in her sister’s voice and knew Winona was having one of her bad days, when nothing made her happy.

  “On that note,” Vivi Ann said, “I’m going to go find my husband. This mermaid costume is itching like crazy, and it’s time for my little man to go to bed.”

  Saying goodbye, she carried Noah through the crowded parking lot, weaving in and out of people who were standing around talking. She heard snippets of conversations; they were the same words she always heard at a gathering like this. A mixture of local gossip; who was screwing whom, who was late on their mortgage, whose kid had gone off the deep end. All she really cared about was that she and Dallas were no longer on the top of the rumor menu.

  As she neared the barn, she found kids and dogs running around in the dark, squealing and barking. The salty tang of the sea air was sharpened by the smell of wood smoke and barbecuing hamburgers.

  The arena was dark except for dozens of strategically placed Chinese lanterns that hung from the rafters. A portable dance floor had been placed over the dirt and every step taken on it sounded like thunder. Over in the corner, a local band was playing a popular mix of seventies and eighties music. People danced, while teenagers bobbed for apples and dug through bowls of cooked spaghetti, looking for grape eyeballs.