I let you down. Should have been there for you. Should have done something before now. All these years, trying to stay away, for good reasons—what difference does any of that make right now? Nothing matters but seeing you again. Making certain you’re going to be okay. Then it’ll be up to you. I can’t throw the truth at you until you’re stronger, though. Too many people could get hurt.
Please be all right when I get there. Please be all right. Please.
As I recovered after surgery—awake and fully alert for the first time in two days—irrational ideas moved through my mind.
“… torn ligaments, torn muscles,” the surgeon was explaining to Grandma Dottie, who sat beside my bed. “A minor fracture of the femur … reconnected the soft tissues … some nerve damage … recovery in about six months, though her leg won’t be the same for a long time after that. A year at least.”
“Was anyone here?” I asked after he left. Grandma Dottie was still sturdy, but white-haired and arthritic. A copy of the Wall Street Journal lay in her lap. She folded it carefully as she watched me. “Was I alone at night?”
“We were all here,” she answered gently.
“All the time? Every minute?”
“No, not every minute, honey. But we’ve been watching over you like hawks. Half the family has come down to Florida to take turns.”
“No one saw anyone … strange?”
She peered at me through her bifocals, bewildered, obviously, and a little alarmed. I was alarmed, too, secretly. “You think somebody strange was here?” Grandma ventured.
“I … don’t know.”
Mama and Daddy came in, carrying more flowers and fruit baskets to add to the dozens of arrangements around the room.
“She thinks some stranger visited her room last night,” I heard her whisper to Mama and Daddy. “I suspect she was just dreaming while the anesthesia wore off.” Mama took one look at me, saw that I was finally alert enough to talk, and began crying. So did I, but not for the same reason.
Because I thought I’d had a long conversation with Roan.
When I was younger I’d cultivated a fantasy that one day I’d look up and Roan would be standing there. He’d walk up to me with a glow of more than recognition in his eyes. He’d study me, up and down, amazed, and he’d say, “You’re beautiful. I always knew you’d be beautiful.”
Or he wouldn’t say anything at all, but I’d know, from the look on his face, that nothing about me disgusted or disappointed him, that he’d forgotten that battered little girl on the floor of Big Roan’s trailer with her overalls pulled down.
But what happened that night at the hospital had to be a drug-induced dream. I was floating in and out, I didn’t remember parts of it later, and parts I remembered word for word, like an overwhelming physical bath of details.
The light in one corner was never turned off. Nurses came and went; I’d been checked more often than a holiday turkey. I was caught up in nightmares—the car, the accident, Terri’s head sagging bloodily against the crumpled dash, the blank stare in her eyes—and older nightmares, too—Big Roan lurching over me, his head flowering red when Roan shot him. The panicky horror and violence, the sadness and fear were all objective in my mind—it was as if I were idly watching closed-captioned videos. And here I felt sick and there I felt terrified.
I heard footsteps on the room’s hard, antiseptic floor—soft clicks, then the settling of a hand on rustling sheets, then its careful pressure on my shoulder. Blinking, I opened my eyes. I was down in a warm tunnel—looking sideways from my dark place into the light, the way the big barn used to feel when Roan and I sat inside the hay loft on a bright day.
A hand—fingertips—brushed my hair from my forehead then feathered over my cheek. I looked across the pillow without moving my head. I saw silvery eyes glittering with tears inside a weathered face that had achingly familiar features—yet different—older, harder, settled forms on granite bones, all hooded by ruffled dark hair. A handsomely rugged man in a pale leather jacket and an open-collared shirt. The lingering scent of tobacco was burned into his fingertips.
My heart contracted. That mental picture was captioned with relief and adoration. “Claire,” he said in a low, deep voice.
Time was confused. It had never passed us by. I was pleased. “They’re not going to leave you at that boys’ home,” I told him. “They know they were wrong. Don’t worry. Oh, Roanie, I love you so much.”
“I thought,” he said as he bent close to my face and stroked my hair, “that you’d forget. That you’d want to forget.” His voice was hoarse.
My concentration faded, then returned. The mental channels changed. Twenty years had gone by. “Roan,” I murmured thickly. “I’m the reason Terri died. Like Big Roan. I’m sorry.”
“My God,” he whispered. He moved his head closer to mine. Those gray eyes shimmered in my dream, fierce and anguished. “I know all about you,” he said. “What you write, what you’ve done. It wasn’t your fault. Not then. Not now.”
And then he sat down in a chair he pulled close to the bed and he talked to me—for minutes, hours, or days, or years—I couldn’t be certain. I watched him from my dream-soaked dimension, hearing his voice, not the words but their essence was soothing. Finally I said, “You don’t need help with your grammar anymore,” and he bent his head in his hands and said nothing for a while. I talked to him while he sat there—about what, I couldn’t be sure.
I felt fine and certain and serene because I hadn’t completely failed him; he’d drawn on our memories to come back to me. I’d understand it all later, somehow, and he’d understand that no one had meant for him to hate the family, to disappear out of shame and betrayal. “I still love you,” I repeated.
He got up, carefully ran his hands over the cast that covered my right leg from hip to ankle, then kissed me on the mouth. His breath was warm, as if he were real. “I still love you, too,” he said. “And when you see me again I’ll prove it.”
I insisted on attending Terri’s funeral. Mama and Daddy gathered the family from Jacksonville hotels. We arrived at the cemetery in a caravan of rental cars, under an overcast Florida sky that pushed heavy, ocean-scented air down on us, and my father rolled me in my wheelchair across the grassy grounds with a wedge of my relatives around me.
“Oh, my God,” I said groggily. The crowd at the graveside service numbered at least a thousand people. Picket signs rose around the edge of the throng like strange flowers.
MALE GOVERNMENT EQUALS DEAD WOMEN
GUNS KILL—TELL THE NRA
WOMEN OF COLOR ARE THE REAL VICTIMS
FIGHT FOR ANTI-VIOLENCE EDUCATION IN OUR SCHOOLS
The Jacksonville police were directing traffic. A news helicopter hovered overhead. Camera crews from several Florida television stations prowled the scene; a reporter spotted me and headed my way at a trot. A couple of cops recognized me and opened a path.
Aunt Jane, sparrowlike and still peeping, asked loudly, “Is this a funeral service or a political convention?”
A minister’s voice boomed some sort of preliminary welcome over speakers set up at the periphery of a huge mortuary tent. The advancing camera crew tried to push past my brothers, who blocked them, Josh in front. “Claire, it’s Mark Creeson from Channel Three! Just give me ten seconds on tape!”
“Keep that television man away,” Mama hissed. Daddy stopped my chair and stepped in front of me. Violet and Rebecca flanked me on either side. Grandma Dottie clutched my shoulders from behind. I began to tremble. Sweat trickled down my face, over bruises and into the raw cuts that speckled across my cheeks. My cast-encased leg, propped straight out in front of me on a wheelchair foot-rest, began to throb. Groups of curious people curled away from the gravesite and pushed up to the human barricade of my family. Strangers craned their heads to peer at me. “Can I have your autograph?” a woman yelled.
“I have to get out of here,” I said. “This isn’t for Terri. This is a circus and I’m responsible for it.??
?
“We’re trapped,” my cousin Rebecca moaned.
Two burly men in dark suits pushed through the family. Daddy confronted them with an icy, bulldog look on his face. “We’re here to help, Mr. Maloney,” one of them said politely. “We’ll clear the way back to your car.”
“Who the hell are you?” Daddy thundered.
“Personal security. Hired by a friend.”
“A friend of who?”
“Your daughter, sir.”
I heard all this dimly, because I felt faint. What friend? I thought vaguely as my family and I reversed direction and the two security men plowed through the crowd without the least diplomacy. Hop and Evan lifted me into the backseat of a car. The security men disappeared before I could ask who’d sent them.
I felt that if I could just unravel the confusion and remember who I was, I wouldn’t lose my mind.
“I’d like to go home,” I said.
So I came home to the blue-green mountains, the family, the farm, the big, rambling house where generations of Maloneys had thrived, surrounded by the constant activity of family events and family business—farmhands who tromped in and out of the kitchen as they had when I was a girl, plus dozens of people who called or visited Josh, because as a state senator he represented ten mountain counties. There was also a daily stream of locals conferring with Daddy, who had been elected county commissioner after he turned the poultry business over to Josh, and flocks of women involved in Mama’s various art societies and charity projects. Josh’s daughter, Amanda, lived with my folks because Josh traveled so much. She became my constant companion.
So there I was, helpless, gawked at every time I crept out in a wheelchair. I was the only nonmoving part of a well-oiled machine.
I’d left for college when I was seventeen, vowing I’d never live in Dunderry again. My father had had his heart attack a year later and I couldn’t bear to stay away, so I returned for a summer. My mother took antidepressants for a year after I moved to Florida after college. I came home when Josh’s wife died after giving birth to Amanda; I came home when Grandma Dottie fell and fractured a hip; and when Grandpa died. But I made certain everyone understood that it took birth, death, and illness to force me back into the fold each time.
Finally, now, I’d broken the cycle by contributing to it.
Mama put me in Roan’s old bedroom because it was on the main floor and near the kitchen. Hop and Evan hung one of those trapezelike bars over the hospital bed Daddy rented and another from the ceiling of the bathroom shower. I could ask for anything and be pampered without question. I called for help using an air horn Aunt Irene brought me.
As spring unfolded, I hid as well as I could on the veranda or at windows, drinking in the sights, seeing everything with mystical clarity, pushing guilt and anger down under layers of familiarity.
I wanted to forget who I’d been before the accident. I wanted to stamp out the driven, ambitious, reckless woman who risked other people’s lives. I wanted to subdue the Claire who’d treated newspaper work like games of intrigue, snooping into the private problems of others, bribing, charming, and manipulating my way into confidential relationships. I’d been the kind of reporter who put on a tight, low-cut black dress and sneaked into the governor’s inaugural ball, where I danced provocatively with one of the governor’s fresh-faced junior aides. I let him ogle my cleavage while I asked him whether the governor had taken campaign contributions from several developers who opposed a network of community centers for the homeless.
The aide was such a political babe-in-the-woods that he assumed he was answering questions off the record. He also assumed he’d get laid that night. I didn’t hang around the party to honor either assumption.
So I got the story and won another press association award. The aide got fired. A lot of heads deserved to roll in the governor’s administration, but that nice, harmless guy was the last person I should have used to swing the hatchet.
In short, I now wanted to erase the Claire who hadn’t always made the kindest, wisest choices. Who couldn’t be trusted with the care and protection of her sources. The Claire who was still so caught up in childhood fantasies and nightmares that she had hallucinated a detailed conversation with a man who had been driven away because of her reckless efforts twenty years earlier. I kept trying—hopelessly—to remember everything Roan had said that night at the hospital and everything I had said in return.
As if he had been real. But Roan, unlike me, would never find his way home again.
Renfrew still worked for my folks and so did Nat Fortner; the whole, broad clan still gathered for Sunday dinners; much had changed, but much had only ripened.
The roads into town still passed old farmhouses with red-streaked tin roofs, pastures and barns with the land molded so intimately around them that deep footpaths and dirt driveways were natural features rubbed into the hills. Dunderry still wore its old farmsteads like a soft cotton shirt.
Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Rhonda had lost most of their drugstore business to a Super K mart on the interstate fifteen miles away. So they refurbished their grand marble soda fountain, added a gourmet coffee bar, and filled the old pharmacy shelves with tourist geegaws and knickknacks.
Aunt Irene became co-president of the Performing Arts Association along with Mama. They headed a drive to buy and renovate the old Dunderry cinema.
The dime store had become an antiques store. Uncle Eldon moved his hardware store outside of town and expanded it to include a plant nursery and home-decorating center. The old Dunderry Diner now served fried green tomatoes with salsa. And avocado sandwiches. And cheesecake. The county built new administration offices on the edge of town, so the white-columned little courthouse at the center of the square was turned into a welcome center and art gallery. Mama sold some of her pottery there.
The county had voted in a beer-and-wine ordinance after a heated religious war. The Methodists were neutral, the Baptists dead-set against, the Catholics and Episcopalians all for it, and everyone else just hoped they could stop driving to Gainesville to buy a six-pack or a bottle of table wine.
Aunt Jane resigned from the library to open a book-store and tearoom in partnership with Cousin Ruby, in the shop space where Ruby used to sell the best polyester pant-suits in north Georgia.
Rebecca, like Violet, married a nice man and had nice children. She ran a boutique in town called Dunderry Irish Imports, selling Waterford crystal and linens. Tula Tobbler inherited the apple business after her grandfather, Boss, died. Her brother, Alvin, did exactly as she prophesied—he played pro football for almost ten years, for the Dallas Cowboys, before his legs gave out. Tula invested Alvin’s money in Tobbler Apple Treats, opened a shop, started a catalog business, and prospered. When Alvin quit football, he came home and joined the sheriff’s department as a deputy. Two years ago, after Vince retired, Alvin was elected sheriff.
There was now a Historic Preservation Committee in town that squabbled over every inch of ambiance around the square. Rebecca had mistakenly planted pink impatiens in the windowboxes of her shop and an hour later, Aster, who chaired the committee, pulled them all up by the roots. “Red and white is the floral color scheme this season,” she’d told Rebecca. “Didn’t you read the resolution?”
Since then Rebecca has called it the Hysterical Persecution Committee.
The Christmas nativity, with its old log manger and painted-plywood figures, had been replaced each December by a life-size and live tableau, with volunteers dressed in costume, two real sheep and a donkey, and a trio of camels that were trailered over from a Gainesville petting zoo.
Daddy volunteered some llamas the year Aunt Dockey chaired the nativity pageant committee. “There were no llamas in the Holy Land, Holt,” she’d said, fuming.
“Well, the Christ child wasn’t born in a manger on a vacant lot next to Dwayne’s drugstore either,” Daddy had told her.
The merchants’ association had taken control of Dunderry’s Christmas atmosphere. Th
e shop owners decorated with all-white lights, plus all-natural and occasionally edible wreaths and garlands. There would be no more plastic Santas, no fake snow, no silver metallic Christmas trees revolving over blue-and-pink lamps.
Uncle Eugene finally retrieved his cojones and ran off with the secretary at his Ford dealership. Aunt Arnetta survived, and was still a county home economics agent. Carlton went into banking, moved to Virginia, and was arrested last year for embezzlement. Uncle Ralph marshaled some high-priced lawyers up there and got him probation.
Neely Tipton married one of my cousins. I heard that their son hid behind the doors at the elementary school and jerked girls’ hair. He never, however, touched any Maloney or Delaney female.
Uncle Pete died in a hunting accident. His son Harold was killed in a stock-car race at Talladega. Arlan moved to New Orleans and we rarely heard from him. Everyone in the family was relieved about that.
Daisy McClendon and her two remaining sisters had moved to parts unknown not long after Roan ran away and Sally disappeared. There had never been any word about Sally.
The family absorbed all the births, deaths, losses, and scandals the way it always had, with tolerance or shunning, quiet effort and loud brickbats of debate.
But no one ever discussed Roan or Big Roan. At least not in front of me.
• • •
Mr. Cicero, my old editor at the Dunderry Shamrock, came to visit me. He had a face as wrinkled as an accordion, he wore trifocals, and he kept his thin white hair side-combed over a large bald spot. He’d been a wire-service correspondent in Europe during World War II and then a crusading editor of a large Mississippi newspaper during the civil rights era. He proudly showed me a photo of the newspaper’s new offices and one-truck distribution center. He’d mortgaged his house to build it.
The structure resembled a small concrete bunker at a NASA radar station. Mr. Cicero had installed a huge satellite dish on the roof so that he could watch CNN during the day, as if he had to be up-to-the-minute on any world news that directly affected Dunderry. Plus he tracked one of the national wire services on a computer network. His subscriber and advertising base barely paid his bills, but his dreams were global.