A Place to Call Home

  “Let me fly this plane,” I said suddenly. “I’ve had some lessons.”

  “I know.” He glanced at me, one brow arched above the dark glasses. “The charter pilot. You wrote a feature article about him a few years ago. I thought you made him sound more interesting than he probably was. I thought that was interesting. That you went to the trouble.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a good thing I didn’t write about the other men I dated.”

  He sat back and rested his hands on his knees. Startled, I grabbed the control on my side. The plane nose-dived briefly, then I got it leveled. We had to work together—his feet on the rudder pedals, my hands on the steering control. “Watch this,” I said between gritted teeth. I swung low over the town square, then across back streets lined with big, gracious old homes with wide yards. I made two passes just above the elaborate roof of a Victorian. Finally a stout, gray-haired woman strode out into the yard and shook her fist at us.

  “Aunt Arnetta is now officially warned that you’re back,” I noted. When I looked at Roan, he was watching me quietly with a thin smile on his lips. “Did you lose the tooth again?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The tooth that Uncle Cully repaired. Must have lost it. You don’t show any teeth when you smile.”

  Slowly he parted his lips. “All there.”

  My hands trembled. I felt ashamed of the giddy excitement but also addicted to it. He’d done that for me already.

  “You trust me,” he said. “Claire.”

  I guided the Cessna out over the countryside. The tiny air strip appeared on a plateau among hay fields. “Do you trust me?” I asked. “I’ve never landed a plane before. I might get us …”

  “Land it,” he said.

  And I did. Not very well, but he didn’t flinch. When we were racing along the narrow asphalt runway, I turned the controls over to him and he brought the plane to a stop. He let out a long sigh. I was soaked with perspiration and gulping air. “Do you remember my mother’s stories about her Grandma Quenna?”

  He frowned and rubbed a hand over his jaw. Of course he wouldn’t remember. He’d been deluged with Maloney and Delaney stories when he lived with us. I was sorry I had asked the question because I wondered if all those quirky family stories had seemed to exclude him, had made him feel more alone. He tilted his head back and eyed me with quiet affection. “You made a perfect no-chicken landing,” he said.

  So he did remember and in minute detail. He’d kept the faith, whether he’d wanted to or not. “Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Whatever we’re getting into, I have to say something. If you disappear again, don’t come back. You’d break my heart.”

  He put his hands over mine. “That isn’t the option we have to deal with. You may wish I’d never come back or tell me to get the hell out of your life.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He raised his hands and slid them into my hair, a tight grip, his thumbs rubbing heat into my cheekbones. There were tears in his eyes and a lot of them in mine. I’m not sure what we said. Not much, maybe nothing. He didn’t just look at me, he absorbed me, my eyes, my face, my humiliating predicament. And I absorbed him.

  And then, because I still marched to the drumbeat of the old, young, take-no-excuses Claire Maloney we’d both known once, I took a deep breath and choked out sternly, “I ought to skin you alive, boy.”

  He’d rescued me and I’d given him a lecture. He began to laugh. It was just like old times, but not remotely the same.

  He returned me to Dunshinnog to get the farm truck I’d deserted the night before, but the truck was gone. Daddy had probably sent dutiful old Nat to retrieve it, not out of concern for the truck but to make certain Roan had to deliver me to the house in person.

  I stood, still barefooted and dressed in the nightshirt and windbreaker, balanced between my crutches in a sea of lavender-tiered foxgloves shimmering in fresh, pink-tinted sunshine. They swayed heavily in small breezes that curled into the vise between the towering walls of oak and beech, sweet gum and white pine. I told Roan why Grandpa and I had planted them. “He was right,” I finished. “They brought you home.”

  Roan walked among the flowers, bell-shaped blooms brushing his hands, the spires dancing in place as they let him pass, the foxgloves presenting him to me. It was a picture I set down permanently in my mind. He halted in front of me, looking from me to the foxgloves around us and back to me. There was a tortured sweetness between us that no amount of unexplained misery could erase.

  Twenty years. A grown man, a grown woman. No more little-girl innocence, no more big-brotherly resistance. A thousand unanswered questions, but pulsing underneath the shock was an unpolished current, ripe and provocative.

  “Please, kiss me,” he said.

  I leaned forward and kissed the edge of his jaw. I kissed one corner of his mouth. He bent his head. We shared a breath. Very slowly, we came together. First it was gentle, but then it became a frantic welcome, consuming the hot, smooth, liquid world between us.

  He held me by the arms, his head bent to mine. I touched his cheek and he turned his face toward the caress. I pulled my hands into a tight, controlled fist against my chest.

  Suddenly we heard wild rustling noises in a thicket of tall laurel that skirts the forest. Amanda burst out, her red hair tangled with twigs and leaves, a pair of binoculars dangling from a leather strap around her neck. She was dressed in sneakers, overalls, and a T-shirt as pink as her face. She halted at the edge of the meadow a dozen yards from us, her hands rising to her mouth in awed scrutiny. “Aunt Claire, he did come back! I told you he’d come back! Everyone’s waiting to see him! Oh! He’s just perfect!” Then she turned and darted back into the laurel, scrambling down the slope until she disappeared from sight.

  “You told her about me,” Roan said softly. “Your niece? You told her about me. When?”

  “Not long ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she needs to believe in magic.” So much for maintaining control. I turned away from the look in his eyes, desperately. “I think we’ve been ambushed by a fairy,” I said.

  The mountain’s old logging trail comes out on Soap Falls just above the driveway to the farm, and we turned in past the familiar oversize rural mailbox with MALONEY FARM painted on its sides in square white letters. Twenty years after his helpless expulsion, Roan made his face a mask as he guided the sleek gray rental sedan back down the graveled road between wide spring hayfields and acres of corn. A mixed pack of fat farm dogs ran out to meet us, barking and wagging.

  Mama and Daddy waited on the veranda. I hoped Roan saw them as I did—so much older, only human, not the icons of authority they had been in his boyhood. My father was turning into Grandpa, complete with the bald head and lumbering stance of an old bear; my mother was vulnerable in the graciously preserved aura of youth, slender in beige slacks and a gold pullover, her shoulder-length hair tinted in expensive shades of brown and copper, her blue eyes fanned with lines at the corners. Grandma Dottie sat royally ensconced in a white rocking chair, and Roan could surely see that she had become a thin little old lady despite the coy blue leggings she wore and a long Pavarotti T-shirt she’d ordered from the public TV catalog. Smoke curled from the tip of a long, filtered cigarette she’d tucked into one corner of her lipsticked mouth, and her bifocaled eyes were wide with hope.

  Amanda, on the veranda’s broad stone steps, swayed from one foot to the other as if caught up in the thrall of an inner song. I saw Renfrew peeking from an upstairs window, a tall feather duster clutched under her chin so that she looked like the hairnetted centerpiece of some strange flower arrangement. Nat gaped with gnomish delight from among camellia bushes in the side yard, potbellied in overalls, wisps of his gray-blond hair dancing atop his head in a warm breeze. The visiting cars were gone. My parents had wisely cleared out the rest of the crowd.

  I had no idea what to say or how to handle the reunion. My stomach was tight under my breastbone. Roan sto
pped the car beside a lawn border of old rose shrubs bursting in full red bloom. Before he could open the car door I reached over and stopped him with my hand on his forearm. Below the rolled cuff of his shirtsleeve his muscles were bunched in ropy lines. I believed, at that moment, that he could easily have slammed his fists into a brick wall. “The day my father took you away in the car I stood at a window and watched and cried until I couldn’t breathe,” I said. “With Grandpa holding me up. I don’t need anybody to hold me up this time, and I don’t intend to cry. All you have to do is listen to whatever they say to you, just listen, and don’t forget that I was here then and I’m here now.”

  He said nothing and abruptly got out of the car. I slung my door open before he could reach it and struggled to my feet, hanging on to the door frame and searching Mama’s and Daddy’s faces. They had the dumbstruck look of old grief and awkward concern; it was a painfully humiliating confrontation for all concerned. My horror was that no one would say a word, that this was beyond words.

  Roan took my crutches from the backseat and helped me get situated on them, closed the door, and then stepped ahead of me and halted. He stood stiffly, as my parents did, not speaking, his head up, his hands hanging by his sides.

  Everyone studied him as if he’d emerged from a cloud of sulfurous smoke. And at me, in my nightshirt and barefooted, hair tangled madly, as if I’d been rolled in strange dough.

  Daddy held up his hands and walked down the veranda steps to us. Mama followed him hurriedly. “Your mother and I can’t tell you what to do,” he said to me. “But we can tell you there’s no reason for you to take sides. Roan’s welcome in this house. You hear me, Roan? That’s the truth.”

  Roan inclined his head slightly, accepting and rejecting.

  Mama said, “Claire needs peace and quiet and rest. I’m not sure you understand that.”

  “You think the worst,” Roan countered.

  “No, Roan. No.” Her face was pale. Her eyes glittered. “You think what you want, Roan. I don’t blame you. If you’re even half as honorable as the boy we were stupid enough to send away, you don’t need to explain a thing to me or anyone else.”

  “I came here to do what I can for Claire. I’ll help her any way she’ll let me. I don’t expect anything from anyone else.”

  “We have faith. I will say it, and say it, and say it—everything I should have said when you were a boy. I’ll say it until you believe it. You’re welcome here. You still have a home in this community and people who never meant to lose you.”

  “That’s really not important to me now.” Roan turned to me. “I have work to do at Ten Jumps. Plans to make. So you know where I’ll be.”

  “Don’t leave like this. Come inside,” I said frantically. “I thought you meant to.”

  “Yes, please, please come in the house,” Mama added urgently. “Talk to us. Tell us about yourself.”

  Roan straightened. “It’s not that simple.”

  Daddy put in brusquely, “Ten Jumps doesn’t have much to offer. There’s plenty of room for you here. I mean that. It’s a sorry invitation, yes, it sounds that way. Pushed out as a needy boy and then asked back as a fine, upstanding houseguest? But listen to me, Roan. We did what we thought was right then. It wasn’t meant to be the end of you with this family.”

  “This”—Roan swept my folks, the house, the valley, Dunshinnog, the whole farm with a burning look that settled finally on me—“was everything I cared about. I still care. But on different terms. My terms.”

  “This is how you’re going to handle it?” I asked, stunned. I gaped at him. I wanted to shake him. “Don’t set terms. People get ruined by setting their own fucking inflexible terms.”

  Anger and frustration colored the mood far darker than the obscenity had; as soon as I said it he touched my face with the tips of his fingers, scalded me with a look that said I’d betrayed him by not understanding, then walked back to his car.

  Suddenly I saw myself the way he must be seeing me for the first time—clearly, in bright, brutal sunlight—my need for family, the incontrovertible evidence that I was a willing part of people who’d hurt him.

  Blind with fury and confusion that rose up within me like a tidal wave, pushing me against my will, I stumbled after him. “It’s not a choice! You’re part of us! You are still part of this family whether you like it or not! You have to be willing to forgive them!” I reached the row of raised stepping-stones that bisected the front yard. The tips of my crutches caught and I tumbled hard.

  On Dunshinnog the night before, then nearly falling at Ten Jumps, and now this. I wanted to sink into the flat fieldstone beneath me, taking every gulp for breath, every aching joint and furious thought of helpless disgrace with me. I heard Mama’s gasp, I heard her and Daddy running toward me.

  Roan was beside me, kneeling. “Easy, easy,” he said. He took me by the shoulders.

  “Don’t touch me. I told you I don’t need anyone to hold me up. Not even you. I won’t be caught in the middle again. This is stupid. You’ve come home. You didn’t make that effort without good reason. You can’t turn it into a standoff now.”

  “Holt, stay back. Let them—” Mama said tearfully.

  “I’m lettin’ ’em. But this isn’t very good for her. This isn’t helping. Roan, dammit, you traipse her around the countryside and bring her home like a rag doll—”

  “Holt!”

  My father went silent. Roan said, “Look at me.”

  I tested the inside of my lips, worked my jaw, then raised my head and gave him a level, brutally honest stare. “I can’t chase you,” I said.

  He gave me the most unwavering scrutiny, heartbreaking and mesmerizing. He lifted a devastatingly familiar hand, big-knuckled, with strong fingers, and gently brushed my tangled hair from my eyes. “You have to try,” he said. “If I don’t make you try you’ll keep sitting here like a goddamned invalid.” I shivered. His accent had boiled down to smooth, dark amber tones. “I remember a girl who never let me hide unless she was with me, to make certain I was all right,” he went on, tearing me apart. He slowly slid his arms around me and pulled me to him. I stiffened more inside his embrace.

  He bent his head next to mine. “How many times did you see me in trouble, and filthy, and hurt, and alone?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Do you want to be helpless?”

  “No.”

  “Then get up. You can do it.”

  I gripped his hands. My legs felt like a lead weight under me. I struggled. Sweating, breathing hard, my eyes never leaving his, I wavered on my knees, got one bare foot under me, and swayed desperately. My nightshirt tangled between my thighs. Roan’s grip tightened on my hands, I felt his calluses, his thick, gentle fingers sliding down to my wrists. He clamped firmly and pulled. I shoved myself upward with every ounce of strength.

  I stood. I stood. No crutches, wobbling, light-headed, my teeth gritted, but I stood. Some unspeakable devotion and challenge moved between us. “I want those letters you wrote to me,” I said. “I want you to bring them here right now and sit with me while I read them. All of them.”

  He arched a brow. “If you want the letters you’ll have to come to Ten Jumps.”

  I stared at him. He wouldn’t give an inch. Amanda bolted to us. “Ask him to stay and visit! Ask him, Aunt Claire!”

  “He’s been asked, sweetie.” I braced my knees. “He understands that I don’t move around very well. He’ll come back to sit with me and visit.”

  Roan smiled thinly at my ploy, but he bent to my niece with gentle regard. That subtle but stunning shift had an effect on all of us. I know it nearly broke me. “Has your aunt ever told you how to sugar people?” he asked Amanda.

  For a second she clamped her hands to her mouth, too overwhelmed to answer him. The legendary Roan Sullivan, cool and powerful—he not only deigned to notice her, he did it with great charm and kindness. “Yes, sir,” she said in a small voice. “She says tell ’em what they want to hear
and they’ll eat right out of your hand.”

  “Yellow jackets used to light on her hands,” he murmured. “She was scared, but she’d never admit it.”

  “Because she sugared ’em,” Amanda whispered back.

  He nodded. “I think she’s practicing to sugar yellow jackets again. You keep an eye on her and let me know.”

  “Oh! I will!”

  Roan looked at me. “I’ll be nearby. You can find me if you want to.”

  “That’s something new, anyway,” I said. “Being able to find you.”

  Watching him drive away was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Behind me, my parents said nothing, individually or in unison, and when I turned to them they looked shaken but resolute.

  “We’ll work on him,” Daddy said.

  “He expects too much from you,” Mama said, “and not enough from us.”

  “He thinks you’re sweet.” Amanda sighed. “He thinks you’re full of sugar.”

  She’d missed his point, thank God.

  Turned thirty this year, Claire, and put my first million in the bank. What would you think of that? I think you’d expect it. Money is power. I hope you’d be proud. I’m writing this on fine linen stationery. Twenty-five dollars for a little box. I use it to write thank-you notes for the parties they invite me to. Big business. Big parties. Money. Land. Opportunity. Women …

  The women. I hope to tell you about them someday. Whatever you want to know. You’ll tell me about the men you’ve been with. And then we won’t talk about that part of our past again, either of us, because it was only loneliness and plain human need.

  I’m learning to play golf. Picture that! It’s a ritual, Claire. A way of fitting in. I learned about rituals with your family. You play a certain way, you fit in. You don’t play, you don’t fit. Human nature, I guess.

  Golf’s a sucker’s game. It looks easy but winning is hidden in the fine points. I respect that, don’t get me wrong. I like the game. It’s precise. But my God. Me dressed in golf shirts and khakis and shoes with cleats. Spending thousands of dollars to play a game. I look at it as a business investment. Everything is business to me. I’d put on a goddamned monkey suit if that’s what it took to make deals with the other monkeys.…