Strange stuff, these letters. I talk to you on paper and lock the letters in a box. Nobody who knows me now would believe I do anything this sentimental. But then they don’t really know me. What a damned waste. Twenty-five dollars for writing paper.
But I would write to you on pure gold if I could.
I was barely able to move for several days. The knee and ankle of my healing leg swelled, were hot to the touch; every muscle in my body punished me for sleeping on the air mattress at Ten Jumps, for falling twice in less than one day, for standing on the leg too much. Emotionally, I felt as I once had when I was assigned to cover a hurricane in Florida. Scared, excited, and holding on as hard as I could in high winds.
“Roan’s come back for revenge,” some in the family said.
“He deserves to take revenge on us,” others replied.
Lurid, uneasily recalled stories resurfaced in the family and among the oldest friends—about Big Roan and Jenny, the Hollow, Roan and the McClendon sisters at Steckem Road, Uncle Pete and Sally, Roan and my family, Roan and me. People sorted rumors and tidbits of truth about us as they lounged on their front verandas in the rose-scented spring air, and over their morning biscuits and cream gravy at the diners, and in the shops and the fields and the offices. And I heard that Roan had made his money in drugs or in gambling; I heard he planned to build a public park and dedicate it to his mother and that he had bought Ten Jumps to develop condominiums, apartments, industrial warehouses, a shopping mall, or a horse farm.
I heard he had taken me away from Dunshinnog against my will the first night, that he had offered me a lot of money to leave town with him, that Mama and Daddy wouldn’t let him set foot on the farm, that my brothers had threatened him if he tried to see me, and that his homecoming had caused me to have a nervous breakdown, which was why I was pale and nearly sleepless and had kept to myself since Roan returned.
The gossip was as good as any story I’d ever written.
During my newspaper career I’d picked through countless strangers’ lives, presenting their heartaches and hopes and failures for other strangers to read. Journalism is a noble but cruel right in a free society. I’ll always defend the principles behind it, but theory doesn’t sink in like the reality of knowing your own life is the object of rabid scrutiny. I wanted to spare Roan all the lies and speculation that swirled around me.
And I wanted to make him come to me because I was furious and hurt. For twenty years he’d let me suffer, worry, and hunt for him while he watched me neatly from a distance. He owed me explanations.
Josh arrived from the legislative session in Atlanta, where he leased an apartment in a downtown high-rise. Brady came, and Hop and Evan. The family gathered in the living room one evening after Amanda was in bed. Josh said brusquely, in the strange way he had of turning other people’s misery into his own problem, “I can understand how a person can search for someone he cares about and not forget the loyalty and not give up, but Roan’s always known where you were. Why did it take him twenty years to come back?”
That was the excruciating question on everyone’s mind.
I felt my face growing hot. “I don’t know.”
Josh pursed his mouth. “He wants to prove a point to the family. He could have contacted you—a phone call, a letter. What stopped him? Instead he spies on your life, and when you’re vulnerable, he bulldozes his way back in. Just when you’ve come home, when you’re getting settled. Because alienating you from the family again would be the ultimate payback. I understand how he might have worried about a reunion—always wondering if you’d want to see him, if he’d done the wrong thing when he left here as a kid—but on the other hand, you may just be some kind of trophy to him, sis.”
“Not much of a trophy,” I said wearily.
“He came to see you at the hospital but waited two more months to see you again. I think you’re hurt and mad as hell about that, and I think you want answers he won’t give. Tell me what you think he wants from you and the family, sis, since nobody else has been forcing you to consider the issue.”
“I don’t know yet.”
Josh leaned forward, his ruddy hands on his finely trousered knees. His general intensity bordered on rabid determination at times. It was as if he were always after something. He would have made a good reporter. “I’m not trying to cause trouble for him,” Josh went on, “but I know too many men who’ve clawed their way out of the gutter by means they won’t admit, and their biggest ambition is to punish all the people who kicked them when they were down. It’s standard philosophy in politics, and not much different elsewhere: Help your allies, hurt your enemies; compromise to get what you want, and never admit your true intentions.”
Daddy scowled. Mama drew up tightly. “Son,” she said in a low, even gentle voice, “you should spend less time with politicians and more with decent human beings. I think you see ugly motives and conspiracies behind every rock.”
This interrupted the flow of conversation temporarily as everyone waited for the angry moment to fade.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Brady said finally. “Maybe Roan’s interested in the investment opportunities around town. I could talk to him about that.”
“Brady, for God’s sake,” Evan retorted. “Have you got a dollar sign tattooed on your—”
“Roan has no reason to give any of us so much as the time of day,” Hop put in gruffly. “But I can’t believe he’s come back to cause trouble. I believe he’s got Claire’s interests at heart.”
“I go along with that,” Evan added, stroking his beard.
I listened dimly as the family launched into a discussion of the situation, my brothers and father arguing my business like a clan of old-world patriarchs, and on a stronger day in my life I’d have accepted it politely from my father, as was his due, then rounded up my brothers in private and scorched the piss out of them with a few choice words. But I had no strength for small battles.
“One thing’s clear—Roan’s never let go of Claire any more than she’s let go of him,” Mama concluded.
I limped outside to the veranda and sat in a rocking chair with the first fireflies of the season blinking yellow around me, gazing toward the Hollow and Ten Jumps, separate from everyone and alone.
I watched Dunshinnog for the lure of another light. There wasn’t any. I was almost relieved. He expected me to follow him everywhere, just as I had when we were kids. Away from the family this time, away from home, never resolving the betrayals and regrets on either side. I was afraid he’d ask me to leave with him.
And that he already suspected that sooner or later I’d go.
Claire, I’m very aware of what I was. That’s why I try to make a strong impression on people. A certain one. There can’t be any doubt they’re dealing with someone to take seriously.
When I was a kid, you were the only one who looked at me without seeing only what I came from.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how your parents treated you and your brothers. The teaching, the discipline, the respect. I try to decide how to do it the way they did. Or how your Grandpa Joe would. Strange thing, Claire. I try to see the world the way they did, to learn from them. I learned more than I thought.
I’m trying to pass it along to my boy.
He bought a box of Earl Grey and a box of English Breakfast tea from me,” Aunt Jane relayed to Mama and the other sisters during a Saturday brunch in the dining room of Hawks Ridge Country Club, Brady’s golf-community development about ten miles south of town. Hop and Evan are two of the main residential contractors for the development, building half-million-dollar homes on lots barely wide enough to mow the sodded grass. There are no more hawks around Hawks Ridge now, and the ridges have been scraped clear of trees, and neither my mother nor any of her sisters play golf, but these ironies paled in comparison to Roan buying tea from a member of the family. “He was very polite but not very talkative,” Aunt Jane confided. “Still, I consider it a fine sign that he rememb
ers me so kindly. I believe I was one of his favorite people.”
“Good lord,” Aunt Irene retorted. “I was the one he’d ask for extra helpings at Sunday dinners. And he sure didn’t speak to anybody else at those dinners.”
“Y’all are worse than Arnetta,” Mama told them. “She’s insisting that she tried to talk Holt and me out of sending Roan to the church home. That’s not how I remember it. God forgive us all.”
“Our memories are kinder to us than the truth is,” Aunt Jane admitted wistfully. “I suppose all he wanted was to buy some tea.” There was considerable silence at the table after that.
I soon realized that Roan didn’t really need anyone’s good references, including mine.
He brought in his own crew to renovate the cabin at Ten Jumps. Uncle Eldon told us about it the day he sold the crew’s foreman a tractor-trailer load of lumber, plumbing, electrical supplies, nails, screws, concrete mix, and assorted other necessities.
Then Uncle Winston, who had purchased a motel franchise in town, where the crew had taken rooms, reported that Roan and the dozen men were working day and night at Ten Jumps. “They got a couple of big electrical generators,” Winston told us, “and enough high-powered lights to hold a football game. You look west over the trees late at night, you can see the glow.”
He was right. I sat outside on the veranda, with a huge gathering of family, and looked that night. The horizon over Ten Jumps was bright.
The crew immediately cleared, scraped, and graveled the dirt road that led to the lake and cabin, then built a pair of stacked-stone columns where the dirt road ended at the paved public road and hung an elaborate, stately set of black iron gates. Everyone was flabbergasted. “I don’t know what to think about that gate,” my father said to me angrily. “Roan’s thumbing his nose at us. What are you going to do about it?”
“What are you going to do about him?” Mama added more specifically. “Because he’s not coming back over here. That’s obvious.”
“If I go I’m afraid I’ll lose something,” I said, shaking my head at my own vagueness. “I’m afraid he’ll make me choose sides and that it’ll be forever. And I don’t know which side I’d pick. I don’t want him to ask me to choose.”
My parents stared at me, unsettled by that honest information.
“Make up your mind quick,” Daddy insisted. “Before he starts building a fort around his place.”
Mama came to me in private later. She said she had missed so much of my “young womanhood,” because I went away to college and stayed so busy—we both knew the truth, that I’d rejected her and Daddy as soon as I was old enough to leave home—but she told me how much she’d missed all the mother-daughter part of that time and I admitted I’d missed sharing it, too. She brightened immediately and got straight to the point. “I never even knew when you had sex the first time,” she said. “I assume you’ve had sex.”
I stared at her. My face grew warm. “Yes,” I managed to say.
“My point is, I’m aware you’re in an awkward circumstance, living at home, a grown woman. If you want to buy some birth control … just go ahead and don’t feel you have to sneak around. I’ll get it for you.” She paused. “Of course, we’re not going to tell your daddy about it.”
I wanted to laugh at her, but I also wanted to slip down low and hug her around the waist with my head on her breasts. To be small again and give us both a second chance at those years we’d missed.
I took her hand. “I don’t intend to have sex with Roan anytime soon, if at all. But thanks. I love you.”
She thought for a minute. “I expect he’ll supply his own, but I’ll get you some condoms just in case,” she announced.
I dreamed at night of faceless women who danced naked, and cats who slept on hard pillows, and other more blatant symbols that included myself, and Roan, and made me forget that my leg ached when I moved.
Food. Of course. Like the old days. I would send him food.
I enlisted Hop and Evan, Uncle Winston, and some of the cousins to take it to him. With the assistance of Mama, Renfrew, and various aunts and cousins, we put together boxes and ice chests filled with enough food to feed him and an entire army of construction workers for several days. Food is a primitive gesture of welcome; food is apology; food is a sacrament. There is more generosity in pies and casseroles than in a thousand pious words. We knew those facts by heart; I hoped he remembered.
I went through some of the storage boxes from my apartment in Florida. I found the large paperbound road atlas, one of those oversize, colorful editions with each state’s map on a separate page. The pages were worn and curling at the corners; the major cities and towns of each state had black lines drawn through them.
I wrapped the atlas in tissue paper and enclosed a note:
It took me a lot of years and who-knows-how-much money in phone bills, but every black line represents a place where I called Information and asked for the telephone number of Roan Sullivan. I called each one. It was never you. Is it you now?
“What did he say?” I asked after my stocky, placid brothers returned from delivering the food. We sat in the living room with Hop’s kids watching a cartoon video in the corner near the piano. “He looked pleased, I guess,” Hop said, frowning. “You know something? I remember his stare when he was a boy, and he’s got that look honed to a hard edge. He’s got that Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry thing goin’ when he levels a look at you, and you can’t tell if he’s likely to smile or take you by the throat. I told him he shouldn’t have brought in outsiders, that me and Evan would have sent a crew, but he just shrugged. If he hadn’t shook our hands I’d have been a little antsy. Him and that crew’re working like they got no time to spit. You ought to see what he’s done with the place in a week’s time.”
“That’s what Roan said,” Evan interjected. “ ‘Tell her to come see for herself. I wanted a nice spot for us to get to know each other again. It’s almost ready. She can come anytime.’ ” He nodded fervently. “After he looked at that package you sent with the food, he got a funny expression on his face. You hit him somewhere soft, sis. He gave me something to bring back. That’s a start.” Evan presented me with a large, bulky manila envelope.
I laid it on my lap, ripped the envelope quickly, and pulled out a half-inch-thick portfolio bound in leather.
I hurriedly scanned the handsomely printed columns and lists on the pages inside the binder, cupping one hand to my throat as I did. I saw an address in Seattle. On the other side of the country. Seattle, of all places. Why there? Hop and Evan peered blatantly over my shoulders.
Land. Houses. Apartments. Warehouses. Buying. Selling. Leasing. Several states, several cities. Good lord, I was stunned by the enormity of it, set down on paper. He was proud of himself, but this ambition was part of a bigger mystery that had kept him away for two decades.
“Good lord,” Hop breathed. “This is some kind of prospectus on his property holdings and investments.”
Evan exhaled loudly. “He’s telling you what he’s worth, baby sister. And he’s worth a fortune.”
Roan had also sent a note. Written on pale gray stationery, it said:
Your Grandpa Joe told me once that he and your grandmother traded gifts for six months before she’d see him without a chaperone. He had a bad reputation. She’d send him apple pies and he’d send her flowers. Finally he bought her some records for her Victrola. Classical music. “I don’t recollect what kind of dog howl it was,” he told me, “But it had lots of violins and she went nutty over it and me.”
So here’s a gift in return for the food. In return for the atlas. Now you owe me another gift. You see, I remamber how traditions stick in the family. I never forgot the best. Or the worst.
I think I know what you’re afraid of.
I’m going to get you out of that house, out of your bed, Claire. By God, you’re going to get over here and take care of your own situation. Nobody to blame but me now. I’m real now, not an unlisted phone numbe
r anymore.
I took out the piece of old wood he’d carved with our names. I wrapped it in handsome gift paper, with a bow, and Hop delivered it to Roan with my note:
I don’t want your resume. I don’t want to know how much damned money you have or that you deal in land and houses or that you set up housekeeping on the Pacific. I want to know everything that happened to the boy who cut his name and mine into this board. Until you’ve got the cojones to SHARE THAT BOY WITH ME, nothing else matters.
COME HERE AND BRING YOUR LETTERS.
He didn’t offer any answer at all in response.
I got up at dawn the next day, dressed in my white terry-cloth robe and jogging shoes, went to the sunroom, and stepped very slowly onto a treadmill Violet had sent over after I hit her with the pillow. I had written her a long letter of apology, and she said she had forgiven me, but she wouldn’t risk being walloped again; she told me to walk.
Josh strode into the room; he’d arrived from Atlanta well past midnight in the staid, gray Town Car that said he was prosperous, conservative, and didn’t believe in bucket seats. The click of my oldest brother’s shoes on the sun-room’s rust-red tiles—custom-made for Mama by a potter friend in Mexico—made my nerves pop.
We brusquely exchanged good mornings. He sat in a wingback wicker chair with his coffee cup perched on his knee. He’s built like a barrel with legs; his red hair has receded into a V that sweeps back from his forehead. I call it his Republican mohawk, and when I do, he has enough humor to laugh at himself.
He flicked invisible wrinkles from his white dress shirt and pinstriped pants, adjusted the knot of a silk tie with one hand, and held the coffee cup in the other. He told me he had a full week planned: speeches, meetings, the care and contrivance of his state senate district. He still used his old bedroom at home, plus a second one he had converted to an office. But he was away three weeks out of four, either traveling or attending legislative sessions in Atlanta.