“Roan and I had a lot to talk about,” I answered, which at least proffered a dignified alibi. “And I read some of the letters he wrote to me over the years. There are a lot of them.”
But Mama and Daddy stood there sphinxlike in their bathrobes, both of them obviously struggling to deal with the fact that we were adults who had spent the night together, probably committing acts they didn’t want to imagine. Mama expected it, of course, and was just relieved we hadn’t left town.
Daddy looked unhappy but all he said was, “I’m sure y’all talked up a storm.”
Roan stepped ahead of me, facing them, and I put a hand on his shoulder. “I asked Claire to visit the West Coast with me for a few days,” he said quietly. “Seattle.”
Mama’s face turned white. Daddy thrust out his chin. “Seattle?” he barked. “You’re taking her to your place in Seattle? Why?”
“It’s all right,” I said gently. “Don’t worry. It’s just a trip we need to make.”
“You promised,” Mama reminded me.
“We’ll be back,” I repeated. “And we’ll bring y’all a gift.”
By early afternoon we had flown more than halfway across the country, turning back the clock in more ways than artificial time zones. There’d been little debate about the choice of travel: Roan’s Cessna was out of the question—I wasn’t up to a couple of grueling days spent airport-hopping from coast to coast in a cramped private plane. We flew first class.
My voice was a hoarse croak, and Roan’s deep, faded drawl had the rasp of a too-tightly-strung cello. My leg throbbed from negotiating the cavernous terminal and concourses at the airport in Atlanta. I refused to use a wheelchair.
His mood was brittle. So was mine. At that moment it was hard to believe we’d been in bed together not many hours earlier, as close and intimate as two people can be.
“What’s in the bag?” Roan asked, gesturing toward the heavy zippered canvas tote I’d stuffed under my seat.
I sipped a Bloody Mary and eased my stiff right leg back and forth. “Photo albums and family histories.”
We traded a look—mine firm but apologetic, his resigned. “He’ll be polite about it,” Roan said, “but he really won’t be too interested.”
O ye of little faith, I thought.
We spent that afternoon in Seattle. Actually, in a town just outside Seattle. The town reminded me of Dunderry when we were children: one main street and no stoplights, a lot of pickup trucks, a pretty municipal park with benches. For a few seconds we watched a college-age couple who sat on a blanket in the park. They were dressed in hiking clothes and a pair of backpacks lay beside them. They were absorbed in each other. He played with the tips of her hair; she rubbed the small of his back. It was a peaceful, simple, indelibly erotic scene.
“When we’re here again and have more time,” Roan said, “we’ll sit over there and do the same thing.”
“But we could do it better at Ten Jumps,” I replied. “We wouldn’t have to wear any clothes.”
He eyed me narrowly. I rubbed the small of his back.
I thought there was significance in the town. Roan had chosen a place so similar to home.
Racavan, Inc., was based in a four-room suite in a small brick office building next to a coffeehouse. He introduced me to Bea, his assistant and the manager of the three-secretary staff. She was motherly and efficient and wore a jumpsuit with rhinestone flowers embroidered along the neckline. She was the kind of woman who used snapshots of her grandchildren as a screensaver on her computer. The kind of woman who could manage the paperwork on a portfolio of real estate properties with one hand and bake cookies with the other. She bear-hugged me and gave me a steaming hot mocha latte to sip. “You’re in coffee country now,” she said. She had long ago nicknamed Roan by his initials.
“R.S. warned me about you,” she added cheerfully.
Roan said to me in a dry tone, “I told her you were probably the mysterious businesswoman who called last week pretending to be looking for commercial property. You can’t hide your accent.”
My face turned hot, but I shrugged. “I’m a journalist. When I get a little information, I naturally try to get more. I was just curious about your business. What kind of people work for you. Nothing sinister about that.” For the first time I talked as if I still thought of myself as a reporter.
“R.S. said you wouldn’t be able to resist,” Bea told me.
“He’s too smart for his own good.”
She laughed. “Thank God. That’s what pays the bills around here.”
“Not to change the subject too quickly, but do you know Roan’s … Matthew … very well?” I asked abruptly.
Bea’s brows shot up. “Of course. When he was growing up, he stayed with me whenever R.S. traveled. He and my grandsons are good friends. They played basketball at school together. Matthew was on the debating team, and the soccer team, and in the chorus, and an honor graduate. And he just graduated from the university this spring with honors. And he married the sweetest girl in the world. But you know all that.”
“Of course. But thank you.”
“He’s married?” I said to Roan when we walked outside a minute later. “That wasn’t worth mentioning to me?”
“I had to be at the wedding and the graduation this spring,” Roan answered. “It’s why I couldn’t get back to you sooner. I don’t like to talk about it because it was hard to be torn two ways.”
“You were right to be at his wedding and graduation,” I said quietly. “You’re his family. I understand.”
“I know you do,” Roan said, and put his arms around me.
Roan’s house sat off on a wooded backroad a few minutes’ drive from town. Roan said he bought it when Matthew was twelve or thirteen, before the big money started to come in, and so the house wasn’t anything grand, but it had been home to them for the past ten years. It was a handsome cedar two-story, refurbished with copper trim and fine stonework and a few acres of shady, hilly, landscaped land filled with tall fir trees and floored with ferns and vines. The setting had a cool, misty, Pacific rain-forest atmosphere. A stone-and-board fence bordered a winding cobbled driveway.
“Hearty,” I said, looking appreciatively at iron pots filled with flowers on the wooden floor of the front porch. “It’s a good, hearty house with a basketball hoop over the garage. I like it.”
“You might like living here,” Roan said as we entered a hallway done in heavy woods and tapestry wall hangings. He moved fast and deliberately inside his own territories. I had noticed that already at the office, and he did it at the house, bounding into a large, vaulted den off the hall, turning on heavy brass and copper lamps, adjusting the thermostat on a wall covered in a huge, framed topographical map of the coastal states.
I limped into the den uneasily, using my cane. “I’d enjoy staying here when we’re visiting Seattle.”
We looked at each other sadly and the subject died.
But I picked up some good details about him that day. He drove a late-model black Suburban with a CD player that had only one CD in it, a reissue of an old Creedence Clearwater Revival album. The radio was set on an all-news station. The Suburban was immaculate except for cigar ashes scattered here and there, but stuck on the dash was a dogeared, sun-faded decal of Donald Duck that looked as if it had been peeled off a series of dashboards over the years.
“Matthew got it when I took him to Disneyland a long time ago,” Roan explained with a casual flick at the decal’s frayed edges. “I keep meaning to throw it away.”
I nodded, my throat aching. “I’m sure you do,” I said gently.
Roan cherished a supply of hand-rolled cigars he kept in a slender wooden humidor on his bedroom dresser. The bedroom was hearty, too—big furniture and bold colors—and it overlooked a rock garden and a pond with a simple fountain. When he opened the windows the water sounds made a soothing melody.
In his large closets there were fine suits and shoes and several bags of golf clubs, but a
lso a row of unpolished western boots so lovingly worn that they sagged at the heels and curled up at the toes. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with novels and reference books, and in an alcove off the bedroom he had a computer, a printer, a fax machine, and a copier, all crowded on a large antique oak desk.
“Sleep. Work. Work. Sleep,” I joked softly, pointing from the office alcove to the bedroom. It was late afternoon by then. I was exhausted and frazzled. Roan looked tired, too. I took his hand. “We’ve got a long flight tomorrow. What would you rather do? Work or sleep?”
He picked me up. “You know what I’d rather do right now.”
“Smart man,” I said. We went to bed.
We lay spooned together in the pearl-soft shadows that night, Roan curled against my back and hips, his left arm under my head like a pillow, his right one around me, me holding his hands in mine, against my breasts, our fingers twined tightly. Trembling, sweet, satiated. There had been moments when we got past everything and found the children inside us, playing gently, knowingly, with each other, in awe of the new entertainment.
He flexed against me; I flexed back. I felt him harden and relax. His bare chest was damp against my bare back; he sighed, unloosened his hands from mine, and stroked them over me. I had the taste of him in my mouth, and my scent was on his hands.
“I watched you sleep once when we were kids,” I whispered. “Not long after you came to live at the house, I slipped into your room one night and watched you sleep.”
He rose on one elbow, over me, and smoothed the hair from my forehead. “I knew you were there, and it scared the hell out of me.”
“Why?”
“Because you were a little girl and I was five years older. Everything female made me uncomfortable. It felt provocative and dangerous.”
“I was too young to know how a teenage boy automatically responds. I’m sorry.”
“I’d rather have died than be like that around you.”
I squeezed his hands. “You were my best friend. You were my love. It had nothing to do with physical ages.”
“I’d never have touched you when we were kids. I wouldn’t even let myself think about you that way.”
“I know that. That night I thought: He hogs the covers. He sleeps in the middle of the bed. When we’re grown-up and sleep together like Mama and Daddy, he’ll squash me.” I laughed. “That was how I watched you sleep. For practical purposes.”
Roan gripped my chin in his hand, made a guttural sound low in his throat, then rolled away from me. I turned over and watched him retrieve his robe from the end of the mattress.
He flung the robe around his shoulders, then walked to the open windows and stood with his hands by his sides, silhouetted by a half-moon. I sat up in bed with my hands knotted in the jumbled sheets. “What worries you so much?” I asked.
“I don’t want Matthew to visit the family,” he admitted bluntly. “It’s not going to be good for anybody.”
I sighed. He wouldn’t relax. Everything was going to be fine. “But you won’t interfere while I sugar him,” I teased carefully. “Will you?”
“I’ll try to keep quiet,” he said. “Anyway, I think you’ll change your mind once you meet him.”
No, I won’t, I thought, but simply called him back to bed.
Never let it be said that I don’t try to make calculated first impressions on people. Plain brown loafers for practicality and intellect, a calf-length black-denim skirt to hide the funky leg and give me the essence of casual elegance, a delicately patterned green sweater to give the illusion of, well, delicacy, and an ugly yellow rain slicker with a Seattle logo, which I purchased in a shop at the Seattle airport before we boarded our Alaska Air flight, because apparently it rarely stopped drizzling in either Seattle or Alaska year-round.
Roan, in creased khakis, a blue chambray shirt, hiking boots, and a brown leather aviator jacket, looked like a darkly rugged individualist who belonged in the Pacific Northwest. I looked like a rejected model for a Seattle Chamber of Commerce ad.
“I’m so nervous I feel sick,” I said.
“You’re perfect. Matthew will be impressed,” Roan answered.
“Impressed and won over?”
“No. Just impressed.”
“I’m his cousin, Roan. We’ll be okay with each other.”
“You’re a meddling stranger to him, peep.”
I chewed my tongue for a moment. “Well, I’m obviously successful at meddling.” And I looked at Roan pointedly. “I got you back, didn’t I?”
• • •
The Alaskan mountains were huge, wild, snowcapped monuments compared to the comfortable old blue-green ranges where we were born. Below the descending jet, the ocean channels looked deep and far more frigid than any Georgia waters. I decided Alaska was a state of extremes. What had Roan taught my cousin Matthew? Independence, strength, confidence, a spirit of adventure? Or Roan’s own isolation?
I expected Juneau to be a full-fledged city because it is the state capital, but from the air I saw no skyscrapers, no expressways, just the patchwork of a sprawling, unassuming town clustered between mountains and water at the edge of the continent. We’re not all that far from Russia, I thought, or the Arctic Circle.
Roan held my hand as the small jet landed smoothly across the channel from Juneau. The sun was out; steam rose from the runway. I strained my eyes as the jet taxied toward a small terminal building, searching the handful of people beyond the metal barricades. Roan leaned over, looking along with me. “Don’t point him out,” I ordered, my heart in my throat. “Let me see if I can recognize him.”
But the jet nosed into a berth on the tarmac that angled away from the waiting area. Frustrated and nervous, I watched Roan get up and retrieve our bags from the overhead compartment. “No gate ramp,” he said brusquely, his tone distracted as he jerked the bags free. “Let me go ahead of you down the stairway. Take your time. I won’t let you fall. Let’s wait until the other passengers get off. Don’t try to rush.”
“Do I seem that frantic?” He glanced at me over the Seattle tote bag he held in his arms. I realized I was tapping both hands on my legs and jiggling one foot. “Never mind,” I said.
We waited. When we stood at the top of the stairs, outside in the brisk, damp air glistening with cool sunlight, I was able to look across at the waiting area. “The young guy like a bodybuilder,” I said. “With the brown hair. That’s Delaney brown hair. That’s Matthew.”
“One step at a time,” Roan said tensely. A flight attendant carried the hand luggage down for us. Roan moved in front of me, patiently, holding my cane for me. I braced one hand on his outstretched arm and clutched the staircase rail on my bad side, peering over him, searching. I tripped on the last step and Roan caught me quickly, cursing under his breath. Unconcerned, I held on to his shoulders and continued gazing past him.
A tall, lanky young man with sandy hair strode purposefully across the tarmac. He was dressed in dark gray trousers, a plaid shirt, a blue cardigan, and hiking boots. Hurrying beside him was a short, plump, sweet-faced young woman in nearly identical clothes. Her dark blond hair flew back from her face like loose wheat straw. She took two light steps to each of his long ones. The pair looked wholesome and ruddy. Pioneers. The last of the fair-haired pioneers lived in Alaska.
I craned my head to look past the couple, still hunting for Delaney hair. He, however, had disappeared with his arms around two of our fellow passengers.
I frowned. Roan put an arm around me, and we faced the advancing pair. My bewildered gaze settled on them, their somber faces riveted to Roan and me, and I stared at the young man. He walked up to us without hesitation, his green eyes shifting defiantly from me to Roan and back to me. He towered over me, but was maybe an inch shorter than Roan. Then he smiled.
For once in my life, I was speechless. Matthew. The baby surrounded by violence and ludicrous Easter charity at Steckem Road. Denied by my uncle, orphaned by his mother, abandoned by his McClendon aunts. B
ut because of Roan—and only because of Roan—he’d grown up healthy, successful, and forthright.
He thrust out a brawny, capable hand. It trembled. Beside him, his wife clasped her hands to her smile and began to cry silently. Roan’s arm tightened around me. I felt the electric tension in him. I won’t let you down.
“I’m not going to shake your hand,” I announced. “I’m not a stranger. I’m your cousin. You’re part of my family.” I gazed steadily at the teary young woman beside him. “And your wife is part of my family, too, even if we haven’t been introduced yet.”
“I’m Mildred,” she said, almost sobbing. “But everyone calls me Tweet.”
“Hello, Tweet. I’m Claire. Your cousin-in-law.” Then, to Matthew, who was gaping at me, I said, “I’m going to hug you, if at all possible.” I lurched at him, hugged him voraciously, and after a stunned moment, he hugged me in return, carefully, as if I might crack. Then Tweet and I hugged each other, and finally I turned toward Roan, who stood as unmoving as a windswept statue on a summit only he could guard, his expression shuttered. I grasped his hand. See, I urged silently.
I thought the hardest part was behind us.
People not only choose to live where they’re comfortable, they choose places that give them comfort, and my first goal was to learn what had drawn Matthew to Alaska. Matthew showed us around in a mud-spattered Bronco with the tip of a whale rib dangling from the rearview mirror. From my poor vantage point in the backseat beside Roan, I struggled to examine every detail about him, his wife, and the scenery, making mental notes.
Cold, gray oceanfronted Juneau and wilderness backed it; the city was secluded, to say the least. A summer honeymoon in Alaska had been one of Roan’s wedding gifts to Matthew and Tweet. Roan had bought a small vacation house in the city when Matthew was sixteen. Matthew loved to hike, photograph the wildlife, and fish for salmon. Roan simply liked the wildness of it all.
He had told me during our flight that everything in Alaska, except for a few dots of civilization, was backcountry tucked among ocean channels, cold rivers, or mountains. Where else would the suburbs include bears, moose, wolves, whales, enormous glaciers, and untrackable wilderness? “I like the honesty of places where a person risks getting bitten or eaten,” Roan said with a certain dark pleasure. “It keeps me from getting careless.”