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PROLOGUE
In a dream I had many times, I was walking up the stairway. Flames were licking at my face and hair, but I didn’t feel the heat. Somewhere below, my father was calling to me, demanding I come back.
I didn’t stop.
At the top, the flames looked more like they were beckoning to me, inviting me into them. There was a clear but narrow strip of floor that I followed until I was in Mama’s room. She was still sleeping.
I yelled for her, and she opened her eyes and then sat up.
I think she saw me, but instantly she turned into smoke and was gone.
And like always, I woke up with a scream.
CHAPTER ONE
There were a little more than a dozen or so people on the last train leaving Hurley the night my grandmother Mazy died. Only two other people had gotten on with me, both strangers. We had but two stops before I would reach the town in which my father now lived a new life with a new family. By the time I stepped off the train, there was only one other passenger left, a young woman with light-brown hair. She resembled my mother, and so my imagination played its tricks on me. I imagined her turning and smiling at me, telling me I was doing the right thing.
Although I had never revealed it to Mazy, I had memorized the entire train schedule—where I could make connections to continue north, south, or west—because I didn’t know what my exact destination eventually would be until I found the secret letters my father had sent to her. However, the trip itself had always been out there, like a promise dangling. Maybe it was a fantasy most of the time, but I had believed that someday I would continue the journey to a new home and a new life, just as my father had done.
After I boarded and sat, no one gave me more than a passing glance before returning to his or her reading, texting, or sleeping. To everyone else, there was probably nothing unusual about my appearance, even though I felt like I was exploding with anticipation. My face felt on fire. I imagined that the excitement in my eyes had turned them into hot coals brightening and fading, brightening and fading with every breath and every heartbeat.
Why didn’t anyone else seem to see it?
Or did the sight of me upset them so much that they had to look away?
Although there was central lighting and anyone who wanted it had a light above his or her seat, darkness soon seemed to be seeping in like water into a sinking ship as the train continued on its route, every bolt, screw, and wheel locked in its predestined journey, just like me. It could never leave the tracks, it could never turn around before its final station, and it could never simply stop short of a set location. I had to go where it would lead me, and do what I had to do. Mazy had died.
The train whistle sounded. The future was out there, hovering like a hawk, waiting to pounce on me and take me to my fate. As the car rocked gently, soothingly, I could feel myself drifting back through time.
The moment I closed my eyes, it was as if everything that had happened between my original train ride with my father and the current ride was truly imaginary. As long as I kept my eyes tightly shut, I could feel him sitting beside me, even smell the fragrance of his aftershave, despite how long ago that was. There are scents that are embedded forever in your memory. For me, his aftershave was one of them, though no odor was stronger than the painful, bitter smell of smoke coming from our house fire.
Despite all the years I had taken care of Mazy’s fireplace and sat with her in front of those dancing flames, they really never became comfortable, nor did the sharp pain in my lungs and heart diminish. Flames, no matter where I saw them, would always be frolicking in glee, even a tiny one on a birthday candle.
Daddy and I had said so little to each other on the train that day.
He had fallen asleep first. I could hear his soft inhales and exhales. Their rhythm was enough to help me fall asleep, too. I felt safe again. I had lived below bruised, angry clouds that rumbled long after the night of our tragedy. However, no one else, not even Daddy, seemed to hear them. The rumbling was there only for me, even if there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I was trapped in the surrounding flames and deafened by the high-pitched scream constantly ringing in my ears. The moment I began to stand still, no matter where we were, I started to tremble. My lips felt like they were bubbling. I was living in a shell with spidery thin cracks that was threatening to shatter and fall at my feet, leaving me as naked and alone as a newborn abandoned in the cold, dark night.
Despite how calm I might have appeared to a stranger back then, inside, the real me was crying hysterically for my mother. When I looked at other people, I was surprised they didn’t hear it. They smiled at me, held my hand, and couched their words carefully in expressions of compassion and hope. Their assurances fell into distant echoes. How could everything ever again be all right? After a while, I didn’t hear them at all, just as they didn’t hear me. The whole world might as well have been deaf.
When Daddy had told me we were leaving to start a new life, I unashamedly felt joy. We were escaping from the darkness, maybe from those flames in my memory, too. Because I was so young, I had believed we would just go a little ways and every terrible thing that had occurred would disappear. I recall even thinking that maybe Mama would be waiting for us at our new place. That her survival of the house fire had been kept secret. That after we had stepped off the train, no matter where we were, she would be standing there waiting. The smile I remembered would be back where it belonged, nestled on her face, brightening her eyes and filling her lips. I’d rush into her arms, and the three of us would walk off into a scene as happy as the last scene of Alice in Wonderland. We’d be holding hands and laughing that everything horrible that had occurred was now only a bad dream. None of us had followed a rabbit down a hole. Everyone has bad dreams.
Why couldn’t that be true for me?
Couldn’t someone say, “You’re safely back in Kansas, Saffron?”
And so, when Daddy had left me at the Hurley train station, filling out figures in my new coloring book with new crayons, I had never doubted that he would come back for me after he had bought some of our necessities, and then we would take the next train to our new home. The speed with which he walked off, practically ran off, convinced me that he didn’t want to leave me alone for too long. I actually was proud at the start, delighted that he would consider me old enough to wait by myself in a strange place, even though I knew in my heart that my mother would be furious at him for doing so.
Thinking back to it now, I suspect that Mazy, the elderly lady who had appeared suddenly and would turn out to be my real grandmother, had deliberately waited until the train station was deserted and I was alone. If she had appeared earlier, while trains and people were still going to and fro, I would never have taken her hand and permitted her, a total stranger at the time, to lead me away to her home and her lonely life. Time, the realization that Daddy wasn’t returning for me, and the chill of darkness had to embrace me first.
After Mazy had taken me in and after days and then weeks had passed, I grew more skeptical of her true intentions, but she was very methodical, cleverly answering every one of my questions and seemingly honest about her efforts to reunite me with my father. She drove back my doubts almost as soon as they occurred.
Now, when I recall those early days, I reali
ze that her experience and training as a grade-school teacher had enabled her to ease me into a new reality, with the main realization being that my father really had deserted me. She’d had to lower me into the truth the way a parent would lower her child into a very warm bath. Even so, what child could live with that revelation? Where could he or she ever find self-respect after having been discarded with maybe little more than an afterthought?
Daddy’s one saving grace was that everything had been prearranged, as heartbreaking as that was to realize. At least, I eventually learned that he didn’t out-and-out desert me and just leave me dangling in the unwelcoming night. Mazy had lost her daughter, my mother, when she had given her up for adoption practically the same moment she had been born, but she could and would enjoy her granddaughter. My father had kept in touch with her while his parents brought him and my mother up in the same home. They were supposed to be more like brother and sister, but they weren’t.
As the train carried me farther and farther away from Mazy and the life she had tried to make for me, I felt deep sadness for her and the pain she had kept hidden in her heart most of her life. Despite the way she had encouraged me to keep hoping my father would return for me, especially in the very beginning, I bore her no resentment and, in the end, blamed her for nothing. In a way, everything she had done to keep me isolated and protected was born out of her own guilt over giving up her daughter, despite how difficult it would have been for an unmarried woman to raise a child with no visible means of supporting herself at the time. That night when she led me to her house from the train station, she finally was doing what she wished she had done the first time around. I was to be her redeeming light. How could I fault her for that?
Mazy was possessive and domineering, for sure, but her intense need to weave her love and her worldly knowledge into me drove her to hover over me, spreading her wings like an angel, to be sure no one would harm me. She wanted to be certain that I’d be well prepared to do battle in this world, for that was how she saw it… filled with a constant series of challenges and conflicts. It had made her quite bitter. Countless times she told me that if I listened to her, I would be strong enough to survive and happily so. It got so I feared stepping out of the door on my own, even if simply to play in the backyard.
The proof that she had prepared me well lay just ahead in a whirlwind of what I expected would be major challenges even if I were older. Both mentally and physically exhausted from my stream of memories and all I had just done to effectuate a good and safe escape after Mazy had died, I welcomed the deep sleep that overtook me during the trip. Just as on that first train ride years ago, this train’s slowing and coming to a stop at the station I wanted was what woke me. When I sat up and looked out the window, I felt like an astronaut gazing out at a new planet.
The young woman I had imagined resembled my mother did not disembark, and when I walked by her and she looked at me, I saw she was nowhere near as pretty as my mother had been. Outside, there were no passengers waiting to board. The train lingered like a great beast catching its breath. Being alone on the train platform when I stepped off made it all seem more like a recurring dream. Was I really here?
This train station was cleaner and more up-to-date than the one I had left. I was both happy and angry that I didn’t have to travel too far, just a little over two and a half hours. I wondered whether my father had taken this exact trip in the opposite direction from time to time to catch sight of me. Was he ever on our street waiting for a glimpse of the little girl he had left behind? Did Mazy alert him ahead of time when we would be in the village so he could stand in some storefront and look at us passing by? I wanted to believe that. I wanted to imagine that he still harbored some love, some curiosity, and still possessed something of any father’s need to know his own child.
But I wasn’t completely convinced he would welcome me now with open arms. Before I had left, I had read all his secret letters to Mazy and looked at the pictures of my mother as a child and then as a woman, a mother herself, pictures he had sent to my grandmother. Even as a very young girl, I had spent hours and hours trying to understand why he would have deserted me in the first place. The letters explained so much, but most of what he had written had stunned me and left me cold. Now I suspected that he had been planning to transfer me into Mazy’s care for a long time, perhaps even before the fire. He had kept his intentions hidden that well. But even if there were clues, why would I have noticed and read into them back then?
Whom can you trust more than your own father and mother? Who did you least expect would betray you? There wasn’t a hint in his eyes or in his voice to warn me he was going to do just that on that fateful day. For so long, I had wondered why he didn’t want me with him. Buried deeply in my heart and mind was the realization that leaving me behind couldn’t only have been for the reason he had given to Mazy in his letters, his desire to repair her loss. But why would he make such a sacrifice for someone he barely had known? He had to have had other reasons. And besides, why ignore my losses and what the desertion would do to me? I read no lines of regret about that in those letters. There were no apologies to be given to me and no expressions of worry for my emotional well-being.
That only reinforced the dark places in my heart and the ugly answers hanging like bats in a cave, answers to questions that I had always fought against exploring. Wasn’t it Mazy who told me, “You never ask a question for which you don’t want an answer. There is much truth to the adage ‘Ignorance is bliss’ ”?
None of this denied that my early life had its moments of sunshine, but mainly before my father and mother had become more like strangers to each other and my mother had fallen into a deep depression. Images and parts of sentences between them lingered in the air filled with static, all of it threatening to connect and then eventually force me to realize the truth, a truth a little girl my age was unable to face at the time. It meant that the bond between my mother and father, the bond that keeps a child feeling safe, was already shattered. Much of who and what they had become to each other had really gone up in smoke with that fire.
What was left of love and tenderness before the first spark leaped out? Where did the wind carry the ashes of all the anger and unhappiness? What greater horror lay in wait out there? What monster, uglier than any I could imagine, sneered and clawed the ground, anticipating its opportunity to seize me and destroy what little remained of faith and love? I would soon know.
Nightmares had become more like movie trailers, snippets of the terrifying reality that had my name across its forehead. But I had little choice. I had to head toward it like someone driving on a road that she knew would end at a cliff. How long would the fall take? Would there be anything left, any reason to continue? Perhaps that was the biggest, most pressing question of all. Even if I found a hint of love, it would pale in the presence of what had happened, what had been real and not imagined. Could I live with it? The simple questions that followed me off the train were: Did any of what I was hoping to find matter? Did family matter? Did everything Mazy had done for me matter under the shadow of all that?
Did knowing who you really were matter?
Was I in a different shell, and should I bother to emerge?
I almost turned around and crossed the platform to take a train going in the opposite direction. If I didn’t continue to go forward, would I never have to confront those answers? “Ignorance is bliss,” Mazy had told me, but could I really live on without knowing these answers? I feared how they would haunt me forever.
I stood there, indecisive. The train that had brought me started away. There was another choice. I was tempted to rush back on and continue into the unknown, go on and on. I felt like a deep-sea diver who, after she had jumped from the edge of a cliff, wondered in midair if she should have. But I didn’t return to the train.
No, I told myself, it’s far too late to change your mind, Saffron. Let yourself keep falling.
In the end, what kept me going wasn’t a you
ng girl’s need for love or truth or justice. My motives weren’t that noble. Truthfully, where else could I go now? There were no family friends, no living relatives. I had a fake birth certificate, but what kind of a life could I have alone?
What had brought me here was just a brutal need to survive first and a hope for restoration of any family, any love, second. In no sense was I coming home, no matter how I wished and pretended I was. Living with Mazy had made it more difficult to lie to myself. Because she wouldn’t tolerate deception in any form, I found it distasteful, too.
I walked slowly off the train platform to a taxi parked nearby. The driver had his bushy, gray-haired head back and his mouth wide open, looking more like someone who had just died. He did resemble who I imagined to be someone’s grandpa driving a cab. Mazy once told me that older people show their age the most when they sleep. I thought about Shakespeare’s line in his sonnet about getting older, “Death’s second self.” Mazy had been amazed when I ruminated about it and I asked, “Isn’t every sleep a taste of what’s to come?”
That day, she had stared at me hard before she said the strangest thing.
“I’m sorry you’re so intelligent, Saffron. You’ll suffer more.”
“Should I stop reading?” I asked, terrified.
She laughed. “Not for an instant,” she said, smiling.
I tapped on the window, and the driver stirred, realized where he was and what was happening, and jumped up instantly.
He rolled his window down and said, “Hey. Sorry, missy.”
I gave him the address and got into the back of the taxi. The moment I did, he started to talk, beginning with why he had fallen asleep. I smiled to myself listening to how guilty he felt. If he had only known the forest of guilt through which I had come, he would laugh at his meager shame.
“This is the last train stoppin’ at Sandburg Creek,” he said. “Most of the time, no one gets off, or if they do, someone is waitin’ for ’em, but I can’t afford to miss a possible fare. Still, ya’d think a girl as young as you would have someone waitin’ for her. I tell ya, the risks parents take with their children in this day and age are astoundin’.”
Out of the Rain Page 1