“You are the best,” Artemas whispered to him. “The very best. We needed you, and you were there. That’s all that matters.”
James made a tragic sound—relief and defeat, joy and anguish. “I wasn’t there when Julia needed me. That’s why I swore I wouldn’t let anyone down again.”
“Then you’ve kept your promise.” James lifted his head. Artemas repeated softly, “You’ve kept your promise.”
Cass, Alise, Michael, and Elizabeth pushed through the double doors to the treatment area and advanced on them. “We can’t wait outside any longer,” Michael explained. “We had to see how Artemas is doing.”
“I’ve never felt better,” he answered. From the pride on his face as he surveyed his brood, Lily knew he meant it.
Lily went upstairs, where Joe Estes was in surgery. Aunt Maude met her as she stepped out of the elevator. “Lily. I was coming to find you. How is Artemas?”
“He’s fine.”
“He and James—”
“It’s all right.”
Aunt Maude sighed. Her sturdy face was as solemn as an owl’s. “The surgeon just came out and told us. Joe’s dead.”
Hopewell fumbled inside his jacket and found the small, rumpled snapshot. He held the photograph in the palm of one hand. “My poor little boy,” he whispered. Joe’s face had a smear of blood on it, and he scratched at it with his thumbnail.
He rubbed his thumb over the photo again, rougher and without much effect on the dried blood. When Little Sis saw what he was doing and how badly his hands shook, she gently took the picture from him. She dabbed a fingertip to her tongue and wiped the blood away. Then she laid the picture back in his hand. “There. Not a speck of stain on him anymore,” she said softly.
Her kindness tore him open. Hopewell cupped the picture in his hands and cried silently. “He took and he took from me and Ducie, and she died from the grief, and then he took every good feeling I had left, and then … he almost took you from me. He did take you, ’cause things’ll never be the same between you and me.”
Little Sis made little shivering sounds of distress and held on to his arm with both hands. “Don’t you give up like this, Hopewell Estes!” She jerked his arm harder with each word.
Hopewell fumbled with the photograph, put it away carefully in his side pocket, and sat staring at the floor.
When Aunt Maude and Lily arrived in the doorway of the hospital’s waiting room, Little Sis looked up gratefully from her place beside Hopewell on the couch. Then she saw James Colebrook with them and froze.
But he didn’t appear too tough or devious now. No, she sensed a sad, dark blue aura around him. Or maybe it was something she saw in his eyes—those big gray eyes like his brother’s, now cloudy as yesterday’s sky.
Big Sis pushed herself up from a chair in one corner. She’d lost her cane in the confusion, so she clung to the chair’s back and stomped one foot for attention. “I need a chew,” she said. “Maudy, you help me down the hallway. Help me find that orderly with the can of Red Man in his shirt pocket. I’m going to bum a chew off him.”
Little Sis gaped as Maude helped Big Sis totter from the room. For once in their nosy, meddling lives they weren’t going to inject their two cents’ worth. After they left, she smoothed the backs of her fingers down Hopeweli’s bruised cheek and whispered, “You want to talk to Lily alone?”
“No, you can stay. Please stay.” He straightened and stared at James. “You too.”
James shut the door and waited nearby, his hands sunk into the pockets of the overcoat he’d never removed. Lily came to the couch and dropped to one knee in front of Hopewell. She looked up at him sympathetically and covered his hands with hers. “I wish Joe had given you a different choice,” she said.
“He didn’t. He never did. I’m so sorry for what he done, Lily.”
James said, “You wanted to let him shoot me.” It was a flat statement, not accusing, almost as if he couldn’t fathom why Hopewell had not let that happen.
Hope well scrubbed a hand across his swollen eyes. “You don’t know me very well if that’s what you think.”
“I wouldn’t blame you for it,” James replied, astonishment filtering into his eyes. “I take full responsibility for the mistakes I made that led to your son’s death.”
“Confession ain’t good for the soul if it doesn’t do nothing but hurt people.” Hopewell looked at Little Sis. “More than anything, I wanted to keep you from knowin’ how weak I was, how I planned—at first—to turn Lily out for Joe’s sake. Then I tried to fix things, and I didn’t want nobody to know the truth.” He swiveled toward James again. “But you want to spread it to the whole world.”
James stared dully at him. “There’s something else you have to know. Yesterday I called Beitner and told him to settle the deal. To pay Joe off in return for you letting Lily stay on her land. If I had done that sooner, Joe might be alive right now.”
Stunned silence sank into Hopewell’s grief. “So that’s why Beitner was coming up my driveway.”
“You saw him tonight?” James asked.
“I ignored him. Drove on past. I was headed out to get Joe. To take him to the sheriff.” Hopewell gave Lily a regretful look. “I couldn’t let somebody else do what I had to do, as Joe’s father.”
She grasped his hand. “I understand.”
The door burst open. Artemas stood there, leaning heavily on the doorframe, the thick white patch of a bandage standing out in stark contrast against his dark hair. The others—Cass, Michael, Elizabeth, Alise, even Tamberlaine, who’d been outside the hospital lobby speaking with the the sheriff—were behind him.
“This should be a family meeting,” Artemas said, staring hard at James.
Tamberlaine looked over the others at Lily. “You know, he’s impossible to stop.”
Lily leaped to her feet and went to him, putting an arm around his waist. He braced himself against her and walked into the room. The rest crowded in as well. Alise took James’s outstretched hand. James never took his eyes from Artemas.
The silence was oppressive. Lily looked urgently at Mr. Estes. “If James had never influenced Joe’s life in any way, if Joe had come home from prison with just ordinary expectations, how would things have turned out differently?”
Hopewell wished he could say that Joe would have been a model son, a model citizen, but that kind of blind loyalty had burned out. “He would have got into trouble again,” Hopewell said, slumping in defeat. He shut his eyes and leaned back on the couch. “He would’ve hated seein’ that I’d let you move onto the farm, and hated Artemas the way he always had, and there would’ve been trouble of some kind. I can’t say things would’ve turned out any different than they did.”
Little Sis chimed in, “Let that story stand, all of you. Some people are born broken and can’t be fixed.” She took Hopewell’s hand gently. “That’s the way Joe was.”
James leaned against a wall. His chest rose and fell roughly Lily walked over to him, tentative at first, then halting in front of him with quiet acceptance.
Artemas stepped up beside her. He gestured toward everyone else in the room, including Hopewell and Little Sis, then at Lily, and finally at him. “This is your family. You risked your life to protect it. Ultimately that’s all that matters.”
James moved into the circle of his brother’s arm.
Hopewell found himself being pulled off the couch by Little Sis, and then, to his amazement, he was being surrounded, taken in, and comforted by Colebrooks.
Lily shut her eyes and exhaled gratefully. Very old sorrows and fears were fading away.
• • •
Artemas woke with a grimace, his head aching, all the events of the day and night before creeping out of unpleasant dreams. But then he realized where he was, and with whom, and that there were no shadows.
Lily was beside him. In his bed. Their bed, at Blue Willow. Carefully lying close to him with her face nuzzled against his jaw, she rose to one elbow and kissed hi
m as his eyes opened. She tucked the covers around him a little better and stroked his hair, studied his bandage, fussed with it a little, then kissed him again.
Golden morning light seeped in through the curtains of the balcony doors. She was as warm and soft as the light.
She whispered to him, maintaining his hypnotic trance with intimate suggestions in a voice so low and private and filled with love, it might only have been in his thoughts. Artemas looked at her in wonder. She pulled the covers aside and took him so gently that he forgot the pain and the bad dreams.
This, she was telling him, was how their ancestors had started it all.
Midmorning sun softened the room’s old paisley hues. Hopewell had opened the heavy drapes. He couldn’t bear the somber light from the wall sconces over Joe’s coffin. Melting snow trickled from the eaves outside, and the drops of moisture gleamed like falling diamonds behind the window’s lace sheers.
He looked at himself in a gilt-framed mirror. His black suit was snug around the gut; he looked robust and strong, while he felt ancient and shrunken. And alone.
He went to a sofa and sat down. The scent of flowers throbbed in his head. There were plenty of flowers in the room. He had forgotten how many friends he had. But they were the kind who would come here to sign the register and stay for a few polite minutes only because they pitied him. They would leave casseroles and cakes on his front porch, because that was the respectful thing to do. They would stick sympathy cards inside the warped screened door and hurry away.
No one would stay.
“Hopewell?”
Little Sis eased into the room, her hands clasped on a little black purse. Her neat, trim brown coat and dress were almost conservative, except for the bright red embroidery down the dress’s front and the red Christmas bow tied girlishly around her gray hair.
She was the dearest sight he’d ever seen, but he didn’t know how to tell her so. He didn’t know what he’d ever say next to her, to make up for the horrible time Joe had put her through.
She settled next to him, not quite touching, and faced forward. “I couldn’t sleep a bit last night,” she said. “Not after you left the hospital without so much as a word to me about where you were going. I finally found out you came straight here.”
“I couldn’t talk to you. Still can’t. There ain’t no words that can say how I feel.” They were all stuck in his throat, stinging his eyes.
“I see,” she said, her voice strained. “Couldn’t you have gone home, or called me or something, so I wouldn’t be worried?”
“I couldn’t bear to go back to my own house. I see Joe and Ducie in every room. I’m thinkin I’ll move into a trailer. Maybe I’ll move over to Victoria—”
“No, you’re not moving away! You come to Maude’s house. We’ve got an extra room. And nobody’ll say anything if you only pretend it’s where you sleep.”
Swaying, he looked at her. “I’m not gonna live in sin with you!”
“Then marry me. Marry me.”
He looked across the room at Joe’s closed coffin. This ought to be all wrong, to be talking about such things in the room with his son’s body. But then, Little Sis had never done things right. She’d just always done what was best for him, and he finally saw that.
He got to his feet, shamed and grieving and happy, and he took her hand and pulled her along beside him, out of the room, out of the little building, into the melting snow and bright sunshine. “I love you,” he said then.
She cried harder and threw her arms around his neck. “I love you too.”
They were kissing each other and crying together, and eventually he looked over and saw the funeral director frowning at them from the doorway. So he scooped a handful of snow into a ball and threw it, and it splattered on the doorway, thank the Lord, but it drove the nosy bastard back inside.
He and Little Sis made their way to a bench on the lawn and sat with their arms around each other and their heads bent close. He could grieve for Joe and not say any more, because she would do all the talking. “My phoenix rising from the ashes,” she called him.
And that was exactly how he felt.
Artemas and Lily stood in the yard of the house, looking toward the barn. He had sent workmen to remove the carcasses, but it wasn’t as easy to erase the ugly memory. Artemas kept his arm around her. Her sorrow seeped into him. “I wish I could tear it down and give the lumber away,” she said. “I don’t want to set foot in there again.”
He was grateful for the sound of a car, a distraction. Lily turned, puzzled, and watched Little Sis’s bright red Cougar come up the dirt lane and turn onto the farm’s drive. “What?” she said, frowning. “What’s this?”
“A surprise,” he said gruffly.
Little Sis parked under the willows. Mr. Estes opened the passenger door and got out, and she took his hand as they walked to Lily and Artemas.
“Thank you for comin’ to Joe’s funeral,” he said to them both, halting in front of them. He looked at Artemas. “Thank you for havin’ your whole family there.”
“It was their decision. I didn’t have to insist.”
Mr. Estes reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled a folded document from it. “Lily.” She glanced at the paperwork and made a small sound of amazement. He held it out with a trembling hand. “The deed’s all worked out, in your name. It’s a weddin’ present. I asked Artemas to make sure you’d be here, so I could give it to you.”
She took the deed as if it were fragile. “Thank you.”
“You and me, we can still make a go of things here. If you need a crusty old man for a partner.”
“Oh, yes, yes.” She put her arms around him. He snuffled in embarrassment but hugged her back. “I know you ain’t goin’ to live in the house here no more—”
“I’ll be at Blue Willow.” She looked at Artemas. “But the two aren’t separate anymore.”
He smiled tenderly. “The Colebrooks and MacKenzies have been neighbors for over one hundred and fifty years. If the legend is true, there wouldn’t be a Colebrook family in America if Elspeth MacKenzie hadn’t taken care of Old Artemas when he was injured. Our families have managed to come back where they started—together. No, we’re not separate anymore. We’re never going to be separate again.”
Little Sis cleared her throat. “What would you say if Hopewell and I got married and wanted to keep an eye on this place for you?”
“Live here?” Lily asked. “Would you like that?”
Mr. Estes studied her sadly. “Would you want an Estes livin’ in your family’s house?”
“I’d like family here. I’d want you and Little Sis here.”
“Then … then that’s settled.” When she moved to hug him again, he waved her away. “Got to go. Got to go.”
“He’s shy,” Little Sis explained, as if it were needed.
They left as quickly as they’d arrived. Lily tucked the deed in the breast pocket of Artemas’s coat. “There’s my wedding present to you,” she said softly.
Epilogue
She sat cross-legged on the brown winter grass outside the granite mausoleum, under a bright, cool winter sky, her hands jammed tightly in the crook of her jeaned legs, the light breeze curling inside her open jacket and chilling her through the heavy sweater she wore. The events of the past two years seemed as distant as a bad dream but as fresh as yesterday; in the odd contrast of grief and acceptance she was beginning to find serenity.
The soft hum of a car engine rising over the knoll of the cemetery’s narrow paved lane made her look up dully. A car crested the knoll and stopped. Artemas got out.
She rose and brushed a hand over her damp eyes as he walked up the hill to her. “I went by the farm,” he said as he reached her. “Mr. Estes said you’d left work early. He told me you’d driven down to Atlanta, and why.”
“He’s become as fussy about me as an old hen.”
“He adores you.” Artemas held out his hands. She took them and looked up at him in silent
misery. “Why did you come here alone, without telling me?”
“I wanted to talk to myself, and to Stephen. And to Richard too. I feel as if I’m still inside a long tunnel, but there’s light at the end now.” She paused. “I’ve only begun to see that light in the past few months. You put it there.”
“I’m with you now, in the darkness, and I’ll be with you when you reach the other side.”
She stepped into his embrace. “I wish there was something I could say or do for Stephen that would make sense of everything,” she whispered, her throat tight. “A way to let go of the pain but keep the memories, without feeling that I’m forgetting him. I never came back here before because I was afraid it would kill me to … to imagine him being alone. I found this inside the mausoleum, sitting on the floor.” She slid a hand into her jacket pocket and removed a tiny brown teddy bear. Meeting Artemas’s shuttered gaze, she asked, “Did you bring this here?”
He nodded. “During all those years that you and I were growing up, separately, there were small gestures that kept the connection. They may seem simple, even maudlin, now, but—”
“No. They meant everything to me. They still do.”
“I can’t bring Stephen back for you, but I can tell you that his memory will always be welcome to me.”
She took his arm. Together they walked to the mausoleum. She opened the wrought-iron door, and they went inside. Lily sat the tiny bear back in its place on the floor, then touched her fingertips to her son’s name, carved on the stone plate next to Richard’s. “You are always with me,” she whispered.
She touched Richard’s name too. Artemas said nothing, but kissed her hair gently.
They went back outside, and she closed the gate. He pulled her to him and held her with comfort and sorrow and mute appreciation. After a while Lily looked up at him and smiled. It was time to go back to Blue Willow and start the new year.
Dawn light, rose-hued and clear, filled their bedroom. Artemas frowned at the empty space beside him and eased out of bed. He threw a robe around himself and went through their suite, looking for her. The air was cool and silent, the rooms empty.
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