The Year of Luminous Love

by Lurlene McDaniel

  “I … I didn’t. I never—”

  “I know,” Arie said, tears in her eyes. “You didn’t want to hurt me.” Arie took short hiccuping breaths, pressing Ciana’s hand tenderly to her cheek. “I wish you’d have told me.” She looked into Ciana’s face. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”

  Ciana fought for composure.

  Arie smiled. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Truly. The heart wants what the heart wants. No regrets.”

  Arie echoed Jon’s words, and Ciana realized she had no regrets either. Nothing could change the past.

  “Now shoo,” Arie whispered. “This room will be swarming with relatives soon. Make a clean getaway while you can.”

  She lifted her arms and Ciana and Eden leaned down to hold her one last time. This was goodbye, and all three of them knew it. A log in the fireplace, burned through its center, thumped down over the andirons and they glanced over in unison. A shower of golden sparks danced upward like spirit sprites, becoming a metaphor for Arie’s life—intense and sparkling. And far too brief.

  Arie was seeing her living room and the people clustered around her hospital bed from the most unique perspective—from above. She hovered close to the ceiling, marveling at how small and wasted she looked on the bed. Was she dreaming? People were crying. Her mother, her dad, Eric and Abbie, Aunt Sally and Aunt Ruth. They were all so sad. She wanted to tell them she was fine, light as a feather, like a bird with its hollow bones, rising, floating over the bed and looking down on the scene. And she felt … what? Safe and warm and peaceful.

  The voices below grew fainter, and it was as if she were hearing them from far away, through a mask, or a tunnel. Ever so slowly, her air body began to turn over so that she saw the ceiling and the poster of the Sistine Chapel, so close that the ink pixels on the paper became geometric shapes. So close she saw the colors as vibrant flares. She watched, transfixed, as the poster turned translucent. And just as it began to fade into nothingness, Arie Winslow reached out and touched the face of God.

  The Windemere Journal, the small hometown newspaper wrote in an editorial:

  Not since the July Rodeo Days has there been such a turnout of people as for the funeral of Arie Winslow, age nineteen and lifetime resident. Miss Winslow, daughter of Swede and Patricia Winslow, lost her brave, lifelong fight with cancer, and the town turned out en masse, closing down local businesses and the high school for three hours on Thursday to bury her.

  Ciana wasn’t surprised. The town felt invested in Arie, its sweetheart, a pretty little towheaded girl with generational lines that went deep and wide. And now she had been placed in a gleaming white casket lined with pale pink satin, dressed in her favorite pink jewel-studded rodeo jacket. Her head rested on a lace pillow, and her hand held a small carved wooden horse, a beaded string hanging from the neck; she had insisted that it be buried with her. Only Ciana knew why, recalling the day she’d first seen it, half formed, in the hands of its creator.

  Early on the day of the funeral, Ciana rose, then washed and groomed both her horses. A sleepy-eyed Eden found Ciana in the barn and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Couldn’t sleep, decided to come prepare the horses for the procession.”

  “You’re bringing the horses? Why?”

  “A sign of respect. I’ll ride mine and lead Sonata. Before Caramel, Arie rode this one.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Ciana looked solemn. “Bring us some coffee. Mom should have it brewing by now. And come help me braid Sonata’s mane and tail with this black ribbon.” She reached down and lifted a silky spool. “I want Sonata to look her finest.”

  Eden looped the ribbon through her fingers, blinking away tears. “My honor. Back with caffeine in a minute.”

  Once the horse was ready, they went into the kitchen and a hot breakfast. No one felt like eating, but Alice Faye insisted. She looked red-eyed, and tired and said things like, “Arie’s poor parents,” and “How does a mother bury a child?”

  Ciana showered and dressed in cowboy black—black jeans, black shirt, boots, and hat. Eden wore a simple black dress and jacket and pulled her hair into a severe bun. Ciana loaded the horses into her trailer and drove to the big Baptist church downtown. Her mother and Eden followed behind in Eden’s car.

  After a celebration of Arie’s life, pallbearers led by Eric and Swede loaded the pearl-white casket into the hearse. From there the seemingly endless procession wound through the streets behind the limo holding Arie’s immediate family. Following that car, Ciana rode her horse and led Sonata, with the dressed-out horse wearing the ornate black and silver Mexican saddle, empty of the rider who would never return. The town would long remember the sight and sound of slow clopping polished horse hooves all along the slow journey to the cemetery.

  At the entrance, Ciana dismounted, grasped both horses’ bridles and walked them the distance to the graveside, a beautiful spot on a hill, near an ancient oak tree. The ground had been left wild, and bright purple and yellow flowers carpeted the hillside. Arie would have loved the space. Blue sky above was shot through with sunlight, and a soft April breeze ruffled the mantle of flowers across the casket. Eden came alongside Ciana, encircled her waist and whispered, “Reminds me of Italy.”

  Ciana agreed, pricked by unbearable sorrow but also comforted that at least one of Arie’s dreams had come true. She also thought of her grandmother, buried in another part of the same cemetery, and her father and grandfather, adjacent to Olivia. Four people she had known and loved were gone before she would turn twenty in July. And one, Jon Mercer, was among the missing. Life is better left to chance. The song’s refrain ran through her head, and she wondered what “dance” lay ahead for them all?

  Rule of thumb: Don’t plant until mid-April, when frost is most likely finished for the winter. Harvest in mid-October before the first killing frost of autumn. Farmers followed the rule faithfully, and Ciana was no exception. In the middle of April, she plowed the fields she meant to plant, turning the rich clay soil to ready it for seeding. As she made the furrows, she grieved for Arie but also found comfort in the smell of fresh dirt greeting warm sunlight. Therapeutic. And watching the soil turn into green fuzz as the seeds sprouted and grew delivered hope for the spring and summer months to come.

  Ciana had several surprises over the months too. The first and best was when Alice Faye, still sober and faithfully attending AA meetings, broke the news that Hastings had hit a bump on his subdivision project via the Tennessee legislature. The snafu required an issue that the politicians would need to vote on, but since they wouldn’t be reconvening until the fall, the Bellmeade Estates project was at a standstill. Her mother and half the town—the half that wanted the project—were disappointed, but Ciana felt as if she been handed a reprieve. “It just pushes our decision down the road,” Alice Faye told her daughter. “Sooner or later, you’ll have to decide.”

  Of course, Ciana had already decided. Her mother had just refused to hear her.

  Ciana also rented out her empty barn’s stalls. With Caramel gone, and with Firecracker and Sonata housed in two stalls, she wielded a hammer to new lumber and created two more. The boarding money helped cover extra and unexpected costs. She reopened pasture land for the new horses to graze, planted additional fields of alfalfa to sell after harvest, and hired Clyde Keating, a boy just out of high school and the size of a heifer, who was planning on attending University of Tennessee in Knoxville on a football scholarship. Come August, he’d leave for football camp, but until then she paid him for a prodigious amount of muscle power. Clyde took a shine to Eden, becoming tongue-tied every time she came into view.

  “You have an admirer,” Ciana teased Eden.

  Eden just rolled her eyes.

  One week, Ciana couldn’t cover Clyde’s cash-only paycheck. She was frantically hunting through cookie jars and under sofa cushions when Eden asked what was going on. Ciana told her and rushed off to the barn.

  Eden followed her. “Good
grief, why haven’t you asked me for it?”

  “You pay rent already,” Ciana said, pawing through the change jar she kept in the tack room. “This is my problem.”

  “Wait here,” Eden said. She returned quickly and handed Ciana ten one-hundred-dollar bills.

  Ciana stared at the money, openmouthed. She threw up her hands. “I won’t take your house money.”

  “It isn’t my house money.”

  “Then where—”

  “Tony’s drug money.”

  Ciana’s eyes widened. “When? How?”

  “Don’t ask. I can’t stick it into the bank without accounting for it come tax time, so it’s tucked away for rainy days. I think today qualifies as ‘rainy.’ Take it.”

  “I … I’ll pay you back.”

  “No need. It may as well do some good after all the harm it’s caused.”

  Ciana took the bills gratefully. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “It’s a pinkie-swear secret, you know. Not even your mother.”

  Ciana hooked pinkies with Eden, then ran from the barn to find Clyde.

  In June, Eden quit the boutique and devoted her energy to helping Ciana and Alice Faye with their giant home garden. She surprised them and herself as well, taking an unexpected interest in growing vegetables, in watering, harvesting, and even in pulling detested weeds. Every week some new food cropped up to pick and eat, each made more delicious because she’d nurtured it. She learned how to cook and how to can, putting up countless jars of tomatoes, squash, beans—a stash of food for the coming winter.

  Eden liked helping Ciana, too, because seeing how hard she worked, how she fell exhausted into bed every night, also made Eden feel valuable and necessary and wanted. Eden didn’t hear from Gwen, could only hope she was safe wherever she was living with her illness.

  July brought the rodeo, but Ciana didn’t ride in the opening ceremonies. Not this year. The flag corps all wore black armbands in honor of Arie.

  August came hot and airless, along with an amazing special concert from a top country singer, exclusively for Arie’s family and friends. Naturally, the crowd was large enough to fill the high school auditorium. The singer told stories about Arie between songs, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

  Sometimes Ciana drove out to the cemetery and put wild-flowers she’d gathered on Arie’s grave, sat for a spell in the quiet, and wept. Her memories of Arie were everywhere; there seemed no escape, no respite, when the fingers of grief unexpectedly grabbed her heart. She saw Arie’s face and sunny smile in the rising sun as she rode Firecracker across her fields. She heard Arie’s laughter over Eden’s childlike exuberance the time she ran into the kitchen from the chicken coop shouting, “Baby chicks! We have baby chicks!” Often when the long summer days were done, Ciana and Eden sat out on the veranda, sipping wine by candlelight, and reminisced about Italy. “I wonder where everyone is, all the people we met over there.”

  “You mean Garret and Enzo,” Eden said. “Who else matters?”

  They giggled. Ciana said, “I’m sure Enzo is bedding some countess.”

  “Do you think he scored every time with every woman?”

  “Probably. He is charming.”

  “But not with you,” Eden said. “You’re the one who got away.”

  “I’m the one who was too scared.”

  “And in love with someone else.”

  “Ancient history.” Ciana rested her feet on the porch’s rail. “Which isn’t the case with you and Garret. Have you given up looking for him?”

  “I haven’t, but I’ve been doing something for myself before I resume the hunt. Something special.” Eden held out one of her arms so that the underside showed. “I’ve been going to a dermatologist in Nashville. He specializes in scar removal, and he’s minimizing my scars from my days of cutting. After treatment, the ugly raised lumps should be reduced to thin white lines. It’s a long process. When I see Garret again, I want my past to be as wiped away as possible.”

  “But you said he knows about your scars and didn’t care.”

  “I know,” Eden said. “And I care.”

  Ciana touched Eden’s glass with hers in tribute. Beyond the porch, fireflies blinked coded messages, and a horse whinnied from the pasture. The night silence was broken by a cacophony of tree frogs calling to each other, underscoring the lost piece of their friendship circle. “I miss Arie.”

  Nostalgia for what was gone brought a lump to Eden’s throat. “Know what she’d ask you if she were here? She’d ask, ‘Why haven’t you called Jon this summer? Asked him to come back?’ ”

  “Phone works both ways,” Ciana said, spinning the glass between her palms. “He hasn’t reached out to me either.”

  Eden had struck a very sore spot. Jon had not once contacted her since leaving. The slight stung until the truth dawned on her: he was content in his old life. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of his memory. The men she met on her and Eden’s occasional venture into Nashville clubs were pale reflections of him, inferior to Jon in every way. She kept this to herself, of course. One of the Beauchamp rules of life: Be content with what you have, and don’t bitch about what you don’t have. Yet in the dark of night, when she was alone or standing under a full moon, she missed him all the more.

  Ciana raised her glass. “To Arie. And to friendship.”

  “How about love?” Eden asked.

  “A fool’s game.” Ciana rose, dumping the contents of her glass over the porch rail, and bounded barefoot onto the grass. “Have you ever caught fireflies, girlfriend?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Come here,” Ciana commanded.

  Eden scampered onto the lawn. “Why do they blink?”

  “It’s their language of love.” Ciana twirled, raised her glass, and scooped it through the air, snagging several blinking insects and slapped her hand across the glass’s open top. “Now your turn.”

  Eden attempted the same procedure but failed to catch even one bug. “Empty,” she lamented.

  “Practice!”

  Eden captured two, but when she saw Ciana’s full jar, she said, “How illuminating!”

  Ciana laughed. “Glowing!”

  “Flashing!”

  “Incandescent!”

  “Resplendent!” Eden shouted after a few seconds of thought.

  “Luminous!”

  “Now what?” Eden asked.

  “We let them go.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can live,” Ciana said, removing her hand covering the glass. She lifted it high over her head, and together the two friends watched the fireflies slip from their prison in slow upward spirals one by one, to mingle with the stars.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have lived most of my life in the South. Honestly, I enjoy the slower pace of life here. I like the South’s sense of tradition, family, and history. I like the idea of inheriting land and place, of holding on to both, and of passing them along to future generations.

  My new Windemere series is a deepening of my own Southern generational roots. The series is filled with imagined characters living in the fictional town of Windemere, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, a place of plentiful farmland and beautiful horses, of seasons measured not only by sun and rain, but by a sense of ownership and respect for the past.

  This first novel, The Year of Luminous Love, depicts love of people and between people, a love for the land, and a way of Southern life still embraced in a fast-moving, ever-changing world. It focuses on friendship, family, and heartbreaking love, on choices made and on pitfalls that cause people to stumble but also to overcome. In this book I launch three young women, best friends from high school, into the bigger world, each with hopes, dreams, and plans for their futures. They often face complicated, even controversial, situations. They have troubles with money, health, love, family. But through every crisis, they have each other.

  You will share their struggles. One girl must fight to hold on to
her beloved land, one must escape the stranglehold of a love relationship gone bad, and one must confront death. When given the chance to travel across an ocean, each girl leaves her familiar life and comfort zone for an adventure that helps her to understand her own needs and wants and to determine what she most values.

  The Year of Luminous Love begins their journey. The Year of Chasing Dreams will continue it. I think of these two books as a love letter to my Southern roots and to you readers, who encourage me. As a bonus, I’m also writing two e-original short stories about these friends and their families. Watch for them online or check my website, LurleneMcdaniel.com.

  I hope you will love Windemere, its past and present, its people, and their stories. Please come into their world with me and live their dreams with them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks for agricultural expertise for this novel go to John Goddard, Loudon County, Tennessee, Agricultural Extension Agent; Bart Watson, Loudon County, Tennessee, Farm Bureau Agent; and Jim Farley, a dashing young insurance man, and Martha Farley, his wonderful wife.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lurlene McDaniel began writing inspirational novels about teenagers facing life-altering situations when her son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. “I saw firsthand how chronic illness affects every aspect of a person’s life,” she has said. “I want kids to know that while people don’t get to choose what life gives to them, they do get to choose how they respond.”

  Lurlene McDaniel’s novels are hard-hitting and realistic, but also leave readers with inspiration and hope. Her books have received acclaim from readers, teachers, parents, and reviewers. Her bestselling novels include Don’t Die, My Love; Till Death Do Us Part; Hit and Run; Telling Christina Goodbye; True Love: Three Novels; and The End of Forever.