Sierra's Homecoming

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I won’t lock you in the cellar, if that’s what you mean,” Doss told her. “I won’t mistreat you or force my attentions on you, and I’ll be civil as long as you are. But until I know whether you’re pregnant or not, you’re staying right here.”

  Hannah huddled deeper into the covers, feeling small, and wiped away a tear with the edge of the sheet. “I hope I’m not,” she whispered. “I hope I’m not carrying your baby.”

  Even as she said the words, though, she knew they were the frayed and tattered weavings of a lie. She longed for another child, a girl this time, yearned to feel a life growing and stirring under her heart. She just didn’t want Doss McKettrick to be the father, that was all.

  She cried quietly, lying there next to Doss. Cried till her pillow was wet. She’d have bet money she wouldn’t sleep a wink, but at some point she succumbed.

  The next thing she knew, it was morning.

  Doss’s side of the bed was empty, and fat, lazy flakes of snow drifted past the window. The room was cold, but she could hear voices in the next room and the clattering of silverware against dishes. The aroma of bacon teased her nose; her stomach clenched with hunger, and then she was nauseous.

  “No,” she said, in a whisper, sitting bolt-upright.

  Yes, her body replied. She’d had the same reaction within ten days of Tobias’s conception.

  Tobias appeared in the doorway, with Doss standing just behind him.

  “You want some breakfast, Ma?” the boy asked. He looked slightly feverish, but stronger, too, and he was wearing a new suit of clothes—black woolen trousers, a blue-and-white-plaid flannel shirt, even suspenders.

  The whole picture turned hazy, and the mention of food, let alone the smell, sent bile scalding into the back of Hannah’s throat. Avoiding Doss’s gaze, she gulped and shook her head.

  Doss laid a hand on Tobias’s shoulder and gently steered him back into the other room. He pulled the door closed, too, and the instant he did, Hannah rolled out of bed, pulled the chamber-pot out from underneath, distractedly grateful that it was clean, and threw up until she collapsed onto the hooked rug, utterly spent.

  She heard the door open again, heard Doss say her name, but she couldn’t respond. She just lay there, on her side, wretched and empty, as though she’d lost her soul as well as the remains of her wedding supper.

  Doss knelt, gathered her in his arms, and put her back into bed, covering her gently. He fetched a basin of tepid water from the other room, along with a washcloth, and cleaned her up. When that was done, he handed her a glass, and she rinsed her mouth, then spat into the basin.

  “I’ll get the doctor,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Don’t,” she answered, and the word came out raspy and raw. “I just need to rest.”

  Doss drew up a chair, sat beside the bed, keeping a silent vigil. Hannah wished he’d go away, and at the same time she dreaded his leave-taking with the whole echoing hollowness of her being.

  A maid came in, replacing the fouled chamber pot, washing out the basin, taking the pitcher away and bringing it back full. Although she cast the occasional worried glance in Hannah’s direction, the woman never said a word, and when she was gone, Doss remained.

  He plumped the pillows behind Hannah’s back and adjusted the radiator to warm the room.

  “I thought I’d bundle Tobias up,” Doss ventured, at some length, “and take him down to the general store. Get him some things to play with, maybe a book to read.”

  Hannah was in a strange, dazed state, weak all over. “You see that he doesn’t take a chill,” she muttered. Common sense said Tobias ought to stay in, out of the weather, and if she’d been herself, she would have insisted on that. As things stood, she didn’t have the strength, and anyway she knew the boy was desperate to get out, if only for a little while.

  Doss stood, tucked the covers in around her. To look at them, Hannah thought, anybody would have thought they were a normal husband and wife, people who loved each other. “Can I bring you something back?”

  “No,” she said, and closed her eyes, drifting.

  When she opened them again, Doss was back, with the chilly scent of fresh air surrounding him. She could hear Tobias in the next room, chatting with somebody.

  “Feeling better?” Doss asked. He was holding a parcel in his hands, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

  “Thirsty,” Hannah murmured.

  Doss nodded, set the package aside and brought her another glass of water, this time from the pitcher on the bureau.

  She drank it down, waited, and was pathetically pleased when it didn’t come right back up.

  “You’d best have something to eat, if you can,” Doss said.

  Hannah nodded. Suddenly she was ravenous.

  He left again, was gone so long that she wondered if he meant to hunt down the food, skin it, and cook it over a slow fire. Tobias wandered in, cheeks pink from the cold, eyes bright. “Uncle Jeb wants to buy me a sandwich,” he told her. “Downstairs, in the restaurant. Is it all right if I go?”

  Hannah smiled. “Sure it is,” she said.

  Tobias drew a step nearer, moving tentatively, as though approaching something fragile enough to fall over and break at the slightest touch. “Doss says you’re not dying,” he said.

  “He’s right,” Hannah answered.

  “Then what’s the matter? You never stay in bed in the daytime.”

  Hannah extended her hand, and after hesitating Tobias took it. “I’m being lazy,” she said, giving his fingers a squeeze.

  He clung for a moment, then let go. His eyes were wide and worried. “I heard you being sick,” he told her.

  A door opened in the distance, and Hannah heard Doss and Jeb exchange quiet words, though she couldn’t make them out. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow,” she promised. “You go and have that sandwich. It isn’t every day you get to eat in a real restaurant.”

  Tobias relaxed visibly. He smiled, planted a kiss on her forehead and fled, nearly colliding with Doss in the doorway. Doss tightened his grip on the tray of food he was carrying. A teapot, with steam wisping from the spout. A bowl of something savory and fragrant.

  Hannah’s nose twitched, and her formerly rebellious stomach growled an audible welcome.

  “Chicken and dumplings,” Doss said, with a grin.

  He set the tray carefully on Hannah’s lap. Poured her a cup of tea and probably would have spoonfed her, too, if she hadn’t taken charge of the situation.

  “Thank you,” she said, trying to square this attentive man with the one who had left her alone on their wedding night to visit the Blue Garter Saloon.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. He sat down to watch her eat, and his gaze strayed once or twice to the package on the nightstand, still wrapped and mysterious.

  Hannah did not assume it was for her, since she’d clearly refused Doss’s earlier offer to bring her something from the mercantile, but she was curious, just the same. The shape was booklike, and before she’d married Gabe, she’d read so much her mother and father used to fret that her eyes might go bad. After she became a wife, she was too busy, and when Gabe went away to war, she found she couldn’t concentrate on the printed word. Letters were all she’d been able to manage then.

  She ate what she could and sipped her tea, hot and sweet and pale with milk, and Doss took the tray away, set it on the bureau. Jeb and Tobias had long since gone downstairs for their midday meal, and except for the sounds of wagons passing in the street below and the faint hiss of the radiator, the room was silent.

  Doss cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Hannah, about last night—”

  “Stop,” Hannah said quickly, and with as much force as she could manage, given her curiously fragile state. The teacup rattled in its saucer, and Doss leaned forward to take it from her, set it next to the parcel. He looked resigned, and a little impatient.

  Hannah leaned back on her pillows, fighting another spate of tears. S
he would have sworn she’d cried them all out the night before, after Doss came back from the Blue Garter and told her he wouldn’t let her go home to Montana, but here they were, burning behind her eyes, threatening to spill over.

  “I figure you know what this means, your being sick like this,” Doss said presently, and in a tone that said he wouldn’t be silenced before he’d finished his piece. “That’s the only reason I didn’t bring the doctor over here, first thing.”

  Hannah closed her eyes. Nodded.

  “I know you’d rather it was Gabe sitting here,” he went on. “That he’d be the one who fathered that child, the one taking you home to the ranch, the one bringing Tobias up to be a man. But the plain fact of the matter is, it’ll be me doing those things, Hannah, and you might as well make peace with that.”

  She didn’t speak, because she couldn’t. She tried to summon up Gabe’s image in her mind, but it wouldn’t come to her. All she saw was Doss, coming in after a night at the Blue Garter, taking off his coat and hat and boots, lying down beside her on the bed, keeping a careful distance.

  He retrieved the parcel from the nightstand and laid it in her lap. She listened, despondent, as he left the room, closed the door quietly behind him.

  She ought to refuse the package, throw it against the wall or into Doss’s face when he came back. But some part of her wanted a gift, something frivolous and impractical, chosen purely to bring a smile to her face.

  She barely remembered what it was like to smile, without thinking about it first, without deciding she ought to, because it was called for or expected.

  Her hands trembled as she undid the string, wound it into a little ball to keep, turned back the brown paper, which she would carefully fold and save against some future need, to find that Doss had indeed given her a book. Her breath caught at the beauty of the green leather cover. The title, embossed in shining gold, seemed to sing beneath the tips of her fingers.

  The Flowers of Western America, Native and Imported: An Illustrated Guide.

  Hannah held the thick volume reverently, savoring the anticipation for a few moments before opening it to look at the title page, memorize the author’s name, as well as that of the artist who’d done the original woodcuttings and metal etchings for the pictures.

  When she couldn’t bear to wait another moment, Hannah turned that page, expecting to read the table of contents. Instead, there was a note, written in Doss’s strong, clear handwriting.

  On the occasion of our marriage, and because I know you long for spring, and your garden.

  Doss McKettrick

  January 17, 1919

  An emotion Hannah could not recognize swelled in her throat, fairly cutting off her breath. She traced his name with her eyes and then with the tip of her index finger. Doss McKettrick. As if men by that name were common as thorns in a blackberry thicket, and any one of them might be her husband. As if he had to be sure she knew which one would give her a book and which had noticed how fiercely, how desperately she craved that first green stirring in the cold earth and in the bare-limbed branches of trees.

  Did he know how she listened for the breaking of the ice on the pond far back in the woods behind the house? How she watched the frigid sky for the first brave birds, carrying back the merry little songs she pined for, in the secret regions of her heart, when the snow was just beginning to seep into the ground?

  Hannah closed the book, held it against her chest.

  Then she opened it again and carefully turned to the first illustration, a lovely colored woodcut of purple crocuses, blooming above a thin snowfall. She drank them in, surfeited herself on lilacs and climbing roses, sweet williams and peonies.

  Doss had given her flowers, in the dead of winter. Just looking at the pictures, she could imagine their distinctive scents, the shape of their petals, the depth upon depth of their various colors—everything from the palest of whites to the fathomless purples and crimsons.

  She gobbled them all greedily with her eyes, page after page of them, tumbled flower-drunk into sleep and dreamed of them. Dreamed of spring, of trout quickening in the creeks, of green grass and of fresh, warm breezes teasing her hair and tingling on her skin.

  When she wakened, drowsy and confused, the room was lavender with twilight, and a rim of golden light edged the lower part of the door. She heard Doss and Tobias talking in the next room, knew by a series of decisive clicks that they were playing checkers. Tobias gave a shout of triumphant laughter, and the sound seemed so poignant to Hannah that tears thickened in her throat.

  She got up, used the chamber pot, washed her hands at the basin. She rummaged for her flannel wrapper, pulled it on and crossed the cold wooden floor to the door.

  Opened it.

  Tobias and Doss both turned to look at her.

  Tobias smiled, delighted.

  Doss looked shy, as though they’d just met. He got up suddenly, came to her, took her arm. Escorted her to a chair.

  “Don’t fuss,” she scolded, but it was after the fussing was through.

  “I beat Uncle Doss four times!” Tobias crowed.

  “Did you?” Hannah asked, deliberately widening her eyes.

  Doss went over to the other bed, pulled the quilt off, made Hannah stand, wrapped her up like renderings in a sausage skin and sat her down again.

  What am I to make of you, Doss McKettrick? she asked silently.

  “I’ll go down and order us some supper,” Doss said.

  “Has your uncle Jeb gone?” Hannah asked Tobias, when they were alone.

  Tobias nodded, kneeling on the floor, stacking checker pieces into red and black towers that teetered on the wooden board. “He took the afternoon train back to Phoenix. Said to tell you he hoped you’d be feeling better soon.”

  “I wish I could have said goodbye,” Hannah said, but it wasn’t the complete truth. She’d not been eager to face Doss’s uncle; he was half again too wise and, besides, he must have known that her new husband had spent much of their wedding night in a saloon, just to avoid her. He’d never have mentioned it, of course, but she’d have seen the knowledge in his eyes.

  Would he tell his wife, Chloe, when he got home? Would she, in turn, tell Emmeline and Mandy and the other McKettrick women? Get them all feeling sorry for poor Hannah?

  She’d know soon enough. Concerned letters would begin arriving, probably in the next batch of mail, full of wary congratulations and carefully worded questions. The Aunts, as both Gabe and Doss had always referred to them, were not gossips, so she needn’t fear scandal from that quarter, but they would have plenty of private discussions among themselves, and they’d give Doss what for when they returned to the Triple M in the spring, settling into their houses on all parts of the ranch, throwing open windows and doors, planting gardens and entertaining a steady stream of children and grandchildren.

  Hannah thought she would have welcomed even their curiosity, if it meant the long winter was over.

  “Ma?”

  Hannah realized she’d let her mind wander and turned her attention to Tobias, who was studying her closely and clearly had something of moment to say. “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Is Uncle Doss my pa, now that you and him are married?”

  Hannah blinked. Took in a slow breath and took her time letting it out. “I told you before, Tobias. Doss is still your uncle. Your father will always be—your father.”

  Tobias’s forehead creased as he frowned. “But Pa’s dead,” he said.

  Hannah sighed. “Yes.”

  “Uncle Doss is alive.”

  “He certainly is.”

  “I want a pa. Somebody to take me fishin’ and teach me how to shoot.”

  “Uncles can do those things.” Hannah didn’t want Tobias within a mile of a gun, but she didn’t have the strength to fight that battle just then, so she let it go.

  “It isn’t the same,” Tobias reasoned.

  “Tobias, there are some things in this life a person has to accept. Your father is gone. D
oss is your uncle, not your pa. You’ll just have to make the best of that.”

  “The best would be if he was my pa instead of my uncle.”

  “Tobias.”

  “You said once that Uncle Doss would be my stepfather if you got married. Now, you’re his wife. So if you leave off the ‘step’ part, that makes him my pa.”

  Hannah rubbed her temples with her fingertips.

  Tobias beamed. Eight years old, and he could argue like a senior senator at a campaign picnic.

  The door to the corridor opened, and Doss came in, followed by two maids carrying trays laden with food.

  “Pa’s back,” Tobias said.

  Hannah’s gaze locked with Doss’s. Something passed between them, silent and charged.

  Hannah looked away first.

  Chapter Twelve

  Present Day

  “You need time to absorb all this,” Eve told Sierra the next morning at the breakfast table. Eve had made waffles for them all, and everyone had eaten with a hearty appetite. Now Liam was upstairs, dressing for his first visit to Indian Rock Elementary School—Sierra planned to register him but wasn’t sure he was ready for a full day of class—and Travis had given the ranch house a wide berth ever since their return from Flagstaff the previous afternoon. “So I’m going to leave,” Eve finished, gently decisive.

  Sierra, who had spent a largely sleepless night, had mixed feelings about Eve’s going away. On the one hand, there were so many things she wanted to know about her mother—things that had nothing to do with their long separation. What kind of books did she read? What places had she visited? Had she loved anyone before or after Hank Breslin? What made her laugh? Did she cry at sad movies, or was she a stone-realist, prone to saying, “It’s only a story”?

  On the other, Sierra craved solitude, to think and reflect and sort what she had learned into some kind of sensible order. She wanted to huddle up somewhere, with her arms around her knees and decide what she believed and what she didn’t.