Sierra's Homecoming

by Linda Lael Miller

  Especially Sierra.

  Not that he loved her or anything. It was too early for that.

  But he sure as hell felt something, and he wished he didn’t.

  “You okay?” she asked, raising herself on to one elbow and studying his face a lot more intently than he would have liked.

  “Fine,” he lied.

  “This doesn’t have to change anything,” Sierra reasoned, hurrying her words a little—pushing them along, like rambunctious cattle toward a narrow chute. Was she trying to convince him, or herself?

  “Right,” he said.

  She pulled away, sat on the backs of her thighs, the quilt pulled up to her chin. “I’d better—get back to the house.”

  He nodded.

  She nodded.

  Neither of them moved.

  “What just happened here?” Sierra asked, after a long time had passed, with the two of them just staring at each other.

  Whatever had happened, it had been a lot more than the obvious. He was sure of that, if nothing else.

  “I’ll be damned if I know,” Travis said.

  “Me neither,” Sierra said. Then she bent and kissed his forehead, before scrambling out of bed.

  He sat up, watched as she gathered her scattered clothes and shimmied into them. He wished he smoked, because lighting a cigarette would have given him something to do. Something to distract him from the rawness of what he felt and his frustration at not being able to wrestle it down and give it a name.

  “I guess you must think I do things like this all the time,” she said. Maybe he wasn’t alone in being confused. The idea stirred a forlorn hope within him. “And I don’t. I don’t sleep with men I barely know, and I don’t—”

  He smiled. “I believe you, Sierra,” he said. He did, too. Anybody who came with the kind of sensual abandon she had, on a regular basis, would be superhuman, dead of exhaustion or both.

  Actually, he admired her stamina, and her uncommon passion.

  And she was up, moving around, dressing. He wasn’t entirely sure he could stand.

  She sat on the side of the bed, keeping a careful if subtle distance, to pull on her socks and boots. “Travis?” she said without looking at him. He saw a pink glow along the edge of her cheek, and thought of a summer dawn, rimming a mountain peak.

  “What?”

  “It was good. What we did was good. Okay?”

  He swallowed. Reached out and squeezed her hand briefly before letting it go. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It was good.”

  She left then, and Travis felt her absence like a vacuum.

  He cupped his hands behind his head, lay back and began making a list in his mind.

  All the things he had to do before he left the Triple M for good.

  She’d made a damn fool of herself.

  Sierra let herself into the house, closed the door behind her and leaned back against it.

  What had she been thinking, throwing herself at Travis that way? She’d been like a woman possessed—and a stupid woman, at that.

  Sierra McKettrick, the sexual sophisticate.

  Right.

  Sierra McKettrick, who had been intimate with exactly two men in her life—one of whom had fathered her child, lied to her and left her behind, apparently without a second thought.

  What if Travis hadn’t been telling the truth when he said he used protection?

  What if she was pregnant again?

  “Get a grip,” she told herself out loud. Travis had clearly had a lot of experience in these matters, unlike her. Furthermore he was a lawyer. He might not have given a damn whether she was protected or not, but he surely would have covered his own backside, if only to avoid a potential paternity suit.

  She stood still, breathing like a woman in the early stages of labor, until she’d regained some semblance of composure. She had to pull herself together. In a couple of hours she’d be picking Liam up at school.

  He’d want to tell her all about his class. The other kids. The teachers.

  There would be supper to fix and homework to oversee.

  She was a mother, for God’s sake, not some bimbo in a soap opera, sneaking off to have prenoon monkey sex in a trailer with a virtual stranger.

  She straightened.

  Her own voice echoed in her mind.

  It was good. What we did was good. Okay?

  And it had been good, just not in the noble sense of the word.

  Sierra went slowly upstairs, took a long, hot shower, dressed in fresh jeans and a white cotton blouse. Borrowed one of Meg’s cardigans, to complete the “Mom” look.

  By the time she was finished, she still had more than an hour until she had to leave for town.

  Her gaze strayed to the china cabinet.

  She would look at the pictures in the album. Get a frame of reference for all those McKettricks that had gone before. Try to imagine herself as one of them, a link in the biological chain.

  She heard Travis’s truck start up, resisted an urge to go to the window and watch him drive away. There was too much danger that she would morph into a desperate housewife, smile sweetly and wave.

  Not gonna happen.

  Keeping her thoughts and actions briskly businesslike, she retrieved the album, carried it to the table, sat down and lifted the cover.

  A small blue book was tucked inside, its corners curled with age.

  A tremor of something went through Sierra like a wash of ice water, some premonition, some subconscious awareness straining to reach the surface.

  She opened the smaller volume.

  Focused on the beautifully scripted lines, penned in ink that had long since faded to an antique brown.

  My name is Hannah McKettrick. Today’s date is January 19, 1919.

  I know you’re here. I can sense it. You’ve moved the teapot, and the album in which I’ve placed this remembrance book.

  Please don’t harm my boy. His name is Tobias. He’s eight years old.

  He is everything to me.

  Sierra caught her breath. There was more, but her shock was such that, for the next few moments, the remaining words might as well have been gibberish.

  Was this woman, probably long dead, addressing her from another century?

  Impossible.

  But then, it was impossible for teapots and photograph albums to move by themselves, too. It was impossible for an ordinary piano to play itself, with no one touching the keys.

  It was impossible for Liam to see a boy in his room.

  Sierra swallowed, lowered her eyes to the journal again. The words had been written so very long ago, and yet they had the immediacy of an e-mail.

  How could this be happening?

  She sucked in another breath. Read on.

  I must be losing my mind. Doss says it’s grief, over Gabe’s dying. I don’t even know why I’m writing this, except in the hope that you’ll write something back. It’s the only way I can think of to speak to you.

  Sierra glanced at the clock. Only a few minutes had passed since she sat down at the table, but it seemed like so much longer.

  She got out of her chair, found a pen in the junk drawer next to the sink. This was crazy. She was about to deface what might be an important family record. And yet there was something so plaintive in Hannah’s plea that she couldn’t ignore it.

  My name is Sierra McKettrick, and it’s January 20, 2007.

  I have a son, too, and his name is Liam. He’s seven, and he has asthma. He’s the center of my life.

  You have nothing to fear from me. I’m not a ghost, just an ordinary flesh-and-blood woman. A mother, like you.

  The telephone rang, jolting Sierra out of the spell.

  Conditioned to unexpected emergencies, because of Liam’s illness, she hurried to answer, squinting at the Caller ID.

  “Indian Rock Elementary School.”

  The room swayed.

  “This is Sierra McKettrick,” she said. “Is my son all right?”

  The voice on the other end o
f the line was blessedly calm. “Liam is just a little sick at his stomach, that’s all,” the woman said. “The school nurse thinks he ought to come home. He’ll probably be fine in the morning.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Sierra answered, and hung up without saying goodbye.

  Liam is safe, she told herself, but she felt panicky, just the same.

  She deliberately closed Hannah McKettrick’s journal, put it back inside the album. Placed the album inside the drawer.

  Then she raced around the kitchen, frantically searching for the Blazer keys, before remembering that she’d left them in the ignition earlier, when she’d come back from town. She’d been so focused on having an illicit tryst with Travis Reid….

  She grabbed her coat, dashed out the door, jumped into the SUV.

  The roads were icy, and by the time Sierra sped into Indian Rock, huge flakes of snow were tumbling from a grim gray sky. She forced herself to slow down, but when she reached the school parking lot, she almost forgot to shut off the motor in her haste to get inside, find her son.

  Liam lay on a cot in the nurse’s office, alarmingly pale. Someone had laid a cloth over his forehead, presumably cool, but he was all by himself.

  How could these people have left him alone?

  “Mom,” he said. “My stomach hurts. I think I’m gonna hurl again.”

  She went to him. He rolled on to his side and vomited onto her shoes.

  “I’m sorry!” he wailed.

  She stroked his sweat-dampened hair. “It’s all right, Liam. Everything is going to be all right.”

  He threw up again.

  Sierra snatched a handful of paper towels from the wall dispenser, wet them down at the sink and washed his face.

  “My coat!” he lamented. “I don’t want to leave my cowboy coat—”

  “Don’t worry about your coat,” Sierra said, wondering distractedly how she could possibly be the same woman who’d spent half the morning naked in Travis’s bed.

  The nurse, a tall blond woman with kindly blue eyes, stepped into the room, carrying Liam’s coat and backpack. Silently she laid the things aside in a chair and came to assist in the cleanup effort.

  Sierra went to get the coat.

  “No!” Liam cried out, as she approached him with it. “What if I puke on it?”

  “Sweetheart, it’s cold outside, and we can always have it cleaned—”

  The nurse caught her eye. Shook her head. “Let’s just bundle Liam up in a couple of blankets. I’ll help you get him to the car. This coat is important to him—so important that, sick as he was, he insisted I go and get it for him.”

  Sierra bit her lip. She and the nurse wrapped Liam in the blankets, and Sierra lifted him into her arms. He was getting so big. One day soon, she probably wouldn’t be able to carry him any more.

  The main doors whooshed open when Sierra reached them.

  “Oh, great,” Liam moaned. “Everybody’s looking. Everybody knows I ralphed.”

  Sierra hadn’t noticed the children filling the corridor. The dismissal bell must have rung, but she hadn’t heard it.

  “It’s okay, Liam,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No, it isn’t! My mom is carrying me out of the school in a bunch of blankets, like a baby! I’ll never live this down!”

  Sierra and the nurse exchanged glances.

  The nurse smiled and shifted Liam’s coat and backpack so she could pat his shoulder. “When you get back to school,” she said, “you come to my office and I’ll tell you plenty of stories about things that have happened in this school over the years. You’re not the first person to throw up here, Liam McKettrick, and you won’t be the last, either.”

  Liam lifted his head, apparently heartened. “Really?”

  The nurse rolled her eyes expressively. “If you only knew,” she said, in a conspiratorial tone, opening the Blazer door on the passenger side, so Sierra could set Liam on the seat and buckle him in. “I wouldn’t name names, of course, but I’ve seen kids do a lot worse than vomit.”

  Sierra shut the door, turned to face the nurse.

  “Thanks,” she said. Liam peered through the window, his face a greenish, bespectacled moon, his hair sticking out in spikes. “You have a unique way of comforting an embarrassed kid, but it seems to be effective.”

  The nurse smiled, put out her hand. “My name is Susan Yarnia,” she said. “If you need anything, you call me, either here at the school or at home. My husband’s name is Joe, and we’re in the book.”

  Sierra nodded. Took the coat and backpack and put them into the rig, after ferreting for Liam’s inhaler, just in case he needed it on the way home. “Do you think I should take him to the clinic?” she asked in a whisper, after she’d closed the door again.

  “That’s up to you, of course,” Susan said. “There’s been a flu bug going around, and my guess is Liam caught it. If I were you, I’d just take him home, put him to bed and make a bit of a fuss over him. See that he drinks a lot of liquids, and if you can get him to swallow a few spoonfuls of chicken soup, so much the better.”

  Sierra nodded, thanked the woman again and rounded the Blazer to get behind the wheel.

  “What if I spew in Aunt Meg’s car?” Liam asked.

  “I’ll clean it up,” Sierra answered.

  “This whole thing is mortifying. When I tell Tobias—”

  Tobias.

  If Sierra hadn’t been pulling out on to a slick road, she probably would have slammed on the brakes.

  Please don’t harm my boy, Hannah McKettrick had written, eighty-eight years ago, in her journal. His name is Tobias. He’s eight years old.

  “Who is Tobias?” Sierra asked moderately, but her palms were so wet on the steering wheel that she feared her grip wouldn’t hold if she had to make a sudden turn.

  “The. Boy. In. My. Room,” Liam said very carefully, as though English were not even Sierra’s second language, let alone her first. “I told you I saw him.”

  “Yeah,” Sierra replied, her stomach clenching so hard that she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t be the next one to throw up, “but you didn’t mention having a conversation with him.”

  Liam turned away from her, rested his forehead against the passenger-side window, probably because it was cool. “I thought you’d freak,” he said. “Or send me off to some bug farm.”

  Sierra drove past the clinic where she and Travis had taken Liam the day of his asthma attack. It was all she could do not to pull in and demand that he be put on life support, or air-lifted to Stanford.

  It’s stomach flu, she insisted to herself, and kept driving by sheer force of will.

  “When have I ever threatened to send you anywhere, let alone to a ‘bug farm’?”

  “There’s always a first time,” Liam reasoned.

  “You were sick last night,” Sierra realized aloud. “That’s why you were so quiet at supper.”

  “I was quiet at supper because I figured Tobias would be there when I went upstairs.”

  “Were you scared?”

  Liam flung her a scornful look. “No,” he said. And then his cheeks puffed out, and he made a strangling sound.

  Sierra pulled to the side of the road, got out of the SUV and barely got around to open the door before he decorated her shoes again.

  This is your real life, she thought pragmatically.

  Not the two million dollars.

  Not great sex in a cowboy’s bed.

  It’s a seven-year-old boy, barfing on your shoes.

  The reflections were strangely comforting, given the circumstances.

  When Liam was through, she wiped off her boots with handfuls of snow, got back into the Blazer and drove to the nearest gas station, where she bought him a bottle of Gatorade so he could rinse out his mouth, spit gloriously onto the pavement, and hopefully retain enough electrolytes to keep from dehydrating.

  Twilight was already gathering by the time she pulled into the garage at the ranch house, having noticed, in spite of he
rself, that Travis was back from wherever he’d gone, and the lights were glowing golden in the windows of his trailer.

  Not that it mattered.

  In fact, she wasn’t the least bit relieved when he walked into the garage before she could shut the door or even turn off the engine.

  Liam unsnapped his seat belt and lowered his window. “I horked all over the schoolhouse,” he told Travis gleefully. “People will probably talk about it for years.”

  “Excellent,” Travis said with admiration. His eyes danced under the brim of his hat as he looked at Sierra over Liam’s head, then returned his full attention to the little boy. “Need some help getting inside? One cowpoke to another?”

  “Sure,” Liam replied staunchly. “Not that I couldn’t make it on my own or anything.”

  Travis chuckled. “Maybe you ought to carry me, then.” His gaze snagged Sierra’s again. “It happens that I’m feeling a little weak in the knees myself.”

  Sierra’s face heated. She switched off the ignition.

  Liam giggled, and the sound was restorative. “You’re too big to carry, Travis,” he said, with such affection that Sierra’s throat tightened again, and she honestly thought she’d cry.

  Fortunately, Travis wasn’t looking at her. He gathered Liam into his arms, blankets and all, and carried him inside. Sierra followed with her son’s things, scrambling to get her emotions under control.

  “It’s arctic in here,” Liam said.

  “You’re right,” Travis agreed easily. He set Liam in the chair where Sierra had sat writing in the diary of a woman who was probably buried somewhere among all those bronze statues in the family cemetery, and approached the old stove. “Nothing like a good wood fire to warm a place up.”

  “Drink your Gatorade,” Sierra told Liam, because she felt she had to say something, and that was all that came to mind.

  “Can we sleep down here again?” Liam asked. “Like we did when the blizzard came and the furnace went out?”

  “No,” Sierra answered, much too quickly.

  Travis gave her a sidelong glance and a grin, then stuffed some crumpled newspaper and kindling into the belly of the wood stove, and lit the fire. Sierra shivered, hugging herself, while he adjusted the damper.