Sierra's Homecoming

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Is something wrong with the furnace again?” she asked.

  “Probably,” Travis answered.

  She was oddly grateful that he hadn’t called her on asking a stupid question. But then, he wouldn’t. Not in front of her son. She knew that much about Travis Reid, at least. Along with the fact that he was one hell of a lover.

  Don’t even think about that, Sierra scolded herself. But it was like deciding not to imagine a pink elephant skating on a pond and wearing a tutu.

  “I think we should all sleep right here,” Liam persisted.

  Travis chuckled, more, Sierra suspected, at her discomfort than at Liam’s campaign for another kitchen campout. “If a man’s got a bed,” Travis said, “he ought to use it.”

  Sierra’s cheeks stung. “Was that necessary?” she whispered furiously, after approaching the wood box to grab up a few chunks of pine. If she was going to live in this house for a year, she’d better learn to work the stove.

  “No,” Travis whispered back, “but it was fun.”

  “Will you stop?”

  Another grin. He seemed to have an infinite supply of those, and all of them were saucy. “Nope.”

  “What are you guys whispering about?” Liam asked suspiciously. “Are you keeping secrets?”

  Travis took the wood from Sierra’s hands, stuffed it into the stove. She tried to look away but she couldn’t. “No secrets,” he said.

  Sierra bit her lower lip.

  The kitchen began to warm up, but she couldn’t be certain it was because of the fire in the cookstove.

  Travis left them to go downstairs and attend to the furnace.

  “I wish he was my dad,” Liam said.

  Sierra blinked back more tears. Lifted her chin. “Well, he’s not, sweetie,” she said gently, and with a slight quaver in her voice. “Best let it go at that, okay?”

  Liam looked so sad that Sierra wanted to take him on to her lap and rock him the way she had when he was younger and a lot more amenable to motherly affection. “Okay,” he agreed.

  She crossed to him, ruffled his hair, which was already mussed. “Think you could eat something?” she asked. “Maybe some chicken noodle soup?”

  “Yuck,” he answered. “And I still think we should sleep in the kitchen, because it’s cold and I’m sick and I might catch pneumonia or something up there in my room.”

  The mention of Liam’s room made Sierra think of Hannah again and Tobias. She went to the china cabinet, opened the drawer, raised the cover on the photo album. The journal was still there, and she looked inside.

  Hannah’s words.

  Her words.

  Nothing more.

  Did she expect an answer? More lines of faded ink, entered beneath her own ballpoint scrawl?

  A tingle of anticipation went through her as she closed the journal, then the album, then the drawer, and straightened.

  Yes.

  Oh, yes.

  She did expect an answer.

  The furnace made that familiar whooshing sound.

  Liam muttered something that might have been a swear word.

  Sierra pretended not to notice.

  Travis came back up the basement stairs, dusting his hands together. Another job well done.

  “It’s still going to be really cold upstairs,” Liam asserted.

  “You’re probably right,” Travis agreed.

  Sierra gave him an eloquent look.

  Travis was undaunted. He just grinned another insufferable, three-alarm grin. “I’ll make you a bed on the floor,” he said, and though he was looking at Sierra, he was talking to Liam. Hopefully. “Just until it gets warm upstairs.”

  Liam yelped with delighted triumph, punching the air with one fist. Then, just as quickly, he sobered. “What about you and Mom?”

  “I reckon we’ll just tough it out,” Travis drawled. With that, he went about carrying in a couple of sofa cushions to lay on the floor, not too close to the stove but close enough for warmth.

  Sierra fetched a pillow and fresh blankets.

  Liam stretched out on the makeshift bed like an Egyptian king traveling by barge. Sighed happily.

  “Are you staying for supper, Travis?” he asked.

  “Am I invited?” Travis asked, looking at Sierra.

  She sighed. “Yes,” she said.

  Liam let out another yippee.

  Sierra made grilled cheese sandwiches and heated canned spaghetti, but by the time she served the feast, Liam was sound asleep.

  Travis, seated on the bench, his sleeves still rolled up from washing in the bathroom down the hall, nodded toward him.

  “If I were you,” he said, “I’d start checking out law schools. That kid is probably going to be on the Supreme Court before he’s thirty.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  1919

  Hannah’s hands trembled slightly as she raised the cover of the family album and reached for the remembrance book tucked inside. She held her breath as she opened it.

  Only her own words were there, alone and stark.

  She was a practical woman, and she knew she should not have expected anything else. Spirits, if there was such a thing, did not take up pens and write in remembrance books. And yet she was stricken with a profound disappointment, the likes of which she’d never experienced before. She’d suffered plenty in her life, seeing three sisters perish as a girl and, as a woman grown, losing Gabe, knowing none of the brave dreams they’d talked about with such hope and faith would ever come true.

  No more stolen kisses.

  No more secret laughter.

  No more cattle grazing on a thousand hills.

  And certainly no more babies, born squalling in their room upstairs.

  Hannah told herself, I will not cry, I have cried enough. I have emptied myself of tears.

  So why do they keep coming?

  “Hannah?”

  She started, looked up to see Doss standing at the foot of the stairs. He’d been working in the barn, the last she knew, doing the morning chores. Chopping extra wood because there was another storm coming. It bothered her that she hadn’t heard him come in.

  “Tobias is worse,” he said.

  Alarm swelled into Hannah’s throat, cutting off her wind.

  She started for the stairs, but when she would have passed Doss, he stopped her.

  “I’m going to town for the doc,” he told her.

  “I’ll just wrap Tobias up warm and we’ll—”

  Doss’s grip tightened on her shoulders. Only then did she realize he hadn’t merely stepped into her path, he was touching her. “No, Hannah,” he said. “The boy’s too sick for that.”

  “Suppose the doctor won’t come?”

  “He’ll come,” Doss said. “You go to Tobias. Don’t let the fire go out, no matter what. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Hannah nodded, bursting to get to her son, but somehow wanting to cling to Doss, too. Tell him not to go, that they’d manage some way but he oughtn’t to leave, because something truly terrible might happen if he did.

  “Go to him,” Doss told her, letting go of her shoulders.

  She felt as though he’d been holding her up. Swayed a little to catch her balance. Then, on impulse, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him right on the mouth. “You be careful, Doss McKettrick,” she said. “You come back to us, safe and sound.”

  He looked deeply into her eyes for a moment, as though he could see secrets she kept even from herself, then nodded and made for the door. The last Hannah saw of him, just before she dashed up the rear stairs, he was putting on his coat and hat.

  Tobias lay fitful in his bed, his nightshirt soaked with perspiration, like the sheets. His teeth chattered, and his lips were blue, but his flesh burned to the touch.

  Hannah could not afford to let panic prevail.

  She had mothering to do, and however inadequate and fearful she felt, there was no one but her to do it.

  She pushed up her sleeves, added more pins to her hair s
o it wouldn’t tumble down and get in her way, and headed downstairs to heat water.

  Heedful of Doss’s warning not to let the fire die, she added wood from the generous supply he’d brought in earlier without her noticing. She pumped water into every bucket and kettle she owned, and put them on the stove to heat. Then she dragged the bathtub out of the pantry and set it in the middle of the floor.

  The instructions seemed to come from somewhere inside her. She didn’t plan what to do, or take the time to debate one intuition against another. It was as if some stronger, smarter, better Hannah had stepped to the fore, and pushed the timid and uncertain one aside.

  This Hannah knew what to do. The regular one stood in the background, wringing her hands and counseling hysteria.

  Tobias was practically delirious when Hannah roused him from his bed, an hour later when the tub was full of hot water, and half carried, half led him downstairs.

  In the kitchen she stripped him and put him into the bath. Scrubbed him down, all the while talking quietly, confidently, without ever stopping to think up the words she’d say next.

  “You’ll be fine, Tobias. Come spring, you’ll be able to ride your pony through the fields and swim in the pond. We’ll get you that dog you’ve been wanting—you can pick him out yourself—and he can sleep right in your room, too. On the foot of your bed, if you want. You can call your uncle Doss ‘Pa’ from now on, and there’ll be a brand-new baby in this house at harvest time—think of it, Tobias. A little brother or sister. You can choose the name—”

  Tobias shuddered, chilled even in water that would be too hot to stand any other time.

  Hannah dried him with towels, put him in a clean nightshirt, got him back upstairs again. Settled him into her own bed while she hastened to put fresh sheets and blankets on his.

  All that morning, and all that afternoon, she tended her boy, touching a cold cloth to his forehead. Holding his hands. Telling him that his pa had gone to town for the doctor, and he needn’t worry because he was going to be just fine.

  They were all going to be just fine.

  Tobias had occasional moments of lucidity. “Liam’s sick, too,” he said once. “I want to be with Liam.”

  Another time, he asked, “Where’s Pa? Is Pa all right?”

  Hannah had bitten her lower lip and reassured him gently. “Yes, sweetheart, your pa’s just fine.”

  The day wore on, into evening.

  And Doss hadn’t returned.

  Hannah put more wood on the fire, donned Gabe’s coat and made her way out to the barn, through ever-deepening snow, to feed the livestock, because there was no one else to do it.

  The wind bit through to Hannah’s bones as she worked. Made them ache, then go numb.

  Where was Doss?

  The other Hannah, the fretful one pushed into the background, kept calling out that question, as if from the bottom of a well.

  Where…where…where?

  It was completely dark by the time she’d finished, and as she left the barn, she heard the faint rumble of thunder. Rare in a snowstorm, like lightning, but Hannah had seen that, too, there in the high country of Arizona, and in Montana, as well. A staggering sense of foreboding descended upon her, and it had nothing to do with Tobias being sick.

  Hannah returned to the house, switched on the kitchen bulb before even taking off Gabe’s coat, thinking somehow the light might draw Doss back to her and Tobias, through the storm. Even in daylight, and even for a man as tough and as skilled as Doss, navigating the most familiar trails would be difficult in weather like that, if not impossible. In the dark, it was plain treacherous.

  “Ma?” Tobias called. “Ma, are you down there?”

  It heartened her, the strength she heard in his voice, but her joy was tempered by worry. Doss should have been home by then. Unless—please, God, let it be so—he’d decided to stay in town.

  “Yes,” she called back, as cheerfully as she could. “I’m here, and I’m about to fix you some supper.”

  “Come up, Ma. Right now. That boy’s here.”

  In the process of shedding the coat she’d worn to feed the livestock and the chickens and milk the cow, Hannah let the garment drop, forgotten, to the floor. She took the stairs two at a time and burst into Tobias’s room.

  With no lamp burning, it was stone dark. She made out the outline of Tobias’s bed and him lying there.

  “He’s here, Ma,” Tobias said, in a delighted whisper, as though speaking too loudly might cause his invisible friend to disappear. “Liam’s here.”

  Hannah hurried to the bedside.

  “I don’t see him,” she said.

  Just then the sky itself seemed to part, with a great, tearing roar so horrendous Hannah put her hands to her ears. The floor trembled beneath her feet, and the windowpanes rattled. Light quivered in the room—she knew it was snow lightning, but it was otherworldly, just the same—and for one single, incredulous moment, she saw not Tobias lying in that bed, but another little boy. And she saw the woman standing on the other side of the bed, too. Staring at her. Looking every bit as surprised as Hannah herself.

  Within half a heartbeat, the whole incident was over.

  “Did you see them?” Tobias asked desperately, grasping at her hand. Clinging. “Ma, did you see them?”

  “Yes,” Hannah whispered. She dropped to her knees next to Tobias’s bed, unable to stand for another instant. Tobias had said “them.” He’d seen the woman, too, then, as well as the boy. “Dear God, yes.”

  “She was wearing trousers, Ma,” Tobias marveled.

  Hannah raised herself from the floor to perch tremulously on the side of Tobias’s bed. Fumbled for the matches and lit the lamp on the stand.

  “Tell me what else you saw, Tobias,” she said. Her hands were shaking so badly that the lamp chimney rattled when she set it back in place.

  “She had short hair. Brown, I think. And she saw us, Ma, just as sure as we saw her!”

  Hannah nodded numbly.

  “What does it mean, Ma?” Tobias asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Hannah said.

  Present Day

  Sierra stood still at Liam’s bedside, hugging herself and trembling, trying to understand what she’d just seen.

  What the hell had she just seen?

  Lightning.

  A woman in an old-fashioned dress, standing on the opposite side of Liam’s bed.

  Hannah?

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Liam asked sleepily. He’d protested a little, when she’d roused him from his slumbers in the kitchen and brought him up here to sleep in his own bed. Then he’d fallen into natural oblivion.

  She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “Mom?” Liam prompted, sounding more awake now.

  “We’ll…we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “Can I sleep with you?”

  Sierra swallowed. Travis had gone back to his trailer several hours before. She’d sat downstairs in the study, with a low fire going, catching up on her e-mail, checking in on Liam at regular intervals. Anything, she realized now, but open the family album and come face-to-face with a long line of McKettricks, every one of them a stranger.

  The house seemed empty and, at the same time, too crowded for comfort.

  “I’ll sleep in here with you,” she said. “How would that be?”

  “Awesome,” Liam said.

  “Just let me change.” Down the hall, she stripped to the skin, put on sweats and made for the bathroom, where she splashed her face with cool water and brushed her teeth.

  Such ordinary things.

  In the wake of what she’d just experienced, she wondered if anything would ever be “ordinary” again.

  Liam was snoring softly when she got back to his room. She slipped into the narrow bed beside him, turned on to her side and stared into the darkness until at last she too fell asleep.

  1919

  While Doc Willaby’s nephew was getting his medical gear together, Doss took the oppor
tunity to slip into the church down on the corner. He hadn’t set foot inside it since he and Gabe had come back from the army, him sitting ramrod straight on a train seat and Gabe lying in a pine box.

  He’d had no truck with God after that.

  Now they had some business to discuss.

  Doss opened the door, which was always unlocked, lest some wayfarer seek to pray or to find salvation, and took off his hat. He walked down front, to the plain wooden table that served as an altar, and lit one of the beeswax candles with a match from his pocket.

  “I’m here to talk about Tobias,” he said.

  God didn’t answer.

  Doss shifted uncomfortably on his feet. They were so cold from the long drive into town that he couldn’t feel them. Cain and Abel had been fractious on the way, and he’d had all sorts of trouble with them. Once, they’d just stopped and refused to go any farther, and then, crossing the creek, the team had made it over just fine but the sleigh had fallen through. Sunk past the runners in the frigid water.

  He’d still be back there, wet to the skin and frozen stiff as laundry left on a clothesline before a blizzard, if three of Rafe’s ranch hands hadn’t come along to help. They’d given him dry clothes, fetched from a nearby line shack, dosed him with whisky, hitched their lassos to the half-submerged sleigh and hauled it up on to the bank by horsepower.

  He’d thanked the men kindly and sent them on their way, and then spent more precious time coaxing Cain and Abel to proceed. They’d been mightily reluctant to do that, and he’d finally had to threaten them with a switch to get them moving.

  The whole day had gone like that, though the frustrations were at considerable variance, and by the time he’d pulled up in front of the doc’s house, the worthless critters were so worn-out he knew they wouldn’t make it back home. He’d sent to the livery stable for another rig and fresh horses.

  Doss cleared his throat respectfully. “Hannah can’t lose that boy,” he went on. “You took Gabe, and if You don’t mind my saying so, that was bad enough. I guess what I want to say is, if You’ve got to claim somebody else, then it ought to be me, not Tobias. He’s only eight and he’s got a lot of living yet to do. I don’t know exactly what kind of outfit You’re running up there, but if there are cattle, I’m a fair hand in a roundup. I can ride with the best of them, too. I’ll make myself useful—You’ve got my word on that.” He paused, swallowed. His face felt hot, and he knew he was acting like a damn fool, but he was desperate. “I reckon that’s my side of the matter, so amen.”