Olivia had never once come back here, simply leaving the place as it was, as her father had left it.
She went outside. An owl hooted somewhere in the nearby woods. Olivia sat on the worn concrete steps, the owl’s mournful call echoing her almost unbearable sense of loss for all that could have been. For everything that had not been. For the father who had never seen the wrong in the way he had mistreated his family. For the love of a boy she’d thought real and true. And for the child she had never had a chance to know.
IT WAS ALMOST two in the morning, and John had reached that point just beyond bone tired. He’d driven Cleeve home from the reunion after his truck had failed to start, and forty-five minutes worth of tinkering had done nothing but give John more fodder for ribbing him about his choice in vehicles. He was a Dodge man. Cleeve a Ford.
This particular stretch of 134 was as straight as a Kansas road. A half-mile or so ahead, a car pulled out in front of him, taillights flashing. Closer in, he recognized the BMW, and then the car accelerated, the lights quickly becoming pinpoints in the distance.
He slowed down, frowning. That was Olivia’s old driveway. What had she been doing out there this late? He rolled by the turnoff at just over twenty miles an hour, his foot off the accelerator.
Strange as it now seemed, in all the time he and Olivia had dated, he had never once been to her house. She’d always made excuses for not taking him there. He’d been curious, but he’d never pressed her about it. He knew her father worked construction jobs, and that they weren’t rich. He hadn’t cared. It made no difference to him, but he had noticed how uncomfortable she was at his house when he’d first started taking her there. And although he would have been the last person in the world to make comparisons, he had never wanted to put her in the position of doing so.
He’d driven out here once after she’d left, looking for answers. Her father had answered the door and told him in a flat, cold voice to get off his property.
John turned the truck around now and without giving himself time to reconsider, headed down the driveway, tree limbs hanging past his windshield. How had Liv gotten her car down this road without getting stuck? He idled down the drive, questioning the logic of what he was doing, but he went ahead anyway.
The house was small. A lone rocking chair sat on the narrow front porch. What little gravel there was left of the driveway in front of the house had all but disappeared.
John reached for the flashlight under his seat, got out and made his way through the overgrown yard to the front of the house. It was locked, so he went around back and found the side door ajar. He pushed it open and stepped inside. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe it was invading something that should be left alone. The arguments hurled themselves at him, and yet he could not turn around.
The house was all but crumbling from neglect, the smell of mildew strong. He guessed no one had lived here after Liv’s father had died twelve years ago. Did she still own the place? He wandered down a hallway. A bedroom. And another.
This had obviously been Liv’s. He stepped inside. A bulletin board hung on a side wall, one end crooked as if the nail had slipped down in the old drywall. He shone the light on it. A school lunch menu. An acceptance letter from the University of Virginia, where they had planned to go together. A photo of Liv and him at a football game.
He thought about the young child who had lived here. The teenage girl he had loved. A chest sat against the wall. He opened a drawer. It was full of clothes. Dusty but neatly folded. Shorts. T-shirts. One said: Go Summerville High. State Football Champions. Another said: Orange County Cutting Horse Competition. He’d given it to her.
He opened the drawer beneath it. Full. And so was the bottom one. He went to the closet. Opened the door. Except for a few empty hangers, it was also nearly full.
Why wouldn’t she have taken her things with her when she’d moved away?
He crossed the room and sat on the bed, trying to make sense of it. Why would Liv have left here and not taken her things with her?
A nightstand sat by the bed. He pulled open the drawer on the front and sent up another cloud of dust. Inside was an assortment of pens, pencils and loose-leaf paper. He started to slide it shut, but it stuck and he gave it a tug. It didn’t budge and he yanked again. The drawer gave with a groan, popping out of the stand. The contents toppled to the floor.
He leaned over, upended the drawer and began picking things up. Something on the bottom caught his eye. He pointed his flashlight at it. A packet of letters tied together with a red ribbon. Like the ones Liv used to write him. They were held in place with a piece of wire that had been tacked to the wood. Alarms sounded inside him. Put it back, John.
They’re not yours to read.
Piece by piece, he retrieved everything from the floor and put it all back inside. Including the letters. He closed the drawer. But he sat there, feeling the pull of them. Wondering if they held any answers to what had gone wrong between Liv and him.
As a grown man with an entire life between then and now, he should have been able to let it to go. But there was enough of the hurt boy still left inside him to need to look.
He opened the drawer again and pulled out the bundle. A heart had been drawn on the back of the paper with John and Olivia written inside. He untied the ribbon. Started to tie it back. Then yanked it off. He unfolded the letter on top of the stack and began to read.
John,
You picked me up at the end of the driveway tonight. Don’t know how to explain this to you, so I just don’t. It’s kind of awkward, and I wonder what it would be like to live in a house where I’d be glad to have you pick me up at the front door. Not a big fancy house. Just a house where it’s obvious somebody loves it and the other people who live there.
We drove up to Starkey Mountain again tonight. Talked. About what we want to do with our lives. The places we’d like to go. You said Ireland because everything is so green there and that you’d like to take me with you. I can’t imagine such a thing, actually leaving here, but I’m seventeen now, and maybe Daddy will be wrong about me dreaming bigger than I am. Maybe I’ll do something really incredible with my life, go to all those wonderful places you and I talk about.
Wouldn’t that be something?
You make me think it really could happen. I loved it when you spread one of Sophia’s old quilts out in the back of the truck tonight, and we lay there on it, studying the sky. You said you were impressed with how many of the constellations I knew. That I’m the smartest girl you’ve ever known. But that’s not true, I don’t think. I just remember things I’ve read.
The letter ended there. He flipped open the next one.
We kissed again tonight. Sweet kisses that make me believe what I see in your eyes when you look at me might actually be love. Which is about the hardest thing I could ever imagine trying to believe. You could have any girl in school. Why would you want me? I don’t know, but when you put your arms around me, a feeling knots up in my stomach, almost a pain, it’s so strong. Is this love? Is that what it means to want someone so much that you almost wish you’d never met because the fear of losing this feeling wakes you up at night and is the first thing you think of in the morning?
An ache set up in John’s chest. He opened the next letter.
I don’t know how long what you and I feel for each other will last, if it’ll be forever or if it will be gone tomorrow. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it isn’t love that you feel. But for now, I’d like to believe that it is. I’d like to believe that someone as deeply good as you could love me.
You asked me about the bruises again tonight. I said I ran into the bathroom door. I wish I didn’t have to lie to you.
Stunned, John opened the last of the pack.
So much has happened in these last few weeks. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been too afraid to put the words on this page. Because that makes them real. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I wish I could find the courage to tell y
ou, John. What am I going to do?
John refolded the last letter, not sure what to think, too numb to feel anything.
He remembered now how she’d always had a bruise somewhere. Had her father hit her? Had it been because of him? Was that why she’d left Summerville? Why she’d been so scared?
He tried to separate the mass of what he felt into individual pieces, take each of those apart one by one. Rage. Tenderness. Terror. Longing. Regret. But suddenly, the walls of the space inside him where he’d long ago sealed away his feelings for Liv Ashford strained at their beams and frame, pushing upward and outward until all the nails holding them popped free, and emotion flooded through him.
With the letters still in his hand, he vaulted off the bed and ran from the house, certain if he stayed a moment longer, he would drown.
A SHORT WHILE LATER, John opened the door to his daughter’s room, stood just inside, saying a silent prayer of thanks for the child curled up on the pale green sheets, a Mickey Mouse night-light sending off its yellow glow of reassurance on the wall just below her. Charlie lay at the foot of the bed. She raised her head and gave him a sleepy, questioning look. He motioned for her to stay where she was. The dog put her head back down and closed her eyes.
It was late, and he didn’t want to wake Flora, but the need to see his daughter burned inside him, so he crept quietly across the thick rug to the bed. He sat down on the corner beside her, reached out and smoothed her soft hair from her cheek, tucked it behind her ear. She made a snuffling noise and curled up a little tighter under the sheet.
John’s gratitude for this child went beyond thankfulness. Her unconditional love for him was one of the greatest gifts life would ever give him. To abuse that love, not respect it for the cherished thing that it was, went beyond anything he could ever imagine.
Anger at Liv’s father roared inside him. He let it burn, while he thought of the young Liv he had known and the lengths to which she must have gone to keep what happened in her house a secret. How many times had he questioned a bruise on her arm, her wrist? They came back to him now and he saw them for what they were.
Each one sickened him.
Had anyone else known? Somehow, he knew the answer was no. She had managed to keep it a secret from everyone. A child who spent her life trying to hide such a secret from the world had no childhood.
He reached out and pulled his sleeping daughter into the curve of his arms, rested his chin on her soft hair, reached for the stuffed monkey that had been on the bed beside her, and stayed there with her until the ink of night dried to day.
CHAPTER TEN
Back Roads
OLIVIA AWOKE the next morning aware that something was different.
Lying there in the early-morning stillness, she felt the change inside herself. It was as if she’d been cut loose somehow. Freed. As if some hard, cold place within her had warmed. And inside it was peace. As if by going back to her old house last night and confronting the ghosts there, she had acknowledged the hold they had once held over her, but at the same time, had seen that they no longer had any power.
She should have done something with the house long ago, but it had been easier just to leave it alone, let the weeds grow up around it and her memories of it as well. Maybe after she got back to D.C., she would call a real estate agent and put the place up for sale.
It was time. Past time.
Maybe, though, it was past time for a lot of things. For so long, she had imposed rules upon herself. Staying single. Keeping her life free of commitment. Of risk. Not considering the possibility of ever being a mother.
She thought of Flora and of Lori’s four beautiful children, and something painful echoed inside her. Long ago, she had never imagined living her life without children. And yet here she was. Thirty-three years old and single with no prospects of being anything different.
Had she done this intentionally, too? Was this one more way, conscious or not, she had found to punish herself for not preventing the loss of her child, John’s child? Would she spend the rest of her life repeating that same punishment? Or was it time to let the blame she had leveled at herself go?
The question was still with her an hour later when she left her room at the bed-and-breakfast to go for a run. The change this morning was in her physical self, too, in her step, her stride, her whole demeanor. She felt lighter, as if she’d been released from the anchor of memories to which she’d long ago chained herself.
Even at this early hour, the air held enough stickiness to predict the humid summer day ahead. But the sky was already that deep Virginia June blue, not a single cloud in sight.
A little after eight o’clock, the town was up. From the bakery on the corner of Main and Fourth came a tantalizing waft of fresh bread. Old Mr. Carlyle still ran the place. He was outside sweeping the sidewalk, making neat little piles of the scattered leaves and candy wrappers to scoop up with his dustpan. “Morning, Mr. Carlyle,” Olivia said, jogging by.
He glanced up, pausing in mid-sweep, his smile wide and genuine. “Morning, young lady. Looks like a beautiful day ahead.”
“It sure does,” she said.
A block down, Jim Carter was opening up the corner drugstore. A sign in the front window blinked Fresh Squeezed Lemonade. A fluffy, gray cat sat beneath the sign on the stone sill.
If things hadn’t changed, the Saturday-morning rush would take place around ten o’clock when everyone came into town for weekly grocery shopping at Singleton’s, which sat just ahead on the corner. Olivia and her mother had driven to town every Saturday and bought their groceries there. She had always let Olivia push the cart and pick out a still warm-from-the-oven peanut butter cookie from the bakery counter.
So far, the town had not succumbed to the huge discount and mega stores sprouting up in America’s small towns, leaving their centers to dry up and die. She had forgotten, perhaps deliberately, how much she had loved this place. The thought of D.C. on this beautiful summer morning felt like a sweater that had gotten too tight and would never be comfortable again.
Ten minutes into the run, Olivia had broken a good sweat and was glad she’d left her running jacket behind in favor of the sleeveless white tank top. She followed Main Street out of town where it turned into Route 121 and led out into the country.
There was plenty to look at along the way. Dairy farms with their black-and-white cows heading back out to pasture single-file after being milked, an orchard whose trees were loaded with tiny peaches, a beautiful old farm house someone had long ago abandoned that now stood in sad neglect with round bales of hay stacked across the front porch, shutters drooping.
A truck engine rumbled up from behind. She glanced over as it went past. John? His truck had an empty stock trailer hooked to the back. Her heart kicked up. The brake lights flashed, and the rig slowed then stopped altogether in the middle of the road. Olivia kept running, not sure whether she should just wave and go on or stop. Awkwardness gripped her in a vise usually reserved for sixteen-year-olds.
She slowed to a walk just before she reached his window. It was rolled down, and he threw up a hand, accompanied it with a nod. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses, the small square kind that wouldn’t have looked any better on Tom Cruise than they did on him. A dark-blue baseball cap with AQHA stitched across the front sat low on his forehead. “You’re out awfully early this morning,” he said, his voice still uneven at the edges, as if he’d just gotten up or had endured a night as short on sleep as hers had been.
“I could say the same for you,” she said.
“I called Lori to see where you were staying. Mrs. Stanley at the bed-and-breakfast said you’d headed down Main Street to go for a run. Thought I’d see if I could track you down.”
A response completely eluded her. He’d deliberately come looking for her this morning? Why? “Is everything all right?” she asked.
He held her gaze for a long moment while two crows on the fence by the road started up a shouting match. “
I just wondered if you might like to ride with me out to Cleeve’s. I was headed over there to pick up some calves.”
Olivia wasn’t sure what she had expected him to say, but that would have been close to the last thing.
“Probably not the most exciting offer you’ve had this weekend,” he said, when she failed to respond. He smiled, not a full-fledged smile, but a halfway, uncertain one, as if he really wanted her to say yes, but thought she probably wouldn’t.
That arrow went straight to Olivia’s heart. To hide her own fluster, she reached down and retied a running shoe that didn’t need retying. Why not? One weekend out of the rest of her life. Not to go would be to give herself a case of permanent regret. She stood and nodded. “I’d love to come along.”
His smile deepened, and she caught a glimpse of the old John. Color rushed to her face and stole whatever response had been making its way to her lips. “I better get this thing out of the middle of the road though, before somebody runs over us,” he said.
“Okay.” She jogged around the back of the trailer, fifteen emotions jostling for prominence all at once. John reached across the seat and opened the door, his gaze meeting and holding hers, the moment brief but meaningful in some way she could not explain.
He shifted gears, and the truck moved out with a low roar.
And all she could think was I must be dreaming this. She turned her gaze to the summer green of the trees, the grass that had grown nearly waist high on the shoulders of the road. They passed a field where two horses, one black, one gray, stood head to tail alongside the fence, swatting flies for one another. In the next pasture up, a group of butter-colored cows loitered beside a big blue metal container, licking molasses from a conveyor belt. The scenes were familiar. They filled her with the kind of homesickness that felt bone-deep and made her dread the thought of going back to the city.
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