A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  “She swore she’d do it someday,” Mama said ruefully. “We should have believed her.”

  “Somebody has to take me out there.” My voice sounded thin and distant. Stares. I wobbled closer, absorbing them. Bold talk for an invalid recluse. “Why?” Daddy asked with anxious gentleness.

  “I just have to go out there. Hop? Evan?”

  “If you want to go,” Evan answered slowly, eyeing me and stroking his beard, “I’ll get my Land Rover. Rained last night. We may end up pulling ourselves out of a gully with the winch.”

  “Good. We’ll need a pry bar and a flashlight, too.” And with that mysterious show of bravado, I teetered back into my bedroom, hoisted myself into my hospital bed, and stared, dry-eyed, at the ceiling.

  We made it to the lake, Evan and I and Evan’s unshakable wife, Luanne. The Land Rover’s running boards dripped mud by the time we reached the lake cove, where the cabin sat, surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briars that grew in ten-foot-tall mounds the closer they were to the lake’s edge.

  “Amazin’,” Luanne said. “How come that cabin hasn’t fallen down after all these years?”

  Evan nodded his appreciation. “Logs a foot thick and a double-tinned roof lined with teak planks. And the stonework’s strong enough to hold up Buckingham-damn-Palace. Look at that chimney. Look at those columns under the porch.”

  “Good lord. This isn’t a cabin. It’s a two-room boat that beached on high ground. It’s a little-bitty Noah’s Ark,” Luanne said.

  “It’s a shack with a pedigree,” I countered.

  We got out. I sat in the Land Rover’s open door while Evan fetched my crutches. “It’s pretty here,” Luanne noted. “Wild and quiet. I like the lake.”

  Evan helped me perch on my crutches. “All right, sis, you’re here. What’s this all about?”

  “I’ll show you when we get inside. Maybe it’s full of termite holes. Maybe it’s fallen to pieces. Just let me look first.”

  I struggled through the briars as Evan and Luanne held them aside.

  “Snug as a bug in a rug,” Luanne said, surveying the cabin’s musty, rain-weathered interior. She knocked on a wall, then stamped her sandal heel on the thick teak floor. “Solid.”

  “Lots of bugs,” Evan added, slapping at a spiderweb. He flashed the light across deserted wasp nests and shards of acorn shells left by squirrels. The summer wind moaned in the deep maw of the chimney.

  “Back there.” I nodded toward a doorway. “The back room.”

  With Evan lighting the way, I thumped into the second room on my crutches. “There.” The beam of light fell on a narrow opening with shreds of some dank cloth still hanging from the top. “You came to see a closet?” Evan grunted. He ripped the cloth down. Dust flew. He shone the light into a tiny space, peered inside briefly, then looked at me with morose expectation. “Yep. It’s still a closet, sis.”

  I angled past him into the space, leaning heavily against the cool log wall behind me. I twisted. “Flashlight.” Evan handed it to me and, holding my breath, I raised the light to a section of plank just above my head. “This is what I want,” I said.

  Evan shouldered in beside me, craned his neck, and looked. “My God, sis,” he said gruffly.

  Carved on a board, hidden in the dark recess of a place no one had bothered with for many years, the simple inscription said: Roan and Claire.

  “Roan carved it,” I explained. “I found it after he left.”

  I took the board home and put it in my dresser drawer.

  No one said a word.

  “You’re going to live here from now on, aren’t you?” Amanda asked during a Sunday gathering as we hid out on twin wicker lounges in the garden room. “Aren’t you?” she repeated. “Going to stay here forever?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll be here quite a while.”

  Amanda twiddled with a soft pink flower on the potted impatiens between our chairs. “But I can count on you being around to do stuff with me, huh? ’Cause Grandma’s always busy with her pottery and Papa’s gone all the time. And Aunt Luanne and Aunt Ginger and Aunt Simone, they’ve got jobs and their own kids and stuff. But you don’t have a job anymore, and you don’t have any kids, so … so we can do stuff together, can’t we?”

  “You betcha. I’ll always do stuff with you, and when I’m an old lady, I’ll come live with you and kids can pretend I’m an extra grandmother.” I swept cupcake crumbs off my jeans. My fingers splayed over the deep gouge of a scar hidden under the denim. “And when I die, you can have my money.”

  “Okay!” She grinned. “I don’t even care if you have any money. Great-Aunt Arnetta says you won’t be worth a penny unless pigs learn to fly. What’s that mean?”

  I just shrugged. “It means I need to practice my oink.”

  “Papa says we gotta be patient with you. I heard him talkin’ to Grandpa about it yesterday. Papa is kinda mad ’cause you hurt Nana’s feelings.”

  My mother is “Nana” to all my nieces and nephews.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I answered. “Your Nana has a chest full of baby clothes for babies I don’t have. I told her she should get rid of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Ohhh, let’s talk about something else.”

  Amanda frowned as she licked the filling from a piece of apple pie. We’re eaters, both of us, usually gnawing off more than we can chew. “I’m not supposed to eavesdrop on Papa,” she whispered to me, “but I couldn’t help it.”

  “So what else did he and your grandpa say about me?”

  “Grandpa said we gotta make allowances for you. ’Cause a sad thing happened to you when you were little and you never got over it. And you’re a whole lot worse now, he said. I gotta know. How sad was it? What happened?”

  An emotional ambush. I tightened all over and felt two decades burning in my chest like hot coals. “It was only sad because of the way it ended.” I gauged my words carefully. “It was wonderful before that.”

  I told her about Roan. From the St. Patrick’s Day carnival to the day he was sent away. About the good Christmas we spent together and the necklace he gave me. About Big Roan. About Sullivan’s Hollow, which is grown over with pine trees and doesn’t exist anymore, the way Roan doesn’t exist. I left out the harsh details. I didn’t tell her Roan disappeared because my parents, her kindly, beloved Grandpa and Nana, had shipped him off to a church home. She wasn’t old enough to understand how good-hearted people can commit terrible mistakes in the heat of the moment.

  “Roan moved away,” I told her. “And that was the last time we saw each other. When your grandpa says I never got over it, well, it’s like what you tell me about your mother sometimes. How you dream that she’s on the other side of a canyon and you can’t quite jump far enough to reach her? That’s what happens when somebody you love goes away. There’s always a little part of you that’s whispering ‘Jump’ even though you know it’s too far.”

  Amanda stared at me with her mouth open and her eyes dewy with romantic grief, the way little girls look when they’re watching Camelot for the first time and have just realized that Guinevere isn’t going to get to keep Lancelot.

  “Oh, Aunt Claire,” she whispered. “Roan Sullivan will jump back over for you. I just know he will.”

  That’s what I get for sharing. A kick right in the solar plexus. Firefly lights in front of my eyes. And then, with a deep breath, sanity returned. “No, sweetie,” I said calmly. “Sometimes people change. They grow up and move farther away from each other, until they forget how to jump.” I didn’t mention the obvious. I couldn’t jump if I wanted to. “I’m not a jumper,” I concluded. “I’m a sitter.”

  Her blue eyes flickered. She looked at me as I would have looked at me when I was young and obstinate and sentimental. “Sometimes I think you don’t try very hard,” she accused softly. “Don’t get old and strange on me, Aunt Claire.”

  My throat closed up and I couldn’t say another word. Wait until I started talking to tomato pla
nts and knitting sweaters for cats.

  I jerked awake that night, not just crying but yelling, and beating the bedcovers with my fists. I hobbled to the closet and dug through a small, lacquered wooden box I’ve had for years. I store mementos in it, the kind I can’t bear to look at but can’t bear to throw away. I pulled my old, faded shamrock pendant and its chain from a tiny cloth bag. I wore the pendant for so many years the green rubbed off and the chain lost its gold plate and turned the color of a tarnished nickel.

  I couldn’t count the hours I’ve spent in public places gazing intently at men walking by, the birthdays and holidays when I sorted hurriedly through my mail, thinking, This year there’ll be a card from him. All the times the phone rang, the doorbell rang, and I thought, for just an instant, It might be Roan. It might be.

  I had nearly forgotten the girl who had been tough enough to stand up for a boy no one else wanted.

  I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the dark by my bedroom window. Dunshinnog was encased in thick clouds that scudded across a full moon and the mountain disappeared into inky black night as devastating as my own thoughts.

  I saw a light. Small and flickering at the summit of the mountain. I blinked and it was gone. I wasn’t imagining this. There it was again.

  Somebody was up there on my mountain, dammit. By the time I woke the household and marshaled their attention, the trespasser might have vanished. There’d be a new round of worried whispers about my emotional stability.

  I threw a windbreaker over my nightshirt, then crawled out the bedroom window. It was more painful than any physical therapy session, and by the time I landed in a heap behind a row of camellia shrubs, clutching my crutches, I was panting for air.

  I made my way around the house, gazing up at Dunshinnog as I did. The light remained. I levered myself into a battered old farm truck parked beyond the barns, cranked the engine, and drove awkwardly, using my left foot on the pedals.

  When I got to the meadowy gate at the top of Dunshinnog along an old, rutted logging road that winds up the mountain’s southern flank, the truck’s headlights glanced off an unfamiliar car with a rental tag. Flames leaped from a small pyramid of brushwood and tree limbs on the stone ledge overlooking the valley.

  Astonished, I struggled toward the fire, glancing around wildly. I saw no one around it, no hint of who had dared wander onto my property during the night. The moon and stars had disappeared completely behind thick clouds laced with heat lightning. I smelled rain in the air.

  “Who are you?” I yelled. “Where are you? This is private property! Private!”

  I tottered barefooted among the foxgloves, offspring of those Grandpa and I had planted twenty years before. Watching, listening, swaying. I suddenly hated the foxgloves for surviving, for making promises they hadn’t kept, for letting some stranger wander up here. I began smashing them with one crutch like some furious, wooden-pronged animal. “Come out of the woods!” I screamed toward the forest on either side.

  Rain began to fall—cold, dense, a torrent that poured down on me. The fire sizzled and coughed billows of white smoke. I slipped on the ledge and fell down.

  The next thing I knew, a pair of thick, strong arms were lifting me into the air.

  I didn’t know who had me or what had me. It was dark, and cold rainwater flooded my eyes, and I was dizzy from the fall, floating, shivering, against a foreign wall of clothed flesh and bone. It was too much like a nightmare. I began to struggle.

  “Claire,” a deep voice said raggedly.

  That was all it took. I swung my drenched head toward it, lightning snapped above the mountain, and I saw his fece carved out against the night, his eyes boring straight down into mine, holding me.

  “Roan,” I whispered in the middle of booming thunder that shook the air out of my lungs.

  Roan.

  I lived through that night as if I were drowning, and many of the details may never come back to me except in foggy symbolism, trying to see through a glass darkly.

  The rain whipped us. Lightning split the torrent and thunder reached across the valley in deep bellows of celebration. The fire—a signal? some kind of primal claim for attention?—sank inside billows of smoke that floated around us as Roan carried me to the rental car. I didn’t ask where we were going; I didn’t care at the moment.

  He drove and I braced myself against the passenger door, studying his profile as best I could during the lightning flashes. An airline ticket folder was crumpled on the floorboard; a sleek leather portfolio had been jammed into the crevice between the driver’s seat and the center armrest console. The cold half of a long cigar lay in the open ashtray.

  My voice was frozen inside my throat. Rainwater slithered down my face and plastered the bottom of my nightshirt to my legs beneath my windbreaker. My bare feet were muddy; I didn’t know where my crutches were.

  He’s alive. He’s come home. He didn’t forget me.

  Not long afterward I realized the car was struggling over rough, unpaved terrain, bucking and fighting his guidance. Limbs whipped the roof and muddy water sprayed up on the windshield, washed aside in wide streaks by the slap of the wipers.

  “Are you kidnapping me?” I asked.

  He glanced my way. I couldn’t read his eyes, but I saw the flash of his smile. “Hell, yes.”

  “Roan.” It was both plea and thanks.

  He jerked the car to a stop suddenly, then vaulted out into the rain and came to my side. In short order he lifted me in his arms again, then carried me through a thicket of some kind, on uneven ground. A lightning flash uncurtained the darkness and I glimpsed the old cabin. Ten Jumps. He’d brought me to Ten Jumps. I wound one hand in his shirt. His skin and hair smelled like summer rain. His chest felt hard and deep against my side.

  Nothing made much sense. He climbed the sagging porch steps, caddied me sideways through the doorway that had lost its door before either of us were born, into that tough shell of teak and shipwood. Wet wind sang through the square hole where a single window had been, but the overwhelming sensation was of having ducked into a protective cave.

  He put me down on the floor, though something beneath me had give to it. I couldn’t see him; I heard him moving. I leaned askew, the bad leg and the good one haphazardly tucked, bracing myself on my hands. There was a sizzling sound, then a flood of light. Roan squatted beside a camping lantern. I was sitting on an air mattress. An ice chest and a bulky duffel bag shared a dusty corner of the small, bare room.

  Over the years I’d fought restless dreams in which a faceless stranger reached through fire for me; intuitively I knew he was Roan, but because I couldn’t see his face, I couldn’t take his hand. All solid evidence of him had disappeared, reduced to stories others told.

  You’ll be thirty years old before you’ll really understand who you are.

  And there I was, with all that history behind me, thirty years old, my heart aching, waiting to see what prophecy had brought Roan back to me.

  He dropped to his heels beside the mattress, one hand bent against his chin; in the eerie white light of the camping lantern he looked like weathered marble except for those gray eyes as intense and quick as mercury. There was no point in talking; shock took up all the words. Like wild animals we gauged the dangerous situation with unblinking scrutiny.

  Finally, after twenty years of unexplained absence, he said with more sorrow than sarcasm, “Home sweet home.”

  I looked into the face of the boy I remembered, now a grown man with scalding eyes hooded in a man’s features, dark hair slicked back wildly from wide cheekbones and high forehead. “Yes,” I said softly. He raised his hand to my face. His fingertips smoothed rainwater from my eyes, my mouth, curved under my chin, focusing me. “I know you,” I whispered, dazed. “I still recognize you.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”

  Thunder shook the cabin. In my fevered imagination the world was ending and beginning again, past and future colliding with w
ild pressures that shoved the only truths up from bedrock.

  He jerked a red and white blanket from beside his knees and swooped it around my shoulders. I finally realized I was shivering. But he moved too fast, with the unsettling grace of lean, male muscles. Maybe he saw the startled reaction in my face; he frowned, sat back on his heels, then glanced around my ancestor’s cabin as if regretting some idea. “I bought this place,” he said.

  Silence again. I needed time to mull over the fact that somehow he’d made that much money, that he used it in secretive ways, and that his purpose had to do with me.

  Rain beat on the roof. I imagined the lake rising, flooding up beyond the blackberry briars and shaggy oaks, until we floated away. The Cherokees’ stepping-stone turtles might come in handy.

  He sat down, drew one knee up, and propped his arms on it. My leg had begun to ache. Suddenly I was exhausted and dizzy. The fall on the ledge had left a fresh, sore throb on one side of my face. I was so incredulous, I felt numb. “I have to rest,” I admitted.

  “I don’t want to take you back to the farm tonight,” he said. The words took the gentleness off his face. “Do you want me to take you back there?”

  He wouldn’t assume want; he phrased my family as a duty. I couldn’t begin to explain my complex retreat and return to him; he owed me explanations, too. “No. I’m not going to let you out of my sight. I’m not even sure you’re real yet.”

  He reached out, carefully, and I stayed still with marginal willpower. He laid his hand along my cheek for an instant. “As real as you are,” he whispered.

  Twenty years. I didn’t have to say that out loud; his eyes darkened; he nodded. Keeping the blanket firmly around me, I lay down on my side as gracefully as possible, which wasn’t too graceful. From somewhere he snared a thick pillow cased in fine blue linen. He laid it within my reach like a mating present. Everything seemed symbolic in my state of mind. I tugged the pillow under my head. Feathers, plush downy feathers. On an air mattress in a cabin with no amenities, in the woods, without another soul but him knowing where I’d gone.