A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  He turned to the lantern, silhouetted; his hand moved in slow sequence, twisting a knob. Inky darkness, scented with the rain and damp earth, enclosed us. For a split second I was disoriented. “Talk to me,” I said quickly. “Tell me anything that matters to you. I want to hear your voice.”

  “I’m sitting beside the mattress,” he replied in gruff tones. “Listening to the rain. Listening to you breathe. This is the most peaceful moment I’ve had in years.”

  A contented fog began to slide over me in the wake of his voice—strange, because I already knew that deep down I was bitterly angry with him. He had been watching me all these years and never let me know. “I dreamed you came to the hospital,” I whispered finally.

  “I did.”

  Early morning sunshine whitewashed the cabin’s spartan interior. A pair of hummingbirds were fighting over the fluted orange flowers of a trumpet-creeper vine that had latched on to the ledge of the broken-out window. I heard the rustle of fragile wings colliding in dive-bombing swoops. My mood was a strange mixture of despair and excitement.

  Roan.

  Clutching the walls and the door frame to steady myself, I half staggered onto the porch. My crutches lay propped against a broken section of porch rail. I hadn’t realized that Roan had brought them with me the night before.

  Roan stood in a small clearing fifty yards away with his back to me. Older, thicker, prime. That uncanny stillness he’d had as a boy, predatory but also defensive, gave me an impression of spiritual strength now. He seemed engrossed by the blue morning sky and the platinum surface of the lake.

  He’s here. He’s really home.

  I studied the terrain between Roan and me. Clods of sopping-wet weeds, a narrow deer trail through briars, the sturdy clumps of young pokeberry. Grandpa had always boiled poke greens to eat in the spring; the rich, fibrous greens gave him his spring cleaning, he swore. Later in the season they matured and turned poisonous.

  I pushed myself step by step. Roan’s blanket slid down my arms. I shoved at briars, balancing wildly. I was wearing a nightshirt with a flaking appliquéd palm tree on the chest, a yellow windbreaker, and no shoes. Panting, cursing under my breath, I lurched into the clearing. Roan pivoted at the sounds and held out his hands. At the moment of victorious arrival I stubbed one tip of my left crutch on a rock.

  He caught me as I started to fall forward. I was livid with embarrassment until I noticed the dark circles under his eyes and forgot my own awkwardness. “Nice catch,” I said hoarsely.

  “Glad to break your fall. I wish I’d been there for you two months ago.”

  “You were. Everything I’ve done for other people has been a substitute for what I couldn’t do for you twenty years ago.”

  “Then we’re alike. I’ve tried to live my life in a way that could make up for what happened.”

  All the unanswered questions, all the years, so many changes, and yet so few. “I can’t think straight right now,” I offered. “I just need to look at you.”

  This seemed to please and worry him. He hunched his shoulders and watched me with chin tucked, his hard, pewter eyes boring into me. “Why don’t you tell me what you see?”

  I could sum up the parts but miss the point. He had texture: rough khaki trousers, hiking boots with black laces, an old gray cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves. And he had context: a heavy gold wristwatch, thick dark hair that was slightly longish, drying into unruliness, his hands looked callused, and he had a fine peppering of dark beard shadow on his jaw and over his mouth.

  “You’re perfect,” I said. Instantly aware of the pale, thin leg with surgical scars, I pulled his blanket closer around me. His gaze slipped down to the hidden leg, then back to my stare. We guided each other with invisible signals.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said quietly. “Let’s get that point settled right now.” There’s power in a man speaking like that, not just in the words but in the music of tone and depth. I studied him intensely. Everything about us, every small discovery, was like water puddling on hard-baked ground; it took time to sink in, to soften and find the old channels.

  “I was always afraid,” I said slowly, “that one day I’d see you somewhere—in a shop, a restaurant, someplace public. And I’d recognize you. I’d walk up to you and say your name and you’d look at me without the slightest idea who I was. I’d have to explain. You’d be polite but edgy—maybe even cold—because the last thing you’d want was to dredge up ugly memories. I’d try to tell you how much you meant to me when we were kids, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. And that’s when I’d realize how much of it had been a little girl’s sentimental fantasies about an older boy.”

  “The way I pictured it,” he said slowly, “I’d walk up to you and say your name and you’d step back. You’d ask me what the hell I wanted. You’d ask me why I wanted you to remember. You’d look at me but see my old man.”

  I sagged a little. He pulled a folding chair from beside a camp stove, where a kettle bubbled over blue-gold flames. I sat down weakly. He poured me a mug of coffee.

  I set the mug aside, then rested my head in my hands. “How have you been?” I asked. Almost polite. Like a stranger. It was painful and absurd.

  “When I saw you at the hospital, when I knew you needed me, that was all I cared about. I just wish, for your sake, it had gone a little different.”

  “Differently,” I corrected. It just popped out; old habits are hard to break. He and I looked at each other with strained humor. He leaned over me, his dark, unkempt hair nearly brushing my forehead, and there wasn’t any innocence between us. The scent of him, the scent of me, was like that of wounded animals and heat. “It’s easy,” he murmured. “How we are together. No one understood it when we were kids, and they won’t understand it now.”

  I leaned back. “How do you know so much about me?”

  “I’ve read every article you’ve written. Not just from the Herald-Courier, but going back to when you were editor of the student paper at the university. And before that. Issues of the Shamrock. You’ve never published a word I haven’t read.”

  We were quiet for a long time. The lake shimmered; the season’s first dragonflies darted above the surface. A small doe stepped from the forest on the opposite shore, watched us, then slowly wandered back into the woods. When I looked at Roan, I thought he must be as numb as I was, his eyes and mouth weighed down by isolation.

  I said slowly, “I developed some peculiar ideas over twenty years. Such as assuming that since I never heard a word from you, you’d either forgotten me or you were dead.”

  “When I sat beside your bed that night at the hospital, you said you’d ruined my life. That you blamed yourself for Terri Caulfield the way you blamed yourself for what happened to me.” Roan jerked his head in the direction of the Hollow, east along the treacherous ridges and gullies he’d followed as a boy to get to this sanctuary. “Is that what pushes you? I know what I see when I look at myself. I see my old man. Is that what you see?”

  “No. You should have at least let me know you were alive and well.”

  “I’ve dealt with my old man’s history as well as I ever will. I won’t let his demons eat you alive, too.”

  “Dealt with it?” I whispered fiercely. “You bought all this land secretly. You wouldn’t step forward at the hospital and tell the family that by God, you’d come to see me. Why? Why? I don’t believe you’re ashamed of who you were. Who are you now? Where have you been? Do you hate the family so much you had to go to Dunshinnog first to prove you—”

  “You asked me to do that.”

  When I gazed at him in disbelief, he said, “You don’t remember. At the hospital. You told me the first thing I had to do was let the mountain know I’d come home. Something about foxgloves. I didn’t understand it, but I promised you I’d go up there and build a fire.”

  “Did I also tell you to buy this property?”

  “No.” He squatted beside me.
“I own a lot of property. Buy. Sell. It’s natural for me to buy my way into a situation. Very uncomplicated that way. And I wanted this place. It means something to me. I don’t want the cabin to just sit here and rot. I’ll have to decide what to do with the place later. In the meantime, I intend to do the same thing for you that you tried to do for me when we were kids.”

  “And what is that? Meddle in my problems, promise me everything’ll be fine if I just learn to trust you, then hurt me? That’s what I did for you.”

  “You gave me something to believe in. I believed in you, and I never stopped believing.”

  The sunshine burned my eyes. I swept a blinded gaze at the scene around us. “You couldn’t come back until you could buy this land? Make some statement about possession and control? Is that it?”

  He didn’t comment on that. “I called home for you,” he said abruptly. He rose to his feet, frowning. “From my car phone. I called the farm at dawn. I may be a cold S.O.B., Claire, but I told your parents you were here and all right. The amazing thing is that they haven’t shown up here to intervene. I think they’re in shock.”

  “You don’t know how much they’ve wanted to find you all these years.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me.”

  “It has to matter. I … need answers. You’re asking me to believe you’re only here to settle old scores. I don’t want to be treated like a debt you have to pay off. I don’t understand you. There’s something you’re not telling me. I want to know everything about you.”

  He went very still, his eyes as dark as the wide-open lens of a camera, like mine on him. We pinned each other inside an invisible maze of smoke and mirrors, searching for each other along separate paths, opening doors, twisting, turning back, edging forward in stark, motionless silence. He reached inside his shirt and brought out a piece of wrinkled, yellowed notebook paper that had been folded for so many years that the creases looked as soft as old skin. “I wrote this to you the first summer,” he said. “I have more letters you might like to read, but just read this one for now.”

  My heart in my throat, my hands shaking, I took the fragile paper. The words on it were scrawled in faded pencil; my eyes blurred with tears.

  You got words that come easy. I never had no words that come that easy. But I will practice writing to you the way you wrote to me that time I was so by myself at 10 Jumps I wanted to die. Feel like I could die from being lonely right now. Can’t half spell. Can’t half write. Hard to think good tonight. You are inside my heart.

  Leaving this shitty church home tonight. Running away. Sorry. It hurts so much. What my old man done to you. What your folks done to me. Sorry. I will learn to be somebody new. I will be better than my old man. I will prove it some way.

  If I ever get to see you again I won’t never hope for nothing but that you have forgot what my old man done to you. If I go away maybe you will grow up okay and not be the girl Big Roan Sullivan hurt that way. You are still a little girl, you hear me? You forget about what happened and about me and you will be okay. Fight for people like you done for me. Don’t be scared of regular boys because of me and my old man. Don’t blame your folks for sending me away. I had to go. I knew it, deep down.

  But I love you, little peep. And there is not nothing nasty or sexy about it. It is the only easy thing I have done in my whole life.

  I folded the letter and clutched it tightly. I was crying. “I want to read all of them,” I said. “Every letter. Every one you wrote to me. I have to understand why you couldn’t come back before.”

  He held out his hands. “Just for this morning, be a kid again. The one who didn’t need answers before she’d take a chance on me.”

  My mind slid close to the edge of a razor. I glimpsed some hard exit, desolate but honest, in us both. I took his hands.

  He owned a twin-engine Cessna. Considering my history with airplanes, this meant more to me than the simple fact that he could afford a private plane.

  My mother grew up helping care for her paternal grandmother, Quenna Kehoe Delaney, who as an elderly widow lived with Mama’s family in the big Delaney house in town. Quenna spoke in a lilting, old-country brogue, was a staunch Catholic, and had a morbid, gothic nature that she insisted was true Irish.

  The Kehoes had been a prominent Irish family; they’d immigrated to Boston when Quenna was a teenager, under relatively luxurious circumstances. This was in the 1890s, more than half a century after the pioneering Maloneys, Delaneys, and other Irish refugees settled in the Georgia mountains. Quenna had two brothers; one was a priest. A misguided Catholic diocese sent him south to the wilds of Dunderry because it was assumed that a town founded by Irish families and bursting with their descendants sorely needed a parish. Quenna and her other brother Ryan came with him.

  Father Kehoe quickly discovered that he was dealing with third-generation Southerners, mostly Methodists, who were not infrequently hostile toward Yankees, even Irish ones. He stoically organized a tiny parish and built a church, which still exists, but eventually he went back to Boston. Quenna married Thurman Delaney, my great-grandfather. Ryan Kehoe married an O’Brien woman, who was a first cousin to Maloneys, and the two of them established the Kehoe clan in Dunderry.

  When Mama was a little girl, in the early 1940s, her Grandma Quenna traveled by plane to Boston for a Kehoe family reunion. All went well until my great-grandmother flew home to the Atlanta airport, which was then little more than a dusty provincial operation. The propellered passenger plane hit a flock of stray Rhode Island Red chickens on the runway during landing. Great-Grandmother Quenna refused to set foot on an airplane again and spent the years of Mama’s impressionable girlhood telling and retelling the exact, horrifying details of her airplane disaster: how the propellers flung chopped-up hen carcasses back along the passenger portholes so that Quenna never forgot the sight of bloody entrails smacking her window.

  Whether Mama was brainwashed into a phobia about flying by that grotesque story, or had a dollop of Celtic superstition in her personality, we had never been sure.

  But Mama has always been terrified to fly. She’ll do it when necessary because she has a merciless scorn when it comes to what she perceives as character weaknesses, her own or anybody else’s. I had watched her march onto commercial jets several times when I was a teenager, her legs shaking, her face as pale as an egg. I think, because I wanted to be even stronger-willed than my mother, I became almost cavalier about flying.

  Once I flew to Tallahassee on a reporting assignment, bouncing all over the hurricane-threatened Florida sky in a claustrophobic commuter plane. The other passengers gripped their armrests and drank heavily. I read a novel and fell asleep. The next year I wrangled a dozen flying lessons from a boyfriend who ran a charter service.

  At the tiny airfield outside Dunderry—two asphalt strips, four hangars, and a tower—I sat beside Roan in the cockpit of his blue and gold Cessna with tears welling helplessly in my eyes and my chest aching with pleasure. “Is it me, the plane, the situation?” he asked as he donned a radio headset and slipped dark aviator glasses over his eyes. “I like to fly. Thank you.”

  He handed me what I assumed was a guest pair of sunglasses. I dully wondered what guests—female, male, business, or pleasure—he took with him regularly. I covered my eyes with the glasses.

  “You didn’t know the airport manager,” Roan said once we were soaring over the green landscape and had leveled out. “I’m surprised.”

  “I don’t know everyone in Dunderry County anymore. I haven’t been around much since college. There’re a lot of new people. It isn’t the way it used to be.”

  “Good.”

  A few minutes later we were soaring through air currents in brilliant sunshine and a cloudless sky. “Any destination?” I asked.

  “Just a local tour.”

  “You want me to say I’m impressed? I’m impressed.”

  “Bought the Cessna a few years ago. I use it for business trips.”

  “Where?�
��

  “Out west.”

  “How far west?”

  “West of the Rockies.”

  He flew low over Ten Jumps. A flock of mallard ducks scattered across the lake, casting shadows like fleeing ghosts. We skimmed along the ribbon of Soap Falls Road. To my right I saw the farm, far away, and Dunshinnog. To the left the deeply wooded ridges led west from Ten Jumps to the Hollow. The Hollow was a cluster of scrub pines draped in kudzu vines, a jungle on the edge of a handsome forest. What could I say for his godawful memories and my own?

  “You had to see it from above, didn’t you?”

  Jaw clenched, he circled the area, banking sharply as he looked down. “Put it in perspective,” he said.

  “Go on. Get away from it. I turned my head for years, every day, when I rode the bus to school. When I got my own car, I never drove past it again. I don’t want you to think about it.”

  “It’s always there. Always will be.”

  I felt sharp-edged with too many emotions, as if I had broken glass inside me. I framed my gaze on open sky for a minute until I realized we were swooping over Dunshinnog, then down into the broad green valley of the farm.

  Putting it all in perspective. Reducing it in scale.

  The house was big and fine nonetheless, the yards around it quilted in gardens and shrubbery, the yard oaks spreading green canopies over the private architecture of roof and family.

  We were no more than a hundred feet above the house. My parents and Amanda hurried out, plus an assortment of relatives I didn’t have time to identify. There were a dozen cars in the yard. Visitors on a weekday, Amanda not in school. An event. The return of Roan Sullivan.

  I waved gamely. Everyone shaded their eyes and squinted up. Amanda butterflied her arms wildly in response. “Feel better?” I asked as the family and valley disappeared below and behind us. “What are you trying to show me? What is all of this really about, Roan?”

  “Just my point of view.”

  We flew north, toward town, above new houses dotting the hillsides, the new roads, a strip shopping mall and supermarket that had been built in recent years. Many newcomers.