Coming Home

by Christine S. Feldman

  • • •

  Behind her, Danny watched Callie as she briskly navigated her way to the nearest exit. He noticed that she avoided any hallways that might pass near the ER, and he wondered if she felt the same aversion to hospitals that he did now. Liddy’s fall yesterday left Danny no other option but to face the cold, antiseptic walls of the emergency room again, and the effect on him had been like a punch to the gut. If it had been anyone else but Liddy, he might not have been able to do it at all.

  Standing there in the waiting room, listening to the occasional curt announcement on the intercom whenever a doctor was paged, he had immediately been drawn back to the night Elliot died.

  It had happened near the railroad tracks. The other driver, dead drunk, slammed into their driver’s side door, and Elliot had taken the brunt of the impact. It all happened so quickly; Danny could really only remember coming to afterwards.

  The blood in his eyes. The pain in his head. The eerie angle of the other car’s headlights as they lit up the shards of glass that were all that was left of the driver’s side window. And the utter stillness of Elliot, slumped over the steering wheel.

  It was hard enough to accept it himself, harder still to be the one who’d had to break the news to Liddy and Callie.

  Oh, yes, he could understand Callie’s haste to get out of this building.

  • • •

  They drove to Liddy’s house, the same house in which Callie and Elliot had grown up. Callie was quiet most of the way, staring out the window at familiar streets and landmarks. Here and there were a new business or a tract of homes that she did not recognize, all reminders that she had been away long enough for changes to happen.

  A knot formed in her stomach that got worse as they got closer to the house. She rubbed the palm of one hand, surprised to feel that it was clammy in spite of the heat of the day. After all, she still had a fondness for this place, even if she did tend to stay away from it. It was the memories, she supposed, and the feelings they invoked. They were better left buried. Less painful that way.

  Danny pulled the truck into the driveway, and Callie stared at the house. Two-story, cheerful yellow siding, window boxes brimming with cascading pink petunias. The front lawn had been recently mowed, and a handmade wooden birdfeeder on a pole hosted several guests. Elliot had made that birdfeeder when he was eleven years old.

  A sudden pang hit Callie, and she swallowed hard.

  Danny noticed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Callie grabbed her bag with one hand and got out of the truck without waiting for him. She wanted to be alone when she stepped inside the house again, and she still had her old key. Taking a deep breath, she opened the front door.

  The house was the same on the inside, too. She stood in the open doorway and let her eyes roam over the front room, the staircase, and the pictures on the walls. Dropping her bag on the floor, she stepped into the living room and let her fingers trail over the back of the couch, the end table. How many hours had she spent here hanging out with her friends when she was younger? And with Elliot …

  She moved on to where a collection of family portraits hung on the wall. There was her mom, much younger and with far more blonde in her hair than the gray that was there now, her arms around her two young children. Elliot’s broad grin, highlighted by his braces. Callie’s dark pigtails. The pictures traced the children’s growth into adolescence under their mother’s watchful smile.

  There were no pictures of Callie and Elliot’s father, though. There had been once, but not after he left, even though Callie could remember begging her mother to put one back up. It was one of many things over which they butted heads.

  Leaving the pictures behind, she wandered to the foot of the stairs and looked up. Would her mother have packed up most of her things, much as they did with Elliot’s? She had every right to do so, but Callie knew it would hurt if she had. Sliding her hand along the banister, she went up the steps and down the hall to her old room. She opened the door and was relieved to see that other than the absence of a few childhood knickknacks, everything else looked just as she remembered from her last visit here a few years ago.

  Had it really been almost four years? She had her reasons for staying away, but she felt ashamed now that it had been so long.

  She would sleep in this room tonight.

  Elliot’s room was further down the hall. With slow steps, she approached it and opened the door. The comforter on the bed was not the one her brother had used. Liddy replaced that one long ago with one that was more neutral and less likely to remind her of her son every time she passed by that room. Callie sat down on it and smoothed out a few wrinkles on its surface.

  There was a day, shortly after the funeral, when she’d stood in this room surrounded by her brother’s things. Old soccer trophies, t-shirts tossed casually across the bed as if he would be coming back momentarily to fold them, a framed photo of Elliot kayaking on whitewater with his paddle raised up over his head in a gesture of triumph and his face lit up in a grin …

  Callie closed her eyes and remembered.

  Just sixteen years old, she stood there with a large cardboard box at her feet, wondering if she had the strength to do this but knowing it would be far too painful for Liddy to do. Reaching out, she picked up a sweatshirt with trembling fingers.

  Someone reached out to take the shirt from her, and she turned to see Danny, his forehead still bandaged from the accident.

  He folded up the sweatshirt for her and placed it into the box. “Your mom said you’d be doing this today,” he said, not making eye contact. “I thought … maybe you might want some help.”

  A creak of the floor brought Callie back to the present. Looking up, she saw Danny standing in the doorway. Their eyes met, and she knew he was remembering that day, too.

  “Still feels like he should be here sometimes,” she said.

  “Yes, it does.”

  There were no more wrinkles left on the comforter, but she pretended that there were so that her hands would have something to do. The silence grew heavy, and finally Callie put her hands in her lap and stared at them.

  “So, how long will you stay?” he asked her, folding his arms across his chest.

  “I don’t know. Depends upon how long she needs me.”

  “What makes you think she didn’t need you before?”

  Her head shot up. “My mother doesn’t need me to live right in the next room for the rest of my life.”

  His voice was clipped. “There’s a big difference between moving out and moving all the way across the country.”

  Callie pushed herself up off the bed, her temper flaring. This was just about the same place where they left off four years ago. They might as well get it out in the open instead of continuing to tiptoe around it. “And here we go again. Déjà vu. It’s not like I’m the first person to ever leave home before, Danny.”

  “But you went as far away as you could get, didn’t you?”

  “Just because you’re happy in Rockford Falls doesn’t mean it’s the right place for me.”

  “Do you even know where the right place for you is? Because it sure seems like you’re having a hard time picking a place and settling down.”

  “Settling down is overrated.”

  “Ah. Is family overrated, too?”

  “You think I don’t appreciate family?” she asked angrily. “Just because I moved away?”

  “I don’t know how you feel about family. You’re never here for me to ask. What I do know is that I speak to Liddy a hell of a lot more often than you do. You want to cut me and everybody else from Rockford Falls out of your life? Fine, that’s your choice. But what about Liddy? She may not need you to live down the hall, Callie, but she needs to hear your voice once in the while.”

  That stung, partly because she kn
ew there was some truth to it. “My relationship with my mother is complicated, Danny,” Callie said stiffly. “And you don’t really have a right to pass judgment on it.”

  “I think being the one she has to turn to instead of you gives me some right.”

  She bit back a bitter laugh. “My mother doesn’t need me nearly as much as you seem to think.”

  “Actually, she does.” Danny left the doorway to stand directly in front of her. “And I know that because I’m here to see it. She misses you, Callie. Sometimes she feels like she lost two children instead of one.”

  His words made her stare at him. “Well, some of that was her choice,” she said finally.

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, so maybe you don’t know everything after all.”

  Before he could respond, the cell phone in his shirt pocket rang. Pulling it out and looking at the caller ID, he left the room without another word to take the call. Callie followed him as far as the door. Danny stood at the end of the hall, head bowed and one hand on the back of his neck as if to ease sudden tension there. She felt an unexpected urge to touch him, to rub away the knots that troubled him.

  She stifled it.

  His voice was too low to hear, and Callie told herself she had no right to eavesdrop anyway, so she went no closer. But curiosity flickered inside her. Judging by his demeanor, the call was a personal one. A friend? Or maybe … a woman? The thought bothered her more than it should have.

  “You’ll have to go back to the hospital without me tonight,” he said, turning around as he ended the call and thrusting his phone back into the pocket of his shirt. “There’s something I have to take care of.”

  “What? After all that talk about being there for people who need you? A little hypocritical, aren’t you?”

  He stiffened, and she knew the words were unfair.

  “Sorry,” she said grudgingly.

  “Give your mom my love,” he said curtly, and he brushed past her to go back downstairs.

  Callie sighed and leaned her head against the doorframe, her anger dissipating.

  That could have gone better.

  • • •

  Danny slammed the door of his truck closed and started the engine. He had not meant to say any of that stuff to her, and certainly not right after she had seen her mother lying in the hospital. She was absolutely right when she said it was up to her to decide where and how she lived, he just didn’t think she fully understood the impact her choices had on others. Like Liddy. And if he was honest about it, him.

  Four years she had gone without once picking up the phone and calling him. He’d tried to call her once, when he thought they’d both had plenty of time to forgive and forget, but her number had been disconnected. It was months later that she finally gave Liddy her new number, and whatever reasons she may have had for waiting so long, he was too bitter to want to hear them.

  He glanced at the house.

  The truth of it was that it had been a hard pill to swallow, that their friendship had not meant as much to her as it did to him. Her presence in his life had been a godsend for him after losing his best friend and had made the loss somehow bearable. Moments that he might have shared with Elliot or that reminded him of his friend turned into moments shared with Callie instead. Like when the two of them grappled for hours with ways to distract Liddy on Elliot’s birthday, or when he first broke ground on the site of his outfitter —

  That had been a day he remembered often.

  Danny stood on the edge of the building site and stared out at the river that surged by. It was everything he and Elliot had hoped it would be, but the knowledge left him feeling heavy-hearted instead of pleased. It didn’t seem right somehow that he should go ahead with things as planned, not when Elliot —

  “Knock it off.” Callie’s stern voice from behind him startled him out of his bleak thoughts. She had come with him to see the builders’ progress, although he suspected her willingness to come had less to do with any interest in rafting and more to do with her memories of her brother.

  “Knock what off?” he asked in surprise, turning to look at her.

  She frowned at him, the expression somehow coming off as matronly on her teenage face. “The guilt trip.”

  He turned his gaze back to the water, feeling his throat tighten. “He should be here.”

  “Yeah, he should.” She came up beside him to wrap her fingers around his hand, and he held them fast. “But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t,” she added softly. “You lived, Danny. Make that mean something.”

  He withdrew his hand from hers long enough to put an arm around her shoulders, and the two of them stood in silence then, staring out at the water …

  Danny blinked, and the image in his mind disappeared. He thought that since Elliot’s death, he and Callie had developed a special kinship, leaning on each other through the grieving process and coming out on the other side of it as two people who each knew a side of the other that no one else did.

  But maybe he had only imagined it after all.

  He leaned back against the seat, and the cell phone in his shirt pocket bumped against his chest, reminding him of the call earlier. This was not the time for a stroll down memory lane.

  Because family was important, and right now his family needed him.

  • • •

  Callie spent most of the afternoon trying to get over her jet lag. Still on East Coast time, she raided her mother’s refrigerator and ate an early dinner by West Coast standards. She half-hoped Danny would call, but a part of her was relieved when he didn’t. She didn’t want to fight with him again.

  Things used to be so much easier between them. She missed that.

  She missed him.

  Biding her time until she would return to the hospital, Callie sank onto her mother’s couch and picked up a photo album from the coffee table. She leafed through it, smiling at some of the pictures, fighting back tears at others. She was not one to cry these days, and hadn’t been for a long time. Probably because she protected herself from disappointment a lot better now than when she was a child. If she didn’t let herself grow attached to things, she didn’t miss them so much when they were gone.

  She turned a page in the album and came across a picture that must have been taken shortly before Elliot’s death. He was forever young in the picture, forever brimming with promise.

  Danny sat beside him in the photo, his seat a large rock somewhere in the wooded outdoors he loved so much. Maybe it was the site the two of them had picked out for their rafting business? It was hard to tell without seeing the building itself that Danny had later built. Well, wherever it was, the camera captured the warmth of his smile perfectly.

  She ran her fingers over the picture, thinking regretfully of the heated words they had exchanged earlier. It was a sign that he cared, she supposed, that he wanted to push Callie closer to her mother. She wished they could be closer, too. But Danny didn’t really know the reasons why they weren’t. Back when they were closer, she had come close to confiding in him once or twice about her mother’s bullheadedness regarding Callie’s father, and now she wondered if things would be different between them if she had.

  For a moment, her hand hovered over the phone. She could call him, tell him that despite appearances to the contrary she was glad to see him. How many times had she thought about calling him in the past few years? Too many to count. But his disapproval of her had stung, and for a long time she had doubted that he would welcome the sound of her voice. She had waited a long time to call, putting it off for fear that she would not like the result. And then one day she woke up feeling as if too much time had passed and she had missed her chance.

  She left the phone where it was and called herself a coward.

  Her mind was restless, but her body demanded slee
p after going so long without any except those few minutes in Danny’s truck, so she dragged herself upstairs to her old room and curled up on the bed. Weariness won out over anxiety, and her eyes finally closed.

  After a long nap that just barely took the edge off her exhaustion, Callie rummaged through her mother’s purse that someone — Danny, most likely — had been thoughtful enough to bring back after Liddy’s accident. She pulled out the keys to her mother’s compact little hatchback, and in the dwindling light of dusk, she drove herself back to the hospital.

  She stared at the building for a long moment from inside the car. Get over it, she told herself flatly. She couldn’t avoid hospitals for the rest of her life just because of what happened to Elliot. But her grip on the door handle was still much tighter than it had to be as she stepped out of the car and approached the automatic doors of the entrance.

  The monitors in her mother’s hospital room made the only noise Callie could hear when she cautiously opened the door and looked in. Liddy’s head had been propped up with extra pillows, but her eyes were still closed.

  “Mom?” Callie ventured softly, taking a few hesitant steps into the room.

  Liddy’s eyes fluttered open. She made a mumbling sound that Callie couldn’t make out, so she crept closer and put one hand on her mother’s bedside railing.

  “Mom?” she repeated.

  Liddy moved her head slightly to see Callie better. Her eyes had an unfocused look to them, as if the pain medication hadn’t completely worn off, but she smiled as she recognized her daughter, and the delight on her face made Callie’s heart constrict. “Callie? What are you doing here?” Her words came out slurred.

  “Danny called. He told me about your accident.”

  “Accident?” She looked confused for a moment. “Oh, yes. Blasted ladder.” She closed her eyes again.

  Callie leaned closer. “The doctor says you’ll be fine. You’ll be taking it easy for several weeks, but don’t worry about a thing. I’m going to be helping you out for a while. And I’ll look after the store for you while you’re laid up, okay?”