Home Before Dark

by Susan Wiggs

  He hunched his shoulders forward and stared at his plate. Like Jessie, Lila and Luz, Owen had bright red hair and pale coloring that blushed like a sunrise. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” She felt Wyatt and Scottie watching her, wide-eyed. Owen’s chin trembled, and her heart turned soft. “Okay, so it was a bad question. But tell me this. Are all the kids at school talking about hill-hopping?”

  Owen nodded.

  “What are they saying?”

  A shrug, a shifting gaze. “Stuff about Lila’s wreck and that kid who got killed.”

  “We will not make a game out of it, ever. Okay, cowboy?” Luz said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He picked up his fork and started eating, and the other two did the same. They left the issue alone like an unwanted vegetable on the plate.

  Luz felt a deep welling of love for her boys, mingled with guilt. In all the hoopla over Jessie’s arrival and Lila’s accident, she’d put her little guys on autopilot. They’d heard snippets of gossip about the accident and were processing it in their own way.

  “Here’s what I want you to know about the accident,” she said, addressing all three of them. “Lila and her friends made some really bad choices. They sneaked out without permission, drank beer and crammed too many kids into their car. And they treated the car like a toy.”

  Owen’s gaze flicked to the overturned Mustang on the floor.

  “They weren’t being careful and a terrible accident happened and everybody got hurt. Now their lives will never be the same.” She was shocked to feel the weight of tears in her eyes. “Lila’s life will never be the same.”

  “So how will it be?” Owen asked.

  “Different, moron,” Wyatt said.

  “She’s grounded,” Scottie said. “That’s like time-out.”

  “She’s grounded because we love her and we want to keep her safe,” said Luz.

  “She doesn’t like being grounded.”

  “It will give her a chance to think about how she’s going to change her life.”

  Scottie’s mouth turned down at the corners. “I don’t want Lila to change. I want my same Lila.”

  “She’ll always be your same Lila. And look at it this way—you’ll get to see even more of her.”

  “Because she’ll never see the light of day again.” With that matter-of-fact pronouncement, Scottie filled his fork with macaroni and cheese. They all fell quiet and finished dinner, more subdued than usual. Wyatt cleared the table without being asked. Owen picked up his Hot Wheels and set it carefully on a shelf.

  The sound of a car door slamming disturbed the too-quiet house.

  “Dad’s home!” Scottie dropped the spoon he was holding for Beaver to lick.

  The sound of singing and laughter streamed across the yard from the carport. “Born to Be Wild” was one of Luz and Jessie’s favorite road songs from childhood. Luz hadn’t heard it in years. Even Ian was singing off-key as they walked to the house and came inside.

  Standing in the kitchen, Luz froze.

  “You changed your life, Lila,” Scottie said.

  “She changed her hair, moron,” Wyatt said, staring.

  “It’s like Aunt Jessie’s,” said Owen.

  Jessie grabbed Lila’s arm and drew her into the light. “Well?” She turned in a parody of a runway model’s slouch, taking Lila with her. “What do you think?”

  “You look weird,” Owen said.

  “Then she fits right in with the rest of us, buddy.” Ian grabbed him and pulled him into the kitchen to forage for food.

  Luz stood rooted to the spot. Her sister and daughter looked incredible. Now that Lila had Jessie’s short, layered haircut, they resembled sisters. Both wore low-slung jeans and cropped T-shirts that showed a hint of midriff, and there, above the waistband of the jeans, was—

  Luz scowled, set down her dish towel and bent to have a closer look. “What’s that? A stick-on tattoo?”

  “I want to see the tattoo!” Scottie yelled.

  Lila smiled with more true joy than she’d shown in days. “Aunt Jessie has one, too.”

  Together, she and Jessie displayed their wares.

  “Yuck,” Wyatt remarked.

  Luz reeled as she regarded the tattoos of constellations. She recognized them from the old map of the night sky posted by the telescope a sponsor had given their mother one year. Pegasus for Jessie, and for Lila, Andromeda, the chained princess. “They’re not stick-ons, are they?”

  “I’m starved.” Lila went to the table, sat next to Ian and attacked the macaroni and cheese.

  “What’s this about a tattoo?” Ian asked with his mouth full. Luz wanted to smack him. He was so oblivious sometimes.

  “It’s just tiny,” Lila said. “See?”

  He glared straight ahead. “No, thanks.”

  “You know what,” Jessie said abruptly, “I have work to do. I need to go have a long talk with the Dictaphone.” Before Luz could stop her, she ducked out and disappeared into the night.

  Luz burned, but she kept the rage invisible and strictly under control. When had she learned to do this, to hold in the fire, keeping it banked until she chose to let it flare?

  Studiously ignoring her turmoil and Lila’s new look, Ian took the boys up to get them ready for bed. Lila excused herself to continue the major excavation project that was the cleaning of her room. But she did it with a song on her lips.

  As was usually the case in the Benning household, life got in the way of a perfectly good crisis. Deep down, Luz preferred it that way. If she stayed busy enough, she could put off the hard stuff or leave it half finished, like everything else in her life. Homework, baths and bedtime came and went; it was after ten by the time she went upstairs to confront Ian.

  He sat in his ancient, overstuffed chair by the window, reading legal briefs from a stack on the floor. Luz loved her husband, but her feelings for him were sometimes tinged with exasperation. Tonight, she was fresh out of patience. “No thanks?” she said, echoing his tone at dinner. “My sister tattoos our daughter, and all you can say is no thanks?”

  He took off his reading glasses and set aside the thick document he’d been studying. “I didn’t want to look at it.”

  “That’s the problem,” Luz said through a flash of anger, hearing the echoes of a thousand previous discussions in his words. “You never want to see. Especially when it comes to Lila. What is it with you, Ian? It’s like you’re barely there for her.”

  “She doesn’t want me around. To her, I’m nothing but a life-support system for a wallet.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can step down as her father.”

  “I know that. Hell, Lila knows that. But at her age, she doesn’t need me the way she did when she was little.”

  “She still needs you. Damn it, you wouldn’t even discuss that tattoo.”

  “Discussing it won’t make it go away. And guess what, Luz? Getting pissed and fighting about it won’t make it go away, either. It happened, okay? We can’t erase it. But we can get over it.”

  Luz deflated onto the end of the bed. She poked idly at a basket of unfinished quilt squares she’d been piecing together for years. He came to sit by her, and the bed made a squeak of protest. The way he massaged the back of her neck never failed to soothe her, even now. “Oh, Ian,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

  “Hope she doesn’t get any ideas about nose rings?”

  She leaned her cheek on his shoulder. “You know what I mean. Jessie wants her to know about the adoption. That’s really what this is about. She hasn’t said anything more, but the haircut and tattoo are speaking loud and clear.”

  “I’ve never heard of a kid going haywire because she found out she was adopted,” he said. “What do you want to do, Luz?”

  She flopped back on the bed, exhausted. “To forget about all this for a little while.”

  “Now, that’s something I reckon I can help with.” He slid down next to her.

  She kn
ew they’d resolved nothing, but that was the magic of Ian. For these few minutes, he made her troubles cease to matter.

  But they were back with a vengeance the next morning. The kids filled the house with commotion as they chomped through breakfast and got ready for school. Luz had to admit that Lila regarded the prospect of school with a more positive attitude than she had before or since the accident. Nothing like a radical new haircut and a permanent tattoo for bolstering a girl’s self-confidence. Lila claimed the new design was “itchy” and she “had” to wear a cropped sweater to keep it from being chafed by her clothes.

  Luz watched Lila shoulder her backpack and walk up the hill to wait for the school bus. Her heart constricted at the sight of her walking away, as small and slender and determined as she had been ten years before, heading off to kindergarten. Shaken by the image, Luz got Scottie ready for playgroup. Ian dashed off for a meeting with the ACLU and Luz drove Scottie to the church. Afterward, she endured a pained and emotional meeting at the high school with the parents of some of the students involved in the accident. She was moved and humbled by their willingness to participate and share. She captured an image of Nell Bridger holding Dig’s football jersey, which she’d rescued from the impromptu shrine that had appeared in front of the school. Luz photographed Sierra’s mom and the cheerleading coach sobbing with their arms around each other, and Kathy’s father seated alone in the empty stands beside the soccer field, staring out at nothing but blue sky.

  By the time Luz arrived home in the late afternoon, she carried other people’s sadness and anger as well as her own. She strode across the property to the row of cabins facing the water. Even in the dazzling autumn sunshine, the outbuildings looked gloomy and dilapidated. She had always meant to spruce them up, and had even painted two walls of the first one, but had never gotten around to finishing. Yet already, Jessie had brought her own colorful sense of style to the place, putting a jar of autumn sage and black-eyed Susans on the windowsill, adding a fringed fuchsia shawl as a swag over the window facing the lake.

  Luz knocked once and stepped inside. “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself.” Jessie sat at the table, her chin propped in one hand, a cup of coffee dangling from the fingers of the other. She wore a dress of deep turquoise and a pair of buff-colored cowboy boots that would have been a fashion crime on anyone but Jessie. Blair’s recorder sat in the middle of the table. Jessie touched a button to shut it off. “I was working on the article.”

  All right, thought Luz. They could do their usual dance and talk around this, or plunge right in. Maybe the intensity of her day had affected her. She felt like plunging.

  Even so, she forced herself to take a seat slowly and speak calmly. “In what universe is it okay to permanently mark a child who doesn’t belong to you?”

  Jessie was equally calm and even more implacable. “In what universe is it okay to keep a kid from knowing she’s adopted?”

  “We discussed this before she was born. You agreed—hell, Jess, you told me it would be best not to tell her. And now you’re mad because we did exactly what you wanted?”

  “Oh, Luz. This is not the sort of thing you get mad about.”

  “True. It’s the sort of thing that calls for permanent disfigurement. Got it.”

  “Oh, yeah, you get every fucking thing right, Luz,” Jessie exploded. “You always do, you with your perfect family and your perfect life.”

  Luz was too stunned to do anything but gape in disbelief. Jessie was blowing up at her? Then the true impact of the accusations slammed into her, and she buried her face in her hands, howling with laughter. “My perfect life,” she gasped, feeling the tears flow.

  “You have it all, you’re always right, and I’m the flake, gallivanting around the world like a loose cannon.”

  “My wonderful falling-down house, my husband who’s never home. My tattooed daughter, my learning-disabled son.” Catching Jessie’s expression, she laughed again, verging on hysteria. “Owen,” she explained. “And that’s only one of the things you don’t know about my perfect life.” She stole a sip from Jessie’s mug. “God, do you know what I’d give to gallivant? To have a career, a life outside of Edenville, Texas? To see the things you’ve seen?”

  “Luz. You don’t want what I’ve got. Believe me, you don’t.”

  “How would you even know what I want or don’t want?” She stood and paced in agitation. Her heart pounded and she realized deep down what was going on. “You’re making me compete with you for her.”

  “What?”

  “For Lila. You gave her to me, and now you’re taking her away. I had no idea she was on loan.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake, Luz—”

  “You’re dazzling her. Sweeping her off her feet. I’m grounding her and making her clean her room while you’re taking her to day spas and getting tattoos. Christ, Jessie, don’t you think it’s hard enough on me to keep her in line without you waltzing in and doing the Auntie Mame thing?”

  “Funny you should mention Auntie Mame. Isn’t she the one who took her nephew traveling the world?”

  “Jess, if you think for one minute you’re going to take that girl away, you’re dead wrong.” Luz planted her feet. She realized that she would sacrifice anything for the sake of Lila. Even her sister. That struck her hard. She would do battle with Jessie if it came down to that.

  “Don’t even think what you’re thinking, Luz. I’m not here to take Lila anywhere.”

  “You don’t have to. For you it’s enough to know that she wants to follow you, that she’s willing to. She worships you.”

  “She worships Dave Matthews, too, but that doesn’t mean she wants to follow him all over the world. Look, you’re her mother. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But sometimes— Damn it, Luz, you’re so busy being the mother that you forget to be anything else.”

  “What the hell else is there? It’s all I know, Jess. It’s not like we were raised by June and Ward Cleaver. I’m making it up as I go along.”

  “Textbook, Luz. You’re forever the mom, and I’m the screwup kid sister.”

  “Hey, if the shoe fits.”

  “You know, in your quest to control every possible situation, you’re overlooking something, Luz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lila.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re so busy regulating her life, tracking her grades, monitoring her every move and worrying about her that you forget she’s a unique individual.”

  “That’s not true. I resent you coming here, fifteen years after the fact, telling me how to raise my daughter.”

  “What’s her favorite rock group? Her favorite teacher? What stresses her out? Did you know Heath broke up with her and found Jesus?”

  That stopped her. “What?”

  “That’s why she couldn’t stay at school. That’s why she needed a day away.”

  “Is that why she needed a tattoo?”

  “Maybe I needed the tattoo.”

  “For the love of God, Jess. You already have one.”

  “Three. I already had three. Now I have four.”

  “Did you think disfiguring my child would force me to tell her she’s adopted?” Luz demanded.

  “Nobody’s forcing you to do a thing, Luz.” Jessie stood and gave the blinds a twist, shutting out the afternoon light. “Coming here was a bad idea.”

  “Don’t you dare say that.” Luz hated this feeling—that the foundations of her world were cracking under her feet, and she had to figure out where to jump for safety. “Ah, Jess. I don’t want to fight with you. I just wish you’d check with me before doing anything permanent to my kids.”

  The sound of tires crunching on gravel interrupted them. Luz frowned. “We weren’t expecting anyone.”

  “I was.” Jessie put a nervous hand to her hair.

  Luz looked out to see Dusty Matlock heading toward the house. When she glanced back at Jessie, she saw something in her sister
’s face that she’d never seen before, ever. It was a stark, naked emotion so powerful and private that Luz looked away.

  Finally, she thought, feeling some of her anger at Jessie slip away.

  Finally. Her little sister was falling in love. It seemed rash to conclude that so early on, but Luz knew she wasn’t mistaken. As Jessie watched Dusty coming up the walk, Luz recognized herself watching Ian come home to her. At such moments, a woman’s heart filled so full that her expression could not hide what she was feeling.

  She liked everything about Dusty Matlock—his mannerisms, his looks, his kid and especially the way he treated her sister. Yet her anger didn’t dissipate because Dusty showed up. Luz was finally working to a full head of steam. Jessie’s having a date didn’t dampen it. The fight stayed open and she fully expected a hangover of emotion and guilt. “So we’ll talk about everything later.”

  “Whatever.”

  Lila’s favorite expression. It was so perfect for people who wanted to be vague and noncommittal. She wasn’t through with her sister or this conversation, but it was pointless to pursue it now. She pushed Jessie to the door and opened it.

  “My mother wants to meet you,” Dusty said, emerging from a veil of shadows cast by the live oaks.

  Jessie grabbed Luz’s arm. “Oh God, you don’t think he’s got her with him, do you?”

  “Let’s go see.”

  All that had passed between them shimmered briefly and then slid away, burying itself beneath a new moment with a new problem.

  “Your mother?” Jessie inquired as Dusty bent to kiss her cheek. “That sounds ominous.” Her voice was light, and Luz sensed her sister’s profound pleasure at his nearness and familiarity.

  “Hey, Luz.” He doffed his Matlock Aviation baseball cap in a curiously old-fashioned gesture.

  “What’s this about your mother?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “She wants to meet Jessie.”

  This was getting better and better. “Really. Why?”

  “Because Jessie is all I can talk about or think about these days. My mother and I even hunted down back issues of World Explorer magazine to see more of her work.”