As Far As Far Enough

by Claire Rooney

  It would be terrible.

  I looked across the kitchen table at Meri Donovan, gracious host of the formerly missing million-dollar bride, and waited for her answer. She was staring at me with both her eyebrows raised high under her bangs, her mouth open in an ‘O’ of surprise.

  “Good lord, Collier,” she said pressing a hand against her chest. “I’m not going to call your family. My Aunt Beatrice would rip me six ways from sundown if I ever did such a thing.”

  I heard what she was saying, but I kept my hands wrapped tight around the tea mug. It had grown cold, and I couldn’t smell the orangey-ness of it anymore.

  She leaned across the table and wrapped her hands around mine, trapping them against the side of the mug. “Collier,” she said sharply and I jumped. “I’m not going to call your father.” She spoke distinctly, her vowels almost smooth except for a funny little twist to her A’s.

  My head twitched in an abortive shake. It was too hard to believe. But I wanted to. I wanted to very much. “You’re just playing a game. You’re trying to keep me here till my father arrives. I bet you’ve already called him, and he told you to keep me here for as long as you could.”

  Meri squeezed my hands tighter. “Collier . . . Bea. I haven’t called him, and I’m not playing a game. You need help, and I’d like to be the one to help you.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Keep your money, in case something really important comes up. If you start to feel bad about staying here without paying, then you can do chores when your head gets better. This is a farm, remember? I can always use an extra pair of hands.”

  That wasn’t the question I was asking, but her misunderstanding it like that made me feel like maybe she wasn’t playing games. Maybe she was telling the truth, but even if she was, then it was only because she didn’t understand the consequences.

  “What about my father?” I asked. “He won’t be happy about you helping me.”

  She shook her head at me. “He’s not going to find you here. You’re a big-city girl. Who would think to look for you in a tiny backwoods mountain town?” She gave my hands another squeeze and sat back in her chair. “Stay as long as you need to. You’ll be safe here, and I’ll be glad for the company.”

  She was wrong again. For that much money, someone would be sure to find me here, but if she didn’t go telling all her friends and neighbors about me, I could be safe for a week, two weeks, or maybe three. That was no small thing. The backs of my hands felt chilled where the warmth of her palms had just been. I opened my mouth to say something, but instead I started to cry. I didn’t mean to, but the shame and frustration, the rage and the fear, finally caught up with me. Not just for the last few weeks of running and hiding, but more like for the last twenty-odd years of—never quite successfully—living a life I didn’t believe in. Pretending, but never quite enough, to be something I wasn’t, all because I had the misfortune of being born into my family, and because, in the end, I failed them so horribly. I wasn’t brave enough to be Collier Ann Torrington. I wasn’t strong enough to do what was required of me to be my father’s daughter.

  Meri dragged her chair around the table and set it next to mine. She put her arms around me, fingers lacing through my hair as she held my head to her shoulder and rocked me. “Shhhh,” she whispered. “I’ve got you, hon.” Her other hand rubbed gentle circles on my back. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. I’ve got you. Shhhh.”

  Chapter Three: BEGINNINGS

  I tinkered with the bike and puttered around the house for the next week or so doing the things that Meri would let me do. It wasn’t much. She wouldn’t let me help her in the apple orchard, saying that she didn’t trust me on a ladder yet, and anyway some of her younger cousins needed something useful to do to keep them out of trouble. About a dozen girls and boys, young men and women, came over almost every afternoon for a week and did all the spring trimming and spraying while I stayed in the house or hid in the barn listening to their loud talk and bright laughter. It seemed so strange to me, their causal joy and quick flares of temper that died an instant after they erupted. My own house was always so quiet, with fear and anger brooding just underneath the patina of polite conversation. Here, Meri’s high, clear voice often rose above the others, with the loudest shouts, the loudest laughter, the loudest in song. It was so odd, even a little daunting at first, but I soon found myself wishing that I could be a part of their work, doing something useful, sharing the load, marching to Meri’s orders. It would be so easy to fall in with them, if only I could.

  Meri did let me take care of Sergeant, brushing him down, turning him out, cleaning and polishing his tack. It was something I knew how to do well, and he seemed to like me fiddling around the barn. He kept blowing on me and nibbling on the bike parts he could reach. He chewed off a rubber handlebar grip. It was on the clutch side. I could live without it.

  The days kept slipping slowly by, and the Band-Aids disappeared, one by one, until there were only three left from the original eighteen. I was eating well, heartily even, probably for the first time in my life, and my head was healing fast.

  After the day’s chores were done, Meri and I spent our evenings together playing cards and board games, laughing too much and talking too loud, trying to paint over the quiet awkwardness that seemed to fall between us as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. She couldn’t believe that I had never played Monopoly before, or that I would be so bad at it. I told her that, traditionally, Torringtons weren’t very good at playing games that had rules. She gave me a funny look, and we switched over to poker where the rules were a bit more fluid, but I didn’t play that very well either. I was good at bluffing, but we played for cashews and I kept forgetting not to eat them.

  One evening, the usual April chill turned almost warm and summery. It was so pleasant out that Meri and I decided to sit on the front porch in the wicker swing and make a game out of counting the stars as they came out.

  “I see another one,” she said, “that makes twenty-six for me.”

  “How do you know it’s not the same one you just counted?”

  “I don’t,” she laughed. “That’s part of the game.”

  “You’re cheating!”

  “I am not cheating. You wanted a game with no rules, so how can I be cheating when there aren’t any rules?”

  “That’s not fair,” I complained.

  “It’s not about fair,” she said, knocking my knee with hers. “That’s the whole point of it.”

  “Why isn’t it about fair, do you think?” I asked her seriously. “It seems to me that life should be fair. Everyone should get an equal chance to make what they can out of it.”

  “That’s easy to say when you’ve got the deck stacked in your favor.” Her tone said that she was joking, but I didn’t think she was.

  “I’ve heard that one before,” I said, looking out toward the darkening line of trees that bordered the road. “But, you know, it’s only half true and the half that’s true is double-edged and tricky.”

  “A fool and his money, you mean?”

  “Something like that,” I said, nodding my head. “Money doesn’t change who you are. Having more money only gives you more choices. More choices give you more opportunities to make the wrong choices. The more wrong choices you make, the more twisted your life becomes until you can’t tell up from down or right from wrong.”

  She glanced at me, eyebrows raised at the bitterness in my voice. “Bea, do you have any regrets?”

  “About leaving?” I asked and she nodded her head. “No. I didn’t belong there.”

  She kicked out with her feet and started the swing swaying back and forth. “Aunt Beatrice said that the talk shows were all saying how brilliant your marriage was going to be, the merging of old and new money fortunes, a healing of the political divide and all that.”

  “That sounds like something my father would say.”

  “It’s what the TV people were saying.” She looked u
p at the pale sliver of moon. “He was very good looking, your fiancé.”

  “He was an asshole of the first water, deeply in love with his polo ponies and, as it’s rumored, two underage congressional pages.” The bitterness surprised even me this time. I shook my head and looked down at my toes. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “What’s it like, Bea,” she asked abruptly, “to be really, really rich?”

  I shivered a little, though the night air was still gentle and warm. “I don’t really know. I’ve never had very much money of my own.” I hugged my arms to myself. “What’s it like to be really, really happy?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, her face looking sad in the twilight. “My life has always been a bit of a struggle trying to balance the things I want against the things that other people tell me I should want.” She smiled then, a thin, grim little smile. “Aunt Beatrice is always telling me that I shouldn’t live here alone, that I should get married and have children so there would always be someone around to help with the farm.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “Because I think that’s a really stupid reason to get married. And anyway, I don’t want to.” She shrugged. “I guess I haven’t found the right person yet.”

  “What about your parents?” I asked, thinking of all the family pictures that hung on the stair wall. “What do they say you should do?”

  Her feet stopped moving and the swing went still. She blinked at the moon. “Both my parents died in a car accident.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It was almost five years ago,” she said, tossing her head. “I think I’ve adjusted.”

  “But you’re still not happy to live here in such a beautiful place? Not even with Sergeant, the amazing motorcycle eating horse?”

  Meri shook her head slowly. “I wasn’t. I love Sergeant and wouldn’t give him up for anything, but sometimes it gets so lonely here. I love this place, but farming wasn’t what I intended to do with my life.” She looked at me with a sideways glance. “I went to college, you know.” She looked down again. “Nothing fancy, just a small state college.”

  I grinned at her. “I went to a big fancy college, all ivy and old bricks, professors with long white beards and big bushy eyebrows. And those were the women.”

  Meri chuckled and my heart flipped around in a funny way. I hated seeing her look sad, and it made me happy to hear her laugh, even at a bad joke.

  “I was an English major,” she said. “I love to read, and I sure did get to read a lot. It was fun, in a way. There was so much to learn. But it was scary, too, because I had no idea what kind of job I’d be able to get. I only knew that it wouldn’t be farming.”

  “All I learned was how to pretend to be a snob so I could blend in better. I didn’t even major in anything specific, just general studies. There wasn’t any point since my whole life had already been planned out for me.”

  “I had my whole life ahead of me.” Meri reached out, touched one of the chains holding the swing, and then tucked her hand in her lap. “This place is all I have left of my parents. I don’t have brothers or sisters. If I don’t take care of it, nobody will.”

  She kicked out hard with her foot and the swing wobbled back and forth. I kicked too and set it back into its smooth, swaying rhythm. She grinned with a wide Cheshire smile, leaned into me and patted my knee. She let her hand rest there. I looked down at it. It was solid and warm and I liked it being there, but it scared me, too. This was a very different place from what I knew, and things might not mean what I wished they meant. I sat stiffly, looking out at the twinkling stars, now far too many to count, until her hand twitched. It started to slide slowly off my knee, but I put my hand on top of hers and pressed it against my leg. She smiled again without looking at me. Then, even knowing it would be a mistake, I slipped my arm around her.

  Just a week later a crazy north wind blew in from the arctic bringing with it a rare hard freeze. The temperature dropped as the sun went down, and frost began to creep across the window panes. I shivered inside my leather jacket as I jogged back to the house after putting a blanket on Sergeant and kissing him goodnight on the soft pelt of his nose. I spared a sad thought for all the poor wildflowers still bobbing and shivering in the fields as the cold leaked past all my zippers and buttons. I grumbled to myself with teeth chattering, “It’s April . . . friggin’ April. It’s not supposed to be eighty degrees below zero.” I was almost sorry that the last of the Band-Aids were gone. I didn’t have a hat, and my head would have been warmer with something to cover it.

  Inside wasn’t much better. The house was exactly what I expected an old house to be in the winter, barely insulated, drafty and cold. I didn’t bother to take my jacket off as Meri handed me a mug of hot apple cider.

  “How do you stand this all winter?” I asked huddling over the steam.

  She shook her head. “It’s not like this all winter. It only stays around zero for about a week near the end of January. The rest of the time it’s not too bad if you wear long underwear and a couple of layers.” She waved her hand in the air. “This will pass. Tomorrow, it will probably be in the sixties.” She reached over and rubbed my arm. “When winter really rolls around again, we’ll have to get you a better coat.”

  I watched the steam curl up from the surface of the cider. The cup was warm against my fingers, but my hands still felt chilled to the bone. I wouldn’t be seeing winter roll around again, not here anyway, but I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what kind of coat she would have picked out for me. Maybe something in a bright checkered plaid with sheep fuzz around the collar. It would have been fun having a coat like that. I watched her standing there in the cold kitchen wearing just one shirt and a light cable-knit sweater looking as comfortable as spring. “How come you’re not as cold as I am?”

  “I guess your body gets used to it.” She laid an almost hot palm against my frosty cheek. “If you’re really that cold you should go to bed and get under a pile of quilts. There’s a whole bunch of them in the cedar chest in your room.”

  Without another word, I shoved the cider into her hands and ran for the stairs, her laughter trailing behind me. True enough, the cedar chest was packed with a rainbow of quilts. I threw two of them on the bed, shrugged out of my jacket and boots, sweater and jeans, and burrowed underneath.

  Hours later, I was still shivering with frozen fingers and icicle toes. It was too cold to sleep. I got out of bed and put on an extra pair of socks. A soft wind was moaning through the attic rafters. The half moon shone through the branches of an old oak tree standing outside my window, tossing frantic silver shadows on the wall. I grabbed a quilt off the bed, wrapped it around me and paced. There wasn’t much room for it. Four steps to the dresser and four steps back, floorboards creaking every first and third. Not enough room really, so I decided to pace in the hallway. I opened my door to see Meri standing in front of hers in her flannel nightshirt, hair tousled and blinking sleepily.

  “I heard the floor squeaking,” she said. “You can’t sleep?”

  I shook my head.

  “Too cold?”

  I nodded.

  “Come on in here,” she said, opening wider the door to her room.

  I followed her in with the train of my quilt rubbing the floor behind me. She stood by her bed and held up the edge of the covers, gesturing for me to get in. I hesitated, and she stood there patiently, her face carefully neutral. I wasn’t sure what it meant for me to get into her bed or even if it meant anything at all. This wasn’t California. Maybe here people held hands and shared beds all the time just for comfort’s sake. Maybe friends patted each other on the knees and cuddled on the porch swing every fine summer evening and that was all it was.

  The thought made me feel squirmy inside. I was very good at pretending to think or not to think, to feel or not to feel, but I didn’t want to have to do that here. Not in this place. I shivered with the cold of the floorboards soaking throu
gh my socks. Mery raised an eyebrow at me. She was right. It was too cold to worry about any of that now. I threw my quilt on top of her bed and crawled under the covers. She slipped in behind me and snuggled against my back, throwing a loose arm around my middle. I was under three quilts now, and her body was hot where it pressed against me. It felt good to be there, wrapped snug against the cold, with her solid weight resting behind me.

  It felt too good. I started to grow warm in uncomfortable places, and I shivered again. Meri pressed in tighter against me, folding her arm across my chest, tucking her thighs against the backs of mine. So much of her skin was touching me. I’d never slept with someone like this before. I shouldn’t be doing it now, but I would never get to sleep if I went back to my room. I smiled at myself. That was very nearly a lie, but it was close enough to true to live with. Whatever this did or didn’t mean to her, it seemed wrong to reject the comfort she was offering or to deny how bad I wanted it. I hugged her arm against my chest and relaxed into her. She sighed deeply, and I felt her relaxing, too.

  I was almost asleep when she rolled away from me, but before I could get cold again, she reached behind her and tugged at my arm. I rolled over and slipped a hesitant hand around her waist. She pulled my arm tighter, pressing me hard against her back. My nose ended up buried in a thick tangle of her hair. It smelled of cinnamon and warm apple cider. That woke me up. She pulled my arm tighter and tucked my hand underneath her chin wrapping her fingers around mine. I could feel her ribs moving underneath my arm, the slight shifting of a flannelled breast against my wrist, the rhythmic pressing of her back against my chest. A slow ache began to build inside me.

  I was far more than warm now, and I was wide-awake. I lay there staring into her hair, the blond of it almost glowing in the moonlight, counting her breaths, timing mine to hers, my stomach pushing against her back, hers pushing against my elbow. I counted until I reached one thousand and her breathing had deepened into a steady rhythm. Slowly, I lifted my head and rubbed my lips against the soft flannel of her shoulder. The material shifted and I let my lips press against the warmth of her bare skin. She stirred softly inside her dream and pressed my hand over her heart.