Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels)

by Graham, Janice

  Once on the road with Eliana, rolling along the interstate in her Jeep, she was swept into a joyous mood of anticipation.

  "Hey, I've got an idea. How'd you like to go to the art museum? The Nelson. Never been myself, but I hear it's great."

  "I've been there," Eliana answered.

  Katie Anne glanced at her. "Doesn't excite you too much, does it?"

  "My mother used to take me there," she said quietly.

  "Okay. Maybe it's not such a good idea."

  "No. I want to go."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah."

  Katie Anne reached over and squeezed the child's hand.

  "You tell me if I ever do anything or say anything to make you hurt inside."

  Eliana turned a wide-eyed face to her. "You don't ever hurt me," she said solemnly.

  "Good." She patted her leg. "Have I ever shown you how a horse eats corn?"

  Eliana grinned. "Show me."

  Katie Anne gripped her little thigh and squeezed, throwing the child into spasms of laughter.

  * * *

  Katie Anne knew very little about what she saw on the walls of the Nelson, but she found it exhilarating. They spent a lot of time in the twentieth-century gallery, and they talked about the paintings. Katie Anne was amazed at the child's imagination, at the things she saw, and how well she expressed what the pictures made her feel. They took their time; they sat on benches and browsed through the bookshop, and they had tea in the courtyard. Katie Anne bought a poster for each of them: Eliana's was a drawing of a horse by Michelangelo; her own was a print by a famous Austrian artist who had died from influenza when he was in his late twenties. According to the clerk, the artist had lived in Vienna at the turn of the century, and the blatant sexuality of his paintings had branded him an outcast in the restrictive Catholic community where he lived. What Katie Anne found so intriguing were the warped lines and disjointed angles he gave to the human body, the haggard faces of his women and above all the translucent quality of their skin, as though one were looking straight through them into their bruised and blackened souls. The print she bought was a self-portrait of the artist and his model, and although the woman looked nothing like her at all, she saw herself there. This artist, long dead, had painted her as she was now, as no one else knew her; he had captured something invisible and laid it out for her to see. She had the clerk roll it up with Eliana's poster and slip it into a tube. As they left the museum that afternoon, Katie Anne knew she had found something very precious.

  On the Country Club Plaza they sat on a patio in the shade of a giant white parasol and ate ice cream. They popped in a kitchenware store just to get cool for a few minutes, and came out with cupcake baking tins and a spatula shaped like a frog, and an apron for Eliana that said "I Heart Paris." After the music store they found a dog bakery and bought a bag full of treats for Traveler, and then they spent the rest of the afternoon in a toy store, where they bought a miniature stable replete with miniature tack and three tiny horses. Their final splurge, at Katie Anne's insistence, was a huge stuffed lion, a mate for Cosette, a big plush thing that lay on its stomach and took up the entire backseat of the Jeep.

  They checked into a hotel on the Plaza, taking all their new purchases up to the room with them, and Eliana changed into her suit and went swimming in the rooftop pool while Katie Anne in her hat and sunglasses, dressed in a long Oriental-looking robe she had purchased at a boutique in the hotel, drank a glass of wine at a poolside table. That evening they ordered room service and ate in bed with the lion, named Aslan, and watched I Love Lucy reruns. They laughed a lot, and after Eliana had fallen asleep, Katie Anne sat in the dark with her earphones on and listened to a symphony by Mahler she had purchased that afternoon. The CD had been sitting there at the checkout counter, a new release, and she'd picked it up on impulse. Now she sat in the dark and listened, enraptured, and felt a fullness inside. She looked down at Eliana.

  "Please, God," she murmured quietly in the dark. "Don't let him take her away."

  * * *

  They changed their minds and stayed Sunday night, too. Ethan didn't see them until he came home from work Monday afternoon. He was surprised to discover that he had missed them. He found them setting up the stable in Eliana's room, unwrapping all the tiny paraphernalia and arranging it around the stable—the bale of hay, the buckets and sack of feed, the blanket rack. There was even a dog that looked like Traveler. Ethan watched them on the floor, playing like children, and when Katie Anne looked up at him, he was struck by how happy she seemed.

  For the next several days he was unusually attentive to her, and Katie Anne felt herself open up to him again. Her eyes softened whenever he walked into the room, and when she was near him, she felt desire swell inside her. He still hadn't touched her, but she felt it just might happen, that he might be having a change of heart.

  One evening after dinner, instead of going to her room, she went out to the porch and found him sitting on the swing. It was one of those rare summer evenings when only a soft breeze stirred the grasses, and with the rising of the moon came a front of mild air. The parched land seemed to sigh, and even the crickets and the cicadas retreated into silence.

  "Can I join you?" she asked.

  "You bet," he said.

  She sat there next to him for a long while, without speaking, basking in the warmth of his presence and this soft night.

  Finally, she interrupted the silence and said, "When I was in the hospital, you said you thought you'd lost me."

  Ethan turned to her. "That's right."

  "So, like, technically, I died."

  "It seemed so."

  "How long was I gone?"

  He shook his head. "I'm not sure. Several minutes maybe. It seemed long."

  "What brought me back?"

  "I don't know. They'd taken you off all the life support. Do you remember any of it?"

  "I'm beginning to."

  "What do you remember?"

  "I know this sounds so silly coming from me, but I think it must have been heaven. I have a very faint recollection of how beautiful it was, but for all the beauty of heaven, I couldn't leave this earth."

  Her hand lay poised on her knee, near his own hand, an invitation. She sat there, willing him with every nerve, every fiber in her body, to reach out and take her in his arms, to smooth back her hair the way he used to, to kiss away the tears in her eyes, to cradle her deep and strong and love her again.

  "I must have come back for a reason. I don't know what it was. I wonder if it was my love for you. Because I loved you so much."

  He remained silent. She left her hand there for a long time without moving it, waiting for his touch, which never came.

  "Ethan," she whispered, "until you learn to forgive me, you'll never see how much I've changed."

  "I know you've changed," he replied. "I know how hard you're trying."

  He rose and went to the porch rail. The night was aglitter with stars, and he felt the immensity of earth and the firmament, and his own loneliness.

  "But that's the trouble," he went on. "You think if you act like her, I'll love you. You think if you read a book or try to sound intellectual, it'll change things."

  "That's not true."

  "I just don't believe you. I guess I never will. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get over her, and it would be unfair to you, or any woman, to give you hope. But what really bothers me is that you seem to want to be like her. I just want you to be yourself. Sometimes I wish I had the old Katie Anne back. It would be easier."

  "You'll never have the old Katie Anne back. She died."

  He shook his head. "It won't work. I know it in my heart."

  "And Eliana? She doesn't want to go. She's told me as much. She doesn't want to leave us."

  "You mean leave you."

  "She feels a lot for you. It's just hard for her to show it."

  "I warned you not to get attached to her."

  "So you're still planning on sending h
er to live with her cousins?"

  "Yep."

  Looking at the profile she loved so much, she saw that she was holding on to an illusion. He'd never understand what she'd gone through, the murky, vague feelings, the emptiness, the confusion, the sense of having lost something, and then the miracle of having found it again. And she realized all of a sudden that she didn't want things to be the way they had been. That she loved him desperately, but it wasn't enough anymore. That she was no longer the woman who would do anything to catch and keep Ethan Brown.

  "Oh, Ethan," she whispered finally, "you've already made one mistake you'll regret for the rest of your life. Don't make another one."

  Then she got up off the swing and went into the house.

  * * *

  Ethan took a walk down to the stables, and he thought about what she'd said. He kept walking past the tractor shed and the arena; he went through the gate and crossed the pasture and he could see the horses outlined against the night sky. They lifted their heads and watched him pass through the field; he opened a cattle guard and walked on into the prairie. Thought he just might like to walk on until he couldn't walk anymore. Thought his hills would heal him. But he knew that all he was doing was carrying it with him, slogging along with all his anger and loss clinging to his feet, and there wasn't a place on earth wide and open enough for him to outwalk it. He finally came to stop at the foot of a lone cottonwood rooted next to a gully, and he sat down and leaned his head back against the tree and cried like a little boy.

  When he had cried it all out, he stretched out on the ground and looked up at the stars and let his mind rest. He was quiet now, and into this quietude came a flicker so fine and faint that, had he not been perfectly still and empty, he would never have heard it.

  But for all the beauty of heaven, I could not leave this earth.

  And again.

  For all the beauty of heaven, I could not leave this earth. I love you too much.

  The voice was so faint in his memory, and it had been the voice of a ghost, and how do you recall the voice of a ghost?

  The notion sent a chill down his back, sitting out here alone in the night prairie, with the wind playing with the cottonwood leaves and making its mournful sounds, and he looked around for Annette, thinking she might appear again if he willed it so.

  Katie Anne had plucked those very words out of her thoughts. The very same words.

  The notion began to stretch his mind, and his imagination put wild ideas into his head. He wanted to laugh at himself for such a crazy notion. He was a believer, for sure, but not in this sort of thing.

  He stood up and brushed the grass off his back and smoothed down his hair, then he began walking back home, his eyes on the stars. He turned over his crazy idea in his head; if it was true, it helped him make sense of little things. Her behavior and subtle changes in attitude that had taken place over the months.

  He didn't know how to talk to her about it. Or anybody, for that matter. She'd think he was crazy for sure. And maybe he was.

  He felt a powerful desire for his home, something solid and real and grounded and comforting. For the first time he began to fully imagine his home without them. Without her music and her positive energy, without the new books piling up at her bedside and Eliana's growing mountain of toys. And he knew she was right, that he was making a dreadful mistake.

  As he entered the pasture behind the ranch he saw the headlights of a vehicle speeding away down the county road, but it was only when he got to the house and saw her Jeep was gone that he wondered if it had been her.

  There was no one home. In Eliana's bedroom he found the toy stable still standing in the middle of the floor, and all the toys strewn around it. But then he noticed that Cosette was gone. And her mother's violin.

  He called Katie Anne's cell phone but she didn't answer, so he got in his truck and drove off to look for them, but he realized the only place she'd go would be to her parents' home, and so he turned back and decided he'd wait until morning.

  He was up at dawn feeding the animals, and he waited until a reasonable hour to call; when she didn't answer her phone, he called Tom and Betty Sue.

  "She's not here," Tom said. "She called last night and said she and Eliana were going to take a little trip together, but she didn't say where. She said not to worry. She'll keep in touch."

  Two days later Tom Mackey called and said he had heard from her.

  They were in Paris.

  Chapter 31

  Ethan rode his horses hard that summer, and he drove his cattle all over the Flint Hills like a fugitive looking for somewhere to hide out in the endless waves of prairie. Word gets around in a town like Cottonwood Falls, and everyone knew that Katie Anne had walked out on him and taken Eliana, but Ethan wouldn't talk about it to anyone. He never showed his face around the South Forty anymore, and unless he had some business in town, he stayed away from his office. He gave Bonnie a month's paid vacation and took his legal files out to the ranch and worked from his home office.

  His absence was keenly felt in Cottonwood Falls. His kindliness and friendly banter were conspicuously missing from all the places he had frequented: Hannah's Café, the South Forty, the gas station opposite the courthouse where his truck was often found up on the rack. He bought himself a new truck that month, but he was such a frugal man, even that didn't lift his spirits.

  Ethan had over ten thousand head of cattle to care for that summer, and he worked himself and his cowhands long hours, from dawn to dusk, mending fences, carrying out vet checks, vaccinating, rounding up strays and generally watching over the huge brutish babies like a mother while they doubled their weight and ate their way to a healthy profit. He was content as long as he was working, but the evenings spent alone at his ranch were unbearable. He took to sleeping out on the range with the wind and the rattlesnakes; sometimes Jer or one of the cowhands stayed with him, and once Tom Mackey drove out at dusk to join them. On those nights Ethan could pretend the world was a solid place, fortified by staunch male defenses. They talked cattle and cursed the politicians in Washington, and ate pan-fried steak and fried potatoes cooked over a Coleman stove, then they stretched out in their sleeping bags and gazed at the stars until they fell asleep. But even this ploy worked only temporarily; after a while the earth became hard under his back and the night sky unbearably bright, and one night at around midnight, when he was out there alone, he packed up his gear and drove back to his ranch.

  His beloved hills had turned bleak and sullen on him. They appeared to him now in the dark light in which so many others had seen them. Impenetrable, they gave up so little of themselves. He recalled Willa Cather's words: Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. His beloved hills. For the first time in his life they afforded him no peace.

  For weeks he waited for a word from Katie Anne, but none came. No response to his emails, no calls. He could get nothing but vague answers out of Tom and Betty Sue. She had a phone number but they weren't giving it out. Yes, she was fine. She had called them just yesterday. They were in Paris. They were in Geneva. Katie Anne was having some cosmetic surgery done at a clinic in Switzerland; Eliana was planning a week at a summer camp in the mountains with some friends from her old school. Ethan didn't ask when she was coming home.

  As soon as he had a mailing address, he sat down and wrote her a letter. It was the kind of letter one would expect of him, articulate and intelligent, full of wit and artful turns of phrase. But there was nothing to betray the terrifying loneliness he was living, nothing to betray the mortal dread that gripped his throat when he thought he might be losing her forever. Beneath his intellectualism, Ethan was a simple man. In his scholarly days he had flirted with philosophies and postures; he had gone through his existential period, his romantic period. But they were brief and very fanciful. Ethan was his father's son, a straightforward man of straightforward morals. He firmly believed that happiness was a state of mind, and it ranked up there in the pantheon of values alongsi
de hard work and honesty. Happiness was his stalwart; it was his David that could bring down any Goliath. There was no tragedy so devastating that he could not overcome it with a certain state of mind. And so, when he wrote Katie Anne, he belied with every word the anguish he was feeling. He looked at the letter and prided himself on how it sounded, how happy, solid, unperturbed it sounded. Attitude, he said to himself. Yes, attitude. If I just keep a good attitude about it all, the world won't come crashing in on me. But his world had crashed in on him. He walked over the rubble every morning when he came into the kitchen to make his coffee; he kicked aside the debris every night when he sat down on his porch with a beer in his hand and looked out upon his beloved land. His house stood strong and tall around him, and yet his life was splintered timber. Still, he forced a smile in the letters to Katie Anne. He believed he could will her to come back with his happiness.

  His letters and emails went unanswered. The fear that she might never return began to grow as the days passed and he had not heard from her. His cynicism faded. Her departure was no ploy, no elaborate scheme to win his heart back. Ethan knew that now. Betty Sue had shared one of her letters with him; she had stopped by one evening when Tom was gone and brought it for him to read. She did this against her husband's wishes, for although Tom loved Ethan Brown like a son, he loved his daughter much more, and he felt that his child must have been deeply wounded to run so far away, to a place she had never aspired to, with a little girl that was not even her own.

  Dearest Mom and Dad,

  I know I just called, but I find I actually enjoy writing to you with pen and paper. I haven't written real letters in years, but I like that it takes time, and that when you get it, you can touch it and feel it, and maybe tuck it away in a drawer.