Home by Nightfall

by Alexis Harrington

  A bubble of anticipation and fear swelled in his chest, one that seemed familiar for no reason he could identify. He stumped into the narrow aisle, blending with the flow of people working their way toward the door. Though he did his best to avoid hitting anyone in the leg with his cane, the woman ahead of him wearing a large, ugly hat turned to give him a severe look, and he knew he’d failed. He mumbled an apology and shuffled down the steps to the platform.

  His palms were already slick with perspiration.

  Around him, passengers, station workers, and people meeting the train all milled together, pausing in eddies, then flowed away. He watched them, wondering what to do next.

  “Riley!”

  “Riley Braddock, over here!”

  He turned toward the sound of the name and saw a small group surging forward, their faces alight with a baffling joy. There was a tall man about his own age with sandy, chin-length hair, an old one almost as crippled as he himself was, a couple of boys, and a blonde woman with shining green eyes. Another woman with them hung back a bit. She had long, dark ringlets, a fine, graceful jaw, and eyes that watched him with the same wariness he felt. He recognized her from the photograph in his pocket.

  They descended upon him and pulled his suitcase out of his fingers as they reached to shake his hand, clap him on the back, embrace him, all talking at once.

  “By God, boy, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the old man said, his voice quivering. He pounded Christophe’s shoulder with a twisted hand and gave a tremendous wet sniff.

  “This is a great day—I got my brother back! Your room is just the way you left it.”

  “Wait till we tell the kids at school about this! Nobody’s got a story as good as this one.”

  “Oh, Riley, welcome home. We’re so grateful to have—”

  Panicked and overwhelmed, his breath coming fast, Christophe jerked away and stumbled backward several steps to stare at them. He leaned heavily on his cane. They gaped at him as he watched them, and a chasm of silence and space opened between them.

  At last, the blonde woman, her brow wrinkled with obvious concern, moved a bit closer. “Riley, how much of this—of us—do you remember?”

  He hesitated and looked at each expectant, stunned face. “The woman who saved me from a shelled ambulance in France, she called me Christophe. That is the only name I’ve known. At least until the Red Cross found me.” Damn them, he wanted to add. Then he returned his gaze to the dark-haired woman, curious. “I’ve seen your picture,” he said to her. He reached into his coat pocket for the photograph and looked at it. He showed it to her, smiling tentatively. “You—I guess I’m married to you…Your name is Susannah?”

  The woman in question put the fingertips of both hands to her mouth and stared at him with wide, horror-stricken eyes. “Ohhhh.” It sounded like an exhale.

  He shifted his weight off his bad leg, drew a deep breath, and glanced at the platform beneath his feet. “I know none of you,” he said. Looking up at the station and the forested butte in the distance, he added, “I don’t know this place.”

  The boys—were they his sons?—backed away as if he were a goblin, fear in their faces.

  “I’m Jessica Layton Braddock, your sister-in-law. I’m married to your brother, Cole. We all went to school together.” The blonde woman gestured at the rugged, sandy-haired man and stepped aside to let a porter pass with a luggage cart. “These two boys are Joshua and Wade—”

  The old man piped up, his expression a combination of impatience and thin indignation. “Kree-stoff! Sweet weepin’ Jesus, I’m not calling you some hoity-toity foreign moniker. How can you not remember your own kin? Your own name? You’re the seed of my loins—”

  Christophe took another step back.

  “Shaw, you’re not helping matters,” Jessica interrupted, rolling her eyes.

  “Pop, damn it, be quiet,” Cole snapped and stepped in front of his father. He resettled his hat on his head. “Look, this is no place to talk about anything. Let’s just go back to the farm and we’ll sort it out. Somehow. It’s a shock for everyone.” He picked up Christophe’s suitcase and inclined his head toward a Ford truck parked near the depot.

  Christophe sighed and followed.

  • • •

  Susannah, clumsy and nervous and holding a knife, sat at the big table in the kitchen peeling potatoes and carrots. She’d already cubed rich stew meat that now bubbled slowly on the stove in a broth fragrant with chopped onions. A double page of newspaper was spread out on the tabletop to catch the thin spirals she produced. Probably no one was hungry, but they had to eat and the job gave her something to do. She’d already cut herself once and had bound up the wound with a strip of old sheeting. Cole had shown Riley to his room upstairs and left him there. Then he and the rest of the family gathered in the dining room to hash over this dilemma. They spoke in hushed, indistinct voices that floated to her when the breeze shifted through the open door, with Shaw’s louder than the rest. The boys, she supposed, were with Tanner.

  During the week before Riley came home, it had been decided that they wouldn’t tell him about her remarriage until he had a chance to settle in. For the time being, Tanner was sharing a room with Josh and Wade. But none of them had anticipated that Riley’s memory would be as blank and featureless as new snowfall upon a field. In fact, this Riley hadn’t even met Tanner yet.

  Those few moments they’d spent together had felt so awkward, she hadn’t attempted to actually engage him in conversation. She wasn’t sure what to say.

  When he’d first emerged from the train clutching a cane, his lanky frame thinner than she’d ever seen it, her heart had twisted in her chest. He walked with a limp that was worse than Shaw’s. Except for the shiny pink scar that creased his temple and disappeared into his hairline, he looked like the husband she remembered. The slightly aquiline nose, broad brow, and expressive hazel eyes, perhaps the same smile, although she’d seen only a glimpse of it. She’d almost leaped forward to throw her arms around him. Yet he was changed enough to make him a complete stranger, and that had stopped her. Even his voice and manner of speaking, his choice of words, were different. There had been just the briefest glimmer of recognition in his eyes when he’d looked at her, and that had been simply because of the photograph he carried.

  It had been another man in another life who had fired a spark in her almost every time she’d seen him. They had barely been able to pass each other in a hallway without touching, without an underlying current arcing between them. Anytime she had looked out the kitchen window, she’d automatically sought his tall leanness and the set of his dark head on his squared shoulders. This Riley—this Christophe—was little more than a fragile shell.

  “Would you like some help?”

  Susannah looked up and saw Jessica standing across the table from her. She’d been so deep in her thoughts she hadn’t heard her approach. “Oh, no, I’m just trying to keep busy and…” She let her voice trail off. And what?

  Jessica nodded at her bandaged finger. “Uh-huh. It looks like you’re having a time of it.” Coming around to sit beside her, she reached over and took the paring knife from Susannah, then picked up a carrot and began scraping it. Susannah let her, although she knew that her sister-in-law’s many talents did not extend to the kitchen. “This is a shock, I know. I don’t think any of us expected Riley to be so amnestic.”

  Susannah sent her a quizzical look.

  Jess pulled the newspaper closer and sliced off the top of the carrot with a surgeon’s precision. “We didn’t realize how much of his memory was gone.”

  She nodded, comprehending now. “Yes, just about all of it, I guess. He doesn’t even sound the same. His voice is different. His words are different. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “Not in my practice here. Since the influenza epidemic passed, I mostly get pregnancies, rheumatism, sore throats, the occasional appendicitis, earaches, that sort of thing. Even when I worked in New York,
most of my patients were indigent women and children. A public health physician doesn’t see much shell shock.” She tipped her a wry look, and a sun shaft from the window snagged on the wheat-gold strands in her hair. “Not the kind caused by war, anyway. But I’ve been reading about it in medical journals. After two years, I would have expected at least a little of Riley’s memory to return.”

  “The doctors at the army hospital thought he would do better here.”

  “He might. But some men apparently have their pasts, well, erased, like words from a chalkboard. Some men like him.”

  “Is there something we should do? To help, I mean?” She sat with her hands in her apron-covered lap, palms up.

  “Well, for one thing, we’re going to have to convince Shaw that Riley isn’t behaving this way just to spite him.” The old man seemed to have taken it as a personal insult that his son didn’t remember him.

  Susannah raised her brows and heaved an exasperated sigh. “That’s a tall order. He’s as hard-headed as a ball-peen hammer.” Jessica let out a choked laugh. “But—do we have to call him by that name? Christopher—Christophe, whatever he said?”

  Jess lifted a shoulder. “I don’t think so. I’ll do some research about his condition, though. I’ve heard of a doctor in Portland who’s had some success treating shell shock patients. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Just then, Susannah heard familiar footfalls on the porch steps, and she looked up to see Tanner pull open the kitchen screen door. He had not gone to the train with the rest of them, and she hadn’t seen him since they returned.

  Jessica glanced at him, then at Susannah. “Um, well, I guess I’ll see what they’re up to in the dining room.” She wiped her hands on a towel that hung from the back of a chair. Then she left, and Susannah waited until she was gone before she spoke.

  “Where have you been keeping yourself?” she asked Tanner.

  He pulled out a chair across the table and sat down, idly reaching for an unpeeled potato. “There was work to do.” He rolled the almost-round tuber between his hands. He smelled of horses and hay, scents she had always liked. His expression was carefully blank. She’d grown accustomed to the trait but sometimes found it frustrating. He was very good at hiding his thoughts. He wanted to say something else, though. She could tell.

  “And?”

  “I moved my stuff out to the bunkhouse.” They called it a bunkhouse, but really, it was more than that, something like a utilitarian cottage that had a kitchen area, a room with bunks, and another that was a small, plain room with an iron bed in it.

  Susannah stared at him. She’d begun to reach for the knife again, but stopped. “What? Why? I thought you were just going to move into the boys’ room down the hall.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. He just kept his eyes fixed on the potato and took a long time to answer. “You said yourself that we might not be legally married. Besides, I’m a hired hand. A hired hand wouldn’t be sleeping in the house. And I figured you need to sort out who your husband is. If it’s not me, I’ll have to step aside. If it’s not him, he needs to know. Either way, I’ll stay out there until you decide.”

  An icy chill began in the pit of her stomach and spread to her limbs. “It’s not my decision. I, we, have to talk to a lawyer.”

  “It’s yours. The law doesn’t have a say-so over what’s in a person’s heart.”

  “But—” She realized she had no answer to this. Not yet, but it bothered her that he’d abandoned her in arriving at the solution to this horrible dilemma. Would he not step in to defend his place as her husband? “What will we tell Josh and Wade?”

  Now he lifted his gaze to hers. “Can they stay in their room upstairs?”

  Susannah felt her heart wrench again. She’d never had her own children, and she adored those boys as if they were her own. Did he really suppose that she would make them leave the house? “Yes, of course. But what shall we say?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Maybe that there’s a wolf pack that’s been coming down and pestering the horses, and that I need to be on the lookout.”

  They all had to think of something. How to treat Riley, what to tell Josh and Wade, how to get through this.

  “I still expect to see you at the supper table,” she said. “Every night.”

  His smile was so brief, she wasn’t sure she’d seen it. “Yes, ma’am.” Then he rolled the potato across the table to her and went back outside.

  • • •

  The man everyone called Riley sat on the edge of the big bed in his room and looked around. His small suitcase stood by his foot, still packed, and his cane was propped against the mattress. He hadn’t changed from his uncomfortable suit, although Cole had opened the doors of the wardrobe to show him clothes that had belonged to him before. Jeans, boots, shirts, a set of dress clothes—they were his to wear, and since he had little else, he supposed he would try some of them on. He found it strange that they had kept them all this time, even though he was believed to be dead.

  Despite the circumstances, everyone in the family had been painfully polite to him, treating him with anxious courtesy. Well, everyone except the evil-humored troll who was his father.

  This was a nice room, too. The quilt on the bed was clean and whole. A colorful, oval braided rug covered part of the floor, and the furniture all matched. The creamy plaster on the walls wasn’t missing big patches from barrages of repeated shelling—it wasn’t even cracked. A framed print of a waterfall hung over the bed and a hairbrush, comb, and razor were neatly lined up on the top of the dresser. There was even a bedside table with a clock on it. But he saw no arrangement of perfume bottles or jewelry boxes or other feminine paraphernalia to indicate that Susannah slept here. There were no women’s clothes in the wardrobe. This was a man’s room.

  She was as beautiful in the flesh as in her photograph. But in person, her eyes were shadowed with worry and apprehension when she looked at him. He understood that—he felt the same.

  Guilt nudged him like a bony elbow. Leaving poor Véronique had been very difficult. They both had known she’d be left alone to fend for herself with nothing but her unproductive farmland and a crumbling house, yet she’d urged him to go. She had practically insisted upon it. He had a wife who would welcome him with open arms, she’d said, and would weep with joy that her husband had been restored to her. She’d said this as tears streamed down her own face.

  But Susannah’s reaction to him had been somewhat different than Véronique predicted.

  Who could blame her?

  With the flat of his hand he grazed one of the pillows, smooth and cool to the touch. Would she—his wife—would she sleep here with him tonight? Probably not. He hoped not. He thought they needed the chance to get to know each other again. In his case, though, he would be starting from scratch if his memory did not return, as the doctors had suggested that it would.

  He hoped to God the doctors were right. If not, how would he learn to live in this alien place? And yet…when his memory did return, what might come with it?

  A sharp knock on the door startled him. Cole poked his head around the door and grinned at him. “Riley, come on. Supper’s on the table. If we don’t get down there, those kids will gobble up everything.”

  “Oh—yes.” He fumbled for his cane and struggled to his feet. Cole rushed forward to help him, but he held up a hand. “Not to worry. I’m not agile, but I manage.”

  He felt his brother’s speculative, baffled gaze resting on him as he passed him and limped out into the hallway.

  “Thank you again for seeing me, Mr. Parmenter.” Susannah rose from the chair on the opposite side of his desk.

  The graying lawyer stood up as well, looking very formal in his dark suit. Behind him, the rows of bookshelves filled with large, leather-bound volumes seemed to add to the heavy solemnity of the situation. The low-slung clouds beyond his window weighed it down even more. She almost felt as if she were talking instead to Fred Husta
d, Powell Springs’s undertaker, to arrange a funeral. “You are welcome, ma’am. I hope I’ve given you the information you were looking for.”

  She gave him a faint smile and stood aside as he opened the door for her. “Yes, well…as you said, I have a lot to think about. And I can count on your discretion?”

  “Absolutely. The attorney-client privilege guarantees confidentiality. If I can be of further help, just come by.”

  Susannah nodded and crossed the sidewalk to untie her horse. She’d always faced her responsibilities head-on without flinching. But now she wished she could climb into the saddle, give Sally her head, and gallop for miles with the brisk wind burning her face, across the open pastures away from the farm, away from the problems and obligations that waited for her there. Right now, knowing the identity of her legal husband made nothing easier.

  The law doesn’t have a say-so over what’s in a person’s heart. So Tanner had told her.

  He was right.

  Nor could the law change the yearning pulling at her with the strength of a mule team.

  Just as she turned Sally around for home, one of the last people she wanted to see rode up alongside her.

  “So, Mrs. Braddock. Been to see the lawyer, have you?” Shaw said, looking her up and down.

  “Wh-what—” She felt as if she had no privacy at all anymore. The fumes of Virgil Tilly’s cheap rotgut wafted to her with his words.

  “There’s no sense denying it. I just seen you outside his office. And I know what he told you, too—that I’m right. You’ll have to send that Grenfell and his boys packing now that your rightful husband is home. Too bad. He was a good wrangler but we’ll find someone else to fill in for him.”

  She glared at his smug face, with its small, shoe-button eyes and lines drawn by a lifetime of weather and a sour, ill-tempered nature. Once, years ago, she’d hoped that Shaw Braddock would be the father she’d lost. She’d catered to him and spoiled him and put up with his cranky outbursts and limitless, carved-in-stone opinions. Now she wouldn’t wish this man on anyone, not even his own sons. And she wasn’t about to discuss personal business out here on Main Street.