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“No one could ever be too good to you, Julia.” He set something, probably her cup, on the table beside her bed. “It’s our largest mug, about half full. I baked cookies last weekend, and there are two on the saucer beside it. Shall I put the mug in your hand?”
“Please.” She extended her hand and closed it around warm pottery, probably one of Maisy’s projects. Maisy had gone through an unfortunate ceramics era, and the cupboards were still filled with lopsided mugs and plates that couldn’t survive the microwave.
Jake waited until she was secure before he released it. “Two lumps of sugar and plenty of milk.”
“I haven’t had it that way in years. What a treat.”
The bed sagged. She could tell he was sitting at the foot now. “You’ve had quite a day.”
She hadn’t thought of it for years, but now she remembered the many times Jake had come to her room as a teenager, making himself available if she wanted to talk, departing without comment if she didn’t. He never probed, never criticized. Jake had always simply been there. No real father could have been kinder.
“Dr. Jeffers was threatening to have me committed if I didn’t agree to stay there on my own.”
“Could he do that?”
“I don’t know the law, something I’m sure he was counting on. I guess he thought that was his ace in the hole.”
“Well, about now he’s playing fifty-two pickup, isn’t he?”
“I couldn’t get better there. But maybe I won’t get better here, either.”
“What would be the worst thing that could happen?”
“I might never see again.”
“Highly unlikely, but let’s say it’s possible. Then what?”
“I learn to live with being blind.”
“Could you?”
“Would I have a choice?”
“Only a very extreme one.”
She realized he was talking about suicide. “This is terrible. Unthinkable. But I still have my life, my family. I’m not going to do anything foolish.” Tears filled her eyes. “Jake, what is Callie going to think of me?”
He was quiet a moment. “I believe we’re about to find out.”
She heard the pickup, too. “I don’t want her to see me crying.”
“Drink some tea and wipe your eyes.”
The tea tasted like childhood, like rainy afternoons and Black Stallion novels and the wind whistling through evergreen hedges. She had regained her composure, at least outwardly, by the time she heard the old heart of pine floors creaking with excitement.
Then her door burst open. She felt Jake remove the cup from her hands, and she opened her arms wide just in time to catch her daughter’s soft body in a fierce bear hug. She pictured her as she held her.
Callie Warwick had pigtails the color of butterscotch and brown eyes rimmed with thick black lashes. Like her mother she was small-boned and petite. Unlike Julia, she was spontaneous, open and unafraid to show her feelings.
“Mommy!”
Julia wondered if she would ever see her daughter’s sweet face again. “I’m so glad you’re here!”
“Maisy came and got me. And she got Feather Foot, too. I mean she told Ramon to get her and bring her here so I can ride at Ashbourne. Isn’t that neat?”
Feather Foot was Callie’s pony. At eight, like most local children, Callie was an accomplished rider. “Maisy is the world’s best grandma,” Julia said.
Callie giggled. “We played hide-and-seek with Mrs. Taylor.”
Julia imagined it was more like hide, then hide some more. She was sure that once Callie’s suitcases were packed, Maisy hadn’t wanted to run into Millcreek’s housekeeper.
“Everything go okay, Maisy?” Julia lifted her face from Callie’s hair. She knew her mother was standing there by the scent of violets.
“No problems at all. And we stopped by the stables to make arrangements to have Feather Foot loaded and delivered within the hour.”
“Are we really going to stay here, Mommy?”
Julia brushed Callie’s bangs back from her forehead. “Yes, we are. Maisy and Jake say they want to take care of us until my eyesight returns, but I think they just want more time with you.”
“Is that true?” Callie said.
“Your mommy’s too smart for words,” Maisy said. “She always was. I could tell you stories.”
“And will if there’s even one moment of silence to give you a foothold,” Jake said.
“Maisy said I can pick out any room I want upstairs. Do you want to help?” Callie was silent as Julia tried to think how to gently remind her that picking things out right now was a difficult task. “Oh, you can’t,” Callie said matter-of-factly. “I forgot.”
Julia felt a weight lifting from her shoulders. She had nearly bought Bard’s warnings that her blindness would be an insurmountable hurdle for Callie.
She hugged Callie again, then released her. “I could go along anyway and tell you what I remember. Like the time I hid under the bed in the room beside the bathroom because I didn’t want to go to school.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. And Maisy pretended nothing was wrong all day. Nobody even looked for me.”
“Is that true?” Callie asked.
Maisy answered. “Absolutely. I figured if she needed a day under the bed, I’d let her have one.”
“Is the bed still there?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Julia said. “You’ll be going to school every day. Besides, it was dusty and boring.”
“I’m going to see if it’s still dusty.” The clatter of feet disappearing down the hall announced her departure.
“Well,” Maisy said, “piece of cake.”
“She didn’t find it odd that you were practically kidnapping her?” Julia said.
“Not at all. She did wonder what Bard would say. Then she said maybe he wouldn’t notice.”
“He’ll notice,” Julia said. “The telephone will be ringing shortly.”
“How would you like us to handle it?”
“There’s a phone on my table, right?”
“I moved the cordless in here. It will be easier for you to use,” Jake said.
“Then I can handle Bard.”
“He’s always welcome here, Julia.” Maisy’s tone sounded sincere enough.
“When Bard is under stress the worst parts of him come to the surface. He gets more rigid and more assertive. But he’ll come around once he sees I mean business.”
“Will you go home, then?”
She was home. As strange as it felt, it also felt right. She wondered what that said about her. She was a grown woman with a husband and child of her own, but she needed the parents she had left behind. She had crawled back into the womb.
“Let her take it one step at a time,” Jake said, when Julia didn’t answer.
“Maisy, will you help Callie get settled upstairs?” Julia said.
“With pleasure. If she wants your old room?”
“It’s a room, not a shrine.”
“Maisy!” Callie’s voice drifted down the stairwell.
“Would you like your tea again?” Jake said.
Julia wanted her life again. She did not want to be a tormented, hysterical, sightless woman who was forced to depend on her stepfather to put a mug of tea in her hand.
She shook her head. “No, I’m going to find it on my own, thanks.”
She waited for someone to argue. No one did.
“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Jake said. “And just so you know, if you happen to knock that particular mug to the floor, that would be fine with me.”
“Not one of my better efforts,” Maisy agreed.
“Definitely not.”
Julia could picture Jake, his arm slung over Maisy’s shoulder, leading his wife from the room. Tears filled her eyes again.
She took a moment to mourn all she had lost. Then she swallowed her tears and began her search.
6
Fidelity Sutherland, her long blond hair woven in a flawless French braid, came to Christian that night. Her smile was as sassy as ever, her throat a gaping caricature, a hideously grinning half-moon that spouted a river of blood down the front of a tailored white shirt.
He awoke without a sound and sat up quickly, but Fidelity would not be purged. In death, as in life, she was tenacious. As a young woman she had found ways to have everything she wanted. Dead almost ten years, she hadn’t lost her touch.
By the faint lightening of the sky Christian saw that dawn was perched on the horizon. There was a small barred window in his cell, too high for any purpose other than to let in slivers of light. He’d often wondered why windows had been included in the prison’s design. To remind the refuse of society that the sun rose and set without them?
Christian pillowed his head on his arms and stared up at the window. One year a red-winged blackbird had taken a liking to the narrow ledge and landed there intermittently all summer, vocalizing his own version of “nevermore,” which had seemed all too appropriate to Christian. He’d found himself looking for the blackbird whenever he was in his cell, but the moment Christian had begun to count on finding it there, the bird disappeared.
Blackbirds had darkened the skies at Claymore Park. Christian had grown up with them. Telephone lines crowded with glistening feathered bodies like endless ropes of Tahitian pearls. Once he had told Julia Ashbourne that her hair reminded him of a blackbird’s wing.
Once he had been a foolishly romantic young man with no idea of how quickly everything in his life could change.
“You awake?”
Christian didn’t take his eyes from the window. His cell mate, a man named Landis, always woke early. Landis, not yet twenty-one, was getting a head start on a lifetime of mornings like this one. Like Christian, his chances of encountering dawn any place else were almost nonexistent.
“Go back to sleep,” Christian said. “You have time.”
“Shit, I don’t sleep. You don’t know what can happen to you when you’re sleeping.”
“Nothing’s going to happen in here. You’re not my type.”
“You got a type?”
Christian’s type had been female and deceptively fragile, black-haired, blue-eyed and much too serious. In the company of the more flamboyant Fidelity Sutherland she had been easy for some people to overlook. He hadn’t been one of them.
He thought the sky was growing lighter quickly, which was too bad. “My type is female. Which means you’re safe.”
“Shit, most people got that idea when they come in here. But look what goes on.”
“Don’t look. You’ll be better off.”
“How you get to be so bored with all this? You don’t care about bein’ here?”
“What good would it do to care?”
“I never met nobody as alone as you.” Landis continued, buoyed by Christian’s silence. “You got no family?”
“All gone.”
“No woman waiting?”
“That would be a long wait, wouldn’t it?”
“You get mail, but you don’t even read it.”
Christian shifted, easing the pressure on his forearms. “You’re paying attention to things that aren’t your business, Landis.”
Landis bristled. “So? You gonna make something out of it?”
