A Place to Call Home (24 page)

• 1995 •

L
ife turns in large cycles, too large to notice until they bring you back to some touchstone, to home, to fractured memories of a sanctuary you thought you’d never need again.

On a balmy northern Florida morning in early March, I headed for lunch down a side street that bordered the peach-colored building of the Jacksonville
Herald-Courier
. The morning edition was still on display in banks of newspaper boxes along the curbs, the lead story, beneath a color photo of a Marlins rookie pitcher, enticed with a new baseball season’s hopes. Beside it, in a column of teasers outlined in bright blue and gold, a promotional blurb blared:

I walked on, pleased. Terri Caulfield hadn’t had many opportunities to be noticed or fussed over. Abused by the uncle who raised her, beaten and then stalked by the husband she’d divorced, she was only twenty-two, scared, depressed, and willing to talk.

I’d met her while researching an article on Jacksonville’s battered-women programs. When I got back to the newspaper offices and told my editor I’d found the perfect case study for a series about domestic violence, his face lit up with a bourbon-on-the-rocks glow. “You could follow her through the system,” he mused. “Show how it works.”

“It doesn’t work,” I countered. “Her ex-husband violated two restraining orders in the past year. He gets out of jail, he stalks her again. He shows up at her apartment, at her job, wherever. Last month he set fire to her car. She’s hiding in the women’s shelter because a judge granted him bond on the arson charge. He threatened to kill her if she testifies against him. Publicizing her story might make him back off.”

“Hmmm. Am I going to like her? Am I going to root for her? She’s not some welfare-queen drug addict with a houseful of illegitimate babies?”

I chewed my tongue. The
Herald-Courier
had hired a team of media consultants to shore up sagging circulation. The newspaper was flailing for attention in a world dominated by the
National Enquirer
and tabloid TV. The consultants advised a strategy they called When Bad News Happens to Good Readers, which, bluntly translated, meant that middle-class sex crimes, murders, and torrid family dramas sell more newspapers to middle-class readers. I understood the economic realities of journalism.

“She’s a nice white dental hygienist,” I said sardonically. “At least she used to be a dental hygienist until her
pathological ex-husband showed up at her job one time too many. She’s been on unemployment since she got fired. And get this: She wrote a letter to the governor last fall asking for help. His office sent the wrong form letter back. ‘Thank you for supporting our state parks.’ ”

“Oh, shit.” My editor grinned.

After a meeting with the rest of the editorial staff, he said happily, “Run with it. If she’s lovable we’ll make her the friggin’ poster pinup for spousal abuse.”

Six months and six articles later, I’d turned Terri Caulfield into a minor celebrity throughout northern Florida. She and I appeared together on a local PBS issues show. We were interviewed on public radio as well. A tabloid show picked up her story and paid her two thousand bucks for an interview. My series on her ran in syndication nationwide.

Hammered by public sympathy, a judge slapped her ex-husband with a heavy sentence on the arson charge. The ex had been in prison ever since.

The city rumbled and sang around me, the bright Florida sunshine glinting off parked cars with saltwater beach rust coating their fenders and palm-tree air fresheners hanging from their rearview mirrors. I had lived and worked here on the Florida coast since college. Seven years. I was only a day’s drive from Dunderry, little more than an hour by plane, but I hadn’t been home for a visit since Grandpa died, a year ago that spring.

Still, it felt like a good day, everything under control and moving smoothly. This was the year my life was supposed to begin making sense to me. Great-Uncle Fen Delaney had told me so when I was thirteen.

We had visited him in South Carolina for his granddaughter’s wedding. Tall, thin, ostrich-shaped, Fen was a Reagan Republican and owned a chain of grocery stores in Charleston, but under his conservative hide was a peculiar streak. He believed in numerology, UFOs, and Bigfoot.

He called me out for a walk. He knew my troubled status in the family, of course. We sat on the low, aged
stone of Charleston’s waterfront park, watching shrimp boats and pelicans. “Six is your number, Claire Karleen,” he told me. “Six letters in your name. And you’re one of five children, and six times five is thirty. So I predict you’ll be thirty years old before you really understand who you are. Important changes will happen to you that year.”

I hoped he was right. I’d tried to make my life seamless with the uneasy glue of ambition and long hours at work. Loneliness got shoved under the clutter of my cubicle in the newsroom, my small apartment, the endless parade of people and events I covered, picking apart other people’s lives and motives like a hungry crow. “You live on the edge of something,” Violet had said not long ago when she and her preschool daughters spent a weekend with me. “Is it exciting? Everyone wonders. Your folks, Claire. They worry so much—”

“Life is short,” I’d tossed back glibly. “Work hard, play fast, and never look back or down.”

“He’s always out there, isn’t he?” she’d asked quietly. “Roanie Sullivan.”

I had looked at her with simple denial. “He’s probably dead. I try not to think about him.”

Lies, lies, and damn lies. I nearly convinced myself.

I turned a corner past a taco stand and a T-shirt shop, striding past my own image in store windows that cast me back in muted shades of blue skirt and gray blazer, damned fine bare legs stepping along in white mules, a mane of wavy red hair pushed back under a rolled white scarf, my cloth tote bag bulging with notepads and a miniature tape recorder. Off duty I favored pipe-legged old jeans and T-shirts; on dates, occasionally, a black cocktail dress or formal gown. Not much jewelry, not much makeup, a sturdy wristwatch, ink-stained fingernails and a thumb callus from scribbling notes on a reporter’s pad.

I’d topped out at five foot nine, nothing voluptuous about the package but all the padding in perky order. Not a bad combination of sturdy Maloney bones and delicate Delaney
proportions. A truck driver whistled at me. I gave him a thumbs-up.

“How you doing today, Emilio?” I said to the tattooed street vendor hawking Cuban sandwiches from a cart. He grinned as he sang out as always, “Hot mama, when will you write about me?”

“When you give me free food.” I grinned, reaching for a paper napkin. He laughed.

As I stood there waiting for my sandwich, a taxi stopped at the end of the block ahead. I gave it an idle glance as the passenger door opened. A tall, dark-haired man got out. I almost glimpsed his face before he strode into a nearby café. “Where you going?” Emilio called. I stuck a five-dollar bill in his hand, then ran up the street with my shoulder bag bouncing wildly against one hip.

I darted inside the café, took a deep breath, and halted behind the stranger, who was leaning against the hostess stand, waiting to be seated. “Roan Sullivan?” I said in a low voice.

He turned. His eyes were blue, not gray, and his face had nothing familiar about it. “Excuse, please?” he replied in a thick, unidentifiable accent. He arched a brow and looked me over with the beginnings of unwelcome appreciation. I turned and walked out, squinting tightly in the sunshine, one sweaty, shaking hand clamped around my bag.

I had done this kind of thing a thousand times over the past twenty years. I kept waiting, kept watching, stayed on alert. Many years ago, when I was a sophomore at the university, I’d thought I glimpsed Roan in front of my dorm. I was walking across the lawn and something made me glance over my shoulder, and I could have sworn I saw him in a truck parked behind some hedges along the curb. For one irrational second I was convinced it must be Roan—as if I knew exactly what he’d look like as a young man—but by the time I turned completely, the stranger was driving off. I ran a good quarter-mile trying to catch that damned truck.

I’d been running after ghosts too long. This self-humiliation had to stop. I promised myself it would. I was getting too old for fantasies.

A week later some bureaucratic clerical error allowed Terri’s ex-husband a sudden and mistaken release on parole. He immediately left a strangled kitten in her mailbox with a note tied to its neck. You are next, you lying bitch.

That night, terrified, she sat on the couch in my living room, dressed in a pale yellow T-shirt and old jeans. When I brought her a cup of hot tea, she sipped it like a nervous canary as she watched me double-check the bolts on the duplex’s front and back doors.

“You’ll be fine here tonight,” I promised. “Off to Miami tomorrow, living it up in a nice hotel. Drink margaritas, work on your tan. The cops’ll round him up so fast you won’t even have time for a hangover or a sunburn.” I was laying it on thick, praying my optimism was justified.

“Why are you doing all this for me?” she asked wistfully.

I waved my mug of beer toward a wall dotted with Florida Press Association awards. “You’re my ticket to a Pulitzer nomination maybe. You sell newspapers. You’re a good story.”

“Oh, come on. You’re always writing about homeless bums and runaway kids and beat-up women. But you don’t make any sense to me, Claire. How come you care so much about strangers but you don’t have a husband and kids?”

I laughed. “I’m too cranky to be a wife, and too distracted to be a mother.”

“I could use some distractions right now.” She wandered around my apartment, shaking her head, studying framed museum posters and stacks of books, refinished flea-market furniture and an antique mahogany desk Grandpa had left to me. On it, beside a portable computer and a fax machine, sat a stack of family photo albums. Mama sent a new one every year for my birthday. A challenge,
a plea, and pure, guilt-inducing sentiment. If I wouldn’t come home to visit often, home would come to me.

Terri carried the stack of albums to the couch, began gingerly picking through them, and looked awed. “Are all of these people relatives of yours?” she asked.

“Those are my brothers,” I told her, as she pointed to one page. “And their wives. I’ve got eleven nieces and nephews. That’s my oldest brother, Josh. His wife died when their daughter was born. That’s her in the picture with her cousins. Amanda. She’s about ten. She lives with my parents.”

“She looks like you. I bet she’s a cutup.”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Terri looked at me oddly. I went on, telling her that Brady was a real-estate developer, Hop and Evan were in the construction business together, and Josh was a state senator.

“Jeez,” she said.

I shrugged. “He’s planning to run for lieutenant governor in the next election. Conservative. Rush Limbaugh school of philosophy.”

“He looks important.”

“Hmmm. He’s busier than he should be. Traveling, making speeches. He’s also in the family poultry business. My father retired a few years ago, after he had a mild heart attack.” I nodded toward a pair of stoneware vases on the coffee table. “My mother’s a potter. It used to be a hobby; now she’s selling her work through a few shops. Daddy stays busy with some llamas he bought.”

Terri turned a page and smiled at a snapshot of the llama herd. “They look like little camels covered in shag carpet.”

“He says they spit when they’re annoyed. I think he loves them dearly.”

“What a great family. You visit home a lot? You must miss them, living down here in Florida.”

“I moved out when I went to college. Haven’t been back much.”

“Well …
why
?”

Twenty years of quiet estrangement couldn’t be summed up easily. Or painlessly. “We had some disagreements,” I said. Silent accusations on my part, that sad mixture of love and retaliation that runs like a cold stream under some families’ surfaces. Their regrets made the current no less chilling.

Terri sighed. “If I had a big family I’d go sit in the middle of them and count my blessings. You’re lucky.”

“You’re going to have a family. A good husband, and kids someday, and a good home. I promise.”

“Claire, I never believed anybody’s promises before. But now I know I can get through this”—she glanced nervously out a window—“because I know people really will help. Because you care.”

I grunted. “All you needed was a little publicity and a push in the right direction.”

Suddenly we heard the slam of heavy footsteps climbing the stairs outside my second-story landing. Terri’s face turned white. She clenched the albums in her lap. I laughed. “It’s just the accountant who lives next door. Relax.”