A Place to Call Home (47 page)

“I don’t need your permission.”

“Oh, hell, you’re welcome around here. You don’t want to believe it, but you are. Ask Claire to marry you. Settle down. You’ll be close to Matthew. Keep being what you’ve been to him. But understand that we’ll have to come to terms about that. You’ve known since he was a kid that I was his father. Accept the new situation.” Josh tapped Roan on the chest. “You’re not his father. I am.”

Roan swayed, his fists clenched by his sides. Josh thrust out his chin, and they stared at each other. I lurched to my feet and nearly fell over as I slammed a hand into the meaty hummock of my brother’s shoulder. Roan caught me by the arms and pulled me to him. He wrapped his arms around me because I was struggling to get at Josh. “You want to threaten somebody, big brother? Threaten me.”

“Claire, for God’s sake.” Josh sighed.

“Come on
. Come on.
”

“You knew.” Matthew’s voice came out of the shadows. Josh, Roan, and I turned quickly. Matthew stepped into an aisle between walls of hay bales. “I didn’t intend to spy,” he said in a strained tone. “It’s just that you were all so busy arguing, you didn’t notice when I walked upstairs.”

My heart twisted. He moved forward, his arms rigidly crossed over his chest, his shoulders hunched. He halted before Roan, who released me. I moved aside but watched Roan worriedly. Matthew stared at him. “You knew Pete
Delaney wasn’t my father, and you knew Josh Maloney was,” he accused. His voice quivered. “You knew when I was a kid, but you didn’t tell me. How could you lie to me like that?”

Roan grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I thought there was nothing worth coming back to here. I thought it was kinder to let you think your old man was dead. I thought it was safer.”

“
You lied
to me
. Nobody deserves to make that decision for another person. I trusted you. I always trusted you. But you let me think I had nobody but you.”

“Matthew,” I said hoarsely. “Don’t jump to conclusions—”

“One phone call,” Matthew went on, his head tilted back. He studied Roan in anguish. “Or even one letter. That was all you needed to write. You could have found out I was wanted here. We could have come back.”

“This family might have taken you away from me. I had no legal rights. Josh could have shipped you off to a foster home. Or put you up for adoption. It’s easy for you to stand here
now
and say he wouldn’t have done that, but that’s not a risk I was willing to take.”

“You couldn’t risk it? You couldn’t risk some simple contact with the Maloneys to find out for my sake? What did they ever do to you to deserve that kind of judgment? Noth
ing
. You taught me to trust people, to give them a fair chance to prove themselves, but you’ve never trusted anybody. You never gave this family a chance to prove anything to you or to me.”

“You see them a different way than I do. Good. I want you to. Hindsight is easy. Enjoy it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s all you’re going to get right now.”

Roan still gripped Matthew’s shoulders. Matthew shoved his hands away. “There’s no excuse for what you did to me. You could have told me who I was when I was old enough. You could have let me decide whether I
wanted to meet my biological father. But you didn’t want anything to do with these people and you made the same choice for me.
Let’s get this straight. You don’t have the right to make choices for me anymore.
”

“Make your own choices then. Tell me what you intend to do.”

Matthew inhaled sharply. He looked miserable, but I didn’t feel sorry for him at that moment. He had hurt Roan for unwarranted sins, and he didn’t understand the depth of that betrayal. “Tweet and I are going to get to know the family. My grandparents. My little sister.” He looked at Josh, who seemed subdued by victory. “And my father.” Matthew stared at Roan. “If you don’t like that, you don’t have to be a part of it.”

Tell him
, I begged Roan silently.
Tell him why you lost faith in the family. Tell him what happened to you and me
.

But Roan stood there offering nothing, no excuses or apologies, while the starlight over Dunshinnog faded in Matthew’s unforgiving eyes.

M
atthew and Tweet settled into a big corner bedroom at the farm, a room that was part of the oldest core of the house.

I was right about Tweet. She loved chickens, but she ate them, too. Matthew loved everything that walked, crawled, swam, or flew on the farm. He and she were outdoors half the time, exploring.

Mama and Daddy pulled out all the stops to surround them with the largesse of that sunny room in the main house of the Maloney clan. There were dinner parties with my brothers and their families, all done up in their prosperous best, the wives smelling like the latest Neiman Marcus catalog.

Matthew and Tweet were made the center of attention among the glimmering antique silver and crystal and china of the dining room, summer flowers bursting from vases at every turn, generations of well-kept heirloom furniture and knickknacks polished for inspection, a family story waiting to be told with each one.

Roan and I stayed away.

My brother proudly introduced Matthew around Dunderry, wined and dined him constantly, and showered him and Tweet with presents that ranged from a set of Depression-glass bowls Josh had inherited from Great-Gran to
fifty acres of prime land in the north end of Dunderry County and a full membership at the country club.

“It’s embarrassing,” Daddy told everyone angrily. “He’s trying to buy instant respect from the boy.” Mama told her sisters Matthew obviously appreciated Josh’s sincerity but wasn’t impressed by money. “That’s because Roan raised Matthew around money, with money—it’s nothing new to him,” I emphasized to everyone who’d listen. “He’s not a hick. He’s not going to be dazzled. Josh can buy his attention, but he can’t buy his love.”

To which Renfrew replied dourly, “But your brother sure is makin’ a down payment on it.”

Josh took Matthew and Tweet to Atlanta, where they were the guests of honor at a cocktail party Josh threw for them at his apartment. He didn’t tell Matthew about his longtime relationship with the Vietnamese-American Lin Su, who was out of town on business. She wasn’t a fatherly subject to share with a new son—a girlfriend who was only slightly older than he. Instead Josh squired Matthew around the state capitol, introducing him to his legislature cronies, to the lieutenant governor, and finally even to the governor.

“Matthew handled the meeting beautifully,” Josh reported to Brady, who told me. “I couldn’t have been more impressed. He’s well-spoken, well-informed, good with people. And so’s Millie.” Josh didn’t refer to Tweet as Tweet. I guess he thought her nickname was undignified. “My son’s a natural-born people person.”

Natural born. Josh really didn’t want to believe that Roan had done a good job raising Matthew, a better job, probably, than he himself would have done. I took grim satisfaction in telling Brady to mention that Roan’s social circles included a senator and two ex-governors of Washington State. That Matthew hadn’t grown up in a cultural vacuum.

But nothing really mattered except the silence and distance growing deeper every day between Roan and Matthew.

• • •

Roan walked the woods obsessively. My leg wasn’t strong enough for me to go along, and he didn’t want me to, anyway, which hurt me. He said he had to be alone, and I told him he was forgetting we shared the same past and future. We didn’t have much else to say to each other during those days. I was worried and depressed.

He couldn’t be still when we were at the cabin together. He didn’t eat much, he didn’t sleep well, and when we reached for each other in bed we were wild, hurried, explosive together, but miserably quiet afterward.

Every day he roamed from the lake to the Hollow and all the land he owned on either side, stretching from Cap’s Ridge on the west to Soap Falls and the Hollow on the east, to the back of Uncle Bert’s farm on the north and the boundary of Kehoe property on the south, a huge block of wilderness pushing into the settled territory around it. He lost himself in the creeks and springs, the gullies and ridges and rocky overhangs, and the Hollow, with its buried corpses of junk.

“What are you looking for?” I asked gently, knowing that he was trying to make peace with what he’d been and what he’d done as a boy. What he had to tell Matthew about himself.

“Answers,” he said.

He brought me wildflowers and turtle shells, birds’ nests and interesting rocks, as if we were still kids. I cooked food we didn’t eat and read box after box of his wonderful but emotionally exhausting letters to me, years of conversation to fill the void. I sat at a table in the gazebo with the boxes scattered around me, stacks of letters anchored by turtle shells and rocks, my chin propped on one fist while I read for hours at a time, tears streaming down my face.

He caught me at it once, and the scene upset him worse than anything I could have said. Not knowing how else to help each other, we lay down in the shade of the
water oaks and eventually made love. He owned his misery and he owned mine.

The next morning Josh brought Amanda home from summer camp and told her, during the drive back, about Matthew. When Josh introduced them, Matthew presented Amanda with a beautiful gold bracelet bearing a small, round charm inscribed
LOVE TO MY SISTER
. Tweet wasn’t the only one who cried sentimental tears over that.

But Amanda shook her brother’s hand formally and offered him and Tweet nothing warmer than the crystalline, blue-eyed stare I had taught her that spring while I was bedridden, and an hour later, when Josh and Mama checked on her in her upstairs bedroom, her window was open and she was gone. I’d also made the mistake of telling her how I used to climb down the jasmine trellis when I was her age.

She left a note on her pillow.

The entire family spent the next six hours frantically searching for her in the woods and the roads around the farm. Alvin called in sheriff’s deputies from all the neighboring counties, horseback teams, search dogs, and forest rangers. Roan and I went up in the Cessna and scoured every pasture, meadow, and mountaintop in a ten-mile radius.

Late that afternoon we landed on the small dirt airstrip Roan had installed at Ten Jumps. Amanda was sitting on the cabin’s front porch.

Her face was swollen from crying. She clutched a cellular phone and a pink knapsack in her lap. She was dirty and disheveled, wearing sandals, denim shorts, and a striped T-shirt; her bare arms and legs were streaked with red lines from briar scratches, her red hair was snarled with twigs and leaves. She had a look of intense little-girl desolation, but when we reached her, she peered up at us with a flat, resolute mouth. “You won’t tell anybody I’m here, will ya? This is a safe place.” She focused on Roan. “Aunt Claire says this was always your safe hiding place. So you won’t jinx it by telling on me, huh?”

“It’d be wrong to turn a needy girl out of Ten Jumps,” Roan agreed solemnly. “You can stay here as long as you want.”

I glanced at him reproachfully as he helped me sit down beside her. I put my arm around her. “I liked your running-away-from-home letter,” I said. “Polite but to the point. Good technical skills as well as a snazzy style. I think you’re ready for a promotion. You’re ready to write a coming-back-home letter.”

Roan sat down on a porch step below ours with one leg drawn up, and Amanda gazed at him tearfully. “I heard you wrote a lot of letters to Aunt Claire. Did you write her a coming-back-home one?”

A child’s sincerity in unhappiness brings memories of corrupted innocence. Roan and I traded somber looks. “Not yet,” he said.

“Then I won’t write one to Papa. You don’t have a kid anymore. So I’ll stay here and be your kid.”

I nudged her gently. “What did your papa tell you about Matthew?”

“Papa said he had a girlfriend a long time before he met my mama and they made Matthew together, but they weren’t married, and she went away when Matthew was
still a little boy. And then she died and Roan took care of Matthew. And Papa’s sorry he didn’t take care of Matthew himself and now he wants to.”

“Then you understand why you have a brother?”

“Yeah. Half a brother. We’ve got the same papa. I get it.” She fumbled with the phone and the bag. “Papa’s all excited about him. He doesn’t need me anymore.”

“Oh, honey,” I said. “That’s not true.”

“He’s never gotten all excited about me.” She gazed at Roan with her mouth trembling. “Don’t you want Matthew anymore?”

“That’s not the problem, and of course I …” Roan halted, and looked away, clearing his throat.