Chapter One

 

Williams, Oregon

Thursday, September 21, 1995

 

“You know he’s fought hard for more than fifty years to keep his leg.”

Lillianna Ferguson paced across the kitchen of her Oregon ranch house, stretching the coiled phone cord to its limits. But she couldn’t escape the slam of guilt her brother’s words brought. Their mother had told her about the way, against all the odds, her father had learned to walk again in the corridors of Valley Forge Military Hospital.

“Can’t you find someone else? A nurse or caregiver? Maybe the Veterans Administration can help.”

“Doctor Willingham claims he can’t fix the aneurysm without amputating. And the way it is now, Pop won’t agree to the surgery. With the size of that bubble, it’s just a matter of weeks before his aorta blows. The VA is paying his bills at Johns Hopkins. Come on, Em—”

“The name is Lillianna, Greg. It’s only been eighteen years since I changed it.” She sighed. Why couldn’t her brother or anyone in her extended family accept the fact she was no longer Emma Miller? That name was a constant reminder of everything she wanted to forget. “The VA has rehab facilities.”

“I checked out a couple, and they’re pretty depressing. Besides, they bring back things. Things he’d rather forget. You’re his daughter, and he hasn’t seen you for years.”

A dose of guilt she refused to swallow. “Since when does he care if he—?”

“For crying out loud. Let it go. He’s an old man, and he needs you. He… He…” Greg’s voice broke.

Lillianna swallowed. Greg, though three years older, had always been the soft-hearted one, the caretaker, the boy who’d tightened her roller skates with a key he kept on a string around his neck.

“He what? He needs me to take care of him? Is that what you’re saying? Well, when did he ever take care of me?” Despite her attempts at control, her voice cracked, and she gripped the phone receiver in her sweaty hand. She glanced at the clock on the microwave. Her husband, Steve, would be back from feeding the horses soon and dinner was almost ready. She didn’t want to be in the middle of an argument with her brother when her husband returned.

“Hell… he didn’t take care of me either,” Greg finally admitted. “But he’s our father. And he’s been through a hell of a lot. He’s not the man you remember. Pop stopped drinking after Mom died. I’ve tried to put the past behind me and be there for him in spite of…”

She dragged her left hand through her hair and clutched the phone a little tighter with her right. “And I haven’t? Is that what you’re saying? Don’t you ever get sick and tired of seeing his side? Don’t you want to stand up and tell the truth about him for once?” She bit the inside of her cheek. Tears stung her eyes. Her brother was right. She hadn’t been there for their father. But that didn’t mean she had to start now.

“No,” Greg answered softly, then sighed. “I’m not even sure I understand what the truth is anymore. And even if I did, it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re a saint, all right. I acknowledge it. Shall I Federal Express you a halo?” She laughed bitterly.

“Forget the halo. Just tell me you’ll come. Agree to help me out, if not him. He’ll be in the hospital for weeks. I can’t take that much time away from the business. It’s my busiest season. Besides, this may be your last chance.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel guilty?”

“It’s a fact. Somebody has to convince him to have the amputation. I tried. He won’t listen to me. Please, Sis, help him see there’s no choice. His doctor isn’t the one to do it.”

“He’s a stubborn old fool,” Lillianna said, her voice almost a hiss. “What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”

“Because he really wants to see you. Whenever I talk with you on the phone, he questions me. How is she doing? Does she sound happy? Did she say anything about coming back home? If anyone can convince him, it’s you. Come on. I’ll pick you up at the airport in Baltimore. There’s a hotel right next to the hospital. I’ll even pay the bill, for God’s sake. I’ll be there on weekends to give you a break. Please. It would mean a lot to him. And to me.”

“I have a life, too, you know. Ranching is hard work. And I’m not sure Steve can manage twenty-six horses on his own. Besides, even if I don’t go into an office every day, I’ve got deadlines to meet.”

“I’ve thought about that. You can bring your laptop. And I can hook you up with a printer if you need one. Don’t let your writing be an excuse not to see him. If you do…” He paused, and his voice grew faint. “I’m afraid you might regret it once he’s gone.”

After agreeing she’d think about it and get back with him in the morning, they said their goodbyes and hung up. Lillianna stared vacantly out the window at a gray squirrel as it sifted through the needles, bark, and pine cones under the conifers. A late September sun lingered over the trees and left a bright shadow on the ceiling.

There was something about autumn that roused her affection and sadness—the way the pastures turned golden and the apples along the drive dropped to the ground in fermenting mounds. She wanted to talk to Steve, but already knew what he’d say. He’d tell her to go, her father wouldn’t be around forever, and someday she’d be sorry. And maybe he’d be right.

Without any warning, young Emma floated up inside her until she was back in Mrs. Ward’s first-grade classroom on the early June day they’d invited dads to their Father’s Day play.

* * *

New Castle, Delaware

June 1953

 

“Coneflowers over here,” Mrs. Ward said.

Emma, barefoot and wearing green tights and a leotard with a big cardboard collar of pink petals around her neck, took her place in the garden. It was planted in front of the backdrop of blue sky with big cotton-ball clouds and a white picket fence. She felt both beautiful and foolish. There were six rows of chairs set up in front of her—all filled with smiling fathers dressed in suits or pressed slacks and clean shirts. She scanned the rows, relieved her dad hadn’t come.

Outside the wall of windows, in the distance, a man staggered across the parking lot toward the classroom.

Emma fingered the horseshoe bracelet she’d worn for good luck and took a few steps forward. Please, God, don’t let it be him.

“Get back into line, Emma,” Mrs. Ward said.

But, focused on the man she now knew was her father, Emma ignored the teacher’s command. She glanced over the rows of smiling dads in the folding chairs she’d helped set up for them—their gazes locked on their children. She looked back at her father’s greasy coveralls and was keenly aware of how miserable and dark her life seemed. There were joy and freedom in the adoring glances of her classmates’ fathers. Emma’s life was a prison she couldn’t escape. And she longed for that other world—as far away from her own as the moon.

The brace on her father’s right leg was stiff and his gait, even when sober, remained that of a cripple. But today it was more than the stiffness of the brace. He lurched and nearly tripped over his untied shoelace.

Emma had often gauged how fast she needed to hide by the way her father walked. Today, he was very drunk. She didn’t want her teacher or her classmates and their dads to see him, stinking with alcohol—to witness the scene she knew would come.

Without a word, Emma raced through the classroom, weaving her way around the fathers and the desks Mrs. Ward had shoved to the back of the room. She ran through the fire escape, across the grassy area, and into the parking lot. The asphalt was so hot on her feet; it brought tears to her eyes, but she kept running until she reached her father. She grabbed his arm.

“My widdle fower girl. I’m here for your…your Father’s Day play, Em.” His words held much more than his usual pint of slur.

Hopping on the burning asphalt, she managed to turn him around and lead him back to his truck. “The play is over. It was really good, Daddy. I was a star.”

* * *

Thursday, September 21, 1995

Williams, Oregon

 

Then, just as suddenly, Lillianna was a middle-aged adult, sitting at her kitchen desk. She buried her head in her arms and wept into her sweatshirt sleeves. Wept for herself, and for all the brothers and sisters who could never be enough for each other—all the parents impossible to forgive.

Perhaps it was time for her to return. She was aware that Greg’s inexplicable loyalty to the old man made her life on this small horse ranch in southern Oregon possible.

Steve and Lillianna believed the ranch was a way for them to reconnect with themselves and each other—a way to own their days again and to live out their early dreams while they still could. At least that’s what they told themselves and their friends who thought them crazy to leave well-paying jobs to raise horses and write novels.

Maybe seeing her father again was part of that reconnect.

She hurried into the bedroom, opened the master closet and grabbed the small stepladder they kept there to reach the high shelving. After pulling the cardboard box from the top shelf, she searched through the contents. The girl who’d once been Emma had packed this box after her mother died. She’d carried it with her across the country to every new place she lived in the past eighteen years. But this was the first time she’d ever opened it. She rummaged through the report cards and letters, certificates from school science fairs, the sympathy cards she’d received after her mother died, and a school varsity letter she’d won for band.

Where was the red leather diary she’d kept throughout her childhood? It had to be there. When she finally found it, she slipped it beneath some books on her bedside table, then noticed a yellowed envelope tucked into the back of the diary. She pulled it out and found a copy of the application for GI Bill educational benefits her father had filled out in 1965, the year Emma graduated from high school. Because he was one hundred percent disabled, the VA would offer Emma, if she qualified, a college education. But until this moment, she hadn’t realized her father, not her mother, was the one who’d applied on her behalf. She stared at his wobbly handwriting, his childlike signature—the note he’d scribbled in the bottom margin. Please approve my daughter. Emma Ruth Miller is the smartest and best person I’ve ever known.

His words brought more tears. Despite years of physical rehabilitation, he’d never learned to write well with his left hand. But now she knew how hard he’d tried.

Lillianna tucked the envelope back into her diary, replaced the box on the closet shelf, and returned to the kitchen to finish dinner preparations. She felt an inexplicable unease, a sense something in the nature of things had quietly turned her in another direction, undermining her years of certitude about her father.

* * *

An hour later, after they’d eaten and she was loading the dishwasher, Steve perched on a kitchen bar stool with his evening brandy. “I’m the last one to give advice,” he said. “I understand how hard it would be for you to go back. I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you refused, but…”

She set a plate into the rack, then turned and looked at him. “But what?”

“You know all about my stormy relationship with my father. But, now that he’s dead, our battles seem pointless.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Look, I wish I could go back and find whatever was real between us—instead of hating him for everything that wasn’t.”

He paused, hunched forward a little and rested his elbow on the counter. Steve’s dark hair, still damp from his shower, curled over the collar of his denim shirt. “Being a parent is hard. We both know that. You make mistakes and hope your kids will forgive you. I’d give anything for the chance you have now.”

She glared at him. “It’s not the same, and you know it.” Her voice rose. “Your father wasn’t a drunk. He didn’t gamble away the grocery money, terrorize you and your mother, and beat you half senseless.” The muscles in her jaw quivered.

Steve waited until she met his gaze. “No. But he hurt me in other ways. Ways I once thought were unforgiveable, too. What I’m trying to tell you is this. After he’s dead, you may come to see things differently, the way I have. But there won’t be another chance to tell him.”

“I only want to tell him one thing, and that’s what he did to me and Greg and how it affected the rest of our lives.”

“Look,” Steve said. “I’m not thrilled with the idea of being on my own for weeks, but this is important. Sleep on it will you, love? Don’t be so hasty.

Obviously, Greg found a way to forgive him.

"You don’t have to make a decision tonight.”

Steve always saw things so clearly. And though he and her father only met a couple times, Lillianna knew he admired the man’s courage. The way she saw it, Steve dealt with whatever life put in front of him. She, on the other hand, tried to talk her way out, reason around the obstacles, and if neither of those techniques worked, she ran. But this time she was unable to talk, reason or run.

Was anyone ever finished with their past?

Steve slid off the bar stool and put his empty glass in the dishwasher. “I don’t mean to sound harsh, but if you ask me, Greg is right to expect some help from you. All the responsibility has been his, and that’s not fair. Like it or not, he’s your father, too. And maybe you should do your part.”

Lillianna paced some more, her arms crossed in front of her. For years she’d convinced herself Greg chose to be part of their father’s life because he wanted to be. She, on the other hand, had chosen to forget and live her life as far away as possible.

She stopped pacing and looked up at Steve. “So you think I should go back? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Look, I can’t make that decision for you, but if it were me, I’d go.” Steve moved closer, dropped his big hands onto her shoulders and stared directly into her eyes. “But only if you can subdue some of your anger, put your grudges on hold, and focus on your father’s wounds. Not your own.”

“That’s a pretty tall order, cowboy.” She ran her hand up his forearm to the place where his veins corded in a blue knot inside his elbow.

He smiled. “Do you think you can do that?”

“I’m not sure.” She didn’t know if she could reappear in that past and think only about her father. He’d held her hostage for the first eighteen years of her life. How much did she owe him now? She untangled herself from Steve and moved across the kitchen to the window. Staring at her reflection in the dark surface, she knew the horrors of her childhood would be with her forever, permanent as a tattoo. And the fact she’d changed her name and moved three thousand miles away would do nothing to protect her once she returned.

On the other side of the glass, the crescent moon had torn itself loose from the treetops and swept noiselessly across the black sky. Steve was right. She couldn’t deceive herself forever. The winding down of her father’s life coincided with the launching of her own. And, even if she didn’t owe this trip to her father, she certainly owed it to Greg. And maybe, just maybe, she owed it to herself.

She told her husband how her dad, who could barely write, filled out an application for the GI Bill so she could go to college. About the note he’d written in the bottom margin. “I found the application in that old box of memories I never open, but can’t seem to part with. I didn’t know he’d…” Lillianna swallowed.

“Do I detect a change of heart?” There was a smile in his voice as he turned and headed down the hallway.

Long after Steve went to bed, Lillianna lingered in the kitchen. In the deep stillness of her sleeping house, the refrigerator hummed, and the dishwasher completed its drying cycle and clicked off. She thought about denial. It was the defense by which she’d survived and refuted her childhood. Half of her life had been denial—even with the people she loved. It wasn’t what we saw, but what we chose to be blind to, that sustained us.

As Emma, she’d been fiercely proud of how little anyone could guess about the pain she pushed beneath the surface. Now, as she struggled to imagine the strangeness of returning to that old universe, Lillianna wondered if she could still bury her pain deep enough to take the first steps.

* * *

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, September 24, 1995

 

In the Baltimore airport, a tall man with a blue chambray shirt tightly tucked into the waist of faded Levi’s moved with long strides toward Lillianna. He had a strong chin and straight, black hair with a sprinkling of gray, heavier at his temples. Though it had been nearly twenty years since she’d seen him, when he smiled and waved, Lillianna recognized her older brother, Greg.

He touched her shoulder. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”

The air was spiked with memories of their childhood. “You do know that planes fly both east and west?” She took a step back. Why did he always expect her to be the one who traveled?

Greg smiled and chose a safer subject. “How was your flight?”

Her mind passed quickly over the three planes she’d been on since she left Oregon that morning, including the one with the baby who vomited in the seat next to her and cried the entire trip between San Francisco and Chicago.

“Fine,” she lied. “But long. It’s not easy to get places from Medford. No straight-through flights to anywhere except San Francisco, Portland or Denver. You look great, Greg. The fifties agree with you.”

“I’m fifty-one. So they haven’t been thoroughly tested yet. But you always were my best fan.” He smiled again and there it was, that small gap between his front teeth that had always seemed so childlike and innocent to her—so Greg. “Seriously, I’m really glad you came.”

After taking the computer case from her hand, he set it on the floor beside him and enveloped her in a bear hug.

“Actually.” Lillianna lowered her voice to a whisper in his ear. “I’m scared half to death.”

He gave her a reassuring squeeze and let her go. “I suspect Pop’s nervous, too. But he’s not going to bite you. And visiting hours are over for the day. You have all night to prepare.” Greg’s dark eyes had a way of engulfing her. He looked so much like their mother. The thought disappeared before she allowed herself to feel its impact, interrupted by a staggering pulse of shame that sucked her breath in. What kind of sister stayed away for almost two decades?

At baggage claim, Greg stacked her computer case on top of her suitcase, jerked up the handle and pulled it through the revolving doors leading outside. She shivered and drew her jacket around her shoulders as the two of them darted through the humid air toward the parking garage.

“I guess I should warn you. Pop’s pretty scared and more than a little depressed.” He shot a sideways glance at his sister. “I hope seeing you will make him want to…”

“Want to what? Strip the leaves off a willow branch and raise a few bloody welts on my back?” She shuddered at the memory.

He waited a few seconds before responding. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Want to live. I’m not sure he’ll even consent to the surgery. He knows how slim his chances are without amputation. Somehow, we have to prepare him. You need to help him believe his life will be okay. That it will have some meaning, even without his leg—if it comes to that.”

Greg loaded her suitcase into his black Ford Explorer, and they headed out of the parking garage, stopping to pay the ticket at the exit.

“And how exactly do you expect me to do that?”

“By letting him know you still have feelings for him. And that his living matters to you.”

“But what if I don’t have feelings for him? At least not any loving ones?”

Greg looked her directly in the eyes, a look filled with shock and pity, then turned back to the road. “What about Steve and the kids? How do they feel about him?”

It was nearly nine p.m., and the sky was still and black as a cat as they crept through the traffic into downtown Baltimore toward Johns Hopkins Hospital.

“My husband and kids barely know him.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Lillianna wiped her clammy hands on the sides of her pant legs. She asked herself a question, too shameful to utter. Did her father’s wellbeing matter to her? “The truth is, his life wouldn’t be so great without his leg. I’m not sure I blame him for the way he feels.”

“In spite of what you think you feel about him, I don’t believe you want him dead.”

Before she could stop it, the thought came. Oh yes I do. A rush of simultaneous guilt rose with the qualifying thought, then I can go back to Oregon where I belong. “I’ll do what I can, but…” She paused, shook her head. “We’ve been estranged for so long.” She stared out the window for a moment, then turned to Greg. “Never mind. I said I’d be here for you and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

How fearless she sounded and how willing to go back and hold hands with the past. But dread invaded her in spite of her brave words.

“Good for you,” Greg said. “You won’t be sorry. He’s a lot different since Mom died. You’ll see. Things change.”

“Some things never change. The worst and best things that happen to us stay our entire lives.”

Greg dropped her off in front of the hotel lobby, then parked the car while she checked in. Once they unlocked the room, he tossed her bags onto the extra bed, then sat on its edge. They chatted about their kids for a half hour or so, then Greg stood. “I hate to leave you here alone on your first night, but it’s a two-hour drive back home, and I’ve got an important meeting in the morning.”

“I understand.” She tried to sound courageous, though the last thing she wanted was to be left alone in a hotel in one of the roughest areas of Baltimore.

“This place is safe,” Greg said as if reading her thoughts. “There’s a fence around the entire campus. And there’s a shuttle between the hotel and the hospital. It runs on the half hour. Promise me you’ll take it. Both ways.”

“It’s okay. I’m tougher than you think,” she lied. “I’ll talk to him. And I’ll take the shuttle, I promise. Drive carefully and say hello to Sarah and the kids.” She stood just inside the open doorway and watched him start down the hallway, a lump in her throat.

After taking only a few steps, he turned. “I’ll call every night at nine. And I’ll be here Friday night or first thing Saturday morning. You can have the weekends off to work.”

Lillianna saluted. “Thanks, boss. That’s mighty kind of you.”

He grimaced. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know. I was only kidding. It’s all fine. Really, it is. I’m glad you called me. Glad I might be able to help you out.”

He laughed then. “No you’re not. But I hope you’ll see him differently by the time you go back to Oregon.” He turned and walked away.

She watched him grow smaller as the distance between them lengthened. He paused at the end of the long hallway, turned once again and waved. The gesture was curiously sad to Lillianna, like the symbol of a childhood forever vanished, but still beckoning mournfully back.

The silence of the hotel room enclosed her. She flipped the television to the late-night news and stared at the screen. None of the words made their way into her head. She could have been watching with the sound turned off.

Then, suddenly, she began to listen to the television, and before she knew what happened, she had tears in her eyes from the story of a young black woman, a volunteer in a government literacy program, teaching her own father to read.

She turned off the television and stood at the hotel window. Fog from the Baltimore Harbor, like the bottom of a broken wave, formed a low ceiling where the parking lot lights morphed into toxic-looking yellow clouds.

In the last ten hours, Lillianna Ferguson had stepped outside her safe life and back into a strange and volatile one.

The minefield of her childhood.