“I know. I’m sorry. Somehow the phone got unplugged. Are you on your way home? It’s a school night.”
“Uh. I’ve . . . been helping Aunt Winona carry stuff down from her attic all day and we’re still not done. Can I spend the night? She’ll take me to school tomorrow.”
“Let me talk to her.”
Winona came on the line. “I’m really here and everything’s fine. I’ll get him to school on time.”
Vivi Ann wanted to say no, demand that her son be returned to her, but it was only because she felt lonely, so she said, “Okay, then. Tell him I love him.”
“You bet.”
She curled up on the sofa, put in her headphones, cranked up the volume, and listened to music on her iPod. Finally, when she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, she went to bed. It felt strange to be alone in the house. She heard all kinds of new noises. For the first time, she imagined how it would be when Noah was grown and gone. How quiet this cottage would be.
Sighing at that, she drifted off to sleep.
Sometime later, a steady
ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump
wakened her. The muffled beat was regular and even, like the movement of a rocking chair in soft dirt. Or of a man riding a horse in the darkness.
Dallas
. She gave in to the memories, let them wash over her . . .
Then she realized it wasn’t a dream. The noise was real. She woke up and threw back the covers and got out of bed, reaching for the robe draped on the foot rail. Putting it on, tightening the frayed belt around her waist, she walked through the quiet house, listening.
Opening the French doors, she stepped out onto the porch and closed the doors behind her. A pearl-white full moon hung suspended above the distant mountains. Its bright light illuminated everything, turning the fields into patches of midnight-blue velvet.
Moonlight shone on the man riding the horse without saddle or bridle.
She was losing her mind finally; after all these years it had just snapped.
She moved to the railing, not caring if she was mad, loving it, in fact. From here, all she could see of him was his white T-shirt; it glowed as if under one of those black-lightbulbs from her youth. Beneath him, Renegade was all but invisible in the darkness, but she could see that he moved in a flowing, rocking lope, his steps as fluid as long ago, when he’d been a champion. Another fact of her madness: Renegade was healthy again.
Of course
.
She tried to stay where she was, but like on a night sixteen years ago, she was powerless to resist. Her footsteps creaked on the wooden slats of the porch as she stepped across it.
She walked down the grassy hillside, careful not to slip in the dew-wet grass, and came up to the paddock fence.
They glided past her, made a circle in the paddock, and then they were in front of her, stopped. Renegade’s heavy, snorting breathing seemed to be the only sound for miles; even the sea seemed to have stilled in anticipation.
“Vivi,” Dallas said, and the sound of his voice made her feel so unsteady she clung to the top rail of the fence.
“You’re not really here . . .”
She stopped. Speaking required more substance than she seemed to have right now; it felt as if she were forming the words somehow, creating them from the parts of herself that were fading.
“I am.”
He slipped off Renegade, took the time to rub the horse’s ears and stroke his muzzle, and then slowly he moved toward Vivi, ducked underneath the fence’s lower slats, and came up in front of her.
For the first time in years, there was no one beside them watching their movements, and no dirty glass between them. He looked older and sadder; the lines on his face were deeply etched, as if drawn on by Magic Marker. The ache inside her was so deep it opened up and she fell in. “I left you alone in there. I know you can’t forgive me. I can’t forgive myself, but . . .”
He moved closer, slipped his hand down her cheek and along her throat and around to the back of her neck. With that one steady hand, he drew her closer.
She felt herself come alive in his arms. She clung to him, afraid to let him go, terrified she’d blink and discover she’d imagined it all.
She touched his face, let her fingertips wipe away his tears. “Dallas,” she said. “Don’t cry . . .”
He swept her into his arms and carried her up the slippery hillside and across the porch and into the cottage that had once been their secret rendezvous location, and then their home, and now was foreign to him. But their bedroom was still in the same place and he carried her there, kicking the door open.
He lay her down on the bed and knelt beside her. Moonlight filtered through the window and puddled on the white sheets. She came up to meet him more than halfway, desperate suddenly to undress him. Her hands moved furiously to peel off his shirt and unbutton his pants; he untied her robe and pushed the worn terrycloth off her shoulders and away until it became a layer of softness beneath them.
They touched with the kind of desperation that can only come from more than a decade of waiting. Their breathing became ragged and torn, their cheeks were damp with each other’s tears as they remembered how easily their bodies had always come together. And when at last he filled her, she cried out the name she’d been holding back for so many long and empty years.
Winona, Aurora, and Noah were gathered around the game table in Winona’s family room, playing a lackluster game of Hearts. Mostly they were talking about Vivi Ann and Dallas, of course, but the cards helped to keep them grounded. They were all so amped up on adrenaline it was difficult to stay focused. Winona had just tried—and failed—to shoot the moon when her cell phone rang.
They all threw down their cards and Winona jumped up to answer it. “Hello?”
“Hey, Winona. I’m sorry to call so late.”
She heard her Realtor’s voice and sighed. “Hi, Candace.”
Noah and Aurora both sat back down.
“What can I do for you?” Winona asked, trying to conceal her disappointment. She didn’t actually expect Vivi Ann to call tonight, but still . . .
“I just got a call from a doctor who wants to rent your beach house. He’s out there right now and wants to see it. Normally I’d drop everything and go, but the kids are in bed. And since we’ve had so few calls on it . . .”
“I’ll go,” Winona said. It was just what she needed: something to occupy her thoughts. “Thanks.” She put down the phone, made a quick excuse to Noah and Aurora, and went out to her car.
The long, dark drive out there was perfect. As she wound along the familiar streets, seeing the landscape beneath the beautiful glow of a silvery blue full moon, she replayed the day in her mind. It had been unquestionably the best day of her entire life. Never would she forget a moment of it, from Dallas’s bear hug, to his quietly spoken
Thank you
, to the way Noah’s face had changed when he met his father for the first time in years.
She pulled into her ratty driveway and parked beside a big blue pickup truck. She was still thinking about Dallas when the shadows beside her shifted, broke up, and moved toward her.
Luke
.
Suddenly he was there, coming toward her.
“What are you doing here?” she said. “You don’t need to rent my house.”
“No. I just wanted to see you alone. I drove all day.”
She didn’t understand. “I told you I’d call you tomorrow, after—”
“When you told me what you’d done for Vivi Ann and Dallas, all I could think about was what it would be like, having you on my side.”
She took a step back, frowning. She didn’t want to misread what was happening, pour meaning into his words, his look. “I’ve always been on your side, Luke. Even when I shouldn’t have been.”
“But I wasn’t on your side, was I?”
“No.” And there it was: everything that had always been wrong between them. It surprised her that he had been the one to see it.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
She didn’t know how to respond to that. She’d forgiven Luke—and herself—a long time ago. “That’s old news, Luke.”
He closed the last small distance between them, and when he looked down at her, she saw the whole of their lives in his eyes, everything that had been theirs—the things that had happened between them and the things that hadn’t—and in that single look, she saw that she wasn’t the only one who’d changed. “Do you believe in second chances?”
“Of course.”
He reached down and took her hand, as he’d done at so many of the critical moments in her life. “Would you like to meet my daughters? They’ve been hearing about you for years.”
“When can we go get them?”
Winona had anticipated the question from her nephew, knew in fact that it would be his first question this morning. She put an arm around him, still smiling from last night. “Soon.”
“My dad is cool, isn’t he?” Noah said. In the past twenty-four hours, Winona had seen this boy learn how to smile from the inside out. Gone completely was the sullen, hair-in-his-face troublemaker; in his place was a young man who’d been through bad times and come out on the other side. A young man who would always know that, while bad things happened, good could still triumph.
And Winona had given him that.
“Thanks, Aunt Win,” Noah said as if reading her mind. She supposed that didn’t surprise her, either. She knew what he was thinking these days, too.
“No. Thank you, Noah.” She turned to face him. “I made a mistake with your parents. The biggest of my life. Until you came around with your crumpled old dollar bill, I thought an apology was all I needed to offer. All I had. You gave me a chance to change what I’d done. So, thanks.”
At about nine o’clock, the first call came in from a reporter. Winona said, “No comment,” and hung up, but a few moments later when the phone rang again, she knew their private time had come to an end. She went to her guest bedroom and woke up Aurora, who’d been up late last night listening to Winona talk about Luke. “Come on, little sis. It’s time to go. The news is out.”
A few minutes later, when Noah came down the stairs in clean clothes, with his hair washed and dried and tucked behind his ears, she knew it was time. “Let’s go tell Dad.”
Aurora groaned. “I’d rather remarry Richard.”
Winona smiled, but herded them out and into her car. The drive to the ranch took almost no time, and as they’d feared, there were reporters at the closed gate.
“Private property,” Winona reminded them as she opened the gate, drove through, and closed it behind her.
“What will Grandpa say?” Noah asked a few minutes later when they got out of the car.
“He’ll be glad,” Winona said, wanting it to be true.
Aurora laughed.
They walked up the porch steps, knocked on the door, and went inside.
Dad was in the living room, sitting on the sofa. He looked up at them through narrowed, angry eyes. “Is it true?”
“Dallas was released yesterday. He’s up with Vivi right now,” Winona said.
Dad drew in a deep breath and let it out. “God. What will folks say?”
“They’ll say we made a mistake,” Winona said.
“And that Winona fixed it,” Aurora said, squeezing her hand.
“Fixed it? You think we’re better off now?”
Winona had expected this reaction. “I’ve done a good thing here, Dad. Whether you know it or not,
I
know it. And right now we’re going to go up to their cottage as a family and welcome Dallas home.”
Her father sat there saying nothing, just clenching and unclenching his crippled hands. She saw the way his mouth tightened in anger, but trembled, too, and how he couldn’t look his daughters in the eyes, and for the first time in her life she saw him as Vivi Ann saw him, a man unable to reveal the smallest emotion.
She went to him, knelt in front of him. All her life she had felt weak in his presence; now, though, she knew that she was the stronger of the two of them. Maybe she always had been. “Come with us, Dad. We’re the Greys. That matters. Show us your true colors, who you used to be.”
He didn’t look at her, maybe he couldn’t. He just got up, walked into his study, and slammed the door. She didn’t need to open it to know what he was doing: standing in his spot, staring out at his yard, his land, making a drink even though it was morning.
Was he crumbling inside or laughing? Did he care about these things he didn’t do, didn’t say, or was he empty inside? The tragedy was that she didn’t know, would probably never know. Whatever he felt or didn’t feel belonged to him alone. All she knew was that for once she hurt for him. His choice made him an island, separate and alone. “Let’s go,” she said, exchanging a meaningful look with Aurora. “He’s made up his mind.”
Vivi Ann and Dallas spent all night making love and getting to know each other again, talking about how Winona had saved them. Finally, when the sun had risen into a cornflower-blue sky, they sat up in bed, the covers puddled around their naked bodies, and talked about the things that mattered.
“Noah is a hell of a boy, Vivi. You’ve done a great job with him. We spent yesterday together.”
“I did a terrible job,” she said quietly, ashamed all over again at how she’d fallen apart without Dallas.
“Don’t,” he said. “We’ve lost enough time. No regrets. You think I don’t kick my ass for not seeing you when you came to visit? I was trying so damned hard to be noble.”
“Still, I gave up.”
He smiled down at her, pushed the sweat-dampened hair out of her eyes, and kissed her again. “And I gave in. None of it matters anymore.”
She was about to ask him something else when there was a knock at the door.
“That will be Dad,” Vivi Ann said. “Wondering why the hell there’s no breakfast.”
She climbed out of bed, put on her robe, and went to the door, opening it.
Her whole family was standing there, smiling at her. Well, almost her whole family. Her father wasn’t there. The pain of that pinched a little, reminded her of things she’d rather forget, a relationship that had been lost or never formed. Even now she wasn’t sure.
“Hey, Mom,” Noah said, drawing her gaze back to the people standing in front of her.
She looked at Winona first, loving her so much she couldn’t hold it all. “You’re my hero,” she said, losing it just a little. She surged forward and hugged her sister fiercely, whispering, “Thank you.” When she stepped back, they were both crying.