Sierra's Homecoming

by Linda Lael Miller

  It was Doss, and he was looking in her direction, too. He’d seen her, watching him from the hotel room window like some woebegone heroine in a melodrama.

  No. It couldn’t be him.

  They had a lot to settle, it was true, but this was their wedding night.

  Hannah clenched her fists and turned from the window for a few moments, struggling to regain her composure as well as her dignity. By now everyone in Indian Rock knew about the hurry-up wedding, knew they ought to be honeymooning, she and Doss, even if they hadn’t gotten any further than the Arizona Hotel. If Doss passed the evening in the Blue Garter Saloon, tonight of all nights—

  She whirled, fumbling to pull up the sash, meaning to call out to him, though God only knew what she’d say. But before she could open the window, he turned his back on her and went right through those saloon doors. Hannah watched helplessly as they swung on their hinges and closed behind him.

  Present Day

  Sierra stood with her hands on her hips, studying the January Christmas tree. The lights shimmered and the colors blurred as she took in the mountain of gifts still to be unwrapped, the wads of bright paper, the expensive loot Liam had already opened.

  Sweaters. A leather coat, reminiscent of Travis’s. Cowboy boots and a hat. A set of toy pistols. Why, there was more stuff there than she’d been able to give Liam in all seven years of his life, let alone for one Christmas.

  Eve had done it all, of course. The decorating, anyway. She might have brought the presents with her from Texas, after sending some office minion out to ransack the high-end stores.

  Did it mean she genuinely cared, Sierra wondered, or was she merely trying to buy some form of absolution?

  Sierra sensed Eve’s presence almost immediately, but it was a few moments before she could look her in the eye.

  “The pistols might have been an error in judgment,” Eve conceded quietly, poised in the doorway as though unsure whether to bolt or stay and face the music. “I should have asked.”

  “The whole thing is an error in judgment,” Sierra responded, her insides stretched so taut that they seemed to hum. “It’s too much.” She turned, at last, and faced her mother. “You had no right.”

  “Liam is my grandson,” Eve pointed out, and the very rationality of her words snapped hard around Sierra’s heart, like some giant rubber band, yanked to its limits and then let go.

  “You had no right!” Sierra repeated, in a furious undertone.

  To her credit, Eve didn’t flinch. “What are you so afraid of, Sierra? That he’ll like me?”

  Sierra swayed a little, suddenly light-headed. “Don’t you understand? I can’t give Liam things like this. I don’t want him getting used to this way of life—it will be too hard on him later, when we have to leave it all behind.”

  “What way of life?” Eve persisted. Her attitude wasn’t confrontational, but it was obvious that she intended to stand her ground. It was all so easy for her, with her money and her power. She could make grand gestures, but Sierra would be the one picking up the pieces when she and Liam made a hard—and inevitable—landing in the real world.

  “The McKettrick way of life!” Sierra burst out. “This big house, the land, the money—”

  “Sierra, you are a McKettrick, and so is Liam.”

  Sierra closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to regain her composure. “I agreed to come here for one reason and one reason only,” she finally said, with hard-won moderation, “because my son needs medical attention, and I can’t afford to provide it. But the agreement was for one year—one year, Eve—and we won’t be here a single day after that condition is met!”

  “And after that one year is up, you think I’m just going to forget that I have a second daughter and a grandson? Whether you’re still too blasted stubborn to accept my help or not?”

  “I don’t need your help, Eve!”

  “Don’t you?”

  Sierra shook her head, more in an effort to clear her mind than to deny Eve’s meaning, found a chair and sank slowly into it. “I appreciate what you’re doing,” she said, after a few slow, deep breaths. “I really do. But if you expect anything beyond what we agreed to, there’s a problem.”

  Eve moved to the fireplace, took a long match from the mantel and lit the newspaper and kindling already stacked in the grate. She waited until the flames caught, crackling merrily, then added more wood from the basket next to the hearth. “What did Hank tell you about me, Sierra?” she asked quietly, turning back to study Sierra’s face. “Did he tell you I was dead? Or did he say I didn’t want you?”

  “He didn’t have to say you didn’t want me. That was perfectly obvious.”

  “Was it?” Eve dusted off a place on the raised hearth and sat down, folding her hands loosely in her lap. “I want to know what he told you, Sierra. After all these years, after all he took from me, I think I have the right to ask.”

  “He never said you didn’t want me. He said you didn’t want him.”

  “Well, that was certainly true enough.”

  Sierra swallowed. “I guess I was five or six before I noticed that other little girls had mothers, not just fathers. I started asking a lot of questions, and I guess he got tired of it. He said there’d been an accident, that you’d been badly hurt and you’d probably have to go to heaven.”

  Eve lowered her head then, wiped furtively at her cheek with the back of one hand. “Who would have thought Hank Breslin would say two true things out of three in the same lifetime?”

  Sierra slid to the edge of her chair, eager and tense at the same time.

  Don’t get sucked in, she heard Hank say, as clearly as if he’d been standing in the room, taking part in the conversation.

  “There was an accident?” Sierra asked on a breath, mentally shushing her father. Just asking the question meant a part of her hadn’t believed Hank, but this, like so many other things, would have to be considered later, when she was alone. And calm.

  Eve nodded.

  “What kind of accident?”

  Eve visibly collected herself, sitting up a little straighter. Her eyes seemed focused on a past Sierra hadn’t been a part of. “I was having lunch at an outdoor café in San Antonio—with my lawyer, as it happens. We’d found you after two years of searching, or at least the investigators we’d hired had, and I’d seen you with my own eyes, in San Miguel. Spoken to you. I wanted to contact Hank, work out some kind of arrangement—”

  A peculiar, buzzing sensation dimmed Sierra’s hearing.

  “Your father had to be handled very carefully. I knew that. It would have been like Hank to take you deeper into Mexico—even into South America—if he’d gotten spooked, and he’d have been a lot more careful to disappear for good the second time.”

  Sierra waited, willing her head to clear, listening with everything in her. “The accident?” she prompted, very softly.

  “A car jumped the curb, crashed through the stucco wall between the tables and the street. We were sitting just on the other side. My lawyer—his name was Jim Furman and he had a wife and five children—was killed instantly. I was in traction for weeks, and it took me another year and a half just to walk again.”

  The incident sounded like something from a soap opera, and yet Sierra knew it was true. Her stomach churned as horrific images, complete with a soundtrack of crashes and screams, flashed through her mind.

  “By the time I recovered,” Eve went on, after a few long moments of silence, “I knew it was too late, that I’d have to wait until you were older, when you could make choices for yourself. You were happy and healthy and very bright. You were still so young. I couldn’t just waltz into your life and say, ‘Hello, I’m your mother.’ I was still afraid of what Hank might do, and I was struggling to rebuild my life after the accident. Meg was spending most of her time with nannies as it was, and I had to turn the company over to the board of directors because I couldn’t seem to focus my mind on anything. With all that going on, how could I take you a
way from the only home you knew, only to turn around and leave you in the care of strangers?”

  Sierra sat quietly, drawing careful, measured breaths, taking it all in. “Okay,” she said, finally. “I can buy all that. But there’s still a pretty big gap between then and six weeks ago, when you finally contacted me.”

  Eve was silent.

  So I was right, Sierra thought bitterly. There’s more.

  “I was ashamed,” Eve said.

  “Ashamed?”

  Silence.

  “Eve?”

  “After the accident,” Eve went on, her voice pitched so low that Sierra had to lean forward to hear, “I took a lot of pain pills. They became less and less effective, while the pain seemed to get worse, so I started washing them down with alcohol.”

  Sierra’s mouth dropped open. “Meg never mentioned—”

  “Of course she wouldn’t,” Eve said. “It was my place to tell you and, besides, you don’t just e-mail something like that to somebody. What was she supposed to say? ‘Oh, by the way, Mother is a pill-freak and a drunk’?”

  “My God,” Sierra whispered.

  “I was intermittently clean and sober,” Eve went on. “But I always fell off the wagon eventually. If Rance hadn’t stepped in after I took control of the company again, God bless him, I probably would have run McKettrickCo into the ground.”

  “Rance?”

  “Your cousin.”

  Sierra struggled to hit a lighter note, because they both needed that. “Which branch of the family tree was he hatched in?”

  Eve smiled weakly, but with a kind of gratitude that pinched Sierra’s heart in one of the tenderest places. “Rance is descended from Rafe and Emmeline,” she answered. “Rafe was old Angus’s son.”

  “It took you all this time to get your life back together?” Sierra asked tentatively, after yet another lengthy silence had run its course.

  “No,” Eve said. Color stained her cheeks. “No, I’ve been on the straight-and-narrow for ten years or so. I said it before, Sierra—I was ashamed. So much time had gone by, and I didn’t know what to say. Where to start. It became a vicious cycle. The longer I put it off, the harder it was to take the risk.”

  “But you finally tracked me down again. What changed?”

  “I didn’t have to track you down. I always knew where you were.” Eve sighed, and her shoulders stooped a little. “I found out about Liam’s asthma, and I couldn’t wait any longer.” She paused, straightened her back again. “Fair is fair, Sierra. I’ve answered the hard questions, though I realize there will be more. Now, it’s your turn. Why did you spend your life moving from place to place, serving cocktails, instead of putting down roots somewhere and making something of your life?”

  Sierra considered her past and felt something sink within her. She’d taken a few night courses, here and there. She’d used her fluent Spanish with customers and volunteered, when she could, at some of Liam’s schools. But she’d never had roots or any direction except “away.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with serving cocktails,” she said, trying not to sound defensive and not quite succeeding.

  “Of course there isn’t,” Eve readily agreed. “But why didn’t you go to college?”

  Sierra smiled ruefully. “There are only twenty-four hours in a day, Eve. I had a child to support.”

  Eve nodded reflectively. And waited.

  Sierra waited, too.

  “That doesn’t explain all the moving from place to place,” Eve said at last.

  “I wish I had a ready answer,” Sierra said, after considerable searching. “I guess I just always had this low-grade anxiety, like I was trying to outrun something.”

  Eve took that in silently.

  “Why did you divorce my father?” Sierra asked. She hadn’t seen the question coming, but she knew it had been fermenting in the back of her mind for a long time. Whenever it arose, she pushed it down, told herself it didn’t matter, but this was a time for truth, however painful it might be.

  “Hank,” Eve replied carefully, “was one of those men who believe they’re entitled to call the shots, by virtue of possessing a penis. He quit his job a month after we were married—he sold condominiums—planning to become a golf pro at the country club. He never actually got around to applying, of course, and it would have been quite a trick to get hired anyway, since there wasn’t an opening and he didn’t know a nine-iron from a putter.”

  Sierra moistened her lips, uncomfortable.

  “He was an emotional lightweight,” Eve went on, quietly relentless. “But you knew that, didn’t you, Sierra?”

  She had known, but admitting it aloud was beyond her. She did manage a stiff nod, though.

  “How did he earn a living?” Eve asked. “Even in Mexico, there’s rent to pay, and food costs money.”

  Sierra blushed. Hank had tended bar at the corner cantina on occasion, and played a lot of backroom poker. The house they’d lived in belonged to Magdalena. “He just seemed to…coast,” she said.

  “But you had clothes, shoes. Medical care. Birthday cakes. Toys at Christmas?”

  Sierra nodded. Her childhood had been marked by two things—a vague, pervasive loneliness, and a bohemian kind of freedom. At last, realization struck. “You were sending him money somehow.”

  “I was sending you money, through Hank’s sister, from the day he took you away. Nell, your aunt, was pretty clever. She always cashed the check, then wired it to Hank, through various places—sometimes a bank, sometimes the courtesy desk in a supermarket, sometimes a convenience store. Eventually my investigators picked up the trail, but it wasn’t so easy in those days, before computers.”

  Sierra flashed on a series of memories—her dad walking away from one of the many cambio outlets in San Miguel, where tourists cashed traveler’s checks and exchanged their own currency for pesos. She’d been very small, but she’d seen him folding a wad of bills and tucking it into his pocket, and she’d wondered. Now she felt a stab of shame on his behalf, recalling his small, secret smile.

  Eve was right. Hank Breslin had felt entitled to that money, and while he’d always made sure Sierra had the necessities, he’d never been overly generous. In fact, it had been Magdalena not Hank, who had provided extras. Sweet, plump, spice-scented Magdalena of the patient smile and manner.

  Sierra’s emotions must have been clearly visible in her face. Eve rose, came over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. Then, without another word, she turned and left the room.

  Sierra had loved her father, for all his shortcomings, and seeing him in this light destroyed a lot of fantasies. Even worse, she knew that Adam, Liam’s father, had been a younger version of Hank. Oh, he’d had a career. But she’d been an amusement to him and nothing more. He’d been willing to sell her out, sell out his own wife and daughters, for a good time. Like Hank, he’d felt entitled to whatever pleasures happened to be available, and to hell with all the people who got hurt in the process.

  For a moment she hated Adam, hated Hank, hated all men.

  She’d been attracted to Travis Reid.

  Now she took an internal step back, and an enormous no! boiled up from her depths, spewing like a geyser and then freezing solid at its height.

  Chapter Eleven

  1919

  Doss returned to the room well after midnight, smelling of cigar smoke and whisky. Hannah lay absolutely still, playing possum, watching through her lashes as he shed his hat and coat and kicked off his boots. Maybe he knew she was awake, and maybe he was fooled. She wasn’t about to give herself away by speaking to him and, besides, she didn’t trust herself not to tear into him like a shrew. Once the first word tumbled out of her mouth, others would follow, like a raging horde with swords and cudgels.

  On the other hand, if he had the pure audacity to think, for one blessed moment, that he was going to enjoy his husbandly privileges, she’d come up out of that bed like a tigress, claws bared and slashing.

  She breathed slowly, de
eply and regularly, making her body soft.

  Doss moved to the bureau, filled the china wash basin from the pitcher provided, and washed. She waited, in delicious dread, for him to undress, since he obviously intended to sleep in that room, in that bed, with her.

  To her surprise, relief and complete annoyance, he remained fully clothed, sat down on the edge of the bed, and stretched out on top of the covers.

  “I know you’re not asleep,” he said.

  Hannah bit down hard on her lower lip. Though her eyes were shut tight, tears squeezed beneath her lids. Gabe would never have done such a thing to her, never have gone out on their wedding night to smoke and drink whisky and carouse with bad companions. Never have subjected her to such a public humiliation.

  A sob shook her body. “I hate you, Doss McKettrick,” she said.

  He sighed, sounding resigned. If he’d apologized, if he’d put his arm around her and held her close, she would have felt better, in spite of it all, but he didn’t. He kept to his own side of the bed, a weight atop the blankets, within touching distance and yet as remote from Hannah as Indian Rock was from the Eastern Seaboard.

  “We’ll have to make the best of things,” he told her.

  She rolled on to her side, with her back to him. “No, we won’t,” she whispered snappishly, “because as soon as Tobias is well enough, he and I are getting on the train and leaving for good.”

  “If it’s a comfort to you,” Doss replied, “then you just go ahead and think that. The truth of the matter is, you’re my wife now, and as long as there’s a chance you’re carrying my baby, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “I hate you,” Hannah repeated.

  “So you said,” Doss answered, with a long-suffering sigh.

  “I’ll leave if I want to.”

  “I’ll bring you back. And believe me, Hannah, I can keep up the game as long as you can.”

  “Then you mean to keep me prisoner.” Hannah spoke into the darkness, and it seemed like a shadow, cast by her very soul, that gloom, rather than mere night, with the moon following its ancient course and the stars in their right places. It was, in that moment, as if the sun would never rise again.