Home Before Dark

by Susan Wiggs

  “Woolgathering,” she admitted, fluffing the pillows against the headboard. Straightening up, she said, “Luz says Lila’s been giving you a run for your money.”

  His face paled and his mouth tightened. Then he took a deep, uneven breath. “I never know what to do about Lila these days. Puberty hit like an eighteen-wheeler. According to Lila, I’m the bane of her existence. I love her, Jess. I love her with all my heart. But she’s a teenager now and it’s not so easy, figuring out the right thing to do.”

  She searched his face, seeking some hint that he knew the deeper secret. But he regarded her openly, and she saw no undercurrents buried in his eyes. He didn’t know. Amazing. If Lila didn’t know who her biological mother was, she couldn’t begin to deal with who had fathered her.

  When Jessie found out she was pregnant, Ian had cornered her in private and confronted her with the inevitable question: Is it mine? Simon had asked the very same question. And she gave each man the same answer, telling one man the truth and one a lie.

  She had looked her ex-lover in the eye, that tall, good-looking man who loved her sister, and said, “No.” What else could she say? If she admitted the baby was his, he would have been forced to choose between taking responsibility for the mother of his child, or keeping a secret from his wife. It would have been a nightmare for all of them, so Jessie had done the only thing that would keep the situation from exploding.

  At the first doctor’s appointment, Jessie discovered the date of conception coincided with a certain tequila-marinated night at a honky-tonk that ended on the screened-in back porch of the rambling old house Ian shared with other law students. But she never said a word. Luz loved this man, and Jessie would not be the cause of her heartbreak.

  The rest of the pregnancy was taken up with discussing the adoption arrangements, getting a passport, making plans to live overseas as an expatriate. She and Simon were going to photograph the world’s wonders. She was going to escape to the adventure of a lifetime. Ian was going to marry her sister, practice law, raise a family. It should have been so simple.

  But at twenty-one, alone and scared, she hadn’t understood that matters of the heart are never simple. She thought knowing the baby was with her natural father and Luz would dull the ache of loss. She thought sending all the money she could spare to help with the hospital bills would somehow exonerate her. But the hurt never quite faded.

  As Ian turned on the hot water heater in the cabin, his pager went off. He checked the tiny display with a frown.

  “Problems?” Jessie asked.

  “Shoot. I was expecting this. I’ve got to get to Huntsville tonight.”

  He probably had to go file a last-minute appeal or something. Watching him, she could see he was already withdrawing, thinking about the case. Being a death row attorney in Texas was clearly a job with a number of built-in frustrations. “You’d better get a move on.”

  “Yep. Anyway, I need to go say good-night to the family and get myself over to the airpark. Fellow there will take me to Huntsville tonight.” He offered her a brief hug. “You need anything, let Luz know.”

  “I will. And thanks, Ian. Good luck.” Standing at the door, she watched him head up to the house with a purposeful stride, a good man trying to keep a bad man from dying.

  After he was gone, she poured the rest of the wine into a glass and went out to the broken little dock in front of the cabin to savor the last of the daylight. The water was dark and flat, the air refreshed by the cooling breath of night. Exhaustion crept through her, and her eyelids drooped.

  But now she forced her eyes open; she had to look. Sixteen years ago, Jessie had left in a red haze of panic, before her premature infant’s survival was assured, before the baby even had a name. Now Jessie was back, driven by desperation to face up to what she had done, to fill in the blanks of those lost years, to somehow find atonement and maybe even redemption. And it had to start with Lila.

  She had to see her daughter, really see her. See the way the light fell on her hair in the morning, how her eyes looked when she smiled or wept, how her hands lay atop the covers when she slept at night, how her mouth puckered when she ate a slice of watermelon.

  Jessie wished for the one thing she wanted above all else, the one thing she couldn’t have—more time. She had consulted doctors and specialists from Taipei to Tokyo, but the prognosis was always the same. Her condition had no known cause…or cure. Once assured of the diagnosis, she’d done the only thing that seemed important. She had come back to see her child before the lights went out.

  CHAPTER 5

  The woman from Texas Life magazine was definitely getting on his nerves, thought Dusty Matlock as he stabbed the off button of the phone. Christ, how many different ways did he have to say no before she got it?

  Blair LaBorde reminded him of his Jack Russell terrier, Pico de Gallo. Persistent as hell, immune to insult, didn’t know when to quit. Over-the-top human-interest stories were her stock-in-trade. She needed them to make a living as much as he needed to fly to make a living. And the spectacular way Dusty’s wife had died and given birth made him a prime target for the circling buzzards; he’d already turned down People and Redbook. Amber was almost two now, and he’d put his life back into some sort of order. The bleeding had stopped, the patient would live, but the scars would never fade. The pushy reporter wasn’t helping.

  The phone rang again, and he grabbed it. “Look, Miz LaBorde, what part of no do you not under—”

  “It’s Ian Benning from across the lake.”

  “Oh. Sorry, I thought it was someone else.” Dusty didn’t elaborate on his troubles with the nosy journalist, but maybe he should. Benning was a lawyer; he might know what to do about a persistent newshound. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need to get to Huntsville tonight. Can you do it?”

  Dusty didn’t take long to consider. Immediate service was his stock-in-trade. “Can you meet me at the airstrip in an hour and a half?”

  “You bet. Thanks.”

  Dusty was glad for the work. Benning had used his service a few times, and word of mouth on Matlock Aviation was starting to spread.

  “Ay, mujer.” In the next room, Arnufo gave a low whistle. “Come and see what I have found.”

  Dusty walked into the front room facing the water. The elderly Mexican stood in front of a tripod that supported a telescope, peering through the eyepiece. The scope was aimed at the dock in front of a cabin across the lake.

  “Leave poor Mrs. Benning alone, you old cabra,” said Dusty.

  “It’s not Mrs. Benning. Take a look. I think La Roja has a sister.”

  Shading his eyes, Dusty could see a woman seated on the dock, her long pale legs dangling over the side. The lowering sun highlighted a head of red hair. At first glance, she did look like Benning’s wife. But at second glance…

  His gaze clung briefly, then shifted away. “I think I passed her on the road earlier.” He recalled a pretty, distracted-looking woman stopped at the side of the road, as though lost, in a late-model rental car.

  “You should have introduced yourself.”

  He put the lens cap on the scope. “This is for looking at the stars, not spying on the neighbors.”

  Glowering, Arnufo straightened up. “We should bake a cake, go and introduce ourselves.”

  “Right.”

  A squawk from the playpen drew his attention. Amber was standing up, her little fists grasping the webbing. Both men hurried across the room to her, and she greeted them with her best five-toothed grin.

  “Hey, short-stuff.” Dusty ruffled her white-blond hair. She reached up, opening and closing her hands in supplication. But her entreaty was aimed at Arnufo, not Dusty, which was just as well, judging by the smell of her. He stepped aside, saying, “She’s all yours, jefe. I bet she’s cooked up a little surprise in her diaper for you.”

  “You are a man of no honor.”

  “I am a man who needs to get a weather briefing and a flight plan. I’m t
aking Ian Benning over to Huntsville tonight.”

  “I’ll fix you some tortas for supper.” Arnufo Garza was a good cook, having learned to rustle grub during his bachelor years as a ranch hand in San Angelo. He picked up the baby. “Come to Papacito. I will not be intimidated by a diaper.”

  The three of them were an unusual family. Arnufo and his wife, Teresa, had been employed by the Matlocks since Dusty was a boy, as caretakers of the big house in the Stony Creek section of Austin. Teresa had practically raised him, because his mother stayed busy with his high-maintenance sisters.

  When both Dusty and Arnufo were widowed in the same month almost two years before, Dusty had proposed the current arrangement. Now the old gentleman spent his days looking after Amber while Dusty got his business off the ground—literally and figuratively.

  He patted his daughter’s hair again, its softness slipping between his fingers, then headed out the back to the shed that doubled as a workshop and business office. To the dismay of his ambitious parents, he was in love with flying, not the petroleum industry. He earned his pilot’s license even before his driver’s license and had been flying ever since. By the age of twenty-one, he’d acquired a Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter, and for fifteen years he’d worked as a pilot in Alaska, flying mining, oil rig and pipeline workers to sites so remote that they seemed to be on another planet.

  The wilds of Alaska would always call to the adventurer inside him, but with the birth of Amber, he’d had to make adjustments. Including leaving the frozen wilderness for his home state of Texas and the picture-postcard world of Edenville. The flying business was working out well here. Between Austin dot-com millionaires and good-old-boy oilmen, Dusty stayed plenty busy. But there was a jagged hole in his life, and he figured there wasn’t any arrangement he could make to change that. His folks complained that Eagle Lake was too far from Austin; why didn’t he find someplace closer?

  They didn’t understand. Karen had died in the autumn when the trees in Alaska took fire with color. She had always loved that time of year, when the first skin of ice on the lakes meant taking the floats off the plane and replacing them with skis. She would like the idea of her little girl growing up in a place where trees turned color as though touched by magic. The sight of those trees here in the middle of Texas was something special, like finding a pearl in an oyster, or a four-leafed clover. Rare, unexpected. Lucky, even. Discovering the maples here was like watching a bumblebee fly. Aerodynamically impossible, but they defied nature anyway.

  From the window of the business office, he watched the woman on the dock. Though unable to see her in detail, he knew somehow that Arnufo was right. She was definitely related to Mrs. Benning. Where had she come from and why hadn’t he seen her before?

  You should have introduced yourself.

  Arnufo was always handing out advice like that, but then again, life was a simple matter to Arnufo. So was death, come to think of it. In life, you made certain you did good work, took care of your family and kept your promises. If death happened to steal something from you—say, your wife of fifty-two years—well, then, you made a new sort of life for yourself.

  Go and take what you want from life, Arnufo liked to counsel him. Don’t wait for it to hand you something. Things given away freely are given away for a reason—because no one else wants them.

  Dusty had tried dating a few times in the past few months, but he found the whole process depressing. His heart wore an armor of numbness. He had better luck when he stuck to running his business and raising his daughter. That’s what he told himself, anyway.

  “Introduce myself,” he muttered under his breath, booting up the computer to log on for his briefing and clearance before gearing up for the night flight. “Hi, I’m Dusty Matlock, and I haven’t been laid in two years.”

  “Some women would find that a great challenge,” said Arnufo, joining him in the shop. On his hip, he carried a smiling, much more fragrant toddler. As she tugged at Arnufo’s trademark bolero tie, she yakked away with the uncanny conviction that her babbling made sense.

  “Yeah? Like who?”

  “Bunny Sumner at the airpark, for one. She gave you a whole plate of brownies and you never called to thank her. And what about Serena Moore from the Country Boy grocery? The one with the muy grande…” With his free hand, he pantomimed a huge rack.

  “Okay, I get your point. Should have introduced myself.”

  Arnufo swung the baby high in the air, crooning a little song in Spanish and earning a sweet chortle from her. The old guy was a natural when it came to Amber. The father of five grown daughters and a herd of grandchildren, he reveled in kids of any age.

  Dusty smiled to himself as he worked at the computer terminal, yet he felt a vague stirring of unease. Arnufo was so comfortable with the baby. Dusty wasn’t a natural when it came to kids. He loved his daughter, and perhaps the bond was even stronger because of what had happened to Karen, but that didn’t mean he knew the first thing to do with Amber. The truth was, he handled her awkwardly, loved her awkwardly. He could read a German instrument panel, a Chinese flight manual or an aberrant weather pattern. He could compute climb and descent times and fuel burn in his head. But he could not read his daughter’s face.

  Arnufo watched him work in silence for a while. Dusty logged in to the weather and flight planning site and went through the drill. A seventy-one degree course, 192.2 nautical miles. Rhumb lines spidered across the screen, and the printer hissed out a chart.

  “Take la princesa.” Arnufo held out the baby. “I will get you packed for the flight.”

  “I need to call the tower and get clearance over the Air Force base, then I’ll be ready.” Holding the baby, Dusty followed Arnufo outside. Sunset covered the lake in a blanket of gold. Amber made a sound of displeasure as Arnufo headed for the house, but she didn’t cry as she sometimes did. Pico de Gallo came racing across the yard, distracting her and cheering her up. The dog was insane, but entertaining; Amber was nuts for him. She shifted in Dusty’s arms, her sharp little elbows and knees poking into him. She smelled like flowers and sunshine and yeasty warm milk.

  The baby made a gurgling sound and waved a star-shaped hand at the lake. The woman was a black silhouette now against the sinking light. When she tipped back her head to take a sip of wine, she looked like an antique French ad poster.

  “Papacito Arnufo thinks I should’ve introduced myself to her,” Dusty confessed to his daughter.

  “Da,” said Amber.

  He perked up. “What’s that?”

  “Ba.”

  “No shit.”

  The purple sky, pricked by early stars, deepened to indigo. A clear night for flying. Across the way, the stranger on the dock stood and walked away.

  Well, he was taking Ian Benning over to Huntsville tonight. Maybe he’d ask him a thing or two about the woman.

  CHAPTER 6

  God, thought Lila Benning, putting her hands over her tortured ears, what a stupid-ass lame family. Even with the stereo turned up as loud as she dared, she could still hear the Three Stooges in the next room, revving up for another night of being morons. Tonight’s entertainment sounded like an armpit-farting contest. Lila dove for the bed, burying her head in a mound of pillows and stuffed animals.

  Predictably, a shout from below created a momentary silence. “Pipe down up there.”

  Her father punctuated the command by thumping the wall with a fist, and the morons subsided. Then the inevitable whispers started up, like the munchkins in Oz peeping out from under their flower petals, the volume increasing until bunk beds rattled and giggles crescendoed with idiotic exuberance.

  “Don’t make me come up there.”

  Her dad’s next command was followed by an even briefer silence and then an even louder song because, as everyone knew from the start, that was the whole point. To get Dad out from behind his paperwork and up the stairs.

  His Timberland work boots thudded on the stairs with ominous slowness. “Fee fi fo fum…” Wi
th each step, he growled out a syllable. She heard him burst into the kids’ room with a roar, followed by a chorus of porcine squeals and the rusty creak of bed springs as he wrestled the boys into submission. The ritual ended predictably. Dutch rubs all around, followed by Scottie’s nightly reading of Go Dog Go! and then a “’Night, guys,” and finally, blessed silence at last.

  Lila crept out from beneath the pillows and waited. Dad tapped lightly at her door.

  “Yeah?” she called out.

  He stepped inside, hesitated. Her dad did that a lot lately. A pause, a measured beat of uncertainty that hovered between them like an unanswerable question. He never hesitated with the boys, but with her, he never plunged right in. The dim light from her computer screen saver outlined his tall, broad form. Her friends often remarked that her dad was a hottie, but she never saw him that way. She just saw her dad, who worked too hard during the week and went fishing on Eagle Lake every weekend and looked at her like she was a space alien.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he said.

  “Hey. Where’s Mom?”

  He gestured vaguely. “She’s helping me get a bag ready for Huntsville.” He shuffled his feet. In Lila’s room, plastered with deathrock posters, littered with schoolbooks and cheerleading gear and cosmetics, he never seemed to know quite what to do with himself, where to settle his gaze. The sight of a bra left out or—God forbid—underwear draped over a doorknob, always made him jittery. “So what do you think of your aunt Jessie?”

  Lila gave a shrug of studied nonchalance. “Don’t know. I just met her.” The fact was, Lila was sort of fascinated. Her aunt, whom she knew only from the occasional scribbled note on the back of a postcard from Indonesia or Japan, an e-mail from an Internet café in Kathmandu and the Christmas phone call—which always came the day before Christmas because of the time difference—had never seemed quite real to her. She was a remote idea, more like a character in a book or a long-dead relative, like Great Grandma Joan. In person, Jessie was interesting and maybe a little weird. Her red hair was cut chin length, the tips bleached blond around her face. A younger, thinner, hipper version of her mom, without all of Mom’s frustrated frowns, long-suffering sighs…and the veiled disapproval that always lurked at the back of her gaze.