As Jack had once said in one of his letters: of all the awful parts of missing their daughter, the not-knowing was the absolute worst.
four
ARIZONA
1996
When the Arizona heat felt like a cloak she couldn’t shake, Tara’s words about Jack’s date wiggled into Katie’s mind, twisting her thoughts with anxiety. That hundred-degree day, preoccupied, Katie was hiking through the shallow trail of a dried river with four young girls when she heard the scream. Dropping her backpack, Katie was at the girl, Anne’s, side in one jump. “What?”
Anne was thirteen years old, and so skinny she seemed to be made of the dry sage twigs that covered the desert, her long hair tied with a frayed shoestring. She was bent over, holding her ankle, screaming without words. Anne was a quiet girl, and Katie knew her terrible story: how her mom had tried to raise her alone when Dad left; how her mom found Anne selling pot and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle. The mom had then sold everything they owned to get Anne into this program and try to save her from the lifestyle that was sucking them both into a black hole of desperation.
“Anne,” Katie took the young girl’s face in between both her hands. “What is it?”
“Snake.” She pointed to the rattlesnake’s tail disappearing into the brush.
Katie had been trained for this, and she knew what to do. But she also tasted guilt in the back of her throat. If her thoughts hadn’t been braided with anxiety about Jack Adams, about a place she couldn’t see, she would’ve been alert. This was her fault. The one thing Katie was meant to do was keep these girls safe.
Katie tied a tourniquet from the first-aid kit, quieted the other girls and used her satellite radio to call transportation to take Anne to the hospital. The waiting was interminable, but the three other girls rallied and made jokes, trying to keep Anne calm. Katie checked vital signs, secured the tourniquet, and marveled at the other girls’ ability to surround Anne. This was a family, an odd and mismatched family sewn together by the threads of abuse and sadness, but together forming something strong. And Katie had failed them.
The crisis passed and Anne was back in the field. Katie told Winsome Wilderness that she needed a few weeks off.
Shawn O’Neal, the owner of Winsome, assured Katie that the snakebite wasn’t her fault. It was nature. It was normal. But Katie told Shawn it was her fault. She hadn’t been alert. She hadn’t noticed the danger. It was Shawn who had taught Katie that nature carried messages inside every plant, feather, and animal. Anne’s bite wasn’t an accident. It was more than the snake and less than the snake. It was what the slithering, biting reptile was telling Katie: something is wrong.
* * *
Jack had written to her about the new house he’d bought, a Tudor style home built in the 1920s. He’d told her he loved the way it sat on top of Red Mountain and overlooked downtown Birmingham like a guardian. He bought it for a steal, as it needed a total renovation. He spent his limited free time polishing the hardwood floors, painting the trim with a small brush, replacing windows, and chipping away at the rot.
It didn’t bother Katie that Jack hadn’t consulted her about the house. She believed it showed that he respected her work and her autonomy by seizing the opportunity for both of them, while he could. She’d taken this fact—that he bought a house—as a hint that he was building a life for them, a life that included a house and settling in. And that’s where she found him after the long flight to Birmingham.
Jack was expecting her. He stood waiting on the front porch, then hugged her as if she might float away. Inside, he showed her through the partially renovated house. They stood in the living room where his windows, grimy and paint-edged, looked over the city. “Look at that view. Who could resist, right?”
She gazed at the night sky, which dominated the view. Resting underneath the moon, the Birmingham lights faded like a world below opaque glass. “Beautiful,” she said.
“The city can look that way from up here, but…”
“No, I’m talking about the moon.” She pointed to the sliver of light that settled into the night sky like a lopsided, but radiant smile.
“Not much of one tonight,” Jack said.
“There will be even less tomorrow night,” Katie said and then turned to him. “But then it starts all over again, growing.”
“You’ve become an astronaut in your spare time?”
“Absolutely. Actually, you think I’m in the middle of nowhere Arizona, but I’m working for NASA.” She snuggled closer to him, but his subtle move away from her was obvious.
He took a deep breath. “Katie, you can’t just walk into my home and pretend you haven’t been gone for over a year.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” she said, taking his hand. “I needed to see you. I only want another few months and I’ll be ready to leave.”
“You said that eight months ago, and then six months ago, and then again last month.”
She cringed again. “I know. But doing what I do, loving what I do, well, that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, Jack. I know you know that.”
“I don’t doubt your love, but I doubt your ability to ever stop long enough for us.”
“For us to what?”
“To be us. To build a life. For God’s sake. We’ve been together for over eight years and now five of those have been in separate states. One day we’ll have to be in the same place to have a life.”
She pointed out the window. “You know the first thing I was ever scared of was the moon not being in the sky.” She looked at him. “And the second is that you won’t be in my life.”
“I’m not in your life, Katie.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling herself closer, body on body. “Yes, you are. You’re with me every single day. Every second. I want you next to me seeing what I see. Everything. All of it. When a hawk feather floats to the ground, or the moon springs from behind cloud cover, or when I hear—far away—a coyote call. All of it, I think of you. Always.”
“Thinking about me doesn’t matter if you won’t leave.”
“Not yet,” she said and buried her head into his shoulder. “I’m not ready.”
“You’ve been gone for over a year, and the truth is that you won’t leave to be with me.”
“I will,” she said.
“I’m dating someone,” he said quietly.
She pulled back, tripping on a plank of unfinished floor. “What?”
“I told you that in a letter months ago.”
“You didn’t tell me anything. All you said was that by now we should be dating other people. I thought you meant … in theory, not reality.”
“Of course you did because you didn’t even ask, Katie. You assumed that the way you wanted it was the exact same way I wanted it.” He paused. “Her name is Maggie.”
“Do you love her?”
He looked away and of all the First Things in her life, this one was the worst: Jack looking away from her as he spoke about another woman. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know if you love someone?”
“Because the way I love you overshadows everything else, Katie.” He did look at her then. “The way I love you blurs all the ways I could love anyone else. But you know what? I want to love her. I want to love someone else. Because this is terrible.” He waved his palm between the two of them. “Having you and not having you is terrible.”
Katie kissed him again. Jack hesitated, somehow giving in and pulling away at the same time, his hand behind her head for a deeper kiss, but his feet taking a step back. Katie held on, sliding closer until the entire length of their bodies touched. She lifted her foot and stepped around him, her leg wound around his. The simple movements of hands sliding beneath fabric, removed shirts and his jeans. Her skirt puddled on the floor. At last she was where she wanted to be, the fleeting and forever moment of skin on skin, legs wound around, her hair a waterfall over his face. The only world that mattered—the one between
their touch—returned.
* * *
She cried as she left Jack the next morning. She promised to give her three-week notice.
But she didn’t because that was when the wounded and twelve-year-old Lida Markinson showed up.
Lida had been living with her aunt outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. She’d been four years old the day her mama dropped her off at Aunt Clara’s, and this was the only memory Lida retained of her mama—seeing her walking off in her pale yellow sundress and waving. Mama had told Lida that she was going to do some errands and she’d be back soon. That’s if soon is never, Lida had told Katie as they sat around a campfire.
Lida’s aunt loved and took care of Lida until the whiskey became more important than mostly anything, including Lida, including food, including shelter. Lida soon learned to fend for herself, which sadly and awfully usually included allowing the local boys to do as they pleased so she had a place to sleep and eat. The same whiskey that made her aunt fade into another world allowed Lida to not care what was being done to her or about her. Until her grandmother came to visit from Atlanta and found the conditions in which Clara allowed them to live.
Appalled and scared, Grandmother Garrison made the pleading phone calls to anyone and everyone she knew in the substance-abuse world and found a place for Lida at Winsome Wilderness.
The history, blurry at best, seemed to be that Lida was born to her sixteen-year-old Mama, who believed that of course she could raise a child on her own. Wasn’t love all a child needed? Love her and all would be well, that’s what Mama also told Aunt Clara.
Well, love, it seems, wasn’t all Lida needed. Food, shelter, and safety were up there on the list also. And, in the end, didn’t Lida know exactly where to find love? In any shack, corner bedroom, or empty barn available.
Lida arrived with her auburn hair hanging in strands of tangled rope down her back, her freckles fading into her skin, and Katie saw an almost alternate, opposite-world image of her own self, as if Lida was the girl whom she would have been without the love of her family. Shawn had warned all the field guides about identifying with any one child. But who could help it? Who can tell love what to do?
So Katie loved Lida Markinson and wanted, more than she ever had, to find a way to heal a wounded spirit.
* * *
Norah was the one who sent a copy of the wedding announcement. Jonathon Gray Adams had married Margaret Lauren Campbell. Jack and Maggie, the small print stated at the bottom of the announcement. It had been a small wedding on the bride’s parents’ farm in central Alabama, no invitations, only announcements after it was all over.
Katie read the card what seemed like a hundred times, and then Lida found Katie throwing up behind a sage bush, and asked the one question that changed everything. “Are you preggers or something?”
It was impossible. It was impossible, those were the words Katie told herself, like magic words, like a mantra, like an enchanted wish.
She’d still believed that Jack, as mad as he’d seemed when she’d told him she was staying to see it through with a young girl named Lida, would wait, but he hadn’t. He hadn’t waited at all.
On an awful and bitterly cold November day, Katie was in Timber for a two-day reprieve. From the crowded apartment, she finally called him. Her resolve had long since dissolved and as soon as he answered, she was already crying. “I miss you so terribly,” she said.
He was silent for a long while and Katie thought he’d hung up on her. Then he spoke. “I can’t talk to you, Katie. If I do, I’ll ruin everything.” His voice cracked and, with hope, she jumped into that small space.
“Please talk to me.”
“I can’t. I just can’t. I’m married.” He said each word as if it stood alone, as if it explained everything there was to know.
“How did this happen? I mean, I was just there and told you I’d come back. How could you.”
“I told you. I did tell you.”
“No.”
“I did tell you that I was falling in love with Maggie. And when you said for the millionth time that you weren’t coming home, I vowed to myself that it would be the last time I heard you say those words. That’s when I decided I was never going to beg you again. That’s when I decided to ask Maggie to marry me.”
“Why didn’t you wait? I love you. This is crazy.”
“I think I’ll always love you, Katie, but I don’t want that life of being alone waiting and waiting. I want this life where love is right here, right next to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, but don’t make me say things that will hurt you, Katie. Please. I don’t want to think about you hurting.”
“Say it,” she said. “Say you love her more than me.”
“No,” he said quietly.
Everything in her that hurt and ached spoke these words. “When you kiss her, when you touch her, when you’re with her, you’ll only think of me.”
“Oh, Katie. Don’t do this.”
She hung up on him because she didn’t have the words she needed—the exact right words that would convince him that he was making a huge mistake. Why couldn’t he know what she knew? That they were perfect together. That he was in the absolute wrong place. That he’d needed to wait the littlest bit longer.
As the days stretched forward, Katie’s nausea grew worse. She fought through the desperate need for sleep that fell over her like smothering and invisible gauze. Her T-shirts stretched across her swelling breasts. And then came the slim, slow knowing, like a cracked door in a dark room.
five
BIRMINGHAM, AL
2010
Phone calls made and suitcase packed, Kate headed for Alabama. She’d told Rowan that she was going to check out a boutique, and her stomach flipped at the half truth, or half lie. The six-hour drive crept through South Carolina, toward Georgia, and then west to Alabama. Except for the Atlanta airport and the snakelike highways through the big city, which would spin her into another direction with one wrong turn, the drive was a view of spring’s birth, taking Kate through the dormant cotton fields and farmland. The radio stations faded in and out until Kate finally shut off the radio and rolled down the windows, allowing the passing wind to be the music.
What she didn’t tell Rowan was a lie of omission, which according to their Baptist preacher was as large a lie as one of commission. Either way, unannounced, Kate was on her way to Birmingham to see Jack Adams.
Kate knew that if she’d called Jack to tell him she was coming, she wouldn’t have gone at all. There was something about overplanning that would have killed the trip before she even put her keys in the ignition. So, she drove with her windows open while her thoughts were as cluttered as the roadside trees drooping with their too-many blossoms. Memories scraped against one another, vying for attention.
When she arrived, Kate smiled at Jack’s house as if it were a person—an old friend—which in many ways it was. The last time she’d seen the house, the front door had been a plywood board and the rick-a-rack trim unpainted. The windows had been cracked, their wooden mullions peeling old paint. Now double doors dominated the front, dark, carved oak with wrought iron dividing their bubbled glass into intricate patterns. The windows of the house were wide and long, divided also by thick iron into oversized rectangles, which looked out onto the street with a wide and curious gaze as she parked her car.
Even in the day of Facebook and Twitter, of social networking and cell phones, where everyone knew everything about everybody, Kate knew very little about Jack’s life. He worked as a lawyer in downtown Birmingham. He was divorced. He lived with his son.
Kate drove into a parallel parking spot on the street and her body remembered everything: the comfortable ease that nestled next to the jittery desire. All this time, all these years passed, and she’d believed the feelings gone, or at least diminished beyond recognition. Yet there she was within a hundred yards of his house, and the exact desire returned as if it had waited patiently at
the end of a long road.
The front door opened. Framed by doorway and sunlight, a young boy emerged with a baseball in his hand, a hat on his head, and a large bag slung over his left shoulder. Kate gripped the steering wheel, holding her breath. The boy—he had dark hair and was small—looked younger than the eight years she knew him to be. He hollered something over his shoulder and his mouth formed a single word, “Dad.”
Then there was Jack. He came through the door, placing his hand on top of his son’s hat and twisting it straight. Kate took in a quick breath. He still moved with the ease of an athlete. The baseball cap on his head bore the same emblem as his son’s, a hornet or bee, Kate thought. Jack grabbed the bag from his son and took two steps down the walkway toward the back driveway.
In her stomach, tiny birds opened their wings and flew up toward her throat. Just because he’d written yearly letters, just because they’d once loved and had a daughter, did this give her the right to show up unannounced in his driveway?
Jack and Caleb were obviously on their way to a game. If she stopped them now, she would make them late and ruin their afternoon. Maybe she’d watch them for a little while. Then decide. Only a little while.
She followed Jack’s pickup down the winding roads into Mountain Brook village, an enclave of beautiful homes tucked into the valley. She followed him through the town dominated by old English architecture and brick-lined sidewalks. He turned right into the elementary school, which at first glance Kate thought was a large estate. The field to the left of the school was packed with families. Baseball bags were scattered like litter, spilling bats and gloves, uniforms and Gatorade bottles. Parents sat in clustered groups with folding chairs and blankets.
This world was foreign to Kate, one that she often avoided for fear of turning over the soil of a long-buried ache. Yet, there they were, families doing whatever it was that families did. Jack and Caleb sauntered in almost identical steps as they approached the crowd. Caleb entered a dugout and Jack turned away to unfold a blue canvas chair.
And Then I Found You Page 5
