It was all he’d needed to say to have them all remaining exactly where they were, lifeless statues, immobile and frozen, watching and waiting for twenty long minutes before screaming ambulances arrived and paramedics scurried into the antique store and carried out two limp figures, one long and lean and the other short and trim.
“Mom! Mom, come quick!”
“Steve’s on TV!”
“Where are you, Mom?”
“Mom!”
“Back porch!” Taylor called, trying to still her suddenly accelerated heart rate at hearing the news that Steve was on television. Being interviewed? He was alive?
The back door banged open and Jason spilled onto the back porch, bare feet flying, face whiter than she’d ever seen it. “You gotta come see, Mom!”
And he burst into tears.
Taylor jerked out of her rocking chair, a part of her mind noting that it rocked as violently as when Steve had pulled her up and into his embrace.
“Jason. Honey...oh, no.”
“It’s Steve, Mom. They’re talking about him...saying he’s...he’s...”
Taylor felt as if every ounce of her blood sank to her suddenly leaden feet. She had to grasp the back of the wildly bouncing rocking chair for any degree of balance.
“It’s on the news, Mom. Right now.”
Josh called from the lighted kitchen. “Come on, you guys! It’s on the news!”
Taylor was never able to remember later if it was Jason or she who crossed the back door’s threshold first. But she knew she was the first into the living room. As races went, it wasn’t one she particularly wanted to have won.
Jonah stood at full attention before the television set, his face rigid, his breathing labored. Josh pressed in against her side, silenced by the announcer’s frightening report. Jason kicked the wall behind her and ran out of the room to slam and bang his way into the boys’ bedroom.
“Is Steve okay?” Josh asked.
“Not again,” Jonah muttered. “Not again. Not again.”
Taylor reached for his hand. He grasped it painfully hard.
“I don’t know yet. Wait...” Taylor murmured, stroking Josh’s hair absently, her entire focus on the sixteen-inch color screen. No. Not Steve. And like Jonah, Not again.
“To recap the events of this afternoon, the Texas Rangers and the FBI in a cooperative effort once again joined forces in the West Texas town of Almost to roust drug smugglers from this small community. In a savage shoot-out, one of the purported drug smugglers was shot and is in critical condition at a hospital in Lubbock. Also shot in the melee was Texas Ranger Steven Kessler.”
Though she’d known it, Taylor couldn’t help but moan a little at hearing it repeated so starkly on the news.
The telephone started ringing.
“According to police, the injured Ranger, a ten-year veteran of the Texas Rangers and two-time awardee of the Texas Gold Star, the top honor a Ranger can achieve...”
“No...please...” Taylor whimpered, unaware she was sinking to the floor.
“Is he dead, Mom?”
“I don’t...know, honey,” Taylor mumbled, her eyes burning, her soul in flames.
“Contributor to various charitable organizations. His condition, at this point, remains a mystery.”
Josh dropped down beside her and wrapped his arms around her numb leg.
The phone continued to ring.
“According to sources within the Texas Rangers, Kessler had just completed an investigation of the Sunrise Corporation for some three months, helping to identify key players in a large-scale child-pornography ring. That case was resolved less than twenty-four hours ago, with seven members of the Sunrise Corporation arrested for possible connections with the child-pornography ring. Kessler had been working with the FBI on the Almost case less than a month. If viewers will remember, just last spring...”
The telephone ceased ringing, but the field reporter continued her simultaneously sterile and vampirishly excited story, which seemed utterly alien to the facts as Taylor and her family had witnessed them.
“At just after 4:00 p.m. this afternoon, Jose Caldrerros, presumed to be a member of a well-known drug family operating out of Brazil, opened fire on an FBI agent and a Texas Ranger as they approached his place of business in Almost.”
The scene on the screen switched to footage of the Lubbock Hospital and then a map of South America.
“Damn it, is he alive...?” Taylor whispered, unaware she was doing so, unaware she was swearing, devoid of any and all consciousness except that of needing to know about Steve.
She pictured his raised finger, the promise behind the gesture. She remembered her last words to him. You can’t lose what you threw away.
The telephone began to ring again. Taylor glanced toward the kitchen and frowned before looking back at the television. She was close enough to the set that she could have touched the screen, and yet it seemed far, far away, as if she were looking at it through a long pipe, a tunnel miles long.
“The fallen Ranger, noted for his active involvement with youth projects and law enforcement sponsor of the Kids versus Crime program, was transported to the Lubbock hospital in critical condition, despite the fact that informed sources say he was wearing a bullet-proof vest.”
The primary announcer said they had an expert on hand to tell the viewers about the fallibility of bullet-proof vests.
A nervous man in an ill-fitting suit and bow tie came on the screen. “The idea that anything short of pure steel, and even that can be a misnomer, can stop a .357 or a .9mm bullet is really a myth. You see...”
The phone began ringing for a third time. This time Josh released her leg and pushed to his feet, stumbled into the kitchen and nabbed the phone from its perch. “What?” he demanded rudely. Then his voice altered, though Taylor couldn’t hear his words. He came back in seconds.
“Who was it?” Taylor asked dully, never taking her eyes from the television set.
According to the primary announcer, while Steve had been transported to Lubbock, the FBI and fellow Rangers were moving in on Almost to secure the town and all evidence left behind after the shoot-out. So were the media crews. Live coverage would continue through the night, until the situation was resolved.
Josh had waited. “It was Aunt Sammie Jo. She’s coming over.”
Taylor closed her eyes, fighting the hardest war against tears that she’d ever waged and praying with all her heart and soul that Steve would survive. “Please, please...oh, just please.”
Less than an hour after the second newscast at ten—some twenty-five people had gathered again in Taylor’s snug living room. There would have been more, but most of Almost’s population went to bed before the ten o’clock news, which at this time of summer was mere seconds after dark, and no one wanted to rouse them. Bad news could always wait until morning.
But those who were awake drifted to the Smithton house as softly and easily as leaves fall from trees in the colder, darker days of autumn. Some brought food, as they’d done only a week before. Some wore thin shawls over their nightclothes and shivered in her living room, unused to central air-conditioning. Some busied themselves in the kitchen, finishing up the dinner dishes and polishing and repolishing her already clean table.
Aunt Sammie Jo sat on Taylor’s sofa between Mickey Sanders and Alva Lu Harrigan. Sammie Jo’s Dolly Parton wig was wildly askew, and Alva Lu had pin-curled her hair with bobby pins and a thick black hair net. All three women were holding hands and staring at the television, waiting for the latest update on the young man they’d met such a short time ago.
Charlie Hampton came in the door without knocking, the way people did if children were asleep in the house or if someone had died. He didn’t say a word but took up a spot behind Taylor’s chair, resting his large, callused hands on her shoulders and squeezing lightly. Comfortingly.
Carolyn and Pete Jackson arrived, carrying their sleeping daughters, whom they took into the boys’ room to deposit o
n a pallet made of extra sleeping bags and sheets. Like Charlie Hampton, Carolyn didn’t say a word, only sat on the floor beside Taylor’s chair and pulled a limp, chilled hand into her own.
“I told him he couldn’t lose what he threw away,” Taylor said, her voice breaking, admitting finally how deeply she’d plunged into a future with Steve. And horrified that those, of all words, should have been her last to him. “Just this afternoon. Right before he got shot. That’s what I said to him, Carolyn.”
“It’s okay, Taylor,” Carolyn said, squeezing her hand, chafing it, bringing warmth if not a blanket panacea.
“This is just like when Doug was killed,” Martha Thompson whispered to Homer Chalmers.
Taylor looked over at Martha, afraid her words might be true, shell-shocked by the memories the night revived. Terrified of what the outcome of this vigil might be.
“I’ve already lived through this,” she murmured, unaware she was probably squeezing Carolyn’s hand too tightly.
“Then you can do it again,” Carolyn said softly, lifting her sister-in-law’s hand to blow warm breath over it.
“Can I?”
“Sure. Because you have to.”
“I only knew him a few days,” she said.
Carolyn pressed Taylor’s hand to her face. “I fell in love with Pete the first morning he was at our place, when he didn’t know whether to sit down at the kitchen table and eat his breakfast or start running for the nearest exit.”
Jason came out of the bedroom, his face scrubbed of tears but somehow looking all the more vulnerable because of the washing. His freckles stood out on his pallid face. “Is he dead yet?”
Shocked gazes ricocheted between Taylor and her “eldest” son. All that could be heard was the faint drone of the turned-down television set and, from the kitchen, the clatter of dishes being put away.
Taylor took her son’s hand in hers and held it tightly. “We don’t know anything more, honey.”
He looked down at her, a fierce expression on his face, his eyebrows drawn to a frowning vee. “If he is okay...I don’t want him coming back here.”
Aunt Sammie Jo spoke up from her vigil spot on the sofa. “Jason, you don’t mean that.”
“Oh, yes I do!” he burst out. He yanked his hand free from his mom’s. “I’m sorry we ever wrote that letter. And I wish we hadn’t written him our second letters. I’m sorry he came here. I’m sorry we wanted him to kiss you so... s-so he’d be...our dad. You know why? ’Cause dads die!”
Taylor rose swiftly and enfolded her son in her arms. She led him from the room and down the hallway to her bedroom. She waited until she’d propelled him through the opened door and shut it behind them before turning him roughly to face her.
“If we hadn’t wr-written him that letter, he wouldn’t have come back h-here and—”
“Listen to me, Jason.” She shook his shoulders a little until he looked up through panicked, tear-filled eyes. “It was wrong to write that first letter to Steve. Okay? You with me? It was full of lies and it was wrong because of that.”
“I know, but—”
“But it wasn’t wrong to want someone like Steve as a new dad. It isn’t wrong to want somebody around to love you, to play ball with you guys, to take you out to fly a kite or just to watch TV with you on a Sunday afternoon. There’s nothing wrong with wanting someone to love and who will love you back.”
Jason shuddered with a near violent spasm and thrust himself into her arms and clung to her so tightly it hurt. And yet it was the first glimmer of warmth she’d felt all night.
“He’s just gotta be okay,” he said.
Taylor wished she could pull a promise out of the hat and hand it to her son. He will be. He’ll be just fine. But she knew, perhaps better than most, that reality often interfered with promises.
Like having to leave town for an investigation in Houston? a humbled voice inside her asked. Like not trusting twice-failed instincts?
“I want to wait up until we know for sure,” Jason said. His voice quavered, but his chin showed a man’s determination to see a terrible event through until its ending, good or bad.
Doug would have been so proud of him right then, she thought. And so would have Steve. Doug, the father of blood. Steve, the father of choice.
“We may not know tonight,” Taylor murmured, remembering another desperate period of waiting, another dark time. She kissed her son’s soft blond head.
“I don’t care. I’ve gotta know.”
“All right. But if the other boys are sleeping, let them stay that way. Jenny and Shawna, too.”
“Nah. They’re awake. They’re playing cards,” he said, then walked out of the room.
She was alone for the first time since she’d heard the news about Steve, since she’d seen the ambulance taking him out of town. She sat down on her bed, her hand trailing across the cool quilt, remembering what it had felt like to lie there with Steve, to gasp as the cold material touched her passion-heated skin.
She remembered being amazed at how far they had traveled that night, from strangers to lovers. And how abandoned she’d felt when he wouldn’t look at her the next morning when he left, and that she’d felt that his silence and avoidance of her gaze had transformed them back into strangers.
And then, he’d come back. And he’d tried to explain his absence, his abrupt departure, and even understanding him, understanding what he might have been trying to tell her, she’d said, You can’t lose what you threw away.
And she’d seen the longing on his face, the hurt in his eyes. And the hope. Dear God, she’d seen the desire for a future. The love of her sons, the ache for her.
And then she’d heard the shot that struck Steve, and the sound had reverberated down into her deepest sorrows and stirred the still-warm coals and brought a flood of unwanted memories back. But the feelings of coldness, of bleak despair she experienced now had nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the unpredictable present.
They had exchanged no commitments, had formed no ties. All she had was a living room full of caring people and the memory of a single perfect night and a few scattered, chaotic hours. All she had was nothing.
Her bedroom door opened and Aunt Sammie Jo entered. She stopped in front of the vanity mirror to straighten her wig, then joined Taylor on the bed.
“You probably don’t know this story,” she said without preamble. She took the hand Carolyn had tried to warm in hers. “Your mama was working in the Amarillo library right out of high school. Her family was from that neck of the woods. And your daddy...well, Barney had just been drafted and was all set to go to boot camp down in El Paso. The war was on. He knew he would be shipped out.
“I remember how he stood up so straight and tall in his new uniform. He looked every inch a man. But he was shaking in those shiny new boots. And what does that poor young ranch kid from Almost worry about just hours before he has to go off to war? That he had a library book overdue.” She rolled her eyes.
“I think the book was Thunderhead by Mary O’Hara. He’d already had it checked out two months. He was like Carolyn’s girls, horse mad. Of course, I’ve always liked her myself. Anyway, he could have just dropped that overdue book in the big box in the front of the library and walked away without a backward glance, but he wasn’t that kind of young man.”
Taylor watched the smile unfurl on Sammie Jo’s face and felt some of her own tension relax. Her aunt looked suddenly years younger as she once again became Barney’s kid sister, remembering her big brother’s romance.
“He explained his situation to the pretty little librarian at the desk. Of course, that was your mama. That sassy little thing just up and lied to him. I don’t think she ever told another lie in her whole life, but she lied right then. She lifted up a piece of paper and waved it in his face and told him it said that the government had passed a ruling that no soldier could be fined for overdue books while serving their country. And that each soldier was allowed to pick out one b
ook from the library to take with him overseas.
“I don’t know if he believed her or not. It doesn’t matter. But he had the good sense to ask her what time she got off work. He took her to a cheap coffee shop and they both drank coffee and talked. And they talked some more. Until it was well past midnight and she had to go before she was locked out of her rooming house.
“But your daddy wouldn’t let her go. They kissed beneath the branches of a big weeping willow tree right there in downtown Amarillo. Marry me, he told her. And she said yes. Just like that. And they loved each other every day of their lives together, Taylor. And you and Craig and Allison coming along all those years later only made things better.”
Taylor’s eyes had filled with tears during her aunt’s gift of a story. She shook her head.
“Aren’t you listening to what I’m telling you?” her aunt asked, sounding exasperated.
Taylor tried to smile and failed miserably. “Aunt Sammie Jo, I’m listening. I know what you’re trying to tell me. Believe me, I know how easy it is to fall in love on one kiss. I did it with Doug, I did it with...but don’t you see? Steve didn’t say anything about loving me, Aunt Sammie Jo. He wouldn’t even look at me the next morning.” She felt a prick of self-consciousness that she’d revealed the full extent of her relationship with Steve. But she needn’t have worried, not with Sammie Jo.
“He probably felt badly about having to leave Almost and go back to Houston,” her aunt said reasonably, patting Taylor’s hand.
“When he came back today, I told him I was just foolish, a country bumpkin who missed every signal he sent my way.”
Aunt Sammie Jo smiled. “Country you are and always will be. Stupid, you are not. You’re one of the most sensitive women I know...and I mean that in the good oldfashioned sense of the word, not the newfangled needtherapy kind of way. You have a knack of picking up on the merest hint of a stray emotion. So let me tell you, you wouldn’t have let him kiss you if he hadn’t been right there in the front seat of the car with you.”
Almost A Family Page 20
