The You I Never Knew

by Susan Wiggs

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  Table of Contents

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright Page

  The You I Never Knew

  Susan Wiggs

  NEW YORK BOSTON

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is a joyous act, but it’s also a lonely one. The support, advice, and fellowship of professional advisors and friends anchor, motivate, and inform me, and for this I’m deeply grateful. In particular, to Robert Gottlieb and Marcy Posner of the William Morris Agency for pushing me off in a new direction, to Joyce, Christina, Betty, Barb, and Alice for reading the manuscript with open minds and blood-red pencils, to Kristin, Jill, and Debbie for moral support, to my gifted editor, Claire Zion, who held up the mirror that transformed this work, and to Sara Schwager for careful copyediting, to Sandra Brashen, M.D., Leslie Townsend, Peggy Moreland and Curtiss Ann Matlock for technical advice, and most particularly to Donna Roberts, who gave her father the gift of life and generously shared her story.

  Saturday

  Chapter 1

  After seventeen years, Michelle Turner was going back. Back to a past she didn’t want to remember, to the father she barely knew, to the town where she grew up too fast, fell in love too hard, and wound up pregnant and alone.

  During the long drive from Seattle to Montana, she rehearsed—under her breath so Cody wouldn’t hear—what she would say when she got there.

  “Hello, Daddy.” Funny how she still thought of him as Daddy, even though he’d never been much more than a picture on the wall or sometimes a face on the TV screen late at night when his old movies played. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner…” Sorry… sorry… sorry. All those regrets. So many of them.

  Sorry wouldn’t do. Gavin Slade—her father had kept his professional name after retiring—knew damned well what had kept her away so long.

  She flexed her hands on the steering wheel of the Range Rover and glanced over her shoulder at her son in the backseat. Cody was lost in the space between the headphones of his Discman. Maybe I’m the one who’s lost, she thought. Here she was, thirty-five years old and the mother of a teenager, and the thought of facing her father made her feel like a kid again. Defensive. Powerless. Inadequate.

  The Washington landscape roared by as she drove eastward, heading toward a place where she’d find no welcome. She and Cody had left their waterfront town house before dawn. The lights had still been shining in the steel skeleton of Seattle’s Space Needle. By sunup, the Cascade Range had given way to rounded hills and scrubby flatland, then finally to high plateaus, a bare and colorless midwinter moonscape, a neutral zone.

  She saw nothing out her window to interest the eye, nor to offend it.

  Long ago, she used to be an artist, painting in savage color with emotions that spilled unrestrained over the canvas, dripping off the sides, because her feelings could not be confined to a finite space. But somewhere along the way she had reined in those mad and glorious impulses, as if a thief had come in the night and stolen the dreams inside her and she hadn’t noticed they were gone until too late.

  All that remained of the wild soul of her younger days was a cold, mechanical talent and a photographic eye. Airbrush and mousepad had replaced paint and canvas.

  Her subjects had changed, too. She used to create art with passion and purity, whether it be a horse on her father’s ranch or an abstract scramble of feelings. Inspiration used to govern her hand, and something far more powerful ignited her spirit. Once seen or imagined, the work rushed from her, generated by a force as strong as the need to breathe.

  Now subjects came assigned to her by memo from the ad agency where she was up for full partner. She used a computer to design and animate dancing toilet brushes, talking dentures, or an army of weed-killer bags marching toward a forest of weeds.

  Tugging her mind away from thoughts of work, she clicked on the wipers to bat away a few stray snow flurries. The day wore on. Spokane passed in a whisk of warehouses and industrial smokestacks. The interstate arrowed cleanly across the panhandle of Idaho. Between empty stretches of highway lay glaring commercial strip centers, tractor barns and silos, wood-frame houses huddled shoulder to shoulder against the elements. Deeper accumulations of snow formed crusty heaps on the side of the road. East of Coeur d’Alene, the landscape yielded to endless stretches of nothingness.

  The monotony of the drive, and her purpose for racing across three states, caused an almost painful tectonic shift in her thoughts. Memories drifted toward dangerous places. Against her will, images from the past turned the barren snowscape to brilliant summer.

  She saw herself as she was at eighteen. A little breathless at everything life had to offer. A little scared, but mostly happy and secure in her world. She finished high school with honors she didn’t care about, a raw talent she didn’t appreciate yet, and no sense of impending disaster. Her mother’s cosmetic surgery was supposed to be routine. No one even considered the possibility that Sharon Turner would die from the complications.

  In a shockingly short span of time, Michelle had found herself alone and motherless—suddenly in need of the father she barely knew. She had expected him to hustle her off to college and breathe a sigh of relief when she was gone, but instead he’d surprised her. He had invited her to take a year off before college and spend the time with him in Montana. A year to grieve for her mother and to learn who her father was.

  In that one brief season she experienced the events that were to shape her life: She learned what it was to be a motherless daughter. She fell in love. She became a painter. Not necessarily in that order. Everything sort of happened simultaneously. Even now, the years-old bittersweet ache rose as fresh as yesterday. It shouldn’t still hurt, but it did, even though he was gone, long gone, from her life.

  Except for the daily reminder he had left her.

  She glanced into the rearview mirror again. Cody, who was sixteen and impossible, hadn’t moved from his long-bodied position in the backseat. A tinny beat of heavy-metal music escaped from his headphones. He stared out at the endless swags of electrical lines strung along poles that bordered the highway. When a green-and-white sign welcomed them to Montana, his only reaction was to blink and shift position.

  A billboard with a nauseating cartoon cowboy invited them to “Stop N Eat” in one mile.

  “You hungry?” She raised her voice so he would hear.

  He stuffed a wad of Fritos into his mouth. “Nope,” he said around a mouthful of food. The roadside café, lit up by neon wagon wheels, disappeared in a smear of artificial light.

  Just for a flash, she saw him as a toddler, cramming Cheerios into his cheeks like a baby squirrel. It seemed like only yesterday that he was her Cody-boy in Oshkosh overalls, with milk dribbling from his chin. That child was gone from her life now, she realized with a lurch of regret in her chest. He had slipped away when she wasn’t looking. He’d vanished as swiftly and irretrievably as if he had wandered off at an airport, never to be found. In his place was this cynical, smart, exasperating stranger who seemed determined to push every button she had.

  His sheer physical beauty then, as now, took her breath away. Only back then, she could tell him how adorable he was to her.

  Now she could tell him nothing.

  Cody had begged to stay in Seattle while she made this trip alone. He claimed he’d be fine, staying by himself at the town house. As if Michelle would consent to that.

  Cody had even suggested that Brad could look after him.

  Right. Brad couldn’t handle Cody. Or wouldn’t. And she was in no position to expect that level of support from Brad, their relationship notwithstanding. Her entire life was on hold until she dealt with her father.

  A semi swung out and passed
her, blasting its air horn. No speed limit in Montana, she recalled, and here she’d been dutifully doing sixty-five.

  Life had trained her well for duty.

  Defiantly, she pressed the accelerator. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five. She reveled in the speed, in the hum of the Rover’s tires on cold bare pavement. Everything passed in a wavy smudge—streaks of cottonwood groves, shale rock ridges, coulees and brushy creeks, the blur of avalanche fence traversing the high meadows. The wind blew a dusting of snow along the highway. The snakelike motion and the subtle flickers of muted color were oddly exhilarating, and for a while she simply emptied her mind and drove.

  The landscape lifted, a subtle change at first, but before long they would reach the high country of serrated crags, endless valleys, hanging alpine lakes. A chill of anticipation prickled her skin. Before long they would be at Blue Rock Ranch.

  At Missoula, they turned northward, passing a giant statue of a Hereford bull at a combination tourist shop, café, and gas station.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” she murmured to Cody, but he didn’t hear.

  The Wild West kitsch was a sign that they had entered a different zone entirely, a land where the cowboy myth revolved around the solemn rites of rope and leather, where a sense of place and tall, endless skies surrounded and seduced her. Some said Montana was an empty land, but that wasn’t quite right. It was just that the space was so vast it expanded the soul. She felt herself being drawn toward an encounter she had resisted for years. She tensed, unable to enjoy the beauty because this landscape held too many reminders of her past.

  Highway 83 took them along the final leg of the journey. Against the brooding afternoon sky rose the peaks of the Swan and Mission Mountains. Shadows flickered in and out of coulees and valleys, creating a palette of sage and ocher and mysterious, restful earth tones that had no name.

  “Cody, look!” She pointed out the side window. A huge herd of elk, winter migrants from the high country, grazed on the scrub-covered hills.

  He stared at the milling herd, then yawned.

  Well, what did she expect? “Gee whiz, Mommy” from a sixteen-year-old?

  But oh, she wanted to share this with him, this sense of wonder inspired by the wild animals, the deep conifer forests and staggering snow-clad mountain peaks. A jewel-like chain of lakes bordered the highway. She wanted to tell him the lakes were formed as flood depressions in glacial moraines, filled when giant chunks of ice melted in each depression.

  She wondered if that was what happened to people: When loss created a void that stayed empty too long, did the space fill up with ice?

  * * *

  They reached the turnoff for Crystal City, and the road began to climb in a series of sharp twists up into the mountains. Glacial violence made this harsh, craggy landscape as resistant to invasion as any man-made fortress. It took a special skill to breach it.

  She hadn’t driven in snow in ages, and the Range Rover fishtailed a little.

  “Nice move, Mom,” Cody observed from the backseat.

  She gave silent thanks for the Rover’s four-wheel drive. The tires gripped the sand-sprinkled snow. Forced to a Sunday-drive crawl, she saw everything with crystalline clarity. Open rangeland and broad meadows flowing past. A ring of mountains surrounding the valley like the walls of a mythical stronghold. Every tortuous inch of this road was familiar to her, so familiar that it made her eyes ache.

  The valley slumbered in midwinter splendor, as if the entire landscape was holding its breath, waiting for the far-distant springtime.

  She read the names on every rural mailbox they passed—Smith, Dodd, Gyenes, Bell, Jacobs. Most people who settled in the area seemed to stay forever. Each farm lay in perfect repose, a picture waiting to be painted: a white house with dark green shutters, a wisp of smoke twisting from the chimney, windowpanes glowing at the first touch of twilight.

  There was a time when this sight had pierced her in a tender spot. She had painted this very scene long ago. Her brush had given life to the hillocks of untouched snow, to the luminous pink of the sunset, and to the fading sky behind alpine firs with their shoulders draped in white and icicles dripping from their branches. On a poorly prepared canvas with second-rate paints, she managed to convey a sense of soaring wonder at the world around her. It was a good painting. Better than good. But young. Impossibly, naively young as she had never been since the day she left this town in anguish and disgrace.

  She wondered what had become of that painting. A part of her insisted that it was important to know. Creating that picture had been a defining act for her. It had opened a window into her future and sent her dreams off in a direction that would bring her joy and heartbreak for the rest of her life.

  She peeked at Cody to see his reaction to their arrival. He stared out the window, his hands playing the air drums in his lap. His narrowed eyes were filled with nothing but indifference. She shouldn’t be surprised. Indifference and contempt were the only emotions he exhibited these days.

  A fading Rotary Club sign marked the city limits.

  I’m back now, really and truly back. She knew it was just her imagination, but she heard a rush of wind as she felt herself going forward… into the past.

  Across the Lions Club sign stretched a banner announcing the WINTER ROUNDUP—MARCH 2–3.

  Great. That meant she wouldn’t find her father at home. As the leading rodeo stock contractor in the state, he was bound to be at the arena. She punched his number into her cell phone—Lord, did anyone but her father keep the same number for twenty-five years?

  “Blue Rock.” A young voice, not her father’s, answered. One of his personal assistants, she supposed.

  “Is Gavin in? This is… his daughter, Michelle Turner.”

  A pause. “I’m sorry, he’s out for the evening. He was expecting you tomorrow, ma’am.”

  “Is he at the arena?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She supposed she could go to his place, sit, and wait for him, but she was too edgy to put the meeting off any longer. The entire town would witness their reunion. Would anyone remember her, and what had happened that year? Would heads shake and tongues wag? Would they look at her son and exchange knowing glances?

  The next road sign posted a greeting from the Calvary Lutheran Church: YOU’RE ENTERING GOD’S COUNTRY.

  “I’ll find him there, then.” She hung up the phone.

  Main Street stretched before her, cold and straight as the barrel of a rifle. She passed the saddlery with its false log façade, Ray’s Quik Chek, the Northern Lights Feed Store and Café, the Christian Science Reading Room, LaNelle’s Quilt and Fabric Shoppe, a bank, and a picket-fronted bar that hadn’t been there seventeen years ago. Blue-and-white signs pointed out the turns to the county hospital and the library.

  On the other side of town was a flat-roofed restaurant hunched atop a knoll and surrounded by eighteen-wheelers with their running lights on—the Truxtop Café. She winced, recalling the last time she had set foot in that place.

  Crystal City was a part of Michelle Turner, no matter how hard she tried to forget that fact.

  Every once in a while she used to fantasize about coming back, but in her mind it was always a triumphant return. Not like this. Not with her heart frozen, her world in disarray, and her purpose to save the life of the father she hadn’t seen in seventeen years.

  Chapter 2

  Sam McPhee stared out the window at the ripples of snow on the hills behind his house. Though it was a familiar sight, he lingered there, watching as the last light of day rode the broken-backed mountains. The sight was a restful thing for a man to hold in his chest. In his youth, he’d carried the image with him no matter where he went, from Calgary to Cozumel, and when the time came to figure out where home was, he didn’t need to look any farther than these hills.

  He adjusted his hat and flexed his fingers into a pair of gloves. He straightened up and hitched back his hip, stomping his foot down into the boo
t, a characteristic gesture caught dozens of times by rodeo photographers.

  Sam was a hard-bitten man, a loner who depended on no one, but sometimes the loneliness howled through him. Sometimes he wished he had someone to share these moments with, someone he could take by the hand, and say, “Look up at the hills tonight. Look at all those colors.” After such a long time on his own, it shouldn’t matter. But every once in a while, in the empty hover of time between evening and twilight, it did.

  He flicked off most of the lights in the house, leaving one burning on the porch.

  His boots crunching on the frozen drive, he went out to finish loading his trailer: saddle, tack, rope, blankets, Yellow Arrow liniment, an extra pair of gloves. These things were sacred to him and he handled them with the reverence and care of a priest performing the rites of consecration. They were the trappings of something so much a part of him that he couldn’t even really think of it as a sport. Rodeo. His second love.

  The sharp cold air needled his lungs as he crossed the yard to the bunkhouse, a squat log dwelling the former owners had remodeled into a guesthouse. Sam’s partner in the horse ranch lived there now. He pounded on the door, then opened it. “Hey, Edward, you about ready?”

  “Coming, coming. Hold your horses.”

  “My horses are already trailered, no thanks to you, pal.”

  “Yeah, well, I was busy,” Edward called from the back bedroom.

  “Did Diego get those stables done?” Sam closed the door behind him to keep in the heat from the woodstove.

  “Diego took off. Got a job in a restaurant up at Big Mountain.”

  “Damn. That’s the second stable hand we’ve lost this month.”

  “What you need is a slave,” Edward called.

  “Last time I checked, it was against the law to keep slaves.”

  “In this society,” Edward said, “we call them kids.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t happen to have any handy.” Sam didn’t let himself dwell on it. “I guess I’ll call Earl Meecham, see if one of his boys’ll work after school each day.”