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“Pull over.”
“Are you feeling ill?” The worst is upon him. The night is ruined.
“Please, just do it.”
He draws the car to the side of the road. He expects her to burst from the door, but instead she turns to face him.
“Nessa, are you all right?”
She seems about to laugh. Before he can utter another word, she takes his cheeks in her hands and draws him toward her, crushing his mouth with a kiss.
—
They have lunch together on Tuesday, see a film the following night, and on Saturday depart in the early morning. The city falls away as they drive deep into the heart of the country. The day is cool, with fat white clouds, though the temperature begins to rise as they make their way west, away from the sea.
It is just noon when they arrive in Headly. The town has improved somewhat. More commercial concerns now line the dusty main street, and the school has expanded. A new municipal hall stands at the top of the square. They check in to the inn—Logan has booked separate rooms, not wanting to assume too much—and, with a picnic lunch, drive on to the ranch.
The sight is dispiriting. The land, untended for years, is weedy and wild; the barn has caved in, as well as many of the outbuildings. The house is only a little better—paint peeling, porch tipping to one side, gutters languishing off the eaves. Logan stands in silence for a moment, taking it in. The house was never large, but like all revisited places it seems a lesser version of the one held in memory. Its degraded condition disturbs him. Yet he also feels the upwelling of an emotion he hasn’t experienced in years: a sense of homecoming, of home.
“Logan? All right?”
He turns to Nessa. She is standing slightly apart from him. “Strange to be back,” he says and shrugs diffidently, though the word “strange” hardly does the situation justice.
“It’s really not so bad, you know. I’m sure they can fix it up.”
He does not want to enter the house yet. They put their blanket on the ground and lay out their picnic: bread and cheese, fruit, smoked meat, lemonade. The site they have selected has a view of the parched hills; the sun is hot but clouds scud past, creating brief intervals of shade. As they eat, Logan points out the sites, explaining the history: the barns, the paddocks, the fields where horses once grazed, the thickets where he spent idle hours as a boy, lost in worlds of his own imagining. He begins to relax; the tension between what he remembers and what he now sees softens; the past flows forth, wanting to be told—though there is, of course, more to the story.
The moment comes when the house can no longer be avoided. Logan takes the key from his pocket—it has lain in his desk drawer, untouched, for years—and lets them in. The door opens directly onto the front parlor. The air is stale. Some of the furnishings remain: a couple of armchairs, shelves, the desk where his father did his accounts. A thick layer of dust coats every surface. They move deeper into the house. All the kitchen cabinets stand open, as if explored by hungry ghosts. Despite the staleness, smells assault him, tinged with the past.
They press on to the back room. Logan is drawn to it as if by a magnetic force. There, covered by a tarp, is the unmistakable shape of the piano. He pulls the cloth aside and raises the fallboard, exposing the keys, which are as yellow as old teeth.
“Do you play?” Nessa asks.
They are the first words either of them has spoken since entering the house. Logan depresses a key, expelling a sour note. “Me? No.” The sound hovers in the air, then is gone. “I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he says, looking up. “You asked me if I came from a religious family. My mother was what used to be known as an ‘Amy dreamer.’ Are you familiar with the term?”
Nessa frowns. “Isn’t that a myth?”
“You mean, hasn’t modern science rebranded the phenomenon? In conventional terms, I suppose you could say she was crazy. Schizophrenic with a tendency toward grandiosity. That’s more or less what the doctors told us.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Logan shrugs. “It’s not really a yes-or-no question. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. At least she came by it honestly. Her maiden name was Jaxon.”
Nessa is visibly taken aback. “You’re First Family?”
Logan nods. “It’s not something I like to talk about. People make assumptions.”
“I hardly think these days anyone would make much of it.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Out here, folks put stock in a thing like that.”
