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4
ANNIE
Once I was inside the cabin, tears came. I sat in the rocking chair by the gas fireplace and sobbed.
This had been a mistake. Maybe keeping the past in the past had been right all along. I’d go home tomorrow.
As I’d walked the shoveled path to my cabin, memories came flooding back. Not only of my time here with Atticus and Stella but those of my mother. Up until that last year, my mother had always been so engaged in my life. One day, the summer before she’d died, I’d found her on the kitchen floor crying. I’d been too shocked to say much to her. A mother’s tears are too complicated for a child to understand. I’d frozen and stared at her for a moment before backing away silently. To this day, I don’t know what she was crying about. I had my suspicions now though, obviously.
She and my father had always seemed happy together. Had it all been an act put on for my benefit? Had she truly been miserable? She and Stella had been as close as sisters, too. Supportive of each other. How could she have betrayed her best friend that way?
After I put away my last sweater, I sat on the bed and criedinto my hands. At first, the pain had been acute. I’d been angry and sad and, more than anything, I’d missed my mother. After the first year of grief, a dull ache had taken permanent residence in my heart. It weighed me down but made me more sensitive to others’ perils and grief. I could sense sadness in others as easily as I could smell their perfume or cologne. Did that make me a good actress? Probably. Would I have traded everything to have had my mother all this time? That was an easy answer. Yes.
Not the mother who left me but the person she’d been before that. Room mother. Cookie baker. The one who tucked me into bed every night.
I couldn’t get my head around how she could leave me.. If I had a child, I couldn’t imagine abandoning her or him. Maybe if I’d been an adult when she’d had her affair, but I was eleven, only months away from starting puberty. I’d gotten my period when I turned twelve, and I’d had to face it without my mother. Nan had been wonderful about it all, talking me through it, but the void without my mother had made a hole in my heart that could never be repaired.
A knock on my door startled me from my sobbing. Wiping my eyes, I went to answer, sure it would be Finley with extra towels or soaps or whatever. She had been worried when she showed up with my suitcases that it wasn’t posh enough and asked if she should try to rustle up a better type of soap. I’d told her it was all fine and not to worry about me, but she hadn’t seemed convinced.
I opened the door just a crack, nervous suddenly that it would be someone unwelcome, like a reporter.
It wasn’t. I recognized her immediately. Yes, she was older, with fine lines around her eyes, and her face had thinned, but there was no doubt in my mind. Stella stood before me.
Currently, her mouth had dropped open, and she stared at me as if she saw a ghost. “Itisyou. Finley said so, but I just couldn’t believe it. God answered my prayers.”
I nodded, unable to speak because of the golf ball of emotion at the back of my throat.
“May I come in?” Stella asked.
I opened the door and let her pass through, shutting it behind me and shivering from the sliver of cold that sliced through the warm air.
“The ranch looks great. Amazing really,” I said.
“Thank you. It’s been a long time since you were last here. We’ve done a lot to it over the years.” Stella’s voice, soft and nurturing, calmed me a little. “What made you decide to come home?”
“I came to, you know, face the past,” I said. “I guess.”
“We’ve all seen the news stories, if you can call them that, over the last few days. I’m sorry, sweetheart. About all of it, and that you’re having to live through this all over again. When I saw the story the other day, I prayed you’d come home and let us help you face it all. You shouldn’t have to go through it again by yourself.”
“I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “It was too risky. I don’t know what I was thinking. The last thing I want is for them to find out your family was involved. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You don’t know what they’re like,” I said. “Vultures. They’ll camp out on the street or driveway if they have to, just to get a photograph.”
“What an awful way to live,” Stella said under her breath.
“It has its moments.” I’d let her interpret that as either negative or positive.
“It’s good you came home. The boys—Atticus especially—will want to see you.”
“They’re all here?” I asked, as if I didn’t know the answer.
“Yes, for the time being. Rafferty’s a doctor now and has taken over Dr. Wilson’s practice. Do you remember him?” She tucked one side of her bob behind her ear. Whether it was dyedor not, the hue was the same as I remembered, a chestnut brown.
“Dr. Wilson or Rafferty?”
She smiled. “I meant Dr. Wilson. I assumed you remembered all of us, since you spent half of your childhood over here.”
