Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (7 page)

"So, no house in the south of France."

"No, but one of us will have his dream come true." She smiled without a trace of bitterness. "I'm happy for you."

"You'll get a fair price."

"I intend to, Mr. Brown. For my daughter's sake."

She looked away and fixed her attention on the approaching rain clouds.

* * *

That night Annette dreamed of the house in the Flint Hills. Her mother was there, mingling with the guests from her funeral, and she looked so lovely and everyone was so happy to see her. She was welcoming them to this old house, built by her grandfather, inhabited by three generations of Reillys. All of them were to take a look around, stay as long as they liked. There were plenty of bedrooms, they could spend the night if they wished. So enraptured was she to see her mother again, risen from the grave, Annette gave no more thought to her dream of a house in Provence.

Chapter 8

It was Ethan who made the arrangements for Eliana to ride later that week. Jer had only one horse that was trained for dressage, a small Arabian named Big Mike—named for his heart, not his size. Jer knew next to nothing about what the horse could do, and he was a little skeptical until he saw the child in the saddle and saw how well the horse responded to her. Jer was already a little awestruck around Annette, which may have had something to do with the fact that he occasionally listened to classical music and had once seen her picture on the cover of a CD when he was looking for a Mozart violin concerto at a music store up in Kansas City. Only there, in a suburban mall, among anonymous shoppers, did he allow himself these guilty pleasures. He had never made it known to his friends in Cottonwood Falls that he had such taste in music, not wishing to expose himself to Ethan's—or anyone else's—ridicule.

"I got that horse for next to nothin'," said Jer as he leaned against the corral next to Annette.

"I was afraid he might be too big for her. But she doesn't seem to think so."

"I ain't never seen that horse so damn mellow, excuse my French." He said it without thinking, and was genuinely embarrassed. Annette smiled and let it pass.

"He does seem gentle," she said.

"He was trained to do dressage, but he got passed along to me and I've just kept him around for the heck of it. To be quite honest with you, I've never seen him do this. He's eatin' it up. He loves it."

"I suppose it seems silly to you, doesn't it? Out here horses have a practical function."

"Well, yes, they do. But to get these animals to obey you, whatever you ask 'em to do, sure ain't silly."

"I doubt if Mr. Brown would agree with you on that."

"Ethan and I don't always see eye to eye."

"I find that reassuring," she said with a smile.

* * *

True to nature, Charlie nitpicked every detail of the trust agreement. He wanted to act as trustee, which meant only he could approve disbursements from the funds; but eventually Ethan managed to talk some sense into the old man, and it was agreed that Ethan would act as co-trustee with Annette. A resolution that said a lot about the attorney's gift for gentle persuasion, as well as his trustworthiness, and gave Annette cause to like him, in spite of herself. She may have found him stubborn, bigoted, and lacking in imagination, but she never questioned his integrity. Finally, his initial offer for the property was so generous that Annette didn't have the heart to negotiate, and the deal was settled, signed and notarized.

The day before she and Eliana were to leave, Nell Harshaw called and invited Charlie to dinner, "to get him out of your hair," she confided to Annette over the phone. "Give you a little time to yourself before you go."

As soon as Charlie's car pulled out of the driveway that evening, Eliana, who had been watching through the curtains, raced through the house to the back room where her mother was packing.

"Maman, il est parti!"

Annette threw back her head and smiled with relief.

"Put on some music, precious."

* * *

They ate dinner that evening in the sewing room. They spread a tablecloth on the floor and made a picnic with fried eggs and bacon and biscuits that Annette had whipped up from some Bisquick in the cupboard. They drank 7Up out of crystal glasses Annette had sent her parents for their fortieth wedding anniversary and pretended it was champagne. They set a place and filled a third glass for Emma, and Annette sneaked sips from it, pretending it was her mother's spirit who was dining with them. They put on all her mother's old LPs, all the great divas, recordings of Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, and they played games. In short, they had their own little wake.

After dinner they worked on the puppet figures Eliana was making from cutouts in a coloring book, and so intent were they on their play and their singing (Annette was listening to Violetta's heart-wrenching plea in
La Traviata
for the third time, much to Eliana's annoyance), they didn't hear Charlie come back until their door opened and they looked up to see him glaring at them from the doorway.

"I'm going to bed now. Keep it down, will you?" he said. His voice was tight.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't know you were home." Annette quickly rose and turned off the old record player. "How was your dinner?"

"I didn't eat much. Nell isn't the best cook in the world."

"I can fry you some bacon and eggs."

"I'm not hungry." He hesitated in the doorway. There was such unhappiness in his eyes and it broke her heart.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Of course I'm not okay."

"Did you take your pills?"

"Yeah."

He started to shut the door.

"Dad?"

"What?"

"I'd like to take some of these recordings with me. Would you mind?"

"Don't ask me to make those kind of decisions now. That's not being fair."

"But you never listen to this music."

Charlie's bloodshot eyes burned with tired rage. "They're still her things and she left all her worldly possessions to me. After I'm dead you can do as you damn well please with them."

He turned and slammed the door.

She and Eliana sat still for a moment, hearing nothing but the pinched timbre of his voice echoing in the air. Then, their gaiety wilted, they wordlessly picked up their clutter and got ready for bed.

Annette sat on the edge of the daybed and leaned down to kiss her daughter good night.

"
Maman,
I'm going to miss Mike."

"Mike?"

"Big Mike!"

The horse. Of course. Annette smoothed back her child's soft hair.

"What about the ponies you ride at home?"

"Oh, they're nothing like Big Mike. I've never ridden a pony like him before. He does everything I ask him to do and if I make a mistake he doesn't get upset with me. He's—" She broke off with a huge yawn.

"Honey, you can tell me all about Big Mike in the morning. It's time to go to sleep now."

"Okay."

Annette kissed her again and stood.

Eliana said, "I don't think it would be so bad to live here. As long as we didn't live with Grandpa. Then we could have a dog, or two dogs, and I could ride Big Mike every day. Maybe Jer would let—"

"Honey, we're not going to live here. It's out of the question."

"I think it'd be fun."

"Wouldn't you miss your friends?"

After a pause Eliana answered, "My real friends are you and the horses."

Chapter 9

A storm came through Cottonwood Falls that night, unleashing its fury upon the plains. A Kansas storm is quite a different thing from the gentle rains that wash down the gray stone facades of Paris each winter. Carried by fierce winds, the rain slashes at the flesh like cold knives; it whips under umbrellas (which are of no goodly use; most Chase Countians never carry them) and climbs inside windbreakers and jackets, circulating with such ingenious mobility that one might think the powers of gravity momentarily suspended. Just after nightfall the temperature dropped below freezing, and on came a sudden rush of hail, pummeling the earth with dull thuds, clattering against glass and metal with a ferocity that sent all living creatures flinching and cowering into shelter. After the hail the wind returned, and lightning and thunder rocked the hills late into the night.

Annette crawled into bed with Eliana, but the child slept through it all. As Annette lay there listening to the storm, her eyes remained fixed on the piano, and sometime very late, well after midnight, she heard once again that achingly beautiful music she had heard her first night there. This time the strange harmonies elicited no surprise and little curiosity, for deep in her unconscious, where intimations of immortality reside, that place from which she drew those nameless forces that lent genius to her work, she knew what she was hearing. Nearing the mysterious oblivion of sleep, her powers of critical thought at a low ebb, angels ushered the music into her soul. As she slept, it brought her the message it had been sent to bear.

Annette awoke at dawn and lay there quietly with an arm around her sleeping daughter. She was going home today and the idea filled her with relief. In less than twenty-four hours she would be stepping off the plane in Paris, and already she longed for the gentle, dreary gloom of its gray skies. The winters she had often bemoaned, with relentless clouds hanging low, penetrated only by a wan chilled light from dawn to dusk, now appealed to her with all the charm of a flawed but great lover.

She found her father in the dimly lit kitchen preparing his breakfast. He had slept poorly because of the storm and was ill humored and not to be tampered with. Annette couldn't bear any more of his sour moods, thought she'd rather do without breakfast than be in the same room with him, so she patted him on the shoulder and went off to bathe and dress. Then she awoke Eliana and herded her through her morning routine. Charlie, still in his bathrobe, sat in his lounge chair reading the newspaper until Annette tactfully reminded him that they needed to leave shortly. As Charlie folded up his papers and neatly rearranged them in a pile next to his chair, Annette noticed how slight his shoulders seemed. He had always been sensitive about his shoulders. She touched him gently on the arm.

"Dad?" she asked softly.

He looked up. His eyes were rimmed in red.

"I won't be long," he said. He patted her hand, then shuffled off to his room.

Despite all her efforts, they were late getting out of the house. Eliana ran off to say good-bye to Bubba, the neighbor's dog, and came back with her shoes caked in mud. The shoes had to be removed and washed, and Annette had to bring the suitcase back inside and dig through it for clean tights. Meanwhile, Charlie insisted on taking an important long-distance call from a member of the board of the Kansas Conference of Methodist Churches. All of which made Annette so anxious she went outside and lit a cigarette. Now, at the moment of her departure, she could see the place with a more benevolent eye. As she leaned against Charlie's old Buick, shivering in the cold and smoking, she looked around, thinking it really was a very picturesque town. Much prettier than the one she had grown up in. There was a slight air of distinction about the place, owing in part to the fact that it had been the county seat back when that meant something to the growing population of immigrants. An imposing slate-roofed Victorian courthouse made from huge limestone blocks stood at the top of Main Street, which consisted of two blocks of the functional and the whimsical, notably a hardware store, a coffee shop, a single-pump corner gas station, a small independent grocery store (Cottonwood Falls boasted no fast-food restaurants or chain franchises), an ice cream parlor with a gazebo in its courtyard (Nell said they had just installed an espresso machine that summer), an art gallery owned by a local landscape artist (her daughter owned the ice cream parlor) and a 1930s movie house that opened only during the summer and school holidays. The street dead-ended at a park looking out over the Cottonwood River and the falls from which the town took its name. Behind the courthouse spread the residential properties. Though none of the houses was grandiose, many were authentic turn-of-the-century Victorian and maintained proudly by their families. The people who lived in Cottonwood Falls manifested a particular fondness for the town; unlike Strong City just opposite them on the river, which had stolen the county seat when it won the battle for the railway line, the town was not loaded with conveniences. What it did have was charm, although she was pretty sure the Chase Countians never thought of it in that light.