Home by Nightfall (14 page)

“You’re welcome to use the apartment upstairs, Doctor, if you’d like. It’s just across the hall from the patient room. I’ll be going home at the end of the day. There’s a café across the street, and if you tell Mae Rumsteadt, the owner, that you need a special diet for Riley, I know she’ll help with that.”

“Thank you very much. I’d like that. I’ll also be able to keep a closer eye on Mr. Braddock.”

• • •

Dr. Carmichael stayed for three days to work with Riley. Susannah had thought his enthusiasm for Riley’s recovery was a bit too optimistic. But the fourth day after his hypnosis treatment, Riley came down the stairs in Jessica’s clinic. She heard his footsteps and went to meet him. He was bathed, combed, and dressed in a pale-blue band-collar shirt and black wool pants. His face looked haggard but she suspected that hers did too.

She had come into town with Jess to see him, if he would agree to it. Now, except for the limp and his cane, at first glance she would have sworn this was the man she’d married, the husband she’d known before the war. Tentatively, she smiled at him, so glad to see him without that haunted look in his eyes that had lurked there since the day he’d arrived in Powell Springs. Until yesterday, he’d seemed like someone caught in a twilight between sleep and wakefulness, when all the demons come out.

He gave her a small smile in return.

“How are you feeling, Riley?” Oddly self-conscious, she smoothed her hands over her skirt and folded her arms across her chest.

His shrug was rueful. “A little better now. Still a stranger but one with a better memory. Dr. Carmichael said that my past will become clearer with time. Right now, it’s like remembering a dream—vivid, but not exactly real.”

She looked up into his face, so familiar to her, if a bit careworn, a bit older. And of course, there was that scar on his temple that was still pink after two years. What must he have looked like when he was first injured? “I can’t imagine what a strange feeling it must be. I—I want to apologize again for not explaining everything to you when you came home. We just weren’t sure—”

He held up a hand. “I know, and maybe you were right. But we can’t change that. We can only go on from here. And I guess I have some apologizing to do myself for what happened at Tilly’s.”

Susannah wondered where going “on from here” would lead them. “I had Granny Mae send over breakfast for you. I’ve been keeping it warm on Jessica’s stove in the back. She’s out on a house call—old Mr. Matthews’s arthritis has pretty much left him housebound.”

“Sure. Breakfast.”

She led the way to the back of the office where Jess had a worktable and her surgery. His memory might have returned but his gait was the same. She could hear him behind her. “Dr. Carmichael went down to the depot to buy his ticket back to Portland. Here, come and sit down.” She took the plates from the stove and put them on a tray with silver and a napkin. “There’s oatmeal and toast, some canned peaches, and coffee.”

The fragrance of the meal was tempting to Riley. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a decent meal since that day in Tilly’s. He sat on the stool she pointed to and let Susannah serve him. He didn’t want the role of invalid, but the past few days had been exhausting. The hangover alone from the whiskey he’d drunk in the blacksmith shop could have brought a horse to its knees. He’d had nothing stronger than wine in the last few years, and then only when Véronique could get it. But at Tilly’s when that idiot drunk Winks Lamont had stumbled in and shot off his mouth, it felt as if an electrical storm had erupted in his head. Learning that he was not married to Susannah when he’d believed he was had turned his thoughts into incoherent chaos. And he realized now, the reeking mess that was Winks had seemed familiar because that was what life in the trenches had smelled like: mildew, dirty clothes, unwashed bodies, rot, manure, death.

“You were wearing a blue dress the night I met you at the grange dance. I remember it had a row of ruffles or something around the neck.”

Susannah lowered herself into a hard wooden chair that stood against the wall and stared at him. “You remember
that
?”

He smiled. “Yes, for some reason. I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. I think you’d had some hard times.”

She raised her brows and looked at a knob on a drawer. “I had. My brother and father were killed in a logging accident in the woods.”

“A steam donkey exploded and they were standing too close.”

“That’s right, too!” she said, now truly amazed. “Maybe Dr. Carmichael is right. He said the mind tucks away all sorts of memories in a kind of mental storage.”

“It’s all I can remember about your past.”

“Still, that’s pretty surprising.”

“Tell me more about yourself.” He took a bite of toast.

She sighed quietly. “I was twelve when that happened. I still had my mother but we weren’t very close, and I couldn’t begin to fill the empty places they left for her. She never said anything, but I felt her resentment in a hundred little ways.
Why couldn’t it have been you instead of them?
At least that’s how it felt to me. We had no way to pay the mortgage on our property so we went to live with my aunt and uncle. They had to feed and clothe us, and they weren’t too happy about that.”

“I don’t think I ever met any of them.”

“No, you didn’t. Once I graduated from high school, it was decided that I should move to Powell Springs and find work. Since it was ten miles away, I couldn’t travel back and forth and the family all urged me to find a place here to live. I guess you
could say I was invited to leave. So I got a room at Mrs. Donaldson’s boarding house and went to work at Bright’s Grocery.”

“They weren’t at our wedding.”

Susannah shook her head. “No, but I invited them all.”

“Did you ever hear from them again?”

She leaned back in the chair. “During the influenza epidemic, I got a letter from one of my cousins saying that my mother had died. I hadn’t seen her in years. Anyway, I didn’t find out about it until after the funeral. Things were pretty hectic during those months. Every town was busy either trying to stay alive or tending the dying.”

“So because you have no family of your own, you dote on Pop. I do remember that.”

She hesitated. “Yes, but he’s become a lot more, well, difficult with age.” Shrugging, she went on, “Maybe he was always that way and I was able to overlook it. Now I’m not so good at it.”

Just as he was about to put his spoon into the oatmeal, the bell above the front door rang and someone walked in.

“I’ll see who that is,” Susannah said, heading toward the waiting room.

It was Shaw. Riley sighed.

“I thought you were at home,” he heard her say.

“I know you people try to keep me in the dark about things, but I heard all about Riley’s to-do at Tilly’s. Now Mae tells me some out-of-town doc in a fancy suit and spit-shined shoes has her cooking for him. I guess the doctor gal couldn’t handle it.”

“Dr. Carmichael is a specialist, Shaw. He deals with problems like Riley’s.”

He thumped in, stooped and stiff, and gave Riley a once-over. “You don’t look any worse for wear.” Behind him, Susannah couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

“Hi, Pop.”

The old man’s eyebrows rose. “So—you remember me now, eh?”

“More than I did before.”

“Sure! You wouldn’t forget your own father. I taught you boys everything you know about horses and ranching, all kinds of stuff. I hear you scared the pee outta Winks.” He cackled. “Damn, I would have paid money to see that.”

Riley frowned at him. Had he always been this thoughtless and dense? Or was he just getting addled? He couldn’t remember his father all that well yet.

“It was a lousy day for me,” Riley said and gave him a bitter look. “I learned from the town drunk that the woman I thought was my wife is not. I wouldn’t wish that on a person in my position.” He closed his eyes for a moment as another fragment of a memory floated to the surface of his consciousness. “In fact, I seem to remember that I could have gotten out of going to war altogether because of the contract we had to send horses to the army, but you wanted me to go. You wanted Cole to go, too.”

Shaw scowled, deepening the furrows on his creased face, and he shifted from one foot to another. Susannah followed this exchange with an expression of rapt attention. “Well, everybody was enlisting—hell, the boys all lined up to buy train tickets to Portland so they could go. You and your brother both wanted to. It was our duty to send troops to Europe.
Everybody
was going,” he said, as if that explained it all.

“Maybe. But this”—he tapped the scar on his temple—”this was the result. And you would have paid money to see the village idiot tell me I’m not married when I thought I was?”

“Heh-heh, it was just a turn of phrase, boy. I didn’t mean any harm by it. Winks is a rummy old windbag. We all know that.”

“It seems to be a common condition around here.”

Susannah looked at him with a cross between admiration and astonishment.

Shaw pointed a crooked, arthritic finger at him and scowled. “Now, look, boy, you keep in mind who you’re talkin’ to. Just because you’re a war hero and all don’t give you the right to sass your father. You’re still one of the junior members of this family, and I ain’t about to put up with guff from you. Why, I won’t take it from any man, so don’t you go gettin’ ahead of yourself.” He shifted his aim to Susannah. “That goes for you, too, sister. I’ll be at Tilly’s if anyone wants to find me.”

He turned and stumped his way out. Susannah’s hands were clenched into tight fists at her sides, her arms straight and stiff as she watched him go.

“Oh, that man!” she said after the door closed.

Riley looked at the oatmeal in front of him. The top had dried out, and it looked crusty and unappetizing. He pushed it away and replied, “He’s a true gem, isn’t he?”

Carmichael’s mental mumbo jumbo had actually helped, but Riley’s memory was still full of holes. Those things he could remember were kind of hazy and partially formed, and he still had trouble with his short-term recollection. Periods of time, a few minutes, a few hours, would pass and he would realize he didn’t know what had happened. This occurred whether or not he’d been drinking.

Some things were much clearer, though. His war experience, the atrocities he had seen and things he had done, which had slumbered in relative isolation in a corner of his mind—except for episodes of The Strangeness—were now more prominent. And there were still the dreams, jumbled, vivid, frightening. His hands trembled at times for no reason and overwhelming fear still dogged him at any given moment, but a drink or two helped that. He’d begun to appreciate the sharp taste of the Canadian whiskey that Cole brought home.

Back at the horse farm, he knew that he used to share his current bedroom with Susannah. He also remembered the feel of her warmth next to him in the night—or under him, in the throes of a passion that sizzled like a branding iron.

And he remembered that he had loved her with equal intensity. That when he was at the desk working on the accounts, he’d
listen for the rustle of her skirts in the hallway or the sound of her footsteps on the flooring.

Now that his memory had improved, and having had the chance to talk to her about some of their shared past, some of his hostility and anger had simmered down. She hadn’t waited very long to remarry, but he could imagine that it might have been lonely here for her. It certainly was for him. Who knew, maybe it might work out between them after all. They could rekindle that warmth and love, and go back to the way things were. It would certainly help to get readjusted to this life if the life were as he’d left it. Her marriage to Grenfell might be only one of convenience for both of them.

One Saturday evening the week after he returned home from Jessica’s office, he was sitting on the base of his spine, deep in the brown leather sofa in the parlor. Grenfell had taken the boys and driven Susannah into town to help the Women’s Library Committee with a bake sale to raise funds for the busy library on Main Street.

Not far from him, his father was creaking back and forth in his rocker. Riley wished he were asleep instead. His snoring was less irritating than his bitching about anything and everything under the sun. Sometimes he could actually block out the sound of the old man’s yammering. Tonight, though, no luck. But when his monologue turned to Susannah, Riley began paying closer attention.

“Y’know, you and your wife had a good thing going before the war. If I was you, I wouldn’t let that Grenfell stand in my way. I always thought there was something shifty about him. Like those kids, for instance—he says he’s their foster father or guardian or something. We’ve never been able to pry it out of him who their
mama is. Wouldn’t surprise me if they were his and she took off and left him with them.”

“Why would he lie about something like that? If they’re his sons, he’d have no reason to hide it.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t much more than a drifter when he came here. Who knows what skeletons are in his closet?”

“I hired him. I remember that much. I wish things could go back to the way they were, but a lot has happened since then. Maybe I don’t have the right to break up their marriage.”