Home by Nightfall (5 page)

Christophe did his best to flex his bad leg beneath the seat ahead of him on the train. Sitting for long periods made it ache more than usual, and the trip to Oregon had been nothing but a long ride. He watched from the window as trees and ferns that grew close to the railroad tracks gave way to broad pastureland and berry fields cradled by tall buttes and cool, dark stands of timber. Herds of fat, sleek dairy cows that grazed in meadows lifted curious heads to look at his train pass, grinding their cuds with jaws that moved from side to side. In the distance, a
V
formation of geese crossed the blue sky, directed by instinct to a warmer southern climate. Late afternoon sunlight, rich and mellow as butter, gilded everything in his view.

The pastoral scene bore no resemblance to the village near Véronique’s farm. Nothing he had seen in America looked like the scarred French countryside he was used to. He was from this place, he’d been told. He had grown up here, had married the pretty woman in the photograph Véronique had given him, and as far as anyone knew, he’d never lived anywhere else until he’d joined the army.

But Christophe, uneasy in the stiff collar and ill-fitting suit he’d been given, found nothing comforting about it. It was as alien as his real name—Riley John Braddock. The meaningless identity
had been forced upon him in General Hospital No. 3, a military hospital in Plattsville, New York. When he’d asked a nurse to call him Christophe, she had pursed her lips so hard they had turned white and she’d told him that he must stop that nonsense immediately. There was no such person as Christophe. He was Riley Braddock. Her brittle, righteous attitude, as starched as her uniform, had infuriated him, and he’d lashed out in French with the first phrase that had come to him.

“Chèvre têtue! Je m’appelle Christophe!”

The nurse’s lips had disappeared completely by then, rolled inward to leave a tight, bloodless crease across her face. She’d spun on her heel and marched away, apparently to find out exactly what he had said.

Learning that he’d declared her a stubborn goat, she returned with an officer who forbade Christophe from speaking French. He was not French, goddamn it, the strident, mustachioed captain had barked, looming over his hospital bed, and
this
was America. His name was Riley Braddock, he was an American, and Americans spoke English.

Not Chinese, not Icelandic, not French.

English.

As the train rounded a bend, a small town appeared in the distance and the conductor announced their approach to Powell Creek. Chugging and squealing along rails that gleamed silver-blue, the train slowed to deliver him to a family of strangers, and Christophe again wished to God that John Bennett and Poppy Weidler, those meddling Red Cross workers, had never found him. He cursed the day he’d spoken with them—they’d told the army he was there, and now he was
here
. Although his injuries still ached, especially when the weather changed, he’d had a measure of peace on Véronique’s small plot on the other side of the
Atlantic. There, it had not mattered that his memory had abandoned him.

Since leaving her, he was reminded of it every day, and he felt lost, inadequate.
L’étrangeté
had become a malevolent shadow that followed him, ready to jump out and overtake him at any moment, inopportune or private. He glanced down and saw that his hand clenched and opened, clenched and opened on his knee. Glancing around to see if anyone had noticed the gesture, he made a conscious effort to open his fist and relax the muscles.

“Powell Creek! Powell Creek Station!” the conductor blared again.

A few of the passengers in his car began gathering their belongings and brushing at the wrinkles in their clothes. The sum of Christophe’s worldly goods was packed in a small suitcase that he kept at his feet. He turned to grab the cane hooked over the back of his seat, a practical piece of oak that had also been issued at the hospital, along with his suit, two changes of underwear, and a few other utilitarian items.

A bubble of anticipation and fear swelled in his chest, one that seemed familiar for no reason he could identify. He stumped into the narrow aisle, blending with the flow of people working their way toward the door. Though he did his best to avoid hitting anyone in the leg with his cane, the woman ahead of him wearing a large, ugly hat turned to give him a severe look, and he knew he’d failed. He mumbled an apology and shuffled down the steps to the platform.

His palms were already slick with perspiration.

Around him, passengers, station workers, and people meeting the train all milled together, pausing in eddies, then flowed away. He watched them, wondering what to do next.

“Riley!”

“Riley Braddock, over here!”

He turned toward the sound of the name and saw a small group surging forward, their faces alight with a baffling joy. There was a tall man about his own age with sandy, chin-length hair, an old one almost as crippled as he himself was, a couple of boys, and a blonde woman with shining green eyes. Another woman with them hung back a bit. She had long, dark ringlets, a fine, graceful jaw, and eyes that watched him with the same wariness he felt. He recognized her from the photograph in his pocket.

They descended upon him and pulled his suitcase out of his fingers as they reached to shake his hand, clap him on the back, embrace him, all talking at once.

“By God, boy, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the old man said, his voice quivering. He pounded Christophe’s shoulder with a twisted hand and gave a tremendous wet sniff.

“This is a great day—I got my brother back! Your room is just the way you left it.”

“Wait till we tell the kids at school about
this
! Nobody’s got a story as good as this one.”

“Oh, Riley, welcome home. We’re so grateful to have—”

Panicked and overwhelmed, his breath coming fast, Christophe jerked away and stumbled backward several steps to stare at them. He leaned heavily on his cane. They gaped at him as he watched them, and a chasm of silence and space opened between them.

At last, the blonde woman, her brow wrinkled with obvious concern, moved a bit closer. “Riley, how much of this—of us—do you remember?”

He hesitated and looked at each expectant, stunned face. “The woman who saved me from a shelled ambulance in France, she called me Christophe. That is the only name I’ve known. At
least until the Red Cross found me.”
Damn them
, he wanted to add. Then he returned his gaze to the dark-haired woman, curious. “I’ve seen your picture,” he said to her. He reached into his coat pocket for the photograph and looked at it. He showed it to her, smiling tentatively. “You—I guess I’m married to you…Your name is Susannah?”

The woman in question put the fingertips of both hands to her mouth and stared at him with wide, horror-stricken eyes. “Ohhhh.” It sounded like an exhale.

He shifted his weight off his bad leg, drew a deep breath, and glanced at the platform beneath his feet. “I know none of you,” he said. Looking up at the station and the forested butte in the distance, he added, “I don’t know this place.”

The boys—were they his sons?—backed away as if he were a goblin, fear in their faces.

“I’m Jessica Layton Braddock, your sister-in-law. I’m married to your brother, Cole. We all went to school together.” The blonde woman gestured at the rugged, sandy-haired man and stepped aside to let a porter pass with a luggage cart. “These two boys are Joshua and Wade—”

The old man piped up, his expression a combination of impatience and thin indignation. “
Kree-stoff!
Sweet weepin’ Jesus, I’m not calling you some hoity-toity foreign moniker. How can you not remember your own kin? Your own name? You’re the seed of my loins—”

Christophe took another step back.

“Shaw, you’re not helping matters,” Jessica interrupted, rolling her eyes.

“Pop, damn it, be quiet,” Cole snapped and stepped in front of his father. He resettled his hat on his head. “Look, this is no place to talk about anything. Let’s just go back to the farm and
we’ll sort it out. Somehow. It’s a shock for everyone.” He picked up Christophe’s suitcase and inclined his head toward a Ford truck parked near the depot.

Christophe sighed and followed.

• • •

Susannah, clumsy and nervous and holding a knife, sat at the big table in the kitchen peeling potatoes and carrots. She’d already cubed rich stew meat that now bubbled slowly on the stove in a broth fragrant with chopped onions. A double page of newspaper was spread out on the tabletop to catch the thin spirals she produced. Probably no one was hungry, but they had to eat and the job gave her something to do. She’d already cut herself once and had bound up the wound with a strip of old sheeting. Cole had shown Riley to his room upstairs and left him there. Then he and the rest of the family gathered in the dining room to hash over this dilemma. They spoke in hushed, indistinct voices that floated to her when the breeze shifted through the open door, with Shaw’s louder than the rest. The boys, she supposed, were with Tanner.

During the week before Riley came home, it had been decided that they wouldn’t tell him about her remarriage until he had a chance to settle in. For the time being, Tanner was sharing a room with Josh and Wade. But none of them had anticipated that Riley’s memory would be as blank and featureless as new snowfall upon a field. In fact, this Riley hadn’t even met Tanner yet.

Those few moments they’d spent together had felt so awkward, she hadn’t attempted to actually engage him in conversation. She wasn’t sure what to say.

When he’d first emerged from the train clutching a cane, his lanky frame thinner than she’d ever seen it, her heart had twisted in her chest. He walked with a limp that was worse than Shaw’s. Except for the shiny pink scar that creased his temple and disappeared into his hairline, he looked like the husband she remembered. The slightly aquiline nose, broad brow, and expressive hazel eyes, perhaps the same smile, although she’d seen only a glimpse of it. She’d almost leaped forward to throw her arms around him. Yet he was changed enough to make him a complete stranger, and that had stopped her. Even his voice and manner of speaking, his choice of words, were different. There had been just the briefest glimmer of recognition in his eyes when he’d looked at her, and that had been simply because of the photograph he carried.

It had been another man in another life who had fired a spark in her almost every time she’d seen him. They had barely been able to pass each other in a hallway without touching, without an underlying current arcing between them. Anytime she had looked out the kitchen window, she’d automatically sought his tall leanness and the set of his dark head on his squared shoulders. This Riley—this
Christophe
—was little more than a fragile shell.

“Would you like some help?”

Susannah looked up and saw Jessica standing across the table from her. She’d been so deep in her thoughts she hadn’t heard her approach. “Oh, no, I’m just trying to keep busy and…” She let her voice trail off. And what?

Jessica nodded at her bandaged finger. “Uh-huh. It looks like you’re having a time of it.” Coming around to sit beside her, she reached over and took the paring knife from Susannah, then picked up a carrot and began scraping it. Susannah let her, although she knew that her sister-in-law’s many talents did not
extend to the kitchen. “This is a shock, I know. I don’t think any of us expected Riley to be so amnestic.”

Susannah sent her a quizzical look.

Jess pulled the newspaper closer and sliced off the top of the carrot with a surgeon’s precision. “We didn’t realize how much of his memory was gone.”

She nodded, comprehending now. “Yes, just about all of it, I guess. He doesn’t even sound the same. His voice is different. His words are different. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

“Not in my practice here. Since the influenza epidemic passed, I mostly get pregnancies, rheumatism, sore throats, the occasional appendicitis, earaches, that sort of thing. Even when I worked in New York, most of my patients were indigent women and children. A public health physician doesn’t see much shell shock.” She tipped her a wry look, and a sun shaft from the window snagged on the wheat-gold strands in her hair. “Not the kind caused by war, anyway. But I’ve been reading about it in medical journals. After two years, I would have expected at least a little of Riley’s memory to return.”

“The doctors at the army hospital thought he would do better here.”

“He might. But some men apparently have their pasts, well, erased, like words from a chalkboard. Some men like him.”

“Is there something we should do? To help, I mean?” She sat with her hands in her apron-covered lap, palms up.

“Well, for one thing, we’re going to have to convince Shaw that Riley isn’t behaving this way just to spite him.” The old man seemed to have taken it as a personal insult that his son didn’t remember him.

Susannah raised her brows and heaved an exasperated sigh. “That’s a tall order. He’s as hard-headed as a ball-peen hammer.”
Jessica let out a choked laugh. “But—do we have to call him by that name? Christopher—Christophe, whatever he said?”

Jess lifted a shoulder. “I don’t think so. I’ll do some research about his condition, though. I’ve heard of a doctor in Portland who’s had some success treating shell shock patients. I’ll see what I can find out.”

Just then, Susannah heard familiar footfalls on the porch steps, and she looked up to see Tanner pull open the kitchen screen door. He had not gone to the train with the rest of them, and she hadn’t seen him since they returned.

Jessica glanced at him, then at Susannah. “Um, well, I guess I’ll see what they’re up to in the dining room.” She wiped her hands on a towel that hung from the back of a chair. Then she left, and Susannah waited until she was gone before she spoke.

“Where have you been keeping yourself?” she asked Tanner.

He pulled out a chair across the table and sat down, idly reaching for an unpeeled potato. “There was work to do.” He rolled the almost-round tuber between his hands. He smelled of horses and hay, scents she had always liked. His expression was carefully blank. She’d grown accustomed to the trait but sometimes found it frustrating. He was very good at hiding his thoughts. He wanted to say something else, though. She could tell.