Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
That spike of panic a woman feels when the thought first hits her -- I'm pregnant -- is like no other. Sixteen years after that moment, its echo haunted Jessie Ryder as she drove through the Texas heat, having traveled halfway around the world to see the daughter she'd never met.
She could still remember the terror and wonder of knowing an invisible cluster of cells had changed her life forever, in ways she could not image. Sixteen years and uncounted miles separated her from that day, but the distance was closing fast.
Simon had tried to stop her -- Its madness, Jess, you can't just go dashing off to Texas -- but Simon was wrong. And this wasn't craziest thing she'd ever done, not by a long shot.
For the hundredth time since flinging her belongings into a bag in an Auckland hotel room, Jessie wondered what else she could have done. There was no script for this, no instruction manual for putting the broken pieces of a life back together.
There was only the homing instinct, the tendency of the wounded animal to seek safe haven. And then there was the unbearable urge, long buried but never quite forgotten, to see the child she had given away at birth to the only person on the planet she trusted -- Luz, her sister.
The front tire rippled over a line of yellow discs marking the center of the highway. Jessie's driving days were numbered, but a stubborn streak of independence, combined with a sense of desperation, made her defiant. She slowed, checked the rearview mirror -- still getting used to driving American cars, on the right side of the road -- and pulled off. She was lost again.
The glint of the sun over the jagged silhouette of the hills blinded her briefly, and she flipped down the visor. Grabbing the map, she studied the route highlighted by the counter clerk at Alamo Rent-a-Car. Southwest along the interstate to exit 135-A, State Highway 290 to Farm-to-Market Route 1486, following the little red thread of road to a place few folks had heard of and even fewer were inclined to visit.
Jessie had followed the directions. Or had she? It was hard to tell, and it had been so long since she'd traveled these forgotten country roads. As she traced a finger over the route, a movement on the road caught her eye. An armadillo.
She usually only encountered them as roadkill, as though they'd been born that way, with their little dinosaur feet pointed skyward. And yet here was one, waddling across her path like something out of a Steinbeck novel. An omen? A harbinger of doom? Or just another Texas speed bump? She watched the creature wander to the other side of the road and disappear into the low thicket of chaparral.
An oncoming car crested the steep hill ahead of her. She squinted at the approaching vehicle. A pickup truck, of course. What else did you find out here? As it slowed and then stopped on the opposite shoulder, she felt a slick thrill of danger. She was completely alone, lost in the middle of Texas, miles from civilization.
The window rolled down. Shading her eyes against the glare, she could make out only the outline of the driver -- big shoulders, baseball cap -- and, incongruously, a child's safety seat on the passenger side. A fishing rod lay across the gun rack.
"Everything all right, ma'am?" he asked. She couldn't get a good look at his face with the sun in her eyes, but that Texas drawl somehow put her at ease, evoking faint memories of lazy days and neighborly smiles.
"I'm headed for Edenville," she said. "But I think I'm lost." "You're almost there," he said, jerking his thumb in the direction he'd come from. "This is the right road. You just haven't gone enough."
"Thanks."
"No problem, ma'am. You take care now." The pickup truck backfiring as it headed in the opposite direction.
You take care now. The friendly throwaway admonition lingered back onto the road. She fiddled with the radio, finding mostly news and tears-in-my-beer country music. At last she discovered a decent rock station out of Austin and listened to ZZ Topp, turned up loud. She hoped the music might drown out her thoughts and maybe even her fears.
Austin's bedroom communities, with names like Saddlebrook Acres and Rockhurst Estates, were miles behind her, giving way to places with folksier appellations like Two-Dog Ranch. She passed a Texaco station with a hand-lettered sign: We Sell Gas To Anyone In a Glass Container.
Deep in the hill country, late afternoon settled in. The dark pockets of shadows hidden within the striated sandstone hills were not to be trusted. The waddling armadillo had reminded her that, at any moment, a jackrabbit or mule deer could leap out onto the road. She would hate to hit an animal. She didn't even want to hit a dead one, she realized, swerving to avoid a battered carcass that had not yet been desiccated into a grotesque kite of flattened skin.
The trip felt much longer than she remembered. Of course, years back, she couldn't wait to leave; now she couldn't wait to get home. Soon she saw it, the weather beaten Welcome To Edenville sign with its faded illustration of a peach orchard. Smaller signs sprouted in the field at its feet: The Halfway Baptist Church. Home of the Fighting Serpents. Lions Club meets on the third Saturday each month.
The tree-shaded town had the eerie familiarity of a half-remembered dream. Hunched-together storefronts lined the main square, which was organized around a blocky, century-old courthouse. Adam's Ribs B-B-Q and Eve's Garden Shoppe still stood side-by-side across from Roscoe's Hay and Feed and an exhausted Schott's discount outlet. Despite the addition of the Celestial Cyber Café, the place retained its midcentury, slow-moving character, a town content to lag behind while time sped past like traffic on the interstate bypass.
Right out of high school, Jessie had left for college. She'd loved Austin's urban bustle and suburban sprawl, its population of politicians, intellectuals, Goths, Mexicans, criminals and rednecks. Now she was back in the small town filled with everything she'd left behind, whether she liked it or not.
Despite the passage of time, she knew her way now. Five more miles along a narrow lane, past the preternaturally green Woodcreek golf course and driving range, and then a right turn onto the lake road.
She rolled down all four windows of the car and took a deep breath. She could smell the lake before she saw it -- mesquite and cedar and the cleansing scent of air blown across fresh water. One of the few cold, spring-fed lakes in Texas, Eagle Lake was bluer than autumn twilight.
Areas of rounded rock, with hawthorn shrubs blooming in the cracks, plunged down to touch the water. The lake itself was a vast mirror with a forest fringe of the most extraordinary trees in the state. They called them the lost maples of Eagle Lake because everyone knew this particular type of tree didn't rightly belong in Texas. Maples grew in the long, frozen sleep of winter found only in the woods up north, not the unpredictable fits and starts of brutal cold and blistering heat of the Texas hill country. And yet here they thrived, non-natives huddled together beside a picture-book lake.
Legends about the maples abounded. Indian lore held that they were the souls of long-dead ancestors from the North. Others claimed a settler had planted them for his Yankee bride to remind her of the New England autumns she missed so desperately. But all anybody really knew was that the trees were transplanted strangers that didn't belong, yet managed to flourish here anyway, bursting into hectic color after a scorching summer had sucked the pigment from everything else.
Each autumn, the maples blazed brighter than any forest fire, in colors so intense they made your eyes smart: magenta, gold, deep orange, ocher, burnt umber. For two weeks every fall, the Farm-to-Market road was clogged with tourists who drove out to Lakeside County Park to take pictures of their kids skipping stones on leaf-strewn water or climbing high in those God-painted branches.
As Jessie drew nearer to her destination, she tried to remember the foliage reached its peak. Early November, she recalled. Homecoming season.
Chapter 2
The road surface changed to a jolting bed of caliche and crushed rock. Jessie clutched the steering wheel hard and concentrated. She had talked the Alamo guy into renting her the Ford Fiesta based on an international driver's license. She'd convinced herself that, once she cleared the bustle and sprawl of Austin's tangled highways and headed out on the open country roads, she was a danger only to herself and the occasional hapless armadillo. A reckless impulse had compelled her to make this trip, and driving a car was one of many independent options she was about to give up. But not yet. Besides, she was almost there. A flurry of nerves stirred in her gut. She had come to fill a need as deep as Eagle Lake, yet she was terrified of hurting people she had already hurt.
She counted the hills to the old place on the lake: one, two and three gentle rises on a slow-motion roller coaster. At the turnoff, she flexed her hands on the steering wheel, drew a nervous breath redolent of hill country dust and slowly moved forward, entering the property through the gate beside a huge, cloven monolith of sandstone. Affixed to it was an old wrought iron sign: Broken Rock. As the story went, her granddad had built the place before there was a road leading to it, and he always told folks to turn at broken rock. The name stuck and was now used to designate the old place on the lake.
The property had been handed down to Jessie's father, a remote and polite gentleman who had signed it over to her mother in the divorce settlement nearly three decades earlier. Glenny Ryder had kept only a few things from that first marriage. Her name -- it was already engraved on a number of golf trophies -- the lake property and her two daughters.
Jessie's childhood was like a colorful dream, filled with glaring sunlight, emerald fairways and long swift trips on the open highway, the world speeding by through the distorted rectangle of a of the car window. The soundtrack of that childhood consisted of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Cat Stevens and James Taylor, crooning from the car radio between ads for Noxema and charcoal-filter Tarrytons.
After their daddy left, Jessie got the backseat of the 1964 Rambler all to herself, so she couldn't say she was all that sorry to see him go. Luz had cried and cried, but Jessie didn't remember crying. She just remembered the endless road.
Their lives were defined by their mother's tour schedule. When they stayed in a motel, there was always a king and a cot. Glenny took the cot and put Luz and Jessie in the bed. To this day, sleeping with Luz, knowing she was there in the bed next to her, was one of Jessie's most vivid memories.
After the divorce, Glenny had treated the lake house and out-buildings like a way station while she chased prizes that never lasted or brought her what she sought. Too many years and three husbands later, she had won only a handful of major titles. But she always did just well enough to stay on the tour, just well enough to pay her expenses, just well enough to keep her gone.
From a distance, the property appeared to be as Jessie remembered it. With a lurch of bittersweet emotion, she recognized the boxy, two-storey main house, the garage and boathouse, the dirt path winding through the woods to the three guest cabins they used to rent out to tourists. When they were girls, Luz and Jessie earned pocket money by changing beds and towels for the fishermen who came for the weekend.
Yet as she drew closer, she noticed differences. Unfamiliar vehicles -- a dusty minivan and a Honda Civic parked under the car port. Gumball-colored toys littered the front path. She spotted a doghouse with the unlikely name Beaver painted over the opening. A partial flat of purple asters lay unplanted in the yard; a half-caned chair stood on the porch. Someone's partially-eaten apple lay on the ground, swarming with fire ants. The place had an air of things left undone; Luz's family had dropped everything as though something had interrupted them.
They were about to be interrupted again. Jessie hadn't dared to call first. She'd been too afraid that she'd talk herself out of coming. Or worse, that she'd promise to visit and then chicken out at the last moment, disappearing as she had fifteen years before, and disappointing everyone -- again. The heartbreak that had sent her running long ago had never healed.
When she got out of the car and slammed the door, a throaty baying erupted. A gangly bluetick hound galloped across the yard, bristling neck hairs contradicted by the friendly swaying of a long tail. Jessie didn't know much about dogs. Because of the way she'd grown up, she'd never owned one. Their gypsy-like existence in the back of their mother's pink Rambler had left room only for the occasional carnival goldfish in a clear plastic bag. One year a white mouse had lived for an entire summer in a Buster Brown shoebox before going AWOL at a motel in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
"You hush," yelled a voice from inside the house.
Jessie's palms were drenched in sweat. She wanted -- needed -- to pray but only the most childish of thoughts streamed out. Please God, get me through this.
The screen door of the porch opened with a creak and shut with a snap. Her sister Luz froze like a pillar of salt at the porch rail. Even in denim cutoffs and a bleach-faded pink T-shirt, Luz appeared formidable, in command.
"Jess . . ." Her whisper lingered over the sibilant sound; then she jumped down the stairs and raced across the yard. "Oh, my God, Jess."
They ran toward each other, arms reaching across time and distance and terrible words until the two sisters clashed in a tangle of limbs. As they embraced, a flood of emotion stole Jessie's breath. She batted back tears as she stepped away, shaken and battered and overwhelmed by bittersweet joy. Luz. Her sister Luz. The years had caused her beauty to soften like an oft-washed quilt. Her face bore the subtle lines of wear and tear. Her vivid red hair was paler in tone now, not so intense. She had borne three children, and it showed; she was rounder than the much younger picture of Luz Jessie had carried in her mind.
"Surprise," she said with forced lightheartedness, then caught a flicker of concern in her sister's eyes. "I should have called first."
Are you kidding? I don't mind," Luz said. "It's fabulous. And it's so you."
Is it: Jessie wondered. Do we even know each other anymore? They'd kept in touch by phone and e-mail, but the sporadic contact was no substitute for being a part of each other's lives. She studied her sister's face, seeing an oddly distorted reflection of herself. Jessie and Luz had the same color hair, a faint saddle of freckles over their noses and eyes, their mother used to say, the color of a Scottish putting green.
A movement caught her eye as someone else came onto the porch -- a tall, slender girl in shorts and a black tank top, with flame red hair and eyes narrowed in curiosity.
Dropping her hands from her sister Jessie gaped. Could this be her daughter, her tiny baby, this tentative young woman who matched her height exactly?
She cast a glance at Luz, whose smile was strained at the edges even as she gave Jessie a gentle shove forward. "Surprise," she whispered echoing Jessie's lighthearted tone.
"Look at you," Jessie said to the girl. Then, with an irony only she understood, she added, "I swear, you're so beautiful, my eyes ache." She opened her arms wide.
For a moment, the girl stared. Frozen with fear, Jessie stared back, then slowly lowered her arms. She sensed but didn't see Luz make a signal to Lila, perhaps in some secret language of semaphores between mothers and daughters.
"Uh, hi," Lila said . . .
Copyright © 2003 Susan Wiggs
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