As Bright as Heaven(88)

Foster lets me out on the corner so that I can make my way quietly and slip unnoticed into the house. I go to the back stoop like usual and I fish the key out of my handbag, and all the while I am wondering how I can somehow trap this lovely lingering feeling inside me. When I step up on the stoop, I nearly trip over a body in the dark.

How dare someone drop off a corpse in the middle of the night? I’m thinking, but then the body moves and my breath catches in my throat.

“Who’s there?” I sound braver than I feel. The last thing I want to do is fight my way past a drunkard or a hobo sleeping on our stoop. Or worse, have to yell for help and wake up the house.

“Willa? Is that you?”

I do not recognize this man’s voice. He raises himself to his knees and then stands. As he does, the sallow light cast by a gas streetlamp a few yards away falls across the top half of his body. The man’s face is vaguely familiar, but I cannot place him.

“Who are you?” I demand.

The man takes a step toward me and is now fully visible. “Willa. It’s me. Jamie Sutcliff.”

For a couple seconds, I just stand there in wordless shock. The last time I saw Jamie Sutcliff, I was eight years old. He had just come home from the war. His brother, Charlie, had died of the flu a few months back and then Jamie had crept off in the half-light of dawn with a duffel over his back without telling anyone—not even his parents—where he was going. He looks the same now, but different. His hair is longer, he seems a mite taller, and he looks more like a man who’s been places. I suppose that’s exactly what he is.

“Willa, what are you doing out here?” he says, worry splashed all over his face.

“What am I doing out here?” I answer. “What are you doing out here?”

“I hitched a ride into town,” he says. “It’s late. My parents’ place is dark, and I didn’t want to wake them by pounding on the door. They don’t know I’m coming. I thought I’d just sleep here on your back stoop until daylight.”

If I hitched my way home after being gone six years, I’d pound on the door of my house—that’s for sure. “You really think your parents would be upset if you woke them up to let you in?” I ask.

He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t want to come home that way. Pounding on the door in the middle of the night.”

“So you’re coming home?”

“Maybe.”

“Why’d you leave in the first place?” I know it’s none of my business, but the question just tosses itself out of my mouth. I suppose it’s because I’ve always wondered. I’d bet lots of people have.

He doesn’t need time to think up an answer. “I had to take care of some things.”

“What things?”

“Things inside me. Broken things.”

We stand there looking at each other for a moment. Jamie must have taken care of whatever was broken inside him, because there he was, on my stoop and only a few steps away from the life he left. I’m one second away from asking him how he did it when he asks me what I’m doing outside at one o’clock in the morning.

“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” I say, the lie coming out fast and smooth, but he just nods like he understands perfectly. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to my father or sisters that I was out for a walk just now,” I add.

“These are not safe times to be on the street in the middle of the night,” he says.

“I didn’t go far.” Not a lie. I had been inside a nice automobile with squeaky leather seats that had just let me out across the street. “And I came back. So I’d appreciate it just the same if you didn’t say anything. I can tell everyone I was getting a drink from the kitchen and heard a noise outside on the back stoop and found you. Please don’t say anything.”

He thinks on it for a second before saying, “All right.”

“Come on in,” I tell him. “Papa wouldn’t want you outside like this when I know you’re here. You can sleep on the sofa in the sitting room.”

It’s cold and damp, and he doesn’t argue.

I unlock the door, and Jamie Sutcliff follows me in. As we step into the mudroom, I ask him if I haven’t changed all that much and that’s how he recognized me so quickly.

“Your eyes are the same,” he says.

I guess our eyes don’t change much from when we were young. Perhaps it’s just how we see things that changes.





CHAPTER 56



Maggie


I know I’ve overslept when I hear a voice downstairs that is deep like Papa’s but does not belong to him. I look at the clock on my night table and am chagrined that it’s after seven, and yet I wonder who has called on us so early in the morning. The two hours that I’d lain awake in the wee hours of the morning—my thoughts in a tumble—had no doubt caused me to sleep past my normal waking time. In the hours before dawn, and while the rest of the house had slept, my brain kept reminding me I had said yes to Palmer.

It had been a week since he asked me to marry him, and I’d finally concluded that being loved by him was surely the most marvelous thing to have happened to me in a very long time. Not only that, but he wanted Alex with us. And while it would be hard to take Alex away from Papa and my sisters, he would at last have the benefits of a typical family with Palmer and me: a father, a mother, and one day, siblings. I would even allow Alex to start calling me Mama if he still wanted to.