Allie's Moon (27 page)

He rolled over on his side and looked at the
empty place beside him lighted by a wedge of moonbeam pouring
through the open door. But as he watched, a long, feminine shadow
fell across the bed. No figure appeared in the entry, and all his
muscles tensed. Jesus, maybe it was Olivia Ford, here to exact some
kind of revenge for exposing her charade.

“
Jeff?” The voice was so tentative it
could have been a breath of night breeze through the willows. But
he recognized it immediately.

Allie came to the doorway dressed in only a
nightgown and her shawl, her hair falling around her like a girl’s.
Jeff was acutely conscious of his nakedness and his state of
arousal that was obvious beneath the sheet. He wasn’t a man given
to personal modesty, and being undressed in front of a woman had
never bothered him. But Allie Ford wasn’t just any woman. He sat
up, hoping the darkness would hide his desire.

“
Allie—are you all right?”

She advanced a step. “Well, I was wondering
if—that is, would it be all right if I sat with you for a
while?”

He couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but
the moonlight gleamed through her thin gown, revealing the shape of
her legs. He wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t have come, that
seeing her like this after his dream, after thinking about her all
day and craving her every night could very well make him forget
what few manners he still possessed. But how could he send her
away? She sounded so vulnerable, so defeated.

“
Uh, sure, Allie. I’m sorry I’m not
dressed for callers.” He rearranged the sheet around him and put
his pillow behind his back. Then he lit the kerosene lantern that
sat on the window sill next to him. The small room sprang to light
and shadow.

Allie stepped inside and perched on an old
chair he’d taken from the barn and put next to the bed. The faint,
sweet fragrance of lavender seemed to rise from the folds of her
gown as it would rise from a field planted with the flowers.

“
It’s a long night for you, isn’t
it?”

She sighed, folding and unfolding her hands
in her lap. “Yes, and it’s not even ten o’clock yet. I feel as
if . . . as if someone pulled the floor out
from under me. Everything is topsy-turvy. Do you know what I
mean?”

Oh, how he knew. “I’ve had some experience
with that, yes.”

“
Of course, I suppose you have.” She
dipped her head in a way that revealed the angry bruise on her
face. Jeff sucked in his breath.

“
Jesus Christ!” Instinctively he
reached out to take her chin and turned her injured cheek toward
the lantern. Even her eye was a bit swollen. “Did your sister hit
you?”

“
No. You know
. . . Olivia throws things during her spells. This
afternoon she threw a pan and it glanced off my cheek before she
flung it through the window. I’m sure she didn’t mean—I don’t think
she meant to hit me with it.”

“
Is the bone broken?”

She touched her fingertips to the bruise and
pressed gingerly. “I-I don’t think so.”

It looked so painful, and just the knowledge
that she was hurting turned up the fire under his boiling kettle
about Olivia. “I’ve seen men beat up like this after a bar
fight.”

He released her chin and it began to quiver.
She dropped her gaze to her lap.

Damn it, could he be any more tactless? he
wondered. Allie had had a lousy life, he concluded, and he knew
only the very thin top layer of it. Deeper than that were years of
loneliness and servitude to a sister who knew exactly how to get
what she wanted. He wanted to pull her off that chair and into bed
with him, just to cuddle her and protect her. “Hell, honey, I
didn’t mean to say that. I’m sorry,” he murmured and took her icy
hand. “This’ll heal, and you’ll be as pretty as ever.”

She jerked her hand away and a sob rose in
her throat. “Pretty! I don’t care about that! What does pretty
matter? I took care of my father and I took care of Olivia. I did
everything I was ever asked, except that one time. And that one
time, just that one horrible, single mistake, led me to this.” She
gestured at her cheek. “It was all my fault, but if not for that,
why, I would have left here years ago! I had dreams once, about a
home and family of my own, far away from here.”

She looked at him with her mouth slightly
open, obviously as surprised as he was by her statement.

He reached for her hand again. “Allie, tell
me about it. I think you need to tell someone, and I want to hear
it. What mistake did you make that was so bad?”

“
I killed my mother!”

She’d said it earlier that day, too, but he
didn’t believe it. It had to be something else. Something that had
haunted Allie every day of her life since it happened. But she
obviously believed what she’d told him, so he went along with
her.

“
How? What did you do?”

Tears welled in her eyes but she remained
mute.

“
Allie, honey, how did you kill your
mother?”

She dropped her gaze to her lap again, as if
looking at him were too painful to bear. When she finally spoke,
her voice trembled, like an old woman’s. “From the day that Olivia
was born, my mother wasn’t quite—well, she wasn’t quite right. Dr.
Brewster said she had melancholia, that it was a common ailment
following childbirth, and that women usually come out of it. Except
Mama never did. It dragged on for months, and if anything, she
seemed to get worse. She’d sit by the window all day long and stare
at nothing. Or she’d stay in bed. She rejected Olivia. She wouldn’t
even n-nurse her, so I had to feed her with a bottle. Father didn’t
have much patience with Mama’s strangeness. He expected her to get
better, and right away.” She fixed her gaze on the wall, a
curiously distant look entering her eyes. “‘No more of this
nonsense!’ he’d say. ‘You snap of this, woman. Right now, I say, or
by God, I’ll know the reason why.’ ” Her gaze flicked to Jeff, then
back to her lap. “Only she didn’t seem to hear him. Not really. So
he took me out of school to see to things around the house.”

“
All the chores fell to you? God,
Allie, how were you, eight or nine?”

“
Yes. He was busy with the farm, and I
was the only one who could help. I did the cleaning and cooking and
washing. I took care of Olivia and Mama.”

“
Your father didn’t want to hire
someone to help?”

She looked up at him then. “Dr. Brewster
suggested it. But Father said it was my job. The Fords took care of
their own, he said. So I was responsible for running the house. I
did everything I was told to, or I’d get a licking.”

The picture forming in Jeff’s mind was of a
flinty, bitter man who enslaved his own child and probably browbeat
his wife. Hell, no wonder she didn’t come out of her
melancholia.

“
One day, I convinced Mama to get
dressed and come for a walk with me. I’d fed Olivia and put her
down for a nap, so I had a little time before I had to start
dinner. It was spring and I thought that getting out on a nice
April day would be good for her.”

Jeff listened as Allie went on, telling the
story of how she walked her mother across a fallow field down to
the creek bottom. The cottonwoods were leafing out and wild flowers
were blooming along the edge of the clear, gurgling stream.

Allie stared at the lantern flame on the
window sill, lost in another time. “I sat my mother down on a
blanket I’d brought with us. I can still see her hair, sparkling in
the sun. It was the same color as mine, I think. She didn’t talk
much, so it was almost like being alone. Then I saw the wild
flowers. Violets—they were violets. They were so pretty, I wanted
to pick some for her. I hoped they’d cheer her up and make her
smile again. The flowers were scattered up and down the banks, and
they were so small it took me a while to gather enough to make a
nice bouquet.”

The tears that had been gathering in Allie’s
eyes began to flow in earnest now, falling in droplets on her
tightly folded hands. “When I turned around to look for her she was
gone. I didn’t realize how much time had passed since I’d last
checked on her. I still don’t know, but it didn’t seem like much.
One minute she was sitting on the blanket, the next— Oh, God, I
searched everywhere along that creek. I was afraid that maybe she’d
fallen in. But there was no sign of her. Nothing.” She tipped her
head down and closed her eyes.

Jeff stared at Allie, her head bowed and her
hands folded like a sorrowful penitent’s, and his heart squeezed in
his chest. She looked like a damned soul sitting in that chair,
waiting for God’s hand to strike her down. He didn’t even care if
he heard the rest of her story. He wanted to tell her it didn’t
matter what she had done, she had paid for it many times over. But
he’d asked her to tell him about it, and he had to make himself
listen.

“
What did you do?”

“
I ran to the house, hoping she’d gone
back inside. But I checked every room, even the closets. She wasn’t
there. Then I remembered that sometimes, before Olivia came, she’d
liked to feed the barn cats. They never let her get close but she’d
leave kitchen scraps for them.” She wadded up the tails of her
shawl in her fists, and recounted to Jeff the ghastly discovery
she’d made in the barn, so like the day with the dummy, but a
thousand times more horrific. Listening to her, Jeff felt the hair
on the back of his neck rise, and despite the heat, shivers flew
down his back and arms.

“
F-father said it was my fault. He
screamed at me—it was the only time—and he damned me to hell for
lollygagging. He said I killed his wife and Olivia’s mother. I
should have been watching her instead of frittering away my time
and attention looking for flowers. We took Mama to the undertaker
in town. Then when we got back, h-he locked me in the barn. He’d
make sure he taught me a lesson, one I wouldn’t forget, by God. I
begged and cried to get out and pounded on the door—I was s-so
scared, so scared— But he left me in there until morning. And after
that, every time he thought I was bad, he locked me in the barn!
Oh, God, I hated him for it!” She appealed to Jeff, as if seeking
answers or some explanation from him so that she might understand.
“Why did he do that to me? I was only eight years old!”

She wept bitter tears and wore such a wild
expression that even now Jeff feared for her sanity in dredging up
these old memories. It was all too clear to him now, her fear of
the barn, her zealous attention to her parents graves, her slavish
devotion to her sister. He gripped her clenched hands in his,
thinking that if Amos Ford weren’t already dead, he’d take great
pleasure in seeing the man horsewhipped. And Jeff, fool that he
was, had planted a row of violets in the garden, hoping to please
her. “Allie, it’s all right now. All right. And I’m sorry about the
violets in the garden—I didn’t know. I just wanted to make you
happy.” God, he was babbling like she was. “It wasn’t your fault.
You didn’t kill your mother—you see that now, don’t you?”

She went on, though, as if Jeff hadn’t
spoken, purging anger and demons that had plagued her since she was
a child. “On his deathbed he made me promise to take care of
Olivia, his darling Olivia. I’ve stayed by her, believing she was
sick and helpless, that she needed me. It was the least I could do
to atone for the terrible wrong I’d committed. To find out that she
has tricked me all this time, pretending to be sick, that she was
the one who hung that dummy in the barn— ” She looked at him with
such anguish and bewilderment in her eyes, Jeff felt his own throat
grow tight with emotion. “I know my father hated me. He always made
me feel like an outsider, and he never forgave me, not even at the
last moment of his life. But Olivia must hate me too, to do those
things!”

Jeff needed to hold her, to comfort her and
himself. Shy about letting her see the tears gathering behind his
own eyelids, he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her off the chair
into his embrace. The corn shuck mattress rustled as Allie fell
against him on the bed and sobbed as if her heart were broken. He
swallowed the hard knot in his throat and rocked her, pressing her
head to his chest while he stroked her silky hair. Silently, he
cursed both Amos and Olivia Ford. God, Allie had had no love in her
life at all.

“
No, honey, it’s not hate, exactly.
Olivia isn’t capable of considering anyone else’s feelings but her
own. She’s spoiled and used to getting her own way. Like I said, I
think she’s trying to make sure you won’t leave her. But what she’s
done is wrong. And you did not kill your mother.” Jeff lifted his
head and stared through the window at the moon crossing the
midsummer night sky. Wes Cooper’s young, battered face appeared in
his memory, bringing with it a dim realization. “Some people can’t
be saved no matter how we try.”

“
You don’t think it was my fault?” Her
words were muffled with her cheek pressed to his chest.

“
Hell no! Allie, your father did a
lousy thing, punishing you for your mother’s death—a child can’t be
held responsible for the actions of an adult. I guess when it comes
down to it, we’re not really responsible for anyone’s actions but
our own.”

“
But I was supposed to watch after her
and—”

“
Yes, and you said yourself that you
were just eight years old. It sounds like she was so lost and
unhappy, she would have found the opportunity no matter what. If
not then, maybe later. Who knows, your love and attention might
have prevented it from happening sooner.”

She sat up and looked at him, a desperate
gleam of hope for absolution in her teary eyes. Ironic that she
should seek it from him, of all people. “Oh—do you really think
so?” She turned her face to the doorway and her brow wrinkled. “I
missed her very much. I think it started long before she died. The
mother I knew disappeared and had been replaced by a silent,
despondent stranger.”