Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (30 page)

"Oh, my God."

"Clay thinks it might have been suicide."

"Suicide?" Her voice was a whisper. "Oh, God, I hope not."

She felt suddenly light-headed, and she went to the porch swing and sat down.

"I thought I'd better let you know. We'll have to tell Eliana. But I don't think she should know the details."

She was looking away, out toward the hills.

"Katie Anne?" He sat down beside her.

"It's my fault," she whispered.

"Why would it be your fault?"

"I should have taken Eliana to see him. She hasn't seen him since she ran away."

"And he hasn't come to see her."

"It was wrong."

"Why? You didn't have any obligation to him."

She turned toward him, wanting to contradict him, but she didn't know what to say.

He could see how upset she was. He took her hand and held it. He rarely touched her, and the gesture only saddened her because it came from sympathy, not desire.

Without a word, she got up and went in the house.

Ethan didn't follow her inside, and she was glad. She had a desperate urge to kneel. She walked around the house looking for a place, and finally she went into her bedroom and kneeled at the side of her bed. She'd heard that Charlie had gone quickly downhill after his daughter's death. That he was losing his bearings and becoming forgetful and starting to wander. Nell had said they might have to put him in a home, because he couldn't take care of himself. Katie Anne imagined the old man losing his way in the dark, wandering down a county road trying to find his way home, and she tried to imagine what had filled his thoughts, in lieu of memory. She was filled with remorse for having abandoned a man whom nobody liked, an old man she barely new.

She had a heated argument with Ethan that evening; she didn't want Eliana to know her grandfather had died. When he finally conceded, she went off to bed, and on Saturday she took Eliana to Kansas City on a shopping trip. She told Ethan they would spend the night, and would be back Sunday evening after the funeral.

* * *

Katie Anne had always preferred her wide-open spaces to the big city, but now it loomed in her imagination like a refuge. She could hide beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat and her sunglasses, and if she said or did anything unexpected, no one would be surprised or confused. They were always saying that about her, sometimes with pride, sometimes with regret, how different she was. She was tired of hearing it. She yearned for a place where she could freely grope her way into a new life, where she could become the new woman growing within her.

Once on the road with Eliana, rolling along the interstate in her Jeep, she was swept into a joyous mood of anticipation.

"Hey, I've got an idea. How'd you like to go to the art museum? The Nelson. Never been myself, but I hear it's great."

"I've been there," Eliana answered.

Katie Anne glanced at her. "Doesn't excite you too much, does it?"

"My mother used to take me there," she said quietly.

"Okay. Maybe it's not such a good idea."

"No. I want to go."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

Katie Anne reached over and squeezed the child's hand.

"You tell me if I ever do anything or say anything to make you hurt inside."

Eliana turned a wide-eyed face to her. "You don't ever hurt me," she said solemnly.

"Good." She patted her leg. "Have I ever shown you how a horse eats corn?"

Eliana grinned. "Show me."

Katie Anne gripped her little thigh and squeezed, throwing the child into spasms of laughter.

* * *

Katie Anne knew very little about what she saw on the walls of the Nelson, but she found it exhilarating. They spent a lot of time in the twentieth-century gallery, and they talked about the paintings. Katie Anne was amazed at the child's imagination, at the things she saw, and how well she expressed what the pictures made her feel. They took their time; they sat on benches and browsed through the bookshop, and they had tea in the courtyard. Katie Anne bought a poster for each of them: Eliana's was a drawing of a horse by Michelangelo; her own was a print by a famous Austrian artist who had died from influenza when he was in his late twenties. According to the clerk, the artist had lived in Vienna at the turn of the century, and the blatant sexuality of his paintings had branded him an outcast in the restrictive Catholic community where he lived. What Katie Anne found so intriguing were the warped lines and disjointed angles he gave to the human body, the haggard faces of his women and above all the translucent quality of their skin, as though one were looking straight through them into their bruised and blackened souls. The print she bought was a self-portrait of the artist and his model, and although the woman looked nothing like her at all, she saw herself there. This artist, long dead, had painted her as she was now, as no one else knew her; he had captured something invisible and laid it out for her to see. She had the clerk roll it up with Eliana's poster and slip it into a tube. As they left the museum that afternoon, Katie Anne knew she had found something very precious.

On the Country Club Plaza they sat on a patio in the shade of a giant white parasol and ate ice cream. They popped in a kitchenware store just to get cool for a few minutes, and came out with cupcake baking tins and a spatula shaped like a frog, and an apron for Eliana that said "I Heart Paris." After the music store they found a dog bakery and bought a bag full of treats for Traveler, and then they spent the rest of the afternoon in a toy store, where they bought a miniature stable replete with miniature tack and three tiny horses. Their final splurge, at Katie Anne's insistence, was a huge stuffed lion, a mate for Cosette, a big plush thing that lay on its stomach and took up the entire backseat of the Jeep.

They checked into a hotel on the Plaza, taking all their new purchases up to the room with them, and Eliana changed into her suit and went swimming in the rooftop pool while Katie Anne in her hat and sunglasses, dressed in a long Oriental-looking robe she had purchased at a boutique in the hotel, drank a glass of wine at a poolside table. That evening they ordered room service and ate in bed with the lion, named Aslan, and watched
I Love Lucy reruns.
They laughed a lot, and after Eliana had fallen asleep, Katie Anne sat in the dark with her earphones on and listened to a symphony by Mahler she had purchased that afternoon. The CD had been sitting there at the checkout counter, a new release, and she'd picked it up on impulse. Now she sat in the dark and listened, enraptured, and felt a fullness inside. She looked down at Eliana.

"Please, God," she murmured quietly in the dark. "Don't let him take her away."

* * *

They changed their minds and stayed Sunday night, too. Ethan didn't see them until he came home from work Monday afternoon. He was surprised to discover that he had missed them. He found them setting up the stable in Eliana's room, unwrapping all the tiny paraphernalia and arranging it around the stable—the bale of hay, the buckets and sack of feed, the blanket rack. There was even a dog that looked like Traveler. Ethan watched them on the floor, playing like children, and when Katie Anne looked up at him, he was struck by how happy she seemed.

For the next several days he was unusually attentive to her, and Katie Anne felt herself open up to him again. Her eyes softened whenever he walked into the room, and when she was near him, she felt desire swell inside her. He still hadn't touched her, but she felt it just might happen, that he might be having a change of heart.

One evening after dinner, instead of going to her room, she went out to the porch and found him sitting on the swing. It was one of those rare summer evenings when only a soft breeze stirred the grasses, and with the rising of the moon came a front of mild air. The parched land seemed to sigh, and even the crickets and the cicadas retreated into silence.

"Can I join you?" she asked.

"You bet," he said.

She sat there next to him for a long while, without speaking, basking in the warmth of his presence and this soft night.

Finally, she interrupted the silence and said, "When I was in the hospital, you said you thought you'd lost me."

Ethan turned to her. "That's right."

"So, like, technically, I died."

"It seemed so."

"How long was I gone?"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure. Several minutes maybe. It seemed long."

"What brought me back?"

"I don't know. They'd taken you off all the life support. Do you remember any of it?"

"I'm beginning to."

"What do you remember?"

"I know this sounds so silly coming from me, but I think it must have been heaven. I have a very faint recollection of how beautiful it was, but for all the beauty of heaven, I couldn't leave this earth."

Her hand lay poised on her knee, near his own hand, an invitation. She sat there, willing him with every nerve, every fiber in her body, to reach out and take her in his arms, to smooth back her hair the way he used to, to kiss away the tears in her eyes, to cradle her deep and strong and love her again.

"I must have come back for a reason. I don't know what it was. I wonder if it was my love for you. Because I loved you so much."

He remained silent. She left her hand there for a long time without moving it, waiting for his touch, which never came.

"Ethan," she whispered, "until you learn to forgive me, you'll never see how much I've changed."

"I know you've changed," he replied. "I know how hard you're trying."

He rose and went to the porch rail. The night was aglitter with stars, and he felt the immensity of earth and the firmament, and his own loneliness.

"But that's the trouble," he went on. "You think if you act like her, I'll love you. You think if you read a book or try to sound intellectual, it'll change things."

"That's not true."

"I just don't believe you. I guess I never will. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get over her, and it would be unfair to you, or any woman, to give you hope. But what really bothers me is that you seem to want to be like her. I just want you to be yourself. Sometimes I wish I had the old Katie Anne back. It would be easier."

"You'll never have the old Katie Anne back. She died."

He shook his head. "It won't work. I know it in my heart."

"And Eliana? She doesn't want to go. She's told me as much. She doesn't want to leave us."

"You mean leave you."

"She feels a lot for you. It's just hard for her to show it."

"I warned you not to get attached to her."

"So you're still planning on sending her to live with her cousins?"

"Yep."

Looking at the profile she loved so much, she saw that she was holding on to an illusion. He'd never understand what she'd gone through, the murky, vague feelings, the emptiness, the confusion, the sense of having lost something, and then the miracle of having found it again. And she realized all of a sudden that she didn't want things to be the way they had been. That she loved him desperately, but it wasn't enough anymore. That she was no longer the woman who would do anything to catch and keep Ethan Brown.

"Oh, Ethan," she whispered finally, "you've already made one mistake you'll regret for the rest of your life. Don't make another one."

Then she got up off the swing and went into the house.

* * *

Ethan took a walk down to the stables, and he thought about what she'd said. He kept walking past the tractor shed and the arena; he went through the gate and crossed the pasture and he could see the horses outlined against the night sky. They lifted their heads and watched him pass through the field; he opened a cattle guard and walked on into the prairie. Thought he just might like to walk on until he couldn't walk anymore. Thought his hills would heal him. But he knew that all he was doing was carrying it with him, slogging along with all his anger and loss clinging to his feet, and there wasn't a place on earth wide and open enough for him to outwalk it. He finally came to stop at the foot of a lone cottonwood rooted next to a gully, and he sat down and leaned his head back against the tree and cried like a little boy.

When he had cried it all out, he stretched out on the ground and looked up at the stars and let his mind rest. He was quiet now, and into this quietude came a flicker so fine and faint that, had he not been perfectly still and empty, he would never have heard it.

But for all the beauty of heaven, I could not leave this earth.

And again.

For all the beauty of heaven, I could not leave this earth. I love you too much.

The voice was so faint in his memory, and it had been the voice of a ghost, and how do you recall the voice of a ghost?

The notion sent a chill down his back, sitting out here alone in the night prairie, with the wind playing with the cottonwood leaves and making its mournful sounds, and he looked around for Annette, thinking she might appear again if he willed it so.

Katie Anne had plucked those very words out of her thoughts. The very same words.