Fly Away (50 page)
She reached out at last, touched Tully’s cheek with a mother’s tenderness. “How could
I not be proud of you?”
Her mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I always loved you, Tully. It was my own life
I was running from.” Slowly, she reached into the nightstand drawer and pulled out
a photograph. “Maybe this will be our beginning.” She handed the picture to Tully.
Tully reached for the photograph that shimmied in her mother’s slim, shaking fingers.
It was square and small, about the size of a playing card, with white scalloped edges
that were bent and mangled. The years had left a crackle-like patina on the black-and-white
print.
It was a photograph of a man, a young man, sitting on a dirty porch step, with one
booted foot pushed out to reveal a long leg. His hair was long and black and dirty,
too. Splotches of sweat darkened the white T-shirt he wore; his cowboy boots had seen
better days and his hands were dark with grime.
But his smile was wide and white and should have been too big for his angular face,
but wasn’t, and it was tilted the slightest bit to one side. His eyes were as black
as night and seemed to hold a thousand secrets. Beside him, on the porch step, a brown-haired
baby lay sleeping in a baggy, grayed diaper. The man’s big hand lay possessively on
the infant’s small, bare back.
“You and your father,” her mother said softly.
“My father? You said you didn’t know who—”
“I lied. I fell in love with him in high school.”
Tully looked back down at the picture. She ran her fingertip over it, studying every
line and shadow, barely able to breathe. She had never seen even a hint of her own
features in a relative’s face. But here was her
dad,
and she looked like him. “I have his smile.”
“Yes. And you laugh just like he did.”
Tully felt something deep inside of her click into place.
“He loved you,” her mother said. “And me, too.”
Tully heard the break in her mother’s voice. When she looked up, the tears in her
mother’s voice matched her own.
“Rafael Benecio Montoya.”
Tully said the name reverently. “Rafael.”
“Rafe.”
Tully couldn’t hold on to the emotion swelling inside her heart. This changed
everything,
changed her. She had a father. A dad. And he
loved
her. “Can I—”
“Rafe died in Vietnam.”
Tully didn’t realize that she’d even constructed a dreamscape, but with that one word,
she felt it fall to pieces around her. “Oh.”
“I’ll tell you all about him, though,” her mother said. “How he used to sing songs
to you in Spanish and throw you into the air to hear you laugh. He picked your name
because it was Choctaw and he said that made you a
real
American. That’s why I always called you Tallulah. To remember him.”
Tully looked up into her mother’s watery eyes and saw love and loss and heartache.
And hope, too. The whole of their lives. “I’ve waited so long.”
Dorothy gently touched Tully’s cheek. “I know,” she said softly.
It was the touch Tully had waited for all of her life.
* * *
In her dreams, Tully is sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs on my deck. I am beside
her, of course; we are as we used to be: young and laughing. Always talking. In the
branches of that old maple tree, dressed now in the scarlet and gold of autumn, several
Mason jars hang from lengths of twine; in them, votive candles burn brightly over
our heads, casting drops of flickering light to the floor.
I know that sometimes, when Tully sits in her chair out here, she thinks about me.
She remembers the two of us flying down Summer Hill on bikes, our arms outflung, both
of us believing the world was impossibly big and bright.
Here, in her dreams, we will be friends forever, together. Growing old, wearing purple,
and singing along to silly songs that mean nothing and everything. Here, there will
be no cancer, no growing old, no lost chances, no arguments.
I’m always with you
, I say to her in her sleep, and she knows it’s true.
I turn—barely a movement at all—just a sideways glance, and I am somewhere else, some
when else. Inside my house on Bainbridge Island. My family is gathered together, laughing
over some joke I can’t hear. Marah is home from college for winter break; she has
made the kind of friend that lasts through a lifetime—and my father is healthy. Johnny
has begun to smile again—soon he will find himself falling in love. He will fight
it … and he will give in. And my boys—my beautiful sons—are becoming men before my
very eyes. Wills still goes through life in fifth gear, loud and booming and defiant,
while Lucas slips along behind, barely noticed in a crowd until you see his smile.
But it is Lucas I hear at night, Lucas who talks to me in his sleep, afraid that he
will forget me. The way I miss them all is sometimes unbearable. But they are going
to be fine. I know it, and now they do, too.
Soon, my mom will be with me, although she doesn’t know it yet.
I look away for an instant, and I am back on Firefly Lane. It is morning. Tully limps
out into the kitchen and has tea with her mother and they work in the garden, and
I can see how strong she is growing. No more wheelchair for her. Not even a cane now.
Time passes. How much?
In her world, maybe days. Weeks …
And suddenly there is a man in the orchard, talking to Dorothy.
Tully puts down her coffee cup and moves toward him; her steps are slow and uncertain
on the tilled, rough dirt of the garden. Her balance is still a little tenuous these
days. She passes her mother and goes to the man, who holds a pair of—
Slippers?
“Des,” Tully says. She reaches out for him and he takes her hand in his. When they
touch, I glimpse their future—a gray, pebbled beach with a pair of wooden chairs set
near the tide line … a table set for some holiday dinner, with my family and hers
gathered around it and a high chair pushed up close … an aging house with a wraparound
porch that overlooks the sea. I see all of this in the time it takes my best friend’s
heart to take a single beat.
I know in that moment she will be okay. Life will go on for her as it must; hearts
will be broken and dreams will be fulfilled and risks will be taken, but she will
always remember us—two girls who’d taken a chance on each other a lifetime ago and
become best friends.
I move closer to her; I know she feels me.
At last
, I whisper in her ear. She hears me, or maybe she only thinks she knows what I would
say now. It doesn’t matter.
It is time for me to let go.
Not of TullyandKate. We will always be a part of each other. Best friends.
But I have to move on, as she has.
When I look back one last time, from far, far away, she is smiling.
ALSO BY KRISTIN HANNAH
Home Front
Night Road
Winter Garden
True Colors
Firefly Lane
Magic Hour
Comfort and Joy
The Things We Do for Love
Between Sisters
Distant Shores
Summer Island
Angel Falls
On Mystic Lake
Home Again
Waiting for the Moon
When Lightning Strikes
If You Believe
Once in Every Life
The Enchantment
A Handful of Heaven
About the Author
KRISTIN HANNAH is the
New York Times
bestselling author of twenty-one novels. A former lawyer turned writer, she is the
mother of one son and lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii.
Visit
www.kristinhannah.com
.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed
in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FLY AWAY.
Copyright © 2013 by Kristin Hannah. All rights reserved. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by Michael Storrings
Cover photographs: lanterns ©
www.etsy.com/shop/treasureagain
; people riding bicycles © amana productions inc/Getty Images; grass hill © altrendo
images/Getty Images; stars © Digital Vision/Getty Images; treeline © Lynn Koenig/Getty
Images; sky © Chad Baker/Getty Images
ISBN 978-0-312-57721-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781250031808 (e-book)
First Edition: April 2013