True Colors (22 page)

“It’s time,” Aurora said, coming up beside her.

“Are you ready?” Winona asked, following close behind.

Vivi Ann hugged them both tightly. Her emotions were so close to the surface right now she was actually afraid she would start crying. “Thank everyone for today, will you?”

“Of course,” Aurora said.

Just then Dallas’s primer-gray Ford truck came out from behind the barn and drove slowly through the parking area toward them. It was an old, rounded model that had seen better days, but the engine worked perfectly. He pulled up in front of them and parked.

Vivi Ann thanked her sisters again and opened the truck’s heavy door. It screeched and rattled, then slammed shut behind her. On the ripped leather bench seat, the robin’s-egg-blue car seat looked bizarrely out of place.

“You ready, Mrs. Raintree?” Dallas said, giving her the first true smile she’d seen in more than a month.

“I’m ready.”

For the next two hours, as they drove down the twisting, tree-lined highway behind a steady stream of RVs and campers, they talked about everyday things—the new school horse that was giving the kids problems, Clem’s aching joints, what to award for prizes at the next barrel race—but when they finally arrived at the hospital, Vivi Ann reached over the car seat and held his hand, unable to think of anything to say.

“Me, too,” he said, and together they walked through the parking lot and into the bright white lobby of Pierce County’s biggest hospital.

In the past weeks they’d become like family within these walls, and they stopped and talked to plenty of nurses, volunteers, and orderlies along the way to the pediatric wing.

There, Noah was waiting for them, swaddled in a blue thermal blanket and wearing a teacup-sized cap over his shock of wild black hair.

Vivi Ann took him in her arms. “Hey, little man. You ready to come home?”

Dallas put an arm around Vivi Ann and drew her close. They stared down at their son in silence and then carried him out of the hospital.

It took Vivi Ann a ridiculous amount of time to get him into the car seat, so much that she was laughing by the end of it.

All the way home, she found herself cooing to him, talking to him in a high-pitched voice that bore no resemblance to her own. He responded by spitting up all over himself.

“Note to self,” she said, laughing. “Keep diaper bag handy.” Looking for a tissue or a wad of drive-in napkins, she clicked open the glove box.

She heard Dallas say, “Don’t!” sharply beside her, but it was too late.

The glove box lid flipped open and she saw what he’d wanted to hide.

A gun.

She started to reach for it, but he said, “It’s loaded,” and she drew back as if stung.

“Why in the hell do you have a loaded gun in your truck?”

He pulled over to the side of the road and parked. They were just past Belfair, at the rounded end of the Canal, where the low tide exposed hundreds of feet of oozing gray mud. Docks jutted out into it, waterless on either side. Boats lay angled on the ground, waiting for the tide to lift them up again.

“You don’t know what my life was like before you.”

It scared her, that simple declaration of a different world; she’d known it all along, but in her naïveté, she’d thought of him as a wounded, abused child. Vulnerable. This was new. This reminded her that he hadn’t been a kid for a long time; that he’d grown into a man that sometimes she hardly knew. Against her wishes, she remembered the fight he’d started at Cat’s, and the steely look in his eyes when a fight had almost started at the Outlaw. And the criminal record he’d told her about. Stealing cars had sounded almost romantic, reckless, but now she wondered. “Okay, but I know what it’s like now and you don’t need to keep a loaded gun in your car. Jesus, Dal, a kid could find it—”

“The truck is always locked.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I am who I am, Vivi Ann.”

“No,” she said. “That may be who you were. You’re different now. Get rid of it. Promise me.”

He released his breath; she knew then he’d been holding it, waiting. Leaning past the car seat, he reached out and closed the glove box. “You’ll never see that gun again.”

In the two years since Noah’s birth, the gossip about Vivi Ann and Dallas died down. Not away, of course; it was simply too entertaining to release altogether, but other transgressions by other lovers had come along to replace it. The only people who seemed determined to hang on to the old animosities were Winona and Dad, and Vivi Ann understood their concerns. In time, though, she knew it would be forgotten completely.

Tonight, beneath a twilight sky the color of a bruised plum, she stood at the paddock fence, watching kids chase after a greased piglet at the annual Water’s Edge Halloween party. Noah was in her arms, dressed for the party in an orange pumpkin outfit. Aurora stood on her left side; Winona was on her right. A pirate and a witch, respectively.

“Remember the first time you and I went after a greased pig, Winona?” Aurora said. “All the rest of the kids were behind us by a mile.”

“I’m sure people said to one another in awe: ‘Wow, that fat girl sure can hang on to a pig,’ ” Winona said.

“Ooh,” Aurora said. “Someone is feeling sorry for herself tonight. I thought it was my turn.”

“You always think it’s your turn,” Winona said, sipping her beer.

“Have you spent any time with Rick and Jane lately? They’re the Children of the Corn. And Richard is losing his hair so fast I need to bring a vacuum to the dinner table. Top that, Miss Town’s Best Attorney.”

Winona turned to her. “You actually think it’s better to be fat, childless, and single?”

“Uh.
Duh
. Again, I point to my offspring and husband. It’s not like I’m married to that hot tattoo guy.”

Vivi Ann laughed. “He is hot. And you’re not fat, Win. You’re big-boned.”

“Lies and pretense,” Winona muttered. “The new family motto.”

Vivi Ann recognized the irritation in her sister’s voice and knew Winona was having one of her bad days, when nothing made her happy.

“On that note,” Vivi Ann said, “I’m going to go find my husband. This mermaid costume is itching like crazy, and it’s time for my little man to go to bed.”

Saying goodbye, she carried Noah through the crowded parking lot, weaving in and out of people who were standing around talking. She heard snippets of conversations; they were the same words she always heard at a gathering like this. A mixture of local gossip; who was screwing whom, who was late on their mortgage, whose kid had gone off the deep end. All she really cared about was that she and Dallas were no longer on the top of the rumor menu.

As she neared the barn, she found kids and dogs running around in the dark, squealing and barking. The salty tang of the sea air was sharpened by the smell of wood smoke and barbecuing hamburgers.

The arena was dark except for dozens of strategically placed Chinese lanterns that hung from the rafters. A portable dance floor had been placed over the dirt and every step taken on it sounded like thunder. Over in the corner, a local band was playing a popular mix of seventies and eighties music. People danced, while teenagers bobbed for apples and dug through bowls of cooked spaghetti, looking for grape eyeballs.

“Do you see Daddy?” she asked Noah, who sleepily babbled something that ended with, “Go Dada.”

“Uh, Vivi Ann?”

Turning, she saw Myrtle Michaelian dressed in a pink polyester princess outfit. Her plump features were outlined in bright color: blue eye shadow, rosy pink blush, red glittery lipstick. A cheap tin tiara sat on her head amid a pile of graying curls.

“Hey, Myrtle,” Vivi Ann said. “Great costume.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“I was just looking for him. Why?”

“Well . . . I don’t usually trade in gossip . . .”

Vivi Ann kept from gritting her teeth by sheer force of will. While it was true that the gossip about their affair had faded, Dallas was still a man to be watched in Oyster Shores. Especially by the older, more conservative people like Myrtle. They didn’t like the way he drank too much, fidgeted in church, played poker for money, and (perhaps most of all) that he didn’t seem to care about their opinion of him. “I’m sure I already know whatever you’re going to say.”

“Really?” She leaned forward, whispered loudly, “Last Saturday I was closing up late and I saw Dallas and that Morgan woman walking across the street. They got into that beater car of hers and drove away.”

Vivi Ann nodded. She’d heard this story in one form or another for two years; Dallas and Cat had been seen together at the minimart, at the gas station, at King’s Market buying beer. “They’re just friends, Myrtle.”

“I’m only saying this, Vivi Ann, because your mama can’t. She was a good friend, and if she were here, she’d tell you that no good can come of giving a man that kind of freedom.”

“I love my husband,” Vivi Ann said. To her, that was answer enough. She loved her husband and she trusted him. So what if he let off a little steam drinking and playing poker once a week at Cat’s? The small-minded gossip meant nothing to her. She knew her husband too well to be jealous.

“I love my dog,” Myrtle said crisply, “but I keep him chained up when the bitch across the street is in heat.”

Vivi Ann couldn’t help laughing at that. “Thanks for the heads-up, Myrtle. I’ll keep a closer eye on my husband.”

“You do that.”

Still smiling, Vivi Ann left the barn and went up the hill to their cabin. In the past year, Dallas had added on a big wraparound porch as well as about eight hundred square feet of space, which they’d turned into a new kitchen, nursery, and bathroom. New French doors ran the length of the living room, framing the majestic Canal view and leading the way out onto the white porch.

In the back bedroom, decorated with horses and cowboy hats, she changed Noah’s diaper, put him into his dinosaur pj’s, and lay him down in his crib. “Goodnight, little pumpkin.”

Out in the living room, she found Zorro standing beside her new sofa. He stepped sideways and turned on the stereo. His cheap black polyester cape caught on something and he pulled it free with a muttered curse.

She smiled. “You said you never dressed up for Halloween.”

“I said there was no Halloween when I was a kid. That’s different.”

He came so close she could feel his breath on her cheek, smell the whiskey he’d drunk. He brought up one gloved hand, let his finger trail down her exposed throat, down to the valley between her breasts.

“Myrtle Michaelian says you’re being a very bad boy lately. She saw you up to no good with Cat.”

“The gossip never stops in Mayberry. What did you tell her?”

“I told her I like bad boys.”

He picked her up and carried her to their bed, kicking the door shut behind him. “Trick or treat, Mrs. Raintree?”

She laughed when he dropped her onto their bed. Moonlight came through their window and illuminated half of his sharp face, turned half of his hair blue. “I think I’ll take a treat, Mr. Raintree. If you’re up to it.”

On Christmas Eve morning, Vivi Ann rose well before dawn and began making cookies. At some point Noah woke up and she brought him into the kitchen with her. He laughed and played with his plastic dinosaurs in a mound of sugar cookie dough. When he realized how good the dough tasted, he giggled and threw the toys aside and started eating.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Wiping her floury hands on her apron, she scooped him up and held him on her hip while she cleaned up the kitchen. It was like carrying a seizing cat; he kept reaching and twisting and crying, “Mo’, Mama, mo’.”

She carried him into their newly expanded bedroom. Sunlight poured in checkerboard beams through the French doors, landed in streaks on the wide pine floorboards, which glowed like streaks of fresh honey. “Get up, sleepyhead,” she said to Dallas. “Your son needs changing.” She dropped Noah alongside Dallas, who mumbled something and rolled over.

“Look, Noah, Daddy’s playing hide-and-seek.”

Noah giggled and clambered over Dallas, falling like a slinky on the other side of him. “Dada?”