It was an exhausted little logging town, but to Annie, whose eyes had grown accustomed to steel and concrete and glass, it was gorgeous. The sky now was gray, but she could remember how it looked without the cover of clouds. Here, in Mystic, the sky started deep in the palm of God’s hand and unfurled as far as the eye could see. It was a grand land of sublime landscapes, with air that smelled of pine needles and mist and rain.
So unlike Southern California.
The thought came unwanted, a stinging little reminder that she was a thirty-nine-year-old woman, perched on the edge of an unwanted divorce. That she was coming home because she had nowhere else to go.
She tried not to think about Blake or Natalie or that big, empty house perched precariously above the beach. Instead, she remembered the things she didn’t mind leaving behind—the heat that always gave her a headache, the cancer she could feel lurking in the invisible rays of the sun, the smog that stung her eyes and burned her throat. The “bad air” days when you were advised to stay indoors, the mud slides and fires that took out whole neighborhoods in a single afternoon.
Annie had roots in this county that went deep and spread far. Her grandfather had come here almost seventy years ago, a block-jawed German with an appetite for freedom and a willingness to use a saw. He had carved a good living from the land and raised his only son, Hank, to do the same. Annie was the first Bourne in two generations to leave this soil, and the first to get a college education.
She followed Elm Street out of town. On both sides of the road, the land had been cut into bite-size pieces. Modular homes huddled on squares of grass, behind yards cluttered with broken-down cars and washing machines that had seen better days. Everywhere she looked, Annie saw the evidence of logging: trucks, chainsaws, and signs about the spotted owl.
The road began its slow, winding crawl up the hillside, thrusting deeper and deeper into the forests. One by one, the houses receded, giving way to trees. Miles and miles of scrawny, new-growth trees huddled behind signs that read: CLEARCUT 1992. REPLANTED 1993. There was a new sign every quarter mile or so; only the dates were different.
Finally, she reached the turnoff to the gravel road that meandered through fifteen acres of old-growth timber.
As a child, this woodland had been her playground. She had spent countless hours climbing through the dewy salal bushes and over crumbling nurse logs, in search of treasures: a white mushroom that grew only by the light of a red moon, a newborn fawn awaiting its mother’s return, a gelatinous cache of frog’s eggs hidden in the bogs.
At last, she came to the two-story clapboard farmhouse in which she’d grown up. It looked exactly as she remembered: a gabled, fifty-year-old structure painted a pale pearl gray with white trim. A whitewashed porch ringed the whole house, and baskets of winter-spindly geraniums hung from every post. Smoke spiraled up from the brick chimney and merged into the low-slung layer of gray fog overhead.
Behind it, a battalion of ancient trees protected a secret, fern-lined pond. Moss furred the tree trunks and hung in lacy shawls from one branch to another. The lawn melted down toward the silvery ribbon of a salmon stream. She knew that if she walked across the grass, it would squish between her toes, and this time of year, the stream would sound like an old man snoring in his sleep.
She maneuvered the rented Mustang to the parking area behind the woodshed and shut off the engine. Grabbing her purse, she walked up to the front door.
Only a moment after she rang the bell, her father opened the door.
The great Hank Bourne—all six feet three inches and 220 pounds of him—stood there for a second, staring at his daughter with disbelieving eyes. Then a smile started, buried deep in his silvery-white mustache and beard.
“Annie,” he whispered in that scratchy, barrel-chested voice of his.
His arms opened for a hug, and she launched herself forward, burying her face in the velvety folds of his neck. He smelled of woodsmoke and Irish Spring soap and of the butterscotch hard candies he always kept in the breast pocket of his work shirt. Of her childhood.
Annie let herself be carried away by the comfort of her father’s embrace. At last, she drew back, unable to look at him, knowing he’d see the tears in her eyes. “Hi, Dad. ”
“Annie,” he said again, only this time she heard the question he didn’t ask.
She forced herself to meet his probing gaze. He looked good for his sixty-seven years. His eyes were still as bright and curious as a young man’s, even tucked as they were in folds of ruddy pink skin. The tragedies he’d endured appeared only occasionally and quickly retreated—a shadow that crossed his wrinkled face when a stoplight turned red on a rainy day, or when the heartless sound of an ambulance’s siren cut through the fog.
He tucked a scarred hand—cut long ago by the unforgiving blades at the lumber mill—into the bib of his faded denim overalls. “You alone, Annie?”
She flinched. The question contained layers and layers. There were so many ways to answer.
He looked at her so intensely she felt uncomfortable, as if he were seeing into her soul, into that big house on the Pacific Ocean where her husband had said, I don’t love you, Annie.
“Natalie left for London,” she said weakly.
“I know. I’ve been waiting for you to call with the address. I thought I’d send her something. ”
“She’s staying with a family called Roberson. It’s raining every day, cats and dogs from what I und—”
“What’s going on, Annie Virginia?”
She swallowed the rest of her sentence on a gulp of breath. There was nowhere now to go except forward. “He . . . he left me, Dad. ”
He looked hopelessly confused. “What?”
She wanted to laugh and pretend it was nothing, that she was plenty strong enough to deal with this, but she felt like a kid again, tongue-tied and lost.
“What happened?” he asked softly.