The Year of Luminous Love (2 page)

The man was shaking all over. “You empty out anything you’ve already put in your pockets,” she commanded, nudging the gun toward his open coat.

He hurriedly obeyed, dropping a handful of coins she kept in a mason jar on the old scarred desk against the wall. He dropped matches and a few candle stubs. Had he been planning to burn her barn before he left, trapping her helpless horses and sentencing them to certain death? The thought focused her anger, melting away all fear. “I should shoot you!”

“No, no, please!”

She stood her ground for a minute, then finally backed out of the doorway and motioned with the barrel of the gun for the vagrant to stand and exit the small room. She stood far back, out of reach but with the gun still aimed at him. “Don’t you ever set foot on my property again,” she said in as menacing a voice as she could muster. “Because I will shoot you dead.” She motioned with the barrel of the gun. “Now get out!” The man seemed frozen to the ground. “I said, out!”

He didn’t need another prod. He sprinted through the barn door like a squirrel chased by a fox. Ciana took a deep breath and lowered the shotgun, for it had grown unbearably heavy in her suddenly trembling hands. She figured she should call the police and report what had happened, but she realized she couldn’t cope with waiting for them to get out to the farm and fill out a report. She went to the stalls to calm the restless horses. She gave each a cup of oats, picked up the gun, and returned to the house.

She scraped off her boots in the mudroom, rehung her slicker, removed the shells from the shotgun and shoved them
into her jeans pocket, and took the gun with her to her room. Once inside, she leaned against the wall, her legs rubbery, too quivery to hold her up. She sank to the floor, grasping the gun in her lap. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Olivia was supposed to be in charge. Ever since Ciana had been six and her father and grandfather had died in the crash of Granddad’s single-engine Cessna, Olivia had been the backbone of the family. She had taken care of Bellmeade, the family farmland that traced its origins to before the Civil War.

No more.

Dementia and old-age frailty had claimed Ciana’s beloved grandmother. She was in a continuous-care facility in downtown Windemere, fifteen miles away. As for Alice Faye, Olivia’s daughter, well, she lived inside a gin bottle, unwilling and unable to take the reins. Ciana longed to talk to her friends, Arie and Eden, but it was almost three in the morning. She couldn’t call them now.

Ciana began to weep as the tension of the night’s confrontation began to leak out of her body. She might have killed or severely wounded the intruder. She muffled her sobs with her fist, her shoulders shaking hard with each racking breath. Just weeks before high school graduation, everything had fallen on her shoulders—the farm, the debt, caring for her mother and grandmother. It was all hers.

And she was only eighteen years old.

“Your CT scan looks good, Arie.”

“How good?” she asked. Every CAT scan was a lesson in hand-wringing, coupled with hope.

“The spots on your liver are greatly diminished. They’ve shrunk to dots.” Dr. Austin gave a self-satisfied nod. “We can remove your shunt.”

Artemis Diane Winslow let out the breath she’d been holding. She’d spent her entire senior year going back and forth from this hospital in Nashville for treatments, longing to be normal, praying that the cancer she’d been fighting since age five and that had popped up in her liver last fall would be defeated. All she wanted was to be free permanently of cancer and medical procedures. Was that too much to ask?

“The sooner, the better,” she told her longtime doctor. “I always feel like I’m climbing a cliff and just when I get to the top and stand up, cancer pushes me over the edge again.”

Dr. Austin touched her shoulder. “You’ve fought hard, and better treatments come along every day. Hang in there.”

He hadn’t said,
“The worst is over. Clear sailing now.”
Disappointing, but with the shunt coming out and her latest chemo protocol over, she might have a normal summer—her last summer before starting college.

“Chosen a college yet?” Dr. Austin asked, numbing the skin around her shunt for the removal and stitching process.

“Middle Tennessee State University. I plan to study art history. It’s close to home.” She’d wanted to go away to college, but living at home would be cheaper. Eric, her twenty-year-old brother who worked with their father in his cabinetmaking business, liked teasing her about her love of art and ancient cultures. “Four years of college and you still won’t be able to
do
anything,” he’d say, and she’d answer, “I’ll be a sought-after lecturer, and you’ll be begging for my autograph.” He always laughed, tickled her side, and dashed off before she could retaliate.

“We’ll keep up the oral meds and check you again in two months,” Dr. Austin said, smiling.

She’d take the pills, but Arie’s pipe dreams included travel abroad to the great museums of Europe.
One thing at a time
, she told herself.
Today the shunt, tomorrow the world
.

“I guess I should let Mom come in to hear the news,” she said, positive that Patricia was outside the exam room with her ear to the door.

“I don’t know how you’ve kept her out,” Dr. Austin said.

Arie had put her foot down months before over her mother or father haunting her every visit to the doctor. All she wanted now was to tell her best friends Ciana and Eden the good news, certain they would make plans to go somewhere fun and celebrate.

“Call her in,” Austin said, “and let’s get you out of here.”

Riding home from the doctor’s office, Arie felt renewed optimism about the future. She glanced over at her mother, driving with a smile and humming to herself. Arie hadn’t insisted on driving so that she could talk and text. She called Ciana Beauchamp first, her best friend since the fifth grade, the one who’d cheered Arie through two other remissions, one at twelve and another through their senior year of high school. On the phone, Ciana first cheered, then said, “Come straight over. We’ll go for a ride.”

Nothing would make Arie happier. The feel of the sun hitting her face and the smells of freshly turned earth, newly mown grass, horseflesh, and saddle-soaped leather always comforted her. And without a horse of her own, she had learned to ride on Olivia’s horse, Sonata, at the Bellmeade farm, Ciana’s home. For graduation, Ciana had given Arie a glittery cowgirl jacket. “For the rodeo parade this summer,” she had said. Arie had never owned a jacket so beautiful. Over the years, such jackets had been loaned to her by Ciana or bought at the Goodwill store and decorated by her mother with sequins and hot-glued rhinestones. Arie had cried when she’d lifted the jacket out of its box.

Next Arie called Eden, who’d joined their friendship in middle school to make an unbreakable trio. Eden worked in a fashion boutique in the downtown area of their small town of Windemere. “Awesome!” Eden said after Arie shared her news. “We have to have some fun.”

Arie wanted to ask if Eden was sure she could break away from Tony, her possessive boyfriend, but she stopped herself. Why darken Eden’s mood? “I’m open to everything! Come over to Ciana’s when you get off.”

“We’ll do something bodacious,” Eden said.

“Nothing that involves a police presence,” Arie said with
a laugh. Beside her, Patricia glanced over with an arched eyebrow. Arie ignored her.

“I’ll be there.” In the background, Arie heard a bell jingle. Eden said, “Whoops, customer just walked in. See you later.”

“What about
our
celebration?” Patricia asked as soon as Arie ended her call. “You know, your family? You may be eighteen, graduated, and all grown up, but we want to celebrate with you too.”

Arie sighed. A party with her family meant crowds, because she had more relatives in the area than Cooter Brown had hunting dogs. “You and Dad plan the party and I’ll be there, but for tonight, I just want to be with my friends. Please.”

Patricia grumbled but followed it with a smile. “All right. Tonight with your friends, but a barbeque with the family soon. You’ll be glad you came. Trust me.”

She imagined a cake and balloons as in years past when she’d been pronounced cancer-free. There would be lots of good wishes, hugs and squeezes, mountains of grilled meat, casseroles, salads, molded gelatins, chips and dips. She’d hear congratulations, and she’d be toasted with sodas and beer. Her family loved her and she loved them—all of them, the entire army of them—but in many ways they still saw her as a little girl, a broken fair-haired, blue-eyed doll cursed to bear the burden of cancer through a life always on the brink of disaster.

After all, Arie was “the cancer girl,” and the whole town had pitched in over time. They had held bake sales, placed collection canisters in stores, sponsored bingo nights at the veterans center, and held fish fries in church parking lots, all to help pay her mounting and finally overwhelming medical bills.

The house wore its emptiness like a dark cloak. Eden McLauren didn’t need to go inside to know that her mother was gone. Yet despite being eighteen and grown, she felt like a four-year-old again. That was how old she was when it first began to dawn on her that her mother, Gwen, wasn’t like other mothers. She had huge mood swings—one day erupting with the energy of a volcano and tearing around in a frenzy, then crashing for days with such depression that she couldn’t get out of her bed.

Eden stepped through the side door in the carport and into the kitchen. Dishes were piled in the sink; cabinet doors were standing open. Gwen had left in a hurry, not even locking the door behind her. No way to tell when she’d left. No way to know when she’d return. The old run-down house seemed to sigh with a sense of abandonment.

Eden’s gaze swept the room, taking in the ripped vinyl flooring, the worn-out table and chairs, and the egg-yolk-yellow walls. Eden had painted them out of spite once when
her mother had left, knowing how her mother hated the color yellow—the color of the sun and daffodils and school buses.

Eden’s old insecurities returned, along with the anger she felt toward her mother. Where did her mother go? Why did she run away? A child’s questions, she knew, but ones that still haunted her even after all these years. She spied the paring knife on the counter and picked it up, staring at the tip, longing to bring it to the inside of her arm, press it into the scarred skin and slice. She imagined the thin line of blood oozing onto her skin and the sudden pain that would dispel the other pain that lived inside her head. How good it would feel, this release, this freedom to bleed. Fighting the urge, she laid the knife down.

Maybe her mother hadn’t run off. Maybe she’d been called in to her cashier’s job at Piggly Wiggly grocery and rushed out the door, carelessly leaving the door unlocked and forgetting to write a note. Eden went upstairs into her mother’s bedroom and checked her hope at the door. Contents from drawers were heaped on the floor, closet hangers picked clean, making it look as if a burglar had ransacked the room. Eden stared at the mess, hardly able to breathe. She glanced to the closet shelf and saw the blue duffel bag was missing. She remembered they’d had their first screaming fight over it when she’d come home from school at age eleven and found Gwen furiously packing it.