Almost Remembered Read online

  But she’d be lying. She still sometimes woke to the echoes of his name being cried aloud, aching from the memory of his lips on hers.

  A horned lark flitted out from the side of the road, its little black Batman hat visible above its yellow neck and brown-and-white-striped body, its wings swooped back as it dived for her. Two more larks followed swiftly behind their leader, darting at the insects slipstreamed by the wake of the car.

  Allison realized her swerving to avoid the birds was unnecessary even as she stomped on the brake and dragged the wheel sharply to the left. The birds scattered, and the car tires screeched as rubber ground into the pavement.

  Instead of the flash of wings and the glint of light ricocheting across the windshield, Allison saw a truck crowding her from the left, a Suburban bearing hard from behind and the white Chevy Nova in front of her. The Nova’s plates were customized, and even before the impact she found an irony in their soon-to-be-destroyed message: 4GET-U.

  Allison remembered screaming. She covered her head and burrowed down into the driver’s seat.

  Well versed in the way of cars, the undamaged horned larks swooped over the stalled vehicle, singing and seemingly frolicking only to drift back down to their hunting posts alongside the road, wholly ignoring the woman hunched and crying softly behind the steering wheel of a rental car in the middle of their road.

  The man with the wire-rimmed glasses and short, neatly trimmed blond hair felt a rush of adrenaline shoot through him. Allison Leary was right ahead of him.

  He frowned heavily. As before, she hadn’t recognized him. Didn’t know him. He ground his teeth to keep from swearing aloud. Or shouting his frustration and triumph to the bright clear skies.

  She meant everything to him. And yet she didn’t know him. They had been so close, had shared some of the most intense moments human beings could ever experience. Now her eyes passed over him as if he were a virtual stranger.

  And yet, hadn’t she stopped when collecting her bags at the luggage carousel in Lubbock? Hadn’t she glanced over her shoulder, combing the crowd for a familiar face?

  His heart had jolted when she looked directly at him, and jolted anew when she continued scanning the sparse crowd. He meant nothing to her. She would pay for that, he thought. Oh, yes, she would most definitely pay.

  She would remember him then. He’d make sure she didn’t forget him a second time. And there wouldn’t be any time after that. No time at all. At least, not for Allison.

  “Oh, and hang on to your britches, Charles...Allison’s coming,” Sammie Jo said, pushing his change across the counter.

  Chas’s fingers, stretching for the pennies and nickels, seemed to numb slightly.

  “We see her on TV and everything—big-time reporter on Timeline and all, but it’s not the same, you know? Hard to imagine what she’s like now,” Sammie Jo said. “My youngest niece.”

  Chas thought her voice sounded wistful. He wished he could lift his eyes from the dancing coins to look at Sammie Jo. Her lizard-dry face, sparkling blue eyes and outrageous wig might serve to ground him again. But he was more than half afraid of what he might read in her expression.

  “It’ll be good to see her again,” Chas mumbled, lying through his teeth. His voice sounded strained and felt far worse. If one of the horses he treated sounded that gruff, he’d probably prescribe clindimycin for an abscess.

  “Just to see her in real life, won’t that be a treat?” Sammie Jo said, and pushed a couple of the pennies a mite closer to his fingers. “Remember how she used to follow you around?”

  “Yeah,” he acknowledged, trying not to remember.

  “Lord, but that girl loved the country. She was such a pistol. All these years away. Still, it’s always been hard to picture Allison living in a big city and all.”

  Finally he grabbed the coins and stuffed them into his jeans pocket Then Chas forced himself to meet Sammie Jo’s eyes and was immediately sorry. In hers, he could read a world of family and loss.

  He could see her battle with breast cancer and her longtime struggle to come to grips with the death of her daughter, Susie. And he sensed that she knew why Allison had shadowed him fifteen years ago. Worst of all, he could see she understood why he’d let her tag along.

  Suddenly, Sammie Jo reached out a sunbaked hand and patted his arm. “Things change, Charles. People change. Heck...sometimes dreams we have when we’re young are the best dreams.”

  He didn’t know what to say to Sammie Jo, the only person left in the world who occasionally called him by his real name. It had been Allison who had nicknamed him Chas. Allison who had marked him permanently by naming him.

  “It’s okay, Charles. Don’t look so scared. And don’t you mind me, I’m just a little fey from all the chemo treatments they’re giving me up in Lubbock.”

  “When is she coming?” he asked.

  Sammie Jo’s hand on his hadn’t pulled the question from him; her frailty had. She owned the market on “life’s too short for lies.” Meeting her eyes, he knew he owed her nothing less than honesty in return.

  Sammie Jo smiled. Chas could see the family resemblance between her and Allison. After all those years, he still recognized Allison’s blue gaze. Could still feel the sting of the contempt in them the day she rejected him, though he’d done his finest to reject her only a day or two after that.

  “This afternoon, hon. Our Allison’s coming back to us today.”

  He should have known, he thought. He should have felt something this momentous. Allison was coming home. The grass should have bent to the east; the clouds should have been filled with rain. Birds should have flown upside down and backward.

  “I didn’t know,” was all he said.

  “Well, now you do,” Sammie Jo replied. She slid her thin, dry fingers into his palm and grasped his hand with a surprisingly strong grip. “And Charles...”

  He tried to smile and felt it slide askew when he saw tears shimmer in her eyes.

  He’d known Sammie Jo for nearly seventeen years. As the town veterinarian and makeshift doctor to most of the folk living within twenty miles of Almost, he’d seen Sammie Jo in nearly every catastrophic situation that had come down the proverbial pike. Invariably she was on hand at a funeral, a birthing, a crisis, a homecoming, a wedding or a barn raising. He’d even been there when her daughter, Susie, was buried in the little cemetery on the outskirts of Almost.

  “Hey,” he said, “talk to me, Sammie Jo. What’s wrong?”

  She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them again, her incredible Leary eyes awash with tears. “I want you to do me a favor, Charles.”

  “Name it, Sammie Jo,” he said promptly, giving her fingers a warm squeeze in return.

  “Keep her here, Charles.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it. I don’t care what you have to do. You promise me, okay? You keep her home.”

  “Sammie Jo—”

  “Promise me, Charles!”

  “But—”

  “Goats butt. Promise me.”

  “This is blackmail, Sammie Jo,” Chas said.

  The older woman chuckled, but a tear sneaked onto her leathered cheek. “I’m entitled.”

  Chas raised a shaking hand to brush the streak away from her face and felt the truth torn from him. “I can’t promise you to keep Allison here, darling. You know I can’t do that.” Strangely, at that moment, promising her to do just that was all he wanted to do. That was all he’d wanted to do for the past fifteen years. “She—”

  “She’ll stay if you ask her to,” Sammie Jo said. Her words were sharp, her grip sharper.

  Chas gave a whispered chuckle, more a sigh than anything else. “You can’t say that, Sammie Jo. She has a life. A career. She’s a somebody and—”

  “And you’re what? Just promise me you’ll ask her.”

  Chas gave up. “Fifteen years is a long, long time, Sammie Jo.”

  She shook her head, her outrageous wig swaying with her movement. �
�Fifteen years is less than a grain of sand in the desert, Charles.” She didn’t let loose of his hand.

  “So, what’s going on in that head of yours, Sammie Jo Leary? You picturing a romance? The old vet and the pretty TV star?”

  “I’ve heard of stranger combinations,” she answered promptly.

  “Not this time, darling. There’s too much water under that bridge.”

  She looked over his shoulder, either at the stand of used books or out the broad, dusty window in front of her store. “If I can’t have Susie back...I want Allison,” she said steadily, despite the two new and unchecked tears racing down her cheeks.

  Chas felt as if a fist clenched his heart. “Oh, God, Sammie Jo. What about Taylor?”

  Sammie Jo waved her free hand and nodded, as if only partway acknowledging her eldest niece, Taylor.

  “And Carolyn?”

  Again Sammie Jo waved her hand and nodded, giving only a partial credence to Carolyn, her niece by marriage, as though he knew she loved both Carolyn and Taylor with all her heart.

  “Allison and Susie were like twins,” Sammie Jo said, pressing his hand, still not looking at him, tears continuing to fall from her blue eyes.

  Chas had the fleeting thought that no two human beings could have been more dissimilar than Susie and Allison. Susie had been like Taylor, as sweet as pure honey and as innocent as a newborn calf. Whereas Allison, a long-legged, skittish colt, filled with all the wrong sorts of trust, determination and grit, raced through each day like a thoroughbred, heedless of everything but the need to run.

  Sammie Jo cleared her throat, and her fingers tightened on his hand. “I want to get to know her again. I want to know what’s going on in that pretty head of hers. I want to know why she stayed away from us so long. I’ve got to know, Charles.”

  Chas felt starkly ambivalent. On the one hand, he wanted the same things Sammie Jo did, and on the other, he was dead certain his life would be much easier and his heart much safer if he didn’t know at all. Ever. “Sammie Jo—”

  Her telephone rang, and she gave it a quick glance. “So, it’s settled,” she said, and withdrew her weathered hand from his. She gave his knuckles a quick pat. She reached for the telephone. “Minimart, what can I do for you?”

  Chas stood perfectly still, his hand still outstretched and hanging in midair. Nothing was settled, he though

  Her eyes met his. He shook his head at her, slowly, even sadly, trying to convey his unwillingness to be drawn into her schemes for Allison. For her. For him.

  She nodded again, as if in response to whoever talked to her over the telephone. But Chas could see that the tears weren’t completely gone from her eyes. As if in answer, she pointed a finger at him and mouthed the words, “Keep her here.”

  He hadn’t been able to do that fifteen years ago when it was the one thing he’d wanted above all things on earth. How in the hell was he supposed to do it now, when he didn’t even know how he felt about seeing her again?

  He opened the door to the Minimart and stepped out into the glare of the midday sun.

  A car passed slowly down the street, a woman gripping the wheel with both hands, her face pale, her blond hair tousled as if she’d run her hands through it many times. Just the way she had when she was younger. A million years ago.

  Allison.

  Chapter 2

  On the far side of the west Texas town, home to some six hundred people, Allison pulled the car onto a narrow strip of wintered yellow grass but made no move to exit the car. She stared through the passenger’s window at the two-story house with its bright yellow trim and broad front porch.

  It was hard to picture Taylor living here. To Allison, it was still the Porter place. She’d been in the same grade as the youngest Porter girl...Jenny? Janey? They’d spent several warm afternoons sprawled on the rails of the front porch drinking sodas and dreaming about where they would be in ten years, twenty, thirty. One thing they’d never imagined was that the Porters would lose their farm and be forced to move to Arkansas to live with family and that one day Taylor would buy their house and raise her family inside those familiar walls.

  Staring at the house gave Allison that same sensation of misplaced time and space as had seized her all too frequently since her car accident. The feeling was much like that of a particularly vivid dream, but one that couldn’t possibly have really happened.

  Her doctor had told her not to dwell too much on the odd sensations; some residual effects of her accident and the attendant concussion were bound to linger. If they didn’t disappear as time worked its healing magic, then he’d run a few new tests to see what might show up.

  But Allison was terribly afraid no tests would ever reveal what was really wrong with her. She remembered interviewing a famous movie star once. The woman had described a strange decline her career had taken several years before. “I think I was soul sick,” the star had said.

  That’s what Allison felt now: soul sick. Too aware of missing elements in her life, her love, even her well-established, now possibly crumbling career. And she had the distinct impression that the peculiar soul sickness had started before finding herself folded between a Chevy Nova and a Suburban. The subsequent memory lapses and panic attacks were only an extension of a strange strain of empty-life syndrome.

  Suddenly the carved oak door of Taylor’s house opened as if in slow motion. Allison found herself holding her breath.

  The slow-motion effect ceased abruptly as three identical boys catapulted through the door’s gap as if thrown out, arms waving, legs flying, thick blond hair dancing from what appeared to be sheer energy.

  She’d known her sister had triplets, but knowing hadn’t prepared her for the reality of three Leary look-alikes. They ran across the yard, yelling like wild creatures, and sailed over the low fence as if professional high jumpers.

  They circled the car and came to a skidding halt outside the driver’s door only to stand, mouths agape, staring at her through the tinted glass. In awe? In confusion? Or was it simply a sudden attack of shyness at seeing the aunt they’d never met before?

  The years of absence had never felt so solid to Allison as they did at that moment, sitting inside a rental car studying her three nephews. How old were they? Eleven, twelve? How dreadful, she thought, that she didn’t even know.

  She could see Taylor in the boys. And Taylor’s lost husband, Doug—whom Allison still thought of as Taylor’s “boyfriend.” And when the three of them raised identical sets of eyebrows, she knew she could see her brother, Craig. And herself. And Aunt Sammie Jo. And Susie. And...Daddy.

  I should have never come back, she thought with sharp panic.

  “Boys!” Allison heard Taylor call, using the exact intonation their mother had used to call her three wayward children in from the barn.

  She dragged her gaze from the boys to the woman crossing the broad porch. She felt as if she’d been hit in the chest. Her heart ached, and her fingers clutched at her handbag with frantic need to cling to something.

  Taylor. She’d have recognized her anywhere, anytime. She’d even caught glimpses of that particular shade of blond hair or a hint of her heart-shaped face a thousand different times in crowds waiting at subway stations or bus stops. But this was the real thing. Her only sister.

  She mouthed Taylor’s name, remembering the girl who had always looked out for her younger sister. She felt her eyes sting as Taylor hesitated at the base of the porch steps, as if uncertain how to proceed.

  Allison hadn’t wholly turned her back on her family fifteen years ago. She’d sent the occasional Christmas card, received and answered the odd letter. She even had a few photographs of the boys in their infant years. But they hadn’t chatted on the phone, hadn’t poured their hearts out over the Internet, hadn’t seen each other one-on-one any time during those fifteen years. Not because Taylor hadn’t wanted it, but because Allison couldn’t face it.

  Her older sister was a woman now, fully grown and lovely. Oh, Taylor...I’ve
missed you. She wondered what that graceful woman saw when looking at her younger but not-so-little sister.

  All her hard-won years of sophistication and poise, expertise and knowledge melted away. She felt more vulnerable now than she did after one of her panic attacks. Why? Because what Taylor thought mattered.

  Allison might have stayed in the car forever, frozen in place, had the boys not taken the matter out of her hands by opening the car door.

  “You’re her, aren’t you?”

  “Aunt Allison?”

  “Doofus. Who’d you think she was?”

  “Aren’t you gonna get out of the car?”

  It seemed like a thousand somewhat grimy hands reached for her. She wondered if they noticed her own hand was shaking as she dropped it into one damp, warm, slightly gritty grasp. A set of strong, broken-nailed, stubby fingers wrapped around her hand. The sensation took her back almost twenty-five years to the memory of her brother’s hand clasping hers.

  Come on, Allison, hurry up!

  “She wants you to help her out of the car, doofus.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  She didn’t know which of her nephews’ hands she clung to as though holding on to a single log in hurricane-churned waters. She issued a faint smile at all three boys and gave a minimal nod. The hand around hers tightened abruptly while its controller gave a mighty tug and roared as if she weighed something close to three thousand pounds instead of her slim 120 pounds.

  She shot from the car like a clown from a circus canon.

  “Josh! For heaven’s sake!” Taylor reprimanded her son, then said to Allison, “Are you all right?”

  Still unsteady on her worrisome leg, Allison gratefully accepted the hands her sister held out to her. Had she not been yanked from the car so precipitously, she might have felt some awkwardness about touching her sister for the first time in fifteen years.