Family at Stake

CHAPTER THREE

“DAD?” AMANDA STOOD, THE tears glittering on her round little-girl cheeks breaking his heart.

“I’m sorry, Amanda.” He held his hands out to his sides. He had failed her so much and so often. “What am I supposed to do?”

The answer burned in her eyes, it radiated off her trembling shoulders. He could see it on her face, in the wild clenching of her hands. I am supposed to take care of her. I am supposed to love her and care for her and make sure no one takes her away from me.

Basic dad things, and he was failing.

She finally turned and ran back to her bedroom. The sound of her footsteps pounded up the stairs, then her door slammed and Mac collapsed into one of the dining room chairs like a sail that had lost all of its wind.

Rachel Filmore. He stared up at the wood-beam-and-stucco ceiling and wanted to howl. Talk about nightmares colliding. The dissolution of his family mixed with the devastating return of Rachel Filmore. Perfect.

He had truly thought the parts of his body that could feel the painful combination of lust and hurt and anger had been burned out of him thirteen years ago. But those numb parts had flared to painful life when Rachel had pushed those sunglasses off her eyes.

God. He rubbed a hand over his face. Rachel.

She still appeared fragile, as though a strong wind would push her over. But he knew better. Her feet were planted wide and firmly on the earth. She was as immovable as one of the trees in his orchard. Her chin was still out, ready to take on the world. Her green eyes held that wrenching combination of hope and cynicism that he’d remembered. One corner of her mouth still curved up, like the suspicious and sarcastic kid she had been, but her whole smile was like the sun coming up on a new day.

She was gorgeous and still had the power to make his heart stop and his hands sweat.

He groaned and shut his eyes. As if his life needed this.

Thirteen years spent erasing her from his memory, trying to forget what it was like to love her and for one night believe that he was loved in return. All of those feelings had come rushing back as she stood on his stairs, in the house he had built, and said she was here to help.

He groaned and winced. Help? Rachel? He couldn’t get his head around it. He’d never thought he would see her again, sure that she had moved as far away from New Springs as possible. And all this time she had been just forty minutes away? He smiled at his own nonsense, as though had he known, he would have done something about it. Nope. He just couldn’t believe that she’d actually stuck around this area.

She’d said she would never come back.

Funny how things work out. Freaking hilarious.

What was funny was how the women he loved were always such mysteries. His wife he’d been able to read like a book, but his mother, Rachel, his daughter—all enigmas.

Things were going on in his daughter’s head that he couldn’t begin to fathom. Since Margaret had died, he’d tried very hard to make Amanda’s home a safe and warm place, despite the absence of her mother. He raced around at double speed to cover up that gaping hole in their home. And until Amanda ran away, he’d seriously thought he was doing a pretty good job.

But now this ghost who looked like his daughter, but wasn’t the girl he knew, wandered through his house and he didn’t know how to help her.

Initially, when they’d been court-ordered into counseling, Mac had been relieved. Finally someone for them to talk to, a guide through this new horrific landscape they traveled, would surely help.

But they’d gotten Frank. Amanda wouldn’t talk to him. She’d become more angry and withdrawn from Mac, with his in-laws, who adored her. Frank hadn’t seemed to care or understand that Amanda was retreating from her family, and Mac had grown frustrated. And when Frank had told Mac that Amanda would be taken away from him, all hell had erupted.

Mac looked over at the counter where the broken plate lay in pieces in the sink.

Way to show your rational side there, Mac thought. A surefire way to keep your family together.

Like a fool, he’d thought they were in the clear. He hadn’t heard from Frank in three weeks after he’d dropped the “removing Amanda bomb” on them. Mac had figured they were just another family who had slipped through the cracks. Only in their case it was a blessing.

I think it’s a blessing. I can help you. Rachel’s words lingered in his head.

Honestly, he doubted it. It wasn’t so much that his faith in the system was nonexistent. It was his faith in Rachel that was lacking. Graduation night he’d let himself believe that she was staying—that they were going to be together. But the next day she’d left without telling him, and then he made that stupid trip to her apartment, when he’d stood out in the rain begging her to come back. Although that was pretty mortifying, it was not what was so disheartening.

Rachel had run away from her family. She’d lied and run away from them. When things had gotten tight, she’d left without so much as a word. She’d abandoned her brother, who never forgiven her. Mac couldn’t blame Jesse. He’d never forgiven her, either.

How could he trust someone capable of that behavior?

How could he trust the woman who’d showed up on his doorstep with promises to help, but who’d acted just as cold and formal as Frank, who’d betrayed him?

How could he trust the woman to whom he’d given everything he had of value? And she’d left it all behind like clothes she’d outgrown.

Mac took a deep breath and pushed himself out of the chair. Right now he had to convince his daughter that they needed to give counseling one more try.

Mac climbed the stairs, feeling a hundred years old, and knocked on his daughter’s door.

“Go away,” she yelled.

“Amanda?”

“Dad.” She ripped the door open and then took three flying steps back to her bed where she curled onto her side away from him.

Her nickname, Eddy, was embroidered on the back of her shirt, the fragile knobs of her spine pressed against the cotton. Suddenly, Mac was nearly on his knees with the desperate desire to rewind time seven years. Amanda would be starting kindergarten, her life an open book to him. There were no secrets, no locked doors, no terrifying three days of her disappearance. No criminal investigations. No Rachel Filmore.

“Amanda.” Two months had passed since the harrowing nights she’d been gone, and he wasn’t any closer to finding out why she ran. “Maybe if you talked to me about why you ran—”

“Dad, I’ve told you,” she mumbled.

“I know it was Christie’s idea, but why did you go?” He watched her thin shoulders shrug. He expected that calculated shrug, considering it had been her standard answer for two months.

Why did you run away?

Why are you so sad?

Why won’t you eat?

Why won’t you talk to me?

Frank had told Mac that he needed to push his daughter for answers, that he couldn’t let her silence get the best of him. But staring at the delicate curve of her spine, he wondered how he could push her. She had already suffered so much.

He cleared his throat and put his foot down on one side of a line they rarely crossed. “Is it about Mom?”

There was a long stretch of quiet that Mac filled with wordless prayers that Amanda would talk.

“No, Dad,” she sighed. “Not everything is about Mom.”

“But maybe you saw something, or heard—”

“I didn’t see or hear anything!” she yelled, flipping onto her back. Mac watched the steady stream of tears running from the corner of her eyes into her hair. “I told you I was asleep. I woke up in the hospital, Dad. I already told you I don’t know what happened!”

“Okay, okay.” He took a step closer to the bed, but she immediately flung herself back onto her side.

“Go away, Dad. Just leave me alone.” Her voice was thick with her tears, and he knew that if he left the room she would sob into her pillows, shoving them into her mouth, probably thinking he wouldn’t hear her. He had stood outside her door for countless hours listening to her do that. What am I supposed to do?

He couldn’t believe after all this time it was going to come down to trusting Rachel Filmore. Amanda had to talk to Rachel. It was the only way out of this mess.

I hope someone somewhere is laughing, he thought.

“If you’re not going to talk to me, Amanda, I wish that you would talk to Rachel.”

“I’ll talk to that woman, I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispered, and even though she was probably lying, he felt a small measure of relief. She’d never said she would talk to Frank.

“Everything’s going to be all right.” He wasn’t sure at this point if that was an out-and-out lie, but he felt better saying it.

“Whatever,” she breathed, her voice tense with sarcasm.

“I’ll call and cancel the tutor.” At the moment he couldn’t force anything else on his daughter.

“Okay.” Her breath shuddered, her thin shoulders shook.

“Do you want to go into town with me, get some chicken at Ladd’s?” Fried chicken used to be a safe bet for his daughter, but these days with her uncertain appetite and mood, he could never be sure. Please eat. Please come eat with me.

“I’m not hungry,” she whispered.

“I’ll go get some for later, then,” he said, unwilling to give up the hope that sometime soon she was going to eat.

“Okay,” she said, her voice muffled.

See? He wanted to shout. See how normal we are?

He lingered for a moment, wanting so badly to have her look at him and smile. She gave him nothing but the cold chill of her silence.

Mac turned and caught sight of the glittery ladybug stickers that she had stuck on the plate of her light switch. She had gotten those stickers for her seventh birthday and put them all over the house. That was a million years ago. He had scraped those stickers off his car, the tractor, off the fridge, a couple of windows. He still had one on his alarm clock. He smiled as he touched them on his way out, those faded but still sparkling reminders of the girl she used to be.

A while later Mac parked the truck in front of Moore’s hardware store in the middle of downtown. The Main Street Café, where Rachel’s mom worked and Mac never ate for obvious reasons, stood next door, and the Dairy Dream ice cream parlor was a few doors down.

Maybe he’d get a pint of rocky road for later.

He smiled ruefully. He kept trying to get his daughter to gain some weight, but he was the only one whose pants were getting tighter.

“Hey, Mac!” Nick Weber, his insurance salesman, waved at him from where he sat with his family on one of the benches outside the Dairy Dream. “You got time next week to come down to the office, look over some of those papers?”

“No problem,” Mac shouted back, and Nick raised his vanilla cone in acknowledgement.

Mac was upping his insurance policies on everything. Fire. Life. Car. Everything was fragile in his life. Nothing was resistant to destruction, and if something happened to him or to the farm, he needed to be sure Amanda would be all right.

“Excuse me,” he murmured, squeezing between the few people standing in line at the movie theater.

The Royal had been standing for more than fifty years. He’d seen his first movie there—Bambi. He and Rachel had seen a million movies at the theater, though always through the back door without paying. And before she ran away, he and Amanda had seen their fair share there, too.

The cyclical way things worked in small towns appealed to him. He checked the marquee to see if the feature was something he could take Amanda to, but the Now Showing poster was for an R-rated movie.

Mac had never felt the way that Rachel did about this town. It had never been a trap for him. He’d always figured his life didn’t need much more than what this little town could offer him.

He’d tried to see the potholes and the bougainvillea and the families differently, as something bad, something to escape, the way Rachel had. But somehow it still all seemed right.

The scent of fried chicken led Mac to Ladd’s front door.

It didn’t matter how many times he walked in those doors, he never got tired of that smell. Ladd’s was right up there with the best smells in the world—sage on his mountain, his lemon grove after a rain, his daughter’s hair when she had been outside all day.

The sound of a girl laughing turned Mac’s head. Christie Alvarez stood with a group of high school boys. She was two years older than Amanda, but tried so hard to be a grown-up. Her black hair was pulled back in a sharp ponytail and heavy black eyeliner rimmed her eyes. Her shorts were far too tight and too short, and her belly, the last remnant of her baby fat, pushed out over the top.

He hardly recognized her. The last time he’d seen her at the courthouse she had been a scared little girl, dressed similarly to his daughter in a long skirt, tights and Mary Jane shoes. Both of them had worn their hair in braids. He remembered the sight of Amanda’s blond braid and Christie’s black one hanging down their backs as they’d stood in front of the judge, their hands locked together.

God, it seemed like yesterday that Christie had played with Barbie dolls with Amanda on the front deck. He had made that girl countless lunches of macaroni and cheese and now he watched as she took a drag of a cigarette.

He was doing the right thing trying to keep Amanda away from Christie. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl, but the very idea of his daughter dressed that way, looking at a boy with such shocking and resigned knowledge, made Mac sick.

Christie must have felt him watching her because she looked up at him with eyes like flat black stones. Empty. Cold. For a moment she appeared ashamed, a flush on her cheeks. But then she turned back to the boy she flirted with, as if Mac wasn’t there.

Mac’s instinct was to go over there, grab her and take her home to her mother. But who was he to judge? He was watching his own daughter fade away moment by moment.

Resigned, he pulled open the door to Ladd’s. Twenty minutes later, he walked back out, his hands filled with brown bags, their bottoms turning damp with grease. He passed in front of the window of the Main Street Café on his way to the truck.

Rachel’s mother, Eve, stood next to one of the window booths, taking an order. He shouldn’t have made that crack to Rachel about her mother. It wasn’t fair.

Eve, her long salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun, leaned away from the young couple in the booth to cough violently. He could practically hear her through the glass.

That’s the price of working for twenty years in the only place left where people could smoke unfiltered cigarettes and eat a blue-plate special.

Of course, in every memory he had of Eve she had a smoke of her own hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Eve didn’t look much like Rachel. Maybe she once had before her husband had gotten hold of her. For as long as Mac had known her, Eve had been rough and broad, her eyes a muddy, graceless brown, while Rachel’s had always been an intriguing blend of green and brown.

Mac started walking again. He couldn’t do this. It was one thing to have Rachel in his home and in his family, but he would be damned if he’d let her back into his head.

He didn’t think he could survive being abandoned by Rachel Filmore twice in one lifetime.

AMANDA STARED OUT HER window and counted her father’s steps up the hallway.

He didn’t even try to sneak past her room. He walked right down the middle of the hallway so every floorboard squeaked.