A Thousand Voices Read online

“Yeah,” I answered, bewildered as he hauled it off the luggage carousel with a grunt, then snagged my bedraggled garment bag. “How’d you know?”

  “I bought it for you.” His mouth hung open in disbelief. “Remember?”

  The memory came rushing back, and I laughed. “How could I forget that?” How, indeed? While all the other high school couples were exchanging promise rings, senior charms, and framed graduation photos with endearments like Yours 4 Ever and True Love Always, Barry bought me luggage.

  “You didn’t speak to me for a week, remember?” He gestured with his hand, churning up the past.

  I hooked my fingers in the belt loops of the Levi’s that I could have sold for a small fortune in Ukraine. “That’s not true.” There had never, ever been a time when Barry and I didn’t speak for a week.

  “All right, maybe it was a day. But it seemed like a week,” he joked, and we laughed together. A woman with a luggage cart bumped into him from behind, and he stumbled forward, then glanced over his shoulder and apologized for being in the way. The woman didn’t answer, and Barry shrugged good-naturedly, then started scooping up my suitcases. “Guess we should get out of here. You hungry? Want to get something to eat?”

  “No, thanks. They gave us a snack on the plane.” Leaving the baggage area, we exited the building near a small flower bed, where a stunted dogwood tree was wilting in the August heat. Not far away, a row of redbuds looked dry, and tired, and ready for winter to come. A maintenance man was mowing grass beside the curb, lacing the air with a scent so strong it eclipsed the odor of damp pavement and exhaust fumes. A rush of memories swirled over me, and for a moment my mind was caught in the illusion that I’d never left. Standing there on the sidewalk, surrounded by the sights and scents of Kansas City, I could have been any age from twelve to eighteen, at the airport to pick up James, who’d just piloted a 747 full of happy travelers home from some faraway locale. If it was summer or a school holiday, Karen and I might have ridden along on family passes to enjoy a short vacation or a music festival during his layover….

  I was suddenly aware that I’d stopped on the sidewalk and people were squeezing by. Beside me, Barry patiently balanced my luggage and waited. I was filled with a rush of affection for him that wasn’t romantic love, but something deeper.

  “What?” Quirking a brow, he hiked my garment bag higher onto his shoulder.

  “Nothing.” Embarrassed, I reached for one of the suitcases. “It’s just good to see you. Here, let me carry something.”

  He shifted the luggage handles possessively and started walking. “I’ve got it. You sure you don’t want to stop off for something to eat?”

  “Only if you’re hungry,” I said, as we headed toward the parking lot. “No. I mean, not unless you are.”

  “I’m fine, but if you want to stop, that’s good, too.”

  “It’s up to you, really.” He shrugged, hefting the heavy garment bag higher onto his shoulder again. “You’re the world traveler.”

  “Tell you what.” As usual, between the two of us, Barry and I couldn’t come up with a decision. “Surprise me. Let’s just head toward Hindsville, and if you see someplace you feel like stopping, then stop. If not, we’ll be at Aunt Kate’s farm in time for supper.” What I really wanted to do was get to the farm. I hadn’t seen anyone in my family since James and Karen had flown to London to watch our final concert almost a year ago. Suddenly that seemed like an eternity. I tried to imagine what it would be like, walking into the family gathering at Aunt Kate’s place this weekend, surprising them because they thought I wouldn’t be home for two months yet.

  Barry started up a conversation about college life as we loaded my things and headed south in his new Mustang, a reward for keeping a straight-A average at Missouri State. Sitting behind the wheel of the glossy new convertible, Barry looked almost cool, which was a feat, considering that our senior year he’d cruised in his mom’s old hatchback wagon.

  Outside the window, the scenery turned from urban to rural, the highway slowly leaving the flatlands and winding upward into the foothills of the Ozarks. It began to look more like Hindsville, more like home. Somewhere during Barry’s dissertation about dormitory life, his new fraternity house, and algebra class, the road disappeared altogether….

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty.” Barry’s voice wound into the blackness, pulling me back into the Mustang from someplace far away. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up. We’re here.”

  Opening my eyes, I blinked against the bright afternoon sunlight as the car turned into the farm’s gravel driveway. One side of my hand was numb against the glass, and the other side was imprinted into my face, complete with the St. Christopher’s ring one of the girls at the orphanage had given me when I left.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, pulling myself upright. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you. That was rude. You should have poked me or something.”

  “I was enjoying watching you snore.”

  “Gross,” I muttered, reaching into my purse for a hairbrush. My heart fluttered into my throat as we wound slowly past the farm fields, then uphill through the shade of Grandma Rose’s old silver maple trees. On the bluff above the river, the big white house loomed imposingly, its dormer windows watching our approach. My entire family would be gathered there, all of them having come to see my cousin, Jenilee’s, new baby. The first baby to come into the family since Aunt Kate’s youngest, Hanna, who was five now. The birth of Jenilee and Caleb’s baby was cause for celebration. They’d waited until Jenilee finished medical school to start a family. Now the baby was a week old, and Jenilee and Caleb still hadn’t picked out a name. Aunt Kate figured it was time for a family meeting. Karen and James had filled me in on all the drama by e-mail. Of course, they had no idea that I’d actually be there for the family name-brainstorming session. For just an instant, I had the thought that I should have waited in Kansas City for James and Karen, instead of coming to the farm. My unexpected return would steal the spotlight from Jenilee’s new arrival. James and Karen might be upset that, after being away so long, I’d asked Barry to meet me at the airport instead of asking them.

  My hands shook as I dragged the brush through my hair.

  “You look fine.” Barry frowned sideways at me.

  I rolled my eyes. I could imagine what I looked like after four transfers and two days of planes, trains, and automobiles. “Maybe I should have called them instead of surprising everyone. They—”

  “Why do you do that?” Barry cut me off.

  “What?”

  “Second-guess yourself.” Pulling into a parking space behind the garage building, he braced an elbow on the console and leaned across toward me. “You look great. You’re beautiful. They’re going to be thrilled to see you.” Dropping the keys in the console, he exited the car. I opened my door, swiveled around and watched my feet touch home soil, then stood and stretched, taking in the warm late-summer air. It smelled of leaves and freshly cut grass, the farm fields down below and late-blooming roses in the garden. Familiar things, the same as always. The scents snuggled around me like a blanket as I closed the car door and started toward the house.

  The yard gate squealed a high-pitched protest as Barry pushed it open. “C’mon, slowpoke.” As usual, Barry was in a hurry to get to the kitchen.

  I paused to take one more look at the blackberry patch behind the old hired hand’s house out back. Hidden in the tall tangle of brambles was a path I could have walked with my eyes closed. Even now, I knew every inch of the trail that led across the river to the little house I’d lived in with Mama and my real granny. The house was gone now, having caved in under the weather and then been bulldozed, but the trail remained.

  “Who’s…?” Aunt Kate’s voice came from the screen porch, somewhere near the kitchen door. “Barry? Barry, what are…?” There was an audible intake of breath as I rounded the garage building and hurried down the path to the gate. “Dell? Dell?” Yanking open the kitchen door, she hollered into the house,
“Dell’s here! Karen, Dell’s here!” A moment later, Aunt Kate was on the walkway, stretching out her arms, hugging me, then examining me at arm’s length. “How in the world did you get here?”

  “On a plane.”

  She shook a finger in a way that reminded me of Grandma Rose. Grandma Rose hated surprises, because it meant that somebody had managed to outmanipulate her. “Oh, you!” She pointed at Barry. “And you. How much did you have to do with this, huh? How long have you known Dell was coming home?”

  “Ummm…not too long,” Barry muttered.

  Aunt Kate’s gaze shifted back and forth between the two of us. “You two are so in trouble. I’m going to…”

  The threat went unfinished as the rest of the relatives hit the door, and we became a wiggling, squirming, squealing mass of family. Barry retreated to keep from being trampled in the commotion. By the time it was finally over, we’d made such a racket that we’d awakened Jenilee’s baby, who was sleeping in the bassinet in the living room. I walked inside with James holding one hand and Karen holding the other, and Barry trailing behind. Both Jenilee and Caleb, followed by Kate’s three children, went to the living room to rescue the newest member of our crazy family.

  We were standing in the kitchen, talking about how I’d managed to come home early, and why, when Jenilee returned with her baby girl, newly fed and freshly diapered. Hanna, Kate’s five-year-old, held the used, rolled-up diaper like it was a time bomb. Her older sister, Rose, fawned over the baby, trying to fasten a loose snap on the fluffy pink terry sleeper. Joshua, Kate’s oldest, had disappeared sometime during the baby retrieval mission.

  “It’s a good thing this is a girl,” Jenilee commented, her soft blond hair falling over her shoulder as she shifted the baby so we could get a better view. “Because your daughters have just carefully observed the entire diapering process, if you know what I mean. I’m going to let you explain about the umbilical cord, Mom.”

  “She gots a stem,” Hanna reported. “It’s icky, but I like her.”

  Everyone laughed, and the door inched open behind Jenilee. “Of course she does.” Aunt Jeane slipped through the opening, peeking in first to make sure the swinging door wasn’t going to take anybody out. “All babies come with stems—that’s from growing in the pumpkin patch.”

  “Aunt Jeane!” Kate squealed. “Don’t tell them that.”

  I giggled, and Aunt Jeane noticed me standing there. “Well, what in the world did I miss while I was upstairs having my nap? All of a sudden, Dell’s here.”

  “She came home early,” Karen reported. “Sneaked in on us.”

  “I wanted to see the baby,” I said, trying to put the focus back on Jenilee and her new arrival. “Can I hold her?”

  Jenilee crossed the room and slipped the bundle into my arms. With Kate’s girls arranging the blanket, buttoning the sleeper, and petting the baby, I looked into the wide blue eyes of my new cousin for the first time. “She’s beautiful,” I whispered, and the baby gurgled and smiled. “Look, she’s smiling.”

  “One-week-old babies don’t smile,” Caleb corrected, standing over my shoulder and gazing down at his daughter. “Except maybe this one. She’s exceptional.”

  I barely heard the last part of the comment. My mind was racing backward instead, rocketing through the years, until I was seven years old, holding my baby brother, Angelo, in my arms. He had soft blond curls and blue eyes like this baby.

  He’s smiling at me, I said.

  He ain’t smiling at you. Little babies can’t smile, because they don’t know anything, Mama snapped. She was having a hard time, back living with Granny and me, trying to take care of the baby and keep herself off meth so she and Angelo’s daddy could get married. He told her if she got herself clean, he’d rent a house for all of us. Granny said it was about as likely for pigs to fly. She said Mama’d be there about long enough to dump another baby on her, and then light out.

  I knew that Mama really wanted to try this time. I could see it in her face. She loved Angelo’s daddy. He took her out of some dumpy hotel and helped her stay clean. She’d been working at his Handi Stop store off and on, and living in the back room—until she got pregnant, and the back room of a gas station wasn’t any place to keep a baby….

  “She has Aunt Sadie’s eyes,” I heard Aunt Jeane say, and my mind snapped back to the present in a way that left me feeling like I was in someone else’s body. I didn’t answer, just sat staring down at the baby, trying to get my bearings.

  “Well, she’s got hair like Nate’s and Joshua’s—look at those blond baby curls,” Aunt Kate chimed in.

  “Who knows?” Karen added. “I mean, baby Rose was a blonde, and then her hair turned reddish when she was about a year old.”

  Rose paused in her fawning over the baby. “It did?” She breathed in with eight-year-old amazement. “Really?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” her father answered. “You used to have hair like this baby, little miss. But you didn’t have that tiny little nose. That’s a Gray family nose, for sure. Your nose was grea-a-at big.”

  “Da-ad,” Rose complained, and Ben laughed, tussling her hair.

  The conversation went on, moving from the baby’s face to her toes, and whose feet she might possibly have. Somewhere in the middle, as the baby lay in my arms, her wide eyes moving slowly from one admirer to the next, I looked up.

  Everyone was so focused on the baby, no one noticed as I gazed around the circle of faces. Something painful stabbed deep inside me, solidified into a conscious thought where there had been only a vague awareness before.

  There wasn’t a single face in that circle that looked like mine.

  And there never would be.

  CHAPTER 2

  Karen shooed me out the door so she, Aunt Kate, and Aunt Jeane could make supper. We stood for a long moment in the doorway. “You’ve grown up,” she said, her eyes moist. “You don’t look like a teenager anymore. Who’s this beautiful young woman on my sister’s porch?”

  I laughed under my breath, wondering if I’d really changed that much. I didn’t feel any different. Inside, I was still a combination of Karen and James’s adopted daughter and the little girl from the house on Mulberry Creek. “Same old Dell.” I squeezed her hand. My experiences in Ukraine had made me more grateful for her and James, more aware of how lucky I was. Compared to the struggles of the kids in the orphans’ home, a drug-addicted mother, an unsupervised childhood, and an adoption into a perfectly wonderful family at twelve was an incredibly good life. “It’s great to be home.”

  That pleased her, I could tell. She never said it, but I knew she’d always wondered whether I loved her the way a daughter should love a mother—as much as she loved me. That feeling was inside me, but I never knew how to show it. Those early years of keeping my distance from people had created barriers that seemed as much a part of me as the way I walked, or talked, or held a pencil—habits formed long before I was conscious of them. Everything that came afterward stayed outside. Karen never complained, but I knew she sensed a part of me that even our family’s love couldn’t penetrate.

  Karen, more than anyone, had been nervous about my wandering these last two years. She’d wanted me to accept one of the music scholarships I’d been offered and go straight to college, maybe even Juilliard. Someplace she could visit during long weekends. She was afraid if I left for Europe, I’d never come back. She was worried that I’d find one excuse after another to hitchhike around the world, never stepping back into real life to figure out who I was supposed to be as an adult.

  Now here I was on Aunt Kate’s porch with all the old questions still unanswered, and the barricades still in place.

  Karen touched the side of my face, combed a few stray strands of dark hair behind my ear. “Is something wrong? You seem a little…I don’t know…down.” She’d always had a sense about me, that motherly sixth sense that told her when something was wrong.

  “Just a little tired, I think.” I couldn’t tell her that com
ing home and seeing Jenilee’s baby hadn’t felt like I’d thought it would. “Jet lag probably.”

  She rubbed a hand up and down my arm. “Well, why don’t you relax a while—maybe sit on the porch and close your eyes for a few minutes? Barry and the guys are in there looking at pictures of James’s latest tractor restoration project. That could take a while.”

  I hesitated a moment, and Karen gave me a nudge. “Go on. It’s okay. You know how it is when your dad gets started talking about his tractor obsession. He’ll keep Barry prisoner for an hour, at least.”

  I chuckled, struck as always by the sense that I liked it when she called James your dad. They’d never really pushed the issue of whether I should call them James and Karen or Dad and Mom. Instead, we’d settled for a strange mishmash of whatever seemed right at the moment. “Poor Barry. Maybe he can work the conversation around to his new Mustang. He’s really proud of that car.”

  Karen glanced toward the driveway. “I’ll bet. It’s a pretty sweet ride.” We both chuckled at her imitation of James’s car-lover lingo. “But, all the same, Barry’s in trouble for picking you up at the airport and sneaking you here without telling us. He just helped me with a Jumpkids after-school camp a week ago, and he never said a thing. How long has he known you were coming?”

  “A couple days. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I thought I’d just catch a cab from the airport and surprise you and James at the house, but then I got the e-mail about all of you getting together at the farm this weekend for the big baby-naming extravaganza. I didn’t know if my car was still at the house in Kansas City or not, so I called Barry to pick me up.” That wasn’t the whole truth. At the last minute, I’d panicked about coming home, and I needed a familiar face. I knew Barry would come for me without saying a word to anyone. He would stay by my side and hold my hand and be the friend he’d always been.

  “I guess I’ll forgive him, just this once,” Karen acquiesced. “Since he did bring you home.” Squeezing my arm, she turned back toward the door. “See you in a bit.”