The McKettrick Legend: Sierra's Homecoming

But she was standing in the ranch house kitchen, and it was different, in subtle ways, from the room she knew.

She was different.

Her eyes were shut, and yet she could see clearly.

A bare light bulb dangled overhead, giving off a dim but determined glow.

She looked down at herself, the dream-Sierra, and felt a wrench of surprise.

She was wearing a long woolen skirt. Her hands were smaller—chapped and work worn—someone else’s hands.

“I’m dreaming,” she insisted to herself, but it didn’t help.

She stared around the kitchen. The teapot sat on the counter.

“Now what’s that doing there?” asked this other Sierra. “I know I put it away. I know for sure I did.”

Sierra struggled to wake up. It was too intense, this dream. She was in some other woman’s body, not her own. It was sinewy and strong, this body. She felt the heart beat, the breath going in and out. Felt the weight of long hair, pinned to the back of her head in a loose chignon.

“Wake up,” she said.

But she couldn’t.

She stood very still, staring at the teapot.

Emotions stormed within her, a loneliness so wretched and sharp that she thought she’d burst from the inside and shatter. Longing for a man who’d gone away and was never coming home, an unspeakable sorrow. Love for a child, so profound that it might have been mourning.

And something else. A for bid den wanting that had nothing to do with the man who’d left her.

Sierra woke herself then, by force of will, only to find her face wet with another woman’s tears.

She must have been asleep for a while, she realized. The flames on the hearth had become embers. The room was chilly.

She shivered, tugged the afghan tighter around her, and got out of the chair. She went to the window, looked out. Travis’s trailer was dark.

“It was just a dream,” she told herself out loud.

So why was her heart breaking?

She made her way into the kitchen, navigating the dark hall way as best she could, since she didn’t know where the light switches were. When she reached her destination, she walked to the middle of the room, where she’d stood in the dream, and suppressed an urge to reach up for the metal-beaded cord she knew wasn’t there.

What she needed, she decided, was a good cup of tea.

She found a switch beside the back door and flipped it.

Reality returned in a comforting spill of light.

She found an electric kettle, filled it at the sink and plugged it in to boil. Earlier she’d been too weary to get out of that chair in the study and turn on the TV. Now she knew it would be pointless to try to sleep.

Might as well do this up right, she thought.

She went to the china cabinet, got the teapot out, set it on the table. Added tea leaves and located a little strainer in one of the drawers. The kettle boiled.

She was sitting quietly, sipping tea and watching fat snow flakes drift past the porch light outside the back door, when Liam came down the back stairway in his pajamas. Blinking, he rubbed his eyes.

“Is it morning?” he asked.

“No,” Sierra said gently. “Go back to bed.”

“Can I have some tea?”

“No, again,” Sierra answered, but she didn’t protest when Liam took a seat on the bench, close to her chair. “But if there’s cocoa, I’ll make you some.”

“There is,” Liam said. He looked in credibly young, and so very vulnerable, without his glasses. “I saw it in the pantry. It’s the instant kind.”

With a smile, Sierra got out of the chair, walked into the pan try and brought out the cocoa, along with a bag of semihard marsh mal lows. Thanks to Travis’s preparations for their arrival, there was milk in the refrigerator and, using the microwave, she had Liam’s hot chocolate ready in no time.

“I like it here,” he told her. “It’s better than any place we’ve ever lived.”

Sierra’s heart squeezed. “You really think so? Why?”

Liam took a sip of hot chocolate and acquired a liquid mustache. One small shoulder rose and fell in a characteristic shrug. “It feels like a real home,” he said. “Lots of people have lived here. And they were all McKettricks, like us.”

Sierra was stung, but she hid it behind another smile. “Wherever we live,” she said care fully, “is a real home, because we’re together.”

Liam’s expression was benignly skeptical, even tolerant. “We never had so much room before. We never had a barn with horses in it. And we never had ghosts.” He whispered the last word, and gave a little shiver of pure joy.

Sierra was looking for a way to approach the ghost subject again when the faint, delicate sound of piano music reached her ears.

CHAPTER FIVE

“DO YOU HEAR THAT?” she asked Liam.

His brow furrowed as he shifted on the bench and took another sip of his cocoa. “Hear what?”

The tune continued, flowing softly, forlornly, from the front room.

“Nothing,” Sierra lied.

Liam peered at her, perplexed and suspicious.

“Finish your chocolate,” she prompted. “It’s late.”

The music stopped, and she felt relief and a paradoxical sorrow, reminiscent of the all-too-vivid dream she’d had earlier while dozing in the big chair in the study.

“What was it, Mom?” Liam pressed.

“I thought I heard a piano,” she admitted, because she knew her son wouldn’t let the subject drop until she told him the truth.