Heartland

HEARTLAND

BY

VICKIE ADAMS

www.wickedpublishing.net

Copyright © 2017 Wicked Publishing

First Edition

Published through Wicked Publishing LLC 2017

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission

Synopsis

Catherine Anne Matson, Cam to her friends, has returned to her Tennessee home after learning her grandfather is dying. When she arrives, he provides her with information on the one man she’s never met…her father. Cam’s return home uncovers more than she bargained for.

Distraught and alone, she rekindles an old friendship with Savanna Collins, an old school flame, who in the end, offers her more than friendship.

Chapter 1

Saturday Morning

Startled from an uneasy sleep, Cam groped for the phone ringing in the darkness.

Hello? she croaked. Her throat felt hot and dry, as though she’d slept in an oven. She wasn’t an early riser by choice any day of the week

"Catherine Anne?"

Cam’s chest tightened. She immediately recognized her uncle’s twangy inflection. Receiving a call from her family meant one thing…bad news. Yes?

"This here’s yo’ Uncle Ray." He paused. Yo’ papaw is dying. Sissy wants you to come home. Sissy was Ray’s pet name for her mother, Lily.

Cam closed her eyes tightly and massaged her temple. A hot band circled her brow. A vision of her grandfather’s face filled her head. Did Ray say dying?

Where is he? she asked, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder.

"The hospital over in Madisonville. Docs say he’s got pneumonia. Come on sudden-like."

Is Mama okay? How’s she doing?

"You know yo’ ma. Don’t say much, but seems to be holding her own."

Tell her I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t make any promises. With nothing left to say, she hung up, threw back the covers, and rose from the bed. She made her way to the bathroom, and in the bright overhead light, she searched the medicine cabinet for aspirin, while her head pounded mercilessly. She tried to remember how many beers she’d downed the night before—more than a six pack, less than a case? She shook two tablets out of the bottle, then took a glass from the cabinet above the sink and filled it with tap water to wash down the aspirin. One of them stuck at the back of her tongue, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth.

Staring into the mirror, she noted that her blue eyes were bloodshot and blinked several times to try to moisten them.

Time for a haircut. Guess it’ll have to wait, she said, while taking mental note of how her dark, thick, disheveled hair had grown.

She carried the glass of water into the kitchen and sat down at the small table.

Ray’s call had stirred unpleasant memories she preferred to keep buried. Her life in Michigan was far removed from her childhood in the hills of Tennessee, although it seemed at times it wasn’t far enough. She grew up in a rural part of the state. Her home life was difficult at best. Her mother, a moody woman, would often go for days without speaking.

For years, contact with her family had been limited to circumspect phone calls on birthdays, Christmas, and Mother’s Day—polite, tense, and terse. Theirs was a relationship only in the loosest sense of the word. Cam tried to forget she had a family. She supposed they probably felt the same way about her.

Clouds covered the sun like dirty cotton balls, and the cold, gray morning reflected Cam’s mood. The men she worked with knew she was a lesbian. They were cool about it, for the most part. But last week, Bill Thompson said something that didn’t set quite right with her. She didn’t remember what he said, exactly. Hell, maybe it wasn’t what he said at all, but the way he said it. Hell, maybe she just wanted a good excuse to belt someone in the mouth. Which is exactly what she had done.

At 5’10" tall and 145 pounds, she was no fluff chick. Of course, it helped that Bill was a big old blubbery guy. He never knew what hit him.

Damn it all, Cam! he hollered. What’d you go and do that for?

Man, what a bleeder. She split his lip and her knuckle wide-open. Blood flew everywhere. You should have seen the stunned looks on their faces. She busted out laughing, which didn’t help the situation. Next thing she knew, they’d both been hauled into a supervisor’s office along with a foreman and union representative. Everyone yelled and gestured while she sat there, hand throbbing, chuckling to herself. She felt better than she’d felt in days.

She received ten days’ suspension, without pay, but she’d expected to have been fired. She knew they were afraid of a lawsuit. What struck her as funny was that Bill got busted too: ten days’ suspension without pay, for sexual harassment. They ordered him to take a sexual harassment class and Cam to see a shrink for anger management. She felt much better after belting Bill. She didn’t think he felt the same way though. She bet he’d take quite a ribbing about getting cold-cocked by a dyke.

She phoned the airline and made her reservations, leaving the return date open, enabling her to return early if the visit became unbearable.

She made a pot of coffee, poured herself a cup, and returned to the table, then sat and stared out the window while resting her chin in her palm. Images of her childhood flooded her mind, beckoning familiar feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Her father was out of the picture before she was born, and her mother and grandfather never talked about him, even though she’d begged for information. They said it’d be best if she put him out of her mind, so she just stopped asking, and while they seemed relieved, she felt more and more like a bastard child—rejected, unwanted, unloved. It bothered her, like half of her was missing. She wanted to know him, to know something about him, and understand why he’d left. That was when the wall went up, one brick at a time, until she no longer cared.

Her mother grew more distant as the years passed, and Cam wondered if she looked anything like her father. Her mouth tightened. Maybe she reminded Lily of him.

Her grandmother died before she was born. Papaw was stoic. He’d probably have been happier if it was just him and Lily. Maybe if I’d been a boy…

She glanced at the clock on the wall above the stove—it was nine-thirty. Her appointment with Dr. March was at eleven o’clock, and she didn’t want to be late; she was the psychologist Cam had been seeing for the past three months.

She showered and dressed quickly, then locked the door to the apartment and headed down the stairs and out of the building, where she pulled out of the parking lot and headed uptown.

***

Cam raked her fingers through her hair and hesitated to answer Dr. March’s question. Her eyes wandered around the office, settling on a painting on the wall opposite the couch. It depicted an English hunt. The hunters were dressed in formal scarlet and black riding habits and sat astride regal looking stallions, a pack of dogs poised at the ready.

Dr. March, an older woman with hair like silver cotton candy, repeated her question. What is your earliest memory? Today she wore an impeccable maroon knit suit and sensible low-heeled shoes.

I remember sitting in Mrs. Frank’s kindergarten class, she spoke in monotone. A little girl hands me a cellophane package of graham crackers and a carton of milk. I sit, staring at the crackers. I feel lost, like I just woke up from a deep sleep. I look around. ‘Where am I?’ I wonder. ‘Where is my mama?’ Her voice cracked, and her eyes grew wet. She remembered the day clearly. God, she had been terrified.

You have no memories of your childhood until you awoke and found yourself in kindergarten. Is that right? Dr. March’s brows knitted together.

Cam nodded, and kept her eyes downcast. Halfway through the year actually. She glanced up and smiled weakly.

Did you ever tell anyone what you had experienced?

No. She shook her head. No, I was just a kid. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. When school ended, I found my mother waiting outside with Ray. I ran and threw myself on her. She seemed startled. Ray said something to me. I don’t know what. I remember shrinking away from him, trying to hide behind my mother. I didn’t say anything. Over the next few days, I kept quiet, watching, and listening. I felt lost. I had to catch up on what was going on around me.

I think the answers to many questions lie in the void, those years which preceded your ‘awakening.’ Dr. March paused. The feeling of waking could mean you dissociated.

I don’t understand.

When something is too great to cope with, you become convinced you are no longer you, the trauma is no longer yours. Like a mental safety mechanism.

A split personality?

No, nothing so drastic is that. A certain amount of dissociation is normal, she explained, her hand punctuating the air. Carl Jung, a renowned psychiatrist, believed everyone has clusters of thoughts and feelings, referred to as complexes, which often manifest themselves as moods and fantasies. Or you could be suffering from a psychogenic amnesia, simply forgetting a specific period. In either case, I think you need to know what happened to cause it.

So, there it was—the huge holes in her memory weren’t normal. But the past was immutable, unchangeable. You must put it behind you, Cam told herself, time and time again. Forget it. Don’t dwell on the past. Whatever should have filled those holes was long gone.

Our memories are part of us—they tell us who we are, what we have experienced, and how we should feel, Dr. March continued. "Proponents of the theory of cryptomnesia believe that everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, we remember—even if we don’t