"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

J.R.R. Tolkien

Chapter 2: A Dangerous Business

Five years later…

My call to Geoff was an urgent one, and as I listened to the dial tone I felt guilty, wondering when I'd come to rely so heavily on my absent elder brother.

It went to voicemail. "Geoff?" I said tentatively. "Geoff, it's Dad…He's…leaving. Says he's going on a trip. Says he's been cooped up in this house long enough, and now he's going to go do all the things he put off doing when we were growing up, and the house is mine, if I like it."

But I don't like it, I thought. I hate it, and the only reason I stayed in it was because of you, and now you're leaving.

"Geoff, I don't know what to do. Please call me."

I hung up feeling even closer to the floor than when I'd picked up the phone. I was a puddle, a mess to be cleaned up. How had I gotten this way? Mom had always raised us to be strong. I'd thought that was what I was doing. Being strong.

Some niggling part of me knew that wasn't true, that I'd also been afraid to leave.

I squared my shoulders and stormed out into the yard. No, no, no. I was a good daughter, a good sister. That was the real thing. The true thing. That was the reason I hadn't stayed.

I hadn't left Dad to rot in his grief.

The cabin was a beautiful place now. When Dad concentrated on anything, it was landscaping, and he'd turned Aunt Scilla's wild world into a back country paradise. The fields rolled in sunshine, just beyond the line of trees surrounding the house. The creek, swollen just now with early summer rains, visible, a blue ribbon cutting through a green swatch. Behind me was the American equivalent of an English garden, my own contribution to the transformation. It looked a mess at first glance, but each plant had been carefully selected and tended, then set to look like it had been dropped into place.

I'd come to love our home. The house occasionally still gave me the shivers, but I spent as little time in it as possible, even in winter. And even then, filled with all our furniture, it wasn't so bad.

I had a job now, which was a lovely and stabilizing thing in a fragile world, and with such small student loans, could probably pay my own way here. But I couldn't operate the larger landscaping machines, and though I had no doubt John'd be over every other week to help me, I knew I'd be lonely.

Without my dad to take care of, I had no idea what to do with myself.

There was John now, coming up the path with a lopsided grin I'd come to feel an odd affection for. It was a feeling I was just beginning to examine closely, and I liked what I was finding.

He stopped to stand beside me. "He really leaving?" he asked, nodded at Dad's figure, beyond the trees, hard at work on the lawn mower.

I nodded. "Apparently. I just left Geoff a voicemail. I hope he comes home."

John looked at me sharply. "Isn't it a good thing? I mean, that's the best he's looked in a long time."

He was right. Dad's color was better, his arms more filled out. He was taking care of himself, not just leaving it all on me. But I was selfish.

"What am I without someone to take care of?" I wondered aloud, then started, because I hadn't meant to say it.

John draped an easy arm around my shoulders. "Not too late to figure that out."

When had he become so wise?

Geoff didn't come. He called to say he couldn't get away from work just then, and that I'd better let Dad have his crisis. It was good for him.

Nothing I didn't already know. I didn't call him back.

Dad left at the beginning of July, leaving a notebook full of instructions on winterizing the property and promising he'd be home for Christmas. I think he called John before he left, because both he and Jimmy appeared on my doorstep that night, with beer and the suggestion that I get a dog.

That reminded me of Aunt Scilla, and I felt slightly sick.

It never took much for Jimmy and John to go under, or maybe it did, but it happened too fast for me to notice. I helped them stumble into what used to be my dad's bedroom, then made my way to my own room, cradling my head as I went.

It seemed to me that all the hurts of my lifetime were gathering in my forehead. I lay face down on my bed with them still throbbing and a familiar pressure on my eyelids.

John and Jimmy were still out cold when I woke the next morning. I pulled out half a pound of bacon to defrost and set the coffee pot, then went in search of something to allay the restlessness I'd woken with.

I found it in the attic, the one room we'd never gotten to in our mad rush to make the place hospitable for year-round human occupation. There were trunks and trunks of Aunt Scilla's things, and I'd decided sometime in the night that I wanted them gone if I was going to live there on my own.

I found books mostly. A few I'd never even heard of…Had Aunt Scilla really been such a scholar? No one had told me. A few I knew very well.

It was in an old copy of The Hobbit that I found it, stuck in the bit where Bard saves Laketown. It was nothing more than an old handkerchief, but even an amateur like myself could tell the embroidery way done by hand, and the symbols weren't ones I could read. They did look awfully like the Norse runes Tolkien had mimicked, however. I picked it up, rubbed my thumb over it…

…And awoke in a field, The Hobbit and the handkerchief still in my hand. Birds flew over my head. I could hear a moving body of water not far off. And someone was singing, somewhere out of sight...

Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!

Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.

Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,

Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,

There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter,

Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.

Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing

Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?

Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o!

Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!

Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!

Tom's in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.

Tom's going home again water-lilies bringing.

Hey! Come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?