Flirting with Forever

by Jennifer Bernard

  Well, at least he’d gotten her out of the car.

  He grabbed her coat—a powder-blue parka with white fake-fur trim around the hood and got out of the car. “Sorry,” he said as he brought her the coat. “I’ve been told that I can be tactless. I meant no harm.”

  “I know you didn’t. I just—“ She ignored the coat, even though she shivered as a cold wind sliced across the property from the direction of the bay. “Prepare yourself for random outbursts of nasty. Being back here is bringing up some stuff. I knew it would. That’s why I didn’t want my friends along. I wouldn’t want to drive them away right when I finally got them back.”

  Maybe he should be offended by that. But obviously he and Chrissie weren’t real friends. They’d just met. They’d negotiated an exchange of services that would benefit them both. That was the extent of it.

  She seemed to realize that her words sounded a little cold, and offered him an apologetic glance. “I’m not so worried about driving you away because you need those flirting lessons, right?”

  “That’s right. Look, don’t worry about me. I’m just here for…” Actually, he wasn’t sure why he was here. “Can you remind me why I’m here?”

  She laughed a little. “Because I thought I could handle it alone, but I was wrong. I needed someone with me and you’re it.”

  “Got it.”

  She gave a hard shiver, and he draped her parka over her shoulders.

  “How about we get out of the cold?” he suggested.

  She nodded, but made no forward motion. This must be extremely difficult for her. He wanted to make it easier. Maybe he should take a page out of her book and make a joke.

  “So…do I need a passport to get into Yatesville? Is there an open borders policy?”

  She gave a delighted laugh that warmed him all the way to his core. Pulling Chrissie out of her funk felt like a personal triumph.

  “I believe he did make some passports at one point. But he rescinded mine when I left.”

  “I can apply for an Einstein visa. I bet Yatesville is low on neurologists.”

  Her face still bright with laughter, she blew him a little kiss. “You’re being very thoughtful, Ian. At this rate, you won’t need any lessons from me.”

  “Really? Was it bringing you the coat?”

  “The coat was definitely a nice touch.”

  He’d brought it to her because she looked cold, not because he was trying to flirt. “I am a doctor. I don’t like to see anyone risk frostbite or hypothermia.”

  “Nonetheless.” She put her arms into the sleeves and zipped up her parka. “Okay then. Ready, player one?”

  “Ready. But I’m not a player. You must know that by now.”

  She giggled, making him three for three, by his count. Maybe he was getting the hang of this. Or maybe Chrissie was just easier to converse with than other people.

  “I’m glad about that.” She took in a long breath. “Okay, then, fellow traveler. Welcome to Yatesville. Watch your step and don’t talk to strangers or random moose.” Taking his hand, she walked toward the house. He liked the feel of her hand in his, even though she was sweating slightly, probably from nerves.

  By the time they reached the steps that led up to the wide deck, he’d decided that Yatesville might be an interesting place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there. They passed so many odd contraptions emerging from the snow that the property felt like a graveyard for inventions.

  He could barely keep up with Chrissie’s rapid-fire tour-guide patter. “Lucky for us, Gramps has been keeping the property plowed from beyond the grave. He left money for it in his will. That thing over there is a satellite dish that Gramps tried to modify to communicate with other dimensions. That’s a dollhouse that he found at the dump and gave me for my fourteenth birthday. I would have loved it for, say, my seventh birthday, but he gave me a gyroscope for that one, and ended up using it for his time travel machine. That thing, I have no idea. It’s new. Maybe it’s a bird feeder, or maybe a supersonic weapon. Who knows?”

  Ian was still stuck back at the time travel machine. “Did he really try time travel?”

  “Oh yes. He actually claimed that it worked, and he was able to travel back in time a fraction of a second. He used to say he knew what I was going to say before I said it. It was extremely annoying.”

  Outside the front door, she used the metal grate embedded in the deck to kick the snow off her boots. He did the same while she waited, her hand on the door knob.

  No key, he noticed. Or a lock, for that matter.

  “Is there no crime in Yatesville?”

  “Are you kidding? No one would dare come out here uninvited. At one point he installed a giant flywheel that would shoot pellets at anyone who tried to come down our road. We didn’t get any mail for weeks. My friends had to tromp through the woods to come play with me. Eventually I snuck out at night and sabotaged the damn thing. I always figured he knew it was me who broke it and was secretly grateful. He never knew how to back out of his crazy ideas.”

  The door creaked as she pushed it open. He was expecting a bad smell—dank abandoned house, moldy dishes, musty upholstery—but a light scent of spruce and cedar greeted them. It smelled as if someone had set a fire recently.

  The walls were mostly exposed studs, with some kind of clay and straw mixture covering the plywood between them. Insulation, he assumed. The light switches had no cover plates, and he saw no trim anywhere. The floor was worn plywood, with no flooring laid over it. The whole house seemed to be one step removed from a construction zone.

  A freeform concrete bench ran along one entire wall, with a woodstove embedded inside it. He’d never seen anything like it; perhaps it was one of Ohlson Yates’ inventions. More unidentifiable creations filled the space, along with things he did recognize, like a huge telescope aimed out the front window, and a bank of batteries lining one wall.

  There were no separate rooms on this floor. A kitchen—a jumble of countertops and ancient appliances—occupied one corner. The rest of the space seemed to be completely devoted to inventions, and tables on which to work on them, and the tools needed to do the work. The only sign that a child had ever lived here were some photographs pinned to the wall with thumbtacks. One showed a very young woman holding a light-haired, joyful baby. Chrissie and her mother, at a guess. An older photo showed an imposing bearded man with three children.

  The contraptions gave the place a jumbled feel, but it wasn’t dirty. The floor looked as if it had been freshly swept.

  “Someone cleaned up,” Chrissie said softly.

  Ten

  Slowly, she moved through the space, trailing her fingers across the concrete bench. She picked up one of the pillows that covered it. “No dust.”

  He followed along with her, marveling at the evidence of the dead man’s inventiveness. He would have liked to have met him in person. Ian had a kinship with eccentric people, since he’d always felt like an outsider himself.

  When they reached the kitchen, Chrissie surveyed the immaculate sink and the drying rack where clean plates were neatly arrayed. They weren’t ordinary mass-produced plates, Ian noticed. Each one was handcrafted by a potter. Did Yates make his own plates?

  At the unintentional rhyme, he chuckled out loud. Chrissie gave him a quick glance. “What’s funny?”

  “I was just wondering if Yates made his own plates. It sounded funny in my brain.”

  A smile flickered on her lips. “Yes. He did make his own plates. He tried to do most things for himself. He wanted to be completely self-sufficient. It was impossible, of course. But he sure tried. His kiln was wood-fired. He gathered the clay from a vein of blue clay that runs through the bluffs here.”

  “He sounds remarkable. I wish I’d known him.”

  “Well, he would have despised you, so careful what you wish for. Like I said, he didn’t like doctors.” She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and frowned at the dishes in their drying rack. “I wonder who did all thi
s cleaning.”

  “One of his friends?”

  “I didn’t know he had any. As far as I know, Gramps was a full-on hermit at the end.”

  “Maybe he did these dishes himself, before he passed on.”

  “It’s possible, but Gramps hated washing dishes. We all did. For years we didn’t even have running water. We’d have to haul our water from a creek and boil it before we could drink it.” She pressed her lips together and groaned. “God, I can only imagine how strange all this sounds.”

  “A little,” he admitted. “We had a dishwasher. My mother never let anyone else touch it. I never washed a dish until I was in med school living on my own. Then it turned out that I enjoyed washing dishes. It’s unexpectedly relaxing.”

  She touched the faucet, which was a cast-iron relic from some previous era. “He got this faucet from a teardown. It was from one of the first homes ever built in Lost Harbor. He was a big recycler. He accumulated so many things from demolition sites, not to mention the dump. He loved the dump. And he never threw any of it out.”

  That didn’t surprise Ian. He’d run into that hoarder mentality before here in Alaska. When it took so much energy for items to reach the state, it was harder to let them go. “You never know when something might be useful,” one old farmer had explained to him.

  “Want to go upstairs?” Chrissie asked.

  “Sure.”

  She beckoned him toward the back wall. “Don’t expect actual stairs, by the way.”

  “He invented a stair alternative?”

  “You’ll see. This is actually pretty cool.” At the rear wall, she gestured to a nook between two studs, where he saw a platform and a system of pulleys. “Go ahead, I’ll haul you up. It’s fun, although not so much in the middle of the night when you have to use the bathroom. And when I say bathroom, don’t take that literally. Have you ever dug a hole for an outhouse? I thought not. Good times.”

  Cautiously, following her gesture, he stepped onto the platform. She kneeled down next to what looked like a car battery and flicked a switch. With a jerk, the platform lurched upwards. He grabbed onto a cable, then let it go as he realized it was running the wrong direction.

  “It’s a short ride, don’t worry,” she called to him as he rose above her. She stood and helped the pulley along by yanking on it, hand over hand. “I don’t want this thing to lose its juice and leave you stranded.”

  “Thanks,” he said faintly. “Very thoughtful. I should remind you that there are patients depending on me.”

  “I promise your last moments won’t be spent in my grandfather’s wall cavity. You’re almost there.”

  He closed his eyes briefly as he passed the boards of the ceiling. When he opened them again the platform was creaking to a stop at the second story. He found himself staring across the open space at a wall of windows of various shapes and sizes.

  “Are the windows still there?” Chrissie called up to him.

  “Yes.

  “You’re welcome to check them out while I bring down the platform.”

  Ian gingerly stepped off the contraption and onto the second-story floor. In this whimsical, strange house, he wasn’t completely sure what was solid and what was illusion. Immediately the platform disappeared in a flurry of clanging cables.

  He walked across the airy space, which was mostly empty, unlike the ground floor. Bamboo screens created three walled-off rooms; bedrooms, he assumed. That must be where Chrissie had slept when she was growing up. It was an intimate thought, and it made him realize that he’d never seen the childhood bedroom of any of the women he’d dated. He’d been in their own bedrooms, of course, in their adult homes. Or their med school digs. Getting a glimpse like this into someone’s youth—that was something new.

  Another series of creaks and clangs announced Chrissie’s arrival on the second story. She joined him at the wall of windows. “Gramps decided to teach me and my friends how to frame windows. We got to choose our own shape.”

  “Which one is yours?”

  “See if you can guess.”

  He surveyed the assortment of windows that punctuated the wall. One was a practical square shape. Another was round, like a porthole. The third was an elaborate hexagon with a gold frame. The last one was a wide picture window decorated with bird silhouettes to keep birds from slamming into the glass.

  He didn’t know her friends at all, and had only met Chrissie a couple weeks ago. But he thought he knew which window was hers.

  He pointed at the gold hexagon. “That one?”

  She turned to him with a look of amazement. “I’m impressed. How did you guess?”

  “It looks like the most complicated one. All those angles must have been difficult.”

  She threw her head back and laughed. “Are you saying I’m complicated and difficult? Not that I disagree, but is that your reasoning?”

  “No, not at all. For your friends, it was a short project. But you lived here and had more time to put into it. That’s all.”

  “Excellent logic.”

  He thought about it some more. “Actually that’s not all. It suits what I know about you.”

  “Oh really? I can’t wait to hear this.”

  He pointed at the square window. “One of your friends is probably very pragmatic. As intelligent as you are, you don’t strike me as being particularly practical, or you wouldn’t have broken down in the pass a hundred miles from your destination.”

  “Point taken.”

  He turned to the porthole. “One of your friends loves the ocean. Despite the fact that you grew up here, I haven’t heard you talk about the ocean much, and you mentioned that you’ve been living in Arizona, which is landlocked. So I ruled that one out.” He pointed at the picture window. “This one was my second guess. The bird cutouts indicate someone kind and who likes animals. You seem very attached to Shuri.”

  “I am.”

  “Also, it would make sense that someone who lives here would worry about the birds. But—” He shook his head. “It’s too predictable. Everyone in Lost Harbor has picture windows like this. You would have wanted to try something different and unexpected. So my first guess was the hexagon.”

  He glanced back at her, then gave a double-take. She was gazing at him with wide considering eyes. He couldn’t quite interpret her expression. There seemed to be wonder in it, along with a touch of alarm. For a woman who was usually so animated—smiling, laughing, teasing—this was the most still he’d ever seen her. Magnetized by the lush blue of her gaze, he couldn’t look away.

  “What? Did I get it all wrong?”

  “No.” She shook herself out of her trance with a little laugh. Pointing at the square window, she said, “Maya made that one. She finished hers way before the rest of us and spent the rest of the time helping us. The round one is Toni’s. She’s never lived more than fifty yards away from the ocean. Her father is a fisherman, her brother is a fisherman, she used to be a fisherman, she serves drinks to fishermen all night, and she’s possibly part mermaid. You should see her swim. She’s amazing. And Jessica made the picture window. When I told her that a bird had bonked into it and dropped dead, she cried for two days, then came back with all those cutouts. I can’t believe you sleuthed all that out.”

  “It’s just logic.”

  “No it’s not. I see some intuition in there too.”

  He tapped his temple. “The brain works in many mysterious ways, and we only understand some of them. I’m not such a fool as to discount intuition. So…did I get your motivation right?”

  She pursed her lips and surveyed her window. “More or less. At the time I was super interested in geometry and fractals and that sort of thing. I was reading about bees and how the honeycomb structure is always six-sided, and so are snowflakes. I was also reading a lot of science fiction. I believe I was half-hoping my window would turn into a portal into another dimension.”

  With a wry smile, she turned back to him. “That’s the thing about being homeschool
ed, you have time for crazy projects. I used to wake up every morning and check my window first thing. But it was never anything more than a boring old window.”

  “Your window is not boring,” he assured her. “It’s my favorite out of all of them.”

  With a soft chuckle, she slipped an arm through his. “Very kind of you. I wonder what kind of window you would make?”

  “I wouldn’t,” he answered seriously. “I can’t risk handling power tools. We surgeons are very careful with our hands.”

  “And there you have it. Good answer!” Still laughing, she guided him toward the closest bamboo screen. “Now if you wanted to say something suggestive and flirtatious, you could throw in something about what else you do with those hands you’re so proud of.”

  “Oh.” Right. He’d forgotten about the flirting lessons. “Hmm. Let’s see.” He thought about it. “My hands can save your cerebral cortex and make you lose your mind?”

  She gave a hoot of that delighted laughter he was coming to really love. “Perfect! That’s brilliant! I’m not sure how you would work that into conversation, and it does have a high risk of sounding like a cheesy bar pickup line. But right here, right now…it’s really working for me.”

  Still smiling, she pushed open the bamboo bedroom door—and then stopped in her tracks. From behind, he put his hands protectively on her shoulders, and looked over her head. He saw a mattress on the floor, neatly made up with a hand-stitched quilt, and a pile of mismatched journals on top of it. A piece of paper was propped against them.

  She bent to pick it up, then read the shaky handwritten words aloud.

  “Chrysanthemum Yates. Do what you want with these. I trust you. Official signature of Ohlson Yates.”

  Eleven

  Vaguely, as if from a great distance, Chrissie felt Ian’s hands on her shoulders. In the back of her mind, she appreciated the support, because her grandfather’s note pressed down on her with the weight of a mountain range.

  She breathed in a long inhale. Air. She needed air. Space. Air and space. Distance. Everything she’d had before she’d come back to Yatesville.