by Cara Colter
“You know what? If I was looking for a damsel in distress, you wouldn’t exactly be my first pick, either. You’re still every bit the snooty doctor’s daughter.”
She felt all of it then. The abandonment. The fear she had shouldered alone in the months after he left. Her parents, who had always doted on her, looking at her with hurt and embarrassment, as if she could not have let them down more completely. The friends she had known since kindergarten not phoning anymore, looking the other way when they saw her.
She felt all of it.
And it felt as if every single bit of it was his fault.
“Just to set the record straight, maybe it’s you who should be thanking me,” she told him. “I came down here to rescue you. You were the one in the water.”
“I didn’t need your help....”
So, absolutely nothing had changed. She was, in his eyes, still the town rich girl, the doctor’s snooty daughter, out of touch with what he considered to be real.
And he was still the one who didn’t need.
“Or your botched rescue attempt.”
The fury in her felt white-hot, as if it could obliterate what remained of the chill on her. Lucy wished she had felt that when she had seen him get knocked off the dock by the post. She wished, instead of running to him, worried about him, she had marched into her house and firmly shut the door on him.
She hadn’t done that. But maybe it was never too late to correct a mistake. She could do the right thing this time.
She stepped in close, shivered dramatically, letting him believe she was weak and not strong, that she needed his body heat back. Mac was wary, but not wary enough. He let her slip back in, close to him.
Lucy put both her hands on his chest, blinked up at him with her very best will-you-be-my-hero? look and then shoved him as hard as she could.
With a startled yelp, which Lucy found extremely satisfying, Macintyre Hudson lost his footing and stumbled off the dock, back into the water. She turned and walked away, annoyed that she was reassured by his vigorous cursing that he was just fine.
She glanced back. More than fine! Instead of getting out of the water, Mac shrugged out of his leather jacket and threw it onto the dock. Then, making the most of his ten minutes, he swam back to his plane.
Within moments he had the entire situation under control, which no doubt pleased him no end. He fastened the plane to the dock’s other pillar, which held, then reached inside and tossed a single overnight bag onto the dock.
She certainly didn’t want him to catch her watching. Why was she watching? It was just more evidence of the weakness he made her feel. What she needed to be doing was to be heading for a hot shower at top speed.
Lucy had crossed back into her yard when she heard Mama’s shout.
“Ach! What is going on?”
She turned to see Mama Freda trundling toward her dock, hand over her brow, trying to see into the sun. Then Mama stopped, and a light came on in that ancient, wise face that seemed to steal the chill right out of Lucy.
“Schatz?”
Mac was standing on the dock, and had removed his soaking shirt and was wringing it out. That was an unfortunate sight for a girl trying to steel herself against him. His body was absolutely perfect, sleek and strong, water sluicing down the deepness of his chest to the defined ripples of his abs.
He dropped the soaked shirt beside his jacket and sprinted over the dock and across the lawn. He stopped at Mama Freda and grinned down at her, and this time his grin was so genuine it could have lit up the whole lake. Mama reached up and touched his cheek.
Then he picked up the rather large bulk of Mama Freda as if she were featherlight, and swung her around until she was squealing like a young girl.
“You’re getting me all wet,” she protested loudly, smacking the broadness of his shoulders with delight. “Ach. Put me down, galoot-head.”
Finally he did, and she patted her hair into place, regarding him with such affection that Lucy felt something burn behind her eyes.
“Why are you all wet? You’ll catch your death!”
“Your dock broke when I tried to tie to it.”
“You should have told me you were coming,” Mama said reproachfully.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Surprise, schmize.”
Lucy smiled, despite herself. One of Mama’s goals in life seemed to be to create a rhyme, beginning with sch, for every word in the English language.
“You see what happens? You end up in the lake. If you’d just told me, I would have warned you to tie up to Lucy’s dock.”
“I don’t think Lucy wants me tying up at her dock.”
Only Lucy would pick up his dry double meaning on that. She could actually feel a bit of a blush moving heat into her frozen cheeks.
“Don’t be silly. Lucy wouldn’t mind.”
He could have thrown her under the bus, because Mama would not have approved of anyone being pushed into the water at this time of year, no matter how pressing the circumstances.
But he didn’t. Her gratitude that he hadn’t thrown her under the bus was short-lived as Mac left the topic of Lucy Lindstrom behind with annoying ease.
“Mama, I’m freezing. I hope you have apfelstrudel fresh from the oven.”
“You have to tell me you’re coming to get strudel fresh from the oven. That’s not what you need, anyway. Mama knows what you need.”
Lucy could hear the smile in his voice, and was aware again of Mama working her magic, both of them smiling just moments after all that fury.
“What do I need, Mama?”
“You need elixir.”
He pretended terror, then dashed back to the dock and picked up his soaked clothing and the bag, tossed it over his naked shoulder. He returned and wrapped his arm around Mama’s waist and let her lead him to the house.
Lucy turned back to her own house, her eyes still smarting from what had passed between those two. The love and devotion shimmered around them as bright as the strengthening morning sun.
That was why she had gone to such lengths to get Macintyre Hudson to come back here. And if another motive had lain hidden beneath that one, it had been exposed to her in those moments when his arms had wrapped around her and his heat had seeped into her.
Now that it was exposed, she could put it in a place where she could guard against it as if her life depended on it.
Which, Lucy told herself through the chattering of her teeth, it did.
* * *
Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Lucy pause and watch his reunion with Mama.
“Is that Lucy?” Mama said, catching the direction of his gaze.
“Yeah, as annoying as ever.”
“She’s a good girl,” Mama said stubbornly.
“Everything she ever aspired to be, then.”
Only, she wasn’t a girl anymore, but a woman. The good part he had no doubt about. That was what was expected of the doctor’s daughter, after all.
Even given the circumstances he had noted the changes. Her hair was still blond, but it no longer fell, unrestrained by hair clips or elastic bands, to the slight swell of her breast.
Plastered to her head, it hadn’t looked like much, but he was willing to bet that when it was dry it was ultrasophisticated, and would show off the hugeness of those dazzling green eyes, the pixie-perfection of her dainty features. Still, Mac was aware of fighting the part of him that missed how it used to be.
She seemed uptight, though, and the level of her anger at him gave him pause.
Unbidden, he wondered if she ever slipped into the lake and skinny-dipped under the full moon. Would she still think it was the most daring thing a person could do, and that she was risking arrest and public humiliation?
What made her laugh now? In high school it seemed as if she had been at the center of every circle, popular and carefree. That laugh, from deep within her, was so joyous and unchained the birds stopped singing to listen.
Mac snorted in annoyance with himself, reminding himself curtly that he had broken that particular spell a long time ago. Though if that was completely true, why the reluctance to return Lucy’s calls? Why the aversion to coming back?
If that was completely true, why had he told Lucy Lindstrom, of all people, that his father had been a ditchdigger?
That had been bothering him since the words had come out of his mouth. Maybe that confession had even contributed to the fiasco on the dock.
* * *
“What’s she doing?” Mama asked, worried. “Is she wet, too? She looks wet.”
“We both ended up in the lake.”
“But how?”
“A comedy of errors. Don’t worry about it, Mama.”
But Mama was determined to worry. “She should have come here. I would look after her. She could catch her death.”
Mama Freda, still looking after everyone. Except maybe herself. She was looking toward Lucy’s house as if she was thinking of going to get her.
He noticed the grass blended seamlessly together, almost as if the lawns of the two houses were one. That was new. Dr. Lindstrom had gone to great lengths to accentuate the boundaries of his yard, to lower any risk of association with the place next door.
Despite now sharing a lawn with its shabby neighbor, the Lindstrom place still looked like something off a magazine spread.
A bank of French doors had been added to the back of the house. Beyond the redwood of the multilayered deck, a lawn, tender with new grass, ended at a sea of yellow and red tulips. The flowers cascaded down a gentle slope to the fine white sand of the private beach.
On the L-shaped section of the bleached gray wood of the dock a dozen canoes were upside down.
What was with all the canoes? He was pretty sure that Mama had said Lucy was by herself since she had come home a year ago.
A bird called, and Mac could smell the rich scent of sun heating the fallen needles of the ponderosa pine.
As he gazed out over the lake, he was surprised by how much he had missed this place. Not the town, which was exceptionally cliquey; you were either “in” or you were “out” in Lindstrom Beach.
Lucy’s family had always been “in.” Of course, “in” was determined by the location of your house on the lake, the size of the lot, the house itself, what kind of boat you had and who your connections were. “In” was determined by your occupation, your membership in the church and the yacht club, and by your income, never mentioned outright, always insinuated.
He, on the other hand, had been “out,” a kid of questionable background, in foster care, in Mama’s house, the only remaining of the original cabins that had been built around the lake in the forties. Her house, little more than a fishing shack, had been the bane of the entire neighborhood.
And so the sharing of the lawn was new and unexpected.
“Do you and Lucy go in together to hire someone to look after the grounds?” he asked.
“No, Lucy does it.”
That startled him. Lucy mowed the expansive lawns? He couldn’t really imagine her pushing a lawn mower. He remembered her and her friends sitting on the deck in their bikinis while the “help” sweated under the hot sun keeping the grounds of her house immaculate. But he didn’t want Lucy to crowd back into his thoughts.
“You look well, Mama,” he said, an invitation for her to confide in him. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
“I look well. You look terrible.” She gave his freezing, naked torso a hard pinch. “No meat on your bones. Eating in restaurants. I can tell by your coloring.”
He thought his coloring might be off because he had just had a pretty good dunking in some freezing water, but he knew from long experience that there was no telling Mama.
They approached the back of her house. The porch door was choked with overgrown lilacs, drooping with heavy buds. Mac pushed aside some branches and opened the screen door. It squeaked outrageously. He could see the floorboards of her screened porch were as rotten as her dock.
He frowned at the attempt at a repair. Had she hired some haphazard handyman?
“Who did this?” he said, toeing the new board.
“Lucy,” she said, eyeing the disastrous repair with pride. “Lucy helps me with lots of things around here.”
His frown deepened. Somehow that was a Lucy he could never have imagined, nails between teeth, pounding in boards.
Though Mama had said nothing, he had suspected for some time the house was becoming too much for her, and this confirmed it.
“You should come to Toronto with me,” he said. It was his opening move. In his bag he had brochures of Toronto’s most upscale retirement home.
“Toronto, schmonto. No, you should move back here. That big city is no place for a boy like you.”
“I’m not a boy anymore, Mama.”
“You will always be my boy.”
He regarded her warmly, searching her face for any sign of illness. She was unchanging. She had seemed old when he had first met her, and she really had never seemed to get any older. There was a sameness about her in a changing world that had been a touchstone.
Why hadn’t she told him she had lost her license?
She was going to be eighty years old three days before Mother’s Day. He held open the inside door for her, and they stepped through into her kitchen.
It, too, was showing signs of benign neglect: paint chipping from the cabinets, a door not closing properly, the old linoleum tiles beginning to curl. There was a towel tied tightly around a faucet, and he went and looked.
An attempted repair of a leak.
“Lucy’s work?” he guessed.
“Yes.”
Again, the Lucy he didn’t know. “You just have to tell me these things,” he said. “I would have paid for the plumber.”
“You pay for enough already.”
He turned to look at Mama, and without warning he was fourteen years old again, standing in this kitchen for the first time.
Harriet Freda’s had been his fifth foster home in as many months, and despite the fact this one had a prime lakeshore location, from the outside the house seemed even smaller and dumpier and darker than all the other foster homes had been.
Maybe, he had thought, already cynical, they just sent you to worse and worse places.
The house would have seemed beyond humble in any setting, but surrounded by the magnificent lake houses, it was painfully shacklike and out of place on the shores of Sunshine Lake.
That morning, standing in a kitchen that cheerfully belied the outside of the house, Mac had been fourteen and terrified. That had been his first lesson since the death of his father: never let the terror show.
She had been introduced to him as Mama
Freda, and she looked stocky and ancient. Her hair was a bluish-white color and frizzy with a bad perm. She had more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei. Mac thought she was way too old to be looking after other people’s kids.
Still, she looked harmless enough, standing at her kitchen table in a frumpy dress that showed off her chunky build, thick arms and legs, ankles swollen above sensible shoes. She had been wearing a much-bleached apron, once white, aged to tea-dipped, and covered with faded blotches of berry and chocolate.
The niceties were over, the social worker was gone and he was standing there with a paper bag containing two T-shirts, one pair of jeans and a change of underwear. Mrs. Freda cast him a look, and there was an unmistakable friendly twinkle in deep-set blue eyes.
Well, there was no sense her thinking they were going to be on friendly terms.
“I killed a man,” he said, and then added, “With my bare hands.” He thought the with my bare hands part was a nice touch. It was actually a line from a song, but it warned people to stay back from him, that he was dangerous and tough.
And if Macintyre Hudson had wanted one thing at age fourteen, it was for people to stay back from him. He had been like a wounded animal, unwilling to trust again.
Mama Freda glanced up from what she was doing, stretching out an enormous piece of dough, thin and elastic, over the edges of her large, round kitchen table. She regarded him, and he noticed the twinkle was gone from her eyes, replaced with an immense sorrow.
“This is a terrible thing,” she said, sinking into a chair. “To kill a man. I know. I had to do it once.”
He stared at her, his mouth open. And when she beckoned to the chair beside hers, he abandoned his meager bag of belongings and went to it, as if drawn to her side by a magnet.
“It was near the end of the war,” she said, looking at her hands. “I was thirteen. A soldier, he was—” she glanced at Mac, trying to decide how much to say “—hurting my sister. He had his back to me. I picked up a cast-iron pan and I crept up behind him and I hit him as hard as I could over his head. There was a terrible noise. Terrible. He fell off my sister. I think he was already dead, but I knew if he ever got up we were all doomed, and so I hit him again and again and again.”