The Smile of an Angel

by Peggy Webb

  December 2, 1966

  Word came today. In the form of a letter. A letter I wished I’d never received. “My beloved,” Michael wrote. “By some miracle I only broke my collarbone, but I shudder to think how easily it could have been my neck. And then you’d be saddled with a cripple. I won’t do that to you. The risks of my profession are too great. I can’t ask you to share them.”

  He told me those horrible things, then signed the letter, “All my love, Michael.”

  Does he really think I’m a hothouse flower who has to be protected? Shielded from painful truths?

  How dare he make this decision without discussing it with me? How dare he send me what amounts to a Dear Jane letter without giving me a chance to say how I feel about the whole matter?

  My first instinct is to say all those things to him in person. And yet…he knows me. He knows I’m made of sterner stuff. He knows I’m a constant woman, not a will-o’-the-wisp.

  Plus, he’s the most stubborn man on two continents. Perhaps the world. He’s made up his mind to disappear from my life, and no amount of reasoning on my part will change that.

  I never thought I’d stoop to games. With him or anybody else. But circumstances warrant drastic measures, and I know just the measure to take. Perhaps it won’t work, especially on a man like Michael, a man clever enough to see through the whole scheme, and yet, I can’t sit back and do nothing. I won’t.

  Tonight I’m calling Herman Richmond and asking him to take me to dinner. And I’ll make darned sure Michael knows.

  Mother would be so proud of me.

  December 10, 1966

  My plan was a roaring success, “roaring” being the operative word. I suspected Michael would react when he discovered my old flame was squiring me around town, but I never suspected he would descend on us like Hannibal storming the Alps. I never expected him to literally pluck me out of my seat at the Met, and then drag me off like a caveman.

  What he did was tap Herman on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, she’s mine.” Then he scooped me out of my seat and carried me off.

  Heads turned. A few people applauded. Some called out encouragement. It’s good to know that even in a city as jaded as Manhattan, romance is still alive and well.

  Michael never paused to wonder why Herman gave up without a fight, and of course, I’ll never tell him. Herman was in on the scheme from the beginning. And wholeheartedly approved. He loves drama.

  I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. Claiming a few scruples takes away the stench of mendacity. (I love that word. Have ever since I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.)

  We spent the rest of the evening making up. Mmm. YUMMY!

  Michael’s sleeping now. Deeply, the way he always does. Right before he fell asleep he said to me, “I can’t believe how close I came to losing you.” I kissed him and said, “Go to sleep now, darling. You didn’t lose me. You never will.”

  I love the way he looks stretched out on the bed so that he takes up most of the space the way a tall, well-built man does. I love that look of peace on his face after we’ve made love. And I love knowing I put it there.

  Such a dear face. What would I have done if my scheme hadn’t worked? How would I ever live without him?

  I don’t even want to think about it.

  Instead, I’ll think about something wonderful. The future. My graduation. The concert tour.

  Michael is taking me dancing to celebrate. There is no one in the world I’d rather celebrate with than my beloved Michael.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The thing that stood out above all else for Emily was her mother’s deep love for Michael Westmoreland. She folded the diary pages and slipped them into her desk drawer. Then she went into the bathroom and blew her nose on a strip of toilet tissue. She never had the real thing when she needed it.

  Gwendolyn cocked her head and looked up at Emily as if to say, What’s wrong?

  “It’s all right, sweetcakes.” She bent to pet the skunk. “Don’t worry your pretty little head over it.”

  She and Gwendolyn had been back in the woods for almost a week, and it was only now that Emily had decided to read her mother’s diary. She knew what had prompted her decision, of course.

  Jake’s phone call last night.

  “How’s Michael?”

  He’d asked that first thing, as he always did, and when Emily said, “The same,” they both fell into one of those long silences that was becoming the rule rather than the exception for them.

  “Romance is like bread,” Grandmother Beaufort was fond of saying. “If it’s left too long without attention, it grows stale.”

  For the first time in her life, Emily saw the logic in her grandmother’s oft-repeated bit of advice.

  “Good grief, Gwendolyn,” she told her skunk. “I’m turning into my grandmother.”

  Hannah would get a kick out of that. Before they’d both left Belle Rose, she had come into Emily’s room for a late-night talk.

  “The thing that bothers me,” Hannah had told her sister, “is that you’re in danger of losing yourself.”

  She’d been talking about Emily’s relationship with Jake, though by tacit agreement, neither of them spoke his name. It was best, considering the circumstances.

  Though Hannah had made the proper noises toward Jake, it had been obvious to everybody that she still held him in some ways accountable for Michael’s coma.

  Emily didn’t. Not anymore. And maybe she never had. Maybe the shock of seeing her father helpless had skewed her thinking processes, turned everything upside down and inside out so that even she couldn’t recognize the truth.

  Well, she simply couldn’t think about it anymore. None of it.

  “Let’s go for a walk, Gwendolyn.” The skunk needed no urging, but trailed along behind Emily as eagerly as a well-trained dog.

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll find a nice little boy skunk for you, and you’ll fall in love and get married and have lots of little skunk babies and live happily ever after.”

  That was when Emily started to cry. Crumpled onto a bed of moss, the same one where she and Jake had whiled away a beautiful afternoon with such passion and joy, she cried for everything that was painful and impossible in a world somehow gone awry.

  Or had it always been that way? Had she merely been fooling herself into thinking there was such a thing as finding the love of your life and having everything work out all right? Maybe that sort of thing really didn’t happen—except for a lucky few.

  Her parents just got lucky. That was it.

  They’d found each other against all odds, and it was foolish of Emily to be thinking that lightning could strike twice in the same family. Maybe God rationed out luck the way he did thunderstorms, and Anne and Michael got all the Westmorelands’ share.

  She pulled her shirttail out of her shorts and wiped her eyes with the hem.

  “I’m going to have to start carrying tissues,” she told Gwendolyn.

  She despised being that kind of woman. The kind prone to tears at the drop of a hat. She was going to have to get a grip. Buck up. Regain her equilibrium. Reclaim her sass.

  Maybe Hannah had been right.

  Emily stood up and dusted off the seat of her pants.

  “Do you see a cute little bushy-tailed male around here, Gwendolyn? No? Well, look on the bright side. At least we have each other.”

  She’d started out of the forest glade when the feather floated down and landed right at her feet. A cardinal’s feather. Bright as a bleeding heart.

  Emily started to pass by it. It was Gwendolyn who stopped to sniff, Gwendolyn who stubbornly refused to leave the spot.

  “Well, all right, if you insist.” Emily bent down and scooped up the feather. “But I have to tell you, Gwendolyn, I don’t believe in that sort of magic anymore.”

  Nonetheless she tucked the feather behind her ear, and the odd thing was, she really did feel better. As if the red feather had magical powers.

  By the time she came in sig
ht of her cottage, she was beginning to feel more like herself. She even started to hum.

  And that was when she saw him. Her love. Standing on the front porch shading his eyes against the sun and smiling.

  She didn’t say anything, mainly because she didn’t know what to say. She was afraid of giving away her heart when all the time he’d come to say goodbye.

  But he wouldn’t be smiling if he’d come to do that, would he? He wouldn’t have driven all the way from Atlanta to tell her something he could say over the telephone, would he?

  The minute Jake saw Emily, he knew he’d been right to come—and a fool for not coming sooner.

  “Where’d you get the hair ornament?” he asked.

  “I found it in the woods. Actually, Gwendolyn found it.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “Just memories.”

  Something inside Jake unfolded, some part of him that had been holding its breath for so long it had almost forgotten how to breathe.

  Emily was now standing in front of him, just standing there with the feather in her hair and a hopeful smile on her face. It was all the invitation he needed. He walked right up to her and took her into his arms as if they’d never been apart, as if there was nothing between them except good times and good memories.

  He cupped her face, tipping it up so he could study it, every beloved detail, the curve of her cheek, the shape of her lips, the deep green of her eyes.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “So have I…missed you.” She sighed, then leaned her forehead against his chest so that her voice was muffled. “Very, very much.”

  “I shouldn’t have stayed away so long.”

  “You’re here now.”

  “For a little while.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him, puzzled now, and uncertain. He silently cursed his choice of words.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said. “I’m taking clients to Dapsang next week. That’s all I meant.”

  He didn’t have to explain. The daughter of a climber, she knew where and what it was, the world’s second-highest mountain, sometimes called K2, located in the Karakoram Range of the Himalayas.

  “Oh…well, then…”

  “Emily, I came because I couldn’t not come.”

  His hands were still on her face, and it felt so good he didn’t want to leave that spot. He didn’t want to go inside where they would sit in chairs that somehow grounded them to the real world. Outside with the song of birds surrounding them and the sun shining down warm and golden, they were in a place divorced from reality, a place where all things were possible. Even an impossible love.

  “I know…I know.”

  “I’ve thought of you every day, and no matter how hard I tried to rationalize staying away, I just couldn’t.”

  “I’m glad you couldn’t. If you hadn’t come here, I would have come there. In spite of Grandmother Beaufort’s rules.”

  He laughed for the sheer joy of it. One of the things he’d always admired most about Emily was her honesty. Rare, he believed. Rare and precious.

  “And what rules would those be?”

  “How young ladies of class comport themselves in the presence of the male species.”

  “You, of course, broke every rule—and still do.”

  “At every opportunity.”

  “You don’t know what a relief that is to me, Miss Emily.”

  She was smiling in the way she had when he first knew her, a full-bodied, open smile that invited a person to come closer, to sit down and relax because there would be no judgment coming from her.

  To think he’d almost lost it, all of it. And now, as much as he wanted to throw her over his shoulder and march into her house and make love with her until they were both sweating and sated, he also wanted to give her something more. Quiet dinners where the two of them held hands and gazed at each other across the table. Evenings at the movies where they would sit side by side with one bag of popcorn, both dipping their hands in at the same time so their fingers would touch, buttery slick. Hot chocolate by the firelight with Emily in the pink bathrobe that made her feel like a cuddly kitten and Jake bending over her massaging her feet. Kissing her toes. And wanting more. That was what he wanted. And if that made him a man longing to join the ranks of the domesticated, then so be it.

  He would tell Emily all of that. And more.

  But not now. First they would walk in the woods, then have a quiet dinner, and then…paradise. Soul-restoring paradise. For one whole week.

  Afterward he would leave for Dapsang, get that climb behind him, and maybe, just maybe, Michael would be out of the coma when Jake returned.

  Then he would tell Emily everything that was in his heart.

  Emily was standing there in the sunshine happy but wondering what was coming next when Jake said, “What do you say we take Gwendolyn on another walk, Em?”

  “Yes,” she said, and that was how simple it was. This coming back together after an estrangement that seemed to have gone on forever.

  Jake reached for her hand, and it felt just right to walk that way with him, lightly connected, no pressure, no questions, nothing except the two of them trailed by a very happy skunk.

  Oh, Gwendolyn was a sight, swishing her tail in ecstasy because Jake was back.

  That was how Emily felt. Like swishing. If she’d had a tail she would, and she just might, anyhow.

  “I have a feeling this is going to be a good day,” Jake said.

  “Yes.”

  “For finding Gwendolyn a companion.”

  “Oh?” She hadn’t been thinking of Gwendolyn at all, but of the two of them as perfect together as a matched set of anything you could name. Horses, maybe. Thoroughbreds. The kind you might see galloping over the greenest grass imaginable somewhere in Kentucky.

  “See how she’s prancing. Almost like flirting.”

  “Yes, but I think she’s flirting with you.”

  Jake laughed, and oh, it was music to Emily’s ears. Somehow all the troubles they’d gone through during the past few weeks shrank to their proper size. Instead of dominating their lives, the coma and all the events surrounding it became something that could be contained in one part of the mind without tainting everything else.

  For weeks Emily had been wrestling with feelings of anger at both herself and Jake. They’d boiled inside her like a volcano getting ready to explode. She’d burned with the need to spew them out, to get rid of them no matter who got hurt.

  She’d been torn apart by her conflicting needs to push him away and to grab hold of him and not let go.

  Now, walking beside him in the quiet woods far away from a brooding mountaintop in the Himalayas and a lonely hospital bed in Vicksburg, she felt only a sense of rightness, of having come through a storm on a leaky raft and discovering to her amazement that she hadn’t lost a single one of her possessions.

  She didn’t even feel any need to talk to him about what had gone on before.

  “Sometimes we can analyze a situation to death, Em,” her father used to tell her.

  Oh, he was extremely wise. And she missed him so.

  And yet…life goes on.

  That was what she was thinking, life goes on, when all of a sudden Jake squeezed her hand and nodded in the direction of the stream, which meandered through the woods. There on its sloping, grassy bank strolled a magnificent male creature, a heartthrob skunk if ever there was one.

  Gwendolyn had seen him, too. She hid herself behind Jake’s legs and peered around, curious at first, and then fascinated. Her tail waved like a banner, and her lively little face twitched.

  “I think she’s shy,” Jake whispered.

  “All she needs is a mother’s advice,” Emily whispered back, then quietly she knelt beside her most difficult rescue-and-rehabilitation challenge. “Go on, Gwendolyn. I think he likes you as much as you like him.”

  She gave Gwendolyn a little push in the right direction, but the s
kunk went only two feet, then stood rooted to the spot, torn between a comfortable life she knew and the exciting but possibly scary one she did not.

  The male skunk had spotted her, but wary of humans, he’d stopped beside a bush big enough to provide instant shelter in case he needed it.

  Jake squatted beside Emily and gave Gwendolyn a little nudge. “It’s all up to you, girl.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “We’ll discuss that later, Miss Em.”

  She loved it when Jake called her that. He called her other pet names, too, and she loved them all.

  Suddenly she was tired of being matchmaker to a skunk. What she wanted was a bit of matching for herself. Or was that mating? The thought of it made her blush, and Jake didn’t pretend not to notice.

  He lifted an eyebrow, then reached out and traced her lips with the tip of his finger. Ever so softly.

  Emily sighed, her mission completely forgotten. She and Jake yearned toward each other and met somewhere in the middle, their mouths open and hungry, their eyes wide open, studying each other, memorizing each other, loving each other.

  Oh, it had to be love, didn’t it? Nothing else could feel this perfect.

  Jake wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close, and there was nothing else in the world except the two of them kissing. Kissing as if their lives depended on it.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Jake said.

  And she said, “Oh, yes. Please.”

  When he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, she noticed that Gwendolyn was gone.

  “Where’s Gwendolyn?”

  Jake nodded in the direction of the stream, and when Emily looked, all she saw was two bushy waving tails, disappearing into the deep woods.

  “Looks like they have the same idea,” Jake said.

  “So it seems.”

  “Let’s see him top this.”

  Jake scooped her into his arms and raced toward the cabin laughing. And Emily owned the world.