This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

He looked injured. “What did I do?”

  “Got an hour?” Joy asked sweetly.

  “For you, Dr. Anderson, I have more than—”

  “Would it be possible to get on with this bloody exploration?” Gabe asked from the darkness beyond Gotcha. “Or is Davy waiting for you two to tuck dollar bills into his muddy underwear?”

  “For you,” Davy said to Maggie as he pulled on his clothes, “the cost is ten bucks. Dr. Anderson, now, could—”

  “Gravy-bear,” Maggie cut in huskily, “did anybody ever mention that you have enough mouth for another row of teeth?”

  Laughing, Davy stuffed his shirt in his pants, completely unself-conscious as he dressed. “Just you, Maggie, and you’re too young for me to take seriously.”

  “Then you’re a damn fool,” Gabe said and turned away.

  Wincing, Davy glanced from Gabe to Maggie. “Looks like you have yourself a champion. You got something going that I don’t know about?”

  “She’s got brains,” Fish said as he pushed out of Gotcha. “Not to mention heart, grit, and a body that would make a saint think about sinning.”

  “Fish,” Maggie said, smiling widely, “would your wife mind horribly if I kissed you?”

  He laughed and stood up as he plugged in his helmet light. “She’d mind like hell, Maggie. You see,” he said, winking at her, “my wife knows I’m too old not to take you seriously.”

  “Old?” Maggie laughed. “You’re not a day over thirty-five.”

  “You got that right,” Davy retorted. “Fish is hundreds of days over thirty-five. Hell, thousands.”

  Maggie gave Davy a sidelong look. “Sometimes you’re a real pain in the ass.”

  “Shut up, children,” Fish said amiably, turning toward Joy. “What’s on the program today?”

  “I want you to referee while Maggie helps Davy with his survey,” Joy said dryly. “Begin at the breakdown on the northeast quadrant of the Voices. I’m going to try to find a path through the Maze.”

  Thinking of the impossibly intricate, ceiling-to-floor mass of solution cavities and cave formations known as the Maze, Fish laughed. “A path, huh? Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  She smiled slightly. “I know, I know. But I can’t help believing that there’s a passage from the Voices into a whole new area of the cave. A big one. The water we’re hearing has to come from somewhere and go to somewhere else. And the air in the Maze blows. You’ve felt it, Fish. You know you have.”

  “Sure have. Lost it, too. Time and time again. Speaking of time, who’s keeping it today?”

  “You.”

  He looked at his watch, rubbed off the muddy face with an equally muddy finger, and asked, “How long?”

  “Call out the hours. And make sure Maggie drinks,” Joy said. “She keeps coming back with her canteen half full. Just because it’s cool down here doesn’t mean your body isn’t using a lot of water.”

  “I hear you,” Fish said.

  He made herding motions with his hands. Davy and Maggie walked ahead of him at a smart pace, keeping between the bright orange strips of tape.

  Joy walked toward the pool of light cast by Gabe’s helmet lamp.

  “Is Maggie all right?” he asked quietly, following Joy as she walked deeper into the Voices.

  “Yes.” Joy’s answer was soft, yet it slid among the murmurous cascading whispers like a knife.

  “Davy’s an idiot,” Gabe said.

  “Maybe.”

  Joy tried to focus on the cave’s uneven floor rather than on her own seesaw emotions. She couldn’t. Her feelings were too strong to be ignored. Hearing Gabe champion Maggie had bruised Joy in unexpected ways.

  “And maybe,” she said bitterly, “Davy’s just smart enough to know that Maggie is too much woman for him.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Maggie has never had a lover, and it’s not for lack of offers.”

  “Which means?”

  Finally certain that they were beyond the hearing of the other cavers, Joy stopped and turned on Gabe.

  “Maggie’s first man will be her last,” Joy said coldly. “Davy is only twenty-three. Do you think he’s ready for that kind of relationship?”

  “I wasn’t, is that what you’re saying?”

  With an effort that left her throat aching Joy made her tone matter-of-fact. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I’m ready now.”

  “Then what are you waiting for? Get moving before Davy wakes up and figures out that he’s letting a terrific woman slip through his thick fingers. Of course, you might have a small problem,” Joy added. “One or all of Maggie’s brothers will do their best to kill you when they find out you’ve seduced and abandoned their baby sister. They just wouldn’t understand how writing another article about the ass end of nowhere is more important than Maggie’s happiness.”

  She heard the harsh intake of Gabe’s breath, but she didn’t see his expression. She was already turning away, already regretting her quick tongue and the emotions eating through her control as surely as acid ate through limestone.

  If Gabe took her advice and pursued Maggie, Joy would hate him, hate Maggie, hate herself.

  The thought that he might have learned enough to find and recognize love in another woman terrified Joy. She’d felt nothing like it since the moment she’d doubled over the steering wheel of the Jeep with labor pains and understood that she’d started toward town too late, that she would end up having her baby in the desert with no one to help her.

  Gabe saw Joy stumble. He caught her, turned her toward him, and wanted to cry out in protest at the strain he saw in her face. He knew that she’d been thinking about the past, a past she refused to talk about.

  As for the future, it didn’t exist—for her, for him, for them.

  He couldn’t bear even to think about it, the days and months and years of regret and pain.

  Past and future were out of reach. There was only the time he would spend at Lost River Cave, exploring the earth and himself and the past Joy refused to discuss despite the small, red-haired tornado dancing through their lives.

  With enough time, enough space, enough understanding, he kept hoping that Joy would talk to him. She simply had to. He didn’t know how much longer he could go on this way.

  No past. No future. Just now.

  So don’t fuck it up now.

  Very carefully he released Joy. Even through the multiple layers of clothing the warmth of her called to his senses. If it was just desire twisting through him, he would have seduced her, satisfying both of them, relieving a torment that had begun seven years ago and had no end in sight.

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  The longer he was with Joy, the more certain he was that he needed more than her body. He needed what he’d once had with her. All of her, mind and body and soul. The laughter and the tears, the heat and the silences, the luminous reflection of love in her eyes.

  He wanted her love with a savage force that taught him how little he’d ever wanted anything before in his life.

  And she wanted only to hurt him more.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “you should confine your lectures to the nature and formation of New Mexico’s limestone caves. If you keep chipping away at me, something will happen that we’ll both regret.”

  Appalled by the cruelty of her own words, Joy could only nod agreement. Though she’d forbidden Gabe to talk about the past, she kept making sideways references to it herself, digging away at his careful exterior, trying to discover what feelings lay beneath.

  If any.

  “I’m sorry,” she said huskily. “It isn’t fair of me to keep prying beneath your surface, trying to find out how you really feel. I already know. I know how important your career is to you. I understand. You’ve made a life for yourself that’s very exciting, very fulfilling, a life that anyone would envy.”

  He looked at her curiously. “Do you?”

  “What?”

 
“Envy my life?”

  The question shocked her.

  Then the answer came, more shocking than the question.

  “Yes. Part . . . part of your fascination for me,” she said, her voice halting, “was the places you’d been to, the places you’d go, everything fresh and exciting. I wanted those places. I wanted them as much as you did, and . . .”

  Her voice frayed into silence. She gave up trying to explain and just shook her head slowly.

  “And I knocked you up and took off for the very places you would have cut off a hand to see,” he finished softly. A shudder moved over him as he realized that he’d delivered Joy into a very opposite kind of life, single motherhood and necessity closing down around her in a cage that had no key. “I didn’t know you wanted the wild places,” he whispered, his voice one among the many Voices in Lost River Cave. “Believe me, sweetheart, I didn’t know.”

  “How could you? I didn’t know myself, until this instant.”

  It was Gabe’s turn to be shocked.

  “I couldn’t let myself know,” she said, “because there was nothing I could do about it except break my heart over it.” She drew in her breath and released it in a long, ragged sigh. “But it’s all right. I had Lost River Cave to explore. And Kati.” Joy smiled through trembling lips. “She’s a miracle. She trusts so easily, lives so completely, loves so beautifully.” Joy laughed shakily. “She’s also a stubborn little witch, but that just reminds me that she’s real, that she’ll grow up, that someday she’ll love a man and . . .” Joy bowed her head against the ache in her throat. “Oh God, let her love wisely,” she whispered beneath the liquid sounds pouring through the darkness.

  But Gabe heard.

  He closed his eyes against the naked pain on Joy’s face, yet nothing could close out what she had said. He knew that her agonized prayer would come to him again and again in the bleak hours before dawn. In the darkness of his soul her words would be whispered endlessly among the Voices.

  “Joy,” he said huskily, reaching for her, needing to comfort her and himself.

  His fingers closed on emptiness.

  He opened his eyes. Joy’s light was retreating from him silently, farther away with each breath, each heartbeat.

  Nineteen

  IN ACHING SILENCE GABE FOLLOWED JOY THROUGH LOST River Cave. They left behind the orange stripes that marked previous explorations, but she never hesitated. Though he moved quickly over the uneven cave floor, he didn’t catch up with her until she stopped and waited for him.

  “We’ll begin here,” she said.

  He listened carefully to the nuances of her voice. Controlled, professional, as though she’d never prayed that her daughter would be wiser in love than her mother had been.

  “Do you see that drapery?” she asked, moving her head and at the same time turning on and focusing the second lamp as an intense, narrow beam.

  Growing down from what had once been a sinuous crack in the ceiling was a huge sheet of creamy limestone striped by various earth tones. It was a decoration of the kind that cavers called “cave bacon.” This particular formation had grown almost to the floor of the cave itself.

  “Turn your back to it,” she said.

  He started to ask why, then simply did as she asked.

  “Now stay there,” she said. “When I call out, shut off your lamp and turn back around. But not until then. Okay?”

  Part of Gabe wondered if she was going to just walk off and leave him to find his own way out of the cave, but all he said was “Okay.”

  Quickly yet very carefully, Joy picked her way over to and around the drapery on a path she had discovered by accident a few days ago. Despite the rarity and beauty of the huge formation, she hadn’t laid down any orange stripes leading to it. She hadn’t even told anyone that the formation existed.

  Until now.

  The cave floor was frosted with delicate formations growing among the more solid decorations. She tried to walk only where the path was over the ancient limestone bed itself rather than the newer, unique sculptures precipitated out of water and darkness. Finally she was behind the drapery.

  Poised on tiptoe, she adjusted both of her headlamps to the widest possible beam. Then she turned toward Gabe. “Lights out and you can turn around.”

  He shut off his light. When he turned around, he sucked in his breath with a wondering sound.

  For all its massive weight, the limestone drapery was translucent. Her lights spread through the stone, making it glow with an unearthly beauty. Subtle colors rippled in silence, a dream living in the mind of a nameless god. Graceful folds of stone shimmered with moisture. The drapery was vital, alive, growing.

  Gabe hadn’t seen anything to equal it in any of the places on earth he’d explored at such great cost to himself and others.

  Joy’s helmet lights stroked across the drapery, then away, leaving it in primal darkness once more. Light halved as she turned off one of her helmet lamps and headed back toward him.

  He made a sound of protest that went no farther than his mind. He tried to tell himself that the stone drapery wasn’t a miracle, it was the result of simple, rational physical processes working over long periods of time. A water drop zigzagging across a tiny crack in the slanting ceiling, the slow seepage of more water, the even slower precipitation of stone, more seepage flowing over the new stone, more precipitation, until the result was an extraordinary limestone drapery so delicate that light could slide through it in a subtle blaze of radiance.

  Without a word Gabe turned toward the woman who was standing beside him. He realized that she’d been watching him, absorbing his reaction.

  Only then did he understand that she’d given him those moments of beauty in silent apology for the mother’s prayer that would haunt his dreams.

  “Thank you,” he said simply, wanting to touch Joy, afraid if he did she would withdraw again. “What do you call it?”

  “You mean like Gotcha or Surprise or the Voices?”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated. “No one else knows about the drapery. It’s not on Davy’s survey. I discovered it a few days ago when you and I got lost in the Maze.”

  Gabe looked toward the jungle of cave formations and solution cavities known as the Maze. “I remember. We came at it from a different angle. It’s an amazing place.”

  “If that’s a pun, I’ll have to kill you.”

  “What pun?” he asked immediately, deadpan.

  Her grin flashed in the reflected light.

  He wanted to hold her. He didn’t. It was enough to see her spontaneous smile.

  “So how did you find it?” he asked.

  “When I turned back to see if you were following me, I saw your light shining through stone.” The memory of it was in her voice, and in the goose bumps marching beneath warm cave clothing. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. It was the most impossible, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

  The understanding that she’d just shared with him something that she hadn’t showed anyone else transformed Gabe as surely as light transformed the rippling stone. Then he saw the same knowledge come to her, changing her.

  She stepped back from him quickly, fear plain in the tight lines of her face. “We’ll have to be sure that Davy surveys it. It’s too beautiful to be lost.”

  “What will you call it?”

  “Deception.”

  Gabe thought of the beauty, the impossibility, the light pouring through stone. “Why not call it Love?”

  “Same difference.” She kept on speaking, her voice precise, leaving him no opening. “There are four sections on the perimeter of this room that haven’t been thoroughly explored. They’re our best hope of finding a passage through to the cavern that is producing the water sounds.”

  “Like Honeycomb?” Gabe asked.

  Joy thought of the section of limestone that had been dissolved away until all that remained was a largely undecorated lacework of stone that very much resembled a honeycomb
. From it came an endless whispering of voices and a steady breeze, telling Joy that there was an opening—a large opening—on the other side of the large formation of lacy stone.

  “Yes, like that,” she said. “But to get through there would mean destroying some of the Honeycomb itself. No matter how much I want to find the source of the Voices, I won’t do that. Lost River Cave has been growing for millions of years. I couldn’t bear knowing that I’d destroyed part of it in a reckless search for its deepest secrets. The cave will either yield to me in the time I have left, or it won’t.”

  Once Gabe might have disagreed with her, but no longer. He knew now the many ways that regret haunted ambition’s deepest caverns, a cold black river running through layers of dissolving stone.

  “I want to try the Maze again,” she said. “I’m sure we can find a way through it.”

  “If we don’t get lost again.”

  “Yes, that was something, wasn’t it? On our hands and knees, listening for the other three cavers.” She smiled slightly. “You should have let me call them on the radio.”

  “Me? You’re the one who said something about not wanting Fish to have to pull you out of another hole. Did he help you when you were lost once before?”

  “You could say that.”

  There was a tone to her voice that alerted him. She was talking about the past. “What could you say about it?” he asked.

  “I could say my damn compass is stuck again.”

  She rapped the face against her watch, jogging loose the stubborn needle.

  Reluctantly Gabe accepted the change of subject. He reached into his backpack and brought out the compass that she had quite frankly coveted at first glance.

  “Trade you,” he offered.

  “Yours is five times better than mine.”

  “Guess I’ll just have to stick real close so you can’t lose me,” he said, switching compasses with her.

  “I’ll only borrow it for the Maze. And I brought a handful of extra light sticks too. We’ll use them as markers.”

  She reached into her own rucksack and pulled out a notebook containing the crude map that she and Gabe had made and expanded each time they tried to unravel the Maze’s secrets. Davy had fed the information into his computer, but the generators had been so cranky he hadn’t tried to update his big map.