“Ah, Lance, don’t get your shirt in a knot. God, how you’ve changed. Sure I’m your guest, but I can’t turn off being a doctor like I can a tap. I see a problem and it’s instinctive to want to delve into it. Unethical as hell, maybe.” He grinned puckishly at Lance. “But I’ve never had a friend sue me yet for caring about his child.”
Lance did not make a reply to that beyond an indulgent smile and a shake of his head as he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the porch rail. He sipped his drink, listening to the far-off, seagull-like cries of children in a swimming pool across the street, the tinkle of ice in glasses and the buzz of a lawnmower spreading the scent of freshly cut grass around the neighborhood. Keith’s words, however, still echoed in his mind, and without preamble, he said, “What problem do you see?”
Keith, he noticed, didn’t even have to ask what he referred to. “Kevin, of course. The kid’s a bundle of nerves. He scared to move, to speak, and if you don’t watch it, he’s going to end up with—oh, forget it. I’m being unethical again. He’s not my patient. When’s the last time he had a checkup?”
“How would I know? That’s Lorraine’s—”
“Department—” Keith interrupted. “Yeah, I know,” He sat up and thumped his glass down on the rail. “Good Christ, man! Don’t you take any interest at all in your own son?”
“Look, dammit!” Lance felt anger rise. “You know the… How do you medics put it? The family history. You know what happened and that I was away from him for a long time after—well you know I was. He forgot me, Lorraine says, in that time and he wasn’t about to accept me back as a father. He had changed. I had changed. It seemed best just to go on the way we were, with her having complete control of him.”
“And look what leaving her in complete control has done to Kevin.” The disgust in Keith’s tone made Lance even more bitter toward the fate that had done this to them. “Where’s the happy, well-adjusted little toddler who used to tumble around our feet and smear himself with ice cream and yell like a banshee if someone dared to wash his face? What happened to that little guy, Lance? Kevin couldn’t fight back or howl about anything now if he were paid to. He’s too damned repressed, and no wonder, living with that sour faced machine in there.”
“So what do you suggest I do? Let Marsha have him?”
“God, no!” Keith said, for once agreeing with his host in this discussion. “That miserable harridan is the true cause of this whole mess, in my estimation. No way should you let her have Kevin.”
“All right.” Lance nodded. “Glad you agree with me there, at least. Then what do you suggest?”
“What’s wrong with you taking on a little more of his day-to-day care?”
“I can’t get through to him. He doesn’t respond to me.”
“Have you tried?”
“Of course I’ve tried. But the minute I open my mouth he hangs his head and looks whipped. All that does is make me mad and then I lose my cool with him and Lorraine has the job of calming him down. Why should I put all of us through that just to satisfy my own ego?”
“But if Lorraine isn’t around? Who calms him down then if your manner upsets him?”
“She’s always around. She has the good sense to never leave us alone together. God almighty, Keith, she’s the nearest thing to a mother he has.”
“Poor little bugger,” Keith muttered before he fell into a thoughtful silence.
Lance suggested some chess, and they played until the second dinner guest arrived. Lance offered to refresh Keith’s drink when he made one for Michelle. Lorraine, after effusive greetings to her friend, rushed away claiming the need to get “the boy” into bed.
“Nope, no drink for me thanks,” Keith said. “I’m off to read a story.” With a grin at the discomforted Lance who had not wanted to be left alone with Michelle., he bounded into the house.
Moments later Lance winced as Keith’s voice rose, loud and argumentative. He quickly got to his feet as his friend, his face flushed and furious, stormed back onto the porch.
“Bedtime stories tend to be upsetting,” he claimed in a falsetto. “They over-excite him and precedents must not be set.” In his normal tones he said, shaking his head sadly, “Look, buddy, I’m going to take a rain check on that dinner. Food prepared by that termagant would choke me.”
“Wait a min—”
Keith ignored the interruption. “Give me a call and we’ll get together at my place… And bring Kevin along. I’m interested in him.” His tone indicated that no one else was. “But if you don’t watch it that little boy’s going to end up with—ah, to hell with it. If you don’t care, why should I?”
While Keith’s walking out had rankled, Lance nevertheless found himself swinging back to that evening time and again and his friend’s parting sentence.
“End up with what?” Michelle had said, looking puzzled.
“I have no idea,” Lance had said then and wished he, too, could take a rain-check on the dinner.
Well, he had found out, hadn’t he? That was why they were here. But a six-year-old with ulcers? If anyone but Keith had suggested it...
~ * ~
“Mother! Mother! Wake up!” Who in the world was saying that? Had she left the TV on? Gypsy struggled and managed to open one eye. Her head ached abominably as did every muscle in her body. The sun made a green and gold webbing across the bent knees of a small, grubby boy. He continued shaking her foot, one muddy hand wrapped around her big toe. “Mother?”
He wore an expression somewhere between incredulous joy and impatience. His face was also extremely filthy and Gypsy suppressed a shudder of distaste. His jeans, what was left of them, were coated in mud. He wore nothing on his skinny torso besides a tan, which was marked here and there with various scrapes and scratches. His high cheek bones stuck out as did his ribs. His hair was long and shaggy, as black as her own, with a patch of burrs matting it in one side. A smear of what might have been jam streaked one cheek from month to ear. He sniffed loudly and wiped his nose on the back of one hand.
An image of her brother swam into Gypsy’s mind and she smiled slowly, only realizing she was speaking aloud when she said his name, “Kevin!”
“Oh, goody, you’re awake now,” the urchin said. “Will you help me build a dam in the creek so the fishies can have more room than a goldfish bowl and grow up to be big?”
Gypsy stared at the apparition. Why, after all these years, was she dreaming about her little brother? Heavens, she’d only been ten, herself, when he was the age he appeared in this dream. And what a weird dream. She wanted to wake up, but it seemed she was already awake. And lying on a fur coat, wearing a bikini… In a forest! And all of while her little brother was shaking her toes and calling her “Mother”. Asking her to build a dam. Oh come on, Gypsy, snap out of it.
He shook her foot again, still grinning that strange grin of his. There was something odd about his face, but what it was eluded her. Oh, well, she thought tiredly, that’s the way it is with dreams. But—knowing it’s a dream usually makes it go away. Why doesn’t this one?
“Oh, please wake up again!” the ragamuffin begged.
“Scram!” Gypsy snapped, pulling her toes out of reach of those bony little fingers. She opened her eye again to see the look of joy fading fast from the dirty face. Two large tears welled up in the bright blue eyes but they did not fall. The crooked attempt at the same charming grin as before creased the jammy cheek.
“Mothers don’t say ‘scram’,” he exclaimed patiently, but the quaver in his voice gave him away. He was about to cry. “They say, ‘Honey, do you guys want to come and help me bake a cake?’ Mickey’s mom says stuff like that and I thought you’d say it too.”
Gypsy rolled over and got one elbow beneath her. She sat up groggily. She hadn’t meant to say it, but this seemed to be half his dream, and it just sort of popped out. “Honey, would you like to help me bake a cake?”
She was rewarded by a beatific smile and it was at that moment s
he realized what was wrong about the face. There were no teeth, top or bottom, in front. “What, what happened to your teeth?” she asked, wondering weakly why she—and this little boy—were still trapped in this dream.
“They fell out.” He sounded completely unconcerned.
“From eating too much cake?” This was going from bad to worse!
“No,” he said seriously. “They fell out because I’m six. Mickey’s five and his aren’t even loose yet.” Then as Gypsy struggled to her feet, feeling terribly ill, knowing it was no dream because if it were, Kevin would have to be four not six. Kevin hadn’t lived to see his teeth grow loose and be replaced by the short, somewhat ragged-edged new teeth she saw in this child’s smile.
He said, “Will you come home now, Mother, and bake a cake?”
Chapter Two
“This,” Gypsy, still bewildered, was informed a few minutes later, “is the place where we’ll build the dam. The rocks are heavy, but we can roll them together, Mother, if we try hard. I’d ask Daddy but he’s busy with the birds and the squirrels. He makes cards and notepaper and I have to stay away so I don’t scare them off.”
“The cards and the notepaper?” Shades of Alice!
“No.” He giggled. “The birds and squirrels. You’re funny. I’m glad I found you, Mother. Now I won’t be alone.”
It was fortunate for Gypsy she wasn’t required to make any reply. With another pull at her hand, the little boy told her a long and checkered story as they walked.
“I wanted my own mother for a long time and one day I asked the lady in the supermarket if she was you. She just laughed and said she’d love to be, but she wasn’t. Auntie Lorraine said I was rude and hit me on the side of the head and the lady said that wasn’t ness—ness—”
“Necessary?”
“Yes. When Mickey’s mother hit me and him for painting Jennifer, she smacked our bottoms and Auntie said she had no right, and Mickey’s mother said someone had to care for neglected children. What’s neglected, Mother? Is that what kids are who don’t have mothers? I guess I’m not neglected anymore, huh, Mother?”
This time, apparently, she was expected to respond for the child stopped and peered intently up into her face. Gypsy thought for a moment and then asked his name.
“But you know my name, silly Mother!” He laughed delightedly at what he thought must be a joke. “You already called me by it!”
“I… I did?” The only thing she had called him was ‘Kevin’ when she was just waking up and thinking he was her brother. “Kevin?” she asked tentatively.
Again the beatific smile. “Yes, Mother?”
Tears of weakness flooded her eyes. Why, with looking so much like the child Kevin had been, so much like the child Kevin might one day have fathered had he lived, did this child have to bear his name, as well? It wasn’t fair.
Kevin, the real living replica of her Kevin, tugged on her hand, his face somber. “Don’t cry, Mother. I’ll put a Band-Aid on your cut and then it will feel better. Come on, let’s go home.”
Before Gypsy’s confused and aching head could consider what to say next, they left the creekside and in a few minutes reached a sunlit clearing with a steep trail down to the water’s edge. Some sections of it contained stairs, with railings to keep people from falling off. She saw a wharf, but no boat. They walked on past the trail-head. Set back toward the semicircle of trees, a small, weather-beaten cabin stood, its window-panes reflecting the glimmer of frolicking waves. As she and Kevin approached it, a man came out of the woods, stopped, dropped to one knee and began to sketch something Gypsy couldn’t see.
Kevin pulled her to a halt. “Oh, he’s home and he’s found something to draw. We’ll have to wait until it goes away by its ownself or he might get mad.”
At that moment, with a wild, thrumming flutter of wings, a grouse, which had obviously been the subject of the artist’s attention, took flight and Kevin drew Gypsy forward.
When he spoke, she looked down at him in surprise for his tone and manner had undergone a distinct change. He spoke timorously, haltingly, far different from the chattering little boy who had brought her here. Even his face had changed. He wasn’t her Kevin anymore, and Gypsy felt as though he had been taken from her all over again.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. Did we scare the bird away? We tried to be quiet but—”
His father lifted his head, scowling, and Gypsy felt Kevin’s hand tighten in her own.
~ * ~
Lance turned slowly, stretching his stiff muscles when he heard Kevin speaking to him. His eyes were strained from having concentrated too closely on the perfect natural camouflage of the grouse and he’d had to squeeze them shut for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose. How stupid! The way the sun and shade were playing around Kevin, for a second or two it seemed as though… But no! It was too bizarre a notion even for him.
He opened his eyes again and there she was, tall and slim, with that black, black hair tumbled in a messy tangle onto her shoulders from which hung a long fur cape. Kevin pulled at her hand again and the cape swung open, revealing a bright red bikini covering very little of what he knew to be the most beautiful, enticing body ever to house a rotten soul— But it was not. Closer scrutiny revealed a stranger, a stranger with a terrible gash down one beautiful cheek and one of the most spectacular shiners he had ever seen.
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered hoarsely, unable to find full voice after the shock of what he thought he had seen.
She enunciated each word clearly and slowly. “I am Mother. I’ve come to bake a cake.”
And then she tumbled to the ground. A heap of long limbs, pale mink, a lot of bling from a diamond on her left hand ring-finger, another on a fine, silver chain around her neck, and a bright red bikini.
Lance stood for a stunned moment looking down at the woman collapsed so ungracefully at his feet. Angry thoughts tumbled through his mind as, shaking his head, he scooped her up to carry her inside and dump her unceremoniously onto a bunk. Balling up Kevin’s sleeping, he stuffed it under her feet. “Loosen the victim’s clothing,” he quoted from a half remembered first-aid manual. “Sure, that’s fine if the victim’s wearing any, but loosen any of this and she’ll be stark naked.”
Pausing, waiting for some reaction, he watched her face closely. He shrugged. Of course there’d be none. She’d be too well trained for that. But where in the world had they found her? Sure, it was said everyone had a double, but this was downright uncanny.
With water and the corner of a clean towel he began to dab at her cut temple, removing the encrusted blood. That cut had nearly closed on its own so he left it and began to soak the gash on her cheek. That was a bad one and he found himself hoping her faint was more genuine than he expected it was. He turned to his son who was skulking in the corner at one end of the bunk. “Get me the first aid kit.”
When he had tape and scissors in his hand he fashioned what he thought might be a series of small, proper butterfly bandages and used them to draw the edges of the cut together, knowing even so that she was going to be left with a bad scar. The butterflies, he covered with a clean white dressing, taped on with neat precision.
“Here,” he said to Kevin who stood watching intently, “you can put this away again.”
Unbelievably almost ludicrously, Kevin gave his father what might have been classed as an admonitory look. “Hush! She’s sleeping,” he said in a stage whisper. Lance stared his son for shocked moment. Kevin? Talking back? Speaking up for himself? A thought crossed his mind. Maybe it wasn’t himself for whom Kevin speaking up, but for this woman.
The thought raised his irritation level even higher. “She’s not sleeping,” he snapped. “She wants me to believe she’s fainted. Women do that. She’ll come out of it when it suits her.” He splashed more water on the white face, careful to avoid the bandage and not noticing until too late he was also splashing his own sleeping bag. Oh, so what? He usually just lay on top of it with a sheet over him. Mary
Hopkins had provided plenty of extra bedding. Lorraine had complained that Kevin still sometimes wet the bed.
His splashing was rewarded by a spluttering grimace and the slow opening of one achingly familiar blue eye. A surprisingly husky voice said, “Cut that out!” Its throaty tone came completely unexpected. With her face and hair and eyes, she should have that sweet little girl voice he expected and had come to despise.
Lance grinned sardonically his son who had just returned from replacing the first-aid kit. “Told you,” he commented. To the woman he said, “All right. Fun time’s over, gypsy-girl. Sit up.”
Gypsy tried groggily to comply. He pulled her the rest of the way up and with an impatient sigh use the towel to mop the drops of water from her face. She blinked, looking at the cabin, not at the man. To people, one must take some sort of response and Gypsy, as yet, had no responsiveness in her.
She examined the room she found herself in, her eyes traveling disgustedly over the untidy mess which covered every available flat surface. The floor was gritty under her feet and she winced, pulling them back up onto the bunk. What a pit! Although she remained silent, her face clearly reflected her sentiments.
“So? What did you expect? A bloody penthouse?”
“I didn’t expect anything,” she said, bewildered, looking at him, wondering why he was so rude. Speaking hurt. She reached up in surprise and encountered a bandage on her cheek He looked as if he might expect some sort of explanation for her arrival, but her head was too full of noise to think. “How could I expect anything when I didn’t even know you were here?”
“No?” he sneered, plainly disbelieving. “Then in that case, since you seem to have recovered from your almost convincing faint, perhaps you would like to be on your way, Ms. er...”
Maybe sarcasm was merely his natural way of speaking…? “Oh! Oh, yes. Of course. You have a boat? I didn’t see one at the dock. You see, we thought the island was uninhabited…” Yes she thought, wrinkling her brow, there was someone else, wasn’t there? She could recall someone saying something about the ‘deserted island’ but whom? It would be nice if this man would let her lie down for a few minutes before he sent her away, but it was plain he didn’t want her around. Gypsy rubbed her forehead, winced when she came too near the cut on her temple, and again fingered the bandage on her cheek.
Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) Page 3