From Here to There

by Rain Trueax

  They set up the bassinet in the corner of the living room. As an only child, the whole thing of dealing with babies was a mystery to her, one she was about to have at least partially revealed.

  She and Amos found themselves talking in whispers, uncertain as to how much noise might disturb the sleeping baby. Whatever amount that was, they were taking no chances. The longer he slept, the better.

  After a hurried dinner, Helene was cleaning up the kitchen when she heard the first sounds of protest. Feeling as though her heart had just jumped into her throat, she ran into the living room. Buddy’s face was screwed up with discomfort, his mouth distorted into something that had no resemblance to a rosebud.

  "What do you want?" Helene cooed to him, then remembered the instructions. She rushed back to the kitchen, set one of the bottles into a pan of hot water to warm up and took another deep breath to calm herself.

  Amos came in from the barn as the first angry bellow emanated from the living room. "He's awake," he guessed.

  Helene smiled faintly. "So it would seem."

  "He's got good healthy lungs." The sounds were growing in distress.

  "I guess I should change him," Helene said, knowing the bottle couldn't possibly be warm enough yet. She waited for Amos to offer to help her. When the offer wasn't forthcoming, she took another deep breath, grabbed the diaper bag and headed for the living room.

  By now there was no doubt Buddy was awake and very disturbed by something. Was he old enough to recognize a strange environment? Worse was he old enough to recognize a strange mother? Well, it was too late to worry about all that. Helene grabbed a quilt, threw it on the floor, then reached into the bassinet for the upset baby.

  "How's my boy?" she cooed, her voice changing into what she hoped would be a soothing, motherly register. The crying didn't cease, but he did look at her. This might be good or bad, depending on whether he recognized someone new.

  Laying him on the blanket, Helene unsnapped his terry cloth sleepers, pulled them and the disposable diaper away from his legs. When she opened up the new one, she had to figure out how it was put back together. Before she could get it back on him, a tiny waterspout erupted from his body, nearly catching Helene in the face. Quickly she threw the new diaper over him. As she talked, he laid playing with his fingers and watching her. The little sounds he made were of contentment. She pulled back on the sleeper, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him out to the kitchen where Amos had remained. He looked up as she came in. "He okay?" he asked.

  "You coward," she said. "Don't you even feel guilty for not coming in and helping me?"

  "Nope," Amos said with a grin. "Babies are women's work."

  She eyed him narrowly. "You need educating. Grandfathers do things like that these days." She took the bottle from the water and tested a drop or two on her wrist. She didn't know where she'd learned that. Maybe that was inborn mothering... or just commonsense.

  Smiling and talking to the baby, she sat in a chair. Cradling the baby in her arms, she tried to put the bottle into his mouth. He spit it out.

  "I bet he's used to his mama's... uh, you know," Uncle Amos suggested.

  "Well, he'll have to get used to this too," Helene said as she tried again, talking and crooning to him as she again placed the nipple in his mouth. This time a few drops got past his lips. He licked them, seemed to approve of the substance and gave the bottle a more interested effort. Soon the milk was flowing and Helene and baby relaxed.

  Amos heaved a sigh of relief. "It's good having him here, but... it'll be good having him go home too. Last time around I was a lot younger."

  By the time Helene was ready to lay the baby back down, she was beginning to like this idea of taking care of an infant. It might not be so bad to have her own someday. She wondered what Phillip's baby would look like and then censured herself for the thought. She couldn't afford to begin wanting what it looked likely she'd never have.

  Chapter Ten

  Three long days passed. Helene read her aunt’s journal as she wrote about her dawning realization that she might love Amos and not as a friend. She had no hope it could work out. She constantly reminded herself that he had someone. There were entries where she wrote of her doubts about even coming to Montana. Writing of the doubts seemed to only strengthen her belief that it was to be her home even if she lived out her life as a spinster. She had written some lovely descriptions of the river at the heart of this valley and her picnics on it with Amos.

  One day her brother showed up and she wrote her disappointment that he didn’t like Amos or Montana. The last entry was the longest.

  May 13, Amos came into town today. He came to the Georges’ home and asked to talk to me alone.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Want? Well...” He stumbled over the words.

  “Amos, what is wrong?”

  “I’ve been thinking on something. You been here near a year now.”

  “Yes.”

  “You planning to go home?”

  “This is home.”

  Well he stopped then for awhile. “I might’s well get this over.”

  “You’re marrying Beth?” I asked feeling a sinking deep inside. “I wish you both the best.”

  “Beth? What the hell you talking about? No, I am not marrying Beth... Chelle, I am asking you to be my wife.”

  “Me?”

  “It’s stupid to ask. I know you don’t want me that way, but I gotta ask if I wanta live with myself. There ain’t nothing that scares me that I don’t face and this is one of those things.”

  “Scares you?” I smiled then. Probably one of the biggest smiles I ever did give anybody. “Why would it scare you?”

  “I know you ain’t been thinking of me that way. You’re way above me, gal, classy and all. No way you’d take me.”

  “Amos, are you trying to talk me out of saying yes. If so, it’s not going to work. I’d like to be your wife.”

  He looked at me like I was saying the very last thing he had ever expected. “You would... I mean that’s a yes?”

  I put my arms around his neck. You know at this point, well he hadn’t even kissed me. Should a woman ever say she’d marry a man who hadn’t even kissed her but I said yes, definitely it was a yes.

  “You sure?”

  “Amos, did you want me or not?” That’s when he grabbed me and the kiss he gave me told me everything I ever needed to know about what kind of marriage we’d have. When he let me go, I was barely able to stand my knees felt so weak.

  “When will you marry me?” he asked then.

  “When do you want?”

  “Justice of the Peace can do it in a few days, right after we get a license and the blood work taken care of. Doc’ll do that.”

  This man wasted no time on what he wanted, that was one thing among many others that I knew for sure about him. So we went down and got that done and now I have to figure out what I’ll wear because on May 17th, we are going to be man and wife. My family might never forgive me but I don’t care, not at all. I know where my heart is and it’s with Amos. I am lucky he lives where I want to make my life, but if he didn’t, well, I’d follow him anywhere. That’s how it is.

  After that last entry, Aunt Rochelle had added a note to Helene. “By now you might realize why I would want you to have these words or maybe not. Basically it’s because I wanted you to know how it was for me, that it didn’t come without some difficulty, that love was all I had hoped it would be. You saw the up side with us but I guess I thought you needed to know it hadn’t always been that way.

  “Amos and I earned what we had, and by the time you’d come along, we’d had many years to perfect what we had begun with. I know you saw us as having something special, and we have but you can too. Marriage isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a real relationship between a man and woman that can be magic or seem like hell.

  “I have seen that you are being particular about what you will have in your life. Where it comes to life, you can make
all kinds of deals to get what you want, give up this or that, but when it comes to love, to your mated relationship, never settle, my dear. Everyone I ever knew who did came to regret it. Someday you will also find that man. I wish I was going to be alive to see it but unless I can look down from heaven, I won’t. I know it though for how it’ll be for you because you are so much like me.

  “Now I don’t know what that man will look like or where he’ll come from. That won’t be the important part. It’ll be that he’ll be a man you’d follow anywhere. You will have the kids, the career even if you want it but in the end, that relationship, it’ll be the star that lights your way. I never had a daughter but in many ways you were that to me. I love you very much. Just remember one thing—life is what happens between here and there. It’s neither the beginning nor the end. It’s the moment.”

  Helene closed the journal thinking over the words. She supposed there was nothing that dramatic or unusual in her aunt’s story. Lots of people found love after being friends. It had been a key turning point though in a life where her aunt had found what she wanted to base her life around. Helene knew from seeing her aunt and uncle together that it had lasted. But she also understood better now that it hadn’t come easy or without work.

  She felt happy to know the story, to see her aunt and uncle as people, not just substitute parents. Was Phillip her moment, her home? She was sure she loved him but not sure whether they had anything they could build a life on. Until he came back, if he came back, she’d not think about it or try to figure it out.

  For the next few days, she sewed, baked, cleaned, read, or did anything that helped her avoid thinking. Sometimes she cried if she thought about it which was another reason not to do so. There were no phone calls, at least not from California, although Wes did call again to ask her to dinner and tell her he'd be around if she ever got over being afraid of another mistake. She was almost speechless at the call, and so only managed to say thank you before she hung up.

  With night, Amos headed into town for his lodge meeting. "You sure you don't want to come in with me," he asked, his eyes reflecting his concern for her.

  "No thanks," she responded with a smile. She wasn't staying home to listen for the phone. She really wasn't, but it seemed there was nothing she wanted to do, certainly nothing in town.

  "Hobo and I'll be fine here," she told him, kissing his forehead before he walked out the door. "If the weather closes in, you stay in town. I don't want to worry about you driving on icy roads, and you've been looking so tired lately."

  "Don't you worry about me. I been driving on icy roads since long before you were born, young lady," he reminded her with a grin as he closed the door.

  Helene took a leisurely bath, wrapped herself in a terrycloth robe and settled onto the living room sofa with a best selling novel she'd been wanting to finish for almost a year. Every time she got a few pages read, she became distracted and put it aside. At the rate she'd been progressing, the movie would be out before she managed to finish the novel.

  When she heard the truck in the driveway, she didn't get up, sure it was her uncle. The door to the kitchen opened, boots tromped across the floor. "What did you forget?" she called out, laughing.

  "What makes you think I forgot anything?" Phillip pushed open the door, still wearing his heavy coat. His eyes looked tired, and his jaw was unshaven.

  "Phillip."

  "You got the name right. I guess maybe I wasn't away too long after all." He grinned tiredly.

  "I didn't know if you'd come back," she admitted, sitting up, the book falling from her lap.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, for one thing, you hadn’t called." She tried to smile. "Are you hungry?"

  "I haven't eaten since last night, but no, I think I'm too tired to be hungry. I left San Francisco this morning. Took me an hour to get to the airport through traffic. In the air, there was a lot of turbulence. It seemed I went through one storm front after another. I feel like I've been run through the wringer and come out the other side flattened."

  She tried to smile but found it impossible. "Are you too tired to talk about how it went with your brother?"

  He shook his head. "There isn't that much to say. How about just it was not good but also wasn’t a disaster."

  His gaze didn't leave hers as she walked across the room to him. She only wished she could read the expression in those clear blue eyes. Was it wariness or simple exhaustion? She put her arms around his neck. "I missed you," she said, reaching up on tiptoe to brush a kiss across his lips.

  "I... uh. Where's Amos?" He sucked in a breath as he felt her unbuttoning his shirt, pushing it and the coat aside to reach the front of his chest with her lips. “What are you wearing under that robe?”

  "It's lodge night," she whispered against the skin she'd bared, the breath of air a teasing promise. “Want a hot bath?”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “Want anything else?” She had thought of doing this, dreamed of making love to him and the dream had become a driving force that would accept no answer but yes.

  "Uh he’ll be back late?" Phillip asked, his voice husky.

  "Yes, not that it would matter. We are married," she reminded him.

  "I've dreamed about you," he said as he bent to take her lips lightly with his, slanting his mouth first one way, then the other.

  "Nightmares?" she asked teasingly as she nipped and kissed the side of his neck.

  "You tell me. In my dream you were lying on my bed, your arms reaching up for me." He didn't know why he was telling her his dreams, admitting the weakness he had where she was concerned, but the words seemed to come without volition.

  "Hmmm seems like an easy dream to make come true," she whispered. She took hold of his hand and pulled him toward the stairs. Once they were upstairs, she ran a hot bath for him. Before he could shrug out of his shirt, he felt her hands on it, pulling it from his shoulders. He turned, saw her golden eyes darken with passion. She reached up, her eyes on his as she finished unbuttoning it, kissing his chest. Slowly undressing him before she led him back into the bathroom where the tub was almost filled.

  When he sank into the hot water with a sigh, she took a washcloth and soaped his back, kissing his neck after she had scooped water to rinse the soap away. “You like this?”

  "You can see that I do," he said, almost under his breath, but against all his best judgment. He'd told himself while in California that it was impossible between them, but he had headed back to her as soon as he could go. Family meant pain, but she was like a magnet drawing him to her. He needed her.

  Back in her room, he resisted the temptation to grab her, take her immediately, letting her set the pace. He wanted her touch, her kiss on his flesh. He hadn't known until that moment how much he'd needed it. Could he be the man she needed though?

  Helene had never felt such a surge of a burning desire to know this man, to take away his pain, to feel again all the things she had the last time they'd made love. She pushed him down so that he sat on the edge of the bed. Leaning over, she looked into his eyes, the blue so pure it seemed unreal. Her lips lightly teased his. Her breath came out a moan as he pulled her onto his lap, claiming her with a kiss that started with the light touch of his lips, then changed as his arms tightened around her. His tongue delved into her mouth, possessing and claiming with a power she couldn't deny if her life depended on it.

  She ran her hands down his chest, circling around his nipples, then teasing down across his ridged belly. "I need you," she whispered. Her hands were shaking with desire as she pushed him onto his back. She felt heady with power as she saw the effect of her touch on his body, but it was having no less and effect on her own.

  He groaned at what her inexperienced touch was doing to him. Phillip had known women before, women who knew all the right moves, the ways to entice, but he'd never felt anything like this. He allowed her to play with him, to drink her fill, because he was lost in mindlessness, writhing under her touch.<
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  Reaching up, he knew he could wait no longer to possess and be possessed. His own hands shaking, he pulled open her robe and found her, as he had hoped, naked under it. He cupped her breasts with his hands, stroking and kissing. Taking first one, then the other into his mouth.

  Phillip lifted Helene over him and in a joining so natural it was as though they'd done it a thousand times before and so exciting it was as though the first time any man took a woman, they became for those precious moments as one. Thrusting, moving, caressing and finally finding fulfillment together.

  Helene collapsed on top of him, barely aware he was pulling the quilt over them. Outside the night had the stillness only a heavy snowfall can bring. It was as though all sound was muted. For this time, this moment, there was no world but the one in which they lay entwined.

  #

  Sitting at the kitchen table in their robes, Helene watched as Phillip ate the meal she'd warmed for him. At Phillip's feet, Hobo sat, watching expectantly.

  "I'm really hungry," Phillip admitted as he took another bite of the lasagna and surreptitiously slid a small piece onto the floor for the big dog.

  Pretending she hadn't seen the violation, Helene poured him a glass of white wine. "Can you tell me now how it went with Derek?"

  He shrugged sitting back in the chair and taking a sip of the wine. "He's filled with resentment. Mad at the world and me. Blaming everybody but himself." He didn't tell her of the depression that had seemed to settle over him as he'd faced the possibility that in leaving his family, he'd done to his brother what his own father had done to him. Sending money was no substitute for having come back more often. He had known his mother wasn’t really capable of doing more than birthing children.

  "He's only going to hurt himself with resentment like that," Helene observed, leaning her elbows on the table.

  Phillip said nothing. Theoretically what she'd said was true, but he knew from experience it didn't work out that way in reality. His brother's resentment was hurting him too.