by JoAnn Ross
Family plots were separated from the others by short white picket fences; the older stones, made of marble or granite, were elaborately carved, the words chiseled into their surfaces lengthy tributes to the deceased. The newer graves were marked by slabs laid flat on the ground with only the name, dates, and a single line to denote a life now gone.
The white picket fence surrounding the Anderson family plot was kept gleaming by a fresh coat of paint applied by her father every June. This year the task would be passed on to Tom or Dana. The names on the stones went back five generations, to her Great-great-grandfather Olaf.
Nora could have made her way to the grave blindfolded.
Dylan Kirk Anderson O’Halloran, the simple marker stated. Beloved son. The inscribed dates told of a young life cut tragically short.
Each time she came to the grave, Nora hoped to find peace. The fact that she never found it never stopped her from coming.
Wildflowers were arranged in a metal cup buried in the ground beside the stone. The casual bouquet consisted of dainty purplish brown mission bells, lacy white yarrow, deep purple larkspur and cheery, nodding yellow fawn lilies. The flower petals glistened with dew.
The bouquet was silent testimony to the fact that Ellen O’Halloran had made her weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery. There were times—and this was one of them—when Nora felt slightly guilty that she’d insisted her son be buried in the Anderson family plot, especially since no one could have loved Dylan more than his paternal grandmother.
But then she would remember how Caine had arrived at the cemetery obviously drunk and had humiliated both families by punching out the workman whose job it had been to lower the small, white, flower-draped coffin into the ground.
Nora pulled off her gloves, then knelt and ran a hand over the brown grass that covered her son.
Her worst fear, after they’d put her child into that cold ground, was that she’d forget his round pink face, the sound of his bubbly laugh, his bright blue eyes, his wide, melon-slice baby smile.
But that hadn’t happened.
Nine years after his death, she could see Dylan as if he were sitting right here, propped up in the maple high chair etched with teeth marks from two generations of O’Halloran boys, his bowl of oatmeal overturned on his head, laughing uproariously at this new way to win his mother’s attention.
Bittersweet memories whirled through her mind—the hours spent walking the floor with Dylan at night, an anatomy text in hand, naming aloud the names of the endocrine glands.
How many babies, she’d wondered at the time, were put to sleep with an original lullaby incorporating the two hundred and six bones of the skeletal system?
Nora knelt there for a long, silent time, tasting the scent of spring in the air. The morning light was a muted rosy glow. Delicate limbs of peaceful trees, wearing their new bright green leaves, arched over the grave.
In the distance, the sawtooth peaks of the Olympic Mountains emerged from a lifting blanket of fog; the upper snowfields caught the rose light of the sky and held it.
Somewhere not far away, Nora heard the sweet morning songs of thrush and meadowlark, then the chime of the clock tower, reminding her of other responsibilities, other children who might need her.
“Mama has to go.” She traced her son’s name with her fingertip. The bronze marker was morning-damp and cold, but Nora imagined it was Dylan’s velvety cheek she was touching. “But I’ll be back, Dylan, baby. I promise.”
After placing a small white pebble beside the one undoubtedly left by Dylan’s paternal grandmother, Nora left the grave site. The cold ache in her heart was familiar; she always experienced it whenever she visited the cemetery. But she could no more stay away than she could stop breathing.
So immersed was she in her own thoughts, Nora failed to notice the man who’d been watching her the entire time she’d been in the cemetery.
Caine leaned against the trunk of a tree, his arms crossed, silently observing his former wife.
A hangover was splitting his head in two, his body ached and the stitches in the back of his head had already begun to pull uncomfortably. But since he knew that he deserved the crushing pain, he wasn’t about to complain.
He hadn’t wanted to come to the cemetery today; indeed, he hadn’t entered those gates since the day of the funeral. A day when he’d shown up drunk, causing Nora, in an uncharacteristic public display of temper, to screech at him like a banshee. Her black-gloved fists had pounded at his chest with surprising strength until her father and brothers had managed to pull her away.
It wasn’t that Caine hadn’t loved Dylan; on the contrary, the little boy had been the sun around which Caine’s entire universe had revolved.
Which was one of the reasons he had never returned to the spot where they’d insisted on putting his son into the ground, never minding the fact that Dylan was afraid of the dark.
Caine had come to the cemetery this morning in an attempt to expunge the lingering pain, and was unsurprised when it hadn’t worked. He’d been about to leave when, as if conjured up from his dark and guilty thoughts, Nora had appeared out of the morning mists, looking strangely small and heartbreakingly frail.
* * *
She was on her way back to her car when she saw Caine. He was standing half-hidden in the shadows. She stopped, but refused to approach him. If he wanted to talk, let him come to her.
They remained that way, Caine leaning against the tree, Nora standing straight and tense, like a skittish doe, poised to flee at the slightest threat of danger.
“Hello, Nora.” His voice was deep and gruff and achingly familiar.
“Hello, Caine.” Her voice was low and guarded. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Like I’ve been run over by Harmon Olson’s Peterbilt, then drawn and quartered. But, since I figure I probably deserve every ache and pain, I’m not complaining.”
Caine looked, Nora considered, almost as bad as she felt. Which meant he looked absolutely terrible. His face, normally tanned, even in the dead of winter, was ashen. Lines older than his years bracketed his rigid, downturned mouth.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw was grizzled by a rough beard and his clothes looked as if he’d slept in them.
“Did you take the pain pills I prescribed?”
“Not this morning.” He managed a faint smile. “The way I look at it, so long as I feel the pain, I know I’m still alive.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy. But I’m not certain it’ll catch on.”
“Probably not. I hope you don’t think I’m following you.”
She shrugged and slipped her bare hands into her coat pockets. “Are you?”
“Actually, I’ve been here about an hour.”
“Oh. I didn’t see your car.”
“I walked.” He’d hoped the fresh air would clear his head. It hadn’t.
“But it’s at least three miles.”
“My arm might be giving me a little trouble, but the day I can’t walk a few measly miles is the day I hang up my glove.”
A thought flickered at the back of her mind, was discarded, then returned. “You brought the flowers.”
“Guilty.”
Part of her wanted to go back and snatch the wildflowers from her son’s grave; another part reminded her that Dylan was Caine’s son, too.
“That was very thoughtful of you.”
“They were growing all around the cabin.”
He pushed away from the tree with a deep sigh and moved across the brown grass until he was standing in front of her.
“I came out this morning and when I saw them blooming, I thought about the time we had that picnic—one of our few summer Sunday afternoons together—and how when I went back to the car to get the portable playpen, you turned your back for a second to get the potato salad out of the cooler, and when you turned around again, Dylan was gnawing on that handful of wildflowers.”
Despite her medical training, she’d been frantic, wo
rried the blossoms might be poisonous. It had been Caine who’d calmly taken the wilting flowers from their son’s grubby fist and offered a favored teething cookie in return.
“I’ve never been able to look at wildflowers again without thinking of how pleased he looked with himself, with yellow pollen all over his nose, his mouth ringed with dirt, and that enormous smile of his,” Nora murmured.
“All four of his baby teeth gleaming like sunshine on a glacier.” A reminiscent smile softened Caine’s features. “That was a pretty good afternoon, wasn’t it? If we’d only had a few more days like that, we might still be together.”
“Caine, don’t…”
She combed a hand through her silky hair in a nervous, self-conscious gesture he remembered too well; Caine caught hold of her hand on its way back to her pocket. It was, he noticed, ice-cold.
“We have to talk about it, Nora.”
“No.” She shook her head, sending her hair flying out like a swirling ray of sunshine in the shaft of shimmering morning light. “We said everything we had to say to one another nine years ago. There’s no reason to rehash painful memories.”
“We were both hurting,” he reminded her, his voice as tightly controlled as hers. “And we both said things we didn’t mean.” His pained eyes looked directly into hers and held. “Don’t you think it’s time we settled things?”
She jerked her hand from his and stiffened—neck, arms, shoulders. A thin white line of tension circled her lips. “As far as I’m concerned, things were settled when you got into that new flashy red Corvette the insurance company gave you and drove away and left me all alone.”
To deal with our baby’s death. She hadn’t said the words aloud, but they hovered in the air between them.
“You didn’t ask me to stay,” Caine reminded her.
“Would you have?”
For some reason he would have to think about later, Caine chose to tell the absolute truth. “No. Probably not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Let me put the question another way,” he said. “If I’d asked you to come with me, would you have?”
Years of controlling her expression while examining patients kept Nora from revealing how the unexpected question startled her. “And leave medical school?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there are medical schools in California.”
He had her there. Realizing that he’d just pushed her into a very tidy corner, Nora hedged. “It’s a moot point. Because you never asked me to go to California with you.”
“If I had, if I had said, ‘Nora, I’m so heartsick about everything that’s happened, come with me to Oakland and let’s try to start over again,’ what would you have said?”
“I might have gone.”
It was a lie; she never would have left friends and family and her lifelong ambition to go chasing after Caine’s dream. But she’d blamed him for so many years that old habits died hard.
Caine’s wide shoulders slumped visibly. Nora had been unrelentingly, coldly angry after the accident, after their child’s death.
She’d told him so many times, in both words and actions, how much she hated him, that Caine had never suspected that he might have, with extra effort, been able to break through all her pain and fury.
But at the time, even if he’d wanted to, he wasn’t sure he would have had the strength to try. Because, although he suspected she’d never believe it, he had been numb with unrelenting grief and guilt.
“I guess I really blew it, then.”
When he dragged his wide bruised hand over his face, Nora felt a distant twinge of guilt for lying to him and ignored it. His dark eyes were those of a man who’d visited hell and had lived to tell about it.
“I told you, Caine, it’s in the past. Let’s just let it stay there.”
“Life would probably be a lot easier if the past could be forgotten, Nora,” he said. “But I think we both know it can’t be.”
Before she could answer, the clock in the village square tolled again. “I’m sorry, Caine, but I can’t discuss this right now. I’m going to be late for work, as it is.”
Caine glanced down at the Rolex sports watch he’d never been able to afford when he’d been married to her. “It’s not even seven.”
“I know, but it’s a long drive to Port Angeles, and there are a lot of trucks on the road this time of morning.”
“You have another clinic in Port Angeles?”
“No, I’m working in the hospital emergency room three days a week in order to fund the Tribulation clinic.”
“The emergency room?”
How can you bear it? The words were unspoken, but they hung in the air between them just the same.
The memory of those hours they’d spent outside the hospital emergency room, at opposite ends of the small waiting room, anger and fear and hurtful pride keeping them from comforting one another, came flooding back.
“During my internship at New York-Presbyterian, in New York City—”
“I know where New York-Presbyterian is,” Caine broke in. “I lived in New York, remember? Before the Yankees cut me.”
She remembered being afraid she would run into him. She also remembered reminding herself that New York was an enormous city; the odds of seeing her former husband were astronomical. But that hadn’t stopped her from getting an ulcer that had mysteriously cleared up after she’d returned to Tribulation.
“Well, anyway,” she said, shaking off that uncomfortable memory, “when it came time for me to do my E.R. rotation, I was sick to my stomach all night. I’d been dreading it for weeks. In fact, I was seriously thinking of dropping out of medicine.”
She fell suddenly silent and stared up at him, wondering what on earth had possessed her to tell him something she’d never admitted to another living soul.
She took a deep breath that should have calmed her but didn’t. “Anyway, thirty seconds after I managed to drag myself into the E.R., an elderly woman who’d been attacked in her bed by a man with a machete was brought in. She had put her arms up to protect herself and there was blood everywhere.
“We must’ve pumped in a ton of blood, but eventually she stabilized enough to be sent up to surgery.”
“Did she make it?”
“Oh, yes. But I didn’t find that out for weeks, because all day patients just kept pouring in: knife fights, bullet wounds, heart attacks, rapes…
“The triage nurses had the patients stacked up like planes over Kennedy airport and by the time I got to stop long enough to have a cup of coffee, I’d been on the run for eighteen hours and had another eighteen to go, but—and this is hard to explain—I felt really, really good.”
“Adrenaline tends to do that to you,” Caine agreed absently. He was trying to come to grips with the idea of cool, calm and collected Nora covered with a stranger’s blood, surrounded by the bedlam that was part and parcel of a city-hospital emergency room. Nora treating bullet wounds? Ten years ago he would have found the idea preposterous. Obviously he’d underestimated his former wife.
“I suppose so. But it was more than adrenaline. I loved being part of a team and I loved the action. It was fantastic!”
A smile as bright as a summer sun bloomed on her face and lighted her eyes. Caine tried to remember a time she’d smiled like that at him when they’d been married and came up blank.
“You should do that more often.” Unable to resist touching her, he reached up and ran his palm down her hair.
It was only a hand on her hair. An unthreatening, nonintimidating touch. So why did it make her mouth go dry and her heart skip a beat?
“Do what?”
“Smile. You have a lovely smile. No wonder your patients love you.”
It was happening all over again. When she felt herself falling under Caine’s seductive spell, Nora took a step backward. Physically and emotionally. “I really do have to go.”
“You haven’t finished the story.”
“What
story?”
“About your first day in the emergency room.”
“Oh. Well, as I said, the rush was amazing. I was hooked. I applied for a residency, got it, and I’ve been working in emergency departments ever since.”
“I wish we’d been living together that day,” Caine surprised both of them by saying. “I would have liked sharing it with you.”
“Please, Caine—”
“I’d like to hear more about your work, your life. Could I take you to dinner tonight?”
“I’m sorry, Caine, but I have paperwork to catch up on tonight.”
“Tomorrow night, then.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“All right, how about lunch?”
“I’m sorry, but the answer’s still no.”
“Breakfast?”
“No.”
“I want to see you again, Nora. Just to talk. That’s all.”
She combed her hand through her hair again and was appalled to find it trembling visibly. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea, Caine,” she said gently, but firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because it would be too painful.” She flared suddenly, causing the birds perched on the branches overhead to take flight in a loud flurry of wings.
“Perhaps that’s all the more reason to talk about it,” Caine suggested mildly. “If we can get everything out in the open once and for all, perhaps we can put it behind us.”
“Do you truly think that’s possible?”
“We’ll never know if we don’t try.”
For a brief, foolhardy moment, Nora was honestly tempted.
“No,” she decided. “I don’t want to see you again, Caine. Not for dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, or just to talk.”
Unaccustomed to failure, but not knowing how to salvage the situation, Caine decided he had no choice but to back away. “I guess I’ll just have to wait and see you in a couple of weeks.”
“Really, Caine—”
“So you can take the stitches out,” he reminded her. “Unless you’d rather have me go to a doctor in Port Angeles.”
“No.” Her cheeks were flushed. “Of course I’ll take them out. There’s no reason for you to drive all that way.”