Bree cleared her throat. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“You brought food.”
“It’s a bribe. I need your advice.”
Verity’s brows went up. When they came down, she smiled. “I don’t think I’m one to be giving advice.”
But Bree stood her ground. It was Verity or nothing.
Verity must have sensed her resolve. With a glance toward the back of the cottage, she asked, “Would you like some tea?”
Bree’s hands were cold, perhaps from the outdoors, more likely from nerves. She rubbed them together. “That would be nice.”
She followed Verity to the kitchen and sat at a scarred wooden table while Verity heated water, warmed a pot, and opened a tin of loose tea leaves. Bree smelled their scent as soon as they hit the air, even more when Verity spooned some into the pot and poured in boiling water. The smell that rose as the tea steeped was raw, rich, and sweet.
Settling in across the table, Verity folded her hands. “What advice do you think I can give?”
Bree had thought long and hard about what words to use. Convinced that her own clumsiness had turned off the woman in the diner and not wanting to do the same here, she had practiced scripts that gently and gradually related the problem. Sitting here, though, with a woman whose home held no pretense, she realized those scripts were misconceived. So, bluntly, she said, “Strange things have happened to me. You’re the expert on strange things.”
Verity’s mouth twitched at that. “UFOs, CE5s, NDEs, OBEs, ESP. I’m not really an expert. Just an observer.”
“And a believer.”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you believe in near-death and out-of-body experiences?”
“Like the ones you had? Yes.” The word had two syllables.
“Why?”
Politely, Verity asked, “Why not?”
“Because there’s no way to prove that they’re real. They happen to people in the middle of traumas, and then they’re over and done. Most of my friends think I imagined what happened to me.”
Verity rose, took cups and saucers from the cupboard, and set them on the table. They were of fine china, white with delicate green leaves inside a bright gold rim, perfectly matched and unchipped. The stream of tea that filled one, then the other, was a deep shade of bronze. It smelled even richer than before.
Verity settled into her seat. She looked from one cup to the other, seeming to take in the whole picture. Then, sprightly, she raised her head and smiled. In the next instant, her eyes widened. Leaving the table again, she took a package from the bread bin, unwrapped it, cut several slices of whatever it was, and set them on a plate.
“A tea party isn’t complete without sweets,” she said, as she set down the plate and returned to her chair. “It’s apple cake. The apples are from my own trees.”
Bree wasn’t hungry, but she took a piece of cake. Verity’s pride was a tangible thing. Bree couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her. Not that she needed to lie about the cake. It was moist, sweet, delicious. She told Verity so and took pleasure in her smile, then set to wondering how to return to the subject at hand.
Verity did it for her. After taking a sip of her tea, she said in a voice that was tea-party conversational, “Your friends think you imagined what happened, because they aren’t open to the idea of a different dimension.”
Bree blinked. A different dimension. “Am I?”
“Not the you who was raised by your father and grandparents. But the you who likes to stand in the woods and dream.”
“How . . .?”
“I’ve seen you. I’m a woods walker, too. I’ve seen the look on your face.”
There was no point in denying it, not here, not to Verity, not when Bree’s curiosity was whetted. “What kind of different dimension?”
“It’s an energy channel. One step above man’s everyday level of functioning. It consists of pure thought and feeling.”
“Does it take a near death to reach it?”
“No. Psychics do it without. And many people who have near deaths don’t reach it. Only the ones with open minds. The ones willing to believe. The others are weighted down by the physical world. They never rise.”
“But I’ve always been a realist,” Bree argued.
Teacup in hand, Verity sat back with a smug smile.
Okay, Bree reasoned. So she dreamed. But did that make her different from others?
“You believe in positives,” Verity said. “You’re an optimist. That’s how you survived living with your father all those years. You made a life for yourself at the diner. You looked outward. You saw the glass as half full.” She paused. “Those forest fairies stirred up by the wind?”
Bree’s eyes went wide.
Verity smiled and shook a gently chiding finger. “Your face doesn’t hide much. I’ve watched you watch them. Some people see drifting leaves. You and I, we see life.”
You and I. Bree had a startling thought.
But Verity was speaking on, slowly and softly, with only the faintest of drawls. “You believe in a world of possibility. Not everyone does. Your friends don’t, which is why they have trouble believing what you experienced. That, and they’re jealous.”
Of Tom? Of her diamond ring? “Of what?”
“Of the inner peace you found.”
“What inner peace?” Bree cried. “I am totally confused. My life used to be sensible and predictable. Then the accident happened, and nothing’s been the same since.”
“Are things worse?”
“No.” She hadn’t meant to complain. Or maybe she had.
“Better?”
“So much so that sometimes I think it’s too good to be true.”
Verity studied her for a minute, then nodded. “Thomas Gates.”
Bree sighed. “Oh, yes. Thomas Gates. Most of the time I forget that half the world knows who he is. Then I remember, and I can’t believe he loves me.”
“He seems happy.”
“Well, he thinks he is now, but what if he should change his mind?”
“Are you going to throw away what you have on the chance that he will?”
Bree started to speak, then stopped. Put that way, the answer was obvious. It told only half the story, though. “If he had happened to me before all this, I could probably believe it faster. But first there was the accident, then the out-of-body experience, now the wishes. Put Tom in the middle of it, and I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”
Verity was frowning. “Wishes?”
Bree hesitated. Then she reminded herself that this was a woman who not only saw forest fairies but had argued more than once in favor of UFOs, psychics, and, yes, a bowling alley in heaven. So she told her about the three wishes, from her first awareness of them, to the fire, to the woman at the diner. She argued both sides, coincidence versus wish. “Do you see why I’m confused? And then there’s the part of me that thinks the only reason I’m back here is for the wishes, and that after the third one, the being of light will reclaim me.
“Oh my,” Verity said. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the drugs I was on right after the accident. Maybe it’s nothing but a human kind of fear.” Most people feared death, didn’t they? It was the most natural thing in the world, wasn’t it? “Do you think the wishes are real?”
Verity considered the question. “They could be.”
“Was that my mother who came to the diner?” When Verity shrugged, Bree again had that startling thought. Again she set it aside. “After the third wish, do I die?”
Verity raised both shoulders and kept them up this time.
“Can I risk it?”
The shoulders dropped. “That depends on what the wish is and how much it matters to you.” She thought for a minute. “I probably would.”
“Even if it means death?”
“What if it means life?”
“You mean a happier life?”
“Happier. Safer. Freer. Most people live like this.” She drew a level line with her hand. “Some people live like this.” She drew a higher line. “Having an open mind makes part of the difference. Risk makes the rest.”
In a moment’s frustration, Bree scanned the room. It held most every creature comfort. “This doesn’t look too risky.”
“Now it isn’t. It was when I first came here. I had never lived alone. I had never taken care of myself. I didn’t have a generator then, just the clothes on my back.”
Regretful of her outburst, Bree brought the tea to her mouth. She let the nearness of the scent tease her taste buds for a minute, took a sip, and, in the smooth, rich heat, found a temporary balm. More calmly, she asked, “Why did you come?”
Verity smiled. “Not for the UFOs, though I do think this is where they land.”
“What did you leave?”
The smile faded. “A man who swore to kill me if I left.”
Bree gasped.
Verity waved a hand. “It’s an old story. Not an uncommon one. It’s nowhere near as exotic as the stories people tell about me in town.”
“How many of them are real?”
“Not many. It may be possible to commune with the dead, but I’ve never done it. I have been followed by strange lights and do believe in UFOs, but I’ve never come face-to-face with an alien. I have come face-to-face with a bear. I was so frightened that I froze. The bear got bored and walked away. So people say I can control wild beasts with a single look. I let them believe it.”
“Why?”
“Because it frees me to be and do whatever I want. For years I couldn’t.”
It sounded so sensible and unbizarre that Bree took the opening it offered. No hopes up, she told herself. Just curious. “Where did you live before you came here?”
“Atlanta.”
“Have you ever lived in California?”
“No.”
It was possible that Bree’s father might have been either wrong or misled. “Have you ever been to Chicago?”
“Once. Fifty years ago. I was ten. We were visiting relatives there.”
That would make her sixty, not the fifty-three that Bree’s mother would be. In that, too, Haywood Miller might have been wrong or misled. “Do you have any children?”
“No. My husband wouldn’t share me that much.”
What if she had run away, had an affair with Haywood, and conceived Bree? What if that was the only way in the world she could have had a child? What if, years later, she had come to Panama to watch Bree grow? That didn’t explain why she had never revealed herself to Bree. But what if Haywood had forbidden her to? What if that had been part of the deal? What if she had changed her looks so that Haywood himself hadn’t recognized her?
Trying to stay calm, she asked, “What brought you to Panama?”
“I closed my eyes and pointed.”
“Pointed?”
“I needed to leave the South. So I opened a map of the North, closed my eyes, and pointed.”
“Did you know anyone here before you came?”
Verity shook her head. Then she tipped it and gave a small, knowing smile. “I thought you thought the woman in the diner was your mother.”
Bree felt a stab of embarrassment. Throwing it off, she raised her chin. “I don’t know that for sure. When I wished for heat, I got a fire. So I moved to Tom’s, where I have heat. I got my wish, but in a roundabout way. My seeing the woman at the diner led to my confrontation with Tom, which led to my coming here.”
Gently, Verity said, “I’m not your mother.”
“Would you tell me if you were?”
“Yes. I believe in telling the truth.”
“Verity.”
“Yes?”
“Your real name?”
Her eyes twinkled. Her accent thickened. “It is. Right on my birth certificate.”
Bree couldn’t argue with a birth certificate. “Do you really think that God is bowling when it thunders?”
“Do you know otherwise?”
“When hot air hits cold air, there’s lightning. The sound comes from that”
“Does air make noise? Do clouds?”
“Scientists say so.”
“Does it make sense?”
Bree saw her point.
“Think back,” Verity went on. “Did I ever say for sure that God bowled? Or did I say it was possible?”
Bree was caught. “Possible.”
“Is it?”
“I guess.”
Verity’s smile was wide. “See? You do have an open mind, just like me, though not because we’re blood kin. Both of us experienced a life threat. That freed us up.”
Freedom was one thing, lunacy another, was what Bree was thinking.
Verity said, “Freedom is relative. So is happiness and reality and risk. Sometimes, in order to be free, we have to take risks. Sometimes, in order to be happy, we have to take risks. As for what’s real and what isn’t, it’s like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Reality is one thing for one person, and another for another. We make our reality. It can be what we want, or what we need.”
“What if my reality is different from Tom’s? What if he really is that other person, the famous one who lives in the fast lane?”
“And if he is? What would you lose?”
“The most wonderful thing in my life.”
“Well, there you have it.”
“Have what?”
“Your answer. The thing that brought you here, what’s real and what isn’t. If Thomas Gates is the most wonderful thing in your life, why question it? You’re an optimist. Deep down inside, past that old inbred cautiousness, you believe in possibility. It doesn’t matter if a thing is real. If the possibility is, that’s what counts.”
Bree’s spirits rose higher with each jolt of the truck during the return trip on Verity’s rutted path. At its end, the forest’s darkness gave way to a near-blinding light that Bree took as her special being’s approval of the visit. Waiting only long enough for her eyes to adjust, she turned onto the main road and, ebullient, headed for Tom.
The house was so quiet when she reached it that for an instant she feared she had waited too long. After searching the rooms on the first floor, she ran up the stairs. “Tom?”
“In here,” came his voice from the end of the hall.
She went to the door of his office. He had yet to unpack the cartons there, but they were pushed aside, which was an improvement, and there was a lamp on the desk. He sat in its light with his computer open, gestured that she should wait, tapped at the keyboard. After reading from the screen, he jotted something on a long yellow pad, tossed down his pen, and pushed himself back.
There was an instant’s hesitancy when he looked at her, an instant’s reminder of their confrontation. Then came a slow grin and the sexiest “Hey” she’d ever heard, but he didn’t leave the chair.
So she went to him. “Hey yourself.” Stopping between his legs, she looped her arms around his neck and kissed him once with her lips, a second time with her teeth, a third time with her tongue.
He circled her waist. “Must have been one hell of a shopping trip.”
She smiled down into his smiling face. “It was. Whatcha been doing?”
“Exploring the feasibility of obtaining a waiver of the ban on federal subsidizing of nonregulated growth material for the Allsworthys’ farm down the road.”
The only thing she could understand of his answer was the bottom line. “Another case?”
He shrugged, but his smile remained. Every few days something new popped up, some legal problem that Martin Sprague didn’t know how to handle. Tom refused to take credit for the work, but the whole town knew what was what.
“I love you,” she said.
He drew in a deep breath. It came out ragged. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Let’s get married.”
He rolled his eyes.
She was more specific. “This weekend.”
Slowly, he straightened. “Do you mean it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“This weekend is three days off,” he warned, but she felt his excitement.
“We don’t need printed invitations.”
“Are you sure?”
“About printed invitations?”
“About the date.”
“Positive.” She was making her own reality, tying Tom down, then giving him a last chance to escape. “Unless you’d rather wait.”
The eloquent look he gave her was followed by another kiss. This one was longer and deeper than the three that had come before and tasted of commitment. Odd, but it made Bree feel free.
She smoothed his hair back and studied him, trying to see the brash and successful man whose face was on the books on the shelf. But there were no traces of that man here. This one was more handsome, more honest, more decent. His hair was longer and his coloring more healthy. He had a scar on his cheek that lent character, and wonder in his eyes. This one was the man who loved her enough to believe in her fantasies and wait through her doubts.
“You are the most wonderful thing in my life,” he said, in a voice that was hoarse with emotion. They were the very same words she had used not so long before at Verity’s house, and would have erased the last of her qualms if those hadn’t already been gone.
All that remained was a world of possibility, one so large and bounteous that Bree couldn’t have explored it all in an hour, a day, a year. But she tried. She touched Tom’s face and his neck with her hands, then her mouth. She unbuttoned his shirt and touched his chest, unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans. She touched everything inside, stroked until she had created a new reality that was larger, harder, and so much more exciting than the old that she slipped to her knees.
Tom jerked at the touch of her lips. “Christ, Bree.”
She didn’t stop. The idea that anything in the world was possible gave her a certain freedom, which gave her a certain power. That power meant taking the thickness of him into her mouth while she held his thighs apart with her hands. It meant milking him to the point of release, then rising up, pushing aside her blouse and bra, and offering him her breasts. It meant watching his wonderful long-fingered hands knead them, then lifting her nipples to his tongue, and if there was brazenness in that, she had no regrets. The power was hers, the freedom, the possibility. All these were her reality with Tom.
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