When he’d asked Jenny to dinner, his eyes had held the same look he’d had for the other woman. Her lips had parted, almost saying yes before she got her refusal out. Jenny wasn’t about to become the next one.
Keep it cool. Don’t get involved deeper than you can handle if it ends. She’d learned the rules, and Jake was too dangerous to play with. Yet working with him, beside him every day, she had learned the joys of sharing his creations, of becoming indispensable to him.
Now, five years later, he was waiting for an answer. “Safety? Yes, that’s what’s important.” As she walked beside him, not touching, she could still feel the imprint of his hand on her shoulder.
He probed, “But you’ve left your job, gone off onto the ocean on a small boat – where’s safety there?”
“There are different kinds of safety,” she said ambiguously. Safety was in getting away from Jake, keeping herself independent, not needing anyone else.
Softly, he asked, “What is it you’re running from this time?”
“I’m not running!”
“Aren’t you?” He stopped, holding a hand out and catching her fingers in his. “I don’t know why, but I do think you’re running. If it’s dissatisfaction with your job, with me—” He gripped her hand tightly in a brief spasm. “—if that’s it, you could have asserted yourself, told me – wouldn’t that have been easier than running?”
“It’s easy enough for you to say that, but you’re a dynamo, Jake. You do things the way you want. Fighting you takes more energy than I’ve got.”
He shook his head, keeping hold of her hand when she tugged to get it free. “I don’t believe that. You always avoid arguments.” He laughed, said, “At least, you did until a few days ago. Why is that, Jenny? Because you can’t argue without getting involved?”
He was too close, too curious. She jerked free, gripped the rail and kept her eyes down as she went up the steep ramp to the parking lot. “Where are you taking me?”
And why was she going with him?
“Tow Hill – nice scenery, a beach, campsite in the wilderness – a picnic lunch too. Glenda packed a basket for us. It’s in the truck – David loaned me his truck.”
They stood at the top of the ramp. She looked at him, tall and lean and aggressive. He was always restless, always moving, and she said, “You mean you’re just going to laze about on a beach?”
He grinned down at her. “That’s right.”
“A whole morning with no rushing around, no camera, no traumatic events – that can’t be the Jake I know.”
“But you don’t know it all, do you?”
No, she didn’t. Seated behind the wheel of an old, workmanlike truck, Jake didn’t look like a man who owned a fast sports car.
Just seeing him again sent her pulse racing. Letting him show her his beloved islands wasn’t going to make Jenny’s bid for freedom any easier. If she didn’t watch herself, he could talk her right back into his studio, right back where she’d been two weeks ago.
Remember Monica, she taunted herself as she pretended to watch the trees and the ocean.
When the silence became uncomfortable, she asked, “Are you going to take me driving on the beach? You never did tell me if you were one of those teenagers who got cars stuck out on the sand when the tide came in. I saw the beach as we came in – it looks like it goes on forever.”
“It does. As for my past, around here you could hear a few tales of my wilder days. Mostly I was kept busy in my summers. I only came to the Charlottes for the summers, you know. To visit my mother’s people.”
“I’ve been reading about the Haida.”
“Of course you have,” he said with a smile.
“You’re laughing at me!”
He threw her a warm glance. “Only a little. You always do your research. You probably know more facts about the Haida people than I do.”
“Is it true that all Haida are either ravens or eagles?” He nodded and she asked, “Which was your mother?”
“A raven.”
“That makes you a raven, too, doesn’t it? Yes, of course. That’s why your sweater has the raven design on it. And that silver chain you wear – that’s a raven design, too?”
“Yes,” he agreed, but she thought he looked more like an eagle, or even a hawk.
“And your aunt – the girl at the hotel called her a Haida princess. Your mother must have been a princess, too. That makes you royalty, doesn’t it?”
Jake laughed, his head tossing the unruly locks of black hair back. “Violet’s not a princess – that’s white man’s myth. She and my mother were daughters to a chief, but Haida don’t have princesses. Here, we’ll park under these trees and walk. What are you wearing for shoes? Good. They’ll do for the rocks, and you can take them off on the beach.”
There was another vehicle parked under the trees, although Jenny saw no sign of its owners.
“Probably hiking up Tow Hill,” suggested Jake, gesturing to the large hill that rose from the shore. He watched her taking in their surroundings, her short curls blowing around her head in the wind.
“I think I like your hair like that,” he said, surprising himself. “It makes you look— here, watch out for that hole! There are beavers here, I think. See that tree? It’s been felled by a beaver not long ago.”
She looked up at him as he caught her arm, waiting for him to finish his statement about her hair. Instead, he said, “We’ll go this way first, out on the rocks. Then we’ll come back and find a spot on the beach for our picnic.”
The ocean stretched to the mountains of Alaska. Off to their right, a sandy beach extended as far as they could see.
She followed him along a path, over rocks, finally coming to rest on granite that the ocean had worn into a gentle curve.
They sat, quietly watching as the green, turbulent water crashed up against the rocks below. When she looked, she found Jake’s eyes on her, a lazy smile in their depths.
“Are you plotting something?” she asked warily, then waved his answer away. “No, don’t tell me. I’m enjoying this too much. Don’t spoil it.”
“Nice, isn’t it?”
“Perfect,” she agreed. “How long is it since you’ve been here?”
He looked out over the wild shoreline, memories in his eyes as he reminded her, “Last year I came for my grandfather’s funeral.”
“But how long since you’ve really taken the time to come back and look at it all? I’ve never seen you so relaxed as you are right now.”
He shrugged, smiling wryly. “The sickness of cities, Jenny. I always seem to be in a hurry – but you can’t appreciate the islands properly when you’re hurrying. It’s years since I really took time to visit these islands properly. This is another world, a different timezone— there, look behind you! The blowhole is about to go!”
Jenny turned quickly, startled by the roar as a huge geyser of water shot up from the rocks in a noisy, spectacular display of nature… then subsided as if it had never been. “It’s a hole in the rocks,” Jake explained. “When the tide is just right, and the waves the right size, water surges into the hole from below and shoots up like that. I was hoping we’d get a chance to see it today.”
“This is the real Jake,” she decided out loud, watching his pleasure, feeling his oneness with these wild surroundings. “You’re a reflection of all this, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” He glanced back, smiling whimsically. “How’s that?”
“The artist and the fisherman, the Haida and the white man. You’re all of them, more than anyone else. You should do this, Jake, get it down on film.”
“Tow Hill?” His black brows shot up as he gestured to the hill rising behind them.
“All of it. Capture the atmosphere of this place. What’s Island Time? Glenda said everyone out here runs on island time.”
He made a broad gesture, taking in the water, the beach, the ancient forest behind. “Can’t you feel it? People who live on islands have a special relationshi
p with their environment. Time moves slower, hasn’t the same meaning as it does to mainlanders.“
He looked out over the water again, smiling. “I’d love to put it all down on film, but I’d get carried away, you know. To me it’s all beautiful.”
She sat up straight, touched his arm and found her fingers lingering. “I was listening to you and David last night, Jake. It’s such a mix – Haida villages with totem poles and satellite dishes. Fishermen with old nets and new electronic equipment. Jets to Vancouver; mining towns, logging towns, old style homestead farms. And politics, for heaven’s sake! Here we are in the middle of nowhere, at the edge of the ocean, sixty miles from the mainland, and these islands are in the midst of a political explosion with land claims and environment protection protests!“
“We’re a political people. I guess we always have been. A hundred years ago we were terrorizing the mainland, taking slaves. But, Jennifer—” His eyes reflected an odd uncertainty. “Jenny, I wouldn’t know where to start. It takes an outsider to see all that. Or someone like you. You always see the whole.”
“And you see the beautiful pictures,” she said softly, “but you don’t step back and see it all together.”
He caught her hand, admitting, “I know that, but it never mattered. Not while I had you to keep everything in balance.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered as her heart stopped.
“You know what I mean.” He kept his eyes on their linked hands, his voice low. “Without you stopping me, I tend to go off collecting a meaningless jumble of pictures – beautiful pictures, granted, but you’re the one who pulls it all together, gives it meaning.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I need you back, Jennifer.”
“Jake, I—” She stared down at their hands. His were large and brown, engulfing her small white fingers. She wanted to turn her hand in his and let her fingers curl, clinging to his.
She wished she could go back and work with him, but she mustn’t. Something was happening to the barrier she had always kept between them. She couldn’t trust herself anymore. She might reach out for him, clinging, asking for whatever he would give her.
“Will you work on it with me, Jennifer— Jenny?” he corrected himself, his eagerness for the project revealed in the sudden tension of his body. “I’ll shoot the pictures, you direct it, put it together.”
She stood up on shaky legs, pulled her hand away to brush imaginary dust from her jeans. She tossed her hair back and wished she hadn’t gotten George to cut it, wished she could drop a barrier between them by bending her neck forward.
Briskly, she said, “Lunch on the beach, you said, and I’m hungry. I didn’t have breakfast. Just that cup of coffee.”
He got up slowly, his lips parted on words he couldn’t seem to say. Then he shrugged and gestured for her to lead the way back.
They walked back through the campground, passing a family with two young children. The children were busily and inefficiently pitching a tent under the trees.
“We saw a bear,” said the boy, “but it ran away.”
“Just as well,” said Jake with a laugh, catching Jenny’s hand to lead her past the tent.
The beautiful, hard-packed sand stretched on as far as Jenny could see. Behind them, she could hear the sound of the children laughing. Ahead there was only the surf on the hard sand.
“Taking off your shoes?” Jake asked, bending to unlace his.
“Of course!” She slipped off her shoes and moved off, down the slow slope of the beach.
Long waves rushed across the sand, churning froth in an uneven, white line. Jenny walked along the edge of the water, letting the occasional wave swirl around her ankles.
“You’ve changed,” his voice followed her, low and throbbing in her ears. “You don’t look like a Jennifer now, or act like one.”
The sun was bright, its heat in sharp contrast to the cold water around her ankles. She bent down to roll up her jeans, asking curiously, “What does a Jennifer act like?”
“Restrained, contained.” He gestured to her hair as he said, “Long, brown hair dropping across her face, hiding the real woman from any invaders. Jenny is a different girl. Barefoot and elusive, but—” He grinned. “—stubborn.”
She couldn’t help smiling, although she recognized that he was trying to assess her new behavior, to maneuver her into doing what he wanted. “Maybe I got tired of doing everything the way you want it.”
“Everything?” he challenged, his eyes losing their coolness. “Are you sure you know what it is that I want?” As she turned away in confusion, his voice changed, became brisk and almost impersonal. “Jenny, are you going to help me with this film?”
She watched a puffy, white cloud moving slowly towards the west. She should say a direct ‘no,’ but she found herself evading, “You don’t need me to do it. They’re your islands. It’s your story.”
“I won’t do it without you.” He dug his toe into the sand, making a hole that quickly filled with water. “If we did it together, I think we might make another award winner.”
An award winner? Was that the most important thing to him?
Jenny had watched the women come and go, and they never really touched him the way a new idea did, a chance to take his camera and create a mood on film. He’d told her he was going to marry Monica, but right now Monica meant nothing compared to the excitement of a new film.
“No, Jake. If you do this film, you’re doing it alone.” She fought down sadness at the knowledge that she couldn’t work with him again, couldn’t share the excitement.
There was a white sail on the horizon, someone tacking far north of the point at Rose Spit to clear the concealed sand bar.
“If you change your mind…” His voice trailed off.
“I’ll let you know,” she said briskly, refusing to get caught in the melancholy that was threatening her. He was standing still, his hands in his pockets, his feet bare beneath a rolled-up pair of denim jeans. She found herself wondering aloud, “What kind of a boy were you? Did you run barefoot on these beaches?”
“Sometimes. Most summers I worked on my uncle’s fishing boat. What about you? How did you spend your summers?”
She shrugged. “In Campbell River. Getting into trouble with George, mostly.”
“You didn’t go on holidays? With your parents?”
“No,” she said flatly. He was waiting for more, so she found herself saying, “Dad kept taking jobs in places like South America and Africa. They loved moving, seeing new places, but they thought I should have a stable home. I stayed with George and her mother when they were out of the country. When they came home, it usually wasn’t for long.”
“You were a lonely child,” he said, his eyes seeing more than she wanted. She shrugged uncomfortably.
“Come on, Jake. I didn’t suffer. I had a home. Aunt Georgia – George’s mother – wasn’t a dragon. She was a nice lady. She was widowed, and I’m sure we made her life chaos at times, but she didn’t often complain— My ankles are starting to hurt from the cold water,” she muttered, moving abruptly out of the path of the waves and away from him.
He followed. They walked away from the water. Jake took her hand to help her over a log, then failed to release it when they regained level ground.
“I’m just beginning to realize how isolated you were,” he said. “You’ve always seemed so self sufficient, as if you didn’t want anyone close. You learned that, didn’t you? With your parents gone most of the time.”
“I—” She shook her head, confused by his penetrating insight into her childhood. “No, there was always George. She was older, but we were usually together… until she got married— you don’t want to hear all this.” Jenny tugged at her hand, but he held it firmly.
He pulled her hand through his arm so that she was walking close against him, their shoulders and hips touching as they moved along the sand. “What you really mean is that you don’t want to share it with me. When did George get married?”
<
br /> Off guard, she answered, “I was sixteen, just turning seventeen.” She remembered that summer, the warm happiness that had grown in George’s eyes as the weeks passed. “It was a big romance – George and Scott – very sudden. Aunt Georgia was really upset about it, because Scott was so much older. But George was so happy, and no one could stop her. Aunt Georgia wouldn’t consent, so in the end they eloped.”
“And then?“
Jake’s voice hardly disturbed the thread of Jenny’s memory. “I don’t know. I didn’t see much of her after that. They lived in Vancouver, and I went to the University of Victoria.“
He was silent, thinking. With his probing eyes, he might easily see far too much. She said swiftly, defensively, “That doesn’t tell you anything about me.”
But he’d already seen more than her words. “You worked hard, didn’t you?”
“Lots of people work hard at university.”
“Not much social life?” he guessed. “And once you came to work for me – there hasn’t been anyone. Boyfriends, but not anyone who mattered. Not since Lance.”
Her fingers tensed in a spasm on his arm. How had she gotten into this? Talking to Jake about her past, for heaven’s sake! “You promised me lunch,” she evaded desperately, “and I’m still hungry. I think—”
“It was Lance, wasn’t it? The man who called you Jennifer?”
He wasn’t going to let her get away, wasn’t going to stop asking until she answered. His eyes were watching, waiting.
Somehow, through all the years she worked for him, she’d managed to avoid answering questions like this. She didn’t answer now, or even nod, but he seemed to read the story in her face because his voice softened and he asked, “When was Lance?”
She shrugged, making her voice casual, wishing the lump would go away, the tears stop threatening. “I met him when George was dating Scott. We went out together.”
“And then George got married.” He was filling in the blanks as if he had been there, watching. “You were alone then, weren’t you? No parents, no George. And you weren’t close to your aunt.”
Island Hearts (Jenny's Turn and Stray Lady) Page 9