MEANT TO BE MARRIED

by Ruth Wind

  Sarah realized that with her mother's intervention, she'd been hoping there would be a different outcome to this old scene, and it hurt her when her father would not give an inch. "Fine, Dad," she said. "You stew here in your own temper. I couldn't get away from you then, but I can now."

  "How can you let him win like this?" Garth growled suddenly. "Make a fool of me? That's all he wants, you know. To use you to get at me."

  "That's what you always said, Daddy! That he was using me. But he was going to marry me! Don't you understand? You stole my husband and my baby because you're too damned stubborn to admit you're wrong!"

  "You'll … see!" His breathing grew so labored he couldn't say any more.

  "Go, Sarah," Mabel said. "I'll call you later."

  She didn't need a second nudging. She stormed out of the house and down the hill toward her cottage, her heart racing, her head pounding. Self-righteous anger gave way to self-pity, then crumbled to depression by the time she reached her cottage. She sank onto the porch without bothering to go inside.

  She stared at the mountains, looking serene and eternal and protective as they rose above the city, and imagined they had looked the same when the whole thing began, so many years before, when Manuel Santiago had raped Emily Greenwood and been hanged in the square.

  Remembering the miniature Octavia had given her, Sarah reached into her purse and took it out, looking at the face that was so much like Eli's. "Why did you rape her?" she asked the picture.

  Times had been different then, with the Anglos coming in after the war, but the Santiagos had been wealthy and well-thought-of. He would have had his pick of young women to take as his wife – why risk so much for an act of violence that was sure to be discovered? And even if he'd been intent on rape, why the daughter of a wealthy Anglo neighbor? Why rape the one person who would almost certainly doom him, and had?

  She sighed and let her hand drop. That line of thinking assumed rape was a rational crime, and it was not. Maybe he'd intended to punish the Anglos by defiling one of their daughters. Maybe he'd seen it as an act of war, and didn't mind dying. Maybe there had been fighting between the families already, over land or water or customs, and the rape had been a payback for some real or imagined slight. Unfortunately, rape had often been a method of retaliation in history.

  It made her lonely to think of that poor young girl, disgraced and despairing. Emily had been so ashamed of her public defilement that she'd refused to go to the hanging. When her family had returned, they'd found her dead in the barn, hanged by her own hand.

  Stop it, she said to herself. Thinking about the past only made her feel worse. "Here, kitty, kitty," she called. But the cat did not come.

  What a day. Somehow she'd managed to alienate Eli by trying to care for her father, and alienate her father by her connection to Eli.

  Nothing had changed in more than a decade. They still put her in the middle, neither willing to budge. And who had paid?

  With a cry of fury she flung a rock across the courtyard. "Men!" she cried, and buried her face in her arms, pulsing with emotions she'd managed to keep safely behind walls for years. Now she ached all over with them, and as she'd always feared, into the wide-open, unprotected space of her heart came her daughter.

  It had been coming for days. She'd felt it, the long-denied grief and anger and guilt, pushing at her walls every time she looked at Eli, every time her father nudged the wound. The reckoning had been dangerously close the night Eli first kissed her, but even then, she had not allowed herself to articulate her feelings.

  Now there was no denying it and she simply gave in. She let the images she'd shared with Eli this morning come back: her beautiful baby daughter with thick black hair. Her tiny nose and fingers, her rosebud of a mouth. She embraced a tactile memory of the feeling of that child against her arm and breast, tiny and trusting. She remembered acutely the warm tones of her baby's flesh against her own white arm.

  The nurse had come and taken her, and Sarah had held on, resisting, trying to find the courage and the energy to say no, and defy all of them. But in the end she had not found the nerve.

  Twelve years after the fact, she finally let herself acknowledge her guilt and her sorrow, and she cried in release. "I'm sorry," she whispered. And knew she would never forgive herself.

  * * *

  Chapter 13

  «^»

  She sat there a long time, utterly winded and empty after the emotional storm. Dusk gathered at the top of the sky and spread downward, bleeding the color from the mountains and the trees. Far away she heard drums begin, the nightly summer tourist ritual at a motel.

  The cat finally appeared, slipping between the slats of the fence and plaintively meowing as he came toward her. He leapt easily into her lap and flopped down, flipping his tail as if to ask her assistance in removing the burrs that had lodged there in his morning's travels. She obliged him, happier to have his company than she would have imagined. He purred as she plucked out the stickers, lifted his head to hers when she bent down to cuddle, and she found her heart easing with his unconditional love.

  She smiled at that. Unconditional had been pretty rare in her life, after all.

  As if on cue, the gate clicked and Sarah looked up to see Eli, bathed in the soft purples of the gathering twilight.

  And as always, he was beautiful in her eyes, tan and straight, with pride on his brow and in the set of his broad shoulders. For a fleeting moment she remembered her deep sense of peace and happiness this morning and wished to have it back again. It made her feel even wearier.

  "What do you want, Eli?" she asked, and heard the exhaustion in her voice.

  "I don't know." He crossed the bricked courtyard and sat beside her, silent for a long time. She leaned sideways against the post, stroking the cat, too weary to summon a challenge or a comment of any kind.

  Finally he said. "I'm sorry, Sarah, for being cruel this afternoon."

  "Accepted."

  "I was jealous."

  She nodded

  Silence fell again, but there was no tenseness in it. Eli shifted to lean on the wall, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He gazed at the mountains, and she heard him sigh. "You turned my life upside down, coming back," he said.

  "Mine, too." She remembered the miniature and passed it over to him. "Your grandmother gave me this today."

  "Who is it?"

  She told him.

  He looked at her intently. "And she gave it to you? Did she say why?"

  "No."

  As if he'd only just really seen her, his gaze sharpened. "Have you been crying, Sarah?"

  She looked at the sky, seeing a few stars begin to wink on. "Yes."

  "Ah, I'm sorry."

  "Not over you," she said, and didn't realize how cold it sounded until the words were out. "The baby," she added, hoping he would understand the shorthand.

  He stood, then knelt beside her. "You're so tired, Sarita," he said. "And some of that is my fault." As if she were a child, he picked her up, cat and all. "You need to go to bed."

  She considered protesting, but his arms offered the support she needed, and his shoulder beneath her head sucked all protest from her throat. She sighed, holding on to the unprotesting cat, letting Eli carry her into her bedroom. Without turning on a light, he put her on the bed and gently took off her shoes. The cat, purring loudly at the unexpected comfort of a bed, kneaded a place near her hip, and curled up. Exhausted, Sarah closed her eyes.

  She felt the bed give under Eli's weight, felt the quilt come up over her shoulders, and the warmth of his body surrounding her, but that was all she registered before sleep rose and claimed her.

  * * *

  Eli did not sleep. He lay beside Sarah in her bed, simply holding her as she slept. Cradling her in his arms, with her hair against his neck, Eli was swept with waves of deepest gratitude, deepest love. He felt no urgency to make her naked and take her in a sexual way. It was just as powerful in its way to simply hold her, smelli
ng her hair and feeling the weight of her arm across his belly.

  She had confessed her daydreams of cooking for him, the symbol to her of the life they would make together. Eli's fantasies had run to this kind of moment, lying in the dark in a warm and comfortable place, with Sarah in his arms. It had seemed such a simple dream in those days – not that he'd underestimated family opposition to the match – and it was, as dreams went, very small. His love, in his arms at night, for the rest of his life. With so much wrong, so much greed in the world, how could the heavens have denied such a simple, clean, pure wish? To be a husband. A father. Make a family and live peacefully.

  Yet it had been denied him. Denied them both. In the quiet, he had to wonder what good had come of it.

  But he knew. The business had come from that denial, a business that had made his family wealthy again, as they had not been in a hundred years – and it had benefited not only his own family; sixty-two people were employed permanently, with another thirty seasonally. And he did not think of it often, but he knew, somewhere in the back of his brain, that it was good for his people when an ordinary man made a success of things. He liked to think of some young boy, somewhere in the world, seeing an Hispanic name on a product and realizing that, he, too, could have a big dream.

  But what a price he had paid!

  He fell asleep finally, and stirred awake only as wrens and sparrows started their morning hymns in the chamiso and juniper outside. It was their song that roused him, insistently drawing him from a pleasurable dream he didn't quite want to release. More slowly, he became aware of the sound of a purr close to his ear, a deeply satisfied sound – and felt the soft brush of fur against his ear.

  And then he realized what pleasantness he'd been unwilling to leave behind, for his hand cradled the luscious heaviness of a breast. And her hand was under his shirt, moving slowly against the skin of his belly.

  This was part of that lost dream. Awakening to Sarah in his arms, in a silent room with the first fingers of light breaking the night. He did not open his eyes to see if she was awake or asleep, but luxuriously stroked the sweet curve, moved his thumb against that nipple that came to life at his touch. She stirred a little, moving closer, her hand moving sensually over his hip, down his thigh, sliding forward to brush his member, then up to his stomach beneath his shirt

  He unbuttoned her blouse, finding her bare beneath it, bare and plump and beautiful. He groaned and bent over the ripe offering, opening his mouth to suckle the aroused tip, feeling her grow more aroused. A soft sound of pleasure came from her throat, and her hands moved on him boldly, finding his buttons and zipper, opening them, her fingers teasing inside until he was free.

  He made a strangled sound as she touched him. They shimmied out of die rest of their clothes and slid together, pressing naked chest to naked breasts, clasping each other close. He stroked her back and kissed her neck, her chin, her shoulders, weaving their legs together. She arched against him, drawing her hands down his back, over his buttocks and thighs, and back again. They touched at every possible point, entwined and rubbing, until at last they moved as one, to join in a single, piercing thrust. He caught his breath as he felt her close around him, and kept his hands still on her shoulder blades, reveling in the feeling of her so close, so intimate.

  When she would have moved, he tightened his grip. "Wait," he whispered. With iron control, he kept his hips still, and brushed her breasts with his hands, put his lips to her sensitive throat, trailed a hand down to stroke her thigh. She shuddered, gripping him.

  "Sarita," he whispered. "Look at me."

  Her eyes opened, and the blazing expression there nearly tumbled him over the edge, but he took a breath and pulled her even closer, holding his hands against her lower back. "This is who we are," he whispered. "Right here. Right now. Us."

  She held his gaze for a long moment, and then he began to move. She moved with him, and they met in a slow, long, rocking heat, slow as he could bear, fully aware of what they did.

  She lost control before he did, and the shattering convulsive movements of her body evoked an explosion from his own. They lay together in silence for a long time, letting the heat fade to embers.

  At last Sarah turned in his arms and put her hand on his face. "Elias de Jesus Salimento Santiago," she said with a faint smile. "I love your name."

  "I love the way you say it."

  With her fingers, she traced the line of his cheekbone, his jaw. "I love your face, too." Her eyes were wide and sober.

  He smiled. "You sound like a satisfied woman to me."

  She only gazed at him, very seriously. She opened her mouth, looked away, then said in carefully measured tones, "I love you, Eli. I don't think I've ever stopped."

  A burst of almost painful happiness spread through his chest, so fierce he had to bury his face in her neck to hide the sudden rush of tears in his eyes. He pulled her tight, breathing in the scent of her, the preciousness of her body against his own. "And I," he whispered against her ear, "love you. It's a miracle we have had a second chance."

  "Or fate."

  He shifted, propping himself up on one elbow. He twined his other hand with hers. "I keep thinking of the proverb. 'La ausencia para el amores lo que aire pal fue go,'" he quoted softly. "'Si es chica se apaga luego, sue es grande mejor.'"

  "Always trying to dazzle me with Spanish," she said with a grin. "Translation, please?"

  "'Absence is to love what air is to fire. If it is small, it soon goes out. If it is great, it burns stronger.'"

  A sudden moisture glazed her eyes. "That's beautiful."

  He remembered suddenly that it was a workday, and looked at the clock. "I have an employee meeting in two hours," he said regretfully. "I am going to have to go get ready for it."

  Her fingers tightened around his. "Wait, Eli. I have to say something before you go."

  A frisson of warning passed over his nerves. "What?"

  "Yesterday I had plenty of time to think about all of this. The past, both our own and the distant past."

  "I'm sorry I got angry with you," he began.

  "That wasn't it. Well, it was part of it." She took a breath. "I went to see my father last night, and I took him the tea your grandmother made for him. He practically spit it out when he found out who it was from." The memory obviously amused her.

  A thread of annoyance wound through him. "Why is that funny?"

  Sarah gave him a quick glance. "Because it's so melodramatic. All of this is pure melodrama. The Hatfields and the McCoys, Romeo and Juliet. It's ridiculous."

  "How can you say that?" He pulled away from her, wounded and angry. "That 'melodrama,' as you call it, nearly ruined our lives. We lost our child, we lost all those years."

  She raised her eyebrows. "We lost our child. That's a tragedy I know I will never forget, and I'm sure you won't, either. But did we really lose the years?" She touched his chest. "I always wanted to see the world. Now I have. You wanted to be wealthy, to restore your family's standing in the world, and you've done that." She took a breath. "Maybe it's time for all of us to just forgive and forget. Move on."

  "No!" He pulled away from her, struggling to articulate the fury her words roused in him. He sat up. "No. I will never forgive your father for what he took from me."

  She sat up, too, and he saw that it wasn't hurt in her eyes this time. It was anger, as clear and pure as his own. "You won't even try!"

  He stood up, taking his clothes from the floor and using them as a shield over his nakedness. Pride, cold and still, made his chin lift. "Don't ask me for the one thing I can't give, Sarah."

  She shook her head, resigned. "I should have known." She pulled the sheets up around her. "You're as stubborn as he is."

  "So be it," he said. He took his clothes into the living room and dressed, and without bothering to say goodbye, he left her, holding his pride close. He would never forgive her father. He would never let the old man win.

  * * *

  Sarah was not sur
prised by the vehemence of Eli's refusal to consider a truce with her father. When she recovered from her own sense of pique, she even understood. Standing in the middle, she could see both sides.

  It would have been nice if she could have made suggestions and everyone just simply gave in to please her. Healed the war, signed a truce, got on with everything. Standing in the shower, she grinned at the absurdity of that wish.

  Yeah, right. When pigs could fly. If all this was easy to solve, someone would have done it long ago.

  In an oddly buoyant mood, she fed the cat and then went out to cut some of the cosmos to put in a vase. Remembering that Teresa would be coming later to go over the prints generated from the photo sessions, she realized she had still not developed the photos the girl had shot the day they all picnicked together. She also remembered the undeveloped rolls she'd shot yesterday, and to her relief, she felt a little rush of excitement at the idea of working with that material, at seeing what she'd captured.

  She turned the darkroom radio to a classical music station and hummed along with Haydn and Brahms as she worked, the light, pleasant music suiting her peaceful mood. Her thoughts wandered aimlessly and she didn't try to rein them in or analyze them. It occurred to her that something interesting was brewing, something that was about to be born from the events of the past two days. It was a feeling she'd forgotten, one that had been lost in the emotional violence of her eighteenth year. She'd sometimes felt it, working in some gloriously beautiful location, a creative rush that felt like colors in her head, but never quite like this, so full-bodied and rich.

  She made a contact of Teresa's negatives, thinking vaguely of the portrait Octavia had given her of Manuel Santiago. Vaguely she wondered if there was a daguerreotype of the Greenwood girl. Maybe. A lot of the early photographers had loved the West, especially Indians. She couldn't remember if she'd ever seen a daguerreotype of the pueblo – but there might be one. Emily's parents had been wealthy; perhaps they would have indulged in something like that. Sarah made a mental note to check at the library.