One True Love

by Barbara Freethy

  Lisa picked up one of the matching pillows, running the lace through her trembling fingers. The white had faded to yellow, and the pillow was covered in dust. It was no good to anyone anymore, she thought with a deep sense of sadness. She traced the heart with her finger. She could almost feel the needle pricking her skin as she stitched the seam in a clumsy, awkward fashion.

  Nick had laughed at her. He'd found her bent over the sewing machine at one o'clock in the morning, tired, cranky and nine months pregnant. She'd spent an hour trying to thread the ancient machine only to have the thread snap midway down the material.

  When Nick had come into the room and smiled with amusement, she'd picked up the box of threads and thrown it at his head. That had made him laugh even more. A reluctant smile crossed her lips as she thought about that night, the way he'd teased her out of her bad mood with affection and love.

  Tears pressed behind her eyes as the memories washed over her. She blinked them back, then set the pillow down in the crib. She walked over to the corner, where she found the jewelry box Nick had made for her their first Christmas together. She opened the lid and smiled at the photo that was taped inside. She couldn't have been more than nineteen when she and Nick had cozied up in the photo booth on the San Diego Pier and paid five dollars to have a silly photograph taken.

  She ran her finger over their faces, tracing his long hair, his goofy smile, his beautiful eyes. Life had been so simple then, so full of promises and hope for the future. They'd actually believed they could have it all -- love, passion, great careers, a family, a home -- everything.

  Only it had ended in this, furniture and memories crammed into a square cement box. She glanced around the room one more time, her gaze catching on the musical mobile with Donald and Mickey and all the gang. She picked it up and let the wires dangle in the shadowy sunlight.

  The pain came sharply and swiftly. Suddenly all the furniture seemed to come to life. The mobile danced in the breeze. The pink lamp in the corner sparkled, refreshed by the burst of sunlight. Lisa could almost see the cradle rocking.

  And out of the silence came the sound of a baby, a sweet, sweet baby, suckling at her breast, cooing at the music from her father's guitar. Lisa could see Robin smiling, her eyes so big and blue and filled with wonder. She could feel the baby's hand twisting around her finger, feel the warmth of her child's breath against her cheek.

  Then the shadows came back. The sighs of joy turned into crying, angry, relentless crying. The baby would not be comforted. Something was wrong. She didn't like her own mother. She just kept crying and crying and crying until Lisa thought she would go crazy.

  "Stop it," Lisa yelled into the darkness. "Stop crying. Please. I love you," she whispered, her heart breaking. "Don't you understand that I love you, that I would do anything for you if only I could make you happy?"'

  There was nothing but silence, an infinity of silence.

  The empty cradle said it all.

  * * *

  Nick ran a cloth along the side of the crib he had just finished making, polishing his signature carving with the special oil he used to protect the wood. He felt better in the back room of his store, working with the wood. Everything was simple here, uncomplicated by emotions, by Lisa. He sat back on his heels and stared at the crib.

  He couldn't believe how much had changed in two short days. The woman he'd spent the last eight years hating had walked back into his life and changed everything, not that she'd wanted to.

  Lisa hadn't meant to distract him, to make him shift his focus from his growing business to her. She'd tried everything she could to get him to leave her, to make him remember all the bad times instead of all the good.

  It would have been easy to do that if the old Lisa hadn't unexpectedly shown up. The woman he'd seen five years ago had been dressed in a business suit so cold and sharp that she looked more like a bed of nails than a soft, loving woman. That brief glimpse had reinforced his opinion that the Lisa he'd loved, the woman he'd married and lived with and hoped to die with, had already died, or at least disappeared.

  But she was back. Watching her with Maggie's kids, with that scruffy mutt of a dog, with her crazy mother and today with him, at the beach, he'd been taken back in time. He could still see her at the beach, pulling the hair out of her eyes, looking down in horror at the seaweed winding around her ankles.

  Nick smiled at the thought. She had been so angry with him, but so alive, the woman he remembered, the woman he'd loved. He'd wanted to kiss her earlier, to strip the wet clothes off her body and make love to her right there on the sand, in front of God and his witnesses.

  "Nick, goddammit, where are you?" Lisa shouted.

  Nick's jaw dropped as he glanced at the partly open door that separated the storeroom from the showroom. Lisa was here? He'd never told her where he worked, for good reason. Lisa had no idea what he did for a living, and as he glanced down at the robin, he knew she wasn't going to like it. Maybe that's why she was angry. Because she was definitely angry.

  He listened as his store clerk tried to reason with her.

  "Excuse me, ma'am, is there a problem?" the clerk asked.

  "There sure as hell is. Where is he?"

  "Uh, uh," the clerk stumbled. "Can I tell him who you are?"

  Nick smiled as his trustworthy employee tried to protect him from what she thought was an irate customer.

  "Oh, he knows who I am all right," Lisa said. "Is he in the back?"

  "You can't go in there--"

  Lisa flung open the door to the back room and stalked inside. Her hair fell wildly about her shoulders, and she looked mad as hell, even more angry than she'd been after he'd tossed her in the water.

  "How dare you!" she yelled at him.

  "Mr. Maddux. Do you want me to call the police?" his clerk asked, hovering anxiously in the background.

  "It's okay. I can handle her," he replied, slowly rising to his feet.

  "Handle me?" she retorted, her blue eyes blazing. "Don't even think of handling me. I am so angry with you, I could hit you."

  In fact, she did hit him, punching him in the arm, not once, but twice, then again, harder and harder, until Nick had to grab her hands and hold her away from him.

  "What is wrong with you?" he demanded, as she tried desperately to free her hands. "Hey, that hurts."

  "You deserve pain, lots and lots of pain."

  "Okay, okay," he said, trying to placate her. "You want to tell me why?"

  "You kept everything. How could you do that to me? How could you let me walk in there without knowing what to expect?"

  Nick let go of her hands, suddenly realizing what her anger was all about. The storage unit. Damn.

  "It was all there. Everything. Her crib. Her bassinet. The mobile." Lisa's voice broke as an unwelcome sob slipped past her defenses. She blinked back angry tears. "I hate you, Nick. I hate you." She brought her fist up to hit him again, but this time he grabbed her arms, and, before she could react, he kissed her.

  He could have slapped her, but kissing her seemed a better choice, especially when all that anger and tension turned into passion, when she stopped trying to shove him away and instead wound her arms around his neck, when her mouth began to move beneath his, when her breasts pressed against his chest, when he smelled everything about her that was her -- Lisa, his lover, his wife, his friend.

  He buried his tongue in her mouth, wanting a piece of her, needing to get past her defenses, to find her, the real her, the woman who'd disappeared so many years ago.

  "Lisa," he murmured against her mouth when they finally came up for air.

  "Nick." She lifted her head and stared back at him with tearful, searching eyes. "Why? Why did you keep her things?"

  "I thought you might want them some day."

  "You should have told me. That day, at the house, when her room was empty, you never said..."

  "I couldn't stand to look at them either. I couldn't have stayed in the house with the room set up for Robin, w
aiting for her, for you. But I couldn't throw her things away. It didn't seem right."

  "She's gone. She's really gone." Lisa took a deep breath, "I've known that for a long time, but when I saw that empty crib, I really felt it here, in my heart." She put her hand to her chest. "And I missed her," she said, swallowing back another sob as her eyes began to water yet again. "I didn't want to miss her. I didn't want to hear the sound of her little voice cooing, laughing, crying. When I touched her diaper bag in the storage shed, I felt like I was touching her. Remember, how her diaper used to feel beneath her sleeper, all crinkly and soft." She sniffed. "I don't want to do this. Why am I doing this?"

  Nick's gut clenched at the wistful longing in her voice, the hunger that he felt reflected in her voice. "I miss her, too, Lisa. You know what I remember, the way Robin used to squeal when we put her in that little bathtub. She loved the water. She didn't care if it got in her eyes or anything. Did you see her rubber ducky in the shed? I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it. She loved it so much."

  "Oh, Nick. Why can't you just learn to throw things away?"

  "Anything can be salvaged, if you try hard enough." He paused, knowing his remark had hit home by the way Lisa looked down at her shoes. "How did you find out about the storage unit?"

  "My mother. She gave me the key and the address."

  "Then how come you didn't go and hit her?"

  Lisa reluctantly smiled. "I don't know. Habit, I guess. You kept some of my things, too, the jewelry box you gave me, the rocker, the birdbath. You should have at least sent me a bill for the storage unit."

  "If I'd done that, you would have destroyed everything."

  "I could do that now."

  "Do you want to?"

  "I don't know." She took a step back, and he pushed his hands into his pockets. For the first time since storming into the room, she looked around. He saw her eyes widen again in surprise, and her hand began to tremble as she reached out to touch the crib he'd just finished. "This -- this is what you make?" she asked, her blue eyes reflecting more shock.

  "Yes. I make handcrafted baby furniture, cribs, cradles, rockers, dressers."

  Her eyes darkened with horror just as he had expected. "Oh, my God. I thought you were normal, that I was the crazy one. But you -- you're sick. You're obsessed with her. You're--"

  "Stop it," he yelled.

  "Stop what? Someone has to say it out loud. Do your customers know that your own baby died in a crib just like that one? Do you think they'd buy this furniture if they knew?"

  Nick felt a wave of deep, stunning anger. "How dare you imply there's something wrong with these cribs? This is not a sick obsession; it's a business, and a good one."

  "Based on our daughter." She peered down at the robin in the corner, then put a hand to her mouth. "You even use the bird!"

  "The name of the business is Robin Wood Designs," he said ruthlessly. "It's all about Robin, our daughter, the one whose name you can't even say out loud."

  "I have to sit," Lisa said, weaving slightly.

  Nick pushed her down on top of a crate. She rested her head in her hands as if that would stop the dizziness, the madness. After a long moment of silence, Nick knelt in front of her. He put his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. She didn't resist, so he just held her for long, silent minutes, his chin resting on top of her head.

  Finally he spoke. "I needed to make something that would last, Lisa, something that would be here when I'm gone. For a long time, after you left, a couple of years I'm ashamed to say, I didn't even know what time it was, what day it was. I got so wasted I lost my job. Then I met an old guy who made furniture, and for the first time in a long time, I actually thought about something besides you, besides Robin."

  She lifted her head and looked at him. When she didn't say anything, he continued, knowing that he had to make her understand, that he couldn't let her go back to L.A. thinking he was crazy or worse -- abusing their daughter's memory in some twisted way.

  "Carving the wood was like therapy, I guess. It felt good to be working with my hands again, to be making something beautiful. It took some of the ugliness out of my life. I stopped drinking, and I started working again. At first I just made rocking chairs. Then one day I made a cradle, then another. It seemed like every time I made a piece of baby furniture, I got a piece of my life back."

  "I don't understand," she whispered.

  "I know you don't. Because in order to survive, you had to leave, you had to forget. The only way I could survive was to face the memories head-on every day, to think about her, to remember her. Otherwise, I felt like she would have died for nothing. Robin was here on this earth for two months. She was inside you for much longer." He stroked her face with his fingers, feeling her soft skin beneath his calluses. "She was in us always."

  "Oh, Nick." Lisa took a shaky breath. "I don't want to cry."

  "She was beautiful, Lisa. Robin looked just like you. Her blue eyes, her dark hair. Remember her tiny hands, her long fingers?"

  "Stop, please."

  "She used to watch you when you left the room. And when she woke up, and she saw you, her smile was so damned bright, it lit up the whole room."

  "Except for once..." Lisa's voice broke as the tears gathered in her eyes and one slid down her cheek. "She didn't wake up, Nick. She didn't smile at me. And it was my fault. I wasn't good enough. I didn't do the right thing. I--"

  "Sh-sh." He put a finger against her lips as the tears streamed down her face. "You did everything right. She just died, Lisa. It wasn't anybody's fault."

  "She was in the crib, and it was too big for her, and she should have been in the cradle, but we wanted her to be in her own room, because we were so tired at night, and it was so difficult to sleep, hearing her breathe and rustle around in the blankets, and that's why we moved her." Lisa sobbed the last few words.

  Nick tucked her hair behind her ear, feeling his own emotions threatening to spill out. He couldn't stand the look on her face, the pain in her voice, but he knew she had to get it out, that they finally had to face it.

  "The crib had nothing to do with it. The doctors all said that."

  "But how can anyone die for no reason?" she asked, crying in earnest now. "How can a little innocent baby die without anyone knowing why? It's not fair. It's not right. Why did this have to happen?"

  "I don't know, honey. All I know is that we loved her as much as any parent could love their child. We didn't kill her with lack of attention, or too many blankets, or put her in the wrong position. We didn't."

  "It could have been that. She was on her stomach."

  "She loved to sleep that way. She hated being on her back, remember?"

  "Now they say that might be bad for babies."

  "Now they say," he repeated softly. "We didn't know it was the wrong thing to do. We still don't."

  His voice was gentle, kind. Lisa felt it cover her like a warm blanket. Looking into his eyes, she couldn't remember why it had been so difficult to trust him before. "That was always the hardest part, the not knowing," she said. "I wanted a reason, Nick, a logical explanation, and no one could give me one."

  "I felt the same way."

  "Having Robin was the best thing that ever happened to me. Losing her was the worst."

  He looked at her for a long minute. "Having you was the best thing that ever happened to me and losing you was the worst."

  She touched his cheek. "I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean that you were any less the love of my life than Robin."

  "Was I? The love of your life?"

  "You know you were."

  "I wasn't sure you did." He smiled and grabbed a napkin off his desk so he could dry the tears from her cheeks. "I think these tears were long overdue."

  "You always knew how to make me cry," she said, her wry smile taking the sting out of her words.

  "Among other things."

  As his eyes darkened, Lisa realized she was still attracted to him, so attracted it took
her breath away. It seemed like only yesterday when they had been together, when kissing him was as natural as breathing air.

  "Lisa?" he murmured. "I want to kiss you again."

  Her body tightened in anticipation, and she couldn't deny that she wanted him to do just that. "We seem to be pretty good at this love/hate thing. A minute ago, you were screaming at me, now you want to kiss me."

  "A minute ago, you wanted to tear me apart, but now I think you'd like to kiss me back," Nick replied.

  "We're both crazy."

  "At last, something we can agree on."

  Lisa smiled, and Nick lowered his head. His mouth had barely touched her lips when she heard the door opening and the sound of a woman's voice.

  "Nick. Are you here?"

  Lisa pulled away, surprised and embarrassed by the unexpected appearance of a beautiful redhead in the doorway.

  Nick turned his head. "Suzanne."

  Suzanne looked shocked as her gaze moved from Nick to Lisa. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. Who--"

  "This is Lisa," Nick said. "My ex-wife."

  "Your ex-wife? First a sister, now an ex-wife? Next, I suppose you're going to tell me you have a kid?"

  Chapter Thirteen

  "If you'd told me three days ago, I'd be on a plane to San Francisco with a handsome stranger, I never would have believed you," Maggie said to Jeremy as their plane began its descent into the San Francisco Bay Area.

  "The mysteries of life are infinitely frustrating for those of us who try to make sense of them," Jeremy said with a smile.

  "You have such a way with words. I can see why you're a writer. What kind of screenplays do you write?"

  "Mysteries. Thrillers. Psychological horror."

  She nodded, somewhat dismayed by the enthusiasm in his voice. Although they'd talked forever last night and Jeremy had shared a bit of his history, he was still a stranger. And she was still neurotic enough to imagine that he could turn out to be a charming serial killer.