He slid me a look. “Don’t thank me just yet. You haven’t met my Great-aunt Beatrice. She likes to pinch cheeks—hard—and she’s got thumbs like a gorilla. I’m just sayin’.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I replied with a laugh.
But geez, he wasn’t kidding. I discovered how serious he was the moment I met her.
o0o
The reception was held in an upscale Victorian inn not far from the church, and following cocktails, a hot meal was served in the dining room. Toasts were delivered and Josh gave a touching speech about his mom that made my eyes well up.
After dinner, a DJ played music in the large parlor and front hall where they rolled back the carpets for dancing on the hardwood floors.
I barely had a chance to sit down. I danced with Josh’s uncles, his cousins, and with the children, too. His five-year-old niece, Susie, took a particular shine to me, and I spent some time upstairs in her room at the inn with Marie, where they showed me her dollhouse, which they’d brought from home.
By midnight the children were falling asleep on the lounge chairs in the parlor, and at one o’clock, the DJ announced the last dance.
Josh turned to me and held out his hand. “Great song.”
A shiver of excitement rippled up my spine, because it had been a perfect night and this would be the perfect ending—to slow dance with Josh to Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic, one of my all-time favorite songs.
Earlier, he had removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, so I could feel the smooth muscular contours of his broad shoulders under the white shirt as I slid my hand up his arm.
“I hope you had a good time,” he said, holding me close.
“It was great,” I replied. “Your family’s amazing.”
Just then, Marie and Kevin tangoed over to us and said, “You guys hungry? ’Cuz we’re going to order some pizzas after this.”
“That sounds great,” Josh said, “but I’m sure Carla wants to get home.”
“No way!” Marie protested. “You can’t drive her anyway. I saw how much champagne you had, little brother. Why don’t you stay, Carla?” she said to me.
My eyebrows lifted. “Stay?”
“Yes, we have the whole inn booked just for our family. Half the rooms are empty. You can choose any one you want and have breakfast with us in the morning and stay to watch Mom and Eric open their gifts.”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” I said.
“You wouldn’t be. Unless you have to get home to your daughter…?”
“She’s spending the night with her cousin,” I explained.
“Well, there you have it,” Marie said. “It’s decided. You have to stay.”
I turned my eyes to Josh to try and get a reading on how he might feel about that.
“Stay,” he said with encouragement. “I’d like to spend some more time with you.”
Maybe it was too much too soon, and maybe I should have known better because that’s how I’d gotten myself in trouble in the past—by not looking before I leaped. It’s how I ended up married to a man who didn’t really want to be married.
But the fact remained that lately I’d swung too far in the opposite direction and had been playing it safe for too long. This was the best night I’d had in ages and I didn’t want it to end.
Besides, what harm could come of it? It was only one night and I’d have my own room.
Chapter Thirty-four
After we finished eating the pizza, Josh and I took our wine glasses and retreated to the small private sunroom at the back of the inn. It was lit by a single kerosene lamp and decorated with floral fabrics. We sat on a wicker love seat with a chintz cushion and looked out at the gently falling snow in the dark yard.
“Do you realize this is the first time we’ve been alone together all night?” Josh asked as he rested his arm along the back of the seat.
“You noticed too?” Clearly there was an intense undercurrent of attraction between us that I found both exhilarating and nerve-racking. “I had a nice time,” I said. “I really needed this.”
He nodded in agreement. “You had a rough year.”
“From what I heard, you haven’t had such a great year yourself,” I casually mentioned. Then I waved a hand and shook my head. “I’m sorry. Marie was eager to share all the details of your personal life with me.”
The corner of his mouth curved up in a grin and he leaned forward to set his wine glass down on the coffee table.
“My sister was never very good at keeping secrets,” he said with affection, “which wasn’t exactly her best quality in high school, because somehow Mom and Eric always found out about any wild parties that were going on and arrived promptly at midnight to drag me home.”
“Sounds like you owe your sister a debt of gratitude for keeping you on the straight and narrow.”
He nodded. “I know it. And I’m not sorry she told you about my past either. It saves me from having to explain it myself, because that’s never awkward.”
I smiled.
“Now that it’s out in the open, we have no secrets,” Josh added.
I rested my temple on a finger. “What a pair we are. Between the two of us, we have enough baggage to fill a small backyard shed.”
Josh agreed and reached for my hand. “And you still wear this,” he said, rubbing the pad of his thumb over my wedding ring.
While his gaze was lowered, I took the opportunity to study the strong features of his face—his dark eyelashes, the straight nose, the full lips and perfectly sculpted cheekbones and jawline.
“I hadn’t really thought about it until tonight,” I said, glancing down at my ring again, “when we were in the car after the ceremony. Maybe I should have taken it off by now, but I’m just so used to wearing it.”
His eyes lifted and met mine. “You’ll know when the time is right. No need to rush it.”
“I think a part of me likes the fact that it sends a message and prevents guys from asking me out. If they look at my hand and see that I’m married, they move on.”
“Except for me,” he said with an intense look. “I didn’t move on. Was that wrong?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m glad you called.”
He picked up his wine glass and took a sip. “So tell me about Seth. If he was a professional climber, he must have been gone quite a bit.”
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t know the half of it.” Then I stopped talking for a moment and looked down at my hands. “If you really want to know the truth, I don’t think he ever wanted to be married. He just felt obligated because we had a child together.” I explained.
“Ah,” Josh replied.
I shrugged. “It’s been hard for me to keep that from Kaleigh. I don’t want her to ever feel like she caused me to choose something I wouldn’t have chosen otherwise.”
“But would you have chosen it?” Josh asked. “If you hadn’t had Kaleigh, do you think you would have eventually ended up married to Seth anyway?”
“Do you want me to be completely honest?” I asked.
He nodded.
I let out a sigh. “It’s not easy to say this. It feels disrespectful because he’s gone now, but looking back on it, realistically, I’m quite sure our relationship would have fizzled before it came anywhere close to marriage. Not because I didn’t want it. I was young and foolish and madly in love, and the fact that he was so elusive, you know, unavailable to me… He was always talking about leaving for the next big climb. That just made me want to hang on to him tighter. It was like he was playing hard to get and it worked like a charm on me. Though of course it wasn’t intentional on his part. He really was genuinely out of reach. Impossible to pin down.” I paused and looked out the window.
“I was so young. I didn’t have enough life experience. I was following my heart, not my head. Although now that I think about it, it wasn’t really my heart. It was probably mostly my ego. I felt like I was competing with the mountain for his attentions—Everest in parti
cular—and I wanted to be the one to win. I figured if I was just patient enough, and supportive enough, he’d get tired of that life and want to come home.”
“Sounds like you were very patient,” Josh said.
“Yes, but sadly, in the end, none of us really won, except maybe the mountain because it’s still there, doing its thing. Seriously…Everest was the ‘other woman’ in our relationship. Then it was K2.”
Josh set down his wine glass and I glanced out the window again.
“It looks cold out there,” I said. “I do love the outdoors as much as the next person, but on a night like this, I’m glad to be inside.”
Marie knocked on the door jamb and peeked her head into the sunroom. “I have your room key,” she said to me.
“Great, thank you.”
She walked in and handed it to me.
I turned it over in my hand. “Wow—a real old-fashioned brass key, not a plastic card.”
“This is a classy joint,” Marie said. “You’re in room 307. It has a canopy bed and a tiny private balcony under one of the dormers.”
“That sounds lovely. Thank you so much.”
“I also told the front desk to send up a toothbrush and toothpaste, and there’s a bathrobe in the room so you should be all set.” Marie turned to go.
“Are you going to bed, sis?” Josh asked, and I noticed it had grown quiet in the front rooms of the inn.
“Yes,” Marie replied. “Mom and Eric just went up to their suite and the kids are down for the count. We’ll see you two in the morning.” She left us alone again.
I slipped the key into my purse and leaned back on the love seat. “What room are you in?” I asked Josh.
“309,” he replied. “Do you think she planned that?”
I laughed. “Probably.”
We both smiled, slouched down next to each other and put our feet up on the coffee table.
Chapter Thirty-five
Josh and I stayed up talking until the wee hours of the morning. We talked about our past relationships and he told me about how the woman he’d imagined himself marrying had had a few too many drinks one night and slept with his best friend from college who had come to visit for the weekend.
Josh was no longer in touch with either of them.
When I started yawning, we decided it was time to call it a night. Josh turned down the dimmer in the sunroom lamp. Quietly we moved through the dark, wood-paneled inn and climbed the stairs.
“We didn’t talk about your job,” I whispered to Josh. I was sleepy but not yet ready to say goodnight. “I wanted to ask what made you want to become a cop.”
Slowly, taking one step at a time, he told me how, at the age of sixteen, he had been home one night babysitting his younger brothers and sisters. Unexpectedly, their next door neighbor came outside with a rifle and began screaming at his wife, who was still inside. Then he fired shots at the house.
“We were all in shock,” Josh whispered as we reached the second floor and continued up the stairs. “I didn’t know what to do at first, then I sent the others down to the basement and told them to lock themselves in the bathroom. I called the police and waited at the window until I saw them pull up in a blaze of sirens and flashing lights. The cops got out of their vehicles and started yelling at our neighbor to drop his weapon. Thankfully he complied and they stormed onto his front lawn. They had him sprawled in the grass and were cuffing him within seconds. Then they came to my door and asked me all sorts of questions and congratulated me for making the call, told me I did the right thing… And that’s the moment I knew what I wanted to be.”
By now we had reached the third floor and he was walking me down the corridor to my room.
“That’s quite a story,” I said. “Have you had many calls like that yourself?”
We reached room 307, but stopped just outside. Josh faced me and leaned a shoulder against the wall.
“Too many to count. Lots of times I glance back and see civilians looking out their windows at us when we’re taking someone into custody, and they always have that same wide-eyed expression, like they can’t believe what they just witnessed. I remember feeling that way in my front window that night. I was never so happy to see those flashing lights come around the corner, because I was terrified our neighbor was going to turn around and start shooting at us, too.”
“Are you terrified now, when you have to answer a call like that?” I asked.
“Not terrified,” he replied, speaking softly. “But adrenaline kicks in sometimes.”
For a long moment we stood outside my room, neither of us making a move to say goodnight, and the mention of adrenaline made me realize I had a mad flock of butterflies in my belly. Feeling suddenly frazzled, I dug into my purse for the room key.
“Guess it’s time for bed,” I said as I withdrew it.
Josh pushed away from the wall and gave me a heated look that set my blood on fire.
“Goodnight, Carla,” he said, his voice husky and low as he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
With that, he turned away and all I could do was stand there in a dazed stupor, watching him dig into his pocket for his own key and smile at me one more time before disappearing into his room.
What a gentleman, I thought, as I closed my door behind me. How wonderful to know they still existed.
Circles
Chapter Thirty-six
Aaron
I realize it might seem implausible that one man could live through a plane crash, a lynx attack, and be chased by a polar bear in one lifetime. And that wasn’t even all.
When I was somewhat recovered from my flight from the bear and my violent tumble down the mountain, I gathered up my belongings and continued to walk along the coast, hoping to eventually reach civilization.
To make a long story short, after about a week of constant walking, I found myself back in the same spot where I’d been chased by the bear, and my heart sank as low as it had ever been.
How was this even possible? True, I’d neglected to use the compass because I didn’t see it as a necessity if I was traveling along the coastline. But here I stood again, overlooking the same the beach, the same walruses, the same rocky cliff I’d jumped over to save myself from a mauling.
That was the day I realized I was not in the Canadian province of Newfoundland, but rather I was stranded on an uninhabited island somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic and I had walked a full circle around it.
I can’t even describe the level of my frustration. All I could do was shrug out of my backpack, drop it on the ground and roar a terrible obscenity at the sky. I picked up snowballs and pitched them across the beach at the water. I shouted expletives and kicked my backpack repeatedly.
It’s a good thing the bear wasn’t nearby listening for supper possibilities. Or maybe he was, and I scared him away.
o0o
Summer on the island spun in and out all too quickly. Thankfully it provided me with a much needed respite from the chill of the merciless wind blowing across those rugged, desolate winter landscapes.
To my delight, a great diversity of plants and flowers bloomed on the limestone coastal barrens, breaking through the cracks in the rocks, creating colorful natural crevice gardens. Day after day, I walked along the cliffs on sunny, breezy afternoons, feasting upon scarlet-colored edible berries and picking flowers to take back to my dark cave—a place where I had established a more permanent residence after the tent fell apart in a windstorm.
In the forests, stunted birch and maple trees grew lush with leaves, then turned red and gold as autumn rolled in.
By then I had at least learned to snare rabbits and catch fish with an expert efficiency, and somehow I managed not to go completely stark-raving mad at the mere notion of spending another winter on the island.
Stay alive, I told myself each night in the cave as I sat before the fire, staring into the flames and then glancing across at the only picture I had of anoth
er human being.
So beautiful…
Stay alive, Aaron, just one more day.
Stay alive.
Desperation
Chapter Thirty-seven
Winter swept in again like a vengeful beast.
For many months, I survived on fish, kelp and rabbit meat, and even on that diet had been reduced to probably two-thirds of my body weight.
Mentally, for my self-preservation, I retreated into my cave and also into a world of fantasy where I entertained myself with dreams of another life. That, at least, gave me something to live for—the dream of returning home.
To my loved ones. Television, restaurants, coffee grinders, cars and books. My guitar.
Sometimes I would sit on a log and stare at trees for hours, picturing these things in elaborate detail. I heard them. Smelled them. Replayed memories in my mind. I often strummed guitar chords in my head.
Weddings… When was the last time I’d sat in a church?
Music. Oh, God…music.
The sound of a lawn mower. The smell of cut grass.
Carla’s blue eyes.
All these images helped to fill my empty, lonely days, until I woke up one morning and realized it had been more than a year since I’d boarded the plane and crashed into this God-forsaken place.
That’s when something took hold of me—a pressing, desperate need to go home, and something about it felt like my last chance. Somehow I knew that if I didn’t go now, with spring on the horizon, all would be lost.
I had turned forty on this lonesome rock and my life was slipping away.
Did anyone miss me? My parents and sister—most assuredly. But I had no wife, no children.
I thought of how I’d always wanted a son.
Nothing but a pipe dream now.
Perhaps that’s what did it. That’s what set me off—the unlikelihood that I would ever achieve any of these things, and a sense of powerlessness that drove me almost mad with despair and longing.
The Color of Love Page 9