So he resisted the urge and fixed his hands on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. He kept his eyes on what little of the road he could see ahead. The country road had no street lamps. It seemed as if they were hurtling headlong into darkness, riding blind in the night, and at any minute something or someone could loom up and he wouldn’t have time to brake before the impact.
That’s pretty much how it had happened with Ginny, he realized. He’d been living blind, thinking no more than one day at a time, looking no farther than the tip of his nose. When Ginny came, it was as if she’d loomed out of the darkness to knock him senseless. He’d never seen her coming.
That plain truth didn’t change anything, he told himself. He was still the man he was before she entered his life; he’d be the same man after she left. Not fit to be any woman’s anything. Certainly not a woman as accomplished and brilliant and loving as Ginny Van Saun.
He drove into the driveway and turned the engine off. Ginny stretched like a cat beside him.
“Don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m all done in.”
“Me, too.”
He hopped out of the truck before she could say anything about sleeping arrangements. He wasn’t sure he wanted to sleep next to her warm, soft body tonight. He wasn’t sure he could prevent himself from loving her, from holding her tight with her head under his chin and saying too much with body language that he wouldn’t allow himself to say with words.
“I’m just going to go around back,” she said as they climbed the stairs to the deck. “I left my sunglasses and a few other things out there this afternoon. Smells like rain, so I ought to get them.”
He grunted some reply, fiddled for the keys and entered the house, tossing the keys on the counter. He sauntered to the bathroom, flicked on the light and went to splash his face with cold water. He stared at the man in the mirror. Seeing a different man. A man who should know better.
Ginny took a long time gathering her things. He peered out a window a little later and found out why: The light was on in his shed, flickering with the movement of her shadow.
When he finally screwed up the courage to go outside to fetch her, Logan found her inside the shed, seated on a stool, cradling one of his finished pieces in her hands. At the sound of his footsteps, she looked up, and the softness and wonder in her eyes stopped him in his tracks.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
Logan’s throat tightened. It was inevitable that she would have discovered this place. He hadn’t intentionally made it off-limits to Ginny or anyone else, but now that she was sitting smack in the middle of his work space, he felt strangely…invaded. Uneasy. This was his sanctuary back here. This was where he found peace these past months.
“I thought that while I was in the backyard,” she explained, “I might as well put away the lawn chairs and the folding table. Rain coming, and all.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“And then I found…all this.”
She cupped a little wooden bird in her hands. Logan recognized one of the western meadowlarks. It had been among his earlier pieces, simpler than the ones he was working on now, but carving it and polishing the wood had brought him hours of serene meditation.
Her gaze fell upon him, clear and bright. “Did you really do this, Logan?”
“Yeah.”
“All these?”
She waved at the dozens of birds perched on the counters and ledges all around the shed: bright yellow larks and tanagers perched for flight; tiny brown wrens teetering on white-speckled eggs; warblers with open beaks caught in midsong; woodpeckers frozen in midpeck. A hawk stretched forward as if it eyed a mouse scurrying across the floor.
Logan shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I’ve been doing them for years.”
“They are amazing,” she said, passing her hand over the meadowlark as if petting its feathers. “The carving, the painting. It looks as if it might stand up in my hand at any moment and fly away.”
Logan resisted the urge to take the meadowlark out of her hand and return it to its perch. He supposed it was inevitable that they’d learn more about each other. They couldn’t spend every moment engaged in hot sex. But this was his private place, his private passion, and the woman had already sunk deep under his skin.
“This is why you take photos of the birds.” She gestured to the prints hanging from a rope stretched across the shed. “You photograph them, then carve their likeness.”
“I try.”
“You are an interesting man, Logan.” She placed the bird on the workbench and slipped off the stooL She fixed him with those whiskey-warm eyes. “So many hobbies. So many talents.”
He swaggered his shoulders and tried to give her a lascivious grin. “So you’ve told me.”
“No, I mean it.” She kept her gaze steady on him, ignoring the sexual innuendo. “This isn’t something you can learn. This is the kind of talent you’ve got to be born with.”
“Ah, Ginny, I’d like to have you believe I’m the next famous American sculptor, but the truth is, I wasn’t born carving birds.”
“Doesn’t matter. You can only be taught so much,” she said, wandering around the bench, touching a bird now and then. “The rest is talent.”
“You’re making me blush.”
“I’m serious.” She ran a finger across the wing of a hawk. “I know what I’m talking about. I took piano lessons for nine years. My father was a child prodigy, you know. Played at Carnegie Hall at the age of eleven. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps so badly… Though I worked my fingers to the bone, I just didn’t have the talent.”
“Ginny Van Saun, I suspect there is nothing on this good green earth that you could not accomplish.”
She looked at him then, gave him a shy smile that made his heart trip. “Now who’s the flatterer?”
“I am. Your most ardent admirer.” He leaned a shoulder against the door frame. “I’d love to hear you play.”
He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth. There was no piano here, in the cabin. To hear her play meant extending this relationship beyond the bounds of this place.
“I can do passable Mozart, but people who spend their life around music would see me as an amateur in a minute. My father sensed my lack of talent very early, and accepted it. With more grace than I did, I suppose. I kept working at it, trying to please him.” She took a breath and said, swiftly, “So, who introduced you to all this?”
“An old Ecuadorian man,” Logan said. “He had terrible rheumatism, he must have been ninety years old. I gave him aspirin to ease the pain. He thought I was too young to be a wise man.”
“And you met this man while working in an emergency room?”
“No.” Logan traced the flecked paint on the doorjamb and figured in for a penny, in for a pound. “I used to work for an international organization called Doctors without Borders. I was one of a team of doctors and nurses who would bring modern medicine into remote areas. Sometimes into war zones. To treat the poor, to treat the victims, to teach basic first aid. I met him while running a temporary clinic in a very remote jungle aren.”
“I see.”
Her words held a world of surprise and he plunged on so he wouldn’t have to explain anything else. “This guy made a living carving birds for tourists out of the fallen branches of local hardwoods. He gifted me with one of them after I treated him.” Logan remembered his own amazement at the fine quality of the work, done with the crudest of tools, the most primitive of dyes. “Birdwatching had always been a hobby for me, and so I asked him to show me how he did it, and…well…” Logan struggled with words. How to describe those long afternoons with a tiny wizened man whose native Indian name he could never pronounce. A man who spoke no English, yet taught Logan how to walk the jungle and seek out wood and let it tell him what kind of bird it wanted to be. “He was generous in his teaching.”
“He saw your talent.”
<
br /> “My first efforts were horrendous,” Logan said, shaking his head. “Crude, unwieldy.”
“Yet you continue to do it.”
“It was just a hobby. A way to relieve stress. That job could make anyone crazy now and then.” He folded his arms across his chest and eyed the aviary within the shed. He hadn’t planned to do this when he got back from Mexico, but one look at the old-growth forests reminded him of those Ecuadorian jungles, and soon he found himself picking up and weighing branches of hardwood in his hands. Carving them filled his long days, gave his mind some relief. “When I came here, I even had some crazy idea of trying to make a living doing this.”
“That’s not so crazy.”
“I tried. Commissioned some with one of the stores in town.” He shrugged. “The sales are keeping me in paint But I’ve discovered that most people like the little birds…and if I have to keep making the same thing over and over, that’ll suck the joy out of it. I’d rather keep it a private passion.”
“A private passion.”
She whispered the words. She’d circled the shed several times and now she came to a stop in front of him. He could not look straight in her face, for she gazed upon him with such open adulation. Such blind wonder. He didn’t deserve to be looked at like this. She’d stumbled upon one of his finer attributes. But there was much she didn’t know, much that still lay in the shadows.
“You are a man of many secrets, Logan,” she whispered, running her fingers down the buttons of his shirt. “You keep surprising me.”
“Not all the secrets are pretty.”
“I guessed that,” she said, pressing her fingers against the forearm crossed over his heart. “Anyone looking at you can see that there’s at least one secret eating away at your heart.”
He flexed his arms, kept them crossed, resisted the urge to open them up. Damn her. She was crossing the line. What was she doing? Hot sex, remember? Nothing more. No commitments. No looking beyond tomorrow, or next week. No use in learning about each other’s pasts.
Her hand lay so warm against his forearm, as if the heat of her touch seeped through flesh and bone to his beating heart.
“What happened, Logan?”
What happened? His blood throbbed through his body, his eyes smarted from the pressure. The light from the shed spiraled, then contracted to a pinpoint. What happened? All the pain he’d suppressed for all these months threatened to rip through, to flood him anew, as fresh and sharp and unrelenting as those horrid days in Mexico. Damn her. He’d managed to hold this back all these months, he’d fooled himself into thinking that it had begun to fade. And now, with Ginny’s eyes soft and urgent on his face, it all rushed back to him as if it had happened yesterday.
What happened?
He’d failed, that’s what. He’d failed, and a little soul had slipped away from this world because of it
“Logan?”
He glared at her and knew he couldn’t keep it in any longer or he would lose his mind.
“I’ll tell you what happened.” The words rushed from his lips as he stepped back, away from her, away from her touch, out of the shed’s light into the night. “I killed a child, Ginny. I killed a little two-year-old girl.”
10
LOGAN TURNED AWAY. He didn’t want to see the shock, the disgust, the horror on Ginny’s face. He strode into the darkness and flattened his hand against the trunk of the tree. He pushed until the bark bit his skin.
He stared up, beyond the boughs, seeing in the pinpoints of the stars the sparks cast off by a failing generator just outside the tent where sixty people lay groaning in pain. He flexed his toes in the cushion of pine needles on the ground and remembered the give of mud made of dirt and blood.
He remembered stepping out of the tent where he and three other doctors worked feverishly trying to stop the bleeding of too many wounds. He’d plundered the supply boxes for gauze, bandages, dean strips of cotton—anything that would suffice. They had run out of clean syringes hours ago. They were treating the pain of machete wounds with over-the-counter painkillers. Not one pair of latex surgical gloves was to be found.
The young woman had stepped out of the murky darkness to confront him. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. Eyes brown as velvet, swimming in tears. She carried a limp child in her arms. Logan knew the woman; she’d been in the week before with her little girl, who’d been running a fever. Logan seized the child, thinking she was another victim, all the while cursing the callous creatures who had caused such bloodshed, wondering at the bestial mind-set that caused such destruction. Wondering that the raid would never be known to the outside world—except to people like him and his co-workers, if all of them weren’t murdered first. That story might, at best, receive some ink, buried on page sixteen of a few larger newspapers, right beside an ad for unconscionably expensive handbags.
He’d carried the young girl into the tent while the mother trailed behind him, babbling in a language Logan could not understand. A quick examination revealed no signs of bleeding, no traumatic wound, no broken bones and no apparent head trauma. Only a runny nose. A fever.
All around him, men and women screamed in pain, some dying before his eyes. He had shouted for one of the nurses, told her to get some pediatric fever medication, then strode back out of the tent, leaving the child in a nurse’s care. He would see to her later, he figured. When he had time.
That’s where he had failed, for he knew better than to treat a child’s fever so lightly. Especially a child who’d had a fever for a week. He knew better than to make such a quick, careless examination. In the jungle, a fever could mean a dozen different diseases, almost all fatal in children under the age of five. Had he spent another minute, another two minutes, looking at the girl—if he had looked at her at all—he would have diagnosed her immediately and she might have lived.
At least she would have had a chance.
But he’d been too busy. He’d brushed her off as unimportant. Neglected and ignored, the mother had taken her child and wandered back to her village. Two days later when she returned, hysterical, carrying her withered little girl awash in bluish bruises, it had been too late to stop the advance of the meningitis.
But he’d tried. Oh, yeah, he’d tried. He’d dragged that young mother and her dying girl on a fifty-mile trek over a bumpy jungle road to the nearest place that could be called a village, to a mockery of a hospital. There the two-year-old died in a rickety bed with needles stuck in her arm and monitors strapped over her body in a huge, echoing room painted stark white and smelling of antiseptic.
He’d seen men, women and children of all ages die. It came with the job—life and death ran together in these makeshift hospitals in some of the most primitive places of the world. But he’d always done his best. He’d always tried. Until that young woman with eyes like brown velvet looked up at him as if he were a god, and with full trust, thrust her little girl into his arms.
He’d killed that child as surely as if he’d dropped her off the side of a cliff.
“Oh, Logan…”
Abruptly he was sucked through space and time and sent tumbling flat-footed onto the hard earth of the northwest United States. His breath came quick; his heart pounded. Ginny’s hand lay soft in the valley between his shoulder blades.
He realized, in his haze, that he’d blurted out the whole story.
He shook himself free of that gentle hand. He pushed away from the tree and wandered deeper into the darkness, farther from Ginny. What the hell had gotten into him? He’d told no one but John about Mexico. John, who’d taken one look at Logan after he deplaned and directed him to the nearest bar stool. Even then, it had taken a number of shots before Logan had broken down. Even then, Logan had not told him nearly as much as he had just told Ginny. He felt deflated, empty, as if he’d exhausted every detail and was left with nothing more to say.
Her voice was quiet. “So that’s why you quit.”
He tightened his lips, nodded curtly, wis
hed he could crawl into a hole, under a rock, anywhere away from her scrutiny. He wasn’t about to tell her that he hadn’t been worth a damn since the incident. He couldn’t examine a patient without second-guessing himself. Couldn’t handle emergency situations without breaking into a sweat. Couldn’t do what he’d spent his life training to do. Could never trust himself with another person’s life again.
He forced himself to turn to her in the darkness. He couldn’t see her eyes. All he could see was the whiteness of her hand across her mouth, and the way her fingers splayed across her abdomen, as if holding back her own disgust.
He deserved her disgust. He was disgusted enough with himself. She wouldn’t want him now. Considering the circumstances, it was best that this relationship end right here. Before it really grew deep and strong. Before he found himself falling to his knees before Ginny Van Saun.
For a long time they stood there in the darkness, with the wind crackling the boughs above them. Ginny leaned against the trunk, her arms loose across her midriff, while he tried to find some interest in toeing a fist-size rock out of the ground. He waited for the inevitable. All the platitudes he’d heard from his colleagues, from his superiors in the organization. You’re not God, Logan. You can’t save everyone. That had been his favorite, always spoken, in his mind, with a tone that suggested it would never have happened to them. Meningitis is difficult to detect, especially in a young child, without tapping the spine for fluid. As if he didn’t know basic diagnostics. You were one doctor of three trying to save the lives of fifty-six wounded people. How many did you save, Logan? He didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He’d failed to save the life of one little girl.
Ginny’s voice came out of the darkness, featherylight. “My father is a surgeon, you know, Logan.”
He tightened his jaw. He didn’t want to hear platitudes. Platitudes were clichés for people who didn’t understand, people who still needed to make sense of it all. He’d lived it and knew that there was no sense to it, no reason. So he waited for the words she needed to say, words that would burn his ears.
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