by JoAnn Ross
“Oh, hi, Ed, this is Nora. Just fine, thanks. And how are you? And Mavis? Another grandchild? Twins? You and Mavis must be thrilled. What does that make now, six? Eight? Really? Well, that’s wonderful....
“The reason I called, Ed,” Nora said, breaking into the pharmacist’s in-depth description of the newest additions to the Nelson family, “is that I know it’s near your closing time, but I’m sending a patient over.”
She turned her back, studiously ignoring Caine.
Frustrated and aching practically everywhere in his body, Caine stalked to the door, then slammed it behind him with such vehemence that one of her diplomas fell off the wall in the adjoining room.
Chapter 4
Caine picked up the prescription at Nelson’s Pharmacy and endured a lengthy conversation with the elderly druggist, who wanted to know all the particulars of Caine’s career-threatening injury.
After finally escaping the medical interrogation, he stopped at the market, picked up cold cuts for dinner and, ignoring Nora’s medical advice, purchased a couple of six-packs of beer. Just to take the edge off.
Then he drove out to the cabin—a cabin that, despite his avowal never to return to Tribulation, he’d never quite gotten around to selling.
Although he’d hired a woman from town to clean the place occasionally, the air was musty and a layer of dust covered everything. Caine neither noticed nor cared.
He turned on the television and tuned in to a game between Kansas City and Toronto on ESPN, threw himself down on the sofa, creating a dusty cloud, and pulled the tab on one of the blue metallic cans of beer. Foam spewed across the back of his hand; Caine licked it off his skin and settled back, stretching his legs out in front of him.
After swallowing two pink pills, he downed the entire can of beer in long thirsty chugs, tossed the can onto the pine coffee table, and opened another.
Three hours later, he’d made inroads on the beer and the Royals had shut out the Blue Jays at home, winning with a home run. And although the combination of pain medication and beer had created a pleasant, rather hazy buzz, he hadn’t enjoyed the game.
The televised broadcast had driven home, all too painfully, the unpalatable fact that for the first time since his fourteenth summer, a new baseball season had begun without Caine O’Halloran on the mound.
That unpleasant thought kept him awake long into the night until, finally, the combination of drugs and alcohol allowed him to slip into a restless sleep.
* * *
Caine wasn’t the only one who had difficulty sleeping. The following morning, Nora awoke more tired than she’d been when she went to bed and irritated with herself for letting Caine get under her skin. She’d tried to put him out of her mind, but ten-year-old memories, as vivid as if they’d occurred yesterday, had proved to be thieves of sleep.
She showered, blow-dried her hair and kept her makeup to a minimum of pink lipstick and mascara. Her clothing—pearl-gray skirt, matching blouse and low-heeled, comfortable shoes—was as subdued as her cosmetics. Although it was spring, mornings were chilly enough to require her wool coat.
As she gathered up her driving gloves, Nora cast a glance at the clock. If she left now, she could still make a stop before driving to Port Angeles.
The clouds were faint pink streaks in a pearly gray sky when Nora parked in front of the Tribulation Pioneer Cemetery. The small iron gate creaked as Nora pushed it open. The front rows of headstones, dating back to the founding of the town, were chipped and weather-pitted. An archangel guarding one resting place had been missing a wing for as long as she could remember.
Family plots were separated from the others by short white picket fences; the older stones, made of marble or granite, were elaborately carved, the words chiseled into their surfaces lengthy tributes to the deceased. The newer graves were marked by slabs laid flat on the ground with only the name, dates, and a single line to denote a life now gone.
The white picket fence surrounding the Anderson family plot was kept gleaming by a fresh coat of paint applied by her father every June. This year the task would be passed on to Tom or Dana. The names on the stones went back five generations, to her Great-great-grandfather Olaf.
Nora could have made her way to the grave blindfolded.
Dylan Kirk Anderson O’Halloran, the simple marker stated. Beloved son. The inscribed dates told of a young life cut tragically short.
Each time she came to the grave, Nora hoped to find peace. The fact that she never found it never stopped her from coming.
Wildflowers were arranged in a metal cup buried in the ground beside the stone. The casual bouquet consisted of dainty purplish brown mission bells, lacy white yarrow, deep purple larkspur and cheery, nodding yellow fawn lilies. The flower petals glistened with dew.
The bouquet was silent testimony to the fact that Ellen O’Halloran had made her weekly pilgrimage to the cemetery. There were times—and this was one of them—when Nora felt slightly guilty that she’d insisted her son be buried in the Anderson family plot, especially since no one could have loved Dylan more than his paternal grandmother.
But then she would remember how Caine had arrived at the cemetery obviously drunk and had humiliated both families by punching out the workman whose job it had been to lower the small, white, flower-draped coffin into the ground.
Nora pulled off her gloves, then knelt and ran a hand over the brown grass that covered her son.
Her worst fear, after they’d put her child into that cold ground, was that she’d forget his round pink face, the sound of his bubbly laugh, his bright blue eyes, his wide, melon-slice baby smile.
But that hadn’t happened.
Nine years after his death, she could see Dylan as if he were sitting right here, propped up in the maple high chair etched with teeth marks from two generations of O’Halloran boys, his bowl of oatmeal overturned on his head, laughing uproariously at this new way to win his mother’s attention.
Bittersweet memories whirled through her mind—the hours spent walking the floor with Dylan at night, an anatomy text in hand, naming aloud the names of the endocrine glands.
How many babies, she’d wondered at the time, were put to sleep with an original lullaby incorporating the two hundred and six bones of the skeletal system?
Nora knelt there for a long, silent time, tasting the scent of spring in the air. The morning light was a muted rosy glow. Delicate limbs of peaceful trees, wearing their new bright green leaves, arched over the grave.
In the distance, the sawtooth peaks of the Olympic Mountains emerged from a lifting blanket of fog; the upper snowfields caught the rose light of the sky and held it.
Somewhere not far away, Nora heard the sweet morning songs of thrush and meadowlark, then the chime of the clock tower, reminding her of other responsibilities, other children who might need her.
“Mama has to go.” She traced her son’s name with her fingertip. The bronze marker was morning-damp and cold, but Nora imagined it was Dylan’s velvety cheek she was touching. “But I’ll be back, Dylan, baby. I promise.”
After placing a small white pebble beside the one undoubtedly left by Dylan’s paternal grandmother, Nora left the grave site. The cold ache in her heart was familiar; she always experienced it whenever she visited the cemetery. But she could no more stay away than she could stop breathing.
So immersed was she in her own thoughts, Nora failed to notice the man who’d been watching her the entire time she’d been in the cemetery.
Caine leaned against the trunk of a tree, his arms crossed, silently observing his former wife.
A hangover was splitting his head in two, his body ached and the stitches in the back of his head had already begun to pull uncomfortably. But since he knew that he deserved the crushing pain, he wasn’t about to complain.
He hadn’t wan
ted to come to the cemetery today; indeed, he hadn’t entered those gates since the day of the funeral. A day when he’d shown up drunk, causing Nora, in an uncharacteristic public display of temper, to screech at him like a banshee. Her black-gloved fists had pounded at his chest with surprising strength until her father and brothers had managed to pull her away.
It wasn’t that Caine hadn’t loved Dylan; on the contrary, the little boy had been the sun around which Caine’s entire universe had revolved.
Which was one of the reasons he had never returned to the spot where they’d insisted on putting his son into the ground, never minding the fact that Dylan was afraid of the dark.
Caine had come to the cemetery this morning in an attempt to expunge the lingering pain, and was unsurprised when it hadn’t worked. He’d been about to leave when, as if conjured up from his dark and guilty thoughts, Nora had appeared out of the morning mists, looking strangely small and heartbreakingly frail.
* * *
She was on her way back to her car when she saw Caine. He was standing half-hidden in the shadows. She stopped, but refused to approach him. If he wanted to talk, let him come to her.
They remained that way, Caine leaning against the tree, Nora standing straight and tense, like a skittish doe, poised to flee at the slightest threat of danger.
“Hello, Nora.” His voice was deep and gruff and achingly familiar.
“Hello, Caine.” Her voice was low and guarded. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Like I’ve been run over by Harmon Olson’s Peterbilt, then drawn and quartered. But, since I figure I probably deserve every ache and pain, I’m not complaining.”
Caine looked, Nora considered, almost as bad as she felt. Which meant he looked absolutely terrible. His face, normally tanned, even in the dead of winter, was ashen. Lines older than his years bracketed his rigid, downturned mouth.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw was grizzled by a rough beard and his clothes looked as if he’d slept in them.
“Did you take the pain pills I prescribed?”
“Not this morning.” He managed a faint smile. “The way I look at it, so long as I feel the pain, I know I’m still alive.”
“That’s an interesting philosophy. But I’m not certain it’ll catch on.”
“Probably not. I hope you don’t think I’m following you.”
She shrugged and slipped her bare hands into her coat pockets. “Are you?”
“Actually, I’ve been here about an hour.”
“Oh. I didn’t see your car.”
“I walked.” He’d hoped the fresh air would clear his head. It hadn’t.
“But it’s at least three miles.”
“My arm might be giving me a little trouble, but the day I can’t walk a few measly miles is the day I hang up my glove.”
A thought flickered at the back of her mind, was discarded, then returned. “You brought the flowers.”
“Guilty.”
Part of her wanted to go back and snatch the wildflowers from her son’s grave; another part reminded her that Dylan was Caine’s son, too.
“That was very thoughtful of you.”
“They were growing all around the cabin.”
He pushed away from the tree with a deep sigh and moved across the brown grass until he was standing in front of her.
“I came out this morning and when I saw them blooming, I thought about the time we had that picnic—one of our few summer Sunday afternoons together—and how when I went back to the car to get the portable playpen, you turned your back for a second to get the potato salad out of the cooler, and when you turned around again, Dylan was gnawing on that handful of wildflowers.”
Despite her medical training, she’d been frantic, worried the blossoms might be poisonous. It had been Caine who’d calmly taken the wilting flowers from their son’s grubby fist and offered a favored teething cookie in return.
“I’ve never been able to look at wildflowers again without thinking of how pleased he looked with himself, with yellow pollen all over his nose, his mouth ringed with dirt, and that enormous smile of his,” Nora murmured.
“All four of his baby teeth gleaming like sunshine on a glacier.” A reminiscent smile softened Caine’s features. “That was a pretty good afternoon, wasn’t it? If we’d only had a few more days like that, we might still be together.”
“Caine, don’t...”
She combed a hand through her silky hair in a nervous, self-conscious gesture he remembered too well; Caine caught hold of her hand on its way back to her pocket. It was, he noticed, ice-cold.
“We have to talk about it, Nora.”
“No.” She shook her head, sending her hair flying out like a swirling ray of sunshine in the shaft of shimmering morning light. “We said everything we had to say to one another nine years ago. There’s no reason to rehash painful memories.”
“We were both hurting,” he reminded her, his voice as tightly controlled as hers. “And we both said things we didn’t mean.” His pained eyes looked directly into hers and held. “Don’t you think it’s time we settled things?”
She jerked her hand from his and stiffened—neck, arms, shoulders. A thin white line of tension circled her lips. “As far as I’m concerned, things were settled when you got into that new flashy red Corvette the insurance company gave you and drove away and left me all alone.”
To deal with our baby’s death. She hadn’t said the words aloud, but they hovered in the air between them.
“You didn’t ask me to stay,” Caine reminded her.
“Would you have?”
For some reason he would have to think about later, Caine chose to tell the absolute truth. “No. Probably not.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Let me put the question another way,” he said. “If I’d asked you to come with me, would you have?”
Years of controlling her expression while examining patients kept Nora from revealing how the unexpected question startled her. “And leave medical school?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there are medical schools in California.”
He had her there. Realizing that he’d just pushed her into a very tidy corner, Nora hedged. “It’s a moot point. Because you never asked me to go to California with you.”
“If I had, if I had said, ‘Nora, I’m so heartsick about everything that’s happened, come with me to Oakland and let’s try to start over again,’ what would you have said?”
“I might have gone.”
It was a lie; she never would have left friends and family and her lifelong ambition to go chasing after Caine’s dream. But she’d blamed him for so many years that old habits died hard.
Caine’s wide shoulders slumped visibly. Nora had been unrelentingly, coldly angry after the accident, after their child’s death.
She’d told him so many times, in both words and actions, how much she hated him, that Caine had never suspected that he might have, with extra effort, been able to break through all her pain and fury.
But at the time, even if he’d wanted to, he wasn’t sure he would have had the strength to try. Because, although he suspected she’d never believe it, he had been numb with unrelenting grief and guilt.
“I guess I really blew it, then.”
When he dragged his wide bruised hand over his face, Nora felt a distant twinge of guilt for lying to him and ignored it. His dark eyes were those of a man who’d visited hell and had lived to tell about it.
“I told you, Caine, it’s in the past. Let’s just let it stay there.”
“Life would probably be a lot easier if the past could be forgotten, Nora,” he said. “But I think we both know it can’t be.”
Before she could answer, the clock in the village square tol
led again. “I’m sorry, Caine, but I can’t discuss this right now. I’m going to be late for work, as it is.”
Caine glanced down at the Rolex sports watch he’d never been able to afford when he’d been married to her. “It’s not even seven.”
“I know, but it’s a long drive to Port Angeles, and there are a lot of trucks on the road this time of morning.”
“You have another clinic in Port Angeles?”
“No, I’m working in the hospital emergency room three days a week in order to fund the Tribulation clinic.”
“The emergency room?”
How can you bear it? The words were unspoken, but they hung in the air between them just the same.
The memory of those hours they’d spent outside the hospital emergency room, at opposite ends of the small waiting room, anger and fear and hurtful pride keeping them from comforting one another, came flooding back.
“During my internship at New York-Presbyterian, in New York City—”
“I know where New York-Presbyterian is,” Caine broke in. “I lived in New York, remember? Before the Yankees cut me.”
She remembered being afraid she would run into him. She also remembered reminding herself that New York was an enormous city; the odds of seeing her former husband were astronomical. But that hadn’t stopped her from getting an ulcer that had mysteriously cleared up after she’d returned to Tribulation.
“Well, anyway,” she said, shaking off that uncomfortable memory, “when it came time for me to do my E.R. rotation, I was sick to my stomach all night. I’d been dreading it for weeks. In fact, I was seriously thinking of dropping out of medicine.”
She fell suddenly silent and stared up at him, wondering what on earth had possessed her to tell him something she’d never admitted to another living soul.
She took a deep breath that should have calmed her but didn’t. “Anyway, thirty seconds after I managed to drag myself into the E.R., an elderly woman who’d been attacked in her bed by a man with a machete was brought in. She had put her arms up to protect herself and there was blood everywhere.