If I'd Never Known Your Love

by Georgia Bockoven

  You went from wide-eyed surprise to full-face grin, picked me up and swung me around, which was an amazing feat in our tiny apartment, and plopped down on the couch with me in your lap. "When did you find out?"

  "You're not upset?"

  "Hell, no. Why would I be?"

  Perversely, your enthusiasm rattled me, even made me a little angry. I'd prepared arguments to convince you that having a baby wasn't the disaster it seemed, and you were over-the-moon happy. "Oh, I don't know. How about we still have a year before we graduate, we're not married, you're about to leave for three months, we're—"

  "Two-and-a-half months."

  "What?" I glared at you. "I'm telling you my life is in shambles and all you can do is correct my time line? Are you crazy?"You caught me as I moved to get up and pulled me back down.

  "We can do this, Julia. "You kissed me then—

  a kiss filled with such warmth and longing and passion that my unreasoning fury melted like a marshmallow in a campfire.

  "How?" I asked, so near to tears my chin quivered.

  "We'll work on that later," you said. "Right now I want to celebrate. With you—"You put your hand on my still-flat belly. "And with our baby."

  We dug through the couch and chairs and under the seats in the car and in the ashtray and came up with two dollars and twenty-three cents. The side pocket of my purse yielded a five-dollar bill, which to us at the time was tantamount to finding a fortune. You took the bottles we'd been collecting back to the store, added it to the change we'd found and came home with an incredible feast. That night we spread a blanket out in a wheat field and ate brie and crackers and grapes and toasted our lives together with sparkling cider. We made love for the first time without any protection. It was so- o-o-o unbelievably sexy to have that kind of freedom that I swore we'd never go back to condoms, which plainly couldn't be counted on anyway. When we'd exhausted positions and each other, we lay with arms and legs entangled and counted stars.

  You pointed out the Big Dipper and said, "See the second star on the handle?"

  I nodded, my chin rhythmically bumping your shoulder.

  "That's our star from now on."

  "Why that one?"

  "It's not one—it's four. They're so near each other, astronomically speaking, that they look like one."

  I'd learned by then to stop questioning how you knew these kinds of things. You absorbed and stored knowledge like an intellectual sponge. "And you chose this star—"

  "Mizar."

  "You chose Mizar because?"

  "It represents our family. Or the family we will have one day."

  " We haven't had our first baby and you 're already planning a second?"

  "Two against two. Us against them. It's only fair to even the odds, don't you think?"

  I'd thought about having a family with you, of course, but not this soon. We had another year of school ahead of us and then graduation, jobs to find, moving and settling into a new apartment. Adding a baby to the mix complicated everything. How was I going to fit labor and delivery around finals? I couldn't possibly care for a brand-new baby and go to classes. I was going to have to quit school, at least for a semester. I started hyperventilating.

  "Hey," you said, and drew me closer. "I didn't mean to scare you. If you really don't want two, we don't have to—"

  "I don't know how I'm going to deal with one," I admitted. "I can't think about two.

  Not yet. Maybe not ever." What I was trying to tell you was that I was scared. Really scared. I still hadn't become a wife and I was going to be a mother.

  The wife part was settled when we eloped without telling anyone. We expected my mom and dad to be hurt, but being able to add that we were married when they announced they were becoming grandparents went a long way in salving the wounds.

  As always, they pitched in and loaded us up with everything we could possibly need for a new baby, including giving us their time whenever possible.

  That was the last summer I spent on the farm. My mother realized I would only be back for visits from then on and spent the entire time adjusting her moods to accommodate joy at having her married and pregnant daughter under her wing and sorrow knowing it would never happen again.

  You and I did fine. No, we did better than fine. When Shelly was born in January, you took to being a father as if you'd been programmed for the job. I used to imagine you with your baby brother and liked knowing that he'd had you to love and care for him during his short life.

  I didn't have to drop out of school, even though we spent the first six months of Shelly's life like loving zombies. We were lucky to share a kiss as we passed each other on our way to and from class and to and from doing the baby duty. Sleep turned into a distant memory; sex, too.

  And then it all came together—graduation, job offers, and a baby who not only slept through the night but also slept in on weekends and gave us time to rediscover each other in some really fun ways.

  The hard part was after the party my folks threw to celebrate all the changes in our lives and we had to tell them that you'd accepted a job—in California. Mom cried; Dad dug deep and came up with a smile.

  If he'd been aware we were starting a Warren family exodus to the West Coast, he might not have been so gracious.

  C H A P T E R 9

  For two days Julia and David got up at dawn and planted themselves along the path they'd seen Pearl take into the forest. Julia was surprised at how comfortable she felt with David as they sat without talking and how often she noted they were drawn to the same things in their silent, sheltered environment. He pointed out a pileated woodpecker's nest in the cavity of a dead tree and Julia reciprocated when she discovered a tiny lichen-covered cup held together with spider webs. Nestled inside were two almost impossibly small rufous hummingbird babies.

  Julia decided that it wasn't all that unusual to feel comfortable with someone in conversation, but it was

  rare to feel such ease in sitting together in silence, especially with a man who was basically a stranger to her.

  The only times they saw Pearl was when she appeared, like an apparition, beside the tree where they'd left her food.

  Missing her again that third morning, they figured she wouldn't be back for a couple of hours and that they might as well get on with their day. Julia was halfway across the pine-needle-covered open area that passed for David's front yard when he called to her.

  "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

  When she'd made the same offer to him the day before, he'd declined and then quickly explained that his mornings were taken. If he didn't work then, he didn't work at all.

  "But I thought—"

  "I'm taking a day off," he said.

  "Then, sure. I'd love a cup."Thank God for coffee, the great socializer.

  "Come on in. It will only take a minute." He paused before going inside. "Or you could wait out here on the porch. Whatever makes you more comfortable."

  What was with David? She'd never met anyone more push-pull."I'll come in, if that's okay. I need to use the bathroom."

  He held the door. "It's in the back, down the hall to your right."

  As she made her way through the house, she subconsciously noted how he lived—

  what was important enough to keep, how often he cleared the coffee table of cups and cans and what reading material he had lying around. Paying attention to those kinds of details was a girl thing, readily understood by her girlfriends but never by any guy she'd known. Not even Evan. He thought what she and her girlfriends did was snooping, pure and simple. Every female she knew applied a different, kinder, word— curiosity.

  What she found wasn't anything like she'd imagined. She'd assumed that David's

  "work" had something to do with fixing things around the property. But the prominence of a desk and computer and peripheral material in the living room made it plain that whatever he was doing away from the daily upkeep of the property wasn't physical. She glanced at the books on the desk. They we
re mostly volumes of poetry and essays and biographies. She stopped to look at the one lying open.

  "Walt Whitman," David said from the kitchen doorway. "Leaves of Grass."

  "A favorite collection of yours?"

  "For several reasons."

  "My father is always quoting Whitman. 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' in particular."

  He nodded. "It's in there."

  "Is there one you like to quote, too?" she asked, sensing his answer would tell her more than he would reveal by direct questioning. Now watch him pick a poem she didn't know.

  "I never quote poetry," he said. And then, as if realizing how dismissive he sounded, he added, "But lines from 'I Sit and Look Out' run through my head whenever I read a newspaper or watch the news on television. I think of them as my conscience."

  She didn't recall the entire poem, but the last line came to her complete, one of the bizarre bits of trivia that cluttered her mind and took over space where more important things should reside."'All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon. See, hear, and am silent.'" Realizing what she'd done, she laughed.

  "Obviously, I fall into the quoting category."

  "I won't hold it against you."

  "Thanks. I promise it won't happen again." A promise embarrassingly easy to keep.

  Until that line popped out of her mouth, she would have sworn she'd never memorized any lines of poetry. "Are you a writer?" she guessed.

  "I used to be. Whatever kept me going in the beginning seems to have disappeared, however."

  "Published?"

  "Some."

  The "used to be" didn't make sense with the desk and computer. And once you had one book published, wasn't that all you needed to guarantee others would follow?

  "Should I have heard of you?"

  "Not necessarily. It depends on what you like to read."

  "At one time I read just about everything," she said."I was hoping to get back to it while I'm here."

  He pointed to several boxes of books."Like I said, you're welcome to whatever interests you."

  "Do you have anything of yours?"

  He shook his head. "Unless you read Spanish. I had some foreign-language copies of one of my books arrive the other day that I was going to give to the library."

  "As a matter of fact, I do."

  He hesitated and then shrugged. "I'll dig one out after we've had our coffee."

  She left for the bathroom then because it would have seemed strange not to. She even succeeded in not peeking inside the medicine cabinet. That really would have crossed the line into snooping. She did, however, glance around again as she walked back through the living room.

  A thin layer of dust coated most surfaces, but she'd already discovered that was a given with the wood- burning stoves both houses used for heat at night. A red plaid pillow sitting propped against the arm of the sofa told her David liked to lie down when he read. Judging by the deep indentation in the pillow, he read a lot. There were books stacked three and four deep sitting on most flat surfaces, the only real clutter in the room. His desk held his laptop and books and little

  else.

  "Coffee's ready," David called.

  She joined him in the kitchen. "Why don't we drink it on the porch. Maybe we'll get lucky and Pearl will stop by."

  David handed her a mug and held the door. They settled into creaking wicker rocking chairs, sinking into faded blue-and-white striped cushions.

  "Did you hear the coyote the other night?" she asked. "He sounded so close, almost as if he were standing in the middle of the front yard."

  David had, but wasn't going to mention it. The excited barking was something coyotes did. when protecting a kill. The longer they'd gone without seeing Pearl, the more worried he had become. "Without any traffic noise to mute it, sound travels a long way here."

  She seemed satisfied with the answer.

  "The view from your place is completely different from mine," she said, plainly struggling for conversation. "It's almost as if I'm looking at a different lake."

  He hid his smile. They'd known each other almost a week, long enough that they were past the initial awkwardness of strangers but not long enough for anything personal, especially after their shaky start. But the more he was around her, the more he found to like and the less inclined he was to fight the attraction. She was smart and direct and had a sexiness that emanated from her like light from a campfire at midnight.

  He looked out at the small cove and island that were hidden from her place by the stand of trees that separated them. "I think in this case the caretaker's cottage has the real money view."

  A pair of geese swam by. They should have been in Alaska months ago, but David had learned from a couple who lived on the other side of the lake that this pair remained year-round. Every winter they lost their young to the flocks of migrating geese that stopped to rest before flying farther south, the call of the wild stronger than the plaintive cry of the parents.

  "Did you know they mate for life, just like swans?" Julia said. "I've never heard what happens when one of them dies." She watched the gander circle and head toward shore.

  The goose followed. "Do you suppose the one left behind eventually gives up and dies, too?"

  The question carried deeper meaning. He didn't have to hear Julia's story to see that she was still hurting. "People die of broken hearts all the time. I don't know why the same thing couldn't happen to birds."

  "That's something Evan might have said. He believed most of us are too egocentric to acknowledge we aren't the only sentient creatures on earth."

  "He sounds like a man I would have liked. What happened to him? "The invitation to cross the barrier that had separated them until now surprised them both a little.

  "He died. Six months—" She covered the awkward moment by taking a sip of coffee.

  "Actually, he died five and a half years ago."

  "Too strong?" David asked, noting the face she'd made and supplying her an opportunity to change the subject.

  "Hotter than I expected."

  "There's ice in the freezer."

  "It's fine."

  Before he could say anything more, she picked up where she'd left off. "Evan has been dead five and a half years, but I only found out six months jigo "

  He didn't say anything, waiting for her to continue or not. The story was hers to tell.

  The geese came onshore to nibble the short grass by the edge of the lake. Seconds stretched into minutes. Julia took another sip of coffee and then another. Finally, the coffee gone, she began.

  When she finished filling David in on her life for the past six years, giving him a highly abbreviated version, she said, "As you've undoubtedly figured out, I'm having trouble letting go."

  "I can understand that." For most, the kind of love she had had with Evan only happened in books and movies. David had known a lot of women, had even loved a couple of them, or at least had felt something he'd thought was love. But when the relationship had ended, he'd always been able to walk away without looking back.

  "On some level my friends and family recognize that what Evan and I had was special, but now that he's gone, they're eager for me to get past losing him. No one understands what we had was a lifetime thing. For me, there is no moving on."

  They were simple words, spoken in a matter-of-fact manner and heartbreaking in their finality. Julia frowned."Somehow, everyone I know seems to have found a way to accept that Evan has been gone five and a half years, while for me... I still can't believe he's gone."

  "It's probably because he was more real to you during the time he was missing than he was to them." That was as deep as he wanted to get into suggesting answers for something so personal.

  "It won't matter how much time passes. I'm never going to feel any different. I will always be connected to Evan the way I am now." She blinked, as if abruptly waking.

  "I'm sorry. I don't know why I told you that. I don't usually—"

  "It's
okay. I like listening to you. Passionate people intrigue me." He was drawn by the depth of her feelings, and wondered what it would be like to love and be loved by someone the way Julia loved David. With a bittersweet sadness he knew it was a world he would never inhabit.

  An embarrassed smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. "Me and Whitman?"

  "I'd like to think there might be one or two more of your type out there."

  "Like you?"

  David didn't answer right away. He never shared his feelings outside his books. It was something both the women he'd lived with and said that he loved had complained about, and in the end told him was a reason for leaving."I feel things deeply," he admitted."But they are never as benign as love. Anger fuels my passions."

  "Could that be why you're having trouble writing? You've mellowed?"

  He laughed at that. "In my mind I can stand on a soapbox with the best of the sixties radicals. But like most of them, I eventually stopped believing raging at injustice can make a difference."

  "I understand."Julia tucked her feet under her and settled deeper into the chair."Hope died for me, too. It would appear we're climbing the same mountain."

  He held up his cup in a salute. "Here's to a fellow climber."

  "Mind telling me how you got there?"

  He did. Curious reporters had dug around and discovered bits and pieces of his background, but not enough to draw conclusions or come close to figuring him out.

  He'd left home at fifteen, abandoning a father who handed out beatings like unshelled peanuts at a road house. Had David stayed, he would either have killed or been killed by his father. His mother had slipped a hundred dollars in his jacket pocket, kissed him goodbye and agreed it was for the best.

  Wherever he'd found himself, in whatever circumstances, he'd given an honest day's work when he needed food or money, but never stuck around for two. He slept in forests and doorways, wearing out almost as many sleeping bags as jeans, living off the land when possible and off the kindness of strangers when not. He'd been confronted by cops on six continents, witnessed a man die trying to outrun an angry mob and lent brawn to the rescue of a wild elephant by African villagers whose crops would have been better off if the animal had died. He'd watched the sun set in the Antarctic and rise over the Himalayas and thrown up from seasickness in every major ocean.