Double Wedding Ring

by Peg Sutherland

  By lunchtime, their arms were loaded with shopping bags filled with cuddly bathrobes, color-splashed neckties and a dozen other items that would soon be brightly wrapped and stashed under a tree. Malorie’s favorite purchase was the pink-cheeked baby doll for the little girl whose tag she had taken from the angel tree at church.

  “Okay,” she said, passing an overstuffed shopping bag to Sam. “You hold on to this and watch Cody while I run into the ladies’ room. Then we’ll grab some lunch and—”

  She glanced around, and the blood froze in her veins. “Where’s Cody?”

  Sam looked down. “Right... He was right here. I—”

  “Cody!”

  Sam dropped shopping bags and packages to the floor. He took her hand in his. “Now, don’t panic. He’s just wandered away. He’s right around here somewhere, you’ll see.”

  “Okay. I’m sure you’re right.”

  But her voice was shaky, and so were her knees. She didn’t want to let go of Sam, but it made sense for them to separate. She could hear Sam calling to the boy as he headed toward the luggage and she headed toward the linens. Her mouth was dry and her heart all but pounding right out of her chest.

  When Sam returned twenty minutes later, he was empty-handed and so was she.

  Cody was gone.

  * * *

  THE WINDOW FROM THE ROOM at the lodge looked out over a winter wonderland. Nestled into the foot of the mountain, it overlooked a stream Tag said was the Little Pigeon River. The night sky glittered with stars and the snow-covered slopes rose until the darkness swallowed them. The sparkle of holiday lights defined the rustic rails of the lodge and the faint sound of carolers wafted up to the room.

  Susan couldn’t take her eyes off the scene.

  “You aren’t eating,” Tag said.

  She smiled at him. “But it’s so pretty out there.”

  “It’s pretty in here, too,” he said, and his eyes told her what he thought was pretty.

  The room was pretty, too. The massive sleigh bed covered in crochet lace was one of many antiques furnishing the room. Tiny pink flowers dotted the wallpaper. And room service had rolled in an elegantly outfitted table, complete with white linen tablecloth and napkins, a silver candlestick and a crystal bud vase with one perfect white rose. They had warmed themselves with hot soup and mulled cider.

  A touch of melancholy crept into Susan’s heart as she realized they would have to go home the next morning. Back to the big house that echoed with bitterness and betrayal. Back to the struggle for recovery.

  “You look sad,” Tag said.

  “I’m not. Wishing it didn’t have to end, I suppose.”

  They sat in silence, holding hands across the table, listening to the faint strains of “Silent Night.”

  When the caroling came to an end, Tag pushed away from the table and walked over to the canvas duffel bag he had set in a wingback chair. From the bag, he took a huge wrapped package, which he set in the middle of the bed. Then he swept Susan out of her chair and deposited her on the bed beside the package. He sat on the corner of the bed, looking at her expectantly.

  “Open it.”

  She smiled. “It’s not Christmas yet.”

  “And this isn’t a Christmas present.”

  Feeling the excitement in her fingertips, Susan began tugging at the wrapping paper. Soft shades of rose and green peeked at her as she peeled the paper away. Recognition bolted through her. She tore at the paper now, shredding it, laying bare the frayed but familiar Double Wedding Ring quilt.

  Tears blurred the quilt. She ran her fingers over the well-worn fabric.

  “Oh, Tag. How did you do this?”

  He was close beside her now, helping her as she struggled to unfold the quilt, as if she needed to reassure herself that every inch of it was actually here.

  “When I found out how you’d lost it, I decided I’d try to track it down. I found the junkyard where they’d towed your car after the wreck, and there it was. Somebody had stashed it in the back seat.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “No big deal?” She looked up at him, dumbfounded, tears still making her vision blurry. “Tag, that must’ve been somewhere in South Carolina.”

  Again he shrugged, and Susan remembered the days he had been gone on his secret mission. The days she had fretted that he was off on some adventure he would never be able to share with her. Now she knew. He had done this just for her. For them.

  She kissed him, drawing his lean, lined face close to hers. She explored the sharp contours of his cheek and jaw, the thick softness of the hair spilling over his collar, the quickening pulse at his throat. She felt the wet warmth of his mouth, the strong insistence of his shoulders and thighs and chest as his body leaned into hers.

  Illuminated by the candle, they lay back on the Double Wedding Ring quilt and made love, as they had so many years ago.

  This time, Susan’s heart told her, it was different. This time, their bodies were older, less perfect. But the fullness in their hearts was sweeter and their joining more poignant than youth could ever know.

  * * *

  MALORIE SAT IN THE HARD, molded plastic chair in the police station, fists balled tightly in her lap, eyes unfocused, back straight. She had shut down. It was the only way she could cope. Even Sam’s steady presence wasn’t enough to keep the fear at bay. Her only defense was to shut everything out.

  The outside door would swing open from time to time, revealing the darkness that had fallen hours earlier. Malorie wouldn’t look at the clock, though; she didn’t want to add up how long Cody had been gone, because she knew every tick of the clock lessened the chances that Cody would come back to her safe and sound.

  That, she knew, was to be her punishment.

  The young policewoman who had talked to them earlier came out, and Malorie jumped up. The officer shook her head as she approached. Malorie noticed her name tag for the first time. Detective Litanna Watkins. “Maybe you folks should go home. We’ll be in touch as soon as we have something to report.”

  Sam put his hand on Malorie’s arm, and she knew he was about to agree.

  “No! No, I can’t leave! I won’t leave without him!” Why couldn’t they understand? And she could see in their eyes that they didn’t. Not the young woman, who maybe had no children of her own. Not even Sam, who was supposed to care so much.

  Detective Watkins exchanged a look with Sam. “I know how you feel, Miss Hovis, but you really need your rest. You won’t be one bit of help to your little brother if you wear yourself out like this.”

  The words taunted Malorie. Little brother. For an instant, it struck her that they would never find Cody if they didn’t even know who they were looking for. Then she realized how irrational that was and wondered if the policewoman was right. She needed to rest. She was no help like this.

  That didn’t seem any more rational than her previous thought.

  “Maybe I should go back out there and call him some more,” she said, looking at Sam, pleading with him to understand. “If he hears me, he’ll come.”

  Sam looked questioningly at Detective Watkins. She shook her head. Anger washed through Malorie. “You can’t stop me! If that’s what I want to do, you can’t stop me!”

  Sam put his arm around her shoulder and held her against him. Just for a moment, she let herself sag against his solid chest. But in letting her defenses down, Malorie felt her control slip. She squared her shoulders and glared at them both.

  Detective Watkins said, “Maybe it’s time to call the boy’s mother.”

  “No!” Malorie had already explained that Susan was away. She didn’t intend to involve Betsy, either. She’d let Betsy keep her away from Cody for more than two years, and she wouldn’t let it happen again. This time, she was here for him. When he came back, she would be here. “I’m telling you, I can handle this myself.”

  If he came back.

  She made up her mind. She turned, yanked her coat off the back of her chair and headed for
the door. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going after him myself.”

  “Malorie—”

  “You can’t stop me! I’m his mother and you can’t stop me!”

  The words spilled out before she realized it. But once they were said, Malorie wouldn’t have called them back. Not even after she saw the look of shock in Sam’s eyes and knew that her reckless words had no doubt cost her all her hopes for the future.

  Suddenly calm, she said, “Cody is my son and I’m going to look for him myself.”

  As she walked out the door of the police station into the cold, damp night, Malorie felt free for the first time in almost three years.

  * * *

  COZY, COMFORTABLE SLEEP, with Tag’s chest for a pillow, beckoned Susan. She was about to give in to it when a memory tweaked her and she started upright. She looked down at Tag, who had already fallen asleep, his long, brown legs twisted in the quilt, his bare chest dark against the sheets. His hair spread over the pillowcase, and she smiled at the realization it was longer than her own.

  Not wanting to wake him, she looked around the room, spotted her overnight bag and struggled with herself.

  In the end, eagerness overcame anxiety.

  Swinging her legs off the side of the bed, Susan put her weight on her right leg and began to maneuver herself across the room, hanging on to the side of the high mattress. By the time she reached her overnight bag, she was perspiring and trembling. With shaking hands she found the tiny pair of manicure scissors she sought, took a deep, weary breath and struggled back to the bed.

  When she reached the bed, she realized Tag was gazing at her questioningly.

  “You’ve been watching me,” she said, embarrassed at being caught, more so as she contemplated the awkward picture she must have made.

  He nodded, yawned. “I kept hoping you’d need my help, but looks like you made it fine without me.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  She climbed back onto the bed, then began running her fingers around the edge of the quilt until she found what she was looking for. With the manicure scissors, she snipped a few stitches at the back of the quilt, parted the cotton batting and spilled a simple gold ring with a tiny chip of a diamond onto her palm.

  Tag was sitting up now, too, and she looked at him as the ring shone in the darkness. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but she realized that he now looked as uncertain as she felt.

  “Well...” Tag said.

  For more than twenty years, the knowledge that this ring remained close by had given Susan a serene confidence that the young love she and Tag had shared had been real and strong and permanent. But with the ring between them once again, she felt a new tension that hadn’t been there before. Where did they go now? Could they really put behind them twenty-plus years of pain and loneliness and betrayals, real and imagined?

  She was no longer certain. And from the look of him, neither was Tag.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MALORIE WANDERED the dark streets in the vicinity of the department store, calling her son’s name. Oblivious to the cold drizzle beginning to fall, even to the danger of being a woman alone in the dark, she knew one thing and one thing only.

  Finding her son was all that mattered.

  She didn’t notice the van that pulled up to the curb behind her on the nearly empty street. Paid no attention when the door slammed and footsteps came up behind her. When Sam spoke her name, she was beyond being frightened. Some things, she’d learned, were worse than risking your neck.

  Pushing back the damp hair plastered to her forehead, she turned at the sound of Sam’s voice. He stood outside the halo of the closest streetlight and the blinking lights marking the nearby construction. She couldn’t read his expression, but at this moment, even that mattered little.

  “You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said.

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He walked to her side. “I’ll stay, too.”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  He nodded, and his face appeared in momentary flashes, there and gone before she could register the set of his jaw, the emotion in his eyes. She started walking, and he followed.

  “Cody!”

  An answering sound came back to her, weaker than the mewling of a lost kitten. She froze and called Cody’s name again. A high, thin sound seemed to fill the deserted street. She dashed in the direction from which it had come and cried out again.

  “Mal, pwease,” said a tiny voice from somewhere beneath the street.

  Malorie dropped to the ground beside the construction work. The grate covering the storm drain had been torn out. And there, far beneath street level, looking up at her from a muddy tunnel leading beneath the street, sat Cody, nursing a scraped and bleeding knee. His face, too, was scraped, and he looked soaked through with rain and mud.

  “Oh, Cody, baby!” Malorie fought the sob in her throat as Sam scrambled down into the ditch after the baby. Hot tears mingled with the cold drizzle on her cheeks.

  When Sam reached up and placed Cody in her arms, the toddler snuggled close and whimpered, “Me cold.”

  Malorie felt as if she was holding him for the first time in her life. Never again would she let go.

  * * *

  BETSY IMPARTED THE NEWS to Tag and Susan as if it pleased her that disaster had occurred while they were away together.

  Susan talked to Malorie at the hospital in Atlanta. The doctors wanted to keep Cody twenty-four hours, to make sure dehydration was the only fallout from his experience. Malorie said there was no need for them to come, but Susan heard the ragged exhaustion in her daughter’s voice. No mother could have stayed away.

  The drive seemed interminable. Tag insisted on driving and Betsy refused to acknowledge his presence the entire way.

  While the windshield wipers smeared her vision of the dreary day, Susan focused sharply on the tension of her unresolved relationship with Tag. Tag had studied the engagement ring, then handed it to her. But it was clear neither of them quite knew where to go from there. Susan had slipped the ring into her makeup bag and wondered if it hadn’t been better off lost in the back seat of a junked station wagon somewhere in South Carolina.

  Somehow, she had believed everything—twenty years’ worth of wrongs—would be okay now. Maybe things wouldn’t be that easy, after all.

  * * *

  THEY FOUND SAM in the waiting room across from the elevator on the ninth floor of the hospital. He looked haggard, and as strained as the three of them had been during the trip from Sweetbranch. He pointed in the direction of Cody’s room and said in a scratchy, bone-tired voice, “Malorie wanted to be alone.”

  Susan wondered at the look he gave her, and said, “I’m going in.”

  Betsy stepped up behind her chair. “I’ll go with you. You’ll need some help.”

  “No, Mother. I can manage by myself.”

  “Well, I hardly see—”

  Tag stepped up and put a hand on Betsy’s elbow. “We’ll wait here,” he said, giving Susan an encouraging smile. “You see about Mal and Cody.”

  With part of her questioning the wisdom of leaving those two together, Susan rolled herself down the hall and into Cody’s room.

  Malorie had pulled the only chair in the room close to the bed. Her eyes were closed, and her head drooped to one side. One hand rested on Cody’s arm, which was hooked up to an IV. Susan winced, noting that they’d taped the restless toddler’s arm to a side rail to keep him from dislodging the needle.

  As Susan rolled closer, Malorie started awake.

  “Mother.” She rubbed her eyes, which looked swollen and red. “Oh, Mother, I was so afraid.”

  Malorie’s voice quavered. In one swift movement, she was at Susan’s side, kneeling with her head in her mother’s lap. Susan touched her daughter’s soft blond hair, felt her shoulders shake with tears.

  “I thought it would be my punishment,” Malorie murmured. “I thought he would die because I gave him up, because I l
ied about him.”

  She looked up at her mother, eyes glistening with tears. Susan thought her heart would break from the anguish in her daughter’s face. The pain of childbirth, she thought, was nothing but preparation for a worse pain—seeing your child brokenhearted.

  “I kept remembering, over and over, how Grandmother told me I’d have to live with the disgrace forever. How the shame would ruin everybody’s life. Even Cody’s.” She wiped away the last of the tears on her cheeks. “But she was wrong. Wasn’t she wrong?”

  “Yes, she was wrong. And so was I, for not being able to see that. For not being able to stand up to her.” Susan shook her head, touched Malorie’s cheek. “I keep thinking I had to be forced into a wheelchair before I could learn how to stand up to my own mother.”

  Malorie nodded, then bit her lower lip. “Sam knows.”

  Susan remembered the defeated look on the young man’s face and felt dread.

  “He had to know,” Malorie continued. “I can see that now. But...I don’t know how he feels.”

  “Ask him.”

  “But he wanted to marry me. And now—”

  “Don’t think you can make his decision for him.”

  Malorie gave a shaky laugh. “I’m not sure I can make my own decisions.”

  “I think you can.”

  Cody stirred, whimpered, and Malorie looked over her shoulder at him. “I guess I have to, don’t I.”

  * * *

  TAG’S FIRST IMPULSE when Betsy returned to the waiting room with her cup of coffee was to leave. But he told himself he could be civil even if she couldn’t. Besides, he wanted to be here when Susan returned.

  “Sam didn’t go in, did he?” Betsy asked sharply, clearly prepared to be miffed if she had been barred from the hospital room while an outsider was admitted.

  “He’s taking a walk.”

  He’d acted strange, Tag thought, troubled in a way he’d never seen before. Tag supposed Sam was simply tired and stressed. But it also confirmed to him that Sam’s interest in Malorie was far more than casual.