“I’m sorry I woke you.”
She laid a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. Do you have these dreams very often?”
“I feel lousy,” he said, ignoring her question, tugging the damp shirt from his skin, raking his fingers almost angrily through his hair. “I’m going to take a shower. You go back to bed.”
Why hadn’t he answered her question? she wondered as she lay there listening to the water running in the bathroom. In his sleep, he had seemed so like a terrified child. And yet she had been the child last night. She only vaguely remembered Jonathan putting her to bed, fitting her into his too-large pajamas, though she recalled clearly her lovely sense of well-being. “Sleep well, my sweet Katherine,” he had said, and kissed her forehead. But had he really? She tried to piece events together, separate fact from fancy. She recalled offering, at some point, a feeble argument about having to go home and work on Hattie Holloway’s portrait. Jonathan had replied, “To hell with Hallie Holloway,” or something to that effect. She must tell Jason about her commission, she thought suddenly. He’ll be so happ…
Memory brought her up short, pressed against her heart. Jason was no longer in the world. For an instant she’d forgotten. She knew from experience that forgetting was common in the beginning. The smallest thing: a song, a book, a mere thought could send you reaching for the phone to dial a familiar number—until you remembered.
And it hurt, dammit! It hurt.
So immersed was she in her thoughts that Katie didn’t notice the water had stopped running, or that Jonathan, now clad only in a navy robe, his hair damply dark and unruly from the shower, stood watching her from the doorway. Only when he spoke did she look up.
“I thought you might have gone back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake you a second time.”
“I wasn’t sleepy. Are you all right?”
“I’ve recovered. How about you?”
She said she was fine, too, and then, as their gazes remained locked, as Katie’s longing for him grew, fear and doubt crept over her like dark clouds blocking out the warmth of the sun. She thought of Lona. She thought of Jonathan telling her not to make more of their single night of love than what there was. Impatiently, she pushed the thoughts away. He loved her. She couldn’t be wrong about this. She felt it from him—felt everything she needed to know. And her heart told her to trust—to believe.
She raised her arm from the bed and held out her hand to him.
***
Later, as they lay together, bodies damp and relaxed, happy, Jonathan traced her lower lip with his fingertip. Katie felt a mixture of wonder and shyness, and thought she would be quite content to stay right here where she was for the rest of time. With perhaps the odd grape or square of cheese tossed to her from time to time for sustenance.
“I always thought magic was reserved for kids,” Jonathan said softly. “I know different now with you, Katherine.”
She smiled dreamily and nuzzled against him. “Me, too.” She raised her eyes to his. “Why do you always call me Katherine? No one has called me that since I was a little girl, and then only my aunt and my teachers.”
He kissed her fingertips. “Because you look like a Katherine.”
“Oh? And what does a Katherine look like?”
“You’re fishing?” he teased lightly.
“Yes.” She nibbled his earlobe. “You said I should learn.”
He laughed and drew her more firmly against him. “Well,” he began, “Katherine is a tall, elegant lady with eyes the color of emeralds under water, and silky brown hair that turns gold in the sunlight. She has a determined, maybe even stubborn, tilt to her chin.
She’s a woman filled with spirit and courage that was evident to me from the moment I set eyes on her in that hospital bed—so fragile, so vulnerable, yet beneath it all, strong and fiercely independent.”
“This is a wonderful story,” Katie said, grinning, a little embarrassed, but loving it all the same. “Is there more?”
“I’m serious. You really are a little girl in many ways, you know.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “That innocence and wonder of life comes through in your work, and in odd, sweet moments, in you.”
Giving her a mock leer, he added, “And Katherine is also a wanton woman, filled with fire and mystery.” He growled sexily and Katie laughed, reminding herself, lest she get carried away, that Jonathan was Irish on his father’s side and clearly more than capable of a little blarney himself. But she didn’t mind in the least.
“She sounds fascinating.”
“You are, my darling.”
It had grown light outside the window as Jonathan and Katie sat together in the bed talking and drinking the coffee Jonathan had prepared. Katie began to absent-mindedly stroke the blanket covering them. Scarlet against black, she noticed now, the two colors woven to form a bold, intricate pattern of zees.
“This is lovely,” Katie commented. “Your mother’s work?”
“My grandmother’s. I fell heir to those things precious to my mother, and in turn, to me. Lona was never very much interested in her Indian heritage.”
Hearing Lona’s name spoken so casually by Jonathan, so unexpectedly in this intimate setting, with Katie still aglow from their recent lovemaking, punctured her new-found serenity. “Lona’s Indian?” she said, unable to look at him, her stomach knotting.
“Half, like me.” There was mischief in his eyes. “Lona’s my sister.”
Katie could only stare at him. Then, a slow anger beginning to build in her, she repeated, “Your sister.”
“My kid sister, actually.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before, Jonathan Shea? Why did you let me go on thinking—a modern, open relationship. Really. You let me make a complete fool of myself.”
He set his coffee mug down on the night table to run a hand slowly down her arm. “Never for a minute. When Lona telephoned your house that night, I thought I detected just a hint of jealousy from you—but I was afraid to hope. After all, I was still operating under the belief that Drake was in the picture. So I told myself it was probably that you were just annoyed at having your phone number given out so freely, which was understandable, particularly given the circumstances.”
“Even so, you could have told me yesterday.”
The mischief was back in his eyes. “Yes,” he grinned. “I suppose I could have.”
“I hate you.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Good.” He kissed her.
When they parted, Katie asked him if Lona was unhappy, and it was wonderful to be able to say the name without feeling the old pangs of jealousy. “You said she stayed with you between plays—and lovers.”
Jonathan was thoughtful. “Unhappy? Yes, she has her moments. Lona lives life at fever pitch. She’s only really happy, or perhaps euphoric is a better word, when she’s on the threshold of a new romance, or a new play. Which fortunately,” he added, his smile one of deep fondness, “is more often than not.”
He told her with modest pride that Lona was a wonderful actress while admitting he might be slightly biased. “But she does get great reviews,” he said, “and audiences seem to love her.”
“It’s a life riddled with insecurities, though, isn’t it?”
“Anything safer would bore Lona to death. She likes to live on the edge, scaling mountain peaks, occasionally dipping into valleys of darkness, just to see if she can climb back out again.”
“I’d like to meet her sometime. She sounds interesting.”
“She is. A bit overwhelming at times, but I think you’d like her. I know she’d be crazy about you. Our mother used to worry constantly about Lona. She…” He stopped abruptly, a haunted expression coming into his eyes. He seemed to slip away from her, out of reach.
She’d seen this expression before, but now, whatever was carving away at his insides was working much closer to the surface.
“What is it, Jonathan?”
He was
staring out the window where trees swayed lightly as if to music only they could hear. “Nothing,” he said.
Katie rose on one elbow and set her coffee cup beside Jonathan’s on the night table. She turned to face him. “Please don’t shut me out.
This has something to do with the dream, doesn’t it? You—called out to your mother in the dream.” She traced his arm, felt the downy dark hair beneath her fingers, felt his muscle tighten. His withdrawal from her became more total, his eyes more distant. Then Katie was above him, her breasts flattened against his chest. She tried to will him with her eyes. “Tell me, Jonathan.”
He came back to her. He smiled, but she saw the falseness there.
“Yes, I want to tell you everything,” he said, reaching up and playfully winding his fingers in her hair. “And someday I will—I promise. But I want to know about you. I want to know about the sort of things that made you cry, when you were a little girl—what made you laugh. I want to feel jealous of all the people who were in your life when I wasn’t.”
“Tell me, Jonathan.”
His hand dropped from her hair. Anger flashed in his blue eyes.
“You just keep tapping away, don’t you? Delicate little taps with you
Katie winced visibly.
The anger fled from his eyes, and he pulled her fiercely to him.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s not just idle curiosity, you know,” she said, her face buried in the hollow of his neck, feeling the pulse there beat soft and warm against her mouth.
“Yes, I do know that, I do,” he murmured. Though she didn’t hear his sigh, she felt it throughout his body—a sigh of resignation, of defeat. “I thought I’d dealt with all of it,” he said. “Come to terms, as they say in the wacky world of psychiatry.”
She smiled and waited, sensing him needing only the gentle push of love she offered. This was agonizing for him, she knew, and she was suddenly taken with a sense of responsibility that almost frightened her. She mustn’t let him down. “Jonathan,” she prodded softly.
“It’s a long and, I’m sure, very boring story,” he said, trying to smile and failing miserably.
He gazed at her for a moment longer, then shifted his eyes to the ceiling, to the square acoustic tiles above them. His eyes snapped shut, as if in response to something he was seeing—something too painful to look at. They opened slowly, continued to stare at the ceiling. Katie had moved off him, now lay quietly at his side.
“It all happened such a long time ago,” he began haltingly. “I was twelve years old. My father was a big, outgoing Irishman. He taught school on the Indian reserve where my mother lived.” He glanced at
Katie. “I told you she was Indian.”
“Yes, but I would have guessed from looking at you that one of your parents was.” She regretted her lightness of tone at once, and prayed it didn’t put him off. She felt a moment’s tension, but thankfully her comment brought only a smile.
“Lona looks more like her. Dad often talked to Lona about Mother—in the beginning. Lona never wanted to hear, though. She said it was depressing. But I hung on his every word. I wanted to know everything about her.”
Katie nodded, sensing that something bad had happened to his mother.
“Anyway, they met and my father fell madly in love with her. She was just seventeen. He said she was lovely, like a rare and fragile flower. Apparently, too fragile,” he said more to himself than to Katie.
“She was tiny, with large brown eyes that often darted about like a frightened doe.”
He sees her now, Katie thought. He sees her and it’s killing him.
“Why was she afraid?” she asked quietly.
Jonathan shifted his weight in the bed, and when he spoke again his voice was oddly wooden and empty, and she understood that he’d needed to detach himself emotionally in order to get the words out.
“The fear came later. But I’m getting ahead of my story. As I said, these things I’m telling you were related to me by my father.” He cleared his throat. “Except for her eyes—oh, yes, I do remember her eyes. I remember…he took her from the reservation and married her, and her people turned their backs on her. She was no longer one of them.”
“Oh, Jonathan, how terrible.”
“My father said she grieved for her family, her friends every minute of her short life. She was an outcast in our neighborhood. She made no friends. There were prejudices, as there are now, only then they were more deeply embedded, more overt.”
“Did you feel the prejudices, too?”
A pause. “Often.”
Katie understood now why he made his little self-deprecating ethnic jokes. It was a defense mechanism. You make the joke before someone else gets the chance to.
“Go on.”
“I never really saw her depression until I was much older,” he said. “She always had a smile for me and Lona, a touch. Sometimes she sang to us at night—soft, sweet lullabies that I never understood the words to, though it didn’t matter. I can still hear them.” He smiled at the memory. Waited, went on. “I remember the way she smelled when she hugged me close, of some delicate wild flower I never knew, and don’t now. Anyway, my father—he said if she left him, she might be accepted back into the tribe. I think they talked about it. He couldn’t bear her unhappiness, and naturally he blamed himself. But she loved him—loved us, and she wouldn’t leave.”
Jonathan plucked a loose thread in the blanket. Katie ached for him, for the terrible pain that was in him. A part of her wanted to halt the flow of words, to chase back the memories. Yet she felt that he needed to look at his past, to delve into it, and perhaps in this way to rid it forever of the power to torment him with such savagery. She remained silent.
“And—and then one day…” He went on, faltered, stared harder at the ceiling, began again. “It was summer, toward the end of the school term. I’d run all the way home from school to plead to be allowed to go swimming. Lona was five then, and being the gregarious one, was off playing with her friends. I can’t be sure, of course, it was such a long time ago, but I think she was. Even before I burst into the house, I heard my mother’s screams. In my rush, I’d paid little attention to the ambulance parked at the curb, thinking, if I thought of it at all, that it didn’t have anything to do with us.
“Two men in green hospital coats, and a tall woman wearing glasses shaped like cat’s eyes—were in our living room. My mother was caught between the grim, red-faced men who were attempting to drag her by her arms toward the door where I stood, watching. She just kept screaming and screaming, bucking and kicking like a trapped animal, trying to free herself, while my father stood by like a gray statue, silent tears rolling down his face.”
Katie’s heart ached at the scene Jonathan described—a scene so traumatic it would etch itself forever in a child’s mind and follow him like some demon throughout his adult life.
“And suddenly she was looking straight at me. Her screams stopped and her body went limp. The biggest of the two men picked her up in his arms as easily as if she were a child. I will never forget her eyes then—big, empty velvet eyes that saw nothing. Or perhaps some long ago memory. She didn’t know me, that much I understood.
“I flew at them, flailing out with my fists, commanding the man to let her go, but it was like beating a wall, like commanding the wind to change direction. When I could do nothing, I ran after them into the street, chasing the ambulance that was taking her from me even after it was long out of my sight. And the wailing siren only an echo in my mind. I ran until I could run no more…”
Again, he shifted his position in the bed, and his pain was visible in the movements. “At last my father came and took me home. I never saw her again. It was just three weeks later that Dad told us she was dead. He didn’t explain why or how, just that she was dead. It was only much later that I found out that one night she slipped out of bed in the darkness of her room in that mental hospital where they’d taken her. Clear
vision must have surfaced from the shadows of her mind for that brief moment. I’ve often imagined how frightened, how alone she must have felt then. Some attendant or careless nurse had left a glass in the room. My mother found it, smashed it, and slashed her wrists.
They didn’t find her until the next morning.”
“Oh, Jonathan,” Katie whispered, her hand going out to cover his.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
At last, he said, “See, I told you it was a long story.”
Ignoring his feeble attempt at lightness, she asked, “What—what about your father?”
Jonathan shrugged. “He nursed his grief with alcohol. His suicide took a little longer to accomplish—about ten years.
“Anyway, I had this idea I wanted to help people with emotional— mental illness. I couldn’t do anything for my parents—I thought I might—I might be able to do something for…” He swallowed hard.
“And you have. It’s a noble calling, Jonathan, and with good motivation.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice weary now. He laced his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. “Maybe I was only trying to help myself to understand it all. I—uh, lost a young patient recently.”
Bewilderment creased his forehead. “A girl—sixteen…” His voice failed.
“Yes, I know.”
He looked at her in mild surprise. “Linda Ring, no doubt. A first rate nurse, but she can’t bear confidences.” Another sigh. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I found myself wondering for the first time if what I was doing had any real worth. You talk—you apply years of accumulated knowledge—you try. And then…”
Katie, anxious to still his self-doubts, said, “You know better than anyone, Jonathan, that psychiatry isn’t an exact science. And you do help people. I know from my stay in the hospital that you have a fine reputation as a doctor.
“You said you try—and that’s all any of us can do. That girl wasn’t your failure. Maybe she was society’s—or her own…”
“Maybe.”
A silence fell between them, then Katie asked, “Does Lona remember her mother?”
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