Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “Yes, for me, Salma died that day. It was the last day I saw her, and I didn’t think she was going to make it. Neither did Richard. He told me so. He said to prepare myself.”

  Teresa had sustained minor burns in the fire, and she had been taken out by chopper with Salma. And Teresa had been at the burn center with Salma when Salma had died. She’d learned of Salma’s death almost at once.

  “No,” Jen said. “She wasn’t dead for you. Not until you learned she’d died.”

  “True, but I think of her death day as the day of the blowup.”

  Jen wanted to get away from the morbid conversation; wanted to get away from an irrational sense of her own responsibility. In no way had she caused or contributed to Salma’s death. She hadn’t even coveted Salma’s fiancé. What had happened between her and Max…

  But she didn’t like herself when she remembered that time. Remembering made her culpable, as culpable as Max, in a mutual seduction or submission to attraction and to perilous circumstances. How could she blame Max for saying that it was all about the fire? Anyone, even the virgin she had been, should have guessed as much.

  She’d wanted to think he was in love with her. In blaming Max for engaging in a casual, gratuitous affair without thought of the consequences, she had to admit her own part—which hadn’t been so different. She’d been opportunistic, at the least.

  Max’s grief had been what she’d needed, perhaps. An excuse for intimacy with a man she knew like a brother, someone both attractive and familiar, known.

  But she’d never really known him until she’d known him as a lover, and then she still hadn’t known him, because he hadn’t spoken about feelings that were locked inside, feelings about Salma’s death.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Would it be mature, the mature thing, she wondered, to tell him the truth?

  But what did she want now, and how would telling him the truth impact on her goals?

  A voice within her whispered that she wanted Max Rickman’s love. Not because she loved him, but because he hadn’t loved her when Elena was conceived. And that was a completely childish desire.

  “I was thinking about—what happened between us. After the fire,” she admitted. “I keep blaming you and it’s not fair, because I knew your girlfriend had just died. I took advantage of you, as much as you did of me.”

  Max lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a new and interesting take on it.”

  “Isn’t it,” she agreed.

  “I’d been attracted to you,” he said, “before Salma died. To be honest, I’m attracted now.”

  The words thrilled her, a warm brush against her skin, a wind promising a future in which she wanted to believe.

  But then it was gone more quickly than it had arrived.

  “I’m not the same person,” she said.

  “The same thing is happening in me.”

  “Which is?”

  “I want to know about you. I’m curious. You’re mysterious to me. And I think that however well I know you, that will continue to be true.”

  Jen didn’t answer.

  What if she wanted more than to know the satisfaction of Max being in love with her? What if she wanted him to be in love with her for different reasons than she’d first believed?

  “I’m over you,” she said. “You can’t seriously believe that after thirteen years I’d still be carrying a torch for you. You can’t believe that of all the men in the world I’d have anything to do with you romantically. I mean, there’s a lot of water under that bridge. And you probably feel as you do,” she said, “because of Elena.”

  “What I said has nothing to do with Elena. But since you brought her up…”

  She waited.

  “She’ll be coming out. I’ve bought the tickets, and she and your mother said it was all right and that they’d cleared it with you.”

  “Yes, yes.” She turned her attention to her food. She felt no particular distrust of Max. But she didn’t understand where he was going with this conversation about her being mysterious. She set down her fork and demanded, “You don’t think I’m going to sleep with you, do you?”

  He reached for his wineglass and took a quick gulp. With a small smile, he resumed eating.

  “You conceited…”

  He shook his head.

  Why was she always acting this way with him, to return again and again to the nineteen-year-old she’d been? Almost all her reactions to him were uncharacteristically immature, not to mention based on fear. Other men didn’t affect her this way. At the martial arts center, she sparred with both men and women.

  “So,” he said, “Thai boxing.”

  As though following her thoughts.

  “What about it?”

  “You hurt each other. You have bruises.”

  She’d worn long sleeves every time she’d been near him. “Did Elena tell you this?”

  “Yes. She thinks it’s strange that you like to fight so much. She said you’re ‘scary,’ but I think it was a compliment.”

  “Have you ever studied any martial art?”

  “Only what Richard taught some of us.” His voice was bitter as poison. “He didn’t make me a fan of Oriental philosophy.”

  “I don’t think of Muay Thai as having much to do with Oriental philosophy. Some, yes. But mostly I consider it an effective fighting art. There are others, but this is my favorite.”

  A slow smile. “Then what Elena says is true. You like to fight.”

  “In the ring. In the context of sport, yes.”

  “I’d like to see you do it.”

  “Really?” She didn’t know why this surprised and pleased her—except that she was a decent competitor.

  “Really.”

  “Maybe back in Colorado,” she said.

  “Do you practice on your own?”

  “Yes, but that’s not exactly a spectator event.”

  “Ah.”

  “This seems as good a time as any to ask why you blame Richard Grass for the blowup—or for the disaster it became.”

  “Because of where he put the crew on the east flank. And we were in the same danger. He’s still in fire, Jen, and he’s still screwing up.”

  She lifted her eyebrows and took a sip of her wine.

  “Last year. Wyoming. A hotshot crew he was supervising nearly got trapped while doing a burnout. Which was, once again, a wrong decision.”

  A burnout, Jen knew, was a fire set inside a control line—a constructed or natural barrier to fire—to consume fuel between the edge of the fire and the control line. She wanted to believe Max; wanted for him to be right. But beneath his accusations against their former superintendent were emotions, some need for revenge. Maybe Max hoped, in some way, to undo Salma’s death or right the wrongness of it by making someone acknowledge error.

  The biggest error, in Jen’s opinion, was the decision to build the Canyon Wind Estates—location. The second biggest error was choosing to risk lives defending those homes.

  But she had friends in Colorado who built dream homes against the national forest. They made all the right sounds of acceptance about the possibility of loss. But this summer, when homes had actually been threatened, no one ever came out and said they didn’t want firefighters to try and save the homes—even at the risk of their lives. She conveyed some of this to Max. “Where is Richard now, by the way?” she asked when they had finished their meal and were waiting for the check.

  “Santa Barbara.”

  Jen blinked. “Now? During fire season?”

  “He’s a fire district administrator with the Bureau of Land Management.”

  “You want him fired, don’t you,” she said.

  The waitress brought their check, and Max took the leather sleeve in which it had come and opened it. “Yes.”

  “I MISS THE OCEAN!” She yelled this through the wind, as they started down the highway. Unexpectedly, Max turned the motorcycle off their southeast course toward Carpinteria and down the winding Pa
inted Cave Road that led toward Goleta. Toward the beach.

  “I didn’t mean now!”

  He slowed and stopped, and she could see the lights of the oil rigs reflecting on the water below. “Do you mean,” he replied over the idling engine, “that you don’t want to go to the beach now? That you want to go home?”

  She did want to go to the beach.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  THEY TOOK OFF THEIR SHOES and walked on the shore outside the Belmont Hotel in Montecito. Jen had asked to go there because she didn’t want to visit wilder shores she associated with their past. She didn’t want Max to believe that her desire to see the ocean had anything to do with him.

  Enjoying the water licking her toes, she said, “Our feet will be covered with tar.”

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “No. It’s worth it.” Just to hear the splash of the water, the quiet rush of low waves, to feel wet sand under her toes. She wanted to cry, as if she’d suddenly been reunited with a part of herself she’d lost. Why had she ever left the ocean? Had she longed for mountains?

  No. She had simply fled, determined to make a new life and become someone new—or rather accept that she was someone new. Maybe. Not a dancer anymore. No more fairy-tale dreams. Had she been hardened, disappointed by life?

  But I love being Elena’s mother. I’ve always loved it.

  Max’s arm reached around her shoulders, and she started, but he was merely steering her around a jellyfish that was lying on the wet sand.

  Jen stopped to look at the jellyfish more closely in the moonlight and the lights from the concrete board-walk. It glittered, iridescent, and she sat back on her heels and inhaled the scent of tar and saltwater, the combined unique smell of the South Coast. The heat, moisture, filled the backs of her eyes again.

  “Happy birthday.”

  She blinked, stood up. Looked at him. “It’s not midnight, is it?”

  “No, but I thought I’d say it anyhow.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sensed Max watching her. What would happen if she looked up? Maybe he would think she expected him to kiss her. Not to look up, to keep walking, would reject the possibility, would kill the chance.

  She wanted neither. Neither to eliminate the chance nor to encourage it—or seem to expect it. She said, “When are you going to see your family?” And tell them about our daughter.

  “I’d planned to do it this evening, but it’s late. After I take you back… Probably tomorrow,” he answered at last. “Come on.”

  He took her hand.

  His was large, hers small. Had he held her hand so long ago? Yes. He had done so many things right.

  She allowed the touch, enjoyed it, enjoyed feeling his calluses, the integrity of a man who worked hard, who lived in the wild, who was somehow one with it. Someone who had become—in a fundamental way—the man he was supposed to be. Jen had not become exactly the person she’d once dreamed of being, and she could no longer even remember the dreams. She supposed they had involved fame, but as an actress or a dancer and not as a television news reporter.

  Unexpectedly, surprising herself, she spoke honestly. “You make me feel young. It feels like, well, college.”

  “I feel that way, too,” he responded in that deep, warm voice that she’d never forgotten. “But this is better.”

  “Is it?” She didn’t pull her hand away. Why was he holding her hand? Because of our child, that’s why.

  A band was playing at a club across from the opulent Hotel Montecito, and Jen heard them doing a Pretenders song, “Brass in Pocket.”

  “Want to go dancing?” he asked.

  “Now?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She glanced up and saw him watching her speculatively. “You smoke jumpers must be lonely guys,” she said.

  “What makes you say that? It happens to be true, but why did you say it?”

  “Because…” She felt herself blush. Well, it was dark.

  “Yes?”

  “You seem to be almost pursuing me, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.”

  “Looked in the mirror lately?”

  She shook her head, not to say that she hadn’t looked in the mirror, but rather to indicate that she didn’t buy what he said. “It’s because of Elena, isn’t it?”

  “Try to remember that I asked you out to dinner before you told me about her. Is it such an alien thing for a man to pursue you?”

  “No,” she admitted. Perhaps he was sincere. Perhaps he simply found her attractive. Perhaps he had a few fond memories of the time they’d spent together in college and after the fire.

  But she doubted it.

  Yes, those could have been his reasons for asking her out to dinner the night they happened to run into each other on Silver Jack Ridge. Happened to be in a burnover together for the second time of your acquaintance. Yes, they’d had more intimacy than many people could count.

  He released her hand, as if he sensed her reservations.

  But she was wrong, because then he put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m attracted to you, Jen. Still, or perhaps I should say again. Or maybe it’s something completely new. It feels new. Does it matter which it is? Not to me. I used to like you—I like you now. And I want to know what’s made you so skeptical.”

  “You made me this skeptical.” She spoke without thinking.

  He dropped his arm from her shoulders. “Want to swim?”

  “Tonight?”

  He made a tsking sound in response. “Afraid of sharks?”

  “No, and I’m not afraid of you, either.”

  When she glanced up, he was grinning, his teeth very white in the darkness.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “I think you are.”

  “That’s the sort of vanity I should have expected.”

  But what she didn’t expect, even after thinking he might kiss her, was his hand, almost trembling as it caressed her cheek. As he tilted her chin up and kissed her.

  Her first thought was, This could work. Because she liked the kiss. It might just as well have been the first time. She could remember little of kissing him more than a decade before. His lips exerted a gentle pressure, his tongue drawing her forth rather than expecting or presuming.

  Pulling back from Max, Jen met his eyes and said the last thing she’d expected to say, or even feel. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, keeping an arm around her as they continued walking.

  Yes, she’d dated since they’d last been together. But this is different, Jen.

  How was it different?

  She knew; knew with a rush of honesty so keen it hurt.

  Going out on dates wasn’t the same as becoming hopeful—hoping for more than a date, more than many dates.

  For a deeper level of caring.

  With Max, tonight in particular, she had begun to hope. And maybe to want.

  She muttered, in irritation with herself, “I don’t suppose you’re frightened of me?”

  “Terrified,” he said, and she didn’t know whether or not he was teasing. His arm stayed around her shoulders. “And with that admission—shall we head home?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THEY FOUND THE OTHERS asleep. In dreamlike privacy, Max kissed Jen good-night outside her bedroom door. And in the morning, when she awoke to a knock on the door she knew who was on the other side. She had slept in an oversized T-shirt with the cover of the vintage graphic novel Tintin in Tibet, on the back. “Come in,” she said, drawing the covers up around her.

  Max opened the door, saw her and stepped inside. He shut the door behind him and gave her an appreciative look.

  Jen grinned. Didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help it. And remembered that this was her birthday.

  Max didn’t seem to remember or didn’t mention it in any case. “I’m going to see my father this morning. Then I have an appointment with Richard. I wondered if you would mind killing an hour or so at a coffeehouse
in Carpinteria, so that I can give my dad a chance to react without an audience. Then you and I can go see Richard.”

  It would keep him from making the long trip back to Canyon Winds Estates to pick her up.

  “Sure,” she agreed. “On the bike?”

  “I thought so.”

  She didn’t want to acknowledge how much she wanted to feel that closeness again, her front against his back, hugging his hard middle. “Okay. Give me a few minutes.”

  “Half an hour?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t need that long.”

  But she was glad to take it, glad for the time to take extra care with her makeup and the time to choose which top to wear with her blue jeans.

  When they met in the kitchen, he had put on black leather chaps over his jeans. He scrutinized her jeans and said, “You should really have some of these, too.”

  Bob was at the table, sipping coffee with Teresa, and he gave Jen a speculative look.

  “Riding motorcycles isn’t normally a part of my life,” Jen said. “I’m fine.”

  “Maybe it will be,” Bob remarked.

  Jen opened her mouth, then snapped it shut.

  Teresa smiled. Strange, for years she’d looked sort of out of shape, pale and unaware. But already, after a night in California—and away from Robin, Jen thought—her color and her eyes were brighter. Like Bob, she seemed on the verge of openly teasing Jen and Max. “Happy birthday,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “How old?” Bob asked. “Or don’t we ask that?”

  “She’s thirty-two,” Max said.

  He remembered that, at least, perhaps had thought about it.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was clinging to him again, feeling like his girlfriend, while knowing she wasn’t. He drove them into the town of Carpinteria, to a coffeehouse called Uncommon Grounds, and went inside with Jen. “I’m buying,” he said, squeezing her hand briefly. “Your birthday coffee.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And it’s a business expense.”

  “Did we say you were paying expenses?” Jen mused.

  He gave her a wolfish grin, his eyes crinkling in the corners. “How do you think I’m going to talk you into letting me buy you motorcycle leathers to protect your precious skin?”