by Donna Alward
“I’ve never cried for her,” he said. “Not the night they told me. Not at her funeral. Not once.”
He thought that would make Nora yank her hand from his. But instead, her grip tightened. She left her hand where it was, and her touch had energy in it. Acceptance. Strength. Healing.
Suddenly Brendan felt an enormous sensation of freedom. He was still free-falling. It was the same as flying.
He had expected telling her would bring him to his knees, unleash that bottled-up torrent of grief.
Instead, it had given him wings.
* * *
From that moment of trust, an unexpected bond grew between them, and together they flew into the sun of summer.
They simply could not get enough of each other. Luke was part of the magic, somehow. Over Nora’s sputtering protests, Brendan taught him how to ride the motorcycle in her driveway. And then he taught her. Just as with poker, Luke had potential, she had none.
The three of them sneaked away in the heat of the day to go to the beach and swim and play in refreshing, icy waters. They rented kayaks, which were more fun than the cumbersome pedal boats. They took the three-legged dog for long hikes in the cool of the forest.
With Iggy recovering under the kitchen table, and Charlie on Luke’s lap, they played poker in the evening. Brendan even let himself be talked into Scrabble.
Increasingly, Brendan and Nora found ways to be by themselves. He took her to enchanted places, like the waterfall that cascaded out of the rocks on the Hidden Valley Trail. They ate picnics, and lay out on the grass, sometimes staying late enough to watch the stars pop out in inky skies.
Village on the Lake seemed the least important thing Brendan had ever done.
Important was reading over Nora’s latest draft for her column. Important was taking Luke and Charlie to visit Deedee.
It was on one of those occasions that Brendan decided it was time to address the Charlie issue.
“Maybe it’s time for Charlie to come back here to Deedee’s. He’s getting better.” Brendan and Luke were doing dishes. Nora and Deedee were outside on her porch in the rocking chairs, Charlie on the elderly woman’s lap.
“No,” Luke said, and cast a troubled look through the screen door. “No. He’s not getting better. He’s holding.”
But given what Charlie had looked like just a short time ago, wasn’t “holding” a miracle?
Brendan smiled to himself. He had gone from being the world’s biggest cynic to believing in miracles.
That was a miracle in and of itself.
And wasn’t that what love did? Create miracles? Turn the ordinary into the extraordinary?
Love.
Brendan contemplated that word, shocked by it.
But what else could make everything ordinary feel as though it was infused with light?
Even the hunger he felt for physical connection with Nora—holding her hand, brushing her hair away from her face, touching her lips—was a miracle of feeling alive, of feeling eager about life.
He took pleasure in showering her with little gifts: a gold necklace with two hearts entwined, a set of tiny silver hoop earrings. Girlie gifts that she was so uncomfortable accepting and then wore with such feminine pleasure.
He took her to public places, like Shakespeare on the Lake, in the natural amphitheatre at Lakeside Park. He had a barbecue at his house and introduced her to his friends and business associates. She still wouldn’t let him tell anyone she was Ask Rover, though.
And it hit him right then, as she was standing at his kitchen sink, after all the guests had gone.
He went and put his arms around her, and breathed in deeply of her hair. She turned and caught him hard and they clung to each other.
And then she stretched up and he stretched down.
And their lips met right in the middle.
And he knew.
In the depth and passion and soul of that kiss, Brendan Grant knew the truth. He loved her. And he put her slightly away from him and he saw the truth shining in her. She loved him, too.
“I want to stay the night,” she whispered.
But he knew that would never work for him. And it would never really work for her, either.
What he was feeling for Nora wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of thing.
There would be people who said it was too soon, and that he couldn’t possibly know, and that he was rushing things.
But it wasn’t too soon. When he counted back the days, he realized he had known her for six weeks. Somehow they had become the best six weeks of his life. He did know, and in this life, where things could turn around so quickly, was there ever a moment to waste?
He had never in his whole life so badly wanted to do something right. He put her away from him. “You need to go home.”
She looked wounded, and he touched her swollen bottom lip with his thumb, nearly caved in with yearning. Gave in to the desire to kiss her one more time.
This time when they pulled away they were both panting. His shirt was tugged out of his slacks where her hands had crept under it, splayed themselves across his flesh with an urgent wanting.
He broke away from her. “Go home.”
Tomorrow he would go out to Nora’s Ark with his motorcycle and pick her up. He would have the most gorgeous ring he could find in Hansen in his pocket. He would have champagne and strawberries, and he’d carry them to a viewpoint in the mountains where he could show her the whole world.
And then he’d ask her to marry him.
But for now? She had to go home before he did something that disrespected her and the enormous love he felt for her.
“Go home,” he said gruffly.
He lay awake for a long time that night, thinking that soon his bed would not be empty. That soon his life would not be empty. He lay awake thinking of how he would propose. The exact words he would say.
He lay awake picturing the light that would come on in her when he went down on bended knee in front of her....
When he finally slept, he dreamed.
Becky had finally come to him. She was in a meadow filled with brown-eyed, wild sunflowers. She was in long skirt, and she was dancing, just like Nora had been dancing that day with the bunny. There was a blanket spread out in the grass, and a baby was sitting on it, his pudgy fist full of wildflowers.
And Becky was holding something, too, just like Nora had been holding Valentine.
Her face shining with joy, Becky whispered, “We’re all right. Can’t you see that we’re all right? All of us.”
And he moved closer to her, wanting to see her, wanting desperately to tell her how sorry he was for not knowing what he had when he had it. He moved toward her, needing to see the baby on the blanket and the baby she was holding.
But then he stopped short.
Because it wasn’t a baby she was holding so tenderly to her bosom.
It was Charlie.
Brendan woke covered in sweat, to the sound of the ringing phone. He knew before he picked it up exactly what had happened. He actually considered not answering.
All this time he had been free-falling. Now he considered the possibility he was not going to survive the landing.
He picked up the phone. As he had known, it was Luke.
“Charlie’s gone,” he said.
Brendan almost said, “I know,” but he didn’t.
“You don’t have to come,” Luke said.
But he did. He had to go and be with them.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
When he arrived, Luke was holding Charlie, with Nora sitting beside him, holding his hand.
She gave Brendan a beseeching look that said, Take this pain away, and he felt all the angry impotence of not being able to.
“I’ll go out and dig a hole,” he offered.
“No, I’m taking him to Deedee’s.” Luke said. “I made a box for him.” He got up, carrying the lifeless cat, cuddling him against his narrow chest.
He brought back a box clumsily made of wood, the corners painstakingly sanded. It had a picture of Charlie lacquered onto the lid. Beneath the picture Luke had carved Charlie’s name.
It was not a box that had been whipped up in the less than an hour since Charlie had died.
Nora lost control when she saw it.
But Luke didn’t. He opened it up and laid the cat on the soft white towel inside. He put on the lid, and turned to Brendan, who felt as if his control was an elastic band being stretched thinner and thinner.
All this time, while he’d been having fun and romancing Nora and convincing himself love could fix everything and that the cat was going to get better, Luke had been getting ready for a different ending. A realistic one.
“We need to take him to Deedee’s,” Luke said. “I’ll call her and let her know we’re coming.”
Considering how Deedee had had issues around being there when the cat died, Brendan wasn’t so sure that was a good idea.
“We’ll bury him there,” Luke stated, as if it was all decided. Brendan might have suggested they bury the cat here, but he was terrified if he opened his mouth all that would come out would be a wail of fury and impotence.
Silently, with Nora beside him crying helplessly, Luke in the back, quiet and pale, with the cat in the box on his lap, Brendan drove them to Deedee’s.
She was waiting, dressed in black. Luke gave her the box, and she stared at it, ran her fingers over the carving of the cat’s name, bent and kissed the picture. And then they all followed her out to the yard.
Brendan saw that while he’d been laughing, and packing picnics and buying trinkets, and watching stars come out, Luke had not just been bringing back a neglected flower bed. He’d been preparing a resting place.
The bed that had been such a mess was now fully weeded. Underneath a rosebush, Luke had dug a square hole. It had been there for a while; white rose petals had fallen inside.
Luke took the box from a quietly weeping Deedee and gently laid it in. A shovel was set unobtrusively against the fence, and he went and got it and began to fill the hole.
Deedee wailed.
It reminded Brendan of how she had sounded when they had buried Becky, that day he had stood there and not shed a tear.
Nora put her arm around those thin, caved-in shoulders of Becky’s grandmother.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.” They moved toward the house. Brendan stayed outside with Luke.
“I’ll do it,” Brendan offered, moving to take the shovel from him.
Luke’s grip on it tightened. “No,” he said, his voice fierce and strong and determined. “I have to finish it. I’m making a mend.”
Brendan shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He was so aware of his own stupidity. Over the last while, his guard had come down. He had let himself hope that everything could be all right.
In a world where it never was.
He listened to the steady thump of dirt hitting the top of that painstakingly crafted wooden box. He thought of Charlie inside, still and silent. Had he actually thought the cat was going to live?
Dead was dead.
He thought of how powerless he had been to stop anything.
Even falling in love, when that was what he knew he could not do. He knew he could not do it, because the light had broken through the cracks in his cave, undermined the strength of the walls.
Everything felt as if it was shattering around him.
Luke glanced up. “Are you okay?”
The youth was watching him way too closely, with that look so much like his aunt’s. You could hide nothing from these two; they saw you, right to your soul.
Brendan pinched the bridge of his nose. He swallowed hard. He tried to breathe, and when none of that worked, he spun on his heel and walked away.
* * *
“Go home,” Brendan had said to her. His face had been ablaze with love and with promise for a future.
But that had been before Charlie died.
She tried to think if he had said a single word at that solemn, sad little ceremony in Deedee’s backyard.
Nora didn’t think he had. And then he had left without saying goodbye.
There was no way she could have known that those last words to her had stopped short of the future. What he must have meant was go home, go away, it’s over.
Those magical days ended as quickly as they had begun. Just like that, the phone stopped ringing, the motorcycle stopped appearing in the yard.
What had changed? Charlie had died. That meant they needed him more, not less. At first, Nora felt furious with Brendan for letting them down.
This was when Luke needed to know he could count on someone else.
She needed to know that.
She had phoned and left Brendan a message. Had practically begged him to be there for her nephew. Had hoped he would hear her own unspoken need.
But he had not come.
Like a lovesick teenager, she had waited by her phone for him to call and offer some explanation, but no call came because there was no explanation.
Trying to protect Luke, she went through the motions. She even managed to rise above her own pain to think of Deedee.
She was bringing Deedee a casserole as Brendan was leaving. He saw her and searched for a way to escape. There was none.
He looked awful, as if he wasn’t eating or sleeping. There were dark circles under his eyes and it made her want to go to him, wrap her arms around him and hold him.
But he was glaring at her, and then he crossed his arms over his chest, waiting, his face a mask. Holding him would be like trying to hold a porcupine.
She had to fight such weak impulses in herself, anyway. He had broken her heart. He had broken Luke’s heart. And she wanted to comfort him?
He needed to be brought to task, and she was just the woman to do it!
She didn’t bother with the niceties. She didn’t say hello, or ask where he’d been or why he hadn’t called.
She said to him, her voice low with fury at his betrayal of her and her nephew, “What are you hiding from?”
He smiled a tight, horrible, icy smile. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You made a mistake,” she said. “But not the one you think.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think the mistake was letting Becky drive that night. But you had started to make the mistake long before that.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“WHAT ARE YOU talking about?” Brendan said.
She could hear the coolness in his voice, but he wasn’t shutting her down or shutting her up. He was the one who, over the summer, had given her a voice, and now he would just have to live with the consequences of that.
“She wanted to love you. While you were busy trying to impress her with someone you weren’t, she wanted to love you. That’s why she got pregnant. She sensed you pulling further and further away. She wanted you back.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can.”
“Stop it. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’re hiding. From pain. From life. From love.”
For one full minute she held her breath. He was hearing her. He was leaning toward her. He wanted it all: that place of refuge, the home, the love.
He wanted it all, and she could tell the exact moment he remembered the price. His face closed.
“That’s rich,” he said coldly. “This from the woman who never tells anyone who she
really is?”
And then he turned and walked away.
The fury dissipated a bit that night as she contemplated that. She had taken a chance through these long days of summer. She had shown him who she really was. She had been zany and carefree, and she had let her intuition out.
Though maybe never quite so much as she had on Deedee’s front steps this afternoon.
And she thought he had liked who she really was. Maybe even loved it.
But then, softly, it came to her. The point wasn’t really what he liked or didn’t like. The point was that she had liked it! She had loved it. She had loved living in that place of freedom, without masks.
As long as she was hiding any part of who she really was, she recognized she would never have power.
She recognized something Brendan Grant might not have known.
You could protect yourself by being alone. But that required nothing of you. Life required something. And that was that you become who you really were, under any circumstance.
Life went on. Nora had a boy to raise. School was starting again soon. He needed school supplies and clothes. She needed to get on with the business of living.
She had even stopped writing Ask Rover, and now was very aware she needed to start again.
So on that first day of school, after Luke had gotten on the bus, Nora went through the piles of letters she’d received, and she didn’t pick a single easy one. She didn’t pick one that said, “Sambo will not stop pooping on the floor,” or “Buffy attacks the mailman.”
She picked one that said, “My dog is sick. Do I spend the money to make him well, or do I give up?” She picked one that said, “My kids want a dog so badly, but I’m a single mom and I feel overwhelmed already.” She picked one that said, “I work long hours and am never home. Is this fair to my dog?”
She picked them, and with Iggy, the most lovable iguana ever born, snoozing on top of her feet, she answered them, from the place deep in her heart that had always whispered to her.
That place that other people didn’t always understand, because it was so pure and uncorrupted.
It was a place of untainted instinct and uncontaminated intuition, and it was who she had always been and who she wasn’t going to be afraid to be anymore.