He brought her a bowl of chowder, for which she thanked him. “Sorry about the ambience,” he joked, gesturing with his spoon at the cabin. “Usually I treat my dates to a decent dinner in a nice restaurant.”
“Your, um, dates,” Kerry said, thinking that she was hardly his date. It was a slip of the tongue, nothing more, and there was no point in calling Sam’s attention to it, since he was wolfing down food from the bowl in his lap and didn’t seem to realize that he’d made her feel extremely uncomfortable. “Do you have a girlfriend?” She was curious about Sam’s personal life. Maybe she shouldn’t even ask. But there wasn’t much for them to talk about.
“I did, but we broke up recently. Her name was Marcia, and there were no hard feelings. Last I heard she was in the Lower Forty-eight living with a race-car driver. I guess she likes men who indulge in dangerous occupations.” He laughed, and Kerry decided that the breakup hadn’t affected Sam much.
She picked at her tomatoes, shoving them around so it would look as if she’d eaten more than she actually had. She didn’t want to have to make a precipitous run for the shed if her stomach started to act up.
“Is your occupation all that dangerous? You don’t fly much anymore, do you?”
“Only when I undertake some nutso favor like flying Vic’s plane back to Anchorage.” Sam set his bowl on the table beside the couch and got up to stir the fire into more activity. The flames leaped up, illuminating his face for a moment before they subsided; in that brief span of time, Kerry detected that Sam was still more concerned about their plight than he had been letting on.
When he came back to the couch, he yanked a pillow out from behind it and tossed it on the floor. Then he lowered himself to it and leaned back against the couch arm, staring thoughtfully into the flames.
Kerry didn’t speak for a long time, but she couldn’t eat any more. “Tell me,” she said after a time, “about the last time you and Doug came up here to Silverthorne.”
He shot her a quick glance, and she didn’t understand why he looked so wary at first. Or maybe she’d been mistaken. Maybe it was just the way the firelight reflected in his eyes.
“Well,” Sam said, and then there was a long pause. “It was like every other time in a way. We arrived, threw our stuff all around the cabin, slept late the first morning, went fishing all the first day. We talked over old times, laughed and joked and had a great time. And we promised we’d meet back here in a year like we always did, and then we didn’t.”
Something about the quiet way Sam spoke lulled Kerry into a sense of well-being; maybe it was hearing him talk about that time as if it had just happened.
“It’s hard to believe Doug is really gone, isn’t it, Sam?” she said softly. Especially after today’s dream. Especially when he was so fresh in her memory and in Sam’s.
“Yes, it is,” Sam replied.
“Did he ever talk to you about us? About our life together?”
In the past few moments, Sam had been feeling really close to Kerry and to Doug. But he didn’t want to talk about the two of them together. He didn’t speak, wishing she hadn’t asked.
“Did he, Sam?”
He swiveled his head and saw that she was staring at him intently, perhaps hoping for more solace than he had to give. And considering what Doug had told him about his life with Kerry, about their inability to make a baby and Doug’s despair over Kerry’s unhappiness about it, Sam couldn’t tell her what they’d discussed without exposing Doug’s part in the resultant scheme.
“He talked about how well-suited the two of you were,” Sam said finally. It was the truth. Doug had loved Kerry with all his heart.
“I don’t think we could have been any more happily married. No, that’s not right. Perhaps we could have been even happier if we’d had a child.”
There it was, the situation he didn’t want to talk about. It was amazing how Kerry had homed in on the one thing that Sam positively couldn’t discuss with her until he was ready to fess up to the plan he and Doug had concocted, the plan that had brought him here to get Kerry’s signature on those papers.
He couldn’t deal with this. Abruptly Sam stood up and faked a yawn, which wasn’t too hard considering what a long and tiring day it had been.
“If you don’t mind, Kerry, I think you’d better sleep down here. I can bunk in the loft like I have many times before.”
“No, I can sleep there,” she said, sitting up.
Sam reached down and gently pressed her back onto the couch. “We can’t have you passing out while you’re climbing that ladder. It’s better if I go. Besides, I want to keep an eye on you, make sure that fainting spell was only a fluke.” He took their plates into the kitchen and brought the kerosene lantern over to the couch. He set it where she could reach it easily.
As he turned to go, Kerry said, “What’s the plan for morning?”
“Depends on whether the storm’s let up by then.” Kerry’s eyes were wide in the light from the lantern, and they looked golden. Like molten gold. He wanted to lean down and kiss her on the forehead, a kind of supplication or benediction or something but, of course, he didn’t do any such thing.
“Good night, Sam,” she said as he climbed the ladder, so softly that at first he thought her voice was only the whisper of the wind outside.
“Good night,” he said, and he groped around in the dim light of the loft until his knees made contact with the edge of the narrow cot where Kerry usually slept. He stretched out on it, his feet dangling off the end. He fell asleep almost instantly, heady with the essence of her on the pillow where she’d laid her head last night.
WHEN KERRY WOKE UP, she heard the rattle of rain on the roof and thought, Oh no! We won’t be able to work on the plane today!
On the other hand, she wasn’t entirely unhappy about the weather. She wanted to help Sam, but didn’t want to be a detriment as he worked to get the plane airworthy again—and she didn’t think she’d been too helpful yesterday.
Under the blanket she folded her hands over her belly.
I will take care of you, she silently promised the baby. I won’t let anything happen to you. Her bruised shoulder hardly hurt at all today, and neither did her hip. Her finger was sore when she inadvertently moved it, but it had settled into a kind of dull ache. Even her stomach was behaving. Funny how that worked; some days she was sick as a dog, other times she felt entirely normal.
She plucked at her clothes with distaste at the thought of sleeping in the same grubby outfit she’d been wearing yesterday. She sat up and tiptoed across the floor in time to Sam’s “snoofling” in the loft. It was the kind of day, dank and damp, that was meant to be spent in bed. She’d let him sleep.
When she came back from the shed, she lit one lantern for the kitchen and one to put on the table near the couch. She reached into the wood box and chucked a couple of small logs into the kitchen stove, closing the door quietly so as not to wake Sam. Then she dipped water out of the barrel to heat on the stove for her bath.
Bathing in the cabin was a cramped affair in an old miner’s tub, a relic of times past. She hoped Sam would stay asleep until she’d finished; she didn’t want him coming down the ladder and stumbling in on her morning ablutions. Well, if she heard him waking up, she’d have to holler out and tell him to stay where he was.
She slipped a warm velour robe from the wardrobe nearby and undressed quietly, smoothing her hands down over her abdomen. It was slightly rounded with her pregnancy, and she thought it probably wouldn’t be long before she started to show. She smiled at the thought; the growing baby within her was tangible proof of the faith that she and Doug had had in their relationship. Despite the hardships, the lack of money toward the end, despite everything, they had been partners for life. They’d longed for this baby. She was sad that Doug would never see it, but then, she would have it to remember him by. Even if it wasn’t actually his baby, it was his in spirit. That’s what he’d always said.
Once she was sitting in the s
teaming three inches of water in the bottom of the tub, she soaped herself quickly and economically, and it was all she could do not to hum while she bathed. She felt happy within herself and luminous with her secret, the secret of the baby.
When she had finished bathing, she dried herself on the rough terry cloth towel that she kept in the kitchen for that purpose and wrapped herself in her warm robe. She put on a clean pair of wool socks and padded soundlessly around the cabin. Outside the sky was gray and the cloud cover seemed impenetrable. She felt a pang as she realized that no planes would be likely to fly over today, which certainly decreased the likelihood that they would be found by chance. Funny, but during the summer planes flew over frequently, bringing tourists on sightseeing trips to Williwaw Glacier or on fishing expeditions. She’d grown so accustomed to seeing and hearing them that she’d taken them for granted. But now she realized that chances were that no plane would venture in this direction for weeks or possibly even months.
Well, she was counting on Sam—he was resourceful and capable, and Doug had called him one helluva good pilot. If anyone could fly them out of here, Sam Harbeck could.
So her best bet was to keep him well fed and to help him as much as possible, and to that end she slapped the frying pan on the stove. Suddenly the snoofling overhead stopped.
“Kerry?” She thought she sensed a note of panic in Sam’s voice.
She stepped out from under the overhang of the loft so she could look up. Sam leaned over the railing above, his hair sticking out in wild-man fashion. His clothes were rumpled, and he needed a shave.
“Yes?” She looked up at him inquiringly.
An expression of relief swept across his features followed by a kind of wry sheepishness. “When you weren’t on the couch, I thought something might have happened. Are you all right?”
“Very much all right. I’m cooking breakfast.”
She smiled; she couldn’t help it. Sam looked so little-boyish, so appealing in that moment.
“Oh. I guess I’d better come down.”
When she next looked around, Sam stood yawning in the middle of the cabin floor. As she returned her attention to her cooking, he moved closer, scrutinizing her with an intensity that she found extremely uncomfortable. He stood behind her, and she felt his gaze on the back of her head.
“You’re really all right this morning? No hint of dizziness?”
“I’m fine,” she said, stressing the word and wishing he’d go sit down at the table.
“You gave me a scare yesterday.”
She spared him a quick glance. His forehead was wrinkled into a slight frown, and he continued to stare at her in that appraising way of his. It made her nerves jangle, that look.
“Well, this morning everything is great. I’m raring to go,” she said. “Well, as raring as possible when it looks as if we’re not going anywhere,” she amended. She gestured with a nod of her head at the window, which presented a vista of gently falling rain and an eddying mist that completely obscured the view of Williwaw Glacier and everything else.
Sam’s gaze followed hers for a moment and then his eyes lit on the half-full bathtub in the kitchen.
“You’ve already had your bath,” he said. An unnecessary statement, since it was obvious. Maybe he was as uneasy with this whole situation as she was. This perception made it hard for her to continue looking nonchalant. She felt the slow heat of a blush rise along the outside of her neck and wondered why she felt so flustered. It wasn’t as if he’d watched while she was in the tub.
“Well, I’d better take one, too,” he said. “After breakfast, maybe.”
She made herself concentrate on lining up slabs of bacon in the frying pan. “Okay,” she said, but the image of Sam Harbeck standing stark naked in the middle of the cabin the night before last sprang unbidden into mind.
“Do I smell coffee?”
“Yes, help yourself.”
He found his favorite mug, the one with the crack, and poured a cupful from the battered coffeepot. He stood nursing it for a moment between his two hands, inhaling the rich aroma before he treated himself to a long satisfying swallow.
“Want me to do anything?” he asked.
She was acutely aware that her robe gapped open where it overlapped and that one of her socks was almost worn through at the heel. “Sit down at the table,” she said, flipping sizzling slices of bacon with a fork. When he lifted one eyebrow as if he might say something sarcastic, she added, “Please.”
Sam didn’t speak, but sat down, still looking at her and not saying anything. She almost wished he would. She was accustomed to their usual back-and-forth teasing; where had it gone?
She thought it might be a good idea to get an exchange going, but try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything with exactly the right amount of verve. And Sam didn’t help. He sat quietly, hands folded on top of the table. She wished he’d disparage her sock with the almost-hole in the heel. She wished he’d comment that the bathtub in the middle of the floor got in the way.
“I think I’ll go out for a minute,” he said suddenly, and he stood up and pushed his chair back so hard that it almost tipped over. She didn’t have a chance to get two words out before he clomped across the floor, past her and out the back door, and she heard the shed door slam as he entered.
She poured herself a cup of coffee, wondering why things were so tense between them and hoping that her morning sickness was gone for good.
JEEZ, IT WAS HARD being around Kerry. She was so calm, so sweet, and he was a jerk. A disgusting, creepy, degenerate jerk.
Well, maybe not all that creepy. But he was degenerate or he wouldn’t be thinking about sleeping with his best friend’s wife.
Widow, reminded a voice inside Sam’s head. But it didn’t help.
Under normal circumstances he would have run like mad from Kerry Anderson. He would have put as much space between them as was humanly possible. But these circumstances were anything but normal. He’d dreamed about her last night. About the way he had felt when he saw her crumpled on the floor. About the softly woozy focus of her gold-and-silver eyes when she finally opened them. About how he would have given almost anything to touch his fingers to her cheek to reassure himself that she was all right, really all right.
And he couldn’t get away from her in this place. Worse, he didn’t want to. In fact, it was all he could do to keep his hands to himself.
Get a grip, Harbeck, he warned himself. Stay on the straight and narrow. Walk away from this whole scene.
But he couldn’t, that was the thing. He and Kerry were stuck here. Together. And if she found out about those papers, they’d be at each other’s throats. Okay, so he’d move slowly, figure out how to proceed. That’s what Doug would have counseled.
When he came back into the kitchen bearing logs for the stove as a kind of peace offering for leaving so abruptly, Kerry glanced around with that quick smile of hers.
“Thanks,” she said. Her teeth were straight and exceptionally white, and he thought he saw the tip of her tongue before she turned around again to shove the bacon around the frying pan. She had piled her hair into a loose knot, making him think how much he wanted to press his lips to the soft white skin of her nape.
He stowed the logs in the wood box beside the stove. “Might as well empty this, too,” he said gruffly, and he carried the battered zinc bathtub outside and tipped it so that the water flowed away with the rainwater that was still coming down.
This time when he came back in, Kerry was sitting at the table in front of a platter of bacon and scrambled eggs. She’d helped herself to the food, and Sam was pleased to see that she was eating. Well, nibbling anyway. The dark circles he’d noticed below her eyes last night had faded.
She had spread a crossword puzzle magazine open beside her plate. He sat down across from her and started to eat, not speaking.
“What’s a four-letter word for marooned?”
“Hell.”
“Very funny.” Sh
e thought for a moment, then filled in the squares.
“What is it?”
“L,E,F,T,” she said without looking up.
He ate in silence for several more minutes, then got up from the table. He washed his plate in the pan of dishwater in the sink and said, “Mind if I shave?”
She spared him a glance. “Not at all.”
He found the enamel pan he’d used the other night and heated water for his bath and shave in the two large pots she’d used earlier. She kept working on the puzzle while he shaved, and she didn’t look up when he asked, “Where will you be while I’m bathing?”
“Upstairs,” she said as she filled in a set of letters.
He managed to grunt at this. When he was through shaving, he made a show of pouring the heated water into the tub, thinking that Kerry would get the hint.
Instead she went right on working the crossword puzzle.
Sam cleared his throat. “I’ve filled the bathtub,” he said.
Kerry had this vague way of looking up from what she was doing, something he’d noticed long ago, and it was a characteristic that had never seemed particularly attractive until now. Today he was struck by the slightly out-of-focus look in her eyes as she drew herself back from wherever she’d been—in this case the crossword puzzle—and made herself concentrate on whatever was at hand. In this case, him.
“Oh,” she said, jumping up from the chair. “I’ll just run upstairs and get dressed,” and she dropped the magazine. Pieces of paper flew out of it as it fell, scattering across the floor.
One of them landed at Sam’s feet. As Kerry bent to pick up the others, he retrieved this one. It was covered with Kerry’s handwriting in graceful loops and curls.
He didn’t mean to be nosy, but he couldn’t help but read what she’d written on the paper.
Douglas Lytton Anderson, Junior
Daniel Lytton Anderson
Brett Douglas Anderson
Amy Anderson
Aimee Anderson
Amelia Catherine Anderson
Alissa Kerry Anderson
That's Our Baby! Page 8