Keeping Caroline

by Vickie Taylor

  “This is the hardest part about living all the way in Sweet Gum,” she said to Matt by way of greeting. “Not being able to visit him.”

  His stoic mien never wavered. “I offered you a solution to that problem.”

  “I can’t stay, Matt,” she said softly.

  “You won’t stay. There’s a difference, might as well be honest about it.”

  “You don’t really want me. You just got caught up in the emotion of the wedding yesterday, and the whole family thing, being back in the house. We both did.”

  Finally a thin smile, more irony than humor, cracked his stone veneer. “I must really be loosing my touch if you can think I don’t want you, after last night.”

  The memory of what had almost happened on the big bed they’d once shared warmed Caroline’s cheeks. The need, the longing, she’d felt then rippled through her again, like an echo. The reaction was natural, she supposed. Maybe even inevitable, as was their response to each other. A year apart couldn’t erase fifteen years of marriage. Their bodies were still in tune, even if their minds were singing different songs.

  “Wanting sex isn’t the same thing as wanting a life, Matt.”

  “Maybe I want both.”

  “If I believed that,” she said, “nothing could make me go.”

  He shoved his shades into the front pocket of his shirt and advanced on her. Towered over her. “What do I have to do to make you believe it? Make love to you without a condom? Is that what you want? Then let’s do it.”

  He reached for her, and she took a step back, frightened by the intensity in his voice. The conviction. “Matt, please. Don’t do this. Not here.”

  “Why not? Our son’s grave is as good a place as any to get it on,” he said bitterly. “There’s no one around.”

  He took another step toward her.

  “Stop it!” she cried. He grabbed her wrist to stop her, but she yanked free. She looked at him, trying to understand what was happening. Searching for some piece of the gentle man she knew. But this man wasn’t the man she knew. This man’s eyes were cold. Hard. Unforgiving.

  She took another step back. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out what you want from me, Caro.”

  “I want you to stop this!”

  “No, you want more. You just won’t admit it. Come on, Caro. Tell me what you really want.”

  She snapped. “I want you to love me, damn it. Not because it’s what your family expects or because we have a baby to take care of. Not because I’m some responsibility you have to see to—a chore, like paying taxes or mowing the grass. I want you to love me just for me.”

  The hard veneer over Matt’s eyes crumbled, revealing soft, green grasslands, stirred by the angry winds of shock. Swirling in confusion. “I’ve always loved you. You have to know that.”

  She didn’t know anything for certain anymore. Except that she was frightened, and Hailey was crying and she had to get out of there. She had to think.

  “I wish I did, Matt,” she said, turning to leave before he decided to try to stop her again. “I really wish I did.”

  Caroline made good time back to Sweet Gum. After only a few hours rambling around the old farmhouse, though, she was finding it wasn’t the sanctuary it once had been. Matt’s presence was still everywhere.

  She’d left him in Sweet Gum, in spite of his protests, convinced that she could take care of herself and Hailey. Certain she no longer needed him. Only now that she was here, she wasn’t so sure.

  Even Hailey seemed to feel the disquiet beneath the calm in the house, sleeping restlessly and fidgeting in her mother’s arms.

  Caroline hadn’t been able to bring herself to put the baby in a crib. Hadn’t been able to let her go, because then she would be alone, and alone was the last thing she wanted to be.

  Needing to do something to take her mind off her troubles, she’d called and set up an appointment to visit Gem’s twins before supper tonight, but that still left an afternoon to kill. A daunting prospect, given Caroline’s state of mind.

  The doorbell chimed, startling Caroline and Hailey both. Savannah greeted Caroline with a hug, and Caroline fell gratefully into her friend’s embrace. She clung a little longer, and a little harder, than usual before breaking apart, wiping her fingers under her eyes surreptitiously, and heading to the kitchen to make a pot of tea.

  Savannah made a quick stop in the office to drop off her purse, and soon they were both settled back in the living room with their chamomile brew. Jeb had gone to the new solarium to play and Hailey lay on blanket at Caroline’s feet, jingling a ring of plastic keys, when Savannah said, “It was tough, huh?”

  “Just the opposite,” Caroline answered. “It was easy to fall back into that routine.” She sipped her tea contemplatively. “Too easy.”

  “And that confuses you.” It was a statement, not a question, Caroline knew.

  “Yes,” she said truthfully. “I thought I’d put that part of my life behind me. That I’d accepted that it was over. You helped me do that.”

  Savannah lifted one brow in a graceful arch. “Did I?”

  “You helped me focus on the future, not the past. You encouraged me to start up a business, build a home for myself. You told me to figure out what I wanted from life and go for it.”

  “And is this business and this house all you want from life?”

  The question took Caroline by surprise. She’d put so much energy into her efforts here that there hadn’t been time to think about much else, except Hailey, of course. Hailey would always come first. Her love of children—all children—aside, Hailey was the reason she’d chosen day care as a way to make a living. She wanted to be home with her baby every day. “It’s enough,” she told Savannah.

  “You plan to spend the rest of your life alone, then?”

  “I’m not alone. I have Hailey.”

  “Honey, Hailey’s good company. But she’s not a man.” Savannah leaned forward, closer to Caroline. “Do you love him?”

  Caroline smiled wistfully. “I’ve loved him since I was fifteen.” She surged to her feet, paced to the window, teacup in hand. Outside, a pair of bright blue jays flitted and chased through the low branches of mesquite. A mating pair, she figured. Drawn together by instinct, as Caroline was drawn to Matt. But she was a sentient human, not a bird. Intellect overruled the animalistic impulses, despite the fact that her more primitive side urged her otherwise.

  “I don’t need a man,” she said.

  “There’s need, and then there’s need,” Savannah said.

  “Meaning?” Caroline’s heart patted rapidly beneath her breast. Savannah had helped her face some painful truths about herself in the past. Caroline had a feeling she was about to get another lesson.

  Savannah rose and stood at her side. “There’s a difference between needing a man—any man—because you can’t live without one, and needing a specific man because he makes your life fuller, richer, more complete by being a part of it.”

  “You think my life is richer with Matt in it?”

  “I don’t know.” Savannah returned to her seat. “Why don’t you tell me about your trip to Port Kingston?”

  Caroline took a seat next to Savannah on the couch. She put her elbows on her knees and clasped her hands tightly. “He asked me to stay there. With him.”

  This time Savannah looked surprised. “But you came back.”

  “I have Hailey to think about. I couldn’t stay there, raise her in a house with a father who doesn’t want her.”

  “Did he say he didn’t want her?”

  “He said we were his responsibility.” Hard as she tried, Caroline couldn’t quite keep the bitterness of that word out of her voice.

  “From what I saw of Matthew, he’s a very responsible man.” Savannah sipped her tea in a move Caroline suspected had less to do with thirst than it did with giving Caroline time to think. “A man like that is bound to feel some obligation toward the people he loves.”


  Caroline’s shoulders pulled back stiffly. “Are you saying I should have stayed?”

  “No. But let me give you this to think about—”

  Caroline braced herself. During the days she’d been seeing Savannah professionally, trying to deal with grief and loss and anger and fear of being alone with a new baby all at once, Savannah’s “homework assignments” had been a constant source of agitation—and growth—for her. Savannah had taught Caroline how to meditate, to ask questions of a higher power and to open herself to the answers, even when they weren’t easy answers. Caroline had a feeling this one would be anything but easy.

  “Is it Matt’s love that you’re unsure of, or your own?”

  Matt visited Brad a long while that afternoon—longer than usual. Before he’d gone to Sweet Gum, this had been the only place he’d felt as though he belonged. With the dead.

  But today, even this place offered no comfort. He didn’t fit in here, either. He wasn’t dead; dead people didn’t feel.

  Yet he could feel the sun on his face and the grass tickling his back when he stretched out. He could feel the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. The soft texture of the rose petals on the flowers Caroline had left. And he could feel pain.

  He could feel emptiness closing in on him like a heavy fog. Loneliness hanging on him like a threadbare coat on a scarecrow.

  No, he wasn’t dead. He’d just begun to live again.

  Now he had a choice. He could go on living—with all the pain and tribulation that entailed—or he could give up. He could crawl back to his miserable existence, go back to work and pretend that a having a job was the same thing as having a life. Better yet, given his track record on the job lately, he could go back to his house, put his pistol in his mouth and make the traditional cop’s one-gun salute to suffering.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d considered that choice, but as he had each time before, sitting here among those who had no more choices, he chose to live.

  Or die trying, he thought, smiling at the irony.

  This newfound life of his was fragile, might not survive. With his heart laid open this way, he could bleed out before he had a chance to heal. But he had to try.

  He had one more stop to make in Port Kingston, and then he was going back to Sweet Gum, whether Caroline wanted him there or not. If she wouldn’t let him in her house, he would rent a room from the Johnsons again. If she wouldn’t listen to him, then he wouldn’t say anything. He would just be there—for Caroline and for his daughter. Eventually maybe she would trust him enough to believe that he really did love her.

  An hour later, with the sun at his back, he set the golden retriever pup he’d picked out for Jeb on the front seat and climbed behind the wheel of his Blazer. Alf eyed the newcomer suspiciously from the back.

  “You be nice,” Matt warned as he caught the image of his partner licking his doggie-chops in the rearview mirror. “This is a friend, not lunch.”

  Alf looked vaguely disappointed, sighed, and lay down with his head propped against the window where he could watch the scenery pass by outside.

  As Matt pulled onto the highway, the retriever crawled across the console and into his lap. He started to push the animal back, but made the mistake of looking down into those big, brown puppy eyes first. The dog trembled when Matt’s hand swept gently across its back, and instead of pushing the pup away, Matt drew her closer.

  “It’s all right, little girl. Nothing to be scared of. You’re going to a new home.” Another tremor wiggled through the puppy’s body, and Matt sighed. “I know, I know. You were perfectly comfortable with your brothers and sisters. You want them back. But you have a new family that will love you, too.”

  Matt thought the puppy understood. Her soft eyes blinked meaningfully and she snuggled up against his stomach, but she still shivered every few seconds.

  “To tell the truth, I’m a little scared, too,” he said, stroking her from the crown of her head to the tips of her golden-fringed ears. “That’s just the way it is, getting a new family. Sometimes you think the old family was better, that no one could love you like they did, and that you can’t love them as much. But you can, you know.”

  Powered by a potent injection of hope, the drive to Sweet Gum sped by. He had to stop twice to let the puppy out, but he still reached the outskirts of town before dark. Whistling, he turned onto the gravel road leading to Caroline’s farmhouse and looked up the hill at his destination.

  The tune he’d been whistling died in midair. His lungs refused to take another breath. From the hilltop, a column of black smoke curled ominously into the pastel sky. The flashing emergency lights—red, yellow and blue—from a dozen vehicles surrounded the house. Men in heavy coats and yellow helmets scrambled around the house like ants.

  Fire. Please, God, no. Not fire.

  Chapter 12

  Sitting on the narrow bench seat in the back of the ambulance, Caroline held Savannah’s hand tightly in her own. “You’re going to be okay,” she told her unconscious friend. “Don’t you worry about Jeb, now. I’ll take care of him until you’re feeling better. Don’t you worry about anything. You’re going to be fine.”

  A serious young woman in a white shirt with the Sweet Gum Emergency Services emblem embroidered over the left breast slipped a plastic mask over Savannah’s face. Caroline leaned back, trying to stay out of the paramedic’s way. She was lucky to have been allowed in the ambulance. They’d tried to bar her, but she hadn’t taken no for an answer. It was her fault Savannah was here. Caroline had asked her to stay with Hailey while she visited the twins. It should have been her lying there, not Savannah.

  “You’re going to be all right,” she repeated firmly.

  Please, oh, please, let it be true.

  Outside, a single voice rose above the din of firefighters, police and medics.

  “Caroline?” Matt’s voice, but with an edge she’d never heard before. Cool, calm Matt, who talked down suicidal hostage takers with guns pointed at innocent victims’s heads without ever breaking a sweat, sounded almost panicked. “Caroline!”

  In a gesture that came straight from the heart, Caroline lifted Savannah’s limp knuckles to her lips for a kiss of reassurance, then said, “I’ll be back. I promise,” before sliding to the rear doors of the ambulance. Her feet had hardly touched the ground before she was swept into a choking embrace.

  “Oh, God.” Matt’s voice shuddered near her ear. His heart thudded against hers much too rapidly. Then he set her back and looked at her. “Are you all right?” She would have told him yes, but she couldn’t get a word in. He fired question after question without waiting for an answer. “Are you hurt? Were you in the house? What the hell happened? Hailey? Where’s Hailey?”

  Finally he ran out of breath and she had her chance to respond. “Hailey’s fine. I’m fine. I wasn’t home, but—” She looked back at the ambulance and her eyes filled. “Savannah…”

  Tears blurred her vision until she couldn’t see Matt, but she could feel him. He pulled her against him again and ground his cheek against her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I went to visit the twins, but they weren’t there,” she explained shakily.

  “Weren’t there? Where the hell were they?”

  “They’re missing. Someone took them. Gem, we think. I knew something was wrong. I came straight home, but—” Her voice gave out. Her tears spilled onto his cream golf shirt. “The Johnsons had already seen the smoke and called the fire department. They found Jeb and Hailey, but Savannah—”

  “Shh. It’s okay.”

  “She got Jeb and Hailey out.” The words tumbled over one another like raindrops down a spout. “But she must have gone back in for some reason. I’m not sure why. Maybe to put the fire out.”

  Matt’s big arms supported her when her knees threatened to buckle. Her vision cleared enough to see him looking at the ambulance over her shoulder. “How bad?” he asked.

  “Sh-she’s unconscious. Some kind of head
injury. And the smoke…”

  His hold on her tightened. “She’ll be okay. She’s a survivor.”

  Caroline knew Matt was right in that Savannah had been through tough times before. But he hadn’t seen her looking so ashen. So lifeless.

  “Excuse me,” one of the paramedics intruded. Matt gave her room to face the man, but kept a supporting arm around her waist. “We’re ready to go. You can follow us in if you like. The docs will need some medical history.”

  “I’ll ride with Savannah,” Caroline said.

  The paramedic stopped her. “I’m afraid that’s against regulations.”

  “I don’t care about your—” She made a move toward the back of the ambulance.

  Matt pulled her back. “I’ll drive you.”

  “No! I’m riding with Savannah.” She struggled away from him.

  “Caroline!” He tightened his grip, shook lightly, and looked pointedly toward where the Johnsons stood with Jeb and Hailey. “They need you more than Savannah does right now.”

  Though her heart wanted to rebel, her mind knew he was right. She sucked in a deep breath and pulled herself together. Jeb must be terrified. She needed to reassure him.

  “You’re right,” she said, calmer. “I’m okay.”

  Matt nodded curtly at the paramedics. “We’ll be right behind you.” Then he led her away. They collected the children, and Hailey’s car seat from Caroline’s car, and gathered around his truck. When he’d lifted Jeb up and strapped the boy in, he reached into the front and pulled out a squiggling blond blob. “Maybe you can hold this for me on the way in,” he said.

  Jeb’s hands roamed over the animal in his lap tentatively at first, then with more interest as Matt climbed into the Blazer. “It’s…it’s a…dog?” he said, breathless.

  “A puppy.”