The You I Never Knew

by Susan Wiggs

  Had he surrendered his dreams? Had it hurt? Had he simply awakened one morning to discover that the life he’d envisioned for himself didn’t match the one he actually had? Did she dare to ask him?

  “Of course not.” Michelle stroked the cat. “It’s none of my business.”

  As she watched out the window, a stocky dark-haired man on a tractor came out of the barn, towing a load of manure on a stone boat. The Border collie cavorted like a clown through the drifts of snow. Cody followed, wearing oversize boots and hefting a shovel over one shoulder. Amazing. He was actually working. It had been forever since Michelle had been able to make him do anything.

  She took another drink, savoring the sweetness of mountain well water. Footsteps thudded on the back porch and a door slammed. She turned to see Sam standing in the kitchen doorway. Faded jeans, fleece-lined denim jacket, battered John Deere cap, gloves protruding from a hip pocket. The Marlboro man without the cigarette.

  “I helped myself to coffee,” she said uncertainly. “Want some?”

  He ignored the question. He flexed his jaw, shifted his weight to one side. Though he barely moved, a subtle threat seemed to emanate from him. It was hard to explain, but Michelle sensed a dangerous turbulence in the air between them. Old intimacy mingled with fresh suspicion.

  He took a step toward her. “So when were you planning on telling me I have a son?”

  His blunt words pounded at Michelle, but she felt no shock. In the back of her mind she had known since last night that he would figure out the truth based on Cody’s age. She folded her arms protectively across her middle. “God, if you said something to Cody—”

  “What the hell do you take me for? Of course I didn’t say anything. Thanks to you, I don’t even know the kid.” His gaze flicked over her, measuring her contemptuously from head to toe and back again. “So I guess that means you’ve never told him, either.”

  She returned his glare. “I didn’t see the point. I didn’t think he’d ever meet you.”

  He grabbed the back of his neck in a distracted gesture. “Jesus Christ. You had my kid, and you never told me.”

  “And this surprises you?” Too many years had passed for Michelle to feel bitter, but she did. The regrets, the resentment, the frustration, all came bubbling to the surface. “I was eighteen years old and pregnant. You’d run off to be a rodeo champ. Do you think I had the slightest idea how to track you down? And what makes you think I didn’t try?”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course I did, Sam. I was in l—” She broke off, unwilling to continue down that path. “Are you telling me it should have been easy to find you? Did you and your mother leave a forwarding address? Did you stay anywhere long enough to have one?”

  “Permanent addresses were never my mother’s strong suit.” His voice was low and hoarse. “We weren’t all brought up in gated communities in Bel Air.”

  She flinched at the implication. She and Sam came from different worlds, though at eighteen they had sworn it didn’t matter.

  “I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend trying to figure out where you’d gone. I had a baby to raise. Beyond the twenty-four hours a day that took, I couldn’t seem to squeeze in a missing-persons search.”

  “I deserved to know, damn it.”

  “Oh, right. So you could do what? Marry me?”

  “So I could have a say in what you did with my kid. You never even gave me a chance.”

  “Tell me an eighteen-year-old cowboy wants a chance with a baby.”

  She was dangerously, humiliatingly close to tears. She refused to shed them. She had wept an ocean for Sam McPhee and he’d never come to find her. Crying now would only prove what Michelle had been trying to deny since seeing him last night. Seventeen years ago he had taken possession of her in ways she was too young to understand. She had never given herself so wholly to another person, nor taken so much from someone else. After Sam left, she had dreamed of meeting someone new, but she’d never found that depth, that completion, with any other person. So she learned to do without.

  Michelle forced herself to get a grip, to stand up from the table so she didn’t feel at a disadvantage. “This is stupid. We shouldn’t argue about the past. We can’t change what happened.”

  “Maybe not.” Unhurried yet unrelenting, he walked toward her, stopping only inches from her. The smell of snow and wind clung to his clothes, underlying the unique scent of him. She thought she had forgotten it.

  “Sam—”

  “We’ve got a lot of talking to do.” His low voice caught at her, mesmerized her. “Problem is, now that you’re here, I want to do a hell of a lot more than talk.”

  “You’re crazy.” She didn’t know this man anymore, but she could feel the anger and passion seething from him. She searched his face, wondering about the lines that fanned out from his eyes.

  “Crazy? I’ve been called worse.” He took another step toward her. “I couldn’t sleep for thinking about you last night.”

  She inched back. “You came in here wanting to talk about Cody.”

  He stuck a thumb into his jeans pocket, his hip propped on the edge of the counter. “So talk. I’m listening.”

  This can’t be happening, Michelle thought. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You had my child and you never told me.” He spoke coldly, the words hard as stones. “How about starting there?”

  “The day I found out I was pregnant, I went to see you. And you had left without a trace. I don’t believe I owed you a thing.”

  The heat of his glare was a tangible thing; she could feel it blasting away at her. “I won’t discuss this with you if you’re hostile,” she added.

  “Excuse me if I’m a little disoriented by all this. It’s not every day a woman I used to sleep with shows up with a kid she had sixteen years ago.”

  “I didn’t know I’d find you here.”

  “Well, here I am, honey.” He spread his arms mockingly. “I’m surprised your daddy didn’t warn you.”

  She was surprised, too, but she wouldn’t admit it to Sam. She wondered if he knew she and her father were strangers, and that only Gavin’s illness had brought her back.

  “We should be talking instead of arguing.” She sat back down at the table, took a deep breath. “Maybe I was wrong. I should have searched high and low for you. But everyone said I’d get over you. Said I was better off without you, that I’d go off to college and meet someone who—” She broke off and shrugged.

  “—wasn’t a born drifter with a hopeless lush for a mother,” Sam finished for her.

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “I had to think about Cody, too. I spent my childhood ducking the paparazzi. I’m very protective of him in that way.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Oh, yeah, the tabloids would’ve had a field day with us. Gavin Slade’s only daughter makes it with a ranch hand.”

  She flinched, knowing he wasn’t far off the mark. As a child, she had shown up occasionally in the scandal sheets—a grainy photo taken through a long lens: Gavin Slade’s Love Child, the caption always read.

  A juicy story like an illicit Romeo and Juliet–style affair would have revived the attention she shunned. That was why she worked so hard to maintain her anonymity. Every once in a while a reporter in search of a scoop came sniffing around. One even snapped her photo when she was pregnant. The incident had scared her so much that she moved to Seattle, where no one knew her.

  Sam sat down across from her. His hands were big, not as work-scarred as she would have thought. She caught herself staring at those hands, remembering how she used to rub Bag Balm on them to soothe the calluses.

  “None of that old stuff can matter now, Michelle. What matters is that we have a son.” He clenched his hand into a fist on the table. “A son. I can’t believe it.”

  She was terrified to ask the next question, but she had to. “Sam, what are you going to do?”

 
; “Do?”

  “About… learning that Cody’s your son.” She tasted the burn of resentment in her throat. “Your biological son.” Yes, that sounded better. More distant.

  He studied her hands, and she wondered if he remembered the Bag Balm, too. On her right one, she wore a Cartier onyx ring. On the left forefinger, a large sapphire.

  “Did you raise him alone, or are you in a relationship?”

  She guessed that meant he wasn’t thinking about the Bag Balm. In a relationship. It was such a modern thing to say. Like so many modern things, it had no meaning.

  “Alone, more or less.”

  “Explain more or less.”

  “I’ve been with someone for the past three years. But it’s not—he’s not—” Damn. How could she explain Brad? “He’s not raising Cody.”

  “I see.” Sam got up from the table and poured himself a cup of coffee. He seemed hesitant when he turned. “So did Cody ever ask about me?”

  “Of course he asked.”

  “And you told him what? Obviously my name doesn’t ring a bell with him.”

  “I was worried about the tabloids. So I left the father’s name blank on his birth certificate.”

  “Christ—”

  “Sam, I was young. Scared. I grew up with cameras shoved in my face every time I sneezed. I didn’t want that for Cody, and I didn’t want anyone to go snooping through records—”

  “—and finding the name of a mongrel cowboy.”

  “Quit putting words in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Didn’t he want to know, just for him? Jesus, a name wouldn’t have sent him off the deep end.”

  “A name’s just… a name. And maybe I was afraid—” She stopped, wishing she could reel in the words.

  “Of what? What were you afraid of?”

  “That maybe he’d get mad at me one day and go off looking for you.” The confession rushed out like air escaping a balloon. “Since school started this year, he’s been… in rebellion.”

  Sam hesitated, took a sip of coffee. In his face she saw more than she wanted to see—interest, understanding. Compassion. “The kid’s mad at the world, Michelle.”

  Ouch. He had seen that so quickly. “We’ve had rough times before. We’ve dealt with trouble. This year… is more difficult than most.” Damn. She knew she should keep her thoughts to herself, but with Sam, it was hard. Years ago he’d had that effect on her, and it hadn’t changed. He still drew truths from deep inside her, made her say things better left unsaid.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked. “Is he having trouble in school?”

  All right, thought Michelle. You asked for it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. “His last grade report was awful. Up until this year, he’s been an A and B student. Now it’s Cs and Ds. At first I thought it was a normal, predictable rebellion, but I don’t see the end of it.”

  “Is he hanging out with his regular friends?”

  “Not as much as he used to. He’s got a girlfriend, and they’re pretty exclusive.”

  “So what are you doing about his problems?”

  “I’m working on it, Sam! Do you think this is easy? Do you think you could do better?”

  “Is it my turn to take over? You had him the first sixteen years, I get the next sixteen?”

  “I didn’t bring him here because he’s a troubled teen. I brought him here… to see my dad.” She didn’t feel like discussing Gavin’s health with Sam. “My father’s never met Cody.” She got up from the table and went to the door. She was afraid. She was angry. And God help her, she felt an old, old yearning unfold in her heart, a burning ache she thought she had buried forever. “What time should I pick him up?”

  Outside, Cody and the dark-haired man were loading bales of hay onto a flatbed truck. It was startling to see her son doing physical labor. It had been ages since he exerted himself doing anything more strenuous than lifting the telephone receiver.

  “He’ll be done around five, I guess,” Sam said. “Edward can give him a lift over to your father’s place.”

  “All right.” Taking her jacket from a hook outside the kitchen door in the mudroom, she shrugged into it. “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t… say anything to him, will you?”

  “Hell, no, I won’t say anything. I don’t even know the kid.” He held open the door for her. He was as tall as she remembered, and broader in the shoulders and chest. His face was more deeply carved with character. His scent, God, why did she remember it so perfectly? Perversely, she had an urge to touch him, just once, but she resisted.

  “ ’Bye, Sam.”

  “ ’Bye.” He followed her out onto the porch and waited while she got into the Range Rover. “Hey, Michelle?”

  She rolled down the window. “What?”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re not telling him.”

  She leaned back against the headrest, closing her eyes. “Damn. I was hoping for a quick getaway.”

  “No such luck, Sugar. Tell him. I want him to know exactly who I am.”

  “But—” She opened her eyes. “All right. I’ll tell him.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll… figure out the right time. Sam, I’ve got a lot on my mind. My father isn’t well, and the next few days might be pretty difficult.”

  He stared at her for a long time. She couldn’t read him. Didn’t know him anymore. Yet that stare was as compelling now as it had been the first time she had met him. “All right. But I want him to know, Michelle. Soon.”

  Chapter 8

  Cody felt like a cockroach in his grandfather’s house—gross, unwelcome, and out of place. After shoveling horseshit at Lonepine all day, he wanted to shower for about nine hours and then crash facedown in his bed.

  Instead, they were having dinner with Legendary Actor Gavin Slade. That was how Gavin was always referred to: Legendary Actor. Elder Statesman of Western Classics. In capital letters, like the guy was a walking headline or something. Lately, instead of showing him with his arm around some bimbo with big tits, the fanzines showed him alone on a horse, his cowboy hat pulled low over his brow. The headlines announced that he’d been in touch with aliens.

  Cody liked the bimbo pictures better. It was pretty bizarre, thinking about his grandfather getting laid by women younger than his own mom, but it was even worse thinking about his grandfather dying of kidney failure. Mostly, he tried not to think of Gavin at all. It wasn’t like Gavin thought about him all the time.

  Cody had tried his best to weasel out of dinner, but he hadn’t gained much sympathy from his mom. After crunching that cowpoke’s trailer last night, he’d used up most of his goodwill points with her. Not that he had many to begin with. Since last summer she’d been driving him nuts, hovering over him, waiting to pounce the second she caught him doing something she disapproved of.

  He’d tried a minor whine—I’m too tired, I worked like a dog today—but all he’d gained was the Look. That cold jackhammer of a stare still affected him sometimes, although he was getting pretty good at ignoring her lately.

  When he was little, he used to be moved by the Look. He used to want to do just about anything to please her. Little by little over the years, he’d figured out that there was no way to please his perfectionist mother. No way to win a smile that wasn’t sad at the edges, or to get praise from her that didn’t demand things he didn’t even know how to give.

  So he quit trying, and he wasn’t even sure she noticed. She was so lame, she and that loser Brad. All Brad cared about was making the almighty buck and showing off to the world that Cody’s mom was his lady, like she was some sort of bowling trophy with boobs.

  That was the only good thing about coming here. It gave him a break from Brad the loser.

  “Hiya, Cody.” Gavin Slade came into the living room. Unlike Cody, he looked exactly right in his surroundings. Jeans and a red corduroy shirt and cowboy boots. Big white hair that made his eyes look bluer than the heated swimming poo
l on the patio.

  “Hi.” Cody hadn’t decided what to call his grandfather, and it would be too dorky to ask. Jamming his hands into his pockets, he pretended great interest in the objects arranged on a lighted glass shelf by the wet bar. After a couple of seconds, he didn’t have to fake it anymore.

  Holy shit. He was looking at an Oscar statue.

  “That’s pretty cool,” he said, pointing to it.

  “You think?” Gavin hooked a thumb into his back pocket like he was posing for a picture or something. Except he didn’t even seem conscious of the pose—it was the natural way he held himself. “I guess so. I liked that movie. The Face of Battle. You ever see it?”

  Only about a zillion times.

  “I think maybe I caught part of it on TV once,” he lied.

  “It’s about a misfit, a real loser. Nobody cared whether he lived or died. After a while, he quit caring, too. And in the end, that’s why he was able to save his battalion. He quit looking for guarantees, and he made the sacrifice.”

  Cody pictured the scene in his head. It was one of those film sequences the experts always showed when they were going over classic movies—the moment Gavin’s character stood alone on a tank-destroyer turret, the only volunteer of his battalion, shooting through a deadly hail of sniper fire at a 77mm tank gun. Like the image of Gary Cooper in High Noon, Gavin Slade’s Face of Battle moment had put him on the pages of the film history books. The memorable image showed a close-up of a face filled with nobility, anguish, and the wisdom of a man who knows he is about to die. It had become one of the most famous movie stills ever published.

  “How come you stopped making movies?” Cody asked.

  “It was always a job to me, to tell you the truth. A job I liked most of the time, and either loved or hated the rest.” He had this intent way of speaking, leaning forward and lowering his voice so you had no choice but to listen. “The business is brutal, Cody. You live and die by the box office. Your looks and your image are everything. Sometimes you don’t get a minute of privacy, and other times you can’t buy attention for yourself. I got sick of the roller coaster. As soon as I could afford to retire, I got out of acting. I still coproduce things here and there, but it’s pretty low-key. Haven’t seen a film on the big screen in ages.”