by Mary McNear
Mila, watching him, unwrapped her own burger and took a small bite. “Oh my God,” she said softly when she’d swallowed it, “this is so good. Is everything at Pearl’s this good?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Do you think there are people in Butternut who eat one of these every day?” she asked, taking another bite.
“Oh, definitely,” he said. “But they probably won’t be with us much longer,” he added. And she smiled, an almost smile, at him. It wasn’t much, but he’d take it, he decided. It was the first tiny crack in the wall of her distrust for him that he’d seen since they’d left the cabin that morning.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, and then Reid noticed that Mila looked tense again. Her eyes flicked briefly in the direction of the parking lot, and Reid followed them and saw a car pulling in. He watched it park and looked as two parents and a passel of kids spilled out of it, all of them armed with coolers and sand toys and inflatable rafts. He glanced back at Mila, thinking that she couldn’t possibly feel threatened by this family. And she didn’t look as if she did, but still, there was something about the car’s arrival that sent her guard back up, and she didn’t go back to eating her lunch, but left it, instead, unfinished in front of her.
“Are you done?” she asked him a little while later, glancing at what remained of his own half-eaten lunch.
“No, not yet,” he said. “I just can’t get enough of these fries,” he added, biting into one. Truth be told, after weeks of undereating, he was already full, but he wasn’t ready to leave yet. Mila said nothing, but she looked at him a little strangely, probably remembering all the uneaten meals he’d sent back to the kitchen.
“You don’t mind if we stay here a little longer, do you?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” she said.
But when Reid came to the end of his lunch, he continued to dawdle. He didn’t want to leave yet. Not until . . . not until he’d found out something about her. Because damned if he wasn’t curious about Mila Jones. And then he thought of something his brother had said to him. If there’s something you want to know about her, Reid, why don’t you just ask her?
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “A question?”
“Uh-huh.”
She frowned slightly. “I guess that would depend on what the question was,” she said finally.
“Okay. That’s fair. The question is, ‘what is it that you do all day?’ I mean, when you’re in your room?”
She hesitated. “You know, I could ask you the same question,” she said.
I try not to think, Reid almost said. At least during the day. During the night, I try not to think and I also try not to sleep. But instead he said, “Well, right now, I’m the one asking the question.”
She seemed to consider it, then shrugged and said, “I study.”
“You study?” That had never occurred to him before. “What do you study?”
She paused, played with a cold french fry, and then sighed. “I’m studying for the nursing school entrance exam. I have some practice books that I brought with me. So I do the sample problems in them.”
“But . . . all day? I mean, most of the day? That’s a lot of sample problems.”
She shrugged noncommittally.
“How many test prep books did you bring with you?”
“A few.”
“Haven’t you done all the problems in them by now?”
She smiled faintly. “That’s more than one question.”
“I know. But there’s something else I’m curious about,” he said, not giving her time to object. “Why don’t you ever go down to the dock?”
“I’m not here on a vacation,” she pointed out. “It’s bad enough that I’m already getting paid for time that I don’t spend working, but getting paid for time that I spend relaxing . . . that doesn’t seem right to me.”
Reid nodded, slowly, thinking she had an admirable work ethic, but that it still didn’t explain everything. “Okay, that’s fair. But you don’t even go down to the dock on your days off,” he said. “You’re not getting paid then.”
She hesitated again, and he could see her weighing whether or not to tell him something. Finally, she said, “I don’t know how to swim.”
“You don’t know how to swim at all?” Reid asked, shocked.
She shook her head.
“Didn’t you . . . didn’t you want to learn? When you were a kid, I mean.”
“Of course I wanted to learn. When I was growing up, I used to walk by this pool sometimes, in the summer, and it looked . . . it looked like fun,” she said, a little wistfully. “I used to . . .” But she caught herself here, and stopped, and looked as if she was sorry she’d said as much as she already had.
“But, I mean, couldn’t you have taken swimming lessons then?” Reid asked. “Or gone to a day camp where they taught you how to swim?”
She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t have taken lessons. Or gone to camp, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because those things cost money,” she said simply. “And we didn’t have any.”
“Oh,” Reid said, not knowing what else to say. He forgot sometimes that not everyone’s childhood was as blessedly middle class as his own had been, though after his father left and kept “forgetting” to send the child support checks, money had been a little tighter. Still, there’d always been enough for swimming lessons and day camps and stuff like that. Though now, when he thought about it, he couldn’t really remember when he’d first learned how to swim. It seemed to him, in a way, that he’d always known how to swim. That he’d been born knowing. And that was a good thing too, because he and Walker had grown up on a lake. Lake Minnetonka. One of his favorite childhood memories, in fact, was of him and his brother as little kids, swimming in the still cold lake on an early summer evening as their mother waited on the dock, towels in her arms, begging them to get out of the water. “Your lips are blue,” she’d called out to them. “You’ll freeze to death.” But she’d been laughing, too. She’d still been young then, and pretty. It was before their father had left them, and before the bitterness had started eating away at her, like some terrible disease. He liked remembering her the way she’d been on the dock that day. God, she’d loved the water, he thought now. And she was an excellent swimmer, too. In fact, it had probably been her, and not some camp counselor, who’d taught him and his brother how to swim.
“Couldn’t your mom have taught you how to swim?” he asked Mila.
She considered this. “Maybe. She knows how to swim. But she didn’t have time to teach me. She was always either working, or sleeping.”
“What about your dad?”
She looked uncomfortable, and he knew she didn’t really want to continue this conversation, but she said, after a long moment, “My dad wasn’t in the picture.”
“Not . . . not at all?”
“No. I don’t even know who he was,” she said, concentrating on an imaginary design she was tracing on the picnic table’s top.
He shook his head slightly. That was rough, not even knowing who your father was. Having him just bail out on you like that, probably before you were even born. His father, of course, hadn’t stuck around for the long haul, either. But he’d been there for a while. Long enough to do the whole Boy Scouts thing. Long enough to go to some of their Little League games. Long enough to make it hurt, like hell, when he left them and stopped doing those things. And then, eventually, stopped seeing them or even calling them altogether. Maybe it would have been easier, he decided now, to never have known him at all.
“Now I have a question,” Mila said, breaking into his thoughts.
“For me?”
She nodded. “I think that’s only fair, don’t you?”
“I guess,” he said noncommittally. “If it’s not too personal.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You mean like asking me about my relationship with my father
?” she said. And Reid frowned because, now that he thought about it, that had been pretty personal.
“Okay, shoot,” he said.
He saw her take a deep breath, as if she was gathering her courage. “When you dream at night,” she asked, “what is it that you dream about?”
Reid was instantly on edge. He hadn’t been prepared for that question. “I don’t . . . I don’t remember my dreams,” he lied, looking away.
“You don’t remember any of them?” she asked gently.
He shook his head. And that was another lie. But what was the point, really, in trying to explain his dreams to her? She would never understand them. He would never have understood them, either, before the accident.
“When I hear you sometimes,” Mila said, carefully, “you’re calling for help.”
Reid looked at her warily. Why was she bringing this up? he wondered. But a moment later, she seemed to think better of it too. “Never mind,” she said, her tone still gentle. “It’s none of my business. And you know what, Reid? You’re right. Some questions are too personal to ask,” and she smiled at him, a smile that seemed as much an apology as a smile.
Reid nodded, wordlessly, as a breeze shook the nearby aspen tree and sent little dappling shadows over the picnic table and the two of them.
“Are you done with those?” she asked, indicating the few now cold french fries that he’d left uneaten. He nodded disinterestedly, his appetite gone. He watched as Mila gathered the remnants of their lunches and threw them in a nearby garbage can. He knew he should have offered to do it, but all of a sudden he was exhausted and anxious to get back to the cabin. Now, though, it was Mila who seemed to want to stay.
“The lake looks so pretty,” she said, gesturing in its direction. “Do you mind if I take a closer look?”
He shrugged indifferently, but then he wheeled after her, at a distance, as she walked down the paved trail until it ended, in a turnout, right in front of the water. And even Reid had to admit that the view from there was stunning, especially the view of the opposite shore of the lake, where the deep blue of the water contrasted dramatically with the pale gray of craggy rocks and the dark green of towering pine trees.
The two of them were silent for a minute until Mila bent down and picked up a stone. It was a flat, round, smooth stone, and the beach and the beach grass were littered with other stones just like it.
“That would be a good skipping stone,” Reid said absently, watching Mila examine it.
“Would it? Here,” she said, reaching over and putting it in his hand. “Try it.”
Reid held it in his palm and ran his thumb across the top of it. He didn’t really feel like skipping stones right now, but this one was so perfectly suited for it that he couldn’t resist. He adjusted his wheelchair so that its left side was facing the lake, and then he swung his arm, a little awkwardly, and, flicking his wrist, let go of the stone. It splashed a little too hard off the water, skipped once, and sank.
He was going to ask Mila for another stone, but she was already gathering up more of them. She handed him another one and he tried again. This time he got some power behind the stone, and it skipped, three times, barely skimming the surface of the water.
“Very good,” Mila said, smiling, and she gave him another one.
He skipped several more of them, and then stopped, marveling that something that involved so little exertion could make him so tired.
“Why don’t you try it?” he asked Mila.
But she shook her head. “It’s another thing I don’t know how to do,” she said, still holding a few of the stones in her hands.
“I’ll teach you then,” he said, surprising himself. He was not, as a general rule, good at teaching people how to do things. He had no patience for it, and he didn’t take any pleasure in it either. But he led Mila through the steps of skipping a stone, showing her how to stand, how to hold the stone, how to swing her arm and flick her wrist. She tried a couple of times before she got one to skip, but when she did, when one skipped twice over the lake’s surface, she laughed delightedly and turned to him.
And when he looked up at her he saw it again, saw the light in her eyes he’d seen that morning when she’d been so angry at him. And, just as it had that morning, it transformed her completely, and, in doing so, it disarmed him completely. It was the reason he’d let her push him in his wheelchair out to the van without any protest. He’d been too surprised by the way her anger had transformed her to offer any real resistance. But she wasn’t angry now. She was just . . . alive. Present. In the moment. And, if he were honest with himself, she was something else, too. She was pretty. Very pretty. Her eyes, which he’d thought were a plain brown, were actually, he saw now, brown flecked with a very pale gold. And her hair, which had seemed to be brown too, was really more of an auburn color, its red highlights shining in the sun. A breeze blew, then, and a strand of her hair escaped from her ponytail and blew against her smooth, pale cheek before she caught it and tucked it back behind her ear. My God, he thought, she was lovely. And it suddenly seemed incredible to him that he’d spent the last several weeks living with her without actually realizing it. Or had he realized it? And was it the reason he’d wanted to come here with her today, not because he hadn’t wanted to go back to the cabin, but because he’d wanted to see that light in her eyes again?
“You’re pretty good. Here, try this one,” Reid said, holding out to her one of the stones she’d given him to skip. As Mila reached for it, though, Reid brushed at a lazy black fly that had landed on his arm, and when it bit him anyway, with a sensation more annoying than painful, he slapped at it, hard, without even thinking.
Mila let out a tiny yelp, though, and jumped back so suddenly that she almost tripped over some tall beach grass behind her. She recovered her balance quickly, but even so, Reid was stunned to see fear in her eyes.
“Hey, it was just a fly,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said, and Reid saw that she wasn’t afraid anymore, just embarrassed.
“Mila,” he said, understanding something. “Did you . . . did you think I was going to hit you?”
“What? No. Of course not,” she said. But she wouldn’t look at him, and he knew she was lying.
“Yes, you did,” he persisted. “You thought I was going to hurt you.”
“Reid, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said abruptly, twisting the hair that had worked itself loose from her ponytail back into place. “But we should be getting back,” she added. And he saw that the light in her eyes was gone, and so, in a way, was she. Well, not gone. Just back inside of herself somehow. And as they made their way back toward the van he saw her familiar wariness return.
They were both quiet on the drive to the cabin, Mila concentrating on the road and Reid looking out the window. And by the time they got back, they’d both settled so far inside themselves again that Reid almost wondered if any of it—the picnic, the conversation, the skipping stones—had actually taken place. Except that he knew it had. He’d pocketed one of the stones Mila had given him, and he found it later that night. He started to put it on his dresser, but he stopped and held it in his hand instead, running his thumb over its lake-washed smoothness. And looking at it, he felt another piece of the puzzle fall into place. He knew why Mila was afraid. She’d been hurt. But who had hurt her, Reid wondered, and what had ever possessed them to do it?
CHAPTER 9
Mila met Brandon Stewart at a time in her life when she was surviving on black coffee, hope, and not much else. She was twenty-three years old, and completely on her own. Her mom, who’d had enough of Minnesota winters, had moved to Florida with her boyfriend as soon as Mila had graduated from high school. She’d told Mila that she could come with them, but Mila had stayed put. She didn’t mind the cold, but she did mind her mother’s drinking, and her mother’s boyfriend, too—the way he looked at Mila had always made her feel uncomfortable.
/> So she’d found a walk-in-closet–sized apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood and enrolled at a local community college. Because she had to work full-time while taking classes, it took her four years, instead of two, to complete her community college degree. By day, she took classes, and by night she worked any number of jobs. In her last year of college, she was working the graveyard shift at a coffee shop where everything—the food, the dishes, and even the counters—seemed to be covered in a thin layer of grease. Still, working there wasn’t that bad. It was slow during the early morning hours, and if its lack of customers was bad for tips, it was good for answering Heather’s letters, and for studying for her classes, many of which were prerequisites for nursing school.
She was studying for one of those classes one night, sitting at the counter, her organic chemistry textbook propped open in front of her, when she met Brandon for the first time.
“Um, excuse me, miss?” she heard him say. “Do you think maybe you could take my order sometime tonight?”
And Mila, unaccountably annoyed by the interruption, glanced up from her textbook and looked at him. She’d been concentrating so hard she hadn’t even noticed him come in and sit down at the counter, just three stools away from her.
“You do work here, don’t you?” he asked, seeming more amused than annoyed.
“I do work here,” Mila said, and, using a spoon for a placeholder in her textbook, she slid off her stool and walked around to the other side of the counter.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, reaching into her apron pocket for a check pad and a pencil. “What can I get for you?”
It was only then that she looked—really looked—at this customer. He was tall, and broad shouldered, with dark brown hair shaved into a buzz cut, and wide brown eyes set in a face that was tanned the year-round tan of someone who worked outdoors for a living. Which he did, judging from the flannel shirt, blue jeans, and work boots he was wearing. Construction worker, Mila decided, putting him neatly in his slot. But in the next second he surprised her. Most construction workers were hungry. All the time. They wanted to eat first and flirt later. This guy was different. He wanted to flirt first and eat later.