by Dianne Drake
“I’m glad you came,” Matthew said, jumping up and running to the edge of the porch to catch a photo of a jackrabbit running across the lawn.
“I am, too,” she replied, watching him take his pictures. Trying so hard to be grown-up about it yet stomping his foot in a typical childish reaction when the rabbit scampered off before he got the picture he wanted. She really did enjoy spending time with Matthew. He almost put her in the frame of mind that she might, one day, want a child. Almost. “So, have you heard anything from Hans Schilling yet?”
“He’s being too slow,” Matthew said, changing his focus to a lone mule deer lingering at the edge of the woods, probably trying to decide if it was safe to leave its cover and head out across the open range.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll hear something soon.”
“Daddy says I may have to wait until I’m seven.” Matthew said, his voice so solemn it almost sounded like Caleb. After taking several shots of the mule deer, which was alerted to the clicking of the camera and darted back into the woods, Matthew aimed his camera at Leanne like before, but instead of taking her picture again, he simply looked at her through its lens. “I don’t think I’m too young, though.”
“Don’t give up on it, or yourself, Matthew. You never know what might happen.”
“I might have to go live someplace else, where Daddy can find me a good teacher.”
“Would you be OK with that?”
Matthew shrugged. “I like Marrell.”
“Me, too, buddy,” Caleb said from the doorway. “So, I think we’ll probably stay here.” He looked at Leanne, who was staring back at him, and gave her a nod and a wink.
Instantly, she jumped up and ran to hug Caleb, but stopped short. Another hug, another kiss...what was she thinking? Instead, she stopped short of him and whispered, “Really?”
Caleb gave her another wink, then said to Matthew, “Fried chicken on the table, with mashed potatoes and corn...not peas. Run upstairs and get washed.”
“When did you find out?” she asked, once Matthew was gone.
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“And you haven’t already told him?”
“Not immediately, because he was disappointed that you weren’t coming, and I didn’t want that to ruin the news. And now that you’re here, he’s anxious to show you his photos, and I want him to have that moment before he has another. You know, keep him away from overload. Let him enjoy everything.”
“I never meant to disappoint him. I figured my not being here wouldn’t matter that much.”
“He was counting on you, Leanne. You made a promise, then you broke it. Young hearts get broken that way. But you’re here now, and he’s happy, and that’s what counts.” With that, he turned and went back into the house, leaving her to stand alone on the front porch for a minute, thinking about what Caleb had said about young hearts getting broken. He was right, of course, and those words...those simple words robbed her of her appetite. Made her feel as frustrated as she had when she’d come here a little while ago. Made her want to scream into the night again. But not because of all the pressures and uncertainties building up inside her. She wanted to scream because Caleb was happy that Matthew was happy. Not because she was here.
* * *
“So, my answer is finally yes. I’m going to accept that position at Sinclair,” Caleb said casually, holding a glass full if iced tea in midair. “Going to buy this house and go from temporary to permanent status now.”
“Well, at least that’s one thing off my list.” Matthew had eaten his dinner quickly, then rushed upstairs to add a few final touches to his queue of photos before he showed them to Leanne. She and Caleb were seated at the kitchen table, across from each other, in no hurry to get up or go anywhere. Not really hitting it off right now, but not not hitting it off either. “So, you’ll tell him the good news after I leave?” She’d really hoped to be around for it, to see Matthew’s excitement. But it wasn’t hers to share, and she understood that. Still, it would have been nice...
“Probably tomorrow morning. Something his five-year-old brain can’t do too well is process more than one thing at a time. Right now, he’s excited about showing you his pictures, and if I tell him he’s been accepted by Schilling, that will change his focus. He’ll miss out on the one thing he really wanted to do this evening. So, I’ll wait.”
“You really do have some amazing insight into him,” she said.
“Sometimes it keeps me up at night, trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead of him.” He chuckled, and took a sip of his tea. “I suppose it was that way for my parents, too, since I was, well...academically gifted like Matthew.”
“They say what goes around comes around. I suppose it’s your turn now.”
“He’s a great kid. Best thing that’s ever happened in my life because he gives me focus as much as I do the same for him.”
“How are you going to deal with him living at the school and not with you?”
“Don’t know yet. For a while I’ll be miserable, I suppose. I know I’m going to miss his music...even when I don’t physically see him, just hearing him play gives me a sense that all’s right with the world. Not sure what I’m going to do without it, or him.”
“Has he always played?”
Caleb nodded. “Pretty much. There was an old piano in the apartment we rented when I was still in the military. First time I heard him play it, he was two, picking out a simple melody from a cartoon he watched. One-handed, of course. But he was spot-on perfect. I already knew he was smart. Started talking early. Walked early. Well ahead of his normal developmental stage. I mean he had these little plastic letters...magnets, he would arrange on the refrigerator door. Only by two, he wasn’t just arranging random patterns like most kids do. He was spelling out simple words. The base psychologist ran him through some tests and told us we had a budding genius on our hands. Which, at the time, didn’t mean a lot to me, as I’d assumed he could be smart and still be like other kids his age. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. He wasn’t on that level, didn’t want to do the things two-year-old kids typically did.”
“And your wife? How did she handle it?”
“I think Matthew’s gifts were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in our marriage. She couldn’t handle them. Didn’t want to deal with the special arrangements we’d have to make to accommodate him. So, she left. Simple as that. Said married life and kids weren’t what she wanted.”
“And you?” Leanne asked.
“Learned by trial and error. Still learning.” He smiled. “And keeping my fingers crossed a lot of the time.”
Much the way her father had raised her. Trial and error, fingers crossed. Except Matthew was getting the attention from Caleb that she’d never gotten from her dad. He’d loved her. Just never had time for her. “No regrets?”
“One. I wasn’t around much for Matthew’s first two years. Spent a lot of time deployed to Afghanistan, and totally missed the baby phase of his life. Wish I could get it back, but I can’t, so that’s probably my biggest regret as far as being a dad. Now, if you want to talk about life regrets...”
Leanne laughed, then stood up. “I think what Matthew has lined up for me now takes priority. But, Caleb, just let me say, from what I see, you’re doing an amazing job with him. I know it’s tough, having been raised by a single dad myself, but he’s a happy, well-adjusted little boy. Differently focused than most kids, but no worse for it. That shows hard work on your part.”
“All I want is for him to fit in. Don’t want him to be so different that the other kids pick on him the way they did me.”
“That can be so damaging. And spill over into adulthood. I’ve read a lot of studies, even treated a few patients who have manifested adult symptoms of childhood bullying, and it’s terrible. It’s like they can never get rid of the nightmare. Which is why wh
at you’re doing for Matthew is so important. He doesn’t deserve to have that happen to him.”
Now he was frustrated. Even a little bit angry. How could she not understand? See, that was the thing about Leanne he just didn’t get. On one hand, she was an open, insightful person who seemed to genuinely care. But on the other, she ignored a significant part of who she’d been. The bully. The person who’d picked on him. Maybe she wasn’t that person now, but to deny what she’d been? Nope, he didn’t understand that at all.
Didn’t understand either why he was so damned attracted to her given his frustrations, anger and downright disbelief. But he was, which worried him as he’d always been blind about her back then, and he wondered if he was still that blind. “No, he doesn’t. No kid does. But that’s just what some kids do, Leanne. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember high school?”
She frowned. “No one picked on me, Caleb. I got along with pretty much everybody.”
“No. You didn’t. But it was of your own choosing because you were the bully. You picked on kids who were different. You encouraged your friends to do it. You ridiculed other kids, called them names, laughed at them. Humiliated them. And I was one of them, Leanne. You bullied me.”
Chapter Eight
YOU BULLIED ME. Why couldn’t she remember it? Her, the bully? That explained the light switch that went on and off with Caleb. But her memories of him were so ambiguous. He’d been a little different, and never a part of the group, yet he was always there. Hanging around. Still, he’d also been a troublemaker. At the time, probably the biggest one in Marrell, not that it had meant anything, as big trouble in Marrell hadn’t been much by other standards. But back when they’d been kids, if there had been trouble in town, she remembered Caleb usually being a part of it.
But she didn’t remember bullying him, and now she was scared. What was wrong with her? With her mind? With her memory? Caleb wasn’t lying about it. She knew that, because of his reactions to her. Caleb might be a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar. Never had been.
So, if Caleb wasn’t lying, why didn’t she remember? How could she have been a bully when she hated everything that stood for? It went against her basic nature.
“Was I that bad to him, Dad?” she finally asked, plopping down in the chair across the desk from Henry. They were home, in his office, and she was hoping he had some answers for her, because she didn’t have any—not even one. She probably should have talked it out with Caleb, but after he’d accused her, he’d walked away, shut himself up in his room, and left her there to look at photos with Matthew. Not that she remembered much of what she’d seen, she’d been so upset.
“Were you bad to him?” Henry repeated, shrugging. “Not so much when you were younger. In fact, I think you loved him as much as any little girl could love any little boy. And when you got older...” His face wrinkled into a frown. “I don’t recall seeing anything that would indicate you were a bully. When you asked me if anything had gone on back then, I honestly tried to think back, but...” He shook his head. “At the time, I’d just absorbed John Wainright’s practice into mine, and I was busy adding on some patient rooms, getting ready for my first expansion. So, I was pretty tied up. Probably not paying as much attention to you as I should.”
That didn’t surprise her. Her dad had never paid much attention to her. As fond as he’d been of Caleb, though, she was surprised he’d never noticed anything going on, at least on Caleb’s side of it. “But he says I was a bully, Dad. So why would I have done that to him? And, most of all, not remember it?”
“I left you to your own devices too much. Maybe you were acting out to get attention. To be honest, there were a lot of times I gave Caleb more attention than I gave you. He always seemed so desperate to learn and, I think, to be someplace where he felt safe. Marrell was never safe for him. He was too smart. There was nothing here to stimulate him. And while his parents were...are good people, they were poor and couldn’t afford a lot for their children. So, they worked all the time, trying to make ends meet. Which left their kids free to wander around town all hours of the day and night.”
“And you took him under your wing, while you ignored me. How was that supposed to make me feel?”
“At the time, I didn’t know I was doing that. You had everything you could possibly want. You were popular with all the kids in town. I thought I was giving you a good life.”
“You gave me things, Dad. You gave Caleb time.” Was that why she’d bullied him? Because he’d had a part of her dad she’d never had, and she’d acted out in resentment?
“I did the best I could,” Henry said.
“It hurt me, Dad. I deserved some of what you were giving Caleb and, yes, I resented that. Probably even hated him for it. But did I resent it enough to become a bully? And why don’t I remember it?” There was something else, though. Something she could feel skulking around inside her. Gnawing. And she wanted to know what it was. Dear God, she wanted to know.
“Again, what can I say? I missed it, Leanne. Missed too much. But as for you hating Caleb, I always thought you had a crush on him. Didn’t see any indications to the contrary.”
“When I was young, Dad. When we were little kids. But I bullied him when we were older, and I don’t remember it.” The feeling of not knowing, not recalling was so frightening, she was getting nauseous. Her hands were shaking. She wanted her dad to wrap his arms around her and simply be her dad for a little while. Tell her he’d help her. Tell her it would be OK. But he didn’t. Instead, he got up from his desk and walked to the office door, then laid his hand on it. He was walking away. As he’d always done.
“If you don’t remember it, Leanne, it probably wasn’t important.” That’s all he said, then he left. And she sat there alone, shaking, fighting back tears for the next ten minutes, trying to figure out what was happening to her. Or what had happened to her back then.
And feeling so, so alone it hurt.
* * *
Well, it hadn’t come out the way he’d intended. Being blunt like that was not his style, and he certainly hadn’t wanted to catch Leanne so off guard. But he had, and Caleb felt terrible about it. What purpose had it served, telling her how bad she’d been to him? She already knew it, even though she’d only hinted at vague memories of those days and had never truly owned up to them. Everybody in Marrell knew what those days had been like for him...for Leanne. The fact that he’d gone off the deep end and vandalized buildings up and down the main street after she’d humiliated him in front of half the town, then been hauled off to jail for it, hadn’t exactly been a well-guarded secret. Or that he’d been sentenced to a year in juvenile detention as a result, and forced to finish off his schooling there.
But it had been three days now since they’d talked, and he didn’t like watching Leanne do everything she could to avoid him. It was a small hospital in a small town, he worked for her, and ducking around corners or going in another direction could only go on so long before they’d finally have to confront the obvious. “I’m not sure what to do about it, Henry,” he said, as the two of them sat at a table in the cafeteria, drinking coffee.
“She mentioned something about how badly she treated you,” the older man said. “Seemed pretty upset about it.”
“She should be. Leanne was...brutal.”
“I think she thinks it happened because I paid more attention to you than I did to her.”
Truth was, so did he. At the time, he hadn’t caught on to that, but thinking back to those years, he didn’t recall that Leanne had had much of a place in Henry’s life. Which would explain a lot of things. But what it didn’t explain was her refusal to either remember or admit it and, frankly, that had him stumped. More than that, it worried him.
What worried him even more, though, was that Matthew was caught up in this. Because no matter how it turned out between Leanne and him, Matthew had grown attached to her and i
f he couldn’t trust her motives in hiding behind a selective memory, he couldn’t trust her motives when it came to anything else. And that included Matthew. He was right there in the middle of this, and he was the one who needed to be protected. “Well, Henry, it sure as hell is complicated. I like Leanne, but I can’t forget the way she treated me.”
“She seems to have.”
“I know. But she wasn’t the one who spent a year in lockup because someone had bullied her into doing something bad. And that’s a lot to live with.”
“Well, I think, Caleb, that since you’re going to be working for her, and she hasn’t changed her mind about that, you two will have figure it out between you.”
“Easier said than done,” Caleb snapped. This was getting him nowhere. He was grumpy—didn’t want to be. He was preoccupied—didn’t want to be that either. And he was defensive—another thing he didn’t want to be. All because Leanne wouldn’t own up to it and Henry was oblivious to it. Also, because he was caught up in Leanne in ways he didn’t want to be, or shouldn’t be. But he was trapped. Had to stay in Marrell for Matthew. Had to work at the hospital because there was no place else for him to work. Had to tamp down his frustrations to be the best doctor he could be—with all this turmoil going on inside him.
Maybe, now that he’d declared his intentions here, Leanne would go back to Seattle, and he could get on with it. But she seemed reluctant about that now. Caleb blew out a frustrated breath. “Not sure what I’m going to do about this, Henry.”
“Have you forgiven her for all that nonsense?”
“It wasn’t nonsense. Innocent people were hurt. Mostly the people who associated with me. And I was hurt. Maybe I didn’t realize it was such an issue then, but I do now, because every waking moment I worry about how Matthew will be accepted since he’s a little different, the way I was. I worry that someone out there will bully him the way Leanne did me. Make fun of him. Coerce him into doing things because he simply wants to fit in. If this was just about me and some old feelings, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it’s not. Because everything I went through...my son is likely to go through, too. And I’m just looking for a way to handle it better so I can be there for him if it does happen.”