Callaghan's Way

by Marie Ferrarella

  There was something hypnotic about Rachel, he felt it every time he was near her. He was going to have to watch his step at all times. Even though he enjoyed being with her, there was a price to be paid for that enjoyment. And he knew that, if he allowed himself to let go, she would be the one paying. She, and possibly her son.

  He could never allow that to happen, not to Rachel. She didn’t need another liability in her life. She’d already had one.

  Straightening, Kirk forced himself to turn around and return to the back room. Ethan should be finished unpacking all the boxes by now. He wanted to show the boy his camera. From all indications, Kirk had a feeling Ethan would enjoy that.

  * * *

  Rachel leaned back in her chair and surveyed the kitchen table. She was careful not to lean back too far. The table leg next to her seemed ready to collapse at any moment. It had shuddered once when she accidentally hit it with her foot.

  “All right, we’ve eaten and cleaned up...” she began, and got no further.

  “Under protest,” Kirk interjected. He made eye contact with Ethan, and the boy nodded in reply. “At least as far as the latter goes.”

  She’d commanded both of them to stack and wash. Ethan had looked ready to refuse until Kirk acquiesced.

  “Cleaning up is good for you,” Rachel insisted.

  Kirk blew out a breath as he glanced at the empty dish rack on the counter. She’d insisted not only on washing everything, but on drying it all and putting it away, as well. “I don’t mind dirty dishes in the sink.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Learn to mind.” Rachel rose. “As I was saying, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the sheets.”

  Kirk looked dubiously at Ethan. A contented, full feeling was curling through him. He couldn’t recall having felt that way in years. “Does she always order people around like this?”

  Ethan was willingly pulled into the scenario as a confidant. He took to sharing feelings with another male surprisingly easily, Rachel thought—although, unfortunately, it was at her expense. Perhaps especially since it appeared to be at her expense. She didn’t care. She’d endure anything as long as it meant that Ethan would come around again.

  Ethan nodded, his blond hair swaying like the fringe of a grass hut in the strong spring breeze. “Yeah.”

  Kirk sighed and then rose to his feet. “Then I guess we don’t stand much of a chance if we try to resist. Might as well give in.”

  Ethan wasn’t as easily convinced. A stubborn expression took over his face. “But it’s your house.” His stance showed that he clearly sided with Kirk. “You can if you wanna.”

  He was enjoying the boy, Kirk thought. Almost as much as he enjoyed Ethan’s mother. And for a whole host of different reasons.

  “Sometimes,” Kirk confided in a conspiratorial tone, “it’s a whole lot easier just going along with things than fighting the inevitable.” Kirk noted Rachel’s pleased expression.

  Ethan frowned and cocked his head. “What’s that? In-inevitable...”

  Kirk placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch this time. That was a good sign. “Your mother, for one.” Kirk raised his eyes to Rachel’s. She looked sure of herself, he thought. He hadn’t had any intention of ever lifting those sheets. But if it meant that much to her, what harm could it do? Maybe it would even make him feel a little better, though he doubted it. “It means something that you can’t avoid or escape. Like your mother getting her way.”

  “Smart thinking.” Rachel pushed her chair in, then led the way into the living room. “I take no prisoners, remember?”

  Ethan made sure he kept up with Kirk. He looked from one to the other now. “What are you guys talking about?” he demanded.

  Rachel wrapped her fingers around the edge of a sheet. “Old childhood games.” She had been a fierce competitor, always desperate to win. Desperate to show her brother and Kirk that she was their equal, even if she was younger and smaller. “And it certainly wouldn’t hurt to try to make this place more inviting.”

  “It’ll take more than removing sheets to do that.”

  She heard the dark note in his voice. What had gone on here? she wondered. If it was so terrible, why had he returned? Why hadn’t he just sold it?

  Maybe she was just reading things into nothing, she thought. “It’s a start.”

  His eyes shifted to hers. “Why start what can’t be finished?” He hadn’t meant it as a challenge, but that was the way it came out.

  She chose her words carefully, for Ethan’s sake, as well as his. “Because you just might be able to finish it after all. You’ll never know if you don’t try.” Rachel pulled the sheet completely off the armchair. It didn’t look particularly comfortable or inviting, she thought as she folded the sheet mechanically.

  Kirk took the sheet from her and let it drop onto the coffee table. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re terminally cheerful?”

  She smiled at him. The look in his eyes made her want to soothe him, to chase away whatever it was that was troubling him. She had very few weapons at her disposal, but she would use what she could.

  “Must be the company I keep.” Her smile faded a little around the edges as she remembered another time. “I wasn’t always.”

  She couldn’t deny what he knew to be true. “You have been for as long as I can remember.”

  She was already tugging off another sheet, this one from a sofa. “You were gone for a while, remember?” She sensed her son’s retreat. Turning, she saw Ethan at the front door. “Speaking of going—” she raised her voice just a little to catch Ethan’s attention “—where are you headed, Ethan?”

  The defiant look was back in his eyes. He kept his hand on the doorknob. “Out.”

  Two steps forward, one step back. Rachel controlled her impatience. “Can you be a little bit more specific than that?”

  Ethan shifted from foot to foot. “I’m bored.”

  It had been good while it lasted, she thought. Avoiding Kirk’s eyes, she looked in Ethan’s direction. “All right, go back into the house and play video games for a while. I’ll be home soon.”

  His expression indicated that she could stay away indefinitely, for all he cared. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The door slammed in his wake, and she winced, both at the sound and at the unspoken display of rebellion it symbolized.

  She sighed as she turned toward Kirk. “I’m not a mother, I’m a drill sergeant.” She finished pulling the sheet away with a vengeance.

  He laughed at the comparison. “Video games are hardly K.P. duty.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. He won’t listen to me if I ask him to do something nicely. I have to order him around before he obeys.”

  The sheet she was folding was long, and she was having trouble with it. Kirk picked up the other end and folded one edge over the other, then brought his end to meet hers. Their hands brushed against each other, and a pleasant, electric feeling reinforced the contact. A feeling of inevitability coursed through him. He remembered the definition he’d given to Ethan.

  “At least he obeys.”

  She dropped the first sheet on top of the other. “For now.”

  Words of hope were not something he was accustomed to doling out. For her sake, he tried. “He doesn’t seem that bad.”

  Bad wasn’t a word she wanted to attach to Ethan. He wasn’t bad. He was troubled. Like Kirk.

  A lot like Kirk, she thought suddenly. “No, not with you,” she agreed. “Not when he thinks I’m not around,” she amended. When she was there, Ethan was inflexible, stubborn, as if her very existence repelled him. “He seems a great deal more relaxed around you.”

  There was a reason for that, Kirk thought. He followed her to the last covered piece of furniture in the living room. “Maybe because we understand each other.”

  The comment lingered in the air between them for a moment. Rachel debated asking Kirk about something that had been preying on her mind.

  It wasn’t curio
sity that won out in the end, it was concern. And the knowledge that sharing pain helped to diminish it far more than the passage of time could.

  Each word seemed to stick in her throat. Rachel had to coerce the question out. “Did your father beat you, Kirk?”

  A dark, distancing look entered his eyes. “What makes you ask?”

  He was being evasive, and he knew it. It didn’t make any sense. The fact that his father had beat him, had abused him, shouldn’t bother him anymore. After all, he’d shed that skin. All of that was in the past.

  But it did. It bothered him a great deal.

  Rachel shrugged. She didn’t want to tell him about that time she had witnessed it without his knowledge. Instead, she shrugged. “I don’t know...some of the things you say, the way you seem to relate to Ethan so well.”

  Kirk avoided her eyes. “Most fathers hit their kids once in a while.”

  She placed a hand on his shoulder, drawing his eyes to her. “Mine didn’t,” she told him softly. Unspoken sympathy filled her.

  “You were lucky.” He laced his hand over hers, but then, very gently, removed it. He didn’t want pity, even from her. “Luckier than you realize. People can be cruel to one another inside and outside of the family. I saw a lot of it in the last nine years.” And he’d relived it in his nightmares, nightmares that came all too frequently.

  He hadn’t really answered her question, but at least he was opening up about his work. It was definitely a step in the right direction.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He sighed and dragged his hand through his hair. If he closed his eyes, he could still see it, the despair, the poverty. The fear.

  “I saw men and women so eaten up by frustration, by their own inability to control their lives, that they took it out on anything that was smaller and more defenseless than they were. Children, each other...” He looked down into her face and fought the temptation to frame it with his hands. Fought the temptation to kiss her. “It’s a very cruel world out there, Funny Face. You don’t know how insulated you are here.”

  She pressed her lips together as she thought of Don. She hadn’t had to go halfway around the world to find the human frailties Kirk cited. “Not so insulated.”

  How could he have been so insensitive? he thought, cursing himself. “Yeah, right, I forgot.” The last thing in the world he wanted was to cause her pain. “I’m sorry, Funny Face.”

  She knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her. “Don’t be.” She wanted to divert the conversation. Don was old territory. She wanted to explore uncharted frontiers—Kirk’s uncharted frontiers. “If you felt the way you did about what you were doing, why did you keep doing it? Why didn’t you just stop?”

  She was asking a question he’d asked himself a hundred times. And he gave Rachel the same answer he’d given himself. “What else would I do?”

  He paced around the room slowly, unconsciously reacting to the echoes of the past he still felt. “I can’t explain it exactly, but the first time I touched a camera, I knew. I knew that this was what I wanted to do. It was as if I’d found a piece of myself that had been left out all this time.” His mouth curved at the memory. “Everyone ridiculed Mr. Miller, but to me, he was like a magical gnome in that photography workshop, unlocking a world for me I’d never seen.” He looked at Rachel, trying to make her understand. “I could trap time, highlight injustice, capture a laugh, all through the eyes of a camera.”

  He made it sound wonderful, but he had still shifted the focus. “All through your eyes,” she pointed out.

  His smile deepened. Did she have any idea how incredibly sweet she was? “Yeah, that’s what made it special. I could observe and show, all without intruding.”

  Rachel heard more. She heard what he wasn’t saying. “Or being part of it? Didn’t you get lonely, standing on the outside?”

  The amusement faded from his smile. She had hit it right on the head. That was the part that had been so appealing. Being on the outside. Untouched.

  “I didn’t stand very much. Most of the places that I’ve been to the last few years required a great deal of running.” Kirk thought of his last harrowing escape. “Usually without any warning.”

  She knew that a collection of his best work had won an award several years ago. It had evoked words such as poignant, poetic, powerful, and incredibly moving from the critics. She also knew that Kirk had taken none of it to heart. He was the least self-absorbed person she had ever known.

  “I saw a great deal of that work. They’ve used your photographs in magazines, newspapers, anthologies. You couldn’t have put that much passion into it without feeling some of it yourself.”

  He knew what she was trying to do, and he appreciated it, but there was no point. “The passion was already there, Funny Face, I just captured it.”

  Rachel wasn’t going to let him elude his due. “Even so—”

  “Even so,” he echoed, “you’re doing a great deal of prodding this morning.”

  She looked at him with an expression of complete innocence. “Is that what I’m doing?” Rachel drifted from the living room into the hall. “I thought we were just having a conversation.”

  He arched a skeptical brow as he followed her. “A conversation starts out with ‘Say, how about those Dodgers?’”

  Rachel refused to be evaded. “Only if you have nothing else to talk about.”

  He shrugged. A curtain had gone down, as surely as if she had watched the material fall, separating him from her. “Maybe I don’t.”

  She tried not to be hurt. He had his reasons, she told herself. “Meaning the subject is closed?”

  It sounded too harsh when she said it that way. “How about tabled?”

  Rachel accepted the terminology. “Speaking of tables, you need to buy a new one for the kitchen. The one you have really wobbles. I thought the leg next to me was going to give way while we were eating.”

  “If I stay.”

  Maybe he just needed to be coaxed, she thought. To be made to feel that someone cared whether he came or went.

  “Why don’t you? Stay for a while, Kirk.” She turned so that her body was just a breath away from him. A small, tantalizing breath. “I think it would be good for everyone.” She could feel her pulse accelerating again when she looked deep into his eyes. This had all the earmarks of an adolescent crush. Except she was light-years away from being an adolescent. “Certainly Ethan. And Cameron, because you bring out the boy in him.” Her eyes held his. “And you, because I think you need to remember that it isn’t all pain out there.”

  He felt his body reacting to her, felt the urge to hold her growing. “How about you? Would it be good for you if I stayed?” It was stupid to ask, but somehow he couldn’t help himself.

  There was no point in being either coy or evasive. “Me especially.”

  “Why?” The word glided along her face, making her breath stop in her lungs.

  She smiled, and it seemed to seep into his bones. “Because I always liked having you around. Because you’re good for everyone.”

  It was the last thing he would ever have expected to be said of him. His father’s mocking words rang in his ears: “You’re nothing. You were born a nothing, and you’re going to die a nothing.”

  She saw the denial rising to Kirk’s lips. “You are,” she insisted. They were standing too close to each other. And to something he didn’t seem ready to explore yet. Drawing herself away, she turned and placed her hand on the knob of the door to the closed room. It would be best if she remained busy. “I wouldn’t mind having you live next door to me forever.”

  He stiffened when he saw what she was about to do. “Leave that alone.”

  He made her jump. “What?”

  His voice was far rougher than he had meant it to be. Emotion had rung it out of him. “I want you to leave the door closed.”

  She raised her hand in surrender. “Okay, but why?”

  “It’s my father’s den.”

  She didn’t see t
he reason for his sudden shift. “And—?”

  He blew out a breath. “I’d just rather not go in there.” He looked at her, an apology in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Funny Face. I didn’t mean to yell.”

  Was that what he called yelling? His voice hadn’t gone up at all. It was the low warning tone that had had her backing away. “It’s okay. After all, as Ethan pointed out, it’s your house.”

  “It was never mine.” Before she could ask him what he meant by that, he retraced his steps into the living room. “I think we’ve cleared off enough sheets for the day.”

  She knew better than to argue.

  Chapter 10

  Rachel was seriously thinking of having Kirk canonized. What was happening—what had been happening for the past three weeks—couldn’t be described as anything short of a miracle.

  Granted that it might be viewed by some as a small miracle. There was no flash or fire accompanying it, and it couldn’t be termed earth-shaking. But it was a miracle, pure and simple nonetheless.

  Rachel saw a piece of it taking shape every day. Ethan was beginning to slowly change. Or rather to slowly revert. Her son was becoming more like the boy he’d been before the whole horrible business of the divorce and his father’s death had taken place.

  And Kirk was the reason.

  No matter how much he shrugged it off, Rachel thought as she sat in her den, grading the mountain of test papers on her desk, Kirk was the cause, the source.

  It had been only four short weeks since Kirk had returned to Bedford and reentered her life. In that time, their former relationship had taken on yet another dimension. He was now her baby-sitter, though she would never have put it that way to him or to Ethan. Neither of them would appreciate it.

  It had all begun with Mrs. Gillion.

  Mrs. Gillion was the woman who watched Ethan three days a week after school let out. Those were the days when Rachel taught classes that ran too late for her to be able to pick up her son herself. Mrs. Gillion picked Ethan up and brought him to her house, where he stayed until Rachel could come for him. He had never been happy about the arrangement, balking at having a “sitter.” But he was far too young for her to leave alone—especially since his behavior had taken such a drastic turn. Rachel wanted to be certain that she knew where he was at all times. Mrs. Gillion had seemed perfect for the position.