The Winter Lodge

by Susan Wiggs

  Bake for about 30 minutes, until golden brown. Let stand for 10 minutes or more. Serve plain or with a dollop of sweetened sour cream.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  1998

  Dear Mom,

  I’m still engaged to Joey. I know you’d probably say I’m too young, if you even cared, but we decided on a long engagement because he doesn’t want to leave me alone on some army base, far from home. Marrying Joey makes sense once he gets out of the service. Gram’s not doing so hot and she needs me to stay close. And all Joey wants is to settle down in Avalon and make a life here. Gram is just crazy about him. She keeps telling me what a wonderful guy he is and what a great husband he’ll be. When he came back on leave last year, we picked out wedding bands at Palmquist’s, and they were on layaway forever. I just brought them home and I feel a very strange giddiness—nerves, maybe? Because the wedding bands make the future seem so real.

  We’re not rushing into anything, though. The rings will wait. Everything will wait. Joey’s been deployed, and since he’s a ranger, he can’t even say where and what he’s doing because it’s a top-secret mission. He had forty-eight hours to say goodbye to me. Rourke and I saw him off at the train. Rourke’s a police officer now, did I tell you that? He got his degree in law enforcement and is working in Avalon. I think his family is horrified by it all, since he’s the only son of Senator Drayton McKnight and is supposed to “do better” than being a small-town cop, but that’s another story. I’m supposed to be writing about Joey. My fiancé. Fiancé. It looks so official in writing. At the station, Joey promised he’d come back in one piece. It was all I could do not to cry, but Joey was all smiles. He’s so devoted to the rangers. One of his battalion buddies told him that if he’s conscious when the medevac carries him out, it means he didn’t try hard enough. They laugh a lot. Maybe that’s how they deal with the danger.

  He had a bit of news for me—he’s asked Rourke to be his best man, and of course Rourke said he would. And then Joey asked Rourke to take care of me while he’s gone. Those were his exact words: “Take care of her, man. I know that’s old-fashioned, but I’m not shitting you. Look out for her.”

  Rourke said he would, as if he even had a choice.

  Why do guys always feel like they need to look out for women? Hello, it’s almost the new millennium and I’ve been running a business on my own since I was seventeen. I think I can look after myself. It’s sweet of Joey to worry, though. Sweet, and maybe a little smothering.

  And then he kissed me so long and hard that I started feeling self-conscious. Don’t get me wrong—I wanted that kiss. He’s a soldier, and he was going away again. I wanted to imprint him on me, somehow, but instead, all I could think about was that we were standing in a crowd of people, sucking face like there’s no tomorrow. I wish I could have just let the kiss sweep me away and make me forget the whole world, but my mind kept wandering to the spectators around us. Then Joey had to get on the train—“See you around, sweetheart,” he said as though he was just going to the next town instead of halfway around the world. And then he was gone.

  As I watched the train pull out of the station, I didn’t look at Rourke. I couldn’t. I was afraid of what I’d see in his eyes.

  Have you ever had that feeling, Mom? That if you look at something, then you’ll be forced to acknowledge it, and everything will change?

  So Joey’s overseas, doing things I can barely imagine, and life goes along. I run the bakery, I take care of Gram. I don’t see much of Rourke these days. He dates a lot of different girls and he works hard. He calls now and then to ask about Gram and the bakery. Honoring his promise, I suppose, to “look out for me.”

  And why in God’s name am I questioning any of this? Joey adores me. I adore him. After we’re married, he wants to live at Gram’s for as long as she needs us. He has a great dad. I love Bruno like a father. Each time we meet, Bruno folds me into his thick, strong arms. He smells of hair oil and peppermint gum, and he told me Joey had a heart like a lion.

  And Joey has enough certainty for both of us. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’m it for him, and I always have been. Joey claims that even when we were kids, he just knew.

  I wish I could say the same. But guess what? I still don’t know.

  Every year, I tell myself, I finally don’t need you, Mom. Finally, I’ve outgrown my needing you. And then I find myself wishing you were around, because I have so many questions. How do you know you’re doing the right thing? Is there any way to tell, or do you just have to go for it, hope for the best, and pray it wasn’t a giant mistake?

  What good does it do to want something I can never, ever have? And here’s the thing. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so—I get the idea Rourke feels the same way. And he’s just as scared as I am.

  * * *

  President Clinton was being interviewed on NPR about U.S. intervention in the Kosovo war, and Rourke wanted to listen, because he suspected that was where Joey might have been deployed. Instead of listening to the radio, he turned his attention to Naomi, his girlfriend. Well, she wasn’t his girlfriend anymore as of ten minutes ago. Once again, things hadn’t worked out.

  “You’re a complete bastard.” Naomi yanked a T-shirt on over her head, covering her best assets. Her head popped out, and she glared at him. “A complete and total bastard.”

  He wondered why he bothered. He kept going into these relationships thinking—hoping, praying—that this would be it, that she was the one he was looking for. And then, inevitably, things deteriorated. Wanting it to work out wasn’t enough.

  Feeling weary, he peeled back the covers and got up and found a pair of shorts. Getting dumped was undignified enough. He might as well get dressed. “I never wanted to hurt you,” he said, nearly choking on the words. He’d said them too many times before, to too many women.

  Clinton was explaining how the nation was now out of debt, the budget balanced, the economy stable and it was time to turn our vision outward, to peacekeeping in the larger world.

  “You don’t even see me,” she said. “You don’t even know who I am.”

  God. She was right. He didn’t know who she was. He only knew who she wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And that was true. He was sorry for her. Sorry for himself. And sorry he kept looking for something he’d already found but couldn’t have.

  She left without another word, a beautiful woman, now damaged by him. He hated himself for doing that, for inflicting wounds she didn’t deserve. By the time she was on the road, headed back to the city, he’d nearly forgotten how they’d met. Was it at a summer concert at Woodstock, or at a bar down in Kingston? Maybe she was one of the women his mother had set him up with. Although his father had never forgiven him for becoming a cop and moving to a tiny river town, his mother kept trying to bring him back into the fold, introducing him to polished, educated young women as though they were offerings.

  He ought to swear off women altogether. But that was impossible. Women were...like air. Necessary to survive.

  He could do better. He would do better. It was just a matter of focus and discipline. These were things he considered himself good at. They were traits that had been drilled into him, and he practiced them every day on the job. It ought to be a simple matter to extend that to his personal life. Why did he even need a personal life, anyway? He should stick with what he was good at—police work. Crime investigation and crisis intervention, public safety, tactical awareness, bringing offenders to justice were all he’d ever wanted to do. That’s the ticket, he thought. Focus on the job.

  Each day as he dressed for the morning briefing, he felt a sense of irony as he put on his protective vest, his carbon-fiber holster and ASP. His own father had sponsored the state regulation requiring body armor for peace officers. Now that Rourke was a grown man, Drayton McKnight was suddenly interested i
n protecting his son.

  Rourke held steady to his vow, focusing on what he was good at. He worked overtime for the good citizens of Avalon—and for the bad ones, too. Sometimes his calls were absurd—a citizen complained that his neighbor’s black Lab kept fouling his yard. The next day, the dog’s owner reported that someone had spray painted a Day-Glo orange obscenity on the side of his dog. Other times, they were heartbreaking—a high-school girl overdosed after being sexually assaulted. An elderly citizen had been scammed out of her life savings. He treated each call as a serious matter, from a complaint about a loud party to a domestic disturbance. His job was not exactly an adventure, but this was the right place for him. Sometimes he thought he was crazy to make his life here, a spectator to Jenny and Joey’s love affair, but he felt a deep sense of connection to Avalon. This was where, as a boy, he’d discovered what freedom was.

  He used his personal time to study—negotiation, administration, community relations. He adopted dogs that had been impounded or abandoned and devoted his free time to training them. Every night at the end of his shift, he checked his e-mail. Joey was an excellent correspondent, and with e-mail, communication was instantaneous. Rourke sometimes learned breaking news before it broke. Despite the screening process, Joey offered a vivid picture of his life in an undisclosed location, which seemed to consist of physical discomfort and boredom interspersed with the pure adrenalin rush of life-or-death action. Joey ended nearly each note with a reference to Jenny: “Keep an eye on my girl.” “Eat a kolache for me.” “Tell her I’ll be home before she knows it.”

  Lately, his battalion seemed to be on the move, and Joey’s correspondence was more sporadic. He was going on night ops now, often transported with his battalion in a specially configured Chinook helo. He had a stomach bug but concealed it because he didn’t want to miss out on the action, which sounded typical of Joey.

  Rourke was in the backyard one night, letting the dogs out for one last run, when he heard the phone ring. Although it was well past ten, he stayed up late with them to make up for his long hours on the job. He gave the soggy tennis ball one final lob and sprinted to the kitchen, wiping his hand on his jeans and then searching for the handset. Too late. By the time he found it wedged between the sofa cushions, the voice mail had kicked on. Muttering with impatience, he listened to the message.

  “It’s me,” she said, and didn’t have to explain who “me” was. Ordinarily, she would offer a cheerful greeting, but tonight there was something in her voice. Something that froze Rourke in his tracks. “Please,” she continued. “I need you to come over. Please.”

  He forgot he was a public safety officer as he drove to her place, running stop signs and speeding as though pursued by demons. He surged into the driveway, got out of the car and took the porch steps three at a time.

  Jenny was waiting for him at the door. He knew before she even said a word. One look at her face, and he knew. Joey.

  She was drinking champagne—the bottle of Cristal she’d been saving for Joey’s homecoming, and it was nearly gone. She shook her head, mute, and then seemed to melt against him, pressing her cheek to his chest. He set aside her glass and held her. She didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound, but she was shaking from head to toe.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, stirring the cinnamon-scented hair by her ear. “You can tell me.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Just...let’s stay like this for a minute.”

  Any inkling of hope he had of being wrong died in that moment. Under ordinary circumstances, he and Jenny tried to avoid physical contact. It was an unspoken agreement between them, enacted the moment she got engaged to Joey. She and Rourke were too volatile together and always had been. When he was around her, the surface of his skin seemed to heat and the world shrank to the number of square inches beneath her feet. And yet she was forbidden territory.

  Tonight’s circumstances were far from ordinary, though, and this embrace, open and raw, was the only place on earth he wanted to be right now. They breathed as one. Touched with pain-filled tenderness, they tried to escape into each other so they didn’t have to move on to the next moment, to the moment when they would have to face what had happened.

  Eventually, she pulled back. “There’s more champagne,” she said, gesturing toward the kitchen.

  Rourke felt as if he was on fire as he went to the pantry, found another bottle and popped the cork. It seemed like a lousy thing to do, inappropriately celebratory, but he did it anyway. He knew this particular bottle came from the case his parents had sent to Joey to congratulate him on his engagement. A Krug Blanc de Blanc, one of only a few thousand bottles produced. Rourke drank the champagne at room temperature straight out of the bottle. Lowering it, he looked across the room at Jenny. Snow White, he thought. She was so pale, her hair and eyes so dark. And haunted now, with a sadness so deep he could feel it in his chest.

  “Your grandmother...?” Rourke asked.

  “She’s already asleep. She was sound asleep when Bruno called. She doesn’t know anything about this yet, and I might as well let her have one more night before telling her.” Jenny glanced at the hallway leading to her grandmother’s room. “Let’s go upstairs to talk. I don’t want to wake Gram.”

  Rourke felt as though he was made of wood as he followed her. When Jenny’s grandmother got sick, she couldn’t negotiate stairs anymore, so Jenny had turned a downstairs room into a bedroom for Helen. She’d transformed the upstairs into a private haven where she could spend her time writing and waiting for Joey. After they were married, they planned to live here. After they were married... With a shaking hand, Rourke took a long drink of champagne.

  When Jenny finally started to talk, her voice sounded soft and slurred with disbelief. She recited the news as though she’d been saying it over and over in her head, memorizing the horror—There was a mishap with a transport helicopter, no survivors from Joey’s Ranger battalion.

  Rourke felt no shock, just a bleak and terrible sense of destiny. As she told him the few details she knew, they finished the bottle of Krug and opened another. “He and sixteen others were in a Chinook helicopter somewhere in Kosovo. It went down in a ravine, and there were no survivors. The names won’t be released officially for several days but Bruno heard right away. He got a call by satellite phone from someone in the battalion,” she said in a broken voice. “It’s not official, there hasn’t been a formal casualty report yet. But...no survivors.”

  Icy pain howled through Rourke. Joey. His best friend. His blood brother. The best guy in the world. For a few moments, Rourke couldn’t breathe.

  Jenny looked up at him, her face reflecting his agony.

  Rourke hated it that she had been alone when the call came in. “Joey’s dad—”

  “He’s with his sisters in New York. I guess I’ll—we’ll—see him at the...oh, my God. Will there be a funeral? A memorial?”

  “I don’t know. Who knows about these things?” He kept seeing images of Joey, a goofy, big-eared kid who had grown into the kind of man everybody liked. They had shared all the important moments of their lives, from lost teeth to lost kittens, sports victories and defeats, graduation and of course, summer camp. Rourke felt as if a limb had just been lopped off.

  And yet, pushing through the empty whistle of grief inside him was something else. Something...guilt and sadness, tenderness and rage.

  He studied Jenny’s face for a long time. Found a Kleenex and dried her face. Then he leaned closer and held her in a way he never had before, not even when he wanted to, not even when she’d practically begged him to. His arms encircled her as though sheltering her from a bomb attack. He held her so that he felt the entire length of her body against his, could even feel her heartbeat, and still it wasn’t close enough. He touched her in a way he’d thought about a thousand times, tracing his thumb along the line of her jaw, tilting her face up to his, and he wanted to
kiss her, to drown in her and forget.

  Somehow, the way they both loved Joey became tangled up with the way they felt about each other, and they were kissing, and it was crazy but they were kissing and moving toward the bedroom, desperate to escape the truth but trapped there, together, with the darkness closing around them. Their clothes made a trail down the hall to her room and by the time they reached the bed, there was nothing between them, nothing at all. She tasted of champagne and tears, and she wound her arms around his neck and kept kissing him and wouldn’t let go. It was crazy, she was crazy, they were both crazy, but she wouldn’t let go.

  She kept hold of him, but pulled back so her mouth was just a whisper away. “He told you to take care of me,” she said. “How are you going to do that, Rourke?”

  * * *

  The phone rang, piercing knife-sharp through Jenny’s alcohol-fogged sleep. She stirred, moaning as she tried to hide from the noise, but it kept flaying at her. Her head felt like a rock, impossible to lift. Finally, mercifully, the shrill ringing stopped and across the room, the answering machine clicked on and she could hear the sound of her own voice picking up. She stretched—and encountered a warm, naked body under the covers. Strong arms slid around her and tucked her close, and a sleepy sigh gusted against her neck. God, oh, God. Rourke. She had slept with Rourke. Joey was dead and she’d had drunken, mind-blowing sex with Rourke.

  She was going to burn in hell.

  The caller started speaking into the machine, and it sounded uncannily like Joey. Which meant she was probably still drunk, or dreaming, because Joey was dead, lost in a helicopter crash. Like a sleepwalker, she went stark naked to the dresser where the small black box of the answering machine was still recording a shockingly familiar voice. “...all a mistake,” he was saying. “My name was on the manifest, but I wasn’t on that chopper...”

  Jenny laughed aloud, the tears streaming down her face as she snatched up the phone and said, “Joey.”