The bunny was sitting up on his hind feet and staring right at them. She took her new phone from her hip pocket and took a picture of him. “I can see him sitting at the end of a rainbow,” she whispered.
“Or maybe with a stylized cactus behind him. He’d be the only real-looking thing in the picture,” Josh suggested.
“Purple cactus with pink spines.” She thought again of what Sophie had said about the liberties an artist could take with her work.
“Might be interesting.” Josh fired up the engine.
She tucked the phone back into the hip pocket of her jeans and wrapped her arms back around him. Then they were off again. The mountain range didn’t look nearly as tall when Emma viewed it from the trailer, but the closer they got to the shade that it threw, the bigger it was.
Josh parked the four-wheeler under a big scrub oak tree. She moved her arms so he could hop off, and then she slung a leg over the seat and did the same. He got out their supplies and a quilt from the saddlebags.
“You thought of everything,” she said.
“This ain’t my first time to come out here. I even discovered a cave about a quarter of the way up the mountain.” He grinned. “We’ll spread this out and have a little snack. Then we’ll just let the ideas for future projects come to us.”
“How do we do that?” Emma asked.
“The ideas?” Josh whipped the quilt up into the air, let it fall, and then smoothed it out. “You just lay down on your back and stare at the tree limbs and leaves and even the clouds. You clear your mind of everything and wait. When you get an idea, you write it down. I brought two small notebooks—one for you and one for me.”
“Couldn’t we just make a note in our phone?” she asked.
“Of course, but I always back up everything with notes in case I lose my phone. You can use the notes app on your phone, but there’s no service when we’re this far out. That picture you took of the bunny was about the last place that got reception,” he explained. “We can spend the whole day until dark, or if nothing comes to mind, we can go home anytime we want.”
She opened her backpack and brought out two bottles of water and some snacks that she’d packed, thinking the whole time that she should have tucked in more. But then, she hadn’t figured on spending the whole day. And ideas about painting? Forget that when she was stretched out beside Josh on a quilt all day. Her mind would be going in circles about him and what Filly had said about hunting for truth, love, and inspiration, not thinking about pictures to produce for Leo and Sophie.
Josh handed her a protein bar and a bottle of apple juice. “There’s”—he blushed—“I don’t know how to say this”—he rolled his eyes up toward the sky—“but if you need it, there’s toilet paper and a small trenching tool in my backpack.”
“I brought some, too, but I didn’t think of a little shovel.” She’d lay dollars to doughnuts that Sophie never had to discuss such things on her first date with Teddy. She opened the protein bar and took a bite. Forget love, inspiration, and truth. I’m hunting for the new me.
Josh handed her a small notebook and a sharpened pencil, finished the last of his snack, and stretched out on his back. “Those clouds look like an angel. I wonder if I could do justice to them in a drawing, maybe with just a hint of color in them from the sun rays.”
Emma never wanted to paint angel clouds again. Just looking up at them made her skin crawl and her stomach almost rebel at the small protein bar she’d been eating.
“I don’t paint clouds that look like angels’ wings,” she said.
“Why?” He turned his head to look at her. “You know you can talk to me, Em. I’m a dang good listener.”
She thought of all the times that Nancy had tried to get her to open up about her memories and she couldn’t. Maybe she should call Nancy and talk to her on the phone about some of this. Sophie and Josh, along with Filly and Arty, were her friends. She could talk to them, and they would help her, but maybe Nancy could help even more.
“I’d just finished the painting a day or so before and gotten my final grade on it,” she sighed. “Rebel used to tell me and Sophie that we had guardian angels that would wrap their wings around us and protect us. That’s what I thought about when I was working on it. Then no one, not a guardian angel or a real person, was there to protect me when I was raped.” She told him about how she felt at the hospital and how she had sneaked out. “I took a knife from the kitchen and destroyed the painting because my guardian angels had forsaken me.”
Josh reached across the distance separating them and laced his fingers with hers. “I understand, but someday you might be ready to paint angel clouds again.”
“Thank you, but what I really need to do is figure out who I am right now,” she said.
He pulled his hand free. “How long do you think that will take?”
Suddenly she felt pressured to figure things out in a hurry, and yet she needed the time to work through it all. Would Josh be willing to wait, or did he want a relationship now?
“I have no idea. It took my whole life in some ways to get me in the shape I was in before I came to the trailer park, so I expect it will be a slow process. I’m sorry if . . .”
He turned his head and reached for her hand again. “I didn’t mean to pressure you. Take all the time you need.”
“Seems that I’m always saying it, but thank you, Josh.” The antsy feeling of being pressured to rush was gone in the blink of an eye.
“Look at those birds, Em.” Josh turned back so he could see the sky again. “They’re flying close to us, but you could paint them in the middle of that heart-shaped cloud.” He was a little disappointed that she wasn’t as ready as he was to be more than just friends.
What makes you think you’d even know how to have a relationship? Maybe you need to work on your social skills before you think about a girlfriend. You couldn’t even keep it together enough to go to public schools. This time it was his mother talking to him.
Emma broke into his thoughts before he could argue when she asked, “What kind of birds are they?”
“Mexican jays,” he said. “The blue on them is so brilliant that they . . . oh!” He sat up and grabbed his notepad.
“What?” She popped up to a sitting position right beside him just in time to see a lizard crawling onto their quilt. “What is that ugly thing?”
“That would be a Texas toad, or what folks around these parts call a horny toad. I haven’t ever done a drawing of one of those,” he said as the round thing that looked like it popped out of a sci-fi comic book made its way across the quilt.
Emma giggled. “If Sophie was painting that thing, it would be purple.”
“What if I draw it with a cactus off to the side of the canvas and put just a tiny bit of purple in the cactus flower?” Josh finished the rough sketch and laid his notebook back down.
“I can’t wait to see it. I think I’ll do one of it all stylized with purple horns and maybe blue eyes.” She made notes until the reptile scurried away.
“Now the day hasn’t been totally shot.” Josh grinned. “If I get even one idea when I come out here, I feel like it’s profitable.” Mentally, he was making notes about his next drawing of Emma’s face with the sunlight filtering through the oak leaves onto it.
Josh loved the peace of this place, with the birds singing, crickets chirping, and the occasional coyote adding his voice to the mixture. But he had never liked it nearly as well as he did when he shared it with Emma.
“Is that thunder?” she asked when a low rumble sounded on the other side of the mountain.
“It’s not supposed to be stormy today.” He stood up and walked out past the four-wheeler. Sure enough, dark clouds were gathering and moving toward them from the southwest, pushing all those puffs of white to the side as if they were nothing but marshmallows. “But I guess it is. We’d better cut our trip short or else we’ll be dodging lightning bolts here in a little while.”
Dammit! he thought as h
e put everything back into the backpacks. He’d looked forward to a whole day with Emma, and a damned storm had ruined it.
She grabbed one corner of the quilt, and he got the other end. Together, they folded it and loaded their backpacks into the saddlebags. Then Josh hopped onto the four-wheeler and tried to start the engine, but it only made a grating sound. The noise when lightning struck a nearby tree deafened them. The thunder that followed compounded the racket, and Josh jumped off the vehicle.
“What’s the matter with it?” Emma’s eyes had gone wide with fear.
“We’re going to be fine,” Josh tried to reassure her. “I’ve had to spend some time out here before. Remember me telling you that I discovered a cave just a little way up the mountain? Well, we should be heading that way if we don’t want to get soaked.”
“I’ve never been inside one, but it sounds better than this. How far is it?” she asked.
“About a quarter mile up that mountain.” He tossed her backpack to her.
She caught it and slung it over her shoulder while he strapped his on and tucked the quilt under his arm. “I already smell rain, and it’s a steep climb, so we should hurry.”
“Lead the way,” Emma said.
The path that he’d used to go from the base of the mountain to the cave had grown over and gotten tangled since the previous fall, but it was still passable, even if they did have to sidestep a few cacti. “I found this place the year I bought the trailer park,” he said. “I was following a rare kit fox up here and happened upon the cave. I was kind of scared to go inside it at first—bats scare the bejesus out of me—but I forced myself to face my fears and go inside. There were no bats or animals of any kind, thank goodness, but I did find where my fox had probably had a litter of babies. I guess I tainted the cave, because I’ve never seen any other foxes or animals up here.”
Lightning zigzagged out of the sky and seemed to land only a hundred feet off to the side of the pathway. Thunder followed so low over their heads that Emma stopped and covered her ears.
“Just a little farther,” Josh yelled over the din just as the first drops of rain splattered on his glasses. “See that big cedar tree? It’s a few steps beyond that. Take my hand. It’s steeper from here to there.”
She grabbed for his hand without hesitation. “What happens when it all ends? We don’t have phone service to call for help. Will Filly and Arty come looking for us?”
“Not until morning,” Josh said as he pulled her inside the opening to the cave. “I told them we might not be back in time for supper, but when we aren’t there in the morning, Arty will come this way.” He went straight to a lantern and lit it.
“Oh, my!” Her eyes grew wide again as she took in the cave.
“After the first time I got stuck up here, I got prepared. There’s dry wood back there for a fire.” He pointed to the circular pit outlined with rocks. “Over there on that big rock are a few cans of beans and a couple of flashlights. Even if I don’t have to stay here, I check on the place a few times a year and make sure firewood is ready if I need it.”
“Well, thank you once again,” she told him just as the wind picked up and the rain fell outside the entrance in gray sheets. “We sure wouldn’t want to be huddled up under that tree with this much lightning.”
Josh dropped his backpack and spread the quilt out near the firepit he’d circled with rocks a few visits ago. “I’ll build us a little fire to warm this place up.”
Emma shivered. “What can I do to help? Is that hail?”
He turned and looked at the cave entrance. “Yep, and that would be why it’s gotten so cold. If you’ll sit down right here in the middle of the quilt, I can wrap the edges up around you. That will keep you warm until the fire gets going.” She sat down, and he pulled the edges up over her shoulders to make a shawl. “The fire will take the damp off the cave in a hurry.”
“I didn’t even think about a jacket,” she told him.
“These storms come up fast out here in the desert,” he said as he laid kindling in the firepit. Once that was burning, he put a few small logs on top of the embers. “First time I did this I was afraid the smoke would run me out of here, but this place has a natural vent up there to get rid of the smoke. I’d love to know the story of why that’s even there.”
“I’ll make up a story for you.” She smiled.
“I’d love to hear it,” he said as he got a good blaze going.
“Once upon a time, a princess lived in this area in an adobe castle with her parents, the king and queen of Hummingbird Lane. She fell in love with a young man, but he was a lowly blacksmith,” Emma said, “and the king would never consent to her marrying the man. Jeremiah, the blacksmith, found this cave when he was running away from the princess’s brothers late one night. He pulled some brush over the opening, and they never found him, so it became the place where he and the princess could meet.”
Josh pulled back the quilt on one side and sat down. “You should have been a novelist as well as an artist.”
“When I was a little girl, I spent lots of hours entertaining myself with made-up stories. Mother fussed at me for spending more time with my stories and pictures than I did with math and history. Truth is, I never wanted to do anything but paint anyway, and I would much rather have cleaned houses like Rebel did than run a big oil company like Mother. Rebel was my hero,” Emma said.
“Tell me more of this story that you just made up.” Josh could have listened to her soft voice all night.
Emma turned her head slightly and smiled.
“Her name was Rachel, and his was Jeremiah. She was a beautiful woman and he was a very handsome man, but he was just a poor man. They knew they could never be together, so after a very long winter, they decided to run away together. They traveled all the way to the shore and lived happily ever after,” she said.
“And it all started right here in this cave?” Josh asked.
“Yes, and it was raining the night they made plans to run away together, just like it is now,” Emma said. “The end.” She had moved closer to him and wrapped a part of the quilt around him.
“But I wanted a whole long family saga that brought the story right up to this century,” he protested, hoping that if she kept talking she would stay right beside him.
“Maybe you are a descendant of one of them—either the blacksmith or the princess. One of their spirits led you to this cave because they knew that someday, you would need protection.” Emma spun more of the story.
“I would rather share genes with the blacksmith. They were artists of a sort.” He stretched out his hands to warm them over the fire.
“Then that’s who you will get your DNA from in my story. He had a strong, square jaw and brown eyes,” she told him.
He blinked several times. “My eyes are hazel, which is pretty common.”
“Rachel had very light brown eyes, and down through the ages, there were some blue-eyed people in my story.” Emma smiled.
“Do you think I’ve saved a princess from getting wet?” he asked.
“No, you’ve saved a commoner from getting hit by lightning. I don’t want to be a princess. I just want to be a common woman who lives in a trailer, goes out into the desert on adventures, and paints pictures of horny toads with purple spikes on their ugly little heads,” she told him.
“You can be anything or anyone you want to be in this part of the world,” Josh said. “Did your mother or father tell you bedtime stories when you were little? Is that where you got your ability to make up fascinating tales?”
“Mother didn’t have time for that. Daddy used to read to me sometimes, and I looked forward to the evenings when he read to me, but after I learned to read for myself, that ended. Rebel used to make up tales for me and Sophie, though. She would entertain us girls when she took her lunch break, and I would sit almost in a trance listening to her.”
The wind blew a few hailstones the size of golf balls across the floor of the cave. The storm had settl
ed right over them, and it was beginning to look more and more like they would be there the rest of the day and probably through the night.
Josh didn’t mind that idea one bit. He could have lived in the small cave for the rest of his life with Emma. “You really love Rebel, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah!” Emma nodded.
“Then why didn’t you call her when”—he stammered a little—“when that happened?”
“I didn’t want Rebel to think I was a complete idiot,” she answered. “Locking it away in a box and throwing away the key was easier than talking about it to anyone until now.”
“Well, I’m glad you can talk about it,” he said.
“Me too. Did your parents tell you bedtime stories?” she asked.
“My grandfather’s friend, Harry, kind of filled in with that role. He spent a lot of time with me, but his stories were more like fishing stories,” he said. “Mother and Dad were pretty wrapped up in their careers, and still are.”
“Well, I love stories,” Emma said as she looked around the tiny cave. “And I like this place. I’m glad you found it.”
Josh’s heart swelled. Emma liked his cave and had told stories that made him look like a warrior. He wouldn’t mind if they had to stay in the cave for the night—not one bit.
Chapter Seventeen
The story had been just a tale that Emma made up to pass the time when she and Josh were in the cave. The characters weren’t real, and she’d made up the names in her rendition of Romeo and Juliet. But when she awoke for the second morning with Josh spooned up against her back and his arm around her, she wished that it were real. As the characters, they would have already had a first kiss, and most likely even slept together—as in real sex. That terrified Emma more than she would like. What if when she finally did get past the kiss, maybe even the making out, she froze when it was time for sex? She had told her therapists in the counseling sessions that having a relationship terrified her, and they had assured her that when the right time came for that step, she would probably be comfortable with it.
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