“That next day as we stood at the foot of the porch, Hugh told me to use whatever I needed. I could hear in his voice that he wasn’t coming back. I had barely been out of bed and hadn’t braided my hair since Daisy had died. As Hugh was helping Iris into the car, Noreen came over to me and whispered, ‘Me saying I’m sorry probably wouldn’t mean a thing to you, Faith. And I don’t blame you.’ Tears welled in her eyes, perhaps the only real emotion I’d ever seen from her. ‘But if I thought there was ever a chance you could forgive me, I could stand all the terrible tortures I’ll be facing in hell.’
“I took out my knife and Noreen squeezed her eyes shut. I grabbed some of the hair that was hanging in front of my face, cut off a piece, and handed it to her. As I turned to walk back toward the house, I cut off three more sections of my hair, dropping them to the ground.” Rain ran her hands up her face and into the hair that fell across her forehead. “After my mother died, the last thing I remember before my father took us off the reservation was many of her friends cutting their hair. So from my childhood, I’ve known that to be a sign of mourning among my people. And ever since Daisy, I’ve worn my hair this way. The rest grows, but I cut these bangs as a mark of grieving, lamenting what I did, and sorrow for what I didn’t do.”
Bett took in a shuddering breath and forced herself to hold back her tears, because she knew if she didn’t, Rain would feel bad about having told her all this. She wanted to ask a dozen questions. How long did you stay there alone? When did you get to South Dakota? What happened to the remaining Murphy family? But Rain looked exhausted and more distraught than Bett had ever seen. Her face was set in misery and her fists were clenched. Bett reached for Rain’s hands, working them open.
Rain’s eyes moved over her face briefly and then returned to the fire. “If you want me to leave, I will,” she said, her voice so full of sorrow that Bett’s heart seized.
“Why would I want that?” she asked, careful to keep her tone even, not wanting to hurt Rain any further.
“You must see me differently now,” Rain answered. “I committed a great wrong and a child died. A family was destroyed because of me.”
“You?” She couldn’t stop her voice from rising in disbelief. “You didn’t do anything wrong. All the bad that happened was that horrible Noreen woman’s fault.”
“It would be easy to believe that, and I did, for a while. But then I came to see that I was complicit in this tragedy as well.”
Bett was shaking her head in disbelief. “How?” When Rain didn’t reply, Bett cupped her hand under Rain’s chin, turning her face until their eyes met. “Tell me,” she insisted.
Rain’s jaw tightened. “That day—the day Daisy…died—I shouldn’t have let Noreen touch me. I should have gone straight to the house the minute I saw her. Even without knowing Daisy was there alone, I could have gotten away from Noreen if I had tried sooner, or tried harder. And I should never—I should never have told Daisy—that story…any of those stories. I knew she had a wonderful imagination. I just…I never thought that she—”
“Rain, listen to me,” Bett interrupted, grabbing her arms and shaking her gently. “You are strong and you have great powers of intuition, but you can’t know everything. You can’t see everything. You can’t control everything. Bad things happen and sometimes there is no good reason why. Maybe you feel you were being punished for what you felt with Noreen, but it’s time to let that go. You were young and she was offering you something you wanted to experience—something that felt good.”
“But it didn’t make me feel good, Bett,” Rain said, almost desperately. “It only made me feel…”
As Rain searched for the words, Bett saw herself at Oxford, going wildly from woman to woman, trying to wipe the pain of her first love Emma’s rejection from her heart with meaningless sex. “Less empty?” she suggested.
Rain shrugged. “Yes, perhaps. For a few seconds anyway. And in those seconds, I let Daisy slip away.”
“You didn’t let her, Rain. She just did.” Bett tugged her hand again. “You must change the way you speak about this, Beloved. Instead of saying you killed a child, which is not true, you must see it as, ‘a child that I loved died.’”
“But—”
“Take yourself out of the picture for a minute,” Bett insisted. “Suppose you were never there, never met the family or Daisy. You went a different route to the reservation and had totally different experiences. All right?” Rain nodded. “Mr. Murphy had already gone to get Noreen, hadn’t he? Might she not stay home one Sunday and abandon a sick Daisy for her own selfish reasons, maybe to be with a young man or simply to pleasure herself at the pond, alone? Couldn’t Daisy have wandered off on her own, looking for some comfort? Maybe the only difference is that no one finds her in the storm, and she dies alone on the prairie, instead of in her own bed, surrounded by those who loved her.” Watching her lover’s fierce expression as she again blinked back tears, Bett knew she was trying to see if there could be truth in this version. She loved this about Rain—she never dismissed ideas out of hand without giving them their due. And truth was the bedrock on which she built her life. Bett pressed on. “And tell me this—would Daisy’s tragically short life be any better for not having known you? Without you, who would have shown her how to repair things, taught her to ride, listened to her, talked to her? Who would have loved her like you did?”
Rain put her face in her hands again. Bett leaned into her, whispering, “And believe this—I don’t want you to go, now or ever. I’m so, so sorry for the sadness and loss you experienced, but I love you for exactly who you are and I always will.”
It might have been exhaustion, or the varied emotions the memories had aroused that made her lover tremble, but Bett suspected there was more to it. “Let’s go to bed.” Rain rose wearily, hesitant to look at her directly. Once they were naked together, she wrapped her arms around Rain’s shoulders. “Is there more you need to tell me?”
Rain nodded and took another deep breath. “Yes, but forgive me, Bett. I cannot go on right now. I don’t know when—”
Bett put a finger on her lover’s lips, quieting her halting speech. “Later. Or never. Either way, you have my heart, And as long as I have yours, then nothing else matters.”
Rain buried her face in Bett’s neck. “How did you get to be this wonderful, so perfectly loving?”
Bett pulled Rain closer, not surprised her lover’s eyes were closing already. “You taught me.”
* * *
Bett was even less surprised that Rain was still sleeping when she got up the next morning, aware that extreme emotions exhausted her like nothing else. From the kitchen she called Kathleen Hartley, whispering her greeting. “We talked last night. It wasn’t what I thought. Well, no, not nothing, but a story from her past she was worried about telling me.”
She’d listened to Hartley’s encouragement the second night she’d stayed over, and now she pondered how it had happened that Kathleen did indeed make a wonderful friend. Happily, she sensed Kat was glad to have someone to talk to as well. “Yes, you were right. Thanks for listening to me go on and on.” Kathleen spoke for a minute and Bett added, “Oh yes, I saw that smile on your face at your lovely dinner. I’m glad for both of you. And your friendship means a lot to us as well.”
She hung up, thinking about the twists and turns of the past months, marveling at how being with Rain, a person whose spirituality was foreign and for the most part unknown to her, had strengthened her own beliefs in life, in love, and in things working out for the best.
* * *
On the day before Valentine’s Day, Bett prepared for their dinner in the formal dining room. Rain came home to find their places set for a candlelit meal. Bett was sitting with a glass of wine in her hand. She wasn’t tipsy, but her color was high.
“What’s the occasion?” Rain asked, amazed that a simple candle could make Bett’s face look even more beautiful.
“I have a surprise for you,” Bett answered. �
�Why don’t you get cleaned up?”
Rain changed her clothes and had just finished washing her face and hands when Bett slipped into the bathroom behind her. “Is this my surprise?” Rain asked delightedly, as Bett reached for the waistband of her jeans.
“No, there’s another. This is for me,” Bett answered in a tone Rain knew well. She positioned Rain with her back to the sink, and knelt in front of her. Rain braced her hands on the counter, and with Bett’s hands squeezing her hips and her tongue stroking irresistibly, it didn’t take too long.
The candles had almost burned down by the time they got back to the table. At Rain’s place was a large envelope.
“Open it,” Bett said, sitting on Rain’s lap. The document looked very official and the language was very complex. Rain finally saw the word “divorce” and looked at Bett. “It’s final,” Bett said quietly. “It’s over.”
Rain held her tightly. “So you are free now.”
“Yes,” Bett said. “Free to be yours.” Rain’s heart soared at the words, but she could sense there was something wrong.
Rain suggested they finish dinner in bed, desperate to dispel the distance in Bett’s eyes. She wasn’t even sure about the source of Bett’s mood, but she didn’t want to ask until she had made her smile. She took Bett’s blouse off and put a little pile of the spaghetti noodles on her belly. Bett’s eyes got big when Rain picked up a spoonful of sauce.
“You’re not really going to–” she started.
“Don’t move,” Rain cautioned, spoon poised.
Bett started to giggle as the warm sauce dribbled onto her stomach and, as Rain began to lower her mouth very slowly, Bett couldn’t help trying to wiggle away. Rain straddled her and began nibbling, spreading the sauce and noodles more widely around Bett’s torso. Soon Bett was laughing hard as she squirmed and Rain’s face was a mess.
“I had no idea you were such a sloppy eater,” Bett panted when about a third of the spaghetti was gone.
“Well, you’re a very shifty plate,” Rain explained.
“I suppose you could do better?” Bett challenged.
Just as Rain removed her T-shirt, Bett quickly pulled her close, squashing the food between them. Rain’s reaction at the feel of cooling spaghetti made Bett start laughing again. Rain let Bett roll them over so she was on top.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Bett answered, “but I bet there’s going to be a big mess, no matter what.”
Rain pretended to give this some consideration. “I think you are right as usual, but we could try to make the mess on the floor and not on the bed.”
“‘Lay on, Macduff,’” Bett answered, and Rain grabbed Bett tightly and rolled them off the bed and onto the floor. She had calculated that Bett would land on top of her, but she hadn’t taken the slipperiness of the pasta into account. Bett ended up face down beside her, laughing again, and then one laugh turned into a sob.
Rain sat up and waited. In a moment, Bett sat up too, taking in a shaky breath. She was facing away from Rain. “I never really thought of myself as married, and now I’m divorced.”
“Is that bad?” Rain asked.
“I don’t like the sound of it. I don’t like the feel of it. It doesn’t feel like me.”
“What do you feel like?”
There was a long pause. Then, in a small voice, Bett said, “I feel like spaghetti.”
Rain couldn’t help chuckling. “I bet we both look like spaghetti.” Bett tried not to, but when she turned and looked at Rain’s face—still covered in sauce—she had to laugh again too.
Rain got them into her shower, saying, “If my dog was here, all that mess would be cleaned up by the time we got out.”
Bett was surprised. “You had a dog?”
Rain told her about Hunter while she soaped and rinsed them both. Bett especially loved the part where Hunter gave her away to Miss Warren, which Rain demonstrated by shaking the shower curtain as Hunter’s tail had shaken the bushes. Rain stopped the story there, not wanting to talk about the dog’s mournful howls as she left him tied at the cabin so he wouldn’t try to follow her to South Dakota. Her face showed some sadness, though, and Bett put her arms around Rain’s neck.
“Oh, Rain, it’s not fair. I want to be married to you! I want to hear all of your stories and tell you all of mine and make new ones together. When people ask me, I want to tell them that I am now really and truly married, very happily married, to the love of my life.”
Rain reached around Bett and turned off the water. “Then that’s what we will do, my Beloved.”
“We can’t, Rain. It’s not allowed.”
“When you join with me on the reservation it will be the same as being married,” Rain said solemnly.
“It will?” Bett moved a little closer.
“To me and to my people, yes.”
Bett moved even closer and looked into Rain’s eyes. “Do you still want to join with me?”
“Yes, Bett. More than ever.”
“Even though I’m a divorcee?”
“I have been waiting for this moment to ask you again. But as usual, you are too quick for me.” Rain moved out of the shower and grabbed one of Bett’s big bath towels. She draped it across her back, holding the ends out. “One of the ways of courtship I know is that a woman waits outside her tipi wrapped in a blanket. When the man she wants to marry comes by, she opens the blanket to invite him in. If he steps inside the circle she makes, it means he agrees to her proposal.”
Bett stepped into Rain’s arms, encircled by the warmth there. “Oh, yes,” she said, more joyously certain of her future than ever before. “I do.”
About the Author
Jaycie Morrison recently exchanged the Texas heat for Colorado cool, where she spends her time staring in wonder at the mountains, learning to identify different bird and animal species, and reading near the fire. Traveling is also a favorite pastime, as are music and discovering gluten-free dining options in her new home. Her interest in history, combined with a particularly vivid dream, led her to start writing what has become the Love and Courage Series. Guarding Hearts is the third in that series and, like Basic Training of the Heart and Heart’s Orders, it features World War II as the backdrop for stories about love and human nature. Contact Jaycie at [email protected] or visit her website, www.jayciemorrison.com.
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