No Place I'd Rather Be

by Cathy Lamb

  He pulled me into his arms, and I cried on that huge and strong chest while he said soft and gentle and reassuring things. “I’ll help you, Olivia. I will do whatever I can to help you.”

  I nodded, cried more, and he pulled me in tighter.

  “In fact,” he pulled back. “Move back in with me.”

  “What?”

  “The judge will like it. Married mother. Father in the picture. Stable home life.”

  “No.” I stared into those dark eyes through a wash of tears. Oh, my gosh. “Yes. Thank you, Jace.” I sagged in relief against him. Total, complete relief. This would help. I was not a separated mother anymore, who might have, in the state’s mind, family issues, domestic issues, broken home issues, and an upcoming contentious divorce. Anthony Bastfield III was already making spiteful, gargling noises about it.

  “Do you want to move in here, or do you want me to move into your house?” he asked.

  I thought of the girls. They loved it here, loved the animals, especially the dogs and cat. Plus Jace and I worked at the ranch. His new home was close to the ranch and ten minutes from town. “Here. If you’d like. It’s easier.” I smiled. My smile wobbled. I felt weak and jiggly inside. “Shorter commute.”

  “Fifteen minutes from my house to here.”

  Living with Jace again. Living with the stud in front of me. I wondered how long I could go without jumping that body like a warrior woman.

  “I’ll come help you all move. When is good for you? How about today?”

  I laughed through tears. “Today?”

  He didn’t laugh. “Would you like to go now?”

  Wow. He’s fast. But it worked. “After I get lunch going?”

  “Sure.” He nodded.

  “Thanks so much, Jace.”

  He smiled. That smile lit up his hard-jawed, weathered face. “No, thank you, Olivia.” He winked. “I know you’re doing this for the girls, and for the custody issue you’re dealing with, but I could not be happier to have all of you living here with me. This is one of the best days of my life.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes.” He was completely serious. “Best days? When I met the love of my life in a bar. The day we got engaged. The day we got married. All of the days that we were married were my best days. And now, another best day.”

  “You are a kind man, Jace.”

  “I want you here. I want the girls here. You make me happy, Olivia, so do they. I want you to be happy. More than anything, that’s what I want.”

  I sniffled. Why can’t I have a tiny, sweet, soft sniffle instead of a big, honking one? And why did Jace make me cry so much? “Three women, Jace.” I smiled up at him. “Are you ready for it?”

  “I’ve been ready for it forever.”

  And that was that.

  Jace and I drove to my house, my grandparents’ log cabin, early that afternoon. We loaded up. I didn’t have that much stuff. I could tell that Jace was surprised. Being broke is quite limiting in what you can buy.

  Jace wrapped me in a bear hug, kissed me, then drove to his house while I cleaned the cabin. Afterward, I stood on the front porch. I had found peace in this home my whole life. I put my hand on the red door, the lasso, the wagon wheel that brought my granddad’s ancestors west, then my grandparents’ cowboy hats nailed to the house. I loved the weather vane with the sun, because my grandma was my granddad’s sun.

  Now I would be going to live with my sun.

  The question was: Could I handle it this time?

  Chapter 15

  I picked up the girls at school after their art class. I took them for ice cream cones. “You girls like Uncle Jace, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” Lucy licked her cone. “He’s nice. He’s going to teach me how to ride a horsey.”

  “Uncle Jace is funny. But there wasn’t a fairy in the batter.” Stephi’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think.”

  “So, Lucy and Stephi.” I took a deep breath. “We’re going to go and live with Uncle Jace. At his house.”

  They both stopped eating.

  “What?” Lucy shrieked, smiling, standing up, her ice-cream cone in the air.

  “We’re going to live with Uncle Jace?” Stephi started jumping up and down. Her ice cream fell off her cone. It didn’t faze her. “When, when, when?”

  “We’re going to live with him starting today.”

  “Oh yay!” The girls hugged each other and jumped. Lucy’s ice cream fell off her cone. It didn’t faze her, either.

  “We love Uncle Jace! And the dogs and the kitty cat,” Stephi said.

  “Now we have a dad,” Lucy said.

  “A giant dad!” Stephi said.

  “A big dad,” Lucy said. “Uncle Jace can beat up the bad mens anytime.”

  “Yep,” Stephi said. “Bad daddy can’t get us. Uncle Jace is our dad now. And the dogs are our brothers.”

  “And the horses are our sisters,” Lucy said.

  Perfect, I thought. Animals for siblings for the girls.

  And a hunk of a cowboy wandering around who will be impossible for me to resist.

  * * *

  The girls were offered their own rooms at Jace’s house, but they didn’t want to be separated. They chose the bedroom with a view of the mountains, and we moved their new twin beds and new pink comforters in. After dinner I helped them unpack. Jace helped, too.

  “I think I see a glittery fairy behind this dresser . . .” Jace said. The girls rushed to see her.

  * * *

  I did not stay in Jace’s bedroom. He said, “I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said, “No, it’s okay. I will.” We argued. Neither one of us would give in, so we ended up sleeping together, on the carpet, under a pile of blankets, in front of the fireplace, the flames dancing. We laughed. He kissed me, and we somehow became semi-naked and I pulled away, because I don’t know what to do with our problem, and he groaned and said, “You’re killing me, Olivia.”

  * * *

  My grandma and I made her family’s peach pie out of the old cookbook. Then she told me another wrenching story about the cooks.

  May 1941

  London, England

  Gisela Gobenko, grandmother of Olivia Martindale

  Two weeks after Renata died, one of the doctors from the hospital came by the new apartment Gisela was sharing with Keila and Naomi and begged her to come back.

  “Gisela, please,” he pleaded, bags under his eyes, his white hair standing on end. It was usually impeccably brushed. “I am so sorry about Renata, about your family.” He took her hand. “But there are people at the hospital who need help. We are shorthanded, you know this. Please. Please come back.”

  Gisela wanted to die. Grief was sealing up her throat like a coffin. Hope had drained out of her. She couldn’t reach any member of her extended family in Munich. She had met a man in the hospital last month. He was Jewish. He was emaciated, diseased, and had escaped from Germany, after hiding in a warehouse, the foreman a friend. He told her what she’d already been told: The Nazis were burning and gassing Jews.

  Why live anymore? What was there to live for? The world was on fire. It was being bombed to annihilation. The Jews were being hunted down and persecuted. If England fell, the Nazis would kill her, too.

  She wanted to lie on her cot in this bleak apartment and let one of the Nazi’s bombs obliterate her. It would take away this searing pain. She wanted to stop eating, stop drinking. For some reason she couldn’t get her mother’s peach pie recipe out of her head. It was as if the pie were home. But she had no home, not anymore, because she had no family.

  “Gisela. Dear. Please. The people we are treating, the people we operate on, they are someone’s sister, too. They are someone’s brother, someone’s son, someone’s father, their mother, their aunt. They are part of a family. Help me. Help me save other people’s family members.” His voice broke on that last word. She liked and respected Dr. Hirschfield.

  “Please, Gisela.” He actually teared up. Controlled, calm Dr. Hirschf
ield. “I need you to help me. Help them.”

  She closed her eyes. Pain ran like a waterfall down her whole body, drowning her.

  She got up. She went to the hospital with Dr. Hirschfield. She saved other people’s family members.

  For years.

  * * *

  In April of 1944, Dr. Hirschfield yelled to her, “Help me, Gisela. In here. Room nine. Downed American pilot.”

  She was exhausted. She had not been home in three days, sleeping here and there at the hospital. Members of the military, Americans and British primarily, were coming in, often flown in, with grievous, critical injuries from the battlefield and the air. Some they could save, some they couldn’t.

  “Come along now, lass,” Dr. Hirschfield said. “We’ll both get home one of these nights. We’ve got to carry on.”

  And carry on she did.

  There was nothing else to do, and people needed help. They were members of other people’s families.

  Today she would assist in the operation on the American pilot, covered in blood, who promptly passed out from his injuries when they lifted him onto the operating table.

  But Gisela could swear, she could, that before he passed out he stared right at her and winked. She was right.

  He winked.

  * * *

  Gisela assisted in three other operations that day with Dr. Hirschfield. They had done their best, but they would lose one patient, a young woman, a victim of a car accident. A lieutenant driving a jeep hadn’t seen her in the rain. Another sister had lost a sister. She swiped at her eyes. She had stayed late again before going home and collapsing on her bed.

  The next morning, her relentless routine began again. The American fighter pilot was sitting up in bed and smiled at her. His smile was wide and friendly. He had blond hair. She had heard his story through another doctor, who heard it through this man’s British and American air force buddies who had stopped by the hospital.

  He had dropped bombs on Germany, then had gotten into a firefight with a German pilot. He shot that plane clean out of the sky, but not before he had been wounded in the shoulder, his plane hit. His plane, barely flying, crash landed on the British air strip, injuring his leg, too.

  “Hello,” he said. “I remember you from yesterday. Thank you for what you did to help me.”

  “You’re quite welcome. I’m surprised you remember. You weren’t in the best shape.”

  “I winked at you. Didn’t you see my wink?”

  For the first time in a long time, Gisela Gobenko laughed. “I did see it. I didn’t think it was a wink, though, I thought it was accidental.”

  “No, ma’am. I saw you and all that pretty brown hair and those green cat eyes and I said to myself, ‘That is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen on Earth,’ so I winked at you before I went and had myself a nice, long Montana nap.”

  “A Montana nap?”

  “That’s what we call it back home.”

  Back home. That hurt. She thought of her home. How was their elegant brick home with the red door in Munich that the Nazis had looted? How and where were the people who had lived in that home? She choked back a sob. “I need to examine your leg and your shoulder.”

  “Thank you. My name is Oliver Martindale. May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?” He shook her hand.

  “Gisela Gobenko.” She went to work. Checking his wounds, cleaning them.

  “You’re from Germany.”

  Her hands stilled. “Yes.” She waited for the negative comments, sometimes hateful, about the Germans. She had tried as hard as she could to rid herself of her German accent but hadn’t fully succeeded. Dirty Germans. Nazi dogs. Heil Hitler, my ass. We’ll bomb those dogs down to the ground.

  “You ran from them, didn’t you?”

  Her green eyes flew to his blue ones. “Yes, I did.”

  “How?”

  She didn’t want to think about this. She was so busy. She had other patients. Maybe it was because Renata’s death had shredded her and left her hopeless, or maybe it was because she sensed a gentleness in him, a kindness, but Gisela found herself talking to Oliver Martindale, sitting beside him on the bed. At one point he took her hand and held it, his eyes so wise, compassionate.

  “You haven’t heard at all from your family in almost four years?”

  “No.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  She went to see her other patients, but over the next couple of weeks she dropped by Oliver Martindale’s room several times a day, to chat, even now and then to laugh. He had sustained shoulder, leg, rib, and lung damage on his crash landing. There was also an infection that raged after his operation.

  But Oliver Martindale healed. He was a doctor himself, he had finished his medical residency, and had enlisted to fight for “America’s, and the world’s, freedom from tyranny, danger, and Hitler himself. I cannot, I will not, sit back and let other men fight while I stay home.” He would return to Montana and work as a doctor in his hometown as soon as the war was won. “You must come and see Montana, Gisela.”

  Ah. That would never happen.

  Soon the American was ready to leave the hospital. By then, he was promising to come back for her after the war to take her to a “proper dinner with a man from Montana.”

  She doubted she would see him again. He was a fighter pilot. He could die on his next sortie over Germany. In fact, he probably would.

  “Good luck, Oliver,” she said, softly.

  “And to you, Gisela. I will be back for you. I promise. The doctor will come for a date with his nurse.”

  He kissed her then, on the mouth, and all the passion they had stored up for one another, all the pent-up emotions from a war that was cremating the world, their own grief, fear, and loss, and their budding, romantic love, came forth.

  He hugged her close and whispered, “You’re my soul mate, Gisela. Please wait for me.” He walked out, friends of his, other fighter pilots, waiting for him in the crowded corridor. They laughed and slapped him on the back. “Ready to fly again, old man?” they asked. “Let’s go get those Nazi bastards.”

  Gisela blinked back tears as he walked down the hospital’s hallway. He turned once and blew her a kiss, then disappeared. She did what she always did: She went to work, healing and helping and saving other people’s family members. She survived.

  She, along with all of the other British people, carried on. They had no choice.

  * * *

  The girls went to the clinic again with my mother and grandma and wore their white coats.

  “Lotta sick people today,” Lucy said. “I like that Grandma and Grandma Gisela make them healthy again. They put ’em back together. Hey! Like a human puzzle, but the puzzle’s sick.”

  “Grandma Mary Beth,” Stephi whispered to me, even though we were miles from my mother, “told one of her patients that he needed to take his medicine or else he would die like a gutter rat. He said to her, ‘What does Mrs. Gisela think about this stuff, Mary Beth? I want her herbs.’ We had to go and get Grandma Gisela, and Grandma Mary Beth said, ‘Get some cement in your spine and take your medicine, Willy.’”

  “He didn’t want to be a dead gutter rat.” Lucy pointed her finger in the air. “No one does.”

  “I think that Grandma Mary Beth is going to let me sew people up soon,” Stephi said.

  “Me too,” Lucy said. “I can’t wait. It’s like sewing a dress, except it’s skin, right, Aunt Olivia?”

  * * *

  Chloe was on the news again. She’s incredible. She was first on the scene of a house fire in her ambulance, a fire truck stuck in the snow. She climbed up the outside of the house, partly via a tree, then climbed in a window and threw three kids out the window to waiting neighbors, black smoke and flames pouring out. No kidding. I mean, how much more heroic can you get? If it hadn’t happened for real, people would assume it was on some cheesy, unbelievable movie.

  She then shimmied back down the tree as part of the ro
of caved in. The house fire was caused by cigarette smoking. Chloe said to a news reporter, “And tell me again why we allow a product to be made in America that causes millions of Americans to die prematurely and sets houses on fire? Tell me that, would you? That man! Mother’s boyfriend. Smoking in a house with children. What a selfish dumb-ass.”

  Chloe is so popular in Kalulell.

  * * *

  I made my grandma crumpets and scones at our blue farmhouse from the recipes that she and Renata wrote in the cookbook when they were in the shelter during the blitz in London.

  I made chamomile tea for her, too.

  “Cinnamon,” she said to me, her voice trembling. “You are a gift.”

  “I love you, Grandma.”

  “And I love you, my darling Olivia.”

  Later she wandered out to the gazebo, wearing her blue silk scarf with the white daisies on it. She tilted her head up to that Montana sky, then she raised a hand up and waved.

  * * *

  “Thank you, Jace,” I said as he handed me a toasted cheese sandwich with a smear of garlic butter and mayo on my thick, homemade grain bread. We’d put the girls to bed, turned off the lights, and he’d lit a fire in the family room. “You make the best cheese sandwiches.”

  “Taught by you.”

  “You make them better than I do.”

  “I aim to please.” He sat beside me on the couch and we watched the flames leaping, the shadows dancing on the walls while we finished our sandwiches.

  “I love your house, Jace.”

  “I built it with you in mind.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why? It’s true.”

  “Because you shouldn’t have built this house with me in mind.”

  “I wanted you to be happy here.”

  I could be happy here. But I could not be happy here if I kept getting pregnant and losing babies. I swallowed hard. I try not to cry about losing the babies so much, but sometimes that loss sneaks up on me and clutches my heart with sharp talons.

  “What is it, Olivia?”

  “Oh,” I waved my hand. “I was thinking about . . .”

  “Our babies?”