by Holly Rayner
Chapter Sixteen
The forest and the street Kyle had given me were only 20 minutes away, but I made it there in 10. Maybe I sped; I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that my foot nudged the gas pedal until the world outside my windows was a blur and the only thing to do was weave by the cars that were crawling along the road ahead of me.
The landscape was dirt and scrub as far as the eye could see, arid plains that looked to be incapable of sustaining a forest for miles, but still I pressed on. Something was drawing me to Carson Valley Way, some deep knowing.
Once I got there, the street itself was what I’d imagined the rich, nice neighborhoods of Spain or Mexico must be like: tan and white adobe two-story boxes with front lawns of tiny pebbles and one single bushy tree apiece. Each box had the same perfectly square windows with the same darker brown border, the same one-car garage. The whole neighborhood had clearly been the brainchild of one individual architect. It was not Brock’s scene at all, but then again, how much did I know about the man, really?
Yet as I drove up and down the street, I saw no sign of a green pickup truck, or any pickup truck for that matter. No, I drove up and down and back up the thin street several times but saw nothing. Finally, in exasperation, I pulled over on in the circle at the end of the street, glanced out the window, and saw just what I was looking for.
“Turquoise Trail” the yellow-lettered sign read. And though the dirt road snaking into more arid plains indicated not the slightest sign of turquoise, it did, on the far-off horizon, offer a hint of trees. That had to be it, Santa Fe National Forest.
Brock wouldn’t be content to live near the forest; he would settle only for living smack dab in the middle of it. At last, I’d finally found a lead.
I grabbed an apple from my center console, took a generous bite, and turned down the “Turquoise Trail” dirt road. I was getting close; I could feel it.
The dirt road was bumpy and meandering, tending left and then right before definitively going left again. More scrub and dirt rolled past my windows, though I barely noticed. My gaze was locked on the horizon, on the green mass I was getting nearer to every second. Then I was in the thick of it, driving on dirt that suddenly housed whole hills of low, bushy trees and little plops of ambitious grasses. Those then gave way to a whole forest of trees. They were tall and small, wide and thin, and every shade of green was present: lime and olive and seaweed and emerald. The trees were everywhere, of every kind—elms, pines, crabapples, oaks, maples, cottonwoods. I was so overcome by this sudden infusion of nature that I almost missed the two massive pines dipping together over a dark, unmarked dirt road.
I stopped the car and peered down the road. At the end was some sort of wooden building and, nearly blending in completely with the trees, a green pickup truck.
I pulled down the dirt road and parked beside the ’92 pickup truck.
With trembling hands, I tucked the chickadee canvas under my arm and got out of the car.
I stopped at the rough wooden door, the slats all mismatched—some too big, others too small, yet all somehow coming together to serve their door-forming purpose.
I lifted my fist to knock and paused.
This was really happening. I was really doing this. I was really going to see Brock again after all this time.
I knocked. In response, the whole door shook, but that was all. After that, nothing. There was no shuffling inside the cabin, no movement anywhere.
Brock’s car was right there in the lot out front. Didn’t that mean he had to be home? It wasn’t like green ’92 pickups were all that common of a vehicle.
This time I knocked with more force, but again there was no response. The third time, I knocked so hard the whole door trembled and then opened. Tentatively, my hand on an outer slat, I pushed the door open farther and stepped into the single room.
There was a sleeping bag balled in one corner and an old-style stove in the other, but there was otherwise little sign of life in the dank place.
A rifle cocked behind me, and I whipped around to see. In the doorway was Brock, his rifle pointed straight at me.
“Don’t move,” he growled.
Chapter Seventeen
His gaze flicked to my belly, and the gun drooped.
“No,” he whispered.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Tears coming to my eyes, I stepped toward him and said again, “Yes.”
We stood there for a minute while Brock’s face registered every possible emotion, from surprise to rage to despair to fear to, finally, happiness.
Regarding me with a cautious smile, he gestured to the sleeping bag behind me.
“I’m sorry there’s nowhere to sit, but do you want to…”
I clasped his hand and smiled myself.
“It’s fine.”
He led me over there, folded the sleeping bag on itself so it was thicker, and then helped me sit down.
“I’ll turn on the oven,” he said once I’d been safely seated on the thing, which was actually comfy. “It’s not much, but it’s warm. I don’t normally… Well, you can probably see for yourself.”
And I could. My first scan of the shack, while it had taken all of three seconds, had pretty much covered the place and what it contained. There was the green tartan sleeping bag I was now sitting on, an old-style oven Brock was turning on, and not much else. A huge body of a backpack slumped against the wall suggested where his latest art was being kept, but that was it.
“I can’t believe it,” Brock said once the oven was on, coming over to sit beside me, his gaze glued to my belly.
“So, what you’re saying is…that it’s mine.”
I shook my head and put his hand on my belly.
“No, Brock. They are yours.”
Now tears were coming to his eyes, and his hand flinched back.
“Wow,” he murmured. “One of them kicked.”
“One of the daughters or the son,” I said, and his dopey grin widened.
“A dad. I’m going to be a dad. Two girls and a boy.”
This his gaze lifted to mine, and his face darkened.
“Before you say anything more,” I said, “please let me explain. Let me tell you how sorry I am for everything that happened. I never meant to betray you. This all started out as a job to get evidence on you; I’m a private investigator who was in desperate need of money. I got in too deep, and after I told Snow, I planned on warning you. But he went after you too fast, drove there right after we met and took me along to boot. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.”
Brock nodded, the lines on his forehead softening.
“And...that night…”
I grasped his hand.
“For me it was real, every bit of it. I wasn’t putting on an act to get information out of you. I genuinely think you’re the most incredible, kind, good man….” My voice faltered, and I shook my head. “I understand if you don’t want to see me anymore, or if you only want a partial part in your children’s lives; we hardly know each other after all.”
I let his hand go, and he grabbed both of mine.
“Alexa, before you say anything more, hear me out. We may hardly know each other, but I, for one, know enough already. I know the remarkable woman I encountered that night, the funny, interesting, one-of-a-kind wonder only a fool would let go of. And we may have skipped all the building-up relationship stuff most couples go through before having children, but I want to make a go of it. I want to make a go of you, us, our children, our family. I want to be with you, Alexa. I’m going to build a new life for us. That life of crime, it was over when you met me, and it’s still over now. For good.”
I paused and looked at him, really looked at him. Every part of Brock matched what he had said: his eyes were intent, his jaw set. He had to be telling the truth, and yet hadn’t Charlie looked the same way every time he had promised to change—so sure of himself? Didn’t people look like they were telling the truth when they were so good at lying that they even l
ied to themselves? What was the difference from then to now, Charlie to Brock? How did I know that he was telling the truth, that my feeling that it was different with him, that he really would follow through, was right?
The answer came with his clasping of my hands. It was different because I knew it was, because Brock hadn’t let me down yet. The only way I would know for sure if I could trust him was to do just that, trust him.
So, I let Brock draw me closer and closer until our lips entwined and worry fell away and everything was made right again.
When we finally drew apart, my head hung with a rueful smile, I admitted: “My name is actually Alex.”
Brock laughed and kissed me on the cheek.
“Anything else I should know?”
I flopped back so I was resting against the wall and laughed myself.
“Oh God, where to begin? I’ve already bought a ton of baby furniture and compiled a short list of baby names for each child. My favorite color is orange, and I have a mildly bad addiction to sugar—but you know that one. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since that night, even before I knew you were the father of my children.”
Beaming, Brock said, “Me too. I had thought I was crazy, falling for some girl I only knew a night—one who I had thought had betrayed me to boot.”
I shook my head and ran my fingers over his beard.
“You’re not crazy; we’re crazy.”
Brock slid his arm around me, and I snuggled into him.
“Now you have to tell me everything,” I said in a mock-serious tone. “How you escaped, how you found this place—everything.”
“I will,” he said. “But first I should share the good news.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a check for $1,000.
My eyes went wide.
“What’s that for?”
“My first art sale. I sold a painting, Alex. It’s starting. I’m going to be an artist.”
“I knew you could,” I murmured, giving him a kiss on the cheek.
He patted my head, and we sank into each other. Brock was better than his word. He told me all of it; he told me more than all of it—how, after the showdown with Russell’s men, he had run through the forest and called the only friend he had left, Garth. How Garth had picked him up at some Nederland convenience store and driven him as far as he could—all the way to Santa Fe.
He told me how he had turned down Garth’s latest Robin Hood scheme, how Garth had laughed at his story of the bakery-bag girl he’d fallen for. He told me how he’d had to work at a McDonald’s for three months to get some money, how afterward he’d moved out to the cabin and started painting and hadn’t stopped since. Lastly, he told me told me about the painting he had sold.
“Couldn’t part with it till I made a copy,” he said, gently untwining his arms from me to go over to his hulking bag.
He returned with a piece of the past, another mystery solved: what he had been doing when I’d caught him working that time so many months ago. He had been working on this.
The painting was of me. It was of that night, of the snow all thrown up around me and onto me; but mostly it was of me, of the laughing girl with sandy, fly-away hair and a smile face-wide. The snow was laughing with her, sprinkling giggles into her mouth, fanning around her head. It was beautiful. She was, too.
“Is that…how you saw me that night?” I asked softly, and Brock nodded.
“That’s how I see you now, an impossible light in this dark world.”
After a few minutes, he whispered, “Want to do it again?”
“Want to do what again?” I asked his eager face.
He responded by getting up, walking over to his backpack, and returning with two canvases.
“No,” I said softly, smiling nonetheless.
“Why not?” he asked. “Lying here, looking down on you, I could hardly resist starting as it was.”
Gazing into his excited eyes, I sighed.
“Oh, fine, though I’m assuming you have paint and brushes too?”
To which Brock raced to his knapsack and then back, some tubes of paint in one hand and a new paintbrush-filled tomato can in the other.
I laughed, and he shrugged.
“Old habits die hard.”
And so we turned to our respective canvases and got to work.
Once again, I found the bare canvas overwhelming. Really, where were you supposed to start? How were you supposed to know what to make, which ideas were worth transferring onto the canvas?
This time the answer came from my own hand: a dash of navy in the middle just like last time. And, even more incredibly, this gave me an idea of what I wanted to make, again just like last time. And so I got to work, first painting only wispy outlines of the figures. These I filled in with black and gray, with the nothingness that they were. The background I made a lighter gray. At the top of the canvas, I made my knight in shining blue. After I’d filled in the colors of each part, I went back and tried my hand at sketching out more definite features. Despite my use of a smaller brush, however, saying that this ended up being a disaster would have been an understatement.
At one point, Brock glanced over and, seeing the black blobs my careful attempts at faces had smeared into, started chuckling.
I glared at him.
“You wouldn’t be chuckling if you knew what the painting was of.”
“Oh really?”
I nodded and glanced away, suddenly feeling shy to say it outright. I had figured Brock would have guessed what it was, but now that I had messed the images up so much, there was little hope of that.
“It’s of searching for you,” I finally said quietly, “how I kept thinking I saw you, but the men never were you. How I still found you in the end.”
All traces of merriment were gone from Brock’s face. There was only a tender fondness as he reached out and stroked my cheek.
“And I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that you did.”
We kissed, and, as we separated, I glanced at his painting.
Brock tried blocking it with his hands and then sighed.
“It’s not finished yet.”
Though really, it didn’t matter. We could’ve only been painting for 30 minutes or so, and yet already the painting was gorgeous. Yellows, blues, oranges, and pinks were in the scene that would have brought tears to my eyes even if it had been in black and white. It was of me, of us. I was lying in some green grass, bare-bellied, our three children soundly asleep in my tummy, ever so slightly visible through my skin, beautiful and snuggled up together.
“Brock…” I whispered, and he kissed me again.
Our fingers ran over each other, delighted by the old feelings racing through our bodies. Brock’s fingers slid down my shoulders to my arms, and from there to my belly.
“Let me paint you,” he whispered in my ear.
“What?” I asked.
“Let me paint your belly,” he whispered.
I broke away and searched his face. He was serious. I smiled, nodded, and lifted the bottom of my shirt so my huge belly was exposed. Then, grabbing some paints and leaning over me, Brock got to work.
At first I watched Brock as he worked, the flicks of green he added to my lower belly, the swooshes of purple around the belly button, the blue up top. It was cute how into it he was, as if my belly was a canvas instead of skin. Soon, however, after all the day’s happenings, I found my eyes closing. Although I didn’t sleep. I relaxed into the soothing strokes of the brush against my bare skin. At least, until Brock placed his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Alex, you awake?”
Opening my eyes, I nodded.
His gaze was intent; it was as if he was still painting.
“Can I do more?” he asked.
“More? What do you—”
I looked down, saw it, and gasped.
My belly was in bloom. Three lush, purple seedlings sprouted from a mass of lime green grass. The seedlings stretched up toward my shirt, which
needed to move for more of the canvas to be completed.
Nodding, I lifted my top over my head so I was completely exposed.
Brock’s face changed for a moment, desire flashing through his eyes as he came face-to-face with my breasts. But after a deep breath, his eyes resumed their immersive stare and he got to work.
I closed my eyes and left the artist to his painting.
When I heard my name once more, I didn’t wait; I opened my eyes and smiled. Rolling waves of clouds spread across my breasts, the halo that was the sun nestled in between them. It was beautiful, perfect, and complete.
“Come over and look in the mirror,” Brock urged, sounding as excited as I felt.
I let him help me up and lead me to a small bathroom, where he pulled a chain and a light snapped on. And there I was. Or rather, there was Brock’s art: the violet seedlings, the lime grass, the azure sky and its marmalade sun. It was incredible.
I glanced at Brock. In the midst of his work, he too had stripped off his shirt and was now bare-chested.
Seeing my gaze, he chuckled.
“Well, it is only fair.”
“Let me paint you,” I said.
He cocked his head at me.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then, poking his ribs, I added, “Well, it is only fair.”
Smirking and taking my hand, Brock led me back to the canvases.
“Okay, Monet, you better have really meant it.”
Taking the paintbrush in my hand was one thing, but staring at the blank canvas of Brock’s muscled chest was another.
“Not as easy as it looks, eh?” he joked after I’d done nothing but stare admiringly at his pecs for a full minute.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a flick of navy on his belly. “It’s not all that hard either.”
And it wasn’t, not really. Not once I’d got the first line down. It was like all the other paintings, like anything in life: the tricky part was getting started.
