“I had every intention of spending time with him, but he made it quite clear that he didn’t enjoy my company even before you came. When I took him with me on sketching trips, he found it boring, couldn’t sit still, kept scaring the subjects away.” Lance sounded indignant, which was an improvement over disinterested, Gypsy judged. “Lorraine told me it wouldn’t work. I should have listened to her.”
Softly, so softly he found himself leaning forward to hear better, Gypsy asked in an innocent tone, “Oh, was she not in favor of this vacation for you and Kevin?” She sounded quietly sympathetic, but with which one of them, he could not be sure.
“No… She thought it would be better for me to come here alone and leave him home with her.”
“Then why did you bring him here?”
“A friend of mine suggested it,” he found himself telling her. “He’s a children’s doctor and… Oh, I don’t know why I listened to him. He was quite obviously wrong. It isn’t going to work.”
“How can you expect a four-year-old child to sit still for hours on in without moving?” she shot back, sensing him slipping away from her.
“He’s not four. He’s six.
“I… yes. Of course. I know that. Slip of the tongue. But even at the advanced age of six, his attention span is limited.”
“If he were interested in what I’m doing, there should be no trouble.”
“He might be interested for ten or fifteen minutes, but I bet when you’re sketching you forget all time, all about him until he moves and scares off your subject. Then, I suppose, you bark at him and make him feel awful.”
Stunned by the truth of her words, and hating her for knowing by instinct just how it had been, Lance said sarcastically, “My, my! You have done your homework. Tell me, dear social worker, how many children do you have?”
“Oh, stop,” Gypsy snapped again. “You know I’m no social worker and you know I have no children. But I do have a few grains of common sense which you seem to lack when it comes to dealing with your own child.”
Lance thumped his book angrily to the table. “How can you, a stranger, expect to understand in one week what Lorraine and I have worried about for three years?” He stood up. “Kevin doesn’t like me and that seems to be that. He doesn’t want me anywhere near him and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’ll thank you to stop trying to interfere in a matter about which you know zilch!”
“I guess you can’t put it more clearly than that, can you?” Gypsy said with deceptive calm.
“No, I can’t,” he replied shortly, going to the door and opening it. “So you’ll drop it and not add to the damage Lorraine’s had to try to undo?”
“No. No I won’t.” Gypsy wondered what was getting into her as she jumped to her feet and followed him. “I think you and Kevin need to learn to have fun together. How will you ever learn to get along if there’s never any common pleasure in your lives? What damage was… is Kevin’s aunt trying to undo?”
Lance hitched himself up onto the porch railing. “Emotional damage caused by things which are none of your business.” By the sound of his breathing, Gypsy knew he was getting really angry, but that seemed to be the only way she could make him respond. If she allowed him to regain his equilibrium he close up again.
She chose the railing at right angles to his and lifted herself onto it, swinging one leg as she looked at him in the glow of light shining through the window. “What makes you so sure Lorraine’s right? Seems to me that in three years she should have been able, with your cooperation of course,” her tone indicated extreme doubt that his cooperation had been forthcoming, “to put an end to a child’s fears of his own father.”
Lance’s shoulders drooped. The anger suddenly died from his eyes, leaving them empty and weary looking, introspective, and when he spoke, the defeat in his tone made Gypsy wish she had never pursued this line.
“I can see you won’t give up until you know. After… When I was left… alone… I tried to look after Kevin myself. I felt no one else was able to do it better. I made it for a few months and then I was… I had to be away from him for nearly half a year. Lorraine stepped into the breach and took over Kevin’s care. No, Gypsy, she isn’t the one who’s made him afraid of me. I did that myself, or so I’m told. I remember very little of it. I had a breakdown after I came very close to killing my son.”
He was pale as he said those last, devastating words and he licked his lips as if intending to go on, but suddenly bolted from the porch and strode away into the dark night leaving Gypsy to stare after him with unexpected tears burning in the backs of her eyes.
It was not until she was nearly asleep his words, “or so I’m told”, came back to her. Who had told him? Lorraine? Oh, Gypsy. Stop it. What’s made you so suspicious of this Lorraine person all of a sudden?
Chapter Four
Gypsy lay restlessly in her bed going over and over what he had said, what she had said, until it was all mixed up, so confusing she was forced to clear in all from her mind and begin again… And again.
The rain drizzled intermittently, pattering hard on the shake roof for a few moments, then slackening before deciding to renew its fury and rattle at the windows. The solution to the problem must be for Lance to relax with Kevin and for Kevin to learn that his father was not a bogey-man at all, but a human being with needs is great as anyone.
She viewed the problem as that of a high wall surrounding Lance, with Kevin on the outside, needing entry and unable to find the gate. Gypsy believed she had found the gate, but what she lacked was the key. Lance was unable, or unwilling to give it to her so she could admit Kevin. The wall was too high to surmount. If Lance had shown some willingness to try, together the three of them might have boosted Kevin over it… But he was too willing to give up. He seemed not to have the heart to try.
She heard Lance creep into the cabin and knew an odd relief that he was home. When his breathing became slow and measured, she turned on her side and slept uneasily until Kevin’s gentle awakening sounds alerted her.
Lance seemed strangely more considerate of Gypsy as they prepared breakfast together, and he kept watching her, a question in his eyes, but when the meal was over, he slipped on his waterproof jacket, pulled up the hood and gathered together his sketching material.
“How can you work in this rain?” Gypsy asked. “Don’t your sketches get wet?”
He favored her with a somewhat strained attempt at a smile. “Days like this I rely mostly on my camera. There are also places in the cliffs on the west side. Overhangs. There’ll be birds driven in from the sea by the storm and I don’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing them, capturing them”—he patted the pocket where he’d stuffed a small but expensive looking digital camera—“for later use.”
When he has gone, Gypsy turned to Kevin, who looked as cheerful as the scene outdoors. “So, what will we do today?”
He shrugged and dug his spoon listlessly into his cereal. “I don’t like powdered milk.”
“Would a little more sugar help?”
That earned her a glimmer of a smile. “Maybe.” It seemed to, for he ate all his cereal then an apple before he descended again into his glum mood.
“We’ll have to think of something fun to do. We can’t just sit here like storm-clouds hanging around mountain-tops all day,” Gypsy chided him. When he just looked sadder, she said, “I know! We’ll have a picnic.”
Kevin frowned at her stupid idea. “We can’t,” he sniffed. “It’s raining.”
“So?” Gypsy raised her eyebrows waggle them until he lost his dour look and giggled. “That should stop us?”
“But where can we go for a picnic in the rain?”
“Didn’t you hear your daddy say he could find overhangs were the rain wouldn’t get him? If he can, we can, and we’ll take his lunch out to him, have a picnic in a cave.”
“A picnic with Daddy?” Kevin’s face wrinkled in perplexity. This was obviously unheard of.
“Of cours
e with Daddy… If we can find him and his cave. So let’s get busy and make a lunch we can carry. I’m going to shred carrots and cabbage so we can make coleslaw and you could open a can of tuna for sandwiches.”
Lance, as should have been expected, Gypsy realized upon finding him, was not under any overhang. Instead he was standing in the middle of the wide, grassy point which formed the north-western arm of the boomerang-shaped island. With his camera out, he took photographs of the spume flinging itself high over the rocks of a smaller, treeless island a quarter mile away. The reef between that one and the one where they stood, lay in the midst of a swirling, roiling froth, where white water mingled with black, a mottled stream of lumps that looked almost solid enough to walk on.
Kevin stopped in his tracks, putting the kettle he carried onto the ground and squatting behind it, almost as if hoping it would shield him from the wrath he expected to be unleashed when his father was confronted with this crazy idea.
“What are you doing out here?” Lance said when she came alongside him. “Don’t you know it’s raining?”
“No,” Gypsy responded sarcastically. “I hadn’t noticed. I was beginning to wonder what that was, dripping off my hair and the tip of my nose. We brought lunch.”
“Oh? You don’t want me in the cabin? Might I remind you just whose cabin it is?”
“We came to have lunch with you, Lance. We brought a picnic.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Probably, but even so, here we are. And now the rest of it’s up to you. I made coleslaw, Kevin helped make sandwiches, there are cookies and apples, too, and if you look over there, your son has toted a kettle of water all the way from the creek… And hardly spilled more than half of it,” Gypsy added with a grin which did nothing to soften Lance’s stern countenance.
“We hoped you could find us one of those overhangs you mentioned, build us a campfire in it so we could have our cocoa in a warm, snug cave with the rain dripping down outside. I think,” she said, staring hard at him, willing him to remember, “it would be… fun, Lance.”
He gave her a startled look which relaxed after an instant into a crooked, half rueful grin. “Do you really?” he said. “Then I guess I’d better find a dent in the rocks which might be classed as a cave.” He turned to move. Gypsy stopped him.
“First, don’t you think it would be a good idea to call Kevin over and ask him to help you look? After all I’m just a girl, and can’t go scrambling around rocks looking for a place until you men find me a safe route to get there.”
“Just a girl…” he echoed, nodding, and for a few, precious seconds, his eyes danced with humor. Why that should make her feel so light-hearted, she had no idea, but she felt as if the next gust of wind might just lift her off her feet. “Yup,” Lance went on, “just a poor, weak girl… With the will of cold steel and more stubborn than a mule. What makes you think this is going to work?”
With an unconscious note of pleading her voice, she said, trying for lightness, “Aren’t you willing to try?”
Lance swallowed, turned away for a moment and stared out over the gray, windswept water. “If you want me to,” he said at length, then walked slowly toward Kevin who remained hunkered behind the kettle, waiting with strange impassiveness for the biting words he likely expected.
His eyes flew upwards in surprise when Lance said “Gypsy wants to have a picnic in a cave. Come and help me find a place.” He assayed a smile, which was not returned as the boy struggled to lift the kettle once more.
“I’ll take that,” Lance said, swinging it with ease from the two small hands which clutched at the handle.
Gypsy wanted to scream. Dammit! Do I have to script every single move for this man? He hadn’t looked at Kevin’s face after he took the kettle so failed to see the resentful, then resigned expression as the child, who had manfully carried his burden this far, relinquished it with reluctance
She waited in the dismal drizzle until Lance reappeared over the brink of the hill. She walked to meet him, her brows raised in query.
“Found a place,” he said, without a great degree of enthusiasm. “Kevin’s picking up driftwood for your campfire, Gypsy.”
My campfire? she asked silently following him as he slipped over the brink and reached back to give her a hand. His felt large and warm and strong around hers but she refused to let him hold it for long. Can’t he ever used the word “our”?
But she knew, as the meal progressed, that he had been right, it was her campfire, her picnic, and neither of the other two were enjoying it one bit. Kevin sat morose and silent in a sheltered corner, nibbling at a sandwich, picking at his coleslaw and staring into the small, reluctant flames of the fire under the black bottomed kettle where the water slowly—much too slowly—heated to make the cocoa Gypsy had promised.
Lance, she had to grant, did try for a few minutes to be pleasant to his son but it must’ve been an effort for soon he gave it up. And why not? she asked herself. How could anyone keep on trying to talk to a child who just sat with averted eyes and bit his lips, twisted his fingers together, answered in a monosyllabic manner? Gypsy, despairing, tried, too, but was forced to admit that the picnic had been a dismal failure even before it had begun.
“Who built the cabin?” she asked, hoping to spark some interest from either of the two down-cast males in the little cave. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m certainly glad they did. If they’d tried to set up housekeeping in this little cave, they’d have frozen to death during the first winter storm.”
“A settler family from Finland built it,” Lance said. “They were tough and hardy people, but even they wouldn’t have thought to live in a cave on the westward side of an island, where the prevailing winds pound in during storms.” His mouth quirked in what might have been a smile. “I don’t suppose they’d have had too many picnics, either, not even in summer.”
Kevin slid along the driftwood log where he sat, drawing closer to Gypsy and the fire. She wrapped her arm around him. “What did the settlers do here?”
“This particular island, because of all the open area—that big grassy field up above us, and the one at the other end, made good grazing land for sheep,” he told her. “A lot of these islands, as inhospitable as they may look on days like today, were used that way. One family, or maybe a few families together on the larger islands, tried to make a living, with the wool and the meat from the sheep. They also grew fruit and vegetables.”
“So what happened? Where did they go?”
“The entire operation was a failure,” he said. “They left. All but a few stalwarts. As I got it, from my friends Mary and Jim Hopkins, who sold me this island, the family who built the cabin here—”
“You own this island?” She couldn’t bite back the startled question.
He shot her a startled look. “Of course I do. What did you think, I was a squatter?”
“I… hadn’t given it much thought at all. I was told the island was uninhabited and—”
Lance reached out a hand and tilted her chin, much the way so many photographers had done, the way she’d learned to hate, to resent. Only this time, she didn’t hate it, didn’t resent it. He gazed into her eyes. “Your name suits you,” he said softly. “A wild, outgoing gypsy, overflowing with happy spontaneity sitting on a log in a cave, with firelight sparkling in your eyes. I would sketch you in sepia, Gypsy, blends of charcoal and sepia. I’d never be able to paint you, though. Watercolors wouldn’t do you justice. You’d need the boldness of acrylics, or the depth of oils.”
The lid on the kettle finally began to rattle and Gypsy jerked her face away from his touch, his intent gaze.
“Got our cups ready, Kevin?” Their cups, three battered enameled tin mugs she thought must have come with the cabin, were stuffed into the bottom of the backpack she’d carried. Kevin dug for them, knocking an apple to the rocky cavern floor. It rolled and bounced to the edge of the fire.
She reached for it at the same moment
as Lance dove after it. Their heads collided with an audible crack. “Ouch!” Gypsy said. “That’s one hard head you have there, Saunders.”
He helped her stand erect, ran a gentle thumb over the small lump already rising on her forehead, and looked into her eyes for longer than she felt comfortable allowing him to hold her gaze. “You okay?”
She nodded and realized she was still clutching in one hand the apple she’d managed to nab, and in the other, Lance’s wrist, which she must have grabbed to steady herself. His pulse under her fingertips raced, as did the lid of the rapidly boiling kettle.
“Kev”—Her voice came ragged, breathless. “The cups and the cocoa mix. Got ’em ready?”
She heard a small, distressed sound and turned. Two of the three tin mugs stood on a flat piece of driftwood they’d been using as a table. Three opened envelopes lay crumpled beside them. The third cup, however, had tumbled to the floor spilling its hot-chocolate powder and Kevin stared miserably at it.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he whispered, his eyes wide and guilt-filled. “I spilled one. I didn’t mean to. I was looking at you and I thought Daddy was going to kiss you like Mickey’s dad kisses his mom and—”
“I was not going to kiss Gypsy.” Lance’s voice sounded overly loud, brusque, even angry and Kevin winced visibly.
“That’s okay, honey,” Gypsy said, picking up the empty mug when Lance just shrugged. “Accidents happen. Look, we can share what’s left.”
She was about to shake a portion of the mix from the two cups that hadn’t spilled, into the one that had, when Lance stayed her hand, nothing more than the brush of his fingertips across the back of her wrist. It was enough to lock her into immobility, still on the outside, but whirling with slowly abating excitement on the inside. “No need,” he said. “I don’t want any.”
“But—”
“I said I don’t want any.” He lifted the kettle, filled the two mugs and left them sitting on the flat-sided log. “Thanks for the picnic, Gypsy.” With that, he zipped up his jacket, pulled up his hood, and strode out.
Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) Page 8
