Chapter 18
IT WAS NEARLY TWO by the time Ciaran dropped me off at the door to the guesthouse, both of us giggling like naughty children. Once inside, I showered and did my hair and makeup, and put on a violet-hued sweater dress that clung nicely to my curves. Outside, snow continued to fall. I was just zipping up my high-heeled boots (I’d wear them, damn the pain, just to catch Ciaran’s eye) when my cell phone rang. It was Blythe, saying Kevan was going into town to fetch my friends in his four-wheel drive. The roads would be slick, and he didn’t think it was safe for Henry to drive the town car out to the house.
“How was snowshoeing?” she asked before we hung up.
“Fine.”
“Isn’t Ciaran a kick to hang out with?”
“Yeah. A total kick.” I swallowed, guilt rising up from my stomach into my throat.
“Did something happen between you?” A note of concern had crept into her voice.
“Of course not.”
“Okay, well, come on over whenever you’re ready. Clemmie’s dying to see you.”
After promising to come right over, I headed outside, pulling on my hat to protect my hair. I was only several feet away from the guesthouse and had slipped twice when I spotted Ciaran headed my way. Great. A lecture about my boots was sure to ensue.
When he reached me, I opened my mouth to defend my boot choice, but before the words could come out of my mouth, he leaned down and scooped me into his arms. “If you insist on wearing these boots in the snow, I’m going to insist you wear them later with nothing else.”
I laughed, speaking softly into his ear. “Nothing else?”
“Yeah, just the ‘throw me on the bed’ boots and nothing else.”
“You’ve named my boots?”
“I have a less polite name, but I’ll refrain.”
“So restrained of you.”
“The boots plus your legs—the combo makes it impossible to get through dinner without wanting to forego the stuffing and jump you. And, that’s saying a lot, because I love stuffing.”
A feeling of unease traveled up my spine. “We have to be careful. Act like friends. Promise me? I don’t want Blythe to figure this out.”
“I can’t promise.” He grinned, his breathing heavy as we trudged across the snow. “Unless you promise to meet me in the bathroom between turkey and pumpkin pie.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You’ll like what I do to you in there,” he said.
I shivered with desire, and changed the subject. “I’m too tall for you to carry. And heavy.”
“You’re right on both counts. Good thing I work out.”
“That’s not very nice.” I lowered my eyes to stare at his mouth, remembering all too the well the taste of him.
“I’m just teasing you.”
Despite the chill, I was hot under my coat. At the house, he kicked open the door with his foot (it had been left open a crack) and deposited me onto the bench in the mudroom. I unbuttoned my coat, skin damp under my clothes, unable take my eyes off him as he shrugged off his outer layers.
I hung my coat, and then knelt to brush the melted snow from my boots. When I stood, I found Ciaran staring at me with an impassive expression. “What?” I asked.
“That dress. It clings to all the right spots.” His eyes skirted up and down my body. My nipples, betraying me once again, hardened under my bra. He moved close, pinning me with his thighs against the wall, and speaking softly into my ear. “I won’t be able to keep my eyes off you.”
“You have to.”
“I’ll be covert.” He grinned, tracing my bottom lip with his finger, before leaning down to kiss me.
The sound of footsteps on the hardwoods made us jump apart. Tiny feet, obviously running, could only mean Clementine. Ciaran turned his back to me, fussing with something in the pocket of his jacket that hung on one of the hooks. Clementine bounded into the mudroom, wearing a shiny pink dress with a wide layer of tulle around the skirt. She began chattering away like a bird on a spring morning, about the dinner, setting the table, how pretty my dress was, how she’d watched Ciaran carrying me from the window. “You looked like Cinderella and her prince.” She looked from Ciaran to me with shining eyes.
“There’s no such thing as Cinderella,” I said. “What did I say about this?”
“Cinderella is a fairytale brought back to life for the purposes of selling unrealistic dreams to hopeless young women.” She spoke the sentence by rote, like an amateur actress saying a line she’d memorized for a play, but with no sense of the meaning behind the words. Clementine, obviously, didn’t agree with my assessment of Cinderella, although she had the sentence mostly right.
“I don’t think I used the word hopeless,” I said.
Her eyes looked to the left, thinking. “What word was it then?”
“Desperate,” I said.
She didn’t comment on my word choice, instead turned to leave, motioning for me to follow, her black patent leather flats squeaking on the tile floor. “I think Mom’s calling me. She needs my help. She told me she can’t do it without me.” Stopping in the doorway, she did a ballerina-type twirl. “Do you like my outfit?”
“It’s very fancy,” I said.
“Yours too, Aunt Bliss. And guess what?”
“I couldn’t possibly guess.”
“Mom brought all kinds of Thanksgiving decorations.” Jumping up and down, she clapped her hands. “I’m so excited, but she says we have to wait a little longer to decorate the table because she can’t remember where she put the candles she bought. Aunt Bliss, you can’t believe how many things she doesn’t remember.” With that, she was off, running down the hallway, her shoes making a tapping noise on the hardwood floor.
Ciaran, at my side, spoke quietly as we walked down the hallway. “Do you think she saw us kissing?”
“No way. She would’ve made a comment. She thinks kissing is gross.” I giggled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Sneaking around like a couple of teenagers.”
“It’s so hot,” he said, giving me a wicked smile. “Why can’t you let her have Cinderella?”
“I don’t want her to expect, or want, a man to rescue her. She needs to make her own life.”
He chuckled. “She’s eight. I think she can have Cinderella and Barbie for a while longer.”
“That’s exactly what’s wrong with our culture. Men, and I do mean men, selling dreams of unrealistic waist sizes and giant boobs and the idea that the only way to have a good life is to have a prince race down a staircase with a glass slipper made from magic for your tiny foot.”
“No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Very funny, Mister ‘I don’t want to get married.’” I made quotes in the air.
We stopped just outside the doorway to the main room. “I never said that.”
“You most certainly did.”
“I said I don’t get involved with women who want to get married.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Not exactly.” He smacked me on the backside. “Don’t be so quarrelsome or I’ll have to punish you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Should I start calling you Mr. Grey?”
“Did I mention my secret room?”
We were laughing as we stepped into the front room. Except for Lola curled up reading a book by the fire, Shakespeare at her feet, the room was empty. I heard Clemmie’s voice from the kitchen calling out to her mother. “Aunt Bliss is here, Mom.”
Lola looked up from her reading only long enough to flutter her fingers in an absentminded greeting. It gave me a start to see her there, as if I had taken a time machine back to myself at eleven. I watched her for a moment, as I breathed in the scent of the wood-burning fireplace, then perched on the arm of the chair nearest the
hearth.
Ciaran moved the grate to the side and added another log from the iron basket to the modest flames. After setting the grate back in place, he knelt on his haunches, his face toward the fire. He warmed his hands, holding them in front of him, the muscles of his thighs bulging against the fabric of his jeans. The new log caught fire, making rather fierce crackling noises. Several fiery splinters of wood plopped against the grate and turned to charred remnants on the floor.
I excused myself to go say hello to Blythe. She was in the kitchen, wearing an apron and looking at a cookbook. Clementine was at the stove, standing on a footstool and stirring something in a saucepan. Rori sat at the counter, snapping beans.
“You needn’t worry, ladies. I’m here to help save this dinner,” I said, teasing.
“Oh, I think I have plenty of help.” Blythe laughed before looking over at Rori. “Bliss isn’t really the cooking type.” She walked to the refrigerator and pulled out the vegetable crisper.
Rori smiled at me. What a lovely young woman she was, I thought. “I’m not really a cook either, but Blythe’s teaching me things.”
“And me too, Aunt Bliss. I bet Mom could even teach you to cook,” said Clementine
“Let’s not get crazy.” I kissed the top of Clemmie’s head as I peered into the pan. Crimson cranberries with shavings of orange peel bubbled. “Did you make this all by yourself?”
“Well, Mom helped a little. But I poured the sugar in. That’s the most important part. Right, Rori?”
“That’s right,” she answered.
“Clemmie, you can turn the cranberries off. They’ve cooked long enough,” said Blythe, her head still in the refrigerator.
Clementine did as asked. The bubbling ceased. I caught a zesty whiff of the orange peel.
“Where’s Cole?” I asked.
“He’s visiting his mother,” said Rori.
“She’s not feeling well,” said Clementine.
Blythe and Rori exchanged looks as she shut the refrigerator. Cole’s mother had drug problems, I remembered from previous conversations. What a way for Cole to spend Thanksgiving, I thought, thinking of my own mother.
Blythe had several ingredients for a salad in her hands: lettuce, carrots, and baby tomatoes. She set them next to Rori, telling her they were already washed.
“Seriously, do you need help with anything?” I asked, feeling slightly guilty. “Everything smells so good in here.” The aroma from the baking turkey made my stomach growl.
“We’ve got it under control,” said Blythe. “Go enjoy yourself. Relax.” She asked me to send Lola to the kitchen. “She wants to me to teach her how to make a pie.”
“How sweet,” I said, hoping she would not ask me to join them for the lesson. Making a piecrust sounded like the ultimate lesson in futility. The closest I would ever come to making a pie was ordering it from a bakery, and I was just fine with that. I slipped back to the living room before Blythe got any big ideas
“Your mom says it’s pie-making time,” I said to Lola.
“Awesome. She’s been promising me this forever.” She grinned, set aside her book and waltzed into the kitchen with Shakespeare following her.
Ciaran stood from where he had knelt by the fire, brushing his hands on his jeans. “I’m going to grab some more wood before it gets dark.” Leaning over, he tucked my hair behind my ear, and kissed the side of my face. “You do look a bit like Cinderella, you know. Just as beautiful.”
“With the heart of the evil stepmother.” I dropped my gaze, wanting to hide how much his compliment pleased me.
“No one believes that, you know.” He knelt on the floor, cupping my face in his hands. “Especially me.”
I opened my mouth to utter another sarcastic quip, but he placed his index finger against my lips. “No, whatever you’re going to say, don’t. I know better. You have the heart of the fairy godmother, Bliss Heywood. Bringing Sam and Sweetheart here? That’s a special kind of magic that required no wand, just your good heart.” Rising to his feet, he crossed the room, disappearing into the hallway.
I turned my gaze to the fire, thinking about Cinderella and the happy curve her life had taken with a couple of swipes from a magic wand. Ciaran was correct, it was the fairy godmother I resembled at this time in life. Of course it was. Not Cinderella with her tiny feet and her beautiful gown and the prince that twirled her across the floor in perfect rhythm. Pushing forty, with the magic that money brings, but no discernible life of my own. No man to twirl me across a ballroom floor or even the kitchen. What would it feel like to have a man love you enough to search a kingdom for you? Would it change me if a man wanted to protect me, keep me from harm, to call me his own? I would likely never know, what with the way I’d chosen ambition over love. Now I was a fairy godmother, able to make magic for others with the contents of my bank account, for which I was grateful. And yet, in the light of the fire that crackled before me, I understood something I had not previously known. I was lonely. Not just for friends, but for a man to love—for a man who loved me. I’d covered loneliness with the pace of my life, and for years and years it had been enough. But now, in the silence of the falling snow, I’d become still. And in my stillness, in the quiet, the truth had been given a space in which to enter. I’d never known what it was like to have a man love me, and I wanted to.
I thought of my father. He should have loved me, but didn’t. During his lifetime he lived like a ghost, lurking in the shadowy corners where cowards and deserters gather. According to my mother, he was unwilling to embrace my mother’s descent into the counterculture, uncomfortable with drug use and her desire for an open relationship. I was a baby when they divorced, and he moved thirty miles up the Oregon highway to a town just like the one we lived in, Dairy Queen and all. He continued his pencil-pusher career, one of those premature balding men with a comb-over, pocket protector, and plaid pants sitting behind a gray, metal desk at some county job no one ever heard of but paid for with their tax dollars. He married again, the only thing he ever did that was different from the moment before. Our stepmother was completely opposite from our mother in every way, except one. Despite my mother being a stoned hippie dressed in a gypsy skirt and Nannette a repressed Baptist dressed in a polyester pantsuit, they had only one similarity. Neither of them had any interest in my sister or me.
Every other Sunday afternoon, Nannette declared shortly after their wedding, between the hours of two and four were visiting times for her new husband’s offspring. I have no memory of this, being only two at the time, but Blythe says he picked us up in his yellow Ford pickup that smelled of rubber and gasoline (her memory not mine) every other Sunday for several months. Throughout theses visits we sat side by side on a couch encased in a plastic cover, as was all the furniture. I vaguely recall the feel of cold, sticky couch cover on the backs of my bare legs and how my feet didn’t reach the floor. Blythe recalls that the room was small and smelled of potpourri, and decorated with modest furniture that Nannette managed to make look fussy with an abundance of knickknacks, mostly in the form of three-inch ceramic dolls and a collection of antique teapots and cups that were displayed on shelves and end tables. Not a book in sight. If someone’s character can be explained by the books on their shelves, surely no books means no soul.
All went as dictated by Nannette until one Sunday I spilled apple juice on a rose-embroidered throw pillow. As it inevitably and inexplicably does when you’re a child, the glass simply slipped out of my hand without warning or explanation. Blythe jumped up and then wiped at it, nearly hysterical, with the sleeve of her sweater, but it was no use. The yellow juice had seeped in, making a stain the shape of Texas across the embroidery. Apparently, there were no plastic covers for throw pillows.
Nannette called me a “careless heathen” as she snatched the pillow from Blythe’s hand while simultaneously ordering our father into the kitchen with a mere penetrating glin
t of her scary, green, cat eyes (Blythe’s description) in his direction. My sister heard her shrill voice coming from the kitchen while the two of us sat hip to hip on the couch, now decorated with one less ugly pillow. “They’re not to come into the house. Not ever again. You take them out somewhere.” She continued on, cabinet doors slamming.
Blythe told me this story during one of our late-night phone calls after Michael left her. That’s the way it is with grief. It opens you up, makes all this truth come out instead of the usual mundane discussions of the weather or what we’d had for dinner or even our accomplishments. After her divorce, raw and painful feelings that had been supposedly been grieved over and tidily put away, spilled out of her. Stories surfaced I’d never heard. This was one of them.
“The remarkable thing is, I cried but you didn’t,” she said. “I’m seven and you’re two—so tiny and sweet with these big, intelligent eyes that took everything in, and yet the whole time she’s screeching at him, it’s me sobbing, thinking we might not ever see him again.”
“What did I do?” I asked her.
“For a bit you were perfectly still next to me. But as the tirade continued, you patted my leg three times like an adult might do to a child. “No cry. No cry, Bythe.’ You couldn’t say your ‘l’ sound. Then, you turned toward the kitchen and gave them the finger.” Blythe started laughing, deep in her chest with that shaky laugh after you’ve been crying that sounds like courage would if it were a sound. “It stopped me crying, I can tell you that.”
“At two? How did I know what that meant?”
“Sally’s friends weren’t exactly discreet around us.” I heard her shifting the phone from one ear to the other and the creak of bedsprings, probably adjusting her legs to sit cross-legged on the bed with a pillow on her lap, as was her habit. “I thought of it just yesterday. How you gave them the finger and I cried. The memory just surfaced. I don’t know why.”
Of course it had. Damn Michael. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“That you cared.”
Blue Moon (Blue Mountain Book 2) Page 18
