Angel Falls (Angel Falls Series, #1)

by Babette de Jongh

  Barefoot with my stiletto pumps in one hand, I waited on the front porch. While I stood there, rain poured from the rooftop, drilling holes into the soft dirt below.

  Ben pulled up in front of the house and opened his door to get out, but I waved for him to wait, ran down the sidewalk and got into the Cherokee. “No sense in us both getting wet.”

  “Wow, Angel. You look great.” Ben leaned across the seat and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m lucky Ian stood you up.”

  I ignored Ben’s comment. It cut too way close to the bone. I wondered again why Ian had broken our date, but made myself attend to Ben’s chatter about the kids, Ben’s work, and the weather, while he navigated the slick streets out of town then headed down the highway.

  The local radio station spouted worst-case scenarios about a flash flood warning, roads closing and neighborhoods flooding. It probably boosted their ratings, and good for them if so, but I wasn’t concerned. Heavy rains went along with the autumn season here, just as they did in the spring. Rivers, creeks and ditches overflowed then receded just as quickly, and only out-of-towners took much notice of it.

  During our conversation, it didn’t register which direction we were driving. But when we hit the black highway, Ben started fiddling with the radio controls, and I was slammed by a strange, backward sense of déjà vu. I’d been messing with the radio that night, too, and looked up to see the truck coming straight at us.

  “Casey....”

  I heard Ben’s voice from a far distance, as if I was sinking underwater and he was standing on a riverbank high above me, calling out my name.

  “Are you all right?” He reached over and squeezed my hand. His hand felt burning hot against my icy fingers.

  “No.” I wasn’t getting enough air, even though my lungs were squeezing and inflating way too fast, an accordion pumped by a monkey hopped up on speed. I gasped and gasped but I couldn’t catch my breath as it raced away from me. “Stop the car.”

  “Angel, I can’t pull over here.”

  Above Ben’s voice calling me by the pet name he’d used when we were dating, I heard Melody’s voice in my head, saying, “I can’t pull over, there’s nowhere—”

  “Hang on. You’re having a panic attack. Breathe slow and deep. I’ll pull over as soon as I can.” I still heard his voice from ten feet away even though I knew he was right beside me, holding my hand. But after that first, burning contact, I didn’t feel anything. I only knew it because when I tried to pull away, I couldn’t.

  Like a horror-struck moviegoer who couldn’t look away from the screen, I stared out the rain-streaked window, watching for the place we had run off the road. I knew I’d see churned-up earth, broken trees, skid marks. “Is this where—?”

  But it had been three months now. Maybe the marks would be gone, the weeds grown back over the bare-scraped ground. My breathing slowed, slowed, slowed, and I could feel Ben’s hand holding mine again.

  “It’s a little farther up ahead.” Ben slowed to the speed of a Sunday drive. “Do you want me to turn around? We could go to The Riverboat instead.”

  “No. I want to see.” I was finally ready, though I had avoided this road ever since the accident. I had started in this direction when I’d tried to follow Ian to Birmingham, but my car bummed out before I got this far. And I’d been so heated by anger and the desperate need to see Ian, I hadn’t thought about this being the road...

  “Here it is.” Ben slowed the car to a crawl, and with no other cars in sight, gave me the time I needed to see the visual marks of the accident. Still here, after all this time. A silent language that testified to those horrible moments when everything changed forever.

  “God, Ben.” Panic filled my insides with adrenaline, urging me to run, to escape the accident I was about to relive again. I couldn’t escape it, because the signs made everything clear. Short, choppy black smears on the pavement—shuddering tires pushed faster than they could roll. Swirling parallel rows of quotation marks—our backward spin down the highway. A deep furrow of dug-up earth—our descent down the embankment.

  I wanted to vomit. I wanted to run. I wanted to somehow turn the clock back. “Pull over.”

  Ben pulled over onto a red-dirt-and-gravel verge just wide enough to get the Cherokee off the road. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

  “I have to. Can you?”

  “I already have.” He grabbed my clasped hands and twined his fingers through mine. “I came the next day. Watched them pull the SUV out and haul it to the police station. I followed the wrecker, looking at that twisted hunk of metal all the way there.”

  Poor Ben. I hadn’t even thought about him, how he’d felt, what he’d done. “Was it... very bad?”

  “Worse.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my lips together. I would not cry.

  After a minute, we got out of the car. It had stopped raining for the moment, but the very air we breathed seemed full of water. Holding hands, we crossed the road then walked down the damp highway. We stopped at the spot where twin ditches pushed past broken trees and mangled shrubs into the chasm. So far down.

  A stout Cypress guarded the river’s edge, skinned of its bark where the car had smashed.

  If not for that tree crushing the driver’s side, Melody might still be alive. But if not for that tree, we would’ve sunk into the river, been sucked down into the mud, and Melody and I might both have drowned. Covered by spindly reeds that lifted their arms up out of the narrow scrim of waterlogged limbs and dirty plastic milk bottles, we’d have been entombed while the river rushed by, relentless and uncaring.

  It was a miracle Ian and Wilson and the rescue team had found us as quickly as they did. A miracle they’d found us at all.

  Ben squeezed my hand. I squeezed back, and we stood together, looking down. Holding each other up by the strength of our clasped hands.

  We didn’t speak. Not then, not on the walk back down the narrow highway, and not as we got back into Ben’s car. I could have asked him if he was okay. He could have done the same. But we already knew. Neither of us was okay.

  Ben pulled back onto the road. The skies opened up again and hurled fat raindrops at the Cherokee as it gathered speed. “I drive past here all the time,” he finally said. “On the way to the airport.”

  I looked over at him, wondering how we could be here, having this conversation, both of us dry-eyed.

  “It’s the drive back that’s the hardest. Driving the same direction y’all were going. It’s usually at night, and I can’t see where you went off the road, but I always know when I pass by.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ben.” The tears I’d denied earlier came so fast I didn’t have time to guard against them. “It should have been me. Melody had so much to live for.”

  “Hush.” Ben took his hand from the wheel long enough to wipe the tears from my cheek with his thumb, but his tenderness only made them flow faster.

  I turned my face away to stare out the window but saw nothing of the rain-drenched view. “Just give me a minute.”

  Ben dropped his hand and let it rest for just a moment on my thigh before returning it to the steering wheel. “Do you remember that time you and Melody kissed me in Kindergarten?”

  I gave a little hiccupping laugh. “I couldn’t remember whether we got our turns.”

  “Yeah. You did. After you held me down for all the other girls.”

  “I’m really sorry about that.”

  “I’ll bet you are.” His tone was teasing.

  “No, really.” I wiped my eyes. “You must have hated it.”

  He chuckled. “I’m sure I was scarred for life.”

  I sniffed as quietly as I could and rubbed my hands across my cheeks to wipe away the last of the tears.

  “Look in the glove box. I keep some tissues in there.”

  I dug through the glove box. “I must look hideous.” I flipped down the lighted mirror on the visor. “Oh, God. I do look hideous.” I repaired as much of the damage
as I could with the Kleenex, spitting on a wadded end and wiping at the smeared mascara under my eyes.

  “There’s a hairbrush under the seat if you need it.”

  “If I need it. You’re a master of understatement.” I added a layer of fresh makeup from the kit in my purse. I might end up looking like a hooker, but that was better than looking like I’d been crying. I’d deal with the tangled mess of my hair in a minute.

  A few minutes later, we pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot and Ben parked under a big magnolia. When he cut off the engine, I turned to him. “Do I look okay?”

  “Beautiful, as always.” He leaned across the console and gave me a quick kiss. “Let’s eat.”

  I started to open my door, but he stilled me with a hand on my leg. “I’ll do that.”

  He came around the hood, took my hand, and steadied me as I stepped down from the Cherokee. This was how I’d imagined we’d be all those years ago, going out to dinner together on weekends while our kids spent the night with my parents, or his.

  But Jake and Maryann and Amy weren’t our kids. They were his kids. And this moment was nothing I’d dreamed of all those years ago, even though a snapshot photo would have looked exactly the same. Stuck again in a Twilight Zone of what-ifs, I followed Ben into the restaurant.

  “We have reservations,” he told the hostess. We followed the young woman to our table where Ben ordered my favorite wine without asking. We sipped the smoky Cabernet and talked some more about the kids, my studio, his job, and deer-hunting—a subject we’d always disagreed on. For long moments, I saw him as himself. Not Melody’s husband, not my lost lover, not the man who’d betrayed me with my best friend. I saw him as Ben, simply Ben, his good and bad qualities all rolled up together.

  For the first time in forever, I gave myself a little credit.

  I could have gone all Jerry Springer when he left me for her. Instead, I had strangled my infant love for him and embraced his newly adopted relationship with Melody. Or at least, I’d tried. But that strangled love wouldn’t die. Denied the right to grow and mature as it should, it became a stunted, misshapen monster. My best-friendship with Melody had become twisted as well. Paired with jealousy, it created a conjoined-twin love-hate relationship that made me hate myself more than I hated Melody for taking Ben from me.

  “Madame?” The waiter leaned toward me to catch my attention. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Oh, yes.” I glanced down at the menu and blurted out the first thing that caught my eye.

  We were just finishing our dinner when I looked up to see Ian talking to the maitre’d.

  His hand rested at the waist of the most stunningly beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  All dark tones, honey skin and wild black hair, the woman on Ian’s arm could have been a Spanish Flamenco dancer. In a skin tight red dress and high-heeled red-soled fuck-me pumps, she stood only a couple of inches shorter than Ian.

  Her painted-on dress left nothing to the imagination, but any man looking at her didn’t have a working brain left in his head anyway. Her image, mixed with testosterone, would immediately liquefy any remaining gray matter and send it sliding south.

  The bitch was tall, curvy, voluptuous. A centerfold in the flesh. Loops of black hair rioted around her oval face, emphasizing dark, almond eyes and a luscious red mouth. I couldn’t help but compare my not-quite blond hair and tiny but perky boobs.

  She leaned into Ian and whispered.

  He bent toward her, listening intently. An intimate half-smile lingered on his lips.

  Asshole.

  Bastard.

  Liar.

  Still, I couldn’t much blame him. What a woman. And Ian was one of the few men on the planet who could hope to hold her attention for more than a day or two.

  That strange phone call he’d made this afternoon made perfect sense. He’d wanted to tell me something, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Now, I knew what—or who—that something was.

  Ben turned around to see what had me so transfixed. “Good God.”

  My thoughts, exactly. I slugged back the last of my wine and watched Ben’s eyes widen.

  “Oh, Angel...” His voice held a world of compassion.

  I was about to need a truckload of it. I’d been kicked in the chest by a rodeo bull and was still trying to figure out how to get up off the dirt. I just hoped to God that Ian and his new girlfriend weren’t about to be led to a table near us. I could get over being gored by the bull’s horns, but I damn sure didn’t want Ian to see me squirming in pain.

  Ben put a hand over mine. “Let’s go.” He raised a hand to signal the waiter.

  “Wait.” I held my head down during a dicey moment when the hostess looked our way, then tapped the computer screen at her podium. Frantic on the inside, I sat rooted to the chair and considered exit options, which pretty much amounted to hiding under the table. But God was on my side in this, at least, and the hostess led Ian and his sex-goddess to the opposite wing of the restaurant.

  My stomach decided whether to give up the meal I’d just eaten while Ben paid the bill. The next thing I remembered was him speaking to me as we drove out of the parking lot. “It might not be what you think.”

  I tried to laugh but it sounded like a wheeze. “Ben, I’m more heterosexual than any woman I met in New York, and I’d have sex with that woman if she’d let me.” She was that compelling, no kidding. “And Ian is a man. It’s exactly what I think it is.”

  “Maybe it’s just business.” Ben sounded about as sure of that as I was.

  I tried to take a steadying breath, but it shuddered on the way out. “Yeah, and I’m the Secretary of State.”

  Ben took his eyes off the road for a second and brushed gentle fingers across my cheek. “You really care about this guy?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. My throat tried to close up but I wouldn’t let it. “I guess I do.”

  He put both hands on the steering wheel and returned his attention to the rain-drenched highway. “Do you love him?”

  I watched the windshield wipers swish away a scattering of tiny, star-like raindrops as soon as they fell. “Well, that’d be pretty damn stupid, wouldn’t it?”

  Wisely, Ben didn’t answer my question. He turned off onto a dirt road, one I remembered but hadn’t seen in years. After a few minutes, the headlights illuminated a deserted, fallen-down house overgrown with Kudzu. “Remember?”

  Ben and I had made love on the concrete picnic table in the back yard of this place more times than I could count. “I can’t believe it’s still here.”

  “Land doesn’t tend to move around much.” Ben put a hand on my thigh and squeezed, teasing just a little to urge me into a better mood.

  “I mean, you idiot, I thought someone would’ve built something else here by now.” A stone’s throw from the river’s edge, right across from Angel Falls, the landmark for which the town was named, this should be prime real estate.

  Ben drove around back of the vine-smothered ruin. He parked on the last scrap of high ground, turned off the engine, turned out the lights, and plunged us into the past. We sat in the car and watched the fast-flowing river hiss past below. Across the river, the silver thread of Angel Falls slipped down the limestone cliffs and into the embracing arms of the Angel, an eerily lifelike formation complete with wings and a white robe shimmering from water that seeped through fissures in the limestone.

  The moon peered from breaks in the shredded clouds above, drenching the angel’s face in its pale glow. The light rain had turned to a soft, silent mist that settled on the windshield like dew. I opened my door and walked across the wet grass to the concrete picnic table at the edge of the river’s sloping bank.

  “Hang on a second.” Ben took out the blanket I’d left in the back of his Cherokee so Lizzie could ride in the back without messing up Ben’s precious leather seats when I used Ben’s car to squire his kids around. He spread the blanket over the table. I took off my s
hoes and set them side by side on the bench seat, then climbed to the tabletop and sat cross-legged.

  Ben sat beside me, put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me close. “You’re shivering. Wouldn’t you rather sit in the car?”

  “No.” I watched the rain-swollen water ripple and shine, and made excuses for Ian’s bad behavior. I had no right to be angry. Ian had never claimed to love me. He had never mentioned monogamy. My expectations weren’t Ian’s fault. He had never promised anything. The fault here was entirely my own. I should have known better than to expect anything from him just because we’d made love.

  Correction; had sex.

  Ben chafed my arms to help me stay warm. “I’m sorry you had to see him with another woman.”

  “He left a message on my machine this morning. Said, ‘something came up.’ Now I know exactly what came up, don’t I?”

  “I’m so sorry, Angel.” Ben ran a hand down my arm. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Who could blame him? My God. Did you see that woman?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said a little too heartily. “I saw her.”

  “You jerk.” I balled up my fist and punched his shoulder. But he wasn’t the one I really wanted to hit.

  “Ow!” Ben rubbed his shoulder, being dramatic. I hadn’t hit him that hard. “What did I do?” he said. “I’m not the one who—”

  “Yes, you were,” I snapped. Maybe I did want to hit him, after all. “You were the first one who jilted me for someone else. You just weren’t the last.”

  And then I started crying.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Ben pulled me into his lap and wrapped his arms around me. “All men are jerks.”

  “And assholes.” I tried to wipe my eyes without smearing my mascara. “Assholes and buttheads.”

  “Idiots,” Ben supplied. “Idiots and imbeciles, the whole lot of us.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” I wailed, falling directly into the pit of self-pity and wallowing there. “Why can’t I find someone who will love me?”