by Joan Kilby
“Will you be my son’s godfather?”
Will grinned. “You bet.”
Ida gazed down at her stomach, and her eyes glistened. “Do you think there’s a chance Rick’ll want me if I tell him the engagement is off?”
“Unless you ask, you’ll never find out. Open your heart, Ida. Tell him you love him. You’ll be surprised how good it feels.”
“Are you going to be okay, Will? What about your dream of having a family?”
He sighed. “I’m not sure. That’s something Maeve and I will have to work out. All I know is, now that I’ve come to see love as the solution, not the problem, anything seems possible. I’m going to find her and talk to her.”
He took Ida’s hand, unfolded her clenched fist and flattened his fingers against hers in the sign of their childhood secret club. “Friends forever?”
Her smile brimmed over. “Friends forever.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“BATHTIME, KRISTY!” Maeve announced to the round-cheeked baby sitting in her high chair, happily gurgling into her milk.
“Ba. Ba.” Kristy banged her cup on the tray at the sound of the water running into the baby bath on the kitchen bench top.
In Maeve’s dream, the bench top was in Will’s kitchen at Sorrento, but she didn’t think that odd.
She scooped Kristy out of the high chair and onto the changing mat next to the bath. Cooing and tickling, Maeve quickly divested her of sleeper and diaper. Holding the squirming, eager baby in one arm, Maeve tested the water with an elbow. “Okay, in you go.” Kristy laughed and kicked her legs. Maeve trickled warm water down her neck and tummy. Kristy giggled, her chubby fist reaching for a loose strand of Maeve’s long hair, pulling Maeve’s face close to hers. For one priceless, endless moment, Maeve gazed, smiling, into Kristy’s eyes, and Kristy gazed back at her. Maeve’s love for her daughter overflowed.
In the space of a heartbeat everything changed. Suddenly, Kristy’s eyes grew dull and staring. Her grip slackened and fell away from Maeve’s hair. The kitchen disappeared, and Maeve was in the nursery. She was walking toward the crib with a sense of dread. She didn’t want to look inside. No, please, no…
Kristy’s pallid face was tinged with blue around her mouth. Maeve reached for her, but the vibrant bundle of love and energy was cold, her little body stiff and lifeless…
“No-o-o-o!” Maeve awoke in a cold sweat, heart pounding, and sat abruptly upright in the single bed in Rose’s spare room. Kristy. Oh, my baby. Maeve dropped her face in her hands and sobbed. She wished she were dead.
The dream stayed with her all morning and colored her mood gray. To distract herself, Maeve squatted among trays of herb seedlings, laboriously transplanting the slender green shoots into pots for Rose to sell at the local Sunday market. Without warning, Kristy’s smiling face appeared before her, and then the transformation to death happened all over again. The rich black potting soil spilled on the grass, and she wrapped her arms around herself while tears squeezed from her clenched eyelids.
Rose found her thus and crouched to take her in her arms. “In the tarot, Death means not literal death but a major change in one’s life. Change can be difficult, especially when you cling to the old and fear the new.”
Wordlessly, Maeve shook her head, too upset to speak. Not wanting to accept Rose’s interpretation. This wasn’t a tarot reading, and she didn’t fear anything but the loss of her beloved child.
Still numb with delayed grief three hours later, Maeve sat on the veranda of Rose’s cottage with a cup of peppermint tea and looked out over the green and steeply sloping valley. Idly, she tracked the movement of a large pale car as it wound its way up the hills between market gardens and vineyards.
When the car turned into Rose’s driveway, Maeve recognized the silver paintwork and the distinctive Mercedes hood ornament. Will. No need to ask where he’d gotten Rose’s address. Art would hand Will the moon if he could.
Her first impulse was to run inside and escape from feelings too painful to confront. Too late. The car crunched to a halt and Will got out. The sight of his familiar figure gave rise to her second impulse, which was to run to him and fling herself in his arms.
Maeve gave in to neither. She stood tall and straight, and waited.
Will walked over to the house and stopped at the foot of the steps leading up to the veranda. “Hello, Maeve.”
His face. His dear, dear face. “You should have called.”
“You left town in a hurry. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
They sounded as though they were talking at cross-purposes. Maeve thought he wanted to be reassured he had nothing to do with her sudden flight. Typical male, he wasn’t likely to apologize.
“I’m fine.” She forced a cheery note into her voice. His rebuff at Sorrento surf beach still stung, but he didn’t have to know. “I’m having a mini-holiday in the hills.”
He planted one foot on the bottom step. “How long do you plan to stay?”
She noted the foot—and something else. Something calm and joyful about him that she didn’t have the emotional energy to interpret. Or to deal with. “Two weeks, maybe three. I’m helping Rose with her herb nursery.”
Will glanced toward the greenhouses to the right of the house. “What about your experiment? Are you just going to drop that?”
After all his work on the solar panel, she guessed he had a right to ask, but she hated the answer she had to give him.
“I don’t want to,” she said. “Art agreed to look after it for me. I wrote out the experimental protocol in terms he would understand, but, well, he forgot to add the nutrients to the hydroponic solution and that week’s data were spoiled.”
She couldn’t blame Art; differential growth rates of chives and parsley wouldn’t be on the top of everyone’s list of priorities. Plus, he had a whole new work situation to contend with. “I’ll set it up again once I return,” she said.
“Except, didn’t you once tell me ambient light was one of the constants? The season will have progressed, and light conditions changed.”
“Yes, well, it can’t be helped.”
Silence fell. Then at last he said, “I should have talked to you that day at Sorrento beach. I’ve missed you.”
She wavered, longing to forgive and forget. Then memories of Kristy insinuated themselves painfully into her consciousness. It was better this way. Couldn’t he understand they had no future together? Ida could give him what he wanted. If not Ida, then some other woman.
Now she forced herself to be caustic. “How kind of you to acknowledge that…after the fact.”
Will just shook his head and gave a small smile. “Can we talk? There are things I understand better now.”
“I really don’t see the point—”
“I’m not marrying Ida.”
“Oh.”
His warm blue eyes held hers. “I love you, Maeve.”
Her sudden yearning for him was so strong she had to turn away so he wouldn’t see it in her face. His circumstances may have changed, but her feelings hadn’t.
“It’s no good, Will.” Her back to him, she spoke gently but firmly, feeling the tears prick her eyes. He would forget her someday and find someone else to bear his children. She was glad it wouldn’t be Ida, though. Ida deserved to have a chance with Rick.
“No? Just like that, you say no?” He sounded quizzical, not angry.
She couldn’t let him matter to her. And it would be better in the long run for him to be rid of her. Facing him again, she confirmed with a steady voice, “Just like that.”
And just like that, he walked away. At his car he turned. “When you’re ready to come home, I’ll be waiting. We’ll talk.”
Of all the arrogant… As if they were already a couple, already married. As if her capitulation was foregone.
Except that he didn’t sound arrogant. He just sounded…quietly confident, infinitely loving.
And then he got into his car and drove away.
> He wasn’t marrying Ida.
“More peppermint tea, darl’?” Rose appeared with a tray bearing a cosied teapot and a second bone china teacup. She saw that Will had left, and her face fell. “What on earth did you say to make him leave so quickly?”
“The truth.” Maeve poured herself another cup of steaming straw-colored liquid and set the creaking wicker to rocking. “I’m not ill, Rose. You don’t have to wait on me.”
“You’re sick at heart,” Rose said softly, before padding away into the wooden cottage.
Truer words were never spoken. But peppermint tea and all the cosseting in the world wouldn’t mend her broken heart.
A FEW DAYS LATER she’d gained a small measure of peace, enough to pick up her cellular phone from the wicker table beside the rocker and punch in her home number. Art answered on the third ring.
“Hi, Dad. How’s it going?” She spoke with an upbeat lilt.
“What’s wrong?” Art said. “You sound odd.”
Maeve sighed. She should have known better than to try to fool her father. “I’m okay. How are you? How are things at work?” She hadn’t even asked Will about his factory.
“No one’s thinking all our troubles are over,” Art said. “But we’re all in it together, sink or swim. Will seems to have benefited from the change, too. He’s different these days.”
“In what way?” Was he pining over his lost family? How desperately she craved news of him was shameful. Especially after she’d literally turned him away from her door.
“Well, now, I don’t know how to describe it. Just a look in his eye. Something deep, some kind of certainty.”
That didn’t sound like a man in mourning. “I heard he’s not getting married, after all.”
“Maybe he feels he had a lucky escape.” Art chuckled at his own joke.
“Honestly, Dad.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for you.”
“Did he…say anything?”
“No. But he did bring over one of the trucks from the factory and load up your experimental plants.”
“He did what?”
“I tried to stop him, love. Honestly, I did. But he just muttered something about how you hadn’t worked so hard just to drop the whole experiment.”
Maeve tried to feel outraged that he’d assumed control, but all she could muster was gratitude that he’d taken the fate of her plants into his capable hands.
“When are you coming home?” Art asked.
She wanted to go this minute. “I don’t know.”
DURING THE WEEKS since Will had come to Rose’s cottage, Maeve returned to the peninsula almost daily to keep up with her more pressing landscaping jobs. Each night she went back to the mountain. She’d driven past Will’s house twice, half hoping, half terrified she would run into him. Getting over Will was turning out to be harder than she’d anticipated.
She dropped in to see Ida one day and coaxed her out for lunch at a café. She was concerned over the other woman’s state of mind and curiously eager to hear how her pregnancy was going.
“This is for your baby,” she said, handing Ida a package wrapped in paper bright with red and yellow balloons. She hadn’t intended to go into the baby store, but it was just two doors down from the hardware store where she bought her hose fittings and, well…
She had drifted through the aisles, fingering baby blankets, inspecting the braking system on a pram. And then, before she knew what she was doing, she found herself standing over a bassinet, fantasizing about a rosy-cheeked, dark-haired baby. Oddly, the baby had not Kristy’s dark-chocolate eyes, but eyes of cobalt blue glinting with gold.
“May I help you, dear?” a grandmotherly saleswoman enquired, discreetly checking out the curvature of Maeve’s flat tummy.
Maeve snapped back to reality. “I’m not pregnant. I’m just looking for a present for a friend’s baby. I don’t plan to have any children,” she added needlessly. “I don’t want children.”
The saleswoman’s gaze changed from warm to wary. “Perhaps you’ll find what you’re looking for in the toy section,” she said, indicating the far wall and shelves stocked with stuffed animals and colorful plastic toys.
Now Ida smiled and ripped open the paper to pull out a purple-and-green stuffed dragon. “It’s gorgeous! Thank you!”
“The teddy bears seemed a little too cutesy.” In fact, they’d looked adorable, but Maeve didn’t feel comfortable with her sudden interest in baby toys. “What are you, four months along?”
“Four months, one week and three days,” Ida said proudly. “I can hardly wait until he’s born. I’ve got more clothes and baby furniture than you could imagine.”
Remembering the joy and excitement of Kristy as a tiny baby, Maeve felt a stab of envy. Could she really resign herself to never experiencing that again? She tried to summon the feelings evoked by her nightmare, but the memory had faded, as dreams do.
“Will told me you two aren’t getting married.” Maeve searched Ida’s face for signs she was unhappy with the way things had turned out.
But Ida merely grinned ruefully. “It wasn’t one of our brightest ideas. I’m feeling a lot better now about the possibility that I’ll be raising this baby on my own. That’s what I planned in the first place, anyway, until Will insisted the baby needed a father.”
“And won’t he have one? What about Rick?”
Ida picked at the remains of her Caesar salad. “He asked me to come to San Diego…to live.”
“Ida, that’s wonderful! Congratulations.”
Ida shrugged. “If I went, we would have to get married for me to stay in the country. I wouldn’t feel right forcing him—”
“Stop right there,” Maeve said. “Is Rick the kind of guy you could force into doing something he doesn’t want to do?”
“Hardly.”
“Well, then? He wouldn’t ask you if he didn’t mean it. You’re going, I hope.”
Ida smiled tremulously. “I want to. Oh, Maeve, I want to so much. He…he seems keen on the baby, in spite of what he told me when we first met.”
“He loves you. Love changes the way you perceive things. It alters your priorities.”
On her way back to Emerald, Maeve found herself going out of her way to drive past the Frankston Memorial Park, a route she usually avoided. She’d cut a bundle of white roses from her bushes at home to take to Rose. But she was sure Rose would understand if she gave them, instead, to Kristy.
Maeve walked through the rows of plain flat markers engraved with names and dates, scant reminders of lives so precious to family and friends. Tears came to her eyes when she stood before Kristy’s grave and read the inscription she’d chosen from a Tennyson poem: “Oh, death in life, the days that are no more.”
At the time of Kristy’s death, the poem had expressed Maeve’s overwhelming grief and sorrow. Now the words seemed too sad for such a sunny-natured child as Kristy. Maeve wished she’d chosen something a little more cheerful to comfort her baby through eternity. Something from A. A. Milne, perhaps. Kristy had loved her stuffed Tigger. Probably because she was the “bouncingest” baby.
Maeve smiled through her tears. Dropping to the grass, she sat for a while, remembering all the many ways Kristy had enriched her life during her few short months on earth. Finally Maeve laid the roses on the gently curving mound of green. “Goodbye, sweet one. Till we meet again.”
THAT NIGHT, Maeve stood on Rose’s veranda and watched the full moon rise over the valley. A whole month had gone by since she and Will had made love beneath its silvery glow. If she stood on tiptoe she could just see a shining sliver of the bay miles away to the west.
Was Will gazing at the moon right now, too? Was it the moon or the love she felt for him that drew her so strongly tonight? Would she spend the rest of her life wishing she were with him? Or did she have the courage to step out of the past?
Without allowing herself to think about her motives or even what she would say to him when she got to Sorrento, Maeve drew a
light cardigan on over her cotton dress and slipped her feet into a pair of sandals. She wrote a note for Rose, who’d gone to bed early, and quietly closed the cottage door behind her.
Down the mountain lane she drove, the headlights of the ute leaping ahead to illuminate the curving road, picking out the flash of amber eyes in dark grass, then shining on a kangaroo bounding across the narrow ribbon of asphalt.
On the flat land between the mountains and the sea, she crossed paddocks of sleeping cows, rumbled over level railway crossings and slowed through small towns with their brightly lit pubs and takeaways.
Would he be home? Would he welcome her after the way she’d treated him? Could they find a common ground without compromising their dreams?
With the bright full moon to guide her, these questions and others flowed through her mind as the miles flowed behind her. Yet beneath the questions lay a growing certainty at her core: whatever else happened, or didn’t happen, in her life, she wanted to be with Will.
And then she was turning into his driveway, and excitement began to build as she followed the last curving path to her destination. The house was dark except for a light deep within, probably in the kitchen. She stood for a moment, gazing at the moon, now at its zenith. The hour was late; traveling had taken longer than she’d expected. Should she go home to Mount Eliza and wait until morning?
“Maeve.” His voice came low and sweet from somewhere close by.
“Will? Where are you?” Her pulse began to race.
“Here, by the kissing gate.”
She saw him then, his shirt and shorts pale against his tanned arms and legs. “What are you doing out here?” she asked, walking over.
“Moon gazing. Waiting for you.” His hands rested nonchalantly in his pockets and he leaned against the circle of the kissing gate as though he hung out there every night.
“You were so sure I’d come.” She was fascinated by the enigmatic curve of his mouth, and suddenly there was nothing she wanted more than to see his dimple. “Say, mister, is there a toll on this gate?”
A tiny dark shadow, familiar and dear, appeared to the right of his grin. Holding the gate open so she could slip into the circle with him, he said, “You bet there’s a toll.”
