Retreat to Love

by Greene, Melanie

  She rummaged. I wondered if I’d brought all of the condoms and stuff into the bedroom already. “Cheers, Ash, see you in a bit. Bye, Caleb!”

  Through compressed lips, Caleb muttered, “Bye.”

  I peeked out the door—this not having direct access to the bathroom from the bedroom thing was getting to be a pain—to check the clarity of the coast. We dashed into the shower, giggling. Damn but I had a good time with this guy. Casting my mind back to the patchy men, I wondered if I would have said the same in the early phases with any of them. I didn’t think I was lying to myself: none of them were like Caleb.

  Even as I discovered the sticky note Lizzy had left with my great-aunt Kitty’s Dublin phone number, his warmth and support grounded me. There was a lot of freedom with Caleb, a lot of feeling like it was the real me exploring life with the real him. And I was learning that the real me felt even realer with him around, than without.

  Chapter 16

  A beautiful rain was falling—the kind that goes straight down, no wind to make it gush and slant, and it hit the roof with loud round flops. We lay and listened to it until I couldn’t stand it and got up to watch out the studio windows. The trees barely moved and the clearing was developing little pits in the dirt where the drops dug into the earth. But of course it was all just a precursor to the real weather, and simultaneously the temp dropped several degrees and the wind rushed in to drive the rain sloppily against the cabin. Within moments rivulets streaked haphazardly down the panes and the dirt in the clearing became streams of mud. I sighed and turned back to my room to get a sweatshirt. The night would be cold again.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t feel like doing anything now.”

  “How long will this last?” I assumed he meant the storm, which was settling in for a loud party. But it looked to break for dinnertime, which was a blessing cause I was starving.

  “Oh shit!”

  Caleb sat up. “What?”

  “We’re on dinner duty. Did you order anything?” I knew the answer—we’d been holed up in the cabin together for hours. He was, he claimed, thinking hard on what his next phase of the project would be, though thinking looked a hell of a lot like laying around on the love seat and drinking beer. But he’d kept me supplied with glasses of ice water and kisses, and stayed quiet so I could concentrate on my two-dimensional men, so I wasn’t complaining.

  “There’s bound to be something we can make,” he ventured.

  I sighed. “Exactly,” and tossed his flannel shirt at him. “Let’s go see if Lizzy will let us steal something from tomorrow.”

  Typically, it was warmer outside than in, but wetter. The rain had slowed but the trees were shedding unpredictable drips and torrents. I laughed when Caleb jumped at the thunder. Californians and their habitual droughts. After semi-successful scrounging, we goofed around the Main House, listening to the rain.

  Gran had written back to my email with Kitty’s contact info:

  “Sweetheart—first the good news. I opened the packet that just arrived for you from Bluebonnet Expo and you’ve been juried! Both Hibiscus Nights and Comfort Food (my favorite excepting Chains, you know) are going to be exhibited. I’m delighted for you, and won’t stand for less than a grand prize from those people, if they know what’s good for them.

  “On to other matters. Naturally I don’t mind you passing on the information from the Murphys. I was still in two (probably more) minds about getting the information, but once I had it, I realized I was glad. But I don’t think I’ll be doing anything about it. At least not at this juncture. Much as I would love to give that Kitty a piece of my mind, I can see nothing more than more hurt coming from that. I know you still honor it, but my request that you not tell your mother or anyone about it all still stands. Don’t be annoyed with me for repeating it, just put it down to your doddery old Gran’s quirky ways.

  “Nothing else of note to report to you, except the opening of the magnolia buds. I imagine there aren’t any up there in your woods, so think about mine and smile.

  “Much love to you, my dream-girl.

  “Gran.”

  Well, that left me high and low. I was delighted about the show—it was great regional exposure and a likely forerunner for Houston’s International Quilt Festival in the fall. Plus they’d rejected my submissions the last two years, so I felt vindicated.

  But I ached that Gran was so torn about the Pappa news. If she’d been raging, I could have been strident in my support; if she’d been stricken with sadness, I could have been her shoulder to lean on; if she’d not minded, I could have been her sounding board about contact or proof or whatever. But instead she was somewhat all of those things, and there was no definitive place for me to set up emotional camp. I worried I’d be too passionate in the wrong direction. Having only written communication about it, too, was hard. I’d reply to the tone of one message, and by the time she got it, she was in another place.

  I did my best, knowing good enough was still no good. But the next family email I got, the next morning, wasn’t from Gran. It was the first time since my arrival at FireWind that Bernadette had written:

  “Dear Ashlyn—It was lovely to see you at my party, and thank you again for the pretty blanket. It means a lot to me. I know your Gran was happy to see you, too. We get more used than we know to having you so close, then when you’re gone we find ourselves surprised to miss you so. I want when you return for you to participate in a conversation with me and your uncles about Mom’s living arrangements. I don’t want to spring this on you suddenly, so I am planting the seed now. It is not urgent, but I know you want the best situation for her and I wouldn’t want to upset you by failing to include you. I’ve cause to worry about her mind-set and as you know, one cannot thrive in any environment without the mental peace to breathe deeply and sleep well. If we can do anything to help Mom attain that, I feel we owe it to her. I hope you agree. And again, I hope I’ve not unsettled you by bringing this up this way. It had been in my mind to touch on it, but now I feel I should open the dialogue in whatever way I can. Hence this message. I wish you many pleasant sleeps and all the energy to create that you seek up there. Frank and I send our love, Bernadette.”

  Well, wow. I sprang up to pace, scaring one of Margie’s hummingbirds from the window feeder. The room wasn’t big enough for the strides I needed, though, so I hit the still-muddy trail out towards the lake. I managed to scare Hester, too, in a real communing with nature moment. Damn these birds.

  I mean, what the hell brought this on? Bernadette a) treating me like an adult b) bringing up this nursing home threat in a freakin email c) acknowledging my gift almost as if she meant it d) sounding like maybe Zach was right and she’s scared of me and e) obviously reacting to some change in Gran that made her want to reach out to me sooner rather than when I got back to Houston.

  Gran wouldn’t have talked to her about Pappa two days after telling me not to, would she?

  I mean, if anyone was going to talk to Bernadette about it, it should be Gran. I realized that. But she’d said she didn’t want her kids to know. She’d been opposed to me mentioning it to a soul. So what was the deal? Was she so devastated and indrawn even Bernadette noted the change?

  I had to reply.

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what to say. Glancing at Rafa’s cabin, which looked empty, I let rip with a primal scream the likes of which I hadn’t loosed upon the world since the Inner Peace workshop Frank and Bernadette had enrolled me in senior year of high school.

  After dinner, the gang showed up in my cabin. I tossed the printout of Bernadette’s message to the coffee table then yanked the cork out of a bottle of Chablis.

  “I need to be there to figure out what’s going on,” I ranted. “She had to have said something. Otherwise this makes no sense, right? Either she said something or she is so bummed out she’s letting it show to Bernadette, and that’s just not her style.” I poured. “Or it wasn’t her style ever before. Mayb
e she is so depressed about this she’s letting it show, in which case I am an idiotic and callous fool for telling her about it.”

  Wren took her glass. “Ash, you’re overreacting. No, you are. I see why you’re saying what you’re saying, but it’s not so bad.”

  “She’s right,” muttered Caleb into his wine, I think afraid to meet my eye. I was beginning to think I was a too-severe person if the people I loved were afraid to stand up and contradict me.

  And now I was thinking about loving Caleb as if it was for granted. I sat down heavily in the rolling desk chair. Great, even more grist for my emotional mill, as if I weren’t overflowing with grist already.

  “Well, I think I should talk to Zach about this,” I said. “Maybe he can go to Houston and check the lay of the land.”

  Lizzy was shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “Your gran told you not to.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not seven. I don’t have to do everything she says.”

  “Fine, so don’t act like you’re seven,” she retorted. “She asked you not to, and it’s her relationships you’re talking about here, so you honor that.”

  “It affects Zach and me, too.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “How? Because it’s our grandfather! It’s our aunts or cousins or whatever out there, unknown to us.”

  “So?”

  “So, we should have a voice in talking to Gran about what she’ll do with the information.”

  “No, not really.” Lizzy sat forward. “Look, it makes no difference in your life to know or not know these Irish people. You don’t stand to gain anything from it, you’re not likely to stage a family get-together, you would just screw up their lives, too, if they knew about you.”

  Wren nodded. “Yeah, the only one this affects is your gran. She’s the one who should decide how to disseminate the information, or even if she should. And she said don’t talk to Zach about it.”

  “He wouldn’t tell her I told him, if I said not to.”

  “And, what, you think she wouldn’t be able to tell?” Caleb asked. “Zach couldn’t hide that from her.”

  He wasn’t exactly the most opaque person.

  All my dramatic sighing was starting to irritate even me.

  “Fine, I’ll keep it to myself.” I glared. “For now. When I get back home if she’s not doing okay and I can’t make her better I’ll tell Zach, though, so he can help me.”

  “How’s he going to help?”

  “I don’t know. He just will. He’s a helpful guy.”

  “Don’t fight with me, I was just asking.” Caleb was getting all defensive on me, and worse, Lizzy and Wren weren’t sticking up for me. So fine. I dropped it and told them about the Bluebonnet Expo. Of course, being foreigners to my great state, they hadn’t heard much about our state flower and thought it sounded all very bucolic, but I took the high road and ignored them.

  Chapter 17

  Wednesday morning Caleb slipped out of our warm bed pre-dawn and hadn’t made it back in time for breakfast. He slammed into the dining room just as I was finishing my coffee and grinned widely at me.

  “Oh, Ash, babe, I’m sorry I was so long. It was incredible—the trail up the stream was bursting with dragonflies and blue jays, and then I swung back by my cabin and Brandon had left some coffee cups on the porch and, oh my God, I couldn’t believe my luck, there were I kid you not, three crows hopping around on the rims and all over. I even got some shots of one of them bowing over the tray like a supercilious waiter while the other two were gazing at each other like star-crossed lovers. Just wait till you see it.” He finished this little rant with a loud smooch on my cheek as he reached for his coffee cup.

  “Great.”

  “Yeah, it was.” He poured and I passed him the cream and he finally stood still. “Hey, I’m sorry I woke you this morning.”

  “It’s okay, I know you need to catch the light, and I’m glad you got some great work done.” I squeezed his upper arm (mmmm, all muscle) as he came back in to get the coffeepot. “Just don’t call me babe. I hate that. You didn’t give birth to me, and I’m not an infant.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not a big deal. Just try to not do it, okay?”

  He nodded, still jazzed from his morning. “’Kay.”

  But then Thursday and Friday mornings he did the same thing, and Friday night I suggested maybe he should sleep in his own cabin, since he was getting less and less subtle in his morning ablutions and we were staying up late enough for the lack of sleep to turn me crankier than I needed to be. He got all puppy-pouty on me again and promised to be super-quiet if I’d let him stay.

  I gave in.

  But, big surprise, he woke me when the door slammed behind him before six the next morning, and to make it worse he came back in to apologize and decided somehow it would help if he rubbed my shoulder to get me relaxed again. All it did was wake me up further. And he was getting impatient to get out in the dawn and jiggling his foot against the bed’s side rail so I had to practically shove him off the quilt to get him to go. And he said ‘sorry’ three more times on his way out. I buried my head under the pillows but never managed to get back to sleep.

  Then it got bad. We went to his studio after lunch. He wanted to show me the new prints, and we made a lot of the usual jokes about skanky artists inviting women up to see their etchings, and then we got there and, well, I just didn’t like them.

  I didn’t like his composition of the crow and coffee shots, and the deer at the salt lick looked derivative of some hunting lodge oil painting, and the hatching chrysalis, which he was going to put into a maternity-ward setting, were so soft-focus they were hard to decipher. It’s not like they were the finished product, I knew that. I knew my reaction to them raw might be vastly different to my reaction to them when composed, but I just couldn’t grasp the frayed ends of his enthusiasm and turn it into excitement on my part.

  So, I wasn’t jumping up and down for him.

  I wasn’t rude or anything. I’m not that big an idiot. I did what I could to praise the prints, to look for the good points and stoke his ego. Apparently, Caleb was getting damn perceptive when it came to reading my body language, or my mind, or my aura, or something.

  “What’s so terrible about them, then?” he asked, all mopey.

  “Wrong? Who said anything was wrong?”

  “No one. No one said they were right, either, did they?”

  I knitted my brow at him. “I said they were good. How is my reaction so important anyway?”

  “Don’t play me for an idiot, Ash. You know damn well you’re my sounding board here. If you don’t like them you should just be honest with me.”

  So I told him he was wrong, told him he was imagining it and being defensive and even paranoid. But he wasn’t so happy with me, and to tell the truth, I wasn’t so happy with myself. The longer we went into it and into it, the more I realized I hadn’t been nice about the prints. But I still thought my reactions were valid—I wasn’t crazy about the work itself. But I also wasn’t crazy about the way I’d expressed myself. Instead of treading carefully, I’d figured a slightly glib path was good enough to get me through.

  Eventually I asked, “Do you want me to stay and talk about this some more, or go?”

  “Go.”

  He didn’t move a muscle, so I had to stretch pretty far across the space between us to brush his cheek with my lips. “Come by and get me for dinner?”

  He exhaled. “I’ll be working here for a while. Why don’t I just see you there?”

  I nodded, and couldn’t think of much else to say. I left.

  Dinner would be a pasta salad—no cooking time to speak of, but I expected him to show up about ten minutes earlier than he did. I wasn’t waiting for him or anything—I was sitting in the common room sketching while I listened to the radio. Wimberley got several country stations and, after I played with the antenna a little, an alternative rock station out of Austin.
/>   Because I wasn’t going to be the first one in the kitchen again. Been there, done that, written the cookbook. So I didn’t rise until after I’d heard him run the water and clank the pot on the stove and open the sticky door of the cabinet where the cutting boards lived.

  He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. I just got my favorite knife and started dicing the tomatoes. He spooned the cornbread into the pan. I scooched aside so he could open the oven door. He closed it with a bit more of a bang than I considered strictly necessary.

  The water was bubbling.

  He was looking, presumably, for the penne, but since he hadn’t bothered to put the mixing bowl in the sink he couldn’t tell it was tucked behind it against the knife block. After his third trip to the pantry, I scraped the tomatoes into the serving bowl and slid the pasta bag out from its hiding place, handing it towards his chest.

  “I know,” he snapped, then opened it and dumped the contents into the pot, sending scalding bubbles up to land on his hand.

  “Fuck.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and when he unwrapped the dishtowel from his wounds I took it to give me leverage in opening the jar of artichoke hearts.

  “Operating with your usual thoughtful sympathy, I see,” he muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I can’t say I understood you, though. You apparently have some problem with my behavior, Mr. Paragon of Romance?”

  He gave the pasta a quick stir. “Oh now I’m not romantic enough as well as being crap at my job?”

  “I never said that. Either of that.”

  “What are you saying, then, Ash? You’re doing your best to be as unclear as possible, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Gee, why would I mind?”

  We locked eyes for a moment before I reached around him to get the mayo out of the fridge. My back was to him as I dumped it in with the olives and tomatoes and everything, then reached for some dry mustard and tarragon. “I never said you were crap at your job, not even remotely. I liked your stuff, I like talking to you about it, and I think what you have is going to turn out great. Just because I can’t see in it the same things you can doesn’t mean your vision is bad, it just means I see it differently.”