The Color of a Dream

by Julianne MacLean

  Diana stood over us. “How did it go, then?” she asked. “Did he stay long?”

  “About an hour,” I replied. “Ellen was sleeping when we arrived so I made coffee. When she woke up I introduced them and we played with her in the living room until he had to go to work. We listened to some music and Jesse played elevator with her.”

  “What’s elevator?” Diana asked.

  “It was so cute,” I explained. “He lifted her up, high over his head, gently set her down, then lifted her up again. And get this, she told him her blue blanket had a name. She calls it Ouwix.”

  “Ouwix!” Ellen said, raising her arms over her head.

  “That’s your blanket, isn’t it!” I excitedly replied.

  She laughed and nodded.

  Diana smiled and sat down. “That is definitely cute. Here, let me finish with her.”

  I handed Diana the spoon and stood to go load the dishes into the dishwasher.

  “He’s certainly different from Rick,” Diana said.

  “Yeah. He’s much more down to earth. Do you know he works for an air ambulance company? He flies rescue helicopters. Remember that kid that fell through the ice with his dog last winter? We saw it on the news and it went viral on YouTube? That was Jesse flying the bird that lowered the basket and pulled both of them out.”

  “Really? Wow, he didn’t tell us that.” Diana paused. “But just remember we still don’t know that much about him and you have to be really careful right now. Your evaluation is coming up. It’s important that you make the right impression.”

  “You mean it’s important that I don’t have a revolving door with a string of new men coming in and out of Ellen’s life.”

  She glanced up at me. “Not that I think you would do that, but yes, that’s what I mean. Appearances are everything.”

  “So I’m not allowed to have a boyfriend?”

  She handed the spoon to Ellen again, and this time Ellen hung onto it and stirred her potatoes and meat. Diana turned in the chair to face me. “Is that where you see this going? You only met Jesse today.”

  Hearing the concern in her tone I plugged the sink, ran the water and squeezed the plastic dish detergent bottle. “Is this going to become one of your judgmental moments where you lecture me about not being an idiot?”

  “No,” she defensively replied. “I just want to know what to expect after today.”

  “You don’t need to expect anything.”

  For the first time since I moved to Boston I wished I had my own place because suddenly I felt like a teenager who had to follow house rules. But I was in no position to complain. I was a single mother. I had no job, no money and I’d have no help with childcare if Diana wasn’t a part of my life. I reminded myself how much she had done for me. I might not even be alive without her.

  “He came in for coffee,” I said. “That’s all. And he was curious about Ellen because she’s his niece. Wouldn’t you be curious in his shoes?”

  “I suppose.” She turned around to help Ellen finish her supper while I dipped the plastic cups and bowls into the bubbly hot water to wash them.

  Though I was grateful to Diana for everything she did for me, I was still annoyed with her for not trusting me to behave responsibly. At the same time, I found myself smiling as I remembered how Jesse had played hide-and-seek with Ellen that afternoon, and how she had laughed until she rolled over on the floor, kicking her legs.

  Later Diana went over to Jacob’s house and I was left home alone.

  After I put Ellen to bed, I made some organic popcorn on the stove and stayed up late reading a romance novel.

  When Ellen woke me the following morning, I was surprised to discover a text that had come in at 3:00 a.m. It was from Jesse, and just like that romance novel, it caused my new heart to flutter like crazy.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Are you free today? I’d like to talk to you about something.

  I rolled over onto my back in bed and texted a reply: Yes, I’m free. What time and where?

  I waited a few seconds to see if he would text back right away and he did: You’re up early. Just heading to bed. 2:00?

  Sure. Can Ellen join us? I usually take her for a walk in the afternoon.

  He texted back a few seconds later: Yes to Ellen joining us. I’ll come to your place at 2:00.

  See you then! I replied.

  Feeling exhilarated, I set my phone down and got out of bed to fetch Ellen who was standing up in her crib, waiting for me to lift her out.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” I said. “Weatherman says it’s going to be a beautiful day.”

  I lowered the crib rail. She grabbed hold of her blanket and dragged it with her as I lifted her into my arms.

  * * *

  For some reason, I chose not to tell Diana about my meeting with Jesse that afternoon. I wanted to find out what he wanted to talk about first.

  He knocked on my door at 2:00 on the nose and I invited him in to wait while I put sunscreen on and buckled Ellen into her stroller. He helped me lift her down the steps to the street.

  “How was work last night?” I asked as I handed Ellen a sippy cup full of diluted apple juice before adjusting the brim of her sunhat.

  “Uneventful,” he replied. “I spent most of the night in the hangar dealing with the engineers. There was a problem with a gearbox.”

  “What’s a gearbox?” I asked, gripping the stroller handle and pushing off.

  “A very important piece of machinery,” he explained as he fell into step beside me. “It sends power from the engine to the rotors.”

  “The rotors are the blades that keep you in the air?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That does sound important.” We chatted more about his work, reached the end of the street and headed toward the Public Garden.

  “You said, in your text, that you wanted to talk to me about something?” I casually asked him.

  “Yeah,” he replied, “though it’s nothing specific. It’s just… After meeting you and Ellen yesterday, I can’t stop thinking about your custody case. I’m surprised Rick is doing this. It brought back some memories.”

  “Your girlfriend?” I gently said.

  He nodded and gestured with his hands. “I want to help you. You said you couldn’t get hold of Rick. What if I called my parents to try and find out where he is? I don’t even know if they’re aware of what’s happening. Or maybe they put him up to this for all I know.”

  I gazed up at Jesse with bewilderment. “You said you hadn’t spoken to your parents in ten years. Why would you want to do that for me? You hardly know me.”

  Jesse slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans and slid me a glance. “You seem like a nice enough person and I saw how you were with your daughter yesterday. You’re a good mom and I can’t stomach the idea of my brother taking Ellen away from you.”

  As I pushed Ellen’s stroller along the brick sidewalk, I remembered Diana’s advice to me about the dangers of inviting men into my life when the courts were judging my fitness as a single parent. Yet nothing could stop the thrilling spark of excitement that flared inside me when Jesse said those kind words.

  He squinted up at the sky. “I’ve seen Rick do too many things without a single thought for how others might feel. He was like that when we were young, especially with girls. I don’t know how he lived with himself.”

  Diana was right about something else—Jesse was nothing like Rick. He was a kinder, gentler soul. I had known few men like him in my life.

  Though I’d only met Jesse the previous day, I could easily see myself falling head over heels in love with him—which was a dangerous thing because I needed to stay focused on Ellen and the custody suit.

  We entered the Public Garden at the corner of Beacon and Charles Streets and walked leisurely down the wide path toward the lagoon. As we entered the shade beneath a large silver maple, I gazed up at the leaves, listened to the sound of Ellen’s squeaky s
troller wheels and breathed in the fresh scent of the late summer air.

  It was moments like these when I became almost overcome by the rapture of simply being alive. I thanked God for the miracle of modern medicine and the generosity of my organ donor.

  I wanted to share my joy with Jesse, but something held me back. Maybe it was the fact that I sensed a brewing attraction between us. Was I worried it might change how he felt about me if he knew there was a long disfiguring scar between my breasts?

  Really…what man would knowingly become involved with a woman who was constantly at risk for infections and had to take medications for the rest of her life to prevent her body from rejecting her own heart?

  It was because of the scar that I didn’t wear low cut tank tops, even in this scorching summer heat. I preferred to keep it hidden from view.

  We reached a giant weeping willow and I heard the calming sound of the ducks quacking on the water.

  “Have you ever taken Ellen for a ride on one of the Swan Boats?” Jesse asked.

  I smiled up at him. “Not yet, but it’s been on my To Do list since the start of the summer.”

  “We should go,” he suggested. “We’ll pretend to be tourists.”

  “All right,” I replied with a laugh, knowing better than anyone that life was precious and opportunities like this shouldn’t be squandered.

  Together, we headed over to the boat dock to buy our tickets.

  * * *

  It was a fifteen-minute ride around the Lagoon with a college-aged captain who sat in the swan seat at the rear of the boat and peddled us around. We passed slowly under the bridge, past weeping willows with branches dipping into the water. Ellen loved seeing the real swans that peddled faster than we did and overtook us around the bend.

  When we returned to the dock and stepped off the boat, I laughed with Jesse that it was the best two dollars and seventy-five cents I’d ever spent. He made sure to remind me with a playful nudge that he had been the one to pay for the tickets.

  Soon we were strolling along the wide path again. Jesse wanted to know more about how Diana and I found each other in Los Angeles two years ago.

  “It must have been strange to meet your identical twin for the first time,” he said.

  I told him everything—how she’d contacted me in a letter and how we exchanged emails back and forth, then finally met in a nearby restaurant.

  “I used to have a recurring dream,” he told me, “that I was running beside myself around a race track. Kind of like I was looking at my twin and cheering him on. I never knew what it meant. I still don’t.”

  “I have a recurring dream too,” I said. “I dream that I’m flying, usually at night.”

  “Really? I think that’s a pretty common dream for people.” He pulled out his phone. “Let’s Google it and see what it means.”

  He typed in the question as we walked, then cupped a hand over the screen to shade it from the sunlight.

  “Here we go,” he said. “This is from Dream Moods dot com. It says ‘If you are flying with ease and are enjoying the scene and landscape below, then it suggests that you are on top of a situation. You have risen above something. It may also mean that you have gained a new and different perspective on things. Flying dreams and the ability to control your flight is representative of your own personal sense of power.’” He lowered his phone and looked at me. “Do you fly with ease?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, I do. I’m not scared or afraid of heights and I always feel pretty good when I wake up, as if I had a good time exploring new places.”

  He nodded. “Well, it’s very clear to me that you have risen above something and I admire you for it.”

  I inclined my head at him. “What’s that?” I asked.

  Had he caught a glimpse of my scar somehow? Did he know the truth? Maybe at lunch, I’d leaned the wrong way and my blouse had fallen open slightly.

  Then he smiled. “You kicked my good-for-nothing brother to the curb.”

  There was no mistaking the flirtatious glimmer of amusement in his eye and I felt a rush of excitement. “You’re right. That has got to be my great accomplishment,” I said with a laugh. “Now I understand!”

  We continued walking and as I pondered the true meaning of my dreams, I realized they hadn’t begun until about six or eight months after my transplant surgery—when I was finally on the road to a clean bill of health. It made perfect sense that I would feel victorious while I slept.

  Suddenly I felt foolish for imagining it had anything to do with my donor. Had I truly contemplated contacting his family to suggest that the spirit of their lost loved one was inhabiting me, flying me over the hospital where he died? They surely would have thought I was a basket case.

  Jesse helped me push the stroller onto a grassy knoll and I unbuckled Ellen so she could toddle around. She laughed as Jesse chased her. He caught her, lifted her up onto his shoulders and carried her to the edge of the Lagoon where they watched the ducks and Swan Boats. Then they played elevator again.

  I stayed behind with the empty stroller and wondered what the future held for Ellen and me. Here we were, spending the afternoon with a man who was her uncle by blood—a man I found immensely attractive. A man I already trusted in a way that surprised me.

  Meanwhile his brother, who had caused Diana and me great pain and heartache in the past, was suing for custody.

  Our broken hearts were insignificant, of course, compared to the thought of losing my daughter who I loved with all my heart. Ellen was the whole world to me, the sole purpose for my existence. She was my reason for living, for surviving. I couldn’t lose her. I simply couldn’t.

  Though Rick had been the one to give her to me, I hated him in that moment. Did he know the level of pain he would inflict if he took her away?

  Did he care? Was he even capable of caring?

  According to Jesse, probably not.

  Perhaps that was how I would prove I was the better parent.

  Revisiting the Past

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Jesse Fraser

  I began this story with a query about coincidences, but I’m not entirely certain that what happened to me could be called such a thing. Everything seemed so orchestrated, as if a puppet master stood over us plotting our movements, moving us here and there, back and forth across a stage. It all came together so tidily in the end that it seemed predestined, as if someone had programed our lives to intersect at a certain moment in time, so a deeper, more profound knowledge would come to all of us.

  But I’m not sure you’ll believe in that sort of thing.

  When I first met Nadia Carmichael, I was the most unromantic skeptic who ever lived. I was jaded and guarded when it came to women, yet my heart nearly exploded out of my chest when she looked up at me for the first time in the restaurant…with her big, expressive eyes.

  I don’t know why I reacted that way to her when I was meeting her identical twin at the same moment. Why was I so powerfully drawn to Nadia and not Diana?

  I suppose I’ll never know unless I admit to believing in love at first sight, or soul mates, or recognizing people you know from some other lifetime or dimension. Or maybe it was just chemistry. Hormones and pheromones.

  Whatever the case, when I sat down at that table for lunch with Nadia, Diana and Dr. Jacob Peterson, my fate was sealed. There was no getting out of it. I simply had to help this woman keep her child.

  I just wasn’t sure why I needed to help her. Or what my true motivation was.

  * * *

  Even when I sent the text to Nadia in the middle of the night—twelve hours after we first met—I was still unsure of my purpose. I had grappled with the decision to see her again and had told myself it was a bad idea.

  Don’t text her. Stay out of it.

  Hadn’t she made her bed when she made the mistake of falling for my brother’s charms? This wasn’t my problem. Was I to spend my entire life cleaning up the emotional wreckage in every woman my br
other left behind? Was that even possible? I certainly hadn’t been able to save Angela.

  But was that what I was trying to do? Save Nadia? Did I even have the power to do that? What if I somehow made things worse?

  Nevertheless, despite all my angst, self-doubt and clumsy decision-making, I sent the text and arranged to meet her.

  Then, true to form, I became even more infatuated. So infatuated in fact, that in the first five minutes during our walk to the Garden, I promised I would call my parents and track down my brother. I would find out what I could to help her case.

  Was I mad? Yes.

  Did I regret it? Definitely not.

  Here’s what I learned…

  * * *

  “Dr. Fraser speaking.”

  The sound of my father’s quiet baritone voice on the phone was like a slingshot that sent me straight back to my childhood, to the memory of how he could walk into a room and intimidate me with just one look.

  You’ll never be quite as good as your brother.

  That was the look. I could see it on his face now.

  “Dad,” I said as I settled into a chair, “it’s Jesse.”

  My greeting was met with silence.

  “Are you there?” I asked.

  My father cleared his throat. “Yes, I’m here. Well. This is a surprise.”

  I’d never heard my father sound flustered before, but there was always a first time for everything.

  “How are you?” I asked. “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s well,” he replied. “And you?”

  I almost wanted to laugh. I was his youngest son and he hadn’t heard from me in a decade. To my knowledge he didn’t even know if I was dead or alive unless he had somehow been keeping tabs on me. Yet he spoke as if I called to confirm an appointment for a dental cleaning. I kept waiting for him to suggest I call his receptionist back in the morning.