by Arlene James
He enforced his orders with action, literally gripping the back of her head and forcing her to bend at the waist. She did as she was told, just like his students, no doubt, gulping great swallows of air. Surprisingly, her stomach settled, even as she wondered wildly what the town gossips would make of this. Surely a salacious connotation could be assigned to her standing on the sidewalk, doubled over, with Ryan’s hands on her.
Straightening abruptly, she shrugged him off and reached for the only defense she could find, anger.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What they’re saying about me!”
Wincing, he squeezed his eyes closed. “What did you hear?”
“Enough!” Then, for some reason she dared not examine too closely, she whispered, “There have been no men, Ryan. Only one. He was a rotten choice, I admit it, but he was the only one.”
“I figured that,” Ryan said soothingly, reaching out for her.
She sidestepped, determined to put distance between them, and folded her arms protectively. She suddenly felt so cold, freezing, in fact, as if the temperature had dropped thirty degrees or more.
“I have to go.” Turning, she all but sprinted up the sidewalk. Ryan fell into step beside her, his long strides easily keeping up with her frantic pace.
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
Sweetheart. The endearment tugged at the strings of her heart. She said nothing, just kept walking, afraid that if she spoke again she would shatter into a million pieces.
“I’m going to put a stop to the talk,” he promised.
“No!” she cried, shaking her head. Whatever happened, he had to stay out of it.
“I should’ve done it already,” he went on. “I just didn’t know how best to take care of it. But I’m telling you right now, if I have to break your father into pieces, I will stop it.”
Ivy froze in mid-stride. “My father? Are you telling me that my father has spread these rumors about me?”
“As near as I can tell,” Ryan admitted, shamefaced.
Ivy put her hand to her head, muttering, “This makes no sense. I always thought I was his dirty little secret, and that’s why he wanted me to stay away. Now…is he using this to drive me away, to keep me away?” If so, it was working, because all that mattered to her now was Ryan, and the only good thing she could do for him was to put as much distance between them as possible, which she would do without further delay.
“Get away from me, Ryan,” she snarled, setting off once more.
“You don’t mean that.”
“You should have told me,” she accused, her heart breaking at the unfairness of it. “Just stay away from me.”
She left him standing there gaping at her back. She felt his stare with every step, but not once did she turn. She walked straight back to her room, threw her things into the SUV and drove away without so much as a pause. Hap could bill her credit card for the room. For now all that mattered was protecting Ryan.
Nearly an hour later, out of nowhere and without the least warning, she began to sob behind the wheel of her vehicle. She wondered if she would ever be able to stop.
Chapter Thirteen
At first, Ryan could not grasp the fact that she was actually leaving. Even as he stood there on the pavement of the motel lot, one arm raised in entreaty, and watched her little hybrid SUV turn out onto the highway, he thought to himself that surely she would not leave like that, but that was exactly what she’d done. She hadn’t even bothered to close the door of her room behind her. When his family came in a few minutes later, they found him fuming. It was Cara who figured it out.
“She’s protecting you, you ninny. She doesn’t want the gossip about her to touch you.”
Stunned, Ryan literally gaped at his sister-in-law. Nothing in Ryan’s life had prepared him for the kind of woman who would instinctively seek to shield others.
His mother had been far too emotionally needy to think of anyone except herself, her children included. His grandmother, God love her, had been of a generation of women almost totally dependent on their husbands. Charlotte was his baby sister, and his sister-in-law, Cara, had come to town in desperate need of a champion, a role that Holt had ably filled.
After several minutes of reflection, Ryan suspected that Cara was right. Ivy was protecting him; it was the only thing that made any sense. How ironic that she should be the only one to concur with his selfish concern for his precious reputation, now that he was beginning to understand what really mattered.
Later, it occurred to him to check her initial registration card for a cell phone number and address. Over the next few days he tried calling, but Ivy did not take his calls, not on her personal phone and not on her radio program. His voice mails went unacknowledged. He tried to e-mail her through the station to no avail, so on Friday immediately after the end of the school day, Ryan made the walk over to the junior high school to find Daniel.
“Has Rose heard from Ivy since the birthday party?”
Daniel shook his head. “No. Why?”
Sighing, Ryan rubbed the back of his neck. “She knows about the gossip, and now she’s not taking my calls. I had hoped that she’d contacted Rose, but I didn’t want to trouble Rose in case she didn’t know about the gossip.”
“She doesn’t,” Daniel confirmed grimly, “and I don’t want her to. My wife has suffered enough.”
“I completely agree,” Ryan assured him. “Can’t you do anything to stop this nasty gossip?”
Dan seemed alarmed. “Me?”
“Can’t you stop Olie somehow? Make him come clean about these lies he’s spreading?”
Daniel slumped, dropping his gaze. “If I could control any member of my wife’s family,” he said, “I would have done it a long time ago, but I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you.” Ryan clasped the other man’s hand. “And would you ask Rose to ask Ivy to call me? Please.”
Daniel nodded, and Ryan went away hoping that this ugly talk would end, and that Ivy would call so he could convince her to come back home. To Eden. To him. Where she belonged.
It became apparent, on that first Sunday in May, that Olie’s venom continued to spew. Either that or he simply could not stop what he had started. Gossip, as Hap said, sometimes took on a life of its own, and that seemed evident in this case.
Ryan didn’t know whether to weep or rage when an elderly woman he’d known all of his life stopped him on his way into the church building. “I’m so glad to see you here,” she said, reaching up to pat his cheek with her blue-veined hand.
“I’m always here, Ms. Roberts.”
“Yes, but last week you had that woman with you,” she said, her snowy head tilting as if in confusion. Ryan blinked, taken aback. Clara Roberts rambled on, apparently unaware of the impact of her words. “It worried me, seeing you with her, and you such a fine young man. I didn’t know what to make of it. ‘He can’t know,’ I told myself. But I see now that you’ve heard about her.”
“I’ve heard the lies that are going around,” Ryan said, sure his tone must have frosted the old dear as she drew back sharply, one hand going to her narrow chest. “That is, assuming that you’re speaking about my good friend Ivy Villard.” Clara Roberts stared, owl-eyed behind the thick lenses of her glasses, as stunned as if he’d suddenly started spouting Swahili. Ryan grit his teeth, doing his best to remain cordial. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
He twisted his way through the crowd to his family’s pew, ill with anger and worry and regret. He asked to speak with Grover after the service.
The pastor had, of course, heard the talk and tried to combat it. “What was Olie thinking,” Ryan demanded softly, “to do this to his own daughter?”
Grover sighed and shook his head helplessly.
“I’m going to speak to Olie, demand he stop this,” Ryan said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Grover told him. “I fear it would
just escalate into something you’d regret. Besides, nothing short of a very public repudiation of these lies is going to help.”
“It’s not fair!” Ryan hissed, knowing that Grover was right but terribly frustrated.
“No, it’s not fair, but God never promised us anything of the kind. Just pray, Ryan, and try to be patient until God shows us the solution.”
Ryan strove to put that advice into practice over the next week or so, but as Mother’s Day drew near, his concern for Ivy grew. Then, on the Friday before Mother’s Day, Ivy announced on her radio program that this broadcast would be her last.
“It’s been fun,” she said cheerfully, “and I want to thank Oklahoma City for a warm welcome, but other opportunities beckon. We’ve selected a great playlist for the next week, but we won’t be taking calls, so this is Ivy telling all her friends, God bless and good-bye.”
Ryan bowed his head over his desk and asked God what to do. If he didn’t act quickly, Ivy could disappear. Even if she signed on with another station, he might never be able to track her down again. Besides, he couldn’t bear the thought of her spending Mother’s Day alone. He decided that if she wouldn’t come to him, he would just have to go to her, and for the second time in recent memory he left school in the middle of the day.
Ivy sat on the floor amidst piles of paper that evening, her laptop open in front of her. She scrolled down an Internet listing of radio stations, mentally checking off those she wouldn’t want to go back to and jotting the call letters and locations of those worth considering on a yellow legal pad balanced atop one folded knee. She’d wracked her brain for new formats to propose, designing shows around catchy titles and quirky premises, backing up her pitches with demographic studies and well-reasoned arguments. Something, she promised herself, would work. No reason to panic.
She had time to find a good fit. Her bank account would hold out for a month or two. Plus the rent on her week-to-week executive-style studio, which amounted to a glorified hotel room, was paid up through the end of the month. Wisely, she had not wanted to sign a lease on a regular apartment, so she’d simply hung some clothes in the skimpy closet here and stashed what furniture she had, along with a dozen or so boxes, in a rented storage unit. She could pick up and go at a moment’s notice; she just had to have something to go to, and this time she’d make sure that the radio station knew exactly what they were getting.
Something, she told herself again, more firmly this time, would work out. The few phone calls she’d made had already yielded a couple of possible opportunities, one in Louisiana, another in Tennessee. It made no difference to her where she landed, not now.
“It’s all up to You, Lord,” she whispered. “Where You lead, I will go.”
A Mother’s Day card had come in the mail from Chelsea’s adopted parents that morning. It remained unopened, tucked into her handbag. She would open it one day, she had decided, when her life had settled into some sort of normalcy, when she did not feel quite so vulnerable and hopeless.
The knocking at her door took her completely by surprise. Convinced that someone had come to the wrong room, she called out, “Who is it?”
Silence followed and then another knock, this time a trio of booms that had her setting aside pad and pen and getting to her bare feet. Suddenly conscious of her ragged shorts and T-shirt, she ran her hands over her head, her fingers fumbling with the loose ponytail sliding toward her nape. Warily, she padded to the door and set her eye to the peephole, but all she saw on the other side was green.
She had never had a visitor here, and she could think of no one who would be calling on her now. It had to be a mistake.
Resigned, she opened the door only as far as the security chain allowed, asking again, “Who is it?”
A man in a grass-green polo shirt and jeans stepped into view against the backdrop of the city lights. She knew who he was even before she saw his face. Ryan!
“Let me in, Ivy.”
She put her back to the wall, heart pounding, one hand gripping the doorknob. For half a minute she could neither speak nor move. Torn between jubilation and shock, all she could think was, Ryan! Here!
“I mean it, Ivy,” he said, using that stern, principal’s voice of his. “Open this door and let me in.”
She gulped, knowing that she had no choice, but before she could make her limbs obey, Ryan stepped closer, pressing his big body to the gap in the doorframe.
“I am perfectly capable of kicking this door in,” he warned. “Don’t think I’m not.”
She chortled, not because the idea of him kicking down her door was funny, but because the man didn’t know how glad she was to see him, that she couldn’t have turned him away if she wanted to. Part of her did want to, but another part, a bigger part, simply wouldn’t allow it. She couldn’t imagine what had brought him here, but it hardly mattered. This was Ryan, her sweet, sweet Ryan. She slipped the chain free, barely dancing back out of the way as he swung the door inward.
He strode in like a man looking for a fight, his hands balled into fists, head down, shoulders squared. His gaze swept the room, taking in the short couch and contrasting armchair in front of the artificial fireplace on his left, the kitchenette and half wall on his right, with the open bedroom and bath beyond. He went back to the laptop and papers piled on the rug beside the chair. Finally, he turned.
“What are you doing here?” she managed, her hand at her throat. Despite the thrill of seeing him again, she knew that this could not be good.
“You wouldn’t take my calls.”
Torn between excuses and lies, she looked away. It was that or throw herself at him. She found a version of the truth to offer. “There’s nothing to say.”
“I’ve got plenty to say.”
“I don’t.”
“So you just run? That’s how you deal with your problems now, is it? Just turn tail and run?”
That stung, because she’d done it for him, but he wouldn’t know that, and he didn’t need to.
“I did what I thought best,” she told him, closing the door.
“Best for whom?” he demanded.
She pushed away from the door, suddenly tired, and wandered toward the kitchen for something to drink. “Everyone.”
“You don’t get to decide what’s best for me, Ivy.”
That gave her a moment’s pause. So he’d figured that out, had he? She continued to the refrigerator and plucked a bottle of water off the bottom shelf, half afraid of what might come next. Leaning a hip against the counter beside the fridge, she faced him.
“What do you want, Ryan?” Her voice betrayed her, and as it softened, so did he.
He stepped closer, his expression open, hopeful. “I want you to come home.”
She started shaking her head at the word home. “I can’t do that.”
“I want you to find that courage I so admire and come home,” he coaxed.
Averting her gaze, she calmly refused. “I don’t have time to visit. I have to find a job.”
“You can do that from Eden.”
“I can’t go back to Eden, not now. Not this weekend, of all weekends!”
He suddenly moved toward her, his arms reaching out. Panicked, she thrust the bottle at him. His steps stuttering, he gave her a look that clearly said he was nobody’s fool. Then, calm as anything, he took the bottle of water and tossed it straight into the sink, where it swirled and clattered and finally rolled to a stop. Before she knew what had happened, he had her pinned against the counter, one hand braced on either side of her.
For a long moment, she held her breath, certain that he would kiss her. Then he straightened and abruptly capitulated.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll stay here.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Sure, I can. For now.”
Ryan insisted on taking her to dinner. He sat on the sofa in her tiny living area with his back to the bedroom while she banged doors, changed clothes and generally pretended to be irritate
d that he’d insisted on taking her away from her job search. He smiled, listening to her grumble to herself. After some forty minutes or so she finally emerged from the bathroom dressed in tan capris and a short, sleeveless top made of a crinkly, flower-print knit fabric, the bottom of which rode just below her waist. She wore gold sandals to match the gold flecks in the flower print and had twisted her hair up into a sleek knot.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her, and she flushed a dark, dusky rose, a smile curving her lips before she ruthlessly pressed them back into a straight line.
Snatching up her huge, puffy handbag, she slung it over one shoulder, sliced him a look meant to make him bleed and headed to the door, but then she stopped, sighed and said, “Thank you.”
Chuckling, he escorted her outside. She was trying so hard to keep him at a distance, for his sake, no doubt, but it wouldn’t work. The fact that she cared so much about what was best for him meant that they were already connected, whether she wanted to think so or not. He prayed that the moment would come when he could point that out to her and that she would be able to accept it.
As they descended those three twisting flights of open-air stairs, listening to traffic in the distance, Ryan thought of his quiet, roomy house in Eden and told himself that Ivy deserved better than an impersonal, cramped walk-up. She deserved peace and a sense of true belonging. She deserved a home, and he meant to give that back to her.
The Italian restaurant to which she directed him was busy. They stood on the sidewalk out front with a perpetually fluctuating group of other people, waiting for a little square gizmo to light up and signal that their table was ready. When the lights finally began to flash, he ushered her inside to their table in a quiet alcove in the back of the building. There, they made small talk about her job search and all that entailed.
“Have you thought about Christian radio?” he asked, hoping to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation.
She looked down, smoothing the napkin in her lap. “I don’t think Christian radio is interested in the Ivy of FireBrand Phillips and Ivy infamy.”
