by DiAnn Mills
I looked at the shiny elbows on his black coat, at the worn edge on his collar, and I wondered what he could teach me, heir to a man who drove a Rolls and owned three massive homes. But during the next hour that old parson made more sense than anyone I’d heard since Dave Yancy left the university.
I also learned that keeping someone out of your line of sight won’t stop you from seeing them. For a solid hour I had to keep pushing aside the image of liquid brown eyes and a sweet, natural smile.
After the service, we left the church. On the steps I paused to shake the old parson’s hand and thank him for the message. As we walked away, I turned to Honey. “I have to make a phone call.”
She latched onto my arm and smiled into my face. “Mind if I come along?”
Covering her glove with mine, I made myself grin. “Do you have to ask?”
“You’ve got something on your mind,” she said, watching me.
“It’s nothing. Honest.”
We strolled across the road toward the store, and I glanced at the village people crossing the bridge, the same bridge Julie and I had skated under a few days ago.
“Is Julie ill?” I tried to sound casual. “She looks pale.”
Honey tilted her head. “Why are you worried about Julie?”
“She’s your sister. Why else?”
She laughed. “I suppose it’s the Good Samaritan in you.”
I stopped in midstride. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was referring to your charity work.” She plucked at my sleeve. “It’s terribly sweet of you, Jim, to want to help those poor urchins in New York. It shows your soft spot, I suppose.”
“Honey, I’m not sure I’ll enter law school next fall. I think God wants me to work with my boys full time.”
She dismissed my statement with a toss of her head. “Your father would never allow it.”
I swallowed hard, feeling as if I stood on the edge of a precipice. I knew what I should do, but did I have the courage to do it?
Shegog’s lay just ahead, a thin gray spiral rising from its chimney.
She pressed her lips together as though deciding something. “Before you make your call, I want to tell you how sorry I am for the way Julie has been hounding you. You have to understand she’s not used to social settings like—”
“Hounding me?”
“You know. Getting you to play checkers with her, keeping you at the piano.”
“Honey, did you speak to Julie about me last night?”
“Darling, I couldn’t let her go on like a giddy child. It’s embarrassing to her and to the rest of us.”
My blood pressure went up ten points. “How could you be so cruel? Julie would be devastated to think she’s made a spectacle of herself.”
“Exactly why she had to be told.” She turned those wide, guileless eyes on me. “Don’t you understand?”
Suddenly, I understood much more than Honey imagined. “My phone call can wait,” I told her. “Let’s walk by the river. We need to talk.”
Chapter 12
Julie, what’s the matter with you? You aren’t ill, so why won’t you come to dinner?” Mother asked, hovering over me. “Please come to the dining room with the rest of us.”
“I can’t, Mother. I just can’t.”
“Why not?”
I pressed my lips together. Finally, she got tired of asking and clumped down the stairs. I’d won, but I didn’t feel like a winner. Roast beef and mashed potatoes are tasteless when eaten from a tray in a lonely room, even with French apple pie for dessert.
When Millie came for my empty dishes I told her, “My head feels like someone’s pounding it with a hammer.”
She touched my hair. “Poor dear. Let me get you an icepack. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
But Mother returned, not Millie. “Here’s a spoonful of sleeping powder mixed with sugar,” she said, “and a glass of water.”
I swallowed, then shivered and gulped the cool liquid. Not that it took away the awful taste. I let my head fall to the pillow, more miserable than I’d been since the accident.
“Julie,” Mother sat near me, “has Honey upset you? I want to know before she leaves in the morning.”
“Don’t blame Honey. She’s only tried to help me.” My eyelids felt heavy. “I’m the one…”
I didn’t hear her leave.
“Julie? Can you wake up?” Honey spoke into my ear. “I’ve got something to tell you.” She gently shook me. “Please wake up. We’ve got to leave soon.”
The soft urgency in her voice brought me around. “What is it?” I rubbed my face, fighting off the drugged feeling that held me down. “I’m awake. What is it?”
She hesitated. “I want to apologize.” She touched my arm. “Sometimes I get so caught up in things, I forget to think about how everyone else feels. We’ve been through this before, I know.”
I waited for the rest of it. She meant it now, but there would almost certainly be another incident like the pageant. Honey couldn’t seem to learn the lesson.
“I didn’t mean any harm, Julie,” she went on. “You really were a lovely Carol Byrd.”
My anger softened. Honey had come home full of energy and expecting a great time. Everything had gone wrong. I felt bad for her.
“I forgive you,” I whispered. I hugged her tight, wanting to say more but not knowing how.
She broke away, murmured “Bye,” and hurried out.
Who told Honey she’d hurt me? Mother?
I threw back the covers and scooted to the window. Through the glass I could hear Alice’s shrill giggle and Jim’s voice calling good-bye. The car chugged to life. It sounded rough, more like Dad’s Tin Lizzie than Jim’s smooth Olds. I hoped they wouldn’t have a breakdown.
Tires crunched over snow and gravel and faded away. Finally, sweet silence told me they had gone. I leaned my forehead against the cool pane. I’d expected to feel relieved. Instead I felt empty.
I turned toward the closet. I had to get to my piano and have a long session with Chopin. Only music could ease my emptiness.
Jim was gone.
I slipped into a housedress, any old one, and touched a brush to my hair.
The cool banister felt comfortingly ordinary under my hand. My slippers made a whisper on the stairs. I heard Millie laughing in the kitchen followed by Esther’s booming scold. Mother would be tidying the parlor, taking down all the decorations. The household had returned to normal the moment the gang drove away.
Why couldn’t I? I felt like a stranger to myself, half a person where a whole person used to be.
I turned toward the library door, my hand outstretched to find the knob. Inside my sanctuary, I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, smelling the fire in the grate, hearing it crackle, feeling its warmth.
Another smell—a man’s cologne, achingly familiar. Did Jim stop by here this morning? His scent lingered behind to torment me.
I tilted my head, straining with everything inside me to “see” both past and present. Something was different, and it was more than just me.
A slow, melodious tinkle shocked me with the rush of a tidal wave. “The Skater’s Waltz.” My music box.
I gasped. “Who’s there? Jim?” Tears welled over before I could stop them.
In an instant, Jim’s fingers twined in mine. “It’s me,” he said.
“You didn’t go.” I was too astonished to be shy, too much in love to care.
“I couldn’t leave you. I finally realized what a shortsighted fool I’ve been. If a man lives for money and prestige, he’s nothing but a shell.”
“But Honey—”
“Isn’t right for me. I told her so yesterday.” He lifted my fingers to his lips. “I won’t be going to law school. When I phoned my father I expected him to disown me, but he didn’t. For the first time in my life I heard respect in his voice when he said good-bye.”
He pulled me closer. “I love you, Julie. You’re sweet and sensible…and real. Will you marry me
?”
“Oh yes.” My hands reached for his face.
He pulled me into his arms and kissed me. My world exploded into a million dazzling lights that swirled and spun in a frenzy of colors. In the middle of it all I saw Jim, the part of him that no one else could see, the part of him that belonged only to me. Sometimes the heart has eyes of its own.
Christmas Flower
Colleen L. Reece
Chapter 1
Tattered banners of crimson, green, and violet fluttered in the autumn sky over the tiny village of Tarnigan, like a shattered kaleidoscope spilling broken rainbows. Fantastic patterns painted the white hills and valleys in the shadow of the Endicott Range. The yellow glow from lighted windows paled by comparison, even those shining brightly in Nika Illahee, the Clifton-Anton home. The distant din of war had faded in the mid-1920s. Peace shrouded the top of the world.
High atop a snow-covered slope above the little village, a parka-clad girl with large dark eyes and wild roses in her cheeks caught her breath at the wondrous sight. She laid a mittened hand over her heart. Shoshana Noelle Clifton, “a rose, born on Christmas Day,” pride of Tarnigan and all of north central Alaska, wound the fingers of her free hand in her malamute Kobuk’s collar. He whined, then stilled beneath her touch.
Did the aurora borealis, she wondered, give her dog the same sense of tension it roused in her? She silently watched the display, held by its splendor, yet unable to shrug off a feeling of apprehension. For twenty years she had marveled at the northern lights. This night felt different, although she could not explain why. The beauty mocked her, bringing pain so exquisite she wondered if she could bear it. The northern lights seemed to whisper a single word to her: good-bye.
Shana flung her head back and cried, “God, what do You want of me?”
Kobuk stirred restlessly and whined again. The heavens glowed with the aurora’s mad dance, and Shana stubbornly refused to give way to the growing coldness inside her well-wrapped body. Like snow figures created by laughing children and left to the mercy of the night, she and her now-silent dog remained still. The performance of lights reached its zenith and began to fade. Only then did Shana tear her gaze from the skies and command, “Home, Kobuk.”
She turned and started for Tarnigan, spurred by nameless dread. Surely her fancy was running away with her, she told herself, but her momentum increased with every step, as though she could escape that single, whispered word. Soon she was running. With a joyous, “Woof!” Kobuk ran beside the fleet figure, as his father before him had run during Shana’s younger years.
Halfway down the slope, a tall figure stepped from behind a cluster of giant spruce trees, halting girl and dog’s impetuous rush. Strong, gloved hands grabbed Shana’s shoulders and shook her. “You know better than to pelt down that slope,” an angry young voice accused.
“Let me go!” Shana jerked free from the gripping fingers. Knowing she was in the wrong added fuel to the fire of her anger. “You aren’t my keeper, Wyatt Baldwin. Just because Strongheart called you Little Warrior when you were born—”
“Don’t forget Dad and Mom recognized even at that young age how appropriate it was and obligingly gave me my French name because Wyatt means the same,” the young man taunted.
Shana knew without seeing that his ocean-blue eyes—so like Arthur and Inga Baldwin’s—crinkled with mischief. “When are you going to grow up and treat me as I deserve?” she demanded. “The Bible says to respect your elders.”
He shouted with laughter that brought an unwilling smile to her lips. “Never going to let me forget you arrived a few weeks before I blessed the world with my coming, are you?” His mirth died. “Right now you deserve to be tied to your bedpost, Shoshana Noelle. Running down the side of a mountain at night is just plain stupid.”
Piqued because he was right and they both knew it, Shana brushed aside the comradely hand he held out to her. Not for the world would she tell Wyatt of the need she had felt to get away from the night. “Even if I fell down, which I didn’t, it would be like landing on a feather bed,” she muttered.
“Sometimes you’re a featherhead, pal. Come on. Let’s go home.”
Shana sedately walked to the foot of the slope. Yet the moment her boots touched even ground, she gathered her muscles and sprang forward with the speed that made her one of the fleetest runners in Tarnigan. Even Wyatt was normally hard put to keep up with her and tonight she had a head start. Down the lane she sped, straight for Nika Illahee, her family’s homestead, the name of which meant “my dear homeland” in Chinook. Wyatt’s snow-muffled steps thudded close behind. A peal of laughter rang out when she reached the steps and burst onto the porch a single step ahead of him.
“You’ll never catch me,” she taunted between hard breaths.
The light from the windows showed his gleaming white smile. A burnished lock of hair had escaped his parka hood and dangled over his forehead. A curious biding-my-time glint in his blue eyes sent warning chills skittering through Shana’s veins. So did his low, “I wouldn’t bet on it” and the odd little laugh that followed.
The door swung open. “Are you two being chased by wolves?” Dr. Bern Clifton wanted to know. His dark eyes twinkled. “Daughter, you look more like your mother every day.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She slipped out of her parka, fashioned from a white wool Hudson’s Bay blanket with scarlet trim and warmly lined with fur. Shana grinned at her mother, pretty Sasha Anton Clifton, whose coronet of gleaming dark braids interlaced with crimson ribbons made her look just a few years older than Shana. “That’s quite a compliment.”
“You’re almost as good a nurse, too,” Bern told her. He ran one hand through the soot-black hair that gleamed with silver threads. His black eyes twinkled. “Tarnigan’s mighty lucky to have us, plus Wyatt’s folks.”
She fell silent, remembering. First, Dr. Bern Clifton, then his best friend, Dr. Arthur Baldwin, had come to Alaska by tangled trails. Both had found love and settled in Tarnigan. Shana privately considered her parents’ and the Baldwins’ love stories even more romantic than Sir Walter Scott’s novels. She felt a quick flush rise to her face and ducked her head so it wouldn’t show. Would she find love one day? The kind that shone in Inga’s eyes for her husband, in Mother’s eyes for Dad? If so, when? With whom?
Shana shot a sidewise glance at tall, handsome Wyatt, her best friend since cradle days. Why had he looked at her the way he did in the glow from lighted windows? Surely after all this time he wasn’t getting notions about his playmate, was he? I hope not. Her mind quickly rejected the idea. I wouldn’t want him to consider marrying me just because I’m the only girl around. Or because he doesn’t want me to be an old maid. I’ll be twenty-one on Christmas Day, pretty old to be unmarried in the north.
The sense of standing tiptoe on the very edge of something too fragile to put into words made Shana mentally back away. Wyatt glanced at her, as if the girl’s close observance had caught his attention. His eyes widened, but he seemed no different than usual. Shana bit her lip and turned from him, relieved, vaguely disappointed, and disgusted with herself, all at the same time.
“You’re different lately,” Wyatt remarked to her a few days later. “Something’s changed, hasn’t it?” He gave her a long, thoughtful look, as though he were searching her thoughts.
Shana flushed and turned her face away. “Leave me alone, Wyatt. Sometimes people just need a little solitude for a change.”
His eyes lingered on her face, but then he shrugged and walked away, leaving her alone as she’d requested. When he did not seek her out the next day or the one after that, she was irrationally peeved, and when she realized an entire week had gone by without Wyatt’s presence, a wave of loneliness swept over her.
Still the time alone gave her a chance to finally pinpoint what troubled her. The compelling feeling God was calling her to use her nursing skills—skills the two doctors had taught her from as far back as she could remember—gnawed at her like a mouse nibbling raw
hide thongs. With it came fear. What if He asked her to take those skills elsewhere? Away from Tarnigan?
“No!” she protested in a mighty surge of rebellion. “God, You won’t make me leave everything I know and love, will You? I’m needed here.” Yet was she, really? Both her mother and Inga Baldwin were excellent helpmeets for their doctor husbands. Shana could be spared, should it be God’s will.
For days she denied the growing feeling in her heart, scoffing at the idea a person could actually be pulled toward a place she had never been except in stories. She shut her heart against the tales Arthur had told of the time he served in a place thousands of miles away, a place known only to Shana by fingering it on a map of the continental United States. A silly map, that had Alaska shoved off to one side as though it were of little importance.
Time after time, she stood beneath an iceberg-cold moon, the sky again alight with the aurora borealis. The low-hanging stars offered no answer. Neither did the flashing lights with which she had grown up. Yet amidst their magnificence, memories more vivid than the dancing heavens filled her mind. A small girl at her mother’s knee, inviting Jesus to be Ruler of her life. A fourteen-year-old kneeling with her friend Wyatt, both promising to go wherever God might choose to lead them.
“Lord, when did my fascination with the valley tucked away in a fold of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina begin to pull me toward ‘the Hollow’?” she brokenly prayed. “When did the creeping suspicion I must one day go there take root in my mind? You know how I laughed at first. How ridiculous to believe You would expect such a thing of someone who loves Alaska as passionately as I do.”
She shivered. Bern and Sasha had taught her since babyhood that God works in mysterious ways to accomplish His purposes. What if He asked her to leave all, including Wyatt? “Don’t be foolish,” she told her rapidly beating heart. “Never by word or deed has he spoken of anything except friendship.”
Shana continued to struggle, saying nothing to family and friends, but pouring out heart and soul to her heavenly Father. Her mother’s dark, troubled eyes, so like her daughter’s, showed she realized all was not well. She said nothing and Shana appreciated it. For several years, Sasha Clifton had allowed her daughter to come to her, rather than attempting to discover what troubled her only child.
