Exhausted, he dropped to the earth and rested his head on his arms.
“Shit! Melanie, I’m sorry. You never deserved that.” It hurt like hell to be wearing that same burden himself. He didn’t want Cassidy’s life. No more than she wanted his. And where did that leave them?
Sure, a fish can love a bird, but where would they live? Old joke. Sad joke.
# # #
“What the hell, Russell?” Her side was killing her, the stitch dug in like a hot knife. All her morning runs through the vast vineyards of California and Italy hadn’t prepared her for the vertical cliffs or the pace that Russell had set up these hills.
He raised his head from his arms and it was the saddest she’d ever seen him.
She dropped to the soil beside him and kneaded her side. She slid an arm around his waist but he shrugged her off.
“What did I do?” Damn it. They were in this incredibly beautiful, romantic wonderland of the Italian coast.
He shook his head, but didn’t answer.
“Is it the phone calls? I’ll stop those. I won’t check another message until we get home.”
“Home.”
“Well, that’s some response. C’mon, Russell. You know I suck at guessing games. Talk to me.” Not even a smile.
“Where’s home, Cassidy?” His voice was deep and rough. As if he was fighting for every word.
“I don’t know. Seattle I guess. Maybe Oakville in Napa soon. How the hell should I know? Where’s your home, Russell? On some damn sailboat?”
“Yes,” he finally looked at her. “Yes! It’s on some damn sailboat. My home has a cat. It has belongings. It is a place where I like myself. It is a place where I’m at my best. How about you, Cassidy? Where are you at your best?”
“In your arms.” She’d said it flippantly, but once said, it was true. It was the one place she could be where the world made sense. When the mad jangle in her head went quiet.
“C’mon, Cassie. I’m not talking about sex.”
She hadn’t been, at least not once she thought about it. But she couldn’t answer his scorn—couldn’t face his anger.
He closed his eyes. He just sat there with his eyes closed. His arms—those nice, strong, safe arms—crossed over his own knees.
The ocean lay spread out before them. Somewhere over that way lay Sardinia, then France, Spain, the Atlantic, and the entire width of the U.S. So many miles away. But it didn’t feel so distant when she sat here with Russell.
She reached for him again, but hesitated with her fingers a scant inch from his shoulder. Finally she withdrew and dropped her hand into her lap.
Everything had been going so perfectly. California had a wonderful offer on the table; they were offering her access to every aspect of the organization. Italy had a nice Old World feel that could be fun, but not as exciting. The U.S. companies, and now there were four of them, exhibited an energy and a vibrancy that egged her on. The French offers were more about status and, she had to admit, a chance to work with grand crus was tempting. The Germans were all about money—a lot of money.
“Why can’t you just be happy for me?”
He shuddered. He actually shuddered.
“What? Come on, Russell. Talk to me.”
“Where is home, Cassidy Knowles?”
# # #
He didn’t speak again except to repeat his question. No matter what she did or said.
“Where is home, Cassidy Knowles?”
When the evening settled in with a foggy chill, that raised goosebumps over her whole body, she deserted him and descended back to the hotel. Though she waited all night, there was no sign of Russell.
Some romantic vacation.
She dialed for her messages. Seventeen. She hung up without listening to a one of them.
At dawn there was a knock on the door and she rushed over to open it.
Instead of Russell…instead of throwing their arms around each other and both being sorry…a maid held out a note.
The paper crackled as she opened it. Russell’s writing, not her father’s. But it was as if they were both speaking from the same page.
Cassidy,
You are really going places. I’m happy for you. Unfortunately, they aren’t places I want to go. The car is in your name and the keys are on the bureau. I’ve taken the 6:30 train to the airport. I’ve left money and instructions with the front desk to ship my belongings. Just leave them in the room and they’ll take care of it. Though if you’d hand carry my camera to Angelo, I’d appreciate it. Don’t if it’s too weird for you.
Best of luck with your future,
Russell
The first thing she noticed was the clock. 6:45. Gone! He was gone. How could that be? What had she said? She’d gone over it a hundred times in the night. And she still didn’t know.
Maybe one of the seventeen phone messages was from him. But she knew none of them would be. He’d spent a cold, lonely night in an abandoned vineyard, come down the hill with the dawn, and left town.
“Where is home, Cassidy Knowles?” As if he were questioning a complete stranger.
Well, to hell with him. She wasn’t going to ruin her vacation because of some jerk of a man. Breakfast. That was it. She’d eat breakfast, take a walk, and then she’d feel better. She was just dizzy from the cold and the long night awake in the chair.
She didn’t like leaving his camera in the room. She slung it over her shoulder as she went out.
# # #
The camera was heavy and dragged at her shoulder. She pulled it into her hand, wrapping the strap as a brace behind her elbow just as he’d taught her.
With the camera in her hand, she started to see pictures to take. A pot with a single red geranium on a narrow set of stone steps, the very stone worn by a thousand years of footsteps. A neon-bright purple door beckoned her to photograph a stone house so old it might have been quarried by Noah’s sons. A Dalmatian stuck her nose out between forest-green, wooden shutters to watch her go by. A black and gray dapple cat impossibly asleep on the narrow keel of an up-turned fishing dinghy.
It was different seeing a village through a camera. Each image she took became a memory of its own. A man who would have passed for an aging hippie back home sat in the sun beneath a shingle advertising his surgery. He offered her a nod and a smile before returning to the novel in his lap. A butcher skinning a lamb. A baker totting a huge basket of crusty breads into one restaurant after another, his load lightening with each stop.
Where is home, Cassidy Knowles?
She’d be damned if she knew.
Brown’s Point Lighthouse
Tacoma
First lit: 1887
Extinguished: 1963
47.3059 -122.444
Oscar Brown was the station’s first keeper in the early 1900s. He moved his wife, a horse and a cow, and a piano onto this remote point. He often rowed the three or four miles to Tacoma to attend concerts. An accomplished musician, when the roads finally reached the lighthouse he became a noted piano teacher when he was not tending the light.
The concrete block lighthouse, though less than a hundred yards from the house, was often inaccessible when major storms flooded the swampy ground. Brown would take a rowing dory out through the mud to add oil or trim the wick.
The striking mechanism for the fog bell had to be wound every 45 minutes. Brown slept little during the long spells of dense fog that frequently plague the point. When the mechanism broke, his wife would count out the twenty-second interval between his strikes. Brown had served thirty years before the fog bell was replaced by a powered horn. The bell traveled to a church for some years but has returned to the old lighthouse, with a bowling ball for a clacker.
The keeper’s cottage is now the centerpiece of a city park. The dwelling’s gardens are filled with rare, heritage plants maintai
ned by the local horticultural society.
NOVEMBER 1
Cassidy was right back where she’d started.
Alone and huddled behind a lighthouse in a blinding rain and a roaring wind.
Better equipped, Cassidy wasn’t likely to freeze to death, but that didn’t make her any happier to be here than at West Point lighthouse last January.
Damn you, Russell. Not one message. Not a single note. When she’d handed his duffle and his camera to Angelo it had been so awkward she’d had to run out of the restaurant not knowing if she would speak or cry had she opened her mouth. Russell had ruined everything.
Jo and Perrin had tried to cheer her up. But neither could explain his final question. They agreed that “in your arms” was a good answer. Light and funny, yet romantic and cozy, too. It had the added benefit of being more than a little bit true. Now her condo felt like a foreign land—with Shilshole Marina and Angelo’s wholly out of bounds.
Yesterday she’d finally tried to call him, but his phone was disconnected. He hadn’t even left a forwarding number. Russell had gone into hiding. Well, good riddance. She didn’t want to talk to him anyway—which was a complete and total lie.
After tomorrow it wouldn’t matter anyway. She’d set aside three days to drive down the coast. Professional movers would empty the condo after she left, and they’d have her house in Napa set up before she got there. A decorator would be there on day four to help her turn it into a home.
So there, Russell Morgan. My home is in the hills above St. Helena, California. In the true heart of American wine country. Is that good enough for you?
She knew it wasn’t. Some part of her knew it wasn’t, but she was at a loss over why or what to do about it.
Get it done…and get out of the rain before her fingers turned to icicles.
She pulled the last two envelopes from her pocket. She wouldn’t be here for December, so she’d brought both. And chosen the closer lighthouse. Besides, she’d visited December’s lighthouse at Ediz Hook twice already, on her way to two of the others. She’d even seen it from the water with Russell when they’d sailed out to Destruction Island. There wasn’t even a lighthouse anymore, just a flasher atop the Coast Guard station.
Leaving Puget Sound was going to be a major advantage of moving to Mondavi. There was no part of the Sound or Seattle that had escaped Russell’s touch—no part of it that could be just hers. Napa would give her a chance to purge her soul of him.
Damn porcupine!
She tore open the first letter and huddled over it to shield it from the rain. The writing was so uneven that she had to construct each word a letter at a time. Her heart clenched with sympathetic pain for the effort he’d taken to write it.
Dearest I. S.,
Too sick to even write her nickname.
I followed my destiny north. I left behind my dreams. I discovered new ones. The most important discovery, the one that made my whole life worthwhile, was the love of my dear Adrianne and for my lovely Cassie. There is ice in your veins, a cold determination to put your head down and battle it out. That you got from me.
From your mother, you got the largest, most loving, sweetest heart there ever was. Listen to that. It is your heart that will make you happy, not your head. And I now know, that is what counts.
You are the Ice and the Sweet,
Vic
“But I followed my heart. I’m following it to the land you loved.”
And yet all she felt was misery.
All those years “Ice Sweet” had more meanings, and she hadn’t known. Her curse and her legacy had become her nickname, always wanting more and always feeling the pain.
Was there any point in even opening the last letter? She already knew the last words of a dying man.
“You would have loved Knowles Valley.” Vic Knowles had spoken his last words to his daughter just minutes before he died. His one great regret and she now had the chance to set it straight. A Knowles would once again walk that land—and she would love it with every ounce of willpower in her soul.
She turned the last letter over and over. He’d left off the GPS coordinates. Misspelled the name of the lighthouse. If they’d come this far together, she might as well finish the journey.
Dearest I.S.,
Remember, above all else. Home is neither a place or a state of mind. It is family.
Thank you for being my family. For being my home.
All my love,
Daddy
Daddy.
In the end, he’d finally felt worthy to name his role in her life. And that was his final word, ever. The wonderful father he’d always been. Always believing in her and—just as strongly—always doubting himself.
Home was family.
No.
It couldn’t be.
Had Russell been asking that of her?
Had he proposed and she hadn’t even noticed?
The realization burned behind her eyes, in her head and in her heart. Like an oak barrel being charred by fire on the inside; it made the oak accessible to the wine while it also mellowed and aged the wine in the process. The precious oak, used for its own flavor.
But there was a second reason they used oak, for both wine and whiskey. Steel trapped the wine, suffocated it. Even the giants of the ultra-modern Napa Valley spent time in oak. And while there, one or maybe two percent of the alcohol and other aromatics leaked out through the porous wood. They slid from the wine and disappeared. It was a tiny loss, but enough to transform a mediocre wine into a wonder.
Giving up so little gained so much.
Could she let go of that precious percent? And what would it be? Or was it too late? Had she missed her chance, locked up in the steel vat of her own icy stubbornness?
Her father’s words were washing off the page of his last ever letter to her. He was gone, taking his past with him. Vic Knowles had left her alone to face her future. Yet another piece for Cassidy to let go of—shed one layer at a time.
She looked at the lighthouse: perched on the rock, a concrete tower surrounded by a barbed wire-topped fence. The old bell was in a small shed at the back of the park. The rowing dory, long gone, replaced with a replica that would never again leave the boat house to be dragged, pushed and prodded, through the mud flats. The remote keeper’s dwelling now in the midst of a posh neighborhood, rentable by the day, and tended by the Points Horticultural Society. All of the history had escaped; no sign remained of the remote corner of Puget Sound where the first keeper had managed to land a piano in 1903.
She stood alone.
The only sign of life she could see through the drenching rain was a blue-hulled sailboat with red sails.
She blinked.
But it was still there slicing through the rain.
Russell, coming to their lighthouse.
Coming to her!
She ran from her partial shelter behind the lighthouse and clambered up onto the rocks.
The Lady continued straight toward her for a long moment, then it jibbed abruptly, awkwardly, shearing off to the west, away from the lighthouse. No—away from her.
She’d hurt him. Not because she’d meant to, but because she didn’t understand.
“Russell,” her voice was little more than a croak. She tried again. It was no better.
He was glancing over his shoulder, but he wasn’t turning back.
She waved her arms to no effect.
Her coat. She was wearing her red parka, for the first time in six months it was cold and wet enough.
Unable to fight her way out of the zipper with her frozen fingers, she dragged the coat off over her head.
“Russell.” She waved it against the wind and rain. “See the coat, damn you. See the coat. Red coat, Russell. Don’t leave me behind. Red Coat. Red Coat!” She cried it out into the storm.
&n
bsp; The boat continued away from her, until it was barely a shadow in the pounding rain. She was soaked to the bone, but wasn’t willing to turn for her car. There was no way she could give up while there was even the slightest hint of a chance. Not even after that.
He had to come back.
She waved the coat once more, but knew it was too little too late. The horizon remained empty. Cassidy let the coat slap wetly against her leg and lie on the sea-spattered rocks.
Then off to the north, in a direction she hadn’t been watching, the Lady once again emerged out of the driving rain.
Cassidy frantically waved the coat again. He was coming back…for her? Please, let him be coming back for her.
The boat pulled close in, a few dozen yards off shore. With one single, emphatic point, Russell indicated the boat launch on the other side of the park.
She ran. She sprinted. She leaned into the rain and flew across the muddy lawn and the rough rocks. She skidded as she leapt onto the wet wood and raced down the dock.
He was there before her. Floating a dozen feet off the end, just a little too far to jump. She considered it anyway, but knew of the bone-aching cold that waited there. The rain pounded off his incandescent yellow slicks like a parade of snare drummers gone mad.
One more time she waved the sopping red coat at him. She didn’t know what else to do.
“What?”
She didn’t know. How was she supposed to know what to say? She had no idea. His hostility was so open that it pushed her back hard enough to nearly make her stumble and go swimming off the dock’s other side. His angry pain lay so sharp and clear, that it made a scar on the face that had once looked at her with such love. It was an ugly scar and she had been the one to put it there.
Where Dreams Books 1-3 Page 30
