A Summer Affair

by Susan Wiggs

  “Dear, please,” Vickery said. “You’re upsetting yourself.”

  “For the time being, that’s the idea,” Isabel explained with an icy calm. “Each of us harbors someone beloved of the other. Making a switch is the only way to solve this, isn’t it? Lucas hasn’t really been shipped out yet, has he, Alma?”

  “Of course he hasn’t, has he, Fremont? He’s with Mr. Leland and those two gentlemen who were helping with the shipment.”

  Vickery’s shoulders sagged. “Don’t hurt her. For the love of God, don’t.”

  “That’s your decision,” said Blue. He looked over at Isabel, and his heart filled so full that it hurt. “Or rather, it’s up to the dangerous criminal I harbored.” If that was what Vickery thought of her, so much the better.

  “Fremont, I’m confused. You said we were going on a voyage tonight,” Alma said. She dug in her carpet bag. “I brought everything, just as you requested.”

  Isabel locked eyes with Blue, just for a moment. He wished he knew what she was thinking, but there were things about her he didn’t understand at all.

  “Your wife and I are losing patience,” she said.

  Dr. Vickery put his fingers to his lips and whistled. A few moments later, Blue saw the two crimps, Punch and Pisco, crossing the waterfront plaza. Between them, Lucas stumbled, his head sagging to one side.

  The sight of his son, broken and bleeding, ignited a terrible rage in Blue. At a nod from Vickery, the crimps shoved the boy at him and slipped away into a stream of stevedores and other dockworkers, disappearing into the dark. “Where are you hurt? Son, can you walk?” Blue asked Lucas.

  Lucas waved away his concern. “What about June and Mrs. Li?”

  “They’re home,” said Blue. “They’re fine.”

  Isabel stepped away from Mrs. Vickery and shoved the pistol inside her traveling cloak. Vickery rushed to his wife, a ragged exclamation of relief on his lips.

  Blue went to help Lucas into the buggy. The boy reeked of blood and dirt. He slumped on the seat. All Blue wanted now was to get away from the chaotic corruption of the waterfront.

  Then, as he turned to Isabel, he saw something flash in Fremont Vickery’s hand.

  A gun.

  “Isabel!” The warning tore from his throat even as he drew and fired his own weapon.

  Two shots rang out. White flashes and gunsmoke filled the air. People screamed and dove for cover. One of the horses panicked and trotted forward, taking the buggy. Isabel lay on the ground, unmoving. Like a flash of lightning, a remembrance of Sancha flickered through him, but then she was gone, and his entire world was filled with Isabel, only Isabel. Blue raced across the plaza and plunged to his knees beside her.

  A denial jolted through his body as he took her in his arms. The still-hot gun dangled from his hand. He released it and pushed at the dark folds of her dress and cloak, searching with his eyes and hands, but also with his other senses. As though returning to the battlefield, he caught the hot cinderburn of powder, the salty-sharp tang of fresh blood. A desperate sound came from him, and he realized it was a prayer.

  “I’m not hurt,” she whispered, tightening her fists into his sleeves. “It just occurred to me to get out of the way when a gun appeared.”

  The sound of her voice was a gift too precious to imagine, one he didn’t deserve.

  “Where is Lucas?” she asked.

  “Here,” Lucas called from the buggy. He’d managed to stop it a half a block away and bring it back to the plaza. His hands trembled; his face had lost all color. This had frightened him more than the beating.

  Blue looked over at Vickery, who lay on the ground. Alma staggered back against the open door of the coach and wailed. Blue glanced at his gun on the ground. A sound like the roar of a fire filled his head. His hand, his fingers—everything burned.

  Slowly he released Isabel and got up, crossing the plaza to save the life of the man he’d just shot.

  Rory McKnight stepped out of a hansom cab. Behind him, a police wagon rolled to a halt and two officers leaped out.

  “There you are,” he said to Blue. “I’ve been trying to find you all evening.” He hunkered down beside Vickery’s supine form and emitted a low whistle. “You’ve been busy, I see.”

  Blue finished Vickery’s field dressing. The tibia was shattered, and he was in danger of losing the limb. He was conscious but chilled from shock. Alma held her hands wrapped around her waist, softly sobbing and rocking herself.

  “Help me get them both into the carriage,” Blue said to the hovering policemen. “I’m taking them to the hospital.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Vickery stated through chattering teeth.

  Rory clucked his tongue, shaking his head. “Defiant to the end. I admired your wealth, Doctor, but that was when I thought you earned it legitimately.”

  “I’m afraid,” Alma said, her eyes hazy with fright. “Fremont, I wish this whole night would go away.” She turned to Rory. “He did that the last time. He told me I was away on the night of the shooting. That’s what I was to tell everyone.”

  “Well, guess what, ma’am,” Rory said. “Starting now, you can tell the truth.” He motioned for the policemen to come forward. A number of onlookers, as well as Rory’s cab, hastened away when the law arrived.

  Lucas handed Vickery’s pistol over to one of the officers. Rory promised a complete account would be given later. As the police took the Vickerys away to Mercy Heights, Blue turned to Lucas. “What the devil were you thinking, rushing off alone like that?”

  Isabel placed her hand on Lucas’s arm. “What your father means to say is that you’ve been helpful, and he’s proud of you. Now, give me a hand into the buggy. I know you’re eager to get home.”

  Without asking permission, Rory hoisted himself up onto the seat next to her. “Good show, my boy. Hello, Isabel, dear. What an eventful night it’s been. When are you going to abandon this unpleasant physician and run away with me?”

  She offered her trademark quicksilver laugh. “How soon can you be packed?”

  She and Rory had far more in common than Rory knew. They’d both been abandoned, had both suffered unthinkably as children. She didn’t have to speak of that time to him any more than Rory did. He simply knew. But the difference was, Rory had never felt compelled to conceal his past.

  Blue headed up the hill toward home, grateful to leave the waterfront behind.

  “Look at that,” Isabel said, lifting her face to the dawn sky, now filled with a flurry of falling leaves. “The season’s changing.”

  “What’s going on?” Blue asked Rory, sensing that his friend was bursting with news.

  “I thought you’d want to know. Officer Brolin is awake. And he told me who shot him.”

  Forty-One

  Following a lengthy visit to the police station with Rory, Blue returned home at midmorning. The events of the night had blown apart his life and when he put himself back together, he felt like a stranger. After ten years of sleepwalking, he had been jolted awake by an extraordinary summer, a love affair so passionate he was suddenly young again. He wondered, if he were to look in a mirror, would he recognize the man he’d become?

  Hearing voices in the garden, he went around the side of the house, in time to witness Lucas and June break their embrace. The two youngsters stood side by side, their faces flushed but their eyes defiant. Lucas bore the bruises of his ordeal, and Blue realized there was no worse sight for a parent than a wounded child. Yet the boy didn’t seem to be in pain. There was something piercing in the way he and June stood together, not touching yet exuding a bond not even the gods could break. Only yesterday, when he thought he knew what was best for Lucas, Blue would have subjected his son to a lecture about propriety and responsibility. Now he suspected there were things the boy understood with far more authority than Blue had given him credit for.

  “Son, I need a word with you,” he said. His voice sounded the same as always—flat, authoritarian. And certainly Lucas’s
reaction was the same—a prideful lifting of the chin.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blue summoned up a smile. “June, thank you for your help last night. You were very brave.”

  Flustered, she dipped into a quick curtsy. “Yes, sir,” she said, then mumbled something about helping her mother and scurried into the house.

  Lucas set himself to raking leaves into a growing pile in the middle of the lawn.

  “Am I that scary?” Blue asked.

  “Always,” Lucas said, concentrating on the raking.

  The arrow darted into him. “Lucas, about yesterday—”

  “Father, the shooting contest—”

  They both spoke at once and both stopped. Then Lucas took a deep breath and set his rake in motion again. “You shot a man to save Miss Isabel’s life.”

  “That doesn’t mean I approve of firearms.”

  “It no longer matters to me. I’ve decided to stop seeking your approval. I’ve done so all my life, and nothing I do is ever good enough.”

  Blue was stunned. He wondered if lack of sleep had affected his hearing. “That’s preposterous. You’ve always had my love and approval.”

  “And I was supposed to deduce that from your lectures and criticisms?”

  “If I seem harsh, it’s because I care so much, son. I want to protect you. To keep you safe and strong. It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

  Lucas set aside the rake and turned to face Blue. “It always comes back to my mother. Why don’t you ever speak of what happened to her that day? Why don’t you let me remember it?”

  “What?” Blue fought the urge to shake his head as though he had ears full of water. “There’s nothing for you to remember. You were too young—”

  “Was I? Then tell me why I dream of it. Tell me why, in dreams, I’m lying very still, feeling her warm blood pulsing out of her. Tell me why I still hear screams, sometimes. Why I wake up at night with the sound of crying in my head. Tell me why the smell of pickles makes me sick.”

  Blue scarcely dared to move. By God, the boy did have memories of that day. “I never wanted you to suffer.”

  His handsome face, a mirror of his mother’s, twisted in agony. “Last night, when the shooting started, I lived it all over again, just like I do in nightmares. How can you think I didn’t suffer?”

  “I was hoping you would never, ever have to remember. When I was just a boy, my mother died in a fire. I recall every moment of it. I watched her, son. It’s part of who I am. I can no more rid myself of those memories than I can change the color of my eyes.”

  “I watched my own mother die, too, but you wouldn’t let me speak of those memories, sir. You would have me believe they don’t belong to me.”

  “I thought it would lessen the pain of losing her.”

  “Those memories weren’t yours to take. Good or bad, they’re mine. Look at your own life, Father. You grew up and became a doctor. You heal the sick. Save lives. Maybe what happened to you as a boy had something to do with it.”

  “It had everything to do with it.”

  “You make my point for me.”

  The words struck Blue like hammer blows. He remembered all the times he’d shushed the boy when Lucas brought up “the day Mama died.” All the times he deliberately misunderstood Lucas’s tears and rages, and later his misdeeds. He hadn’t been protecting Lucas at all. “I should have known better,” he said in a voice that was barely a whisper. “What happened to your mother was so terrible I wanted to wipe it from your mind. But you can’t keep a memory silent. It was wrong of me to try.” He held out his hand, palm up. “You’re a fine son. A fine person.”

  Lucas dropped the rake. “God. Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear those words from you?” He stared up at the patch of sky over the hedgerow, and an autumn wind swept the leaves along the walkway.

  “I thought you knew,” Blue admitted, his chest aching. With new eyes, he regarded Lucas, so handsome and strapping, straining with readiness to take hold of his own life. There was a new maturity in his son, and it was like a gift to Blue. Here was someone not simply to worry about and raise like a prized horse. Here was someone who loved him, someone he could count on every day of his life. He needed Lucas more than he ever thought possible. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to take the big, ungainly boy into his arms, to hold him close to his heart as a bond of love enveloped them both.

  Exhausted as he was, Blue knew he wouldn’t rest until he saw Isabel. But when he walked into her room, he found the bed stripped to the mattress, the linens heaped in a wicker laundry basket. Bernadette Riordan, who was freeing a pillow from its slip, nodded in greeting.

  “Hello, Doctor.” She ducked her head, but not before he saw she’d been crying.

  “Where’s Isabel?”

  Bernadette set down the pillow. “Gone away, sir. You know, like she said. She’s a traveler. We always knew that.”

  The dull thud of a headache descended on Blue, throbbing with a voice of its own. Gone. Gone. Gone… But she filled him still. He only had to close his eyes, and he could feel her. When they made love, she let him come so deep inside her that he lost himself. When she thought he was sleeping, she whispered his name to the empty night. Had she been lying, even then?

  “When?” he asked Bernadette.

  “Hours ago, it’s been. Said we mustn’t wake Lucas on account of the terrible adventures last night. Did she never say goodbye to you, sir?”

  “No,” he admitted. “She never did.”

  Forty-Two

  Whistling tunelessly, Willie Bean came into the Rescue League clinic, wheeling a load of folded draperies of some sort.

  “What’s that?” Blue asked, looking up from his inventory of herbal preparations.

  Willie shuffled his feet, bashful as always. “New, um, shrouds from the Ladies Aid Guild, sir. They sent over a dozen, all hand-stitched.”

  “There’s room in the storage closet for them,” said Blue. Resignation sat heavily upon him, but it lacked the useless rage that used to bind him to the past. People would die no matter how hard he worked. It was part of the circle of life. Some would die tragically or senselessly. Now, in the months that followed Isabel’s departure, he no longer filled himself with wrathful laments for the lost souls he couldn’t save. He found another way of seeing his work, his strength and his limitations. He faced each tragedy with a different understanding. Instead of raging against loss, instead of reliving his own grief over and over again, he let go. He knew how to do that now. It was such a simple matter, but it had taken him a decade to learn it.

  Willie put away the shrouds and Delta brought in his next patient, a little girl named Sadie, howling from an earache in the arms of her weary mother. The child had no fever, so he suspected he’d find some sort of foreign object lodged in the ear canal.

  Delta did her best to soothe the hysterical child, but it took Blue, hunkering down and looking the girl in the eye, to get her attention.

  “If you want it to stop hurting, you’ll have to hold still for me,” he said.

  “You’ll only make it hurt worse,” sobbed Sadie.

  The old Blue would have ordered Delta to hold her down, or he might have lied to her and said it wouldn’t hurt a bit. Now he said, “It will hurt worse, but only for a moment.”

  “How long is a moment?”

  “For as long as it takes you to sing ‘Camptown Races,”’ he said. “But you must keep perfectly still while you do so.”

  “Sing with me,” she said in a small voice.

  “I don’t—” He caught Delta’s glare across the table. Then he took a deep breath and sang quietly, with a smile on his face, while his patient joined in. Delta held the lamp and he worked as he sang, gently probing until he dislodged what appeared to be a dried lima bean. He held out the porcelain-clad tray.

  Sadie ducked her head. “I was just playing. It was a long time ago.”

  “If you’d waited much longer, this would have spr
outed.” He put two drops of warm oil in her ear to soothe the inflamed part.

  Her eyes widened, first with alarm and then surprise. “That didn’t hurt,” she declared, hopping down from the table. On the way out, she turned and smiled at him shyly. Her face was like a pansy open to the sun, and the whole world was in her eyes.

  He was still smiling after she left, because he found himself thinking of Lucas. A child belongs to a parent only for a time, and trying to hang on too long betrayed the natural order of things. Two months ago, he helped Lucas pack a single traveling case and put him on a train bound eastward. Lucas’s choice for his education had shocked everyone. He had convinced Senator Leland Stanford to nominate him to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he would learn to be a warrior.

  When Lucas first told Blue his plans, Blue had been staggered by fear and love and pride. He knew what war was, but Lucas had to find out for himself. Blue considered putting his foot down, refusing to allow Lucas to go, but he knew Lucas would escape him anyway. Finally—too late—he realized that holding on too tight was as dangerous as letting go too readily.

  In this, too, Lucas showed a curiously adult wisdom. He pledged to stay loyal to June Li, but that didn’t keep him from striking out into the world, confident that he’d come back a better man.

  His son’s absence would be a wound in his life, but he found a kind of sweetness in the pain. Lucas had finally decided on the direction of his dream.

  There was no sweetness in the absence of another, however. Since the events of summer, he had a new sense of before and after. Before Isabel came tumbling into his world, and after she left.

  He learned that she’d gone to Honolulu, just as she always said she would. As much as he loved her, he could still step back and see that she was the sort of woman who couldn’t stay in one place. He was a man who couldn’t leave the world he’d created for himself.