The Dark Side of the Rainbow

by Rita Hogan

  Over the course of the past six months they had seen each other only twice: once when Tomas took a week of vacation to visit her in Portland, and another time when Shannon flew to Patagonia over a long weekend. Aside from those few visits, their entire relationship and courtship had blossomed via FaceTime. Tomas had praised modern technology, stating that it would have been impossible to survive the last several months without seeing Shannon’s lovely face every day.

  The first full day of her trip to Patagonia, Tomas whisked Shannon off to Buenos Aires. They had dinner and then saw a performance at the Teatro Colon, one of the world’s top five concert venues known for their phenomenal acoustics. Afterwards, they enjoyed a nightcap and dancing in the rooftop lounge of The Chase, one of NLG’s premier properties in Buenos Aires. While they moved to the music, Tomas had taken Shannon’s hand, placing it in his jacket pocket. When she felt the square velvet box, she stopped her body from swaying to the beat in response to the shock she felt. Tomas removed the princess cut diamond ring from its plush encasing. When he placed it on her finger, his words were simple: “I don’t want to live without you; I love you, Shannon.”

  When they arrived back in Bariloche, they invited Landon and Olivia to dinner to tell them the news.

  “A toast,” Landon said, as he raised his glass to the couple.

  “I couldn’t be happier for you both,” Olivia added. The sound of ringing crystal filled their small table at Dragonfly. “When is the big day?”

  “Hopefully in a couple of months,” replied Tomas.

  “We’re getting married in Portland. My grandparents aren’t well enough to make the journey, and my mother would be devastated if she couldn’t help me plan the wedding.”

  “How will your parents take the news? It will be hard for them, knowing you will be moving to Patagonia.”

  “They know how much I love Tomas.” Shannon smiled at her fiancé. “It will be hard, but they accepted it as a possibility the moment they met him.”

  “We’ll fly them down as often as they like,” Tomas added.

  Landon patted his friend and colleague on the back and then looked at Shannon. “I realize you already know this, but you are marrying a good man.”

  “I can’t begin to describe how happy I am,” beamed the bride-to-be.

  Later that night when they arrived home, Olivia couldn’t be more pleased. Soon, her friend would be here permanently. She couldn’t wait for Shannon to get to know Natasha; they would all be such close friends.

  Standing before the mirror in her bathroom, Olivia looked down at the counter, searching through her various pots of cream and cosmetics for her makeup remover. Suddenly, a flash went off in her mind, like the blinding light of a camera.

  Landon was sitting on the couch searching for the soccer game he had recorded when he heard his wife cry out in what sounded like pain.

  Startled, and then panicked by the sound, he ran to the master bedroom. He could hear crying from the bathroom.

  “Olivia!” he called, his heart pounding in his chest. He found her lying on the floor, her body convulsing from heart wrenching sobs.

  Quickly he grabbed her. Lifting her up and into his arms, he carried her to the bed.

  “Oh, God!” she cried out in agony. “I remember,” she sobbed over and over.

  Landon’s gut clenched at the pain he knew she was feeling. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” he crooned rocking her in his arms.

  “Why?” she wailed. “Why, why, why?” Devastated and angry she pummeled her fists against Landon’s solid chest. With tears in his eyes he allowed her to vent all the pent up emotions. He had worried that the release would be bad, but he could never have prepared himself for this.

  He didn’t know how many times she cried out asking why. He didn’t allow her angry words, “Why did you have to ask him to race?” to cause him to lose hope. She loves me, became his own internal cry. She loves me.

  Exhausted from the deluge of emotions, too spent to shed another tear or utter another word, she lay in the fetal position on the bed and simply stared at the wall. She didn’t resist his presence, but neither did she turn to him for comfort. Eventually, Olivia fell asleep. After he covered her up, he left their bedroom to call his sister.

  “Natasha, I’m sorry to call you so late.”

  “Oh no, Landon! What’s happened? I can hear it in your voice.”

  “She remembered.”

  She could hear her brother’s attempt to stifle his own sorrow and knew it had not gone well.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “No,” he said. “She’s sleeping. She may want you here in the morning. I only wanted—needed— to tell you. I’ll call you and let you know how she’s doing.”

  As he lay beside his now slumbering wife, sleep eluded him. When he finally did go under it was a restless, fitful kind of slumber. Every time he was dragged back into consciousness, he heard the words in his mind, she loves me. Tossing onto his side, Landon grabbed hold of the thought like a drowning man before falling back under the weight of exhaustion.

  When he woke the next morning, Olivia was no longer in bed. Panicked, he stood up and went in search of her. She was nowhere in the house. He opened the door to the garage and saw both cars there, his and the one he had bought for her.

  He opened the door to the deck, hoping to find her sitting outside, but she wasn’t there either. Scanning the terrain he saw her walking in the valley. She was a speck on the horizon, having walked quite a distance. Landon could tell by her movement that she was making her way back to the house.

  Unsure of what to do, afraid to see the anger—possibly contempt—in her eyes, he went to his home office and shut the door. He chose to sit in one of the two dark espresso club chairs rather than his desk. The chairs faced the only window in the room, but in a different direction than the deck. He could not see Olivia approaching from the distance.

  He must have fallen asleep in the chair. Words and a touch to his hand startled him. With a small gasp of surprise, he sat up, feeling a little disorientated. Olivia was kneeling beside him, cupping his hand much the way she had the first morning in his suite at the Grand Vue.

  He was relieved to see that there was no contempt in her eyes. Concerned with what she might say, he felt a little guarded.

  “How are you doing, Olivia?”

  “Getting better,” she replied as she let go of his hand and then sat on the plush carpet with her legs crossed.

  “The first thing I remembered was a memory of the first time I wore makeup. Removing mine after dinner last night must have triggered something.

  “Aunt Sarah had told me that putting on makeup was like a rite of passage. When I showed Jacob my new face, he had not been his usual supportive self. He had become sullen all of sudden. I followed him to the tree house to ask him what was wrong. It was the moment my brother realized we were both growing older. Gone were the days of our carefree lives. Time no longer seemed endless; moments of “always” seemed fewer and farther in between. As much as we wanted to avoid the inevitable, we both knew the day would come when we would begin lives of our own, different homes with our own families.”

  Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “He made me promise we would always be there for each other. I remember him looking up at the ceiling of the tree house. Jacob had said with confidence that we were to keep our childhood playhouse intact so that one day we could take our children there and tell them about the castles we had stormed.”

  The words, which were not meant to attack, felt like knives piercing his flesh. How many times had he looked at his own niece and nephew, knowing Jacob would never have children of his own? To this day it pained him to know what he had done.

  Landon ached to touch Olivia, to comfort and to draw comfort from her, but he kept his distance. He needed to know how she felt about him, about them, in light of her remembrance.

  “Do you recall the first night I had dinner at the Grand Vue?”

>   Landon nodded his head.

  “You had walked into the restaurant with a beautiful woman on your arm. She was the type who was so comfortable in her own skin and didn’t mind showing some of it. I thought she was your girlfriend. Part of my plan was to seduce you. I remembered thinking that if this was the type of woman you liked, I was in way over my head.

  “I wouldn’t admit it then, but it was hard to see you with someone else. The summer before Jacob’s death, I had begun to feel things for you, too. That night at the resort I dreamt of you. We were walking along the Pearl District. In my dream you told me how you had not made the best choices in your life and how I made you want to be a better person. You asked me if I knew why that was important. When I didn’t know, you told me it was because you were falling in love with me.

  “You kissed me and when I opened my eyes I was no longer staring at the seventeen-year-old Landon Gray that I had come to know that summer, but I was staring at the broken adult version of Landon Gray with whom I had been reunited in Patagonia. I was so furious, I slapped you right before I woke up from the dream.

  “Do you see, Landon? Even before our trip onboard The Absolution I was already beginning to realize how wrong I was, but I didn’t want to admit it. I had worked my whole life toward this one fixed mark on the horizon, and I hadn’t strayed from it.

  “I know now why I was angry the night of my accident, why I had pushed away from the railing and ran. I was falling in love with you. I wanted you to kiss me while we dined in my room. Later, on the deck, when you told me why you had named your ship The Absolution, I was angry because I knew I could not go through with my plot of revenge. Without my vengeance to anchor me I was reeling and wanted to flee.”

  Pushing herself up on her knees, she knelt before Landon. “I’m sorry I was so awful to you last night. When I remembered, the feelings were vivid and fresh, the agony of my memories made it impossible to filter all that I was experiencing against what I knew to be true about you, and about Jacob’s death.

  “When we said our vows of forgiveness, it was possible for my mind to be at peace, but now that I remember with my heart, all of me longs to give you the absolution you desire – as you forgave me.”

  Landon knew the forgiveness she offered was more precious because of the knowing.

  Touching the compass that his wife always wore, he looked at her and said, “Thank you, Olivia. I doubted for too long that I would ever have this moment. It has been as elusive as chasing the wind. Now that I hold total absolution in the palm of my hands, I’ve come to discover that the beauty is not in the chasing and acquiring, but in pulling up the sails and simply receiving. Thank you for forgiving me, and for loving me so completely.”

  EPILOGUE

  PORTLAND, OREGON

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  “That’s right, Reagan. This is where Mommy and your Uncle Jacob used to play.” Olivia glanced at Landon, who sat on the cushion next to hers, holding Madeline. They each had their arms wrapped around one of their twin three-year-old daughters.

  While his wife had been pregnant, Landon hoped they would have hair as red and as curly as their mother’s. Reagan was the first to be born. Landon had been overjoyed to see her beautiful red hair the moment she was placed onto Olivia’s breast. Ten minutes later, to their amazed delight, Madeline was born with strawberry blonde hair the same color as her Uncle Jacob’s.

  Landon’s heart had twisted in great knots of love when he saw the stunned look on his wife’s face. “Is it possible?” she had said, grappling with the fact that the hair coloring of her two daughters was identical to hers and Jacob’s.

  Overwhelmed by the joy of seeing their precious children for the first time and from missing Jacob, they held each other and cried. It had been an unexpected blessing.

  Landon’s heart felt heavy as he remembered Olivia looking up toward the ceiling of the labor and delivery room, mouthing the words, Thank you.

  The tree house of his wife’s childhood stood strong in the backyard of the home she had loved as a young girl. They visited Portland often, but this was the first time they had taken the girls inside the lofty retreat.

  “Mommy and Uncle Jacob used to look out this window,” Olivia pointed to a small pane of Plexiglas overlooking the main house. “We could see our dad, Grandpa Josh, in the kitchen and would pretend he was a fire-breathing dragon. The trees on the other side of the house were giants who roamed the land. We had sticks . . .”

  “I want to play princess,” Madeline exclaimed in her sweet three-year-old voice, uninterested in dragons and giants.

  Landon laughed and kissed his daughter until she giggled. Reagan jumped up from Olivia’s lap and leaped toward her father, wanting to join in on the fun. “You’re my favorite daughters in the whole world; do you know that?”

  Regan pinched his dimpled cheek and said with a giggle, “We’re your only daughters, Daddy.”

  Soon the girls were content to sit side by side and look at one of the picture books they had brought with them into the treehouse.

  Landon was leaning against the other side of the cedar structure holding Olivia’s back to his chest, his arms wrapped loosely around her waist.

  “They are too adorable!” his wife exclaimed, her hands caressing the soft hair of his forearm.

  Unable to resist nuzzling her neck, he said, “Thanks to their mother, who is the most adorable creature I have ever met. The first time I ever thought of you in such a way was when we went fly fishing and I saw you in those waders. I was so crazy for you. Helping you learn how to cast had me thinking about tango dancers. I wanted to devour you on the spot.”

  “I wish you . . .”

  Placing his hand over her mouth, he could feel her lips pulling into a smile.

  “Temptress,” he said lovingly.

  When he removed his hand, she turned to him. “We’re married. I can tempt you all I want.” Looking over her shoulders at her daughters, who remained engrossed in their book, she turned back to Landon and whispered into his ear all the ways she wanted to tempt him.

  “Vixen,” he said before kissing her soundly on the lips.

  “Eeww!” They heard Regan squealing.

  “Daddy and Mommy, will you please stop your smooching!” ordered Madeline.

  Landon pulled away from his wife. “Did you teach them that?”

  Giving her husband a mock look of consternation, she replied, “Why, I would never!”

  “Nicholas,” the couple said in unison, before falling into a fit of laughter.

  Acknowledgments (Last page)

  As a lifelong reader of fiction, I found myself creating my own stories at a very young age, but only in my mind. I had no desire to put words on paper until one hot Sunday afternoon in July of 2012. That day I began penning my first novel. What started as purely a whim unlocked a passion for writing that I never knew existed.

  With this newfound joy for writing, a dream was born: to see my stories in print. Thank you, Father, for opening this door; and thank you, Booktrope, for seeing the potential in my story. I am so appreciative.

  None of this would be possible without the Booktrope team: Heather Huffman, Project Manager; Karen Huffman, Book Manager; Mary Ward Menke, Editor; Mary Scro, Proofreader; and Greg Simanson, Cover Designer. I can’t thank you all enough for your part in making my dream come true. It has been a privilege!

  Finally, a heartfelt thank you to all of my family and friends who have encouraged me along this incredible journey. Joel and Sean, I am moved by your infinite patience with me, and all the things you’ve had to sacrifice these last three years so that I could write. Joel, you didn’t let me give up! My beta readers, Rebecca Johnson, Lori Verlautz, Barbara Brooks, and Rosemary Melvin—all four of you chose The Dark Side of the Rainbow as the book to pursue. Thank you for your unanimous vote; it made my choice an easy one!

  If I were to sum up what being a writer means to me, it is this:

  When I replicate the world around me
with words, interweaving the real and the imagined, I feel as if my tiny space in this grand scheme of life has been well-tended.