If I'd Never Known Your Love

by Georgia Bockoven

  "Well, from her lips to God's ears," Julia said. She reached for the envelope and was startled to see her hand shaking, not just a little, the way it did when she was on a caffeine high, but a lot. She stared at her trembling fingers for several seconds, then brought her other hand up and saw that it was shaking, too.

  "Is this something new?" Barbara asked.

  "I don't know. I think so. At least, I've never noticed it before."

  "Is it the meeting?"

  Denial was on the tip of her tongue, when she felt a swell of tears tighten her throat and admitted, "I'm so tired, Barbara. Just getting someone to call me back anymore takes weeks and weeks. The ambassador is only seeing me tomorrow as a favor to his cousin Gina Michaels, the new FBI agent assigned to the case. Evan is yesterday's news and I've run out of ways to make people who can do something about it want to try. I don't know what else to do."

  "I'm such an idiot. I should have realized."Barbara put her arms around her sister.

  "What time is Harold picking you up?"

  Wary of the abrupt change in the conversation, Julia answered slowly. "Twelve-thirty."

  "What do you have planned between now and then?"

  "What's your point?"

  "You shouldn't be alone. You're going to drive yourself crazy thinking about this."

  "I'm alone every day."

  "Today is different." She took Julia's hand."Come on—let me do this for you."

  "I'm okay. Really."She managed to summon a confident smile."Now, get out of here.

  There's a classroom full of five-year-olds who need you more than I do."

  "Let me do this for you," she persisted.

  "Save it for later. When I get back."

  "Oh, Julia...I don't know what to say. I'm just so, so sorry."

  "Yeah, me, too." She forced a smile.

  Barbara glanced at her watch. She sighed in defeat. "Any last-minute instructions?"

  "None that I've thought of. All the phone numbers and flight times are on the fridge, as usual." She walked Barbara to the door. "Oh, there is one thing. Shelly is upset that I'm not going to be here for her date with John on Saturday, so be prepared."

  "I'll have some cocoa ready when she comes home, in case she wants to talk. And if she doesn't—" She shot her sister a wicked grin. "I'll make her life a living hell until she does."

  Julia felt a sudden, unreasoning stab of jealousy. She should be the one Shelly talked to. A first date only happened once. The excitement, the joy, the enthusiasm would be watered down or lost in the retelling.

  "Are you sure you're okay?" Barbara asked.

  The phone rang. "Stop worrying about me." Julia gave Barbara a quick hug. "I'll call as soon as I get to the hotel." She made a dash for the kitchen and grabbed the phone on the fourth ring. "Hello." She waited for a response. Nothing. She tried again.

  "Hello?"This time static cut the silence, loud, with a hint of unrecognizable speech. "Is someone there?" The static ended. The line hummed.

  Julia listened for several more seconds before she replaced the receiver. As she did, an odd, unsettling feeling settled over her. She shoved her hand into her pocket to retrieve the laminated four-leaf clover.

  Barbara had the right idea. Julia could use something to believe in, but she'd need more than an aberrant piece of vegetation.

  Four Months and One Week Missing

  I wasn't as much upset as frightened when you told me you'd done something so bad that you could go to prison.

  By then I was so in love I would have done anything to keep you safe, including running away with you if you'd asked.

  "What did you do?"I was torn between wanting to know because I wanted to know everything about you, and not wanting to know because I was scared it would change things between us. But it didn't matter. You felt you had to tell me.

  "I missed a lot of school when my brother was born. My mom managed to stay clean while she was carrying Shawn, but a couple of weeks after she got him home she was mainlining again. If she'd scored the night before, she would still be high when I left for school in the morning. Half the time she would pass out and forget all about Shawn. I'd come home and find him in a diaper so full that shit was leaking out the sides. He'd be screaming his head off because he hadn't been fed all day."

  "What about Shawn's dad?"

  You stopped looking at me then and stared out the window. You must have realized you were talking to someone who had no reference to understand the life you'd led.

  "My mother was a prostitute, Julia. That's how

  she got the money to pay for her drugs. If someone promised her a brick, she couldn't have picked Shawn's father out of a lineup."

  "I don't know what a brick is."

  You sighed. "Fifty bags of heroine."

  "Oh...."

  "I shouldn't be telling you this."

  "Probably not," I said. "But you might as well finish or I'm going to imagine something a whole lot worse than it is."

  You let out a disparaging laugh. "Not likely. I'm years behind where I should be in school, but that's not what matters. As soon as I turn eighteen I'm on my own. There's no way I can stay in school and get a job that makes enough money to support myself-

  — not without a high-school diploma. I'd be like a dog trying to catch its tail."

  "I don't understand what this has to do with—"

  "Give me a minute. 'You grabbed the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grasp. "I thought if I could get rid of the transcripts from my old school, I could show up here and convince everyone I was in the grade I should be in. I knew I'd have to do some catching up but figured if I handled it right, everyone would just think I was slow and had come from a bad school. I didn't care if I graduated last in the class. Nothing mattered but getting out of school and then out of here."

  "And you were afraid if you made friends, someone would find out. So you did this big tough- guy act and drove everyone away."

  "Pretty much."

  "Except me."

  "You have to admit I tried."

  I put my hand on your arm, but you shrugged me

  off.

  "There's more," you said.

  "There isn't anything you could tell me that would make a difference."

  "Don't be so sure. "You faced me again. "How would you feel if you knew I was responsible for burning down my old school?"

  I didn't say anything. You told me later that you thought it was because I was waiting for you to finish, but it was because I was too stunned. All my life I'd operated on the premise that there wasn't anything I couldn't fix or make better. This was the first time I'd been hit with something that I couldn't make go away and it was almost impossible to accept. "What happened?" I finally managed to ask.

  "I tried to get my records through the office, but they wouldn't release them to anyone except my court-appointed guardian. When I told them there was no way my aunt would come to Detroit, they said they'd mail them directly to the school. I was sunk if that happened. I knew if I broke in and took only my file they'd figure out it was me. So I started a small fire to burn a couple of file drawers, figuring the sprinklers would kick in and put it out before there was any major damage. By the time they got around to replacing the files with duplicates from the main office there wouldn't be anyone who remembered they were supposed to send my records here."

  "So what happened?"

  "The sprinklers didn't work."

  "And the whole school burned?"

  "Not the whole school. The administration offices."

  "Was anyone hurt?"

  You shook your head. "But they made a big deal out of it on the news and in the newspapers the next day. Hell, you'd have thought I'd burned down the Pontiac Silverdome and that the Pistons had to play in the parking lot. Then it came out that this wasn't the first school fire that summer. The cops said whoever did this one did the others, too, and they had a serial arsonist on their hands. I decided that if I owned up to it, I'd get nailed for the others
, too."

  "We have to tell my dad."

  "Shit, Julia—you promised."

  "He won't tell anyone."

  "But he'll know. "You lowered your head, hiding your face with a waterfall of black hair. "Everything will change. It always does when people find out bad things about you. They might want to forget, but they can't."

  "My dad's not like that. He'll help you."

  "No one can help me, Julia. I did it. Nothing anyone can say or do can change that."

  That was when I did something I wanted to do since the day we met. I leaned over and kissed you. It wasn't a good kiss, landing more on your cheek than your lips, but you got the idea. I could see you struggling with what to do next. Then, with a deep moan that was like some kind of magnet that reached all the way to my heart, you pulled me into your arms and kissed me back.

  I will remember that kiss until the day I die, Evan. Things melted in me that I never knew existed. It didn't matter that the gearshift was stuck in my ribs or that my body was twisted in ways it wasn't meant to twist; all I could think about, all I cared about, was finding a way to keep your lips from leaving mine.

  C H A P T E R 5

  Julia poured another cup of coffee and headed back upstairs to finish packing.

  Shaking off a foolish, lingering unease over the phone call, she mentally recited the list of things she still had to do before Harold arrived.

  At the landing she absently stopped to pick a piece of lint off the threadbare carpet.

  The night before Evan left for Colombia, he'd joked that their Christmas presents to each other that year would be five gallons of paint, their birthday presents new carpeting and for Valentine's Day a new stove.

  At first she'd put off the major changes and repairs they'd talked about, waiting until he could be there

  to do them with her. Finally, one by one she'd gone ahead, convincing herself it was all right, that Evan wouldn't be coming home to a house he didn't recognize but to one with the changes they'd planned together. She'd finished the work two years ago, everything but the carpeting and the new stove. Those, for some unfathomable reason, she couldn't bring herself to do without him.

  She'd instantly fallen in love with the house the Realtor had generously called a fixer-upper. Evan hadn't caught her enthusiasm until he saw the backyard. After sitting at the kitchen table at their old house, listing all the things they would have to do to make the new house livable and how much it would add to the cost, Julia accepted, reluctantly, that it was beyond their means. She continued to look at other houses in the area, bringing Evan into search whenever she found something with potential, but it was like having a passion for French fries and being offered potato chips.

  Nothing gave her the same emotional connection. It was something she couldn't explain. Through the tattered, garish wallpaper, the pink tile in the bathrooms, the ancient appliances in the kitchen, she saw the warmth in the exposed beam ceiling in the family room, the shine of refinished oak floors, the joy of friends and family gathered under the limbs of the hundred-year-old heritage oak in the backyard.

  She had been ready to tell the Realtor to expand the search, moving from Carmichael to Fair Oaks, when Evan called one morning and told her to meet him for lunch at Venita Rhea's, their favorite restaurant in Rocklin and only five minutes from Stephens Engineering.

  He'd phoned ahead and asked Randy to reserve their special table next to the mural, the one with the baby duck swimming in the canal. Evan said the expansive painting represented the French countryside; Julia said it had to be Italy. They could have settled the ongoing argument by asking Lisa, one of the owners, but that would have been too easy.

  During dessert—an obscenely large and incredible bread pudding, which Evan had insisted they order in lieu of champagne—-he'd handed her an exquisitely wrapped package. Inside was an offer on the house, lacking only her signature.

  They visited the vacant house a dozen times in the month it took to close, planning, deciding which projects they work on first, which could be postponed. Her enthusiasm for the inside became his, while she grew more and more caught up with his ideas for the garden, picturing the four of them eating outside on the deck under the oak tree surrounded by a living rainbow.

  They met at Venita Rhea's so often over the next month to go over kitchen-design brochures and paint chips and carpet samples that Julia put on three pounds.

  The pounds came off the week they actually moved in, when they alternated between euphoria and exhaustion, eating off paper plates set on boxes, working until two in the morning to clean years of accumulated dirt in the kitchen and then getting up at six to work their paying jobs. They barely gave themselves time to stop and admire a finished room before moving on to the next. It was a perfect month, filled with dreams, with hope, with nonstop talk of the future. Words that still haunted her when she thought of everything Evan had missed.

  Julia curled the retrieved piece of lint into a ball between her fingers and finished climbing the stairs. She was on her way to the bathroom to toss the lint in the trash when the phone rang. She hesitated. For an instant she considered letting it go to the answering machine, but was brought up short by her bizarre reaction. Not once in five years had she ever ignored a ringing telephone.

  She answered in the bedroom.

  "Hope I didn't catch you at a bad time," Harold said. The necessity to identify himself had disappeared years ago. "Something has come up that I have to take care of before we leave for the airport. Would it be all right if Mary swung by an hour earlier to pick you up first?" He was as involved with working to bring Evan home now as he had been in the beginning.

  "Sure." And then she remembered. "I thought Mary was out of town."

  "She came home last night."

  Julia laughed. "Didn't trust you to pack for yourself?" Harold was notorious for his unusual taste in clothes. As her and Harold's and Mary's friendships had grown into something far past ordinary, Mary had gently tugged Julia out of several deep emotional holes with stories of Harold's lifelong fashion faux pas. She particularly loved the one about the Hawaiian shirt and pin-stripe suit combination he'd worn to a semiformal award ceremony, but had only personally witnessed his appearance at a company picnic in brown socks, loafers, rainbow-colored shorts and a turtleneck.

  "Maybe, but she had the good grace to tell me it was because she missed me. Of course, she was going through my suitcase at the time, so I wasn't entirely convinced."

  "Tell her I'll be ready."

  "Thanks, Julia."

  "No problem."

  She glanced at the clock when she hung up and jumped when the phone instantly rang again. Five minutes to nine. Her mother. The two-hour time difference between California and Kansas put her mother between the work she did for the volunteer fire department on Wednesday and getting lunch ready for her father.

  Julia tucked the receiver between her ear and shoulder and reached into a drawer for a shoe bag. "Hi, Mom."

  First silence and then static filled the line.

  Dropping the bag on the bed, she shifted the receiver to her hand. "Hello?" She waited. "Is anyone there?"

  The line cleared. She heard a man say,"...twelve kilometers south of Envigado..." A series of clicks followed.

  Envigado? She knew that name. It was a city in Colombia just south of Medellin.

  "Evan?" she said in a choked whisper. "Evan, is it you?" More clicks, and then a hum telling her she'd been disconnected.

  She put the phone down and bumped the vase with the peach-colored rose. A petal fell. Her breath caught. Seconds passed as she stood there and stared. She absolutely refused to see it as a sign. She couldn't live that way. The rose was old and fragile, and.

  freeze- dried flowers weren't meant to last forever.

  Damn it, Mother. Why have you done this to me?

  She headed for the computer in Jason's room to look up Envigado's exact location.

  The phone rang again.

  Her heart i
n her throat, she answered. "What is it? What are you trying to tell me?"

  "Julia?" her mother said hesitantly. "Is that you?"

  Julia sat on the corner of the bed. "I thought you were someone else."

  "Obviously. What's wrong?"

  "Nothing." If she told her mother about the strange phone calls, she would either say Julia was cracking up or that it was another sign. Julia wasn't up to dealing with either possibility. "It's been a busy morning and I'm feeling a little on edge about the meeting with this new ambassador."

  "It sounded like something more than that."

  "Really, it's nothing."

  "All right. I was just checking up on you, and wanted to tell you I had a dream about Evan last night. You two were sitting in the backyard in those special chairs you bought to celebrate his birthday last year."

  "Adirondack," Julia said.

  "You were so happy," her mother continued. "I woke up and I was crying. I asked everyone at church to say a prayer that this new ambassador will be able to do something."

  "Thanks, Mom." Even with call waiting she was reluctant to stay on the phone any longer. "I have to let you go so I can finish packing."

  "Don't forget your raincoat."

  "I won't."

  "Did Barbara stop by this morning?"

  "She did."

  "And?" Maggie prompted.

  "She gave me the clover. I have it in my purse. Now, I really do have to go."

  Two hours and six phone calls later, Julia had managed to convince herself that the strange call was simply another Colombian reporter looking for a new angle for a five-year anniversary story about the longest-held American kidnap victim. She had dressed and finished packing and was on her way downstairs, suitcase in hand, when the phone rang yet again. Mentally going over the list of friends and family who had yet to contact her, she setded on her brother.

  After five years it was more than reasonable to expect her friends and family to have shifted focus and moved past the intensity of waiting to hear something about Evan's kidnapping, which had gripped them all in the beginning. But Evan was still almost as much a part of their lives as he was hers. For a long time she'd believed their continued intimate involvement was because they loved and cared about her. And they did. But it was Evan himself who drew their hopes and concerns and prayers. They refused to believe a heart so filled with love and compassion and joy no longer beat.