“We tried to make it work, for Billy’s sake,” Chas managed to say eventually.
This was Allison in his arms now, a woman he claimed to love. Commitment, a possible future together—these things were based on honesty, on revelation of feelings and beliefs, and bonded by values. If he dodged the truth now, he would be creating a fissure that could only widen later, separating them, and they already had too many gaps between them as it was.
“Thelma and I married for all the right reasons, just to the wrong people,” he said. “I was in love with you. She knew that. Accepted it, I thought. But not inside. Inside, where she really lived, she needed much more from me than I was able to give. And so she was desperately unhappy. She began drinking. It was a stroke that took her, the doctors said, but I think it was a basic lack of hope.”
Allison didn’t say anything for the longest time. But he felt a teardrop dampen his shirt and lifted his hand to her face to feel several spilling free.
“What is it?” he asked. He hadn’t meant to hurt her with his honesty. He stroked her cheeks to brush away any further tears.
“Somehow it was easier thinking that you’d been happy together,” she said slowly. “I don’t know why the fact that you were unhappy, that she was...and that I was so unhappy, too...that all seems such a terrible, terrible waste.”
“But there was Billy,” Chas reminded her softly.
Allison gave a choked sound before she said, “Yes. Of course. And he’s worth all the pain, isn’t he?”
Chas didn’t know quite what she meant by that question, if she was being sarcastic or, if not, whose pain she thought Billy worth—his, certainly, and Thelma’s, perhaps.
“I love Billy,” he said softly. Firmly. “He’s the whole world to me.”
“I know. You should feel that way.”
He ached to tell her the raw truth right then, even opened his mouth to do so. But she clenched her hand in his shirt suddenly, pulling it tight across his shoulders, making his collar bite into his neck. But she didn’t raise her head from his chest.
“Chas...”
Every pore in him yelled at him to move now. To get up, go to the kitchen, find his way to the bathroom, call a long lost friend in Denver. Anything. On this day of wonder and revelation, he was about to hear even more. And instinctively he knew he didn’t want to hear whatever she was about to reveal. Not at all.
Her dream had been right. The past should be buried; there were some things that belonged solely to the past.
Fear clutched at his chest, in the form of Allison.
“When you told me you were marrying Thelma Bean, I couldn’t think what to do or say. I just ran, if you remember.”
“I remember,” Chas said. His heart had started to beat in swift, painful thuds. He knew something was coming. Something dark. Some terrible truth. God, it had only been hours before when he’d preached at her about the past, about just letting it go, opening it up. And only moments before when he’d demanded they talk about the past.
“Susie was in the car,” she continued.
“Don’t...” he said, though it was really a plea.
She ignored him, though her hand on his shirt pulled even more fiercely, as if she needed the hold on the fabric to be able to explain.
“We were supposed to be going to Lubbock, remember?”
Chas remembered that, too. There was nothing he didn’t remember. But he was terrified of what he didn’t know.
“I was crying. I was swerving on the road. Susie kept begging to take over the wheel. When I almost ran into the ditch, I pulled over. I let her drive.”
“Oh, God, Allison. I’m so sorry,” he said.
She shook her head against his chest, her hand still bunched in his shirt, still dragging at the material as if holding on to a lifeline. Her fist beat once against his chest, not painfully, but as if she were beating the knowledge into him.
“No! You don’t understand.”
He waited, stilled, desperately fearful of whatever it was he didn’t understand.
And when her words came, they spewed in a rush, like a flash flood, filled with debris and detritus, hurt and confusion. “I...I was pregnant, Chas. And w-when the car rolled, it didn’t kill just Susie. It wasn’t only Susie. You asked what was in the box marked Yesterday...now you know.”
Chas felt his head jerked back as if yanked by invisible hands. His eyes slammed shut, squeezed tightly against the pain, a seering-hot knife blade that cut through the very core of his being.
God, what had he done?
He remembered that day as vividly as if it were yesterday. Her coming to the clinic, nervous, angry, he’d thought. She’d looked at everything but him. And he, still smarting from her rejection of his plans, and fresh from Thelma Bean’s need, had blurted out his intention to marry Thelma.
She hadn’t waited for explanations, though her face had paled to a shade that should have alarmed him, would have alarmed him if he’d been anything but absorbed in his own world of hurt and self-righteous nobility.
He’d been angry that afternoon. Wounded. Smarting because he’d laid his plans for their future out before her and she’d scoffed at him. Had he told her about Thelma in some measure of revenge, of retaliation?
He hadn’t known she was pregnant. She must have been so scared. So young and so very, very scared.
And then the accident.
He’d gone to the hospital, but she wouldn’t see him. Refused to see him. She’d fled Almost as soon as she was able to walk and had never come home again. Until now.
And now he knew why. The knowledge was a white-hot agony burning through him.
How very much she must have hated him all these years.
He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, that his lungs had been frozen with this terrible knowledge. At that moment, he was sure he would never draw breath again.
All the decency, all the rationale for the decisions made fifteen years ago, the noble choices that determined his entire history suddenly seemed questionable.
She’d been pregnant. Dear God. His child. His, hers. His child.
Threads of molten regret and an icy guilt winged through him, wiping out all the good things he might have ever done, the wonderful, silly little things that had made his life seem whole, if somewhat lonely at times.
Allison’s fingers relaxed their grip of his shirt and soon, despite his stillness, in spite of his silence, began to smooth the bunched fabric into some semblance of normality.
But the motions didn’t soothe him, didn’t take away one iota of the maelstrom of agony churning in him. Surfacing over and over was the image of her Yesterday box.
In his bedroom, naked and waiting for him, she’d said, “I can’t have any more children.”
Her meaning now became more than crystal clear; it became the facets and slivers of that shattered crystal, each piece embedded in his heart, in his soul.
He wanted to cry out loud, to yell as loudly as he could, to scream out his denial, his fury, his longing and his horrible guilt to the universe, as if by wailing it out into the air he would be absolved.
But absolution wasn’t possible. Nor even, judging by her soft body nearly wrapped around his, something required.
She’d carried this knowledge, this agony for fifteen years. Never once had she let anyone know. Not Sammie Jo, not Taylor. If she had, he’d have known. Because, despite his confused pain, he knew that if someone was paying the slightest bit of attention, there were no secrets in a small town.
Unless that someone had been young, scared and pregnant.
That was why she hadn’t known about Thelma. That was why she’d thought Billy was his, had believed him capable of loving her and being with Thelma at the same time.
Chas wanted to pull her into himself, never to let her go.
But knowing so much now, he had to ask the final question. He had to know why she’d turned him down when he’d asked her to be his wife. Especially since she’d been pregnant.
In a choked, nearly voiceless tone, he rasped out the question.
She was silent for so long that he tightened his grip on her. “Allison?”
“You didn’t ask,” she said.
“What?” he asked blankly.
“You didn’t ask me, Chas.”
“But—”
She sighed heavily. “I was young. I was foolish.”
He felt her shake her head against his chest. He ached to be staring into her eyes but knew she’d never be revealing so much if he were.
“I don’t understand,” he said, telling the absolute truth. “I did ask you.”
She sighed again. “Not really, Chas. You told me. It sounds so silly now, saying that. And childish. But that’s just what it was. Not monumental, not huge. I never knew that until I came back home. All these years, I did think it was huge. A betrayal so horrific that I could never talk about it. But now I see it for what it was. My part in it, yours.”
He was frowning, trying to puzzle out her meaning.
“It was just a stupid little game. I just wanted you to ask me to marry you, not to tell me.” She said this sleepily. Dreamily. “I was a kid. Don’t you see? Just a kid. I wanted the bended knee, the outstretched hand. Flowers. Everything. What did I know?”
“But that’s what I felt,” Chas said, stunned. Shocked. “That’s everything I felt.” He didn’t add that he still did. He couldn’t, not in the face of everything he’d learned that afternoon.
“Was it? I didn’t know. And even if I did, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? We can’t change the past,” she said. She yawned. Incredibly, stunning him, she just yawned. “But I didn’t know it then. Then I was just...miffed.”
“Miffed,” he repeated. “Miffed?”
She chuckled slightly. “Piqued. Angry. Upset. I wanted to teach you a lesson.”
He realized her humor hadn’t been over finding the situation amusing in the slightest. It had been a purely self-deprecating, despairing chuckle, and he knew it the moment she said, “Guess the lesson backfired.”
“Backfired.” He felt stupid. Slow. And felt the flickers of a dark anger rising in him.
“Yeah. You married Thelma. Susie died because I couldn’t even see to drive because I was hysterical. My father blamed me.”
“No.” Chas felt the word yanked from him. “You’re wrong, Allison. He wouldn’t have.”
“He did. I saw it in his eyes. When I woke up in the hospital. Besides, he said so.”
Chas closed his eyes again. So much hurt, so much pain. All carried for too long. No wonder she hadn’t come back for her parents’ funeral.
And he’d been the one to let her run out of the clinic that day, her face paler than pale, her eyes blank with shock. Pregnant with his child.
“She took Deadman’s Curve too fast. She didn’t know. I didn’t warn her. We were just kids. Kids. The car rolled and she flew through the windshield. She hadn’t buckled her seat belt. I didn’t know that. I reached for her hand on the pavement. I crawled to touch it. But Susie wasn’t there. Only her hand.”
Chas felt as if the entire world had turned upside down and shaken him free. He was being catapulted through the universe, ungrounded, completely unable to find a hold in a world he’d always known.
How could she ever bury that particular heartache from the past? How could he now? How could he hope to ever know what to say to her now?
Outside, in his clinic, the dogs started barking. He frowned, almost grateful that he might have to go check on them, guilty that he felt a sense of relief.
Allison had been right when she said she was ambivalent. Not indifferent, no. About the two of them, because of what lay between them, she could never be indifferent. Ever. And now, with this knowledge, he would never have that simple faith in the rightness of things, a trust that things could work easily, naturally.
Because even knowing the past, even understanding the depths of pain, the sharpness of the despair he now felt for the future, he still could only choose the life he had lived, the mistakes, the woes, the gifts...and Billy.
The dogs, the shepherd cross in particular, began barking furiously. Frantically.
Strangely Allison was relaxed in his arms, her breathing steady and regular. Her palm lay flat against the shirt material she’d grasped with such fervor earlier. She didn’t seem alert, alarmed or even cognizant of the sounds coming from his clinic. She seemed quiescent, relieved perhaps. Or maybe just weary.
His heart bled for the girl she’d been, for the woman she was now. And his mind raced from the past to the present. He didn’t dare think about the future.
Because through his own actions in the past, or whatever was making the animals in his clinic go crazy, Allison was in trouble. Big, old-fashioned trouble.
He’d been a party to the pain of the past, an anguish he was only becoming aware of, but he’d be damned if he would be any part of such suffering in the present.
“I’ve got to go check on the animals,” he said.
She stirred. He couldn’t see her face, could only feel her soft, gentle form resting against him. He had the odd notion that she’d half fallen asleep, as if the admission from the past had sapped every ounce of her strength, as if the confession had drained every last bit of her reserves.
“Allison?”
“Mmm?”
“I want to talk about what you told me. But I’ve got to go check on the animals.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said rather dreamily. “Not anymore.”
His hand drew her more tightly to his chest. “We do. There’s a lot to talk about, Allison. Whys. Whats. Everything. But the dogs are going crazy, and I’ve got to go check it out.”
“Okay,” she said easily. Too easily, he thought. And he thought this very uneasily.
He slid from beneath her and pushed to his feet. She scarcely moved, only curled a little tighter onto the cushion he’d pulled from the sofa. Outside, the dogs were still barking frantically. Inside, Allison appeared asleep.
He swiftly dragged his coat on and stomped his feet into his boots. He gave her one last glance before he opened the door to the February storm and the freezing sleet. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
In a perfect world, she would have raised her head, flashed him that high-intensity smile and said, “I love you, Chas.”
The words would have served as a shield against the bitter cold of the sleet needling his face and hands. The smile would have wrapped a warm scarf around his neck.
But the world was far from perfect. And Allison was about as far from ever saying those words again as a human being could ever get.
Chas slid a little on his porch steps, fought the icy wind as he pulled the door closed behind him and turned into the storm. Defenseless.
Chapter 11
Chas found general pandemonium inside the clinic.
All the dogs were loose and barking at each other or the one-pawed cat, thankfully still locked in her cage.
Tense, prepared for a battle or worse, he searched the three-room clinic and the holding pens with a caution hitherto unknown. And once he got the dogs settled down and back in their pens, he crossed through the breezeway leading to the barn, where the larger animals were restlessly pacing in their stalls and pens.
He didn’t have that creepy being-watched sensation prickling on his skin, but he knew that someone had been in his clinic. Nothing overt, except the dogs, had been disturbed. But a hackamore outside one of the horse’s stalls lay on the floor, mute evidence of an intruder.
He picked up the hackamore and looped it over the peg, absently soothing the young horse nervously pawing at the stall gate.
“And who was in here, huh, Chico? Who got you so worked up?”
The horse, who had been in and out of the clinic at least fifteen times in his young life because he had a curiosity that made a mockery of so-called horse sense and was invariably straying into danger or nibbling something he shouldn’t have, calmed
down somewhat, though his eye rolled at the back entrance several times, as if expecting a return of whatever had frightened him.
When the horse stopped kicking at the gate, Chas gave him a few extra oats and molasses and gave him a good scratch, looked the barn over one more time and pulled the door to, leaving on the lights.
He stopped dead on reentering the small-animal section of his clinic. The shepherd cross was back out of the cage. He found himself hunching to a fighting stance, arms loose at his sides, knees bent, eyes raking the brightly lit clinic, ready for anything that might spring at him.
Nothing did.
The shepherd wagged her tail slightly and chuffed at him, as if applauding his humorous actions. She sat down, tail still sweeping the floor. She didn’t just look pleased with herself, she grinned at him.
He slowly straightened. “Well, you little devil. You got out of that cage all by yourself, didn’t you?”
Her tail wagged with more vigor, as if acknowledging the truth of his surmise.
“And did you let the others out?”
She chuffed at him, a hiccup of a bark. Truthful dog.
Chas found himself grinning. “An escape artist, hmm?”
She chuffed again.
He couldn’t help but contrast the behavior of the unrepentant dog with that of the cowed animal that had been curled in on herself in that cage for at least two weeks.
Her real healing had begun the moment Allison had talked to her, cried over her.
“She stole your heart, too?” he asked, stepping farther into the room.
Though the shepherd’s ears twitched when he moved, she didn’t back away from him or flatten to the ground as though afraid he would strike her.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said, crossing to the cabinet where he stored the dog and cat food.
Her eyes followed his every move, her head swiveling to keep him in sight at all times. Her tail lay still on the concrete floor.
“I’ll leave you out tonight. But you have to promise to let the others stay in their cages, okay?”
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