She sighed, and dropped her pen on the desk. “Because it makes me feel organized. I agree to get through so many projects, spend so much time on each one, and then I can check them off when I do.”
Jim sniffed. “Kinda like Mom’s shopping lists and stuff. She puts things on there she’s already done, y’know, just so’s she can cross some off before she does anything else.”
Donna laughed and ruffled her small brother’s dark, curly hair. Every day he looked more like their father, only with their mother’s blue eyes. “Mom’s got a good trick there. But you’re a little pest, James McGrath. And you aren’t helping me get my studying done. Scat and let me work.”
He planted his feet wide apart and locked his sturdy knees. “I heard something.”
Donna ignored him and took up the pen again.
“Don’t you want to know what I heard?”
“I want you to get out of my bedroom and let me work.”
“What is it you’re waiting for all the time?”
She gripped the pen tightly, but kept her head down. “Okay, Jim. What did you hear?”
“Will you play ball with me if I tell?”
“You little crook.” She darted from her chair, going down on her knees in front of him and grabbing his shoulders. “Five years old and already into organized crime.”
“What’s that?”
She sighed, bowing her head. “In this case, blackmail.”
“What’s—”
“Jimmy,” she warned, “spill it.”
He tried to whistle, but gave up and grinned instead. “Nothing, I guess, except I heard Mom say it was hard on you waiting. She said…she said she could feel you waiting.” His brow furrowed. “What?” he began to ask, then changed his mind.
She sat back on her heels. “Leave me alone for a couple of hours, and I’ll kick a ball around with you in the park, okay?”
When the door finally closed behind him, she went back to her desk and opened a drawer. Carefully, she removed one pin from a row of pins jammed in a crack in the bottom. She counted the ones still standing, and the ones dropped in an old pill bottle. Days, days, days. So many gone by since San Francisco, so many to go until…She shut the drawer and leaned over to peer down into the street. Seven weeks. Forty-nine days since she’d seen Bruce. She’d kept her promise not to write or call—and so had he. Her mother felt the waiting, too. Donna smiled. Mom had always understood.
FALL BOWED BENEATH a furious winter. Donna plodded on—school, home, study, run, more school. And she joked and laughed and drew even closer to her family. Their lives, their happiness, chipped little pieces from the cold shell that threatened to choke her heart. Her parents, their faces pink from walks in Stanley Park, sitting close together in front of the fire, holding hands, planning, sharing, were handsome and vibrant and obviously in love. Jim bounced through his world, a ball or a bat and at least one bloody knee seeming to be permanent parts of his strong body. And Donna drew strength and hope from all of them.
Routine saved her from giving in and calling Bruce, or writing, or catching a plane to San Francisco—or going mad. School was a challenge she enjoyed. She made one or two friends, but steadfastly turned down dates until even the most persistent candidates stopped asking her out.
A heavy snow, unusual for Vancouver, came early, before Thanksgiving, and stayed on the ground. Straggling along the treacherous sidewalk outside the townhouse each day, Donna would kick at lumps of ice, pull her woolen cap more firmly over her ears, and wonder what Bruce was doing. She caught the bus to and from school. If she’d driven herself, there’d have been no chance to use the travel time for study. The bus allowed her to read—and wonder what Bruce was doing.
Three weeks before winter break, twenty-one days, she sat in her philosophy class, staring at the back of a man’s head. His hair was sort of blond, light brown with those sun-bleached streaks. Bruce’s hair was like that. She closed her eyes and concentrated on seeing his face. In her mind he was sprawled on his back in Golden Gate Park, groaning with pretended pain, then laughing. Then he took her in his arms and she felt his warmth.
“Ms. McGrath, are you still with us?”
She jumped, and blood rushed to her face. The professor must have asked her something. “Ah, yes, yes,” she replied.
He tapped his chalk on the board. “Is this argument satisfiable?”
The words blurred together. She couldn’t think. “Ah, yes.”
A titter rippled across the room. The professor was young, and enjoyed his job and his own sense of humor. He tossed the chalk in the air and caught it behind his back. “You haven’t been listening for a long time, I’m afraid. Contradictions are always…” he paused, palms up, inviting a response.
“Unsatisfiable,” she responded in a small voice. “Sorry about that.”
More days crawled by. Donna checked every mail delivery, tried not to leap for the phone when it rang, tried not to strain to hear if she would be called to answer. And when the call was for her, she walked with deliberate steps, and managed an expressionless face or a benign smile when, as was always the case, she heard her friend Amy’s voice who kept in touch from her college in Alberta, or from one of the other students from her own school. Twice she spoke to Raymond Tsung. Hearing his voice only deepened her sadness, somehow.
And then it came, the last day of the fall quarter. Donna fumbled through her classes, trembling inside, watching the clock.
“Going home for the vacation?”
She almost slopped the coffee she was putting on her tray in the cafeteria. “Home?” She looked over her shoulder at the man who had spoken. He was the one who sat in front of her in Philosophy. She pulled a paper napkin from the holder.
“You going home for the holidays?” he said, smiling. A nice smile. They’d never spoken before.
“This is home,” she said. “I live in Vancouver. How about you?”
“Seattle’s home for me, and that’s where I’m headed.” He smiled again and she saw he was excited. She liked him for it. He was young, maybe still eighteen, and he wanted to go home and share with his family the experiences of his first months in school.
They sat at the same table, and he talked. Donna felt old and anxious. She checked her watch and tried to listen, and returned his thumbs-up sign when he got up to leave.
He hesitated by the table.
“Bye,” she said. “Have a great time.”
“Yeah, thanks.” He didn’t go. “See you next year, huh?”
Donna looked up at him, puzzled; then she managed to laugh. “I…here’s to next year,” she replied, raising her empty coffee cup.
When she emerged from her final class, snow instantly settled on her hair and dusted her lashes. She walked slowly to the bus stop, her bag heavy on her shoulder. At the curb she searched the street in both directions, squinting against the snow to peer at every figure.
Her throat tightened until it hurt. The bus came and she climbed aboard, squeezed past bodies and umbrellas and bags spilling into the aisle until she found a seat amid the moist warmth and the smell of wet wool.
The vehicle jolted forward. She rubbed a smeary patch on the steamed-up window. Had she expected him to be waiting outside the school for her? She leaned her forehead against the clammy glass. Yes, she had expected that or, at least, she’d hoped.
“EVAN, YOU’RE A show-off,” Sara yelled, lunging for, and missing, the tennis ball he shot across the net. “And if you don’t start hitting some to me, I’m going to quit.” She glanced at Donna. “We’re going to quit, aren’t we?”
Donna did a jig and planted her feet in time to return her father’s next serve with a lob that sent him dashing for, then crashing into, the corner of the bubble.
“You missed!” Sara chortled, mimicking Donna’s jig. “Sure you shouldn’t be the one over here with me and put Donna over there on her own?”
“Donna,” he called, ignoring Sara. “This is Australian tennis, remember? I get to use
the alleys, you two don’t.”
Donna put her hands on her hips. “That shot wasn’t anywhere near the alley.”
“Come on. It was alley. Look, here’s the mark.” He jabbed his racket at one of a thousand ball scuffs on the court.
Sara started to laugh. “The old man’s tired, Donna. I knew it. Now he’s grasping at straws.”
Donna joined the laughter and changed places with her father. As she passed the window to the lobby she hesitated, and watched a man straighten from the reception desk. For an instant her blood seemed to stop, only to pound through her veins again when she saw him turn. He was much shorter than Bruce, and darker. She pressed a fist into her stomach.
“You okay, honey?” Her father had turned back and come to her side, bending over her. He looked into the lobby, then down into her face and grimaced. “Is every guy you see Bruce, Donna? Is that it?”
She nodded.
“I thought the tennis was a good idea to take your mind off things. It’s not working, huh?”
“I guess not.” Her voice was lost in the great canvas bubble.
Sara came to them silently and slipped her arm through Donna’s. “You having another sad spell?”
Had she been so bad at covering her feelings? Had they known all along that she felt time was running out and now she’d been out of school a week and Bruce hadn’t contacted her, that she was starting to give up?
“You know,” she said levelly. “I think I’d like to go home and light a fire. We could pick up the Christmas tree on the way and decorate tonight.”
“Great idea, don’t you think so, Sara?” her father said, too heartily.
“Terrific,” her mother agreed, with a smile that only intensified the worry in her eyes.
They went through the motions of being cheerful, picking up Jim from the sitter, making much of selecting just the right tree, laughing at Evan as he struggled to straighten it in its stand.
They were laughing when the phone rang.
Evan picked it up. “McGraths’,” he said, a little out of breath. He bent over until Donna couldn’t see his face. “Hi…thanks. Happy holidays to you, too…fine, how are all of you? Yes, of course, she’s right here. Donna?”
She jerked the tinsel garland she held through her fingers, and felt the cord cut her thumb.
“Donna, it’s…uh…Ray. He wants to wish you a happy holiday.”
For a moment, she couldn’t move. When she did, it was with a sensation of unreality. Why couldn’t it have been Bruce who’d called? As soon as she formed the thought, she hated herself for it.
Raymond Tsung answered her soft “hello” eagerly, and she heard anxiety in his deliberately light comments. How was she? How was school? He and his family had sent her a little gift which should arrive soon. And as they talked she warmed slightly, then warmed more, until she could feel again the kinship she’d felt with him the last time they’d met.
“I guess I should let you get back to your family,” he said, after a pause had lasted too long.
“We’re decorating the Christmas tree,” she replied lamely.
“Enjoy, my dear,” Raymond said. “Are you…are you happy?”
What could she say, either answer would be…her philosophy prof would have laughed. Neither answer would be satisfactory. She turned her back to the room and evaded the question. “Have you…seen…”
“We had lunch. Several weeks ago. All he wanted to talk about was you, Donna. But I guess that was easy for both of us.” He laughed, and she liked him even more.
A minute later, she hung up and stood bracing her weight on the table. All Bruce could do a few weeks ago was talk about her. What had happened to make him stop caring?
“Come on, Donna,” Jim said impatiently. “Help with the tree.”
DONNA’S FEET CRUNCHED into frozen grass, thudded on ice-dead earth. Mist-veiled shafts of white light sprayed skyward from the morning horizon. Donna ran on, listening to her footfalls, her breathing, watching the vapor clouds her breath made, and the awakening of another winter day. The last day of the year.
It was all over. The packages, the ribbons and bows, the great meals she’d helped her mother and Aunt Christine prepare, the treks to Christine and Ben’s wonderful, confused house that was truly a home. The holidays were over. And Bruce hadn’t come, or called, or written, except for a Christmas card sending them all his “love.”
Blessing her luck at living so near Stanley Park, she veered back toward the path, deliberately cutting this way and that through slender, leafless trees. I’m practicing for ski season, she told herself, knowing her friends had been skiing Whistler and Grouse Mountain for weeks and she’d steadfastly refused to go.
She reached the winding pathway again and headed deeper into the park, past the cricket oval. Then she opened up, and sprinted. I mustn’t think. I mustn’t think. But she was breathing through her mouth, and she began to feel in her throat the ache that was almost never gone now. Her nose ran, and she sniffed.
A little while longer and she’d be back in school. Donna heard a noise and instantly realized it had been her own cry raked past an indrawn breath.
Another runner was behind her now. She remembered being afraid of strangers in the park when she was alone. She wasn’t this morning. She felt strong, and angry, and…immune.
The other runner’s shoes made a different noise from hers. They cracked sharply on the concrete. Cracked. Like street shoes, a man’s dress shoes. Her stomach dropped, and she ran faster and could tell she was pulling away.
At the next bend, she turned and ran backward. And stopped.
The man who loped toward her looked like a parody of Sherlock Holmes, a tall, contemporary version. His long camel’s-hair coat flapped. A paisley scarf had come loose, streaming under his arms, and he wore a shapeless tweed hat jammed on his head.
“Donna!” Her name came to her on a pant. “Wait, will you?”
She couldn’t speak. Someone had snatched all the air from the world. Her blood trembled in her veins.
A few yards away from her he slowed, then walked until he stopped, too far away to touch, close enough to see…so clearly.
“You never called,” Bruce said, “or wrote.”
“Neither did…did you.”
He pressed a hand to his side. “I know. I promised I wouldn’t.”
“So did I.”
“I know, but I hoped…I mean…Oh, Donna, this has been the longest winter of my life.”
“Mine too.” Why couldn’t she move?
“I almost persuaded myself I should stay out of your life. Give you a chance to get further into school, but—”
“Is that why you waited so long to come?”
He nodded, still holding his side.
“What’s the matter?” Donna asked. “Do you hurt?”
He pulled off the hat and stuffed it into his pocket. “A stitch, that’s all. I could be just a tiny bit out of shape.”
She covered her mouth.
“Don’t laugh,” he threatened. “You wouldn’t have wanted me running alone in Golden Gate Park.”
Then she did laugh…until she realized she was laughing alone.
“Donna,” he said, “have you had enough time to decide? Would you still be happy somewhere warmer than this? San Francisco, say? Married to a grumpy lawyer who loves you more than he knows how to say?”
She opened her mouth, but no sound came.
Bruce took another step and held out his arms. “Say yes, sweetheart. Please say yes.”
Finally she could move, she could cannon forward full tilt until she barreled into his chest and wrapped her arms around him. He reeled slightly, then framed her face with his hands. She looked up into his anxious blue eyes, glanced at his hair, awry and spiky, and back at his eyes.
“Say something, Donna.”
“Yes.” She buried her face in his shoulder and felt herself lifted from the ground and whirled around.
“Thank God,” he yelled,
and he set her down, still holding her close. “But remember, my love. Yes is forever.”
“Yes,” Donna said. “Yes, yes.”
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6457-4
YES IS FOREVER
Copyright © 1987 by Stella Cameron and Virginia Myers.
Originally published under the name Jane Worth Abbott.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
www.HQNBooks.com
Yes Is Forever Page 26
