by Cindy Gerard
He wished that he could have saved her that anxiety. But he’d needed some time. To absorb. To digest. To acclimatize himself to the glut of information he’d received today from both Ellie and Doc.
After church he’d taken her out to dinner at the Dusk to Dawn, Sundown’s one and only restaurant, bar and youth center all rolled up into one. She had protested at first. He’d overridden her feeble excuses. He’d wanted to show her a thousand reasons why he didn’t put any stock in her fears.
Afterward he’d been sorry that he’d forced the experience on her. She’d been uncomfortable, self-conscience. Miserable. While he recognized some of the faces, many, he didn’t. And many had stared—or tried not to.
He needed time to deal with that, too. With what those stares did to her.
So once they’d gotten home, he’d changed into his work clothes, kissed her tenderly and saddled up Bud. Then he’d headed out to check the herd. That had been nearly three hours ago. He wasn’t really needed out here. Most of the mares had dropped their foals before he’d returned to Shiloh last week, but there were a few holdouts, so it was a good excuse to see how they were making out.
But she’d known. She’d known as well as he had that he needed some room to draw conclusions, make decisions, deal with what he now knew that he’d never known before.
There were so many terms. So much information. So much of it hard to accept. Big deal. It was hard for him; she lived it. What must it be like for her?
He dismounted, ground-reined Bud and let him graze. Then he lay down on his back in the pasture grass. Crossing his arms behind his head, he stared at wispy clouds that drifted like mare’s tails across acres of blue Montana sky. He used to do this a lot when he was a kid. Laze around in the sun. Think and brood. Later in the summer this pasture would be alive with colors—the brilliant yellow of wild buttercups, the burnt orange of Indian paintbrush, the soft lavender of harebells.
Lavender, like Ellie’s eyes.
Ellie.
“Partial complex seizures,” Doc had said. “No, no son. Surgery’s not a good option for her, although we did consider it for a time. She does well on her medication.”
Anticonvulsants. Phenytoin, phenobarbital. And more. Some he couldn’t pronounce or remember.
“She hates them,” he’d told Doc, confiding what Ellie had confessed, trying to understand why.
“I know. She remembers when she first started on them, or the times we’ve had to adjust. The side effects are always more noticeable when we have to mess with her meds, but then her body settles in, the chemistry becomes more balanced and the effects aren’t as severe.”
Dry mouth, periods of depression, sluggishness.
The epilepsy wasn’t bad enough. She had to live with the treatment, too.
“The medication has done a remarkable job managing her seizures,” Doc had added. “We always have to keep that in mind.”
“What causes them?”
Doc had shrugged. “It’s not always something we can pinpoint. With Ellie we suspect it was a birth trauma. And at this point it really doesn’t matter. The results and the treatments are the same.”
“What happens? What, exactly, happens to her?”
Doc had frowned as he thought to formulate a response. “There are innumerable cells in our brains, and they normally work in perfect harmony—relaying the electrical and chemical signals that allow us to tell a story or clap our hands or even to feel happy. With Ellie things work smoothly most of the time. But sometimes certain brain cells go haywire and misfire. That’s when she has a seizure.”
More helplessness. More questions. “What triggers them?”
Doc had shrugged again. “When she was little, it was usually a fever. Any time she cut a tooth, got the flu. Puberty was especially hard on her—all the hormonal changes. Now her seizures are mostly controlled. But sometimes, if she gets too stressed or too tired…” He’d trailed off, lifted a hand as if to say, you never know. “Sometimes it’s nothing at all. It just happens. No explanation.”
He remembered what she’d told him this morning. “She says she hears chimes.”
“Her aura,” Doc had said with a nod. “With Ellie, her warning aura comes in the form of chimes. Sometimes, if she tunes in soon enough, she can actually forestall an episode, or at least diminish the severity if she can lie down in a dark, quiet room and just wait it out.”
“But not always.”
“No. Unfortunately, not always.”
The shadow of a bald eagle, its wingspread as wide as a small car, sailed overhead. Lee watched it soar, wished for that kind of freedom for Ellie.
“What do I do?” he’d asked Doc. “When she has a seizure. What do I do?”
“Just give her room. If you’re around when it happens don’t crowd her. And unless it lasts for more than two or three minutes, don’t panic. Anything more, you get on the phone and you call me. She’ll be in a form of suspended consciousness. You may think she’s alert, but she’s not. She may speak, but she doesn’t know she’s talking and what she says may not make sense to you. She may roll her wrist, or pick at things… Clare once told me that she usually has busy hands…like she’s buttoning and unbuttoning nonexistent buttons. That sort of thing. She won’t be violent. She won’t be self-destructive. She may lie down or just sit. But if you crowd her, she might become frightened, distraught. So you just leave her be, make sure that if she’s up and walking that you keep tabs on her so she doesn’t hurt herself.
“And when it’s over,” Doc continued, “you help her cope. She won’t remember it but she’ll have a humdinger of a headache, and she’ll be disoriented for a while. She’ll also be as exhausted as if she’d run a marathon. And then she’ll have to mourn the fact that she’s lost a little bit of herself again. I think that’s the hardest for her. Knowing that she was completely vulnerable, not knowing what she did, how she acted.”
As the sun beat down, Lee remembered the way his breath had felt huge and thick in his chest as he’d listened to Doc. “How does she deal with it?” he’d asked aloud, without even knowing he’d said the words.
Doc had laid a hand on his arm. “Son, she deals with it like a trooper. She’s one of the most adjusted individuals I have the pleasure of knowing. You’ve probably already figured that out for yourself, though. She could be angry. She could be bitter. She could be frightened and insecure. She’s none of those things. Oh, I know she has her moments, but, for the long haul, she’s solid.”
Lee closed his eyes. He’d given her some of those moments with his own insecurity, his own ignorance and inability to get this out in the open. She had been so right this morning in the barn. He did want to fix things for her. He was a man of action. He felt crippled by his inability to help her, just as he was crippling her by not allowing her to be what she needed to be for him.
“Acceptance of herself, of her epilepsy are the most critical factors to help her live with it,” Doc had added meaningfully. “It’s also critical for you to accept it if you hope to develop the kind of relationship you’ll both need to see you through the tough times.”
Doc had looked at his boots, looked at the sky.
“But I reckon you’ve already got that part figured out, too. It’s the other part of the relationship that’s worrying you now.”
“I don’t want to hurt her,” he’d said quietly.
“But you want her,” Doc had concluded.
He’d pushed out a disgusted snort. “What does that make me?”
Lee hadn’t seen anything funny but Doc had laughed. “Why, it makes you a red-blooded American male, son. And it makes her a lucky woman. The only thing you could do to hurt her is to refuse to let her be a wife to you.
“Look, Lee, Ellie is experiencing all the feelings a bride is supposed to feel—along with some that no bride should have to contend with. She has to deal with the reality of her epilepsy—with the moments it steals from her life, the strength it saps from her psyche, with the cost
to her pride. Most of all she has to deal with the differential treatment she’s afraid she’s going to get from you because of it.”
Doc had placed a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “She needs the physical part of your relationship as much as you do. Probably more and, given the male libido, that’s saying quite a lot,” he added with a chuckle.
Lee’s scowl must have told Doc how little humor he’d found in the situation.
“Take her home, son. Love her. Give her babies.”
“Babies?” He’d looked at Doc as if he’d sprouted horns.
“You don’t want babies?”
He’d cupped his nape, rolled his shoulders. “Could that be good for her?”
“There’s a risk, sure, but with proper monitoring and special care, she can have babies.”
Lee hadn’t heard anything beyond the word risk. There would be no babies. He would never put her at risk and was relieved to know that one of the medications she was taking to control hormonal imbalances that could worsen her symptoms was, in essence, also a form of birth control.
So that risk, at least, was factored out—but wasn’t he putting her at risk right now? As he stalled for time out here on the mountain and left her alone to wonder and worry about the conclusions he had drawn, the decisions he had made—wasn’t he putting her at risk with his distance?
He sat up, propped a forearm over an upraised knee and looked toward home. Where his wife waited. For him. To make her a woman.
Not much rattled him. This did. He didn’t want to let her down, was determined that he wouldn’t.
He rose to his feet, walked over to Bud, snagged the reins and swung into the saddle.
The setting sun followed him home.
Home to the house where, somehow, without his being aware of it happening, everything that mattered waited along with the light that burned in the bedroom window.
Eight
Ellie sat in front of her vanity mirror. The low, wide bench was upholstered in an antique satin tapestry of ivory and pink. The triple-fold antique mirror was large, its beveled glass encased in aged, lustrous oak. She could see herself from three angles; each one revealed her uncertainty about whether she’d done the right thing today.
Maybe Lee really hadn’t wanted to hear some of the things she’d told him this morning. Maybe he hadn’t liked what Doc had told him, either. She’d seen their heads together after church. While Peg had pumped her for information and she’d done her best to assure her that everything was wonderful and that Peg’s plan had worked, she’d worried that they had actually drifted further apart instead of closer together.
Hadn’t he left her alone all afternoon? Hadn’t he ridden out with excuses about checking on the herd and then stayed away until almost sundown?
She dropped her silver-filigree brush to her lap, ran her fingers across the bristles. She didn’t want to spend another night alone in her bed.
Why had she told him so much? Why had she told him that one story in particular? She stared, without seeing, at the mirror. A soft light burned by the bed, illuminating her reflection. She’d had her bath, pulled on her old pink chenille robe and sat down to brush her hair.
She wouldn’t wear her honeymoon gown tonight. She figured there would be no need. If Lee hadn’t wanted her before, he couldn’t want her, now that he knew so many more things about her.
Some places were harder to go to than others. The day that she’d told him about this morning had been one of them. She’d never talked about it before. Not even with her mother. She’d been fifteen and she’d been scared. Why, oh, why had she told Lee?
Because he’d felt so solid and strong as she’d sat on his lap that the story had just tumbled out.
“I rode Bud up to the north pasture one day,” she’d begun, hearing her voice as if it belonged to someone else, seeing herself in the sunshine riding Bud bareback, his hide warm and solid and wide between her legs. “I was fifteen. I’d taken Daddy lunch. On the way back…” She’d stopped, swallowed, concentrated on remembering the warmth of the sun, the bear grass and fireweed dancing in the breeze, the hawk she’d spotted riding the wind currents.
“On the way back, I cut over to Mile High Pass so I could ride part of the way on the road. I’d seen a spring fawn at Miller’s Creek the week before, and I thought maybe I’d get lucky and it would be there again.”
She hadn’t been able to look at him as she’d talked, and even now, all these hours later, she remembered staring at her hands that were gripped so tightly together her knuckles had turned white.
“This old truck came barreling down the road, kicking up gravel, stirring up a dust trail. It was almost on Bud and me before they saw us and slammed on the brakes. Bud bolted and dumped me in the ditch.”
Lee’s big hands had stroked her back.
“I wasn’t hurt. Humiliated, but not hurt. I took off walking after him but he was hell-bent on home. I was still dusting myself off when I heard them behind me.”
She stopped. Swallowed. “I’d…I’d seen them before. Once at the feed store. Once at the Stop and Shop. They were brothers—new in Sundown—and I’d heard Momma and Dad say that they were bad news.”
Just like this morning when she’d told her story to Lee, her vision got blurry, and she felt the hot sting of tears, tasted the salt of them in the corner of her mouth.
“I…I could smell their breath when they…when they started walking beside me. They’d been drinking.”
She’d felt Lee’s hard body tense beneath her. Heard him say her name.
“I was so scared. They were…they were so mean. They laughed and made fun of me. ‘You’re Ellie, right? Ellie Shiloh? We heard about you. You throw fits, don’t ya? Crazy as loon, right? But hey—you’re kinda cute so what do you say Ellie? What you got under that shirt there? How about goin’ crazy with us?”’
Even now she remembered both the humiliation of that day and the contrast of Lee’s arms wrapped around her this morning. For a moment all the hurt, all the shame those boys had made her feel, had eased back into the past where it belonged. Where it couldn’t touch her.
“They hurt you,” he’d said, his voice hard and cold and edged with something that traced a trail of fear down her spine and made her shiver.
“No. They didn’t touch me. They just humiliated me. And scared me. I got so scared that I…I had a seizure. When I came…came back to myself, they were gone. They’d just left me there.”
She’d swallowed, stared at her hands. “They didn’t know if I would be all right or if I needed help. They just left me. Like—”
She hadn’t said it. But she’d felt what she’d left unsaid many times over the years. Like she was nothing—or worse than nothing. Like she was something revolting.
She’d tried for a smile. “Guess I scared them more than they scared me, huh?”
Lee had been quiet for a long time when she’d finally looked up and met his eyes. She’d seen rage, compassion and something she hadn’t understood then but thought she understood now.
He wasn’t here. That was all the understanding she needed.
She heard a sound behind her—the creak of a floorboard. Her heart jumped, with something that was more surprise than hope.
She didn’t turn around. For the longest time she didn’t even look up. She stared at her hands, at her fingers wrapped around the silver brush handle and wished she knew what to do, what to say to the man who stood in the doorway to her bedroom.
Finally she gathered her courage, lifted her head and met his reflection in her vanity mirror.
And her heart skipped several beats.
He’d showered—evidently in the basement, because she’d never heard him in the upstairs bathroom. Like the night they’d come home from the Fergusons, his hair was still wet. She should be used to seeing him this way. Her heart shouldn’t flutter so. But it did as he stood there in his bare feet and blue jeans, his shirt hanging open, the tails falling loose at his hips.
Between the open placket of his shirt, she could see the softly curling hair that covered his chest and arrowed down his hard abdomen to disappear beneath jeans that were zipped but not snapped. Her gaze was riveted there, at that spot where denim met flesh, and the slight rise and fall of that beautifully taut skin was the only indication that he was a living, breathing man, not a figment of her imagination.
She swallowed and finally raised her gaze to his. And her heart stopped. In the diluted bedroom light, in the reflection of her mirror, she saw the deep-blue of his irises, the dark intensity of his bold stare.
He watches you.
In her mind she heard Peg’s words, remembered how he had looked at her the night of the shivaree.
He was watching her now…the way he had watched her last night on the porch, just before he’d kissed her.
And then she heard Lee’s words, like a song that floated on the cusp of her memory.
Not want you? I have wanted you for what seems like forever.
Her reservations forgotten, her insecurities locked back in that place from which they had escaped, she held his gaze.
And smiled.
Her smile was heartbreaking, head-spinning. It was full of wonder, full of trust. Full of a love Lee was sure he didn’t deserve but was determined to never betray. She had more than enough reason to feel angry and confused and insecure. And yet she sat there, with her strong, brave heart. Waiting for him. Eager for him. Smiling for him.
He wanted her so much in that moment, he thought he would explode with it. She wouldn’t want to hear it, but now, more than ever, he needed to take care with her. Not just because of what he’d learned about her disease—but because of how huge his need had grown. And because she deserved the best he could give her.
And, yeah, there was more to it than that. He’d not only learned things about her today, he’d learned a few things about himself. It was still a tough pill to swallow, but if he were being utterly, brutally honest, he had to admit that it hadn’t been Ellie as much as himself that he’d really been trying to protect all this time. What he felt for her…what she did to him.
