Mountain Song

by Ruby Laska

  But what about the way she’d touched him? The hunger in her kiss? The path of her hands still smoldered on his skin. Her passion was real. Andy would wager everything that Claudia’s had not been the embrace of a woman whose heart was already committed .

  “No,” he said abruptly, deciding, shaking his head. “No. I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

  “Not after the way you—after what just happened here.”

  He watched as deep color rose in her face.

  “I—don’t know exactly what happened. But what I do know is that I love Paul.”

  “But you want me.”

  Silence. Her gaze fixed on a spot past his shoulder, and her thick lashes lowered to conceal any emotion in her eyes.

  “Admit it, Claudia,” Andy demanded, refusing to back down. Lack of options made him deadly stubborn. Having been born with his back against the wall, standing his ground had become a way of life for him. He’d spent the better part of his professional life trying to learn the art of compromise, but at this moment he felt like the self he’d thought he’d left long behind. Like a struggling 24 year old again, ready to burn it all down to prove some principal he wasn’t sure he could even define.

  “All right,” she said softly. “I still...respond to you, Andy.”

  Once the words were spoken, Andy felt not a rush of triumph, but a frustration, deep and wide, building inside him.

  He wanted her. She wanted him. He was a grown man now, a respected professional with diplomas and awards. His car was paid for, he owned a home, had a comfortable bank account. He was a man who woman aspired to be with.

  And still he wasn’t good enough for Claudia Canfield.

  “Congratulations, Claudia,” he said, tightly. “So you’ve found yourself someone. Someone with the right pedigree, the right name in the social register, whose ancestors came over here on the right damn boat. I’m glad. When he holds you at night, I hope you remember every one of those advantages. Count ‘em good, because they’ll have to make up for a hell of a lot of—”

  Passion. Fire. Heat. What they’d shared—what they’d almost stumbled into again, today, he was sure was nothing she’d ever come close to again. He sure hadn’t. Never in the string of women who’d briefly shared his life had he ever felt something even close to what he felt with her.

  And yet she wanted no part of him, simply because of who he was. Or, more aptly, who he was not.

  He didn’t bother to finish his sentence.

  “Forget it,” he muttered, turning to go. “I’ll put together some materials for you. The standard stuff on nursing homes and other assisted living alternatives. You’ve got a lot of options in the area. I’m sure you’ll want to discuss it with your father. I can go over it with you or, if you prefer, I can have the social worker meet with you. And I’ll schedule Bea to meet with Dr. Dupree, the specialist I think would be appropriate. If, that is, you have no objections.”

  “Fine,” Claudia sighed, pressing a palm to her temple and squeezing her eyes shut. It was as if all the life had drained out of her.

  The ding of the microwave roused Claudia from her semi-dazed state. She rose from the kitchen table and stirred the contents of the frozen meal, a mélange of pasta and unidentifiable vegetables in a white sauce.

  Claudia rubbed at her eyes and glanced at the clock. Nearly eight. The clock, at least, was battery-powered and so hadn’t been affected by the power outage. When Claudia had returned from the grocery late that morning, the electricity was back on, and she’d spent half an hour replacing light bulbs and resetting the digital displays on appliances and clocks, until the house had been returned to some semblance of normalcy.

  For several hours Claudia had dusted, scrubbed, and organized. Somehow she kept putting off her visit to the hospital. She would get the house put back together. Because her grandmother was going to return to her home, no matter what Andy said. Claudia would see to that.

  But now her arms felt leaden, her face tired. Between the hard physical work of the early part of the day, her confrontation with Andy (she didn’t even want to think of what preceded it) and the hours she’d spent with Bea at the hospital, she felt exhausted. Overwhelmed. Beaten.

  A knock splintered the silence, and then she heard the door swing open.

  “Claudia?”

  Andy. She sank back into the straight-back kitchen chair. He would insist on coming in, no matter what she said, so there was no point in trying to talk him out of it.

  She’d dreaded seeing him at the hospital. Bea, for her part, kept mum on the subject, not mentioning Andy at all. But then Bea hadn’t had a lot to say today about anything.

  When the hours passed without his appearance, Claudia began to hope that she might not have to deal with Andy again today.

  No such luck.

  “Hello, Claudia.”

  Andy’s large frame filled the kitchen doorway, and he hesitated. Claudia’s hands went to her hair, smoothing, twisting, before she became aware of the gesture and forced her hands back on the table, crossed awkwardly like some defendant in a courtroom.

  He had been right earlier: there was still something powerful between them. Looking up at Andy, Claudia felt overpowered, disadvantaged. She tried to distance herself, look at him critically, anxious to isolate exactly what it was that drew her with such irrational attraction. If she could understand it, she could overcome it.

  And so she searched. A day’s growth of beard only sculpted the planes of his face further, giving him a sort of devil-may-care appeal that contradicted the exhaustion apparent in the deep circles under his eyes. Even his hospital scrubs couldn’t dilute his unconscious sensuality. Andy Woods moved like a tiger, quietly, deliberately, with a coiled power simmering below the surface. As he leaned on the door jamb just a few feet away from her, Claudia felt his draw on her as powerfully as that first time she spotted him through a cloud of powder as she swooshed into a tight stop at the base of the lift line.

  “Sit down,” Claudia said warily, motioning to the chair across the table from her. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer in the hospitality department. Shall I heat up another Lean Cuisine?”

  That earned her a short, mirthless laugh. “Thanks. That’s even right off my usual menu, but I think I’ll pass.”

  He slid into the chair across from her. The tile-topped table was small, and his knees nearly touched hers. Idly he removed his plastic hospital ID card and flipped it back and forth over his fingers. Claudia watched, grateful for the diversion.

  “You’ve been working hard,” Andy finally said, after an uncomfortable silence stretched between them. “I barely recognize the place. I can’t imagine where you’ve hidden all the junk. And it smells a hell of a lot better in here, too.”

  “Lysol, Windex, Pledge, Comet,” Claudia ticked off on her fingers. “With a liberal dose of potpourri. I couldn’t find the good stuff, like Bea makes from her flower garden, so I had to settle for that fake pine stuff.” She wrinkled her nose, but in truth it was such a huge improvement over the musty smell she’d driven out that she felt a little surge of accomplishment. And pleasure that he’d taken note.

  “And you got the windows open. Nice breeze.”

  “Yeah. They’re saying it won’t get below sixty tonight, and so I thought...”

  Claudia let her voice trail away. Even silence was better than exchanging banal pleasantries with Andy. Twelve hours ago she’d writhed in his arms. Eleven hours ago they’d faced off over a chasm of history and hurt.

  And now they were chatting at the table like a pair of housewives.

  “Well.” Andy reached for the briefcase he’d placed on the floor, drawing out a thick sheaf of papers, which he dropped on the table with a heavy thud. “I understand you spent some time with Bea today.”

  “Yes. I was there for most of the afternoon and through her dinner. She, um, dropped off for the last half hour or so.”

  Andy nod
ded, shuffling some pamphlets at the top of the stack. He cleared his throat and drummed his fingers lightly on the papers, but still didn’t meet her eyes.

  “She...didn’t look very good,” Claudia added. It felt awkward, talking to him like this, but he was Bea’s doctor. The rest of it—whatever it was between them—was unimportant. Ridiculous to focus on it at all, when she would soon be gone, Lake Tahoe relegated for a second time to her history.

  “How so?”

  “Oh, tired, I suppose, and thinner, more lines than I remember around her eyes. And she was so quiet. I kept trying to come up with conversation but I couldn’t seem to keep her interest. In fact I was still talking when she fell asleep.”

  Claudia felt a catch in her voice and cleared her throat. She stood and busied herself scraping out the untouched meal, then rinsing her utensils in the sink.

  “She was tired,” Andy said. “I’m sure it cost her quite a bit to keep up appearances yesterday for you.”

  Claudia stilled, holding a fork in the running water.

  “What do you mean, appearances? Yesterday Bea was herself, every bit as witty and wonderful as she’s always been.”

  “Yes.” His tone was patient, professional. “I noticed. It was nice to have her back with us, even if she was directing her sharp tongue in my direction. Look, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. Yesterday was an aberration. Her affect in the last couple of months has been flat, even before her injury. The pain is always on her mind. I think that to pull it together for your benefit drained her.”

  Claudia slowly set the fork down and turned off the water, then leaned against the sink with her back to the table where Andy sat, patiently tearing holes in her heart.

  “You sound so...clinical.”

  “Well, I am a physician, Claudia. I’m trained to diagnose, to look at things critically—”

  “But we’re talking about Bea here! About my grandmother. Do you have any idea—”

  She bit her lip rather than let the catch in her voice turn into tears. “When I was four,” she said at last, “Bea sent me a bug collecting kit. There was a glass jar and these special tweezers and a magnifying glass and a net. Everyone else bought me dolls and fancy dresses and ballet slippers.

  “I loved that net,” she added. “I brought it out here when I came to stay with her and Grandpa Bud for a few weeks in the summer. Every night we filled that jar up with fireflies. They let me stay up as late as I wanted, and we’d sit out there thinking up names for every one of those bugs. And then we always let them go.”

  Andy was silent. She hadn’t talked about these memories, even thought of them, for years. Life had gotten so complicated; it was all she could do to get through each day. Today, though, after seeing Bea, the memories were jogged loose in her mind, and now, even with Andy sitting a few feet away, she suddenly wanted—needed—to talk about them.

  “And I remember when Daddy and I had a big fight about whether I could get my ears pierced. I think I was thirteen and I thought I would just die if he didn’t let me. Bea got on the phone and called him up and wore him down until he agreed, and then she sent me my first pair of earrings, silver with turquoise beads. I still have them.”

  “Have you always called her Bea?” Andy asked after a moment.

  Claudia managed a small smile. “Yeah. She never liked the ‘Grandma’ bit. Said it reminded her of old ladies who wore plastic rain bonnets and played bridge. Who sat around all day letting life pass them by. She was never one to sit still.”

  Until now. Not only was she confined to one place, she had barely been able to find the strength to sit up today in her hospital bed. Claudia had been unable to interest her in the cookies that the volunteer brought, or even a cup of tea or glass of water.

  Resolving to change the subject, Claudia swiped at her damp eyelashes and then swung around, leaning on the counter and surveying Andy.

  “What about you?” she asked. “What did you call your grandparents?”

  Andy frowned slightly, then dropped his glance to the table. “I never knew them. Dad and Mom were in their forties when they had me and...”

  And all his other relatives were dead, or else just so far away as to be nameless, faceless mysteries to him. His father never finished school, could barely read. He had come West with his wife looking for work in the once-active mines, work that slowly petered out, leaving him no choice other than taking any job he could get. He bused tables and washed dishes in the winter, and took on the most back-breaking work outdoors in he summer while his wife cleaned houses. When their miracle child came, the one doctors told them they would never have, Henry Woods worked all the harder to make sure his son would have the advantages he never had.

  No, there’d been no grandparents. No aunts, uncles, or cousins, either. Andy had a dim, soft, heart-tugging image of his mother, but she’d been taken before his fifth birthday.

  “I’m so sorry,” Claudia said quickly, clapping her hand over her mouth. “I wasn’t thinking. My mind was on Bea and—please, just ignore me.”

  “Forget it.” A little too quick, his voice a little too hard. So he had no relatives—what of it? Lots of people never saw their families. Others couldn’t stand them, and wouldn’t that be worse?

  It was just like Claudia, though, to be so wrapped up in her own life that she forgot all about those around her. He’d told her about his parents and his upbringing—he didn’t talk about it often, of course. But that made her lapse all the more egregious. It wasn’t something that came easily, and when he’d trusted her enough to share his history with her, so long ago, he’d counted on her to understand. Losing their mothers early was something they had in common, a shared pain that brought them together despite all their differences.

  But she’d forgotten, tossed his secrets aside like she discarded everything else. He had to face it: very little mattered to Claudia besides her own immediate concerns.

  Still, he had to admit, it wasn’t the Claudia he thought he knew who’d worn herself out cleaning the house today. He was surprised that she even knew what to do with a rag or a mop, that she was willing to scrub toilets and floors and windows. But she had, and without a word of complaint.

  “Look,” he said. “You’ve done a lot today. It was probably inconsiderate of me to bring all of this over tonight. Why don’t I just leave all this and you can read over it when you have a chance.”

  Claudia shrugged, a distant look in her eyes, and Andy wondered if his words had registered.

  “You think we should put Bea in a nursing home,” she said finally.”

  “That’s not what I said. I’m trying to bring your attention to her condition so you and your father and the rest of your family can start to think about alternatives—”

  “Which is another way of saying she belongs in a home. Do me a favor,” she added, walking past him into the living room, where she wearily settled into the couch, pulling a neatly folded afghan off the back and settling against it like a pillow. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not.” Impatience rose in Andy’s gut. Damn it, she wasn’t paying attention. “If you’d just read through this, we could have a conversation—an informed conversation—about the alternatives here. A nursing home is just one of several solutions.”

  “Read,” Claudia murmured. “Study. That’s the way you always operate, isn’t it? If it’s on paper, great. If it has facts and figures, so much the better. Did you ever once in your life rely on your intuition, Andy? Ever make a decision using your heart rather than your mind?”

  Andy stood and followed her into the other room. “I can’t believe you said that. Don’t Canfields calculate every decision? Don’t forget, you’re the one who taught me that there’s a bottom line for every choice.”

  Claudia’s sleepy eyes flew open and regarded him with the sparks of anger.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Claudia. I’ve been on the losing end of one of your comparison shoppi
ng expeditions, remember? When things got a little problematic for the two of us, what tipped the scales? Tell me that. What lured you home? Tired of picking up the tab every time we went out? My mattress too uncomfortable? My clothes too shabby to be seen with me? Don’t tell me about letting your heart guide you, sweetheart. I don’t for a minute think it had any place in your decision to leave me.”

  Claudia sat up straight and her skin drained of color. “How...” she began, then shut her mouth and stared at him with something that looked a lot like disbelief.

  Too far. He’d gone too far, again. What was it about her that took away any sense of discretion, of common sense? In the twenty four hours since he’d seen her again, he’d managed to anger her, hurt her, and keep coming back for more.

  “I’m sorry, again,” he sighed. “You know, I think I’d better say good night before I say anything else that I’m going to regret. I’ll have the social worker give you a call.”

  He was about to retrieve his briefcase, lighter now since he’d unburdened it of its stacks of literature, when her soft voice stopped him.

  “I know you called,” she said, so quietly he had to turn and look for proof that he’d heard right. He let the leather handle of the briefcase slip from his fingers, and against his better judgment returned to the living room. Remembering the broken springs in the lumpy chair he’d chosen earlier in the day, Andy lowered himself onto the couch, leaving some distance between himself and Claudia.

  “I know you called me, after I...left,” she repeated. “Daddy didn’t want me to know, but my sister Tina told me. Everyone was treating me like a child, letting me stay in bed half the day and bringing up food to my room. Tina finally told me you were calling me every day, but Daddy was yelling at you.”

  Andy would have liked to forget those calls. The represented a risk to his heart that he could ill afford, especially when each call met with the same response: “She has no interest in talking to you, young man.”

  “You could have told me yourself.” Andy shook his head, trying to adjust to this new information. He’d always thought Claudia had returned to a life that barely registered the interruption, resuming her tennis and shopping and whatever else she did. Staying in bed—grieving—were not part of the picture in his mind.