Karissa shrugged. “I didn’t know you’d ever gone through such a tragedy. I guess I thought your life had been pretty smooth.”
Brionney sat back on the bench and sighed. “It’s not something I go around announcing or anything. But I tell you—up until that point in my life it was the most traumatic thing that had happened to me. I wanted Jesse’s baby desperately. I mean, he treated Savannah like she was his, but our first baby together was special.”
“You mean Jesse’s not Savannah’s biological father?” Karissa’s asked slowly.
“No. I was married before. He left me.”
“You don’t sound too unhappy about it.”
“Derek’s leaving was the best thing for me and Savannah, though I didn’t know it at the time. Jesse and I were meant to be together. He’s a good father and husband. Derek wasn’t either of those.”
Karissa didn’t speak for a moment but watched the girls. Savannah, with her long, white-blonde hair, was pushing both Rosalie and Camille on the swings. “She looks just like you. Only with long hair.”
“My ex-husband has blonde hair and blue eyes too,” Brionney said without bitterness. “She does look like me, but I can see him in her also. But she’s Jesse’s now. My ex-husband allowed him to adopt her.”
They sat without speaking. The woman with the twins had taken both infants in her arms and was rocking them, love etched on her face. Karissa felt jealousy boil up in her chest.
“So you had the miscarriage before Camille,” she said, looking away from the mother and her babies.
“Yes. I got pregnant with Camille about three months later. I hoped I was having the twins, but I didn’t.” There was a touch of melancholy in Brionney’s voice.
“She’s very special, that Camille,” Karissa said. “It would have been good for you to have your twins, but then you wouldn’t have had Camille, would you?”
Brionney was silent for a long minute. “I never thought of it that way. You’re right. I wouldn’t trade Camille for them. How could I? It’s not a choice a mother could make. I’m glad I didn’t have to. That sort of puts things into perspective.” She turned to look at Karissa. “Thank you. Mostly, I’m fine with the past, but today I think I needed to be reminded of how special my little Camille is.”
Karissa laughed. “Anytime. And who knows? If you really feel you’ll see those babies again, maybe you’ll have them this time.”
“Oh, no,” Brionney said. “I think I’m beyond that dream for now. I can barely handle the three I have. I can wait until the Millennium to have my boys.”
Karissa thought it all nonsense. It was romantic to believe as Brionney did, but not realistic. Yet if it was true, Karissa’s own secret past could come back to haunt her some day—even more forcefully than it did now.
Oh, for a cigarette!
“You know,” Brionney said, “we buried the babies beneath the cherry tree in my sister’s yard—we were renting from her at the time. When we moved, I dug up the dirt, and of course there was nothing there. They were so tiny, and so much time had passed. Still, I put some of the dirt in a container, and on top of that I placed the two flat rocks we had used to mark the spot. I know it sounds strange, but it seems to help, having something tangible to remember them by.”
Karissa had glimpsed the plant container and wondered at the contents. “That doesn’t seem so strange to me,” she said. “Working for the hospital, I’ve learned it’s good for people to have something they can use to focus their grief. It actually helps in the healing process.”
“That’s a relief,” Brionney smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “I never told anyone besides Jesse because I thought I was losing it.”
“I think you’re doing just fine.” Karissa wished she had something on which to focus her own grief. But there was nothing—except those terrible dreams of a mother causing her baby’s death. Thankfully, those hadn’t returned since she’d stopped smoking.
“Come on,” she said to Brionney. “Enough of seriousness. Lets go find somewhere on this uncivilized island to buy ourselves an ice cream.”
* * * * *
Later that night, they ate baked halibut. The tasty morsels broke apart in Karissa’s mouth as she chewed slowly. She hadn’t liked fish before coming to Kodiak, but that was one more thing in her life that had changed.
“Next week, I want to take the girls with us,” Jesse said enthusiastically. “I’ve never gone saltwater fishing before. I can’t believe how big these fish are. Only one day, and we have enough for a week of fish!”
Karissa sighed. She liked halibut, but not that much. Fish is healthy, she consoled herself.
“I want to come too,” Brionney said.
Jesse’s dark eyes softened as they came to rest on his wife’s face. “Are you feeling better today?” he asked. “I mean, you look really good, like maybe you haven’t been so sick.”
Brionney glanced over at Karissa, one blue eye closing in a wink. She wore the eye liner Karissa had put on at the park, along with the burnt sienna lipstick, now partially smeared from dinner. The extra color made her face more alive than usual. “I feel pretty good,” Brionney said. “I think being on Kodiak agrees with me.”
At least someone besides Malcolm likes this prison, Karissa thought. But her husband looked so pleased that she didn’t say the words aloud.
Camille and Rosalie had satisfied their small appetites. “Can I take a bath?” Camille asked.
“Me too,” Rosalie said. “Can I take a bath too? I stink real bad.”
Brionney laughed. “Of course you can. There’s time before bed.”
“Please do,” Jesse said, plugging his nose and rolling his eyes. “Before my nose dies from the smell! Wow! How can such a little girl smell s-o-o-o-o bad?”
Rosalie giggled, her brown eyes dancing. “I smell bad!” she squealed. “I stink!” Camille leaned over to sniff her sister’s arm, and Savannah pinched her nose shut. Karissa laughed out loud.
While Brionney and Jesse went upstairs to bathe their brood and settle them in bed, Karissa and Malcolm cleared the table. They worked side by side, so close that Karissa could smell her husband’s freshly washed hair. She felt as if she needed a shower herself. During her outing with the girls, she’d worked up quite a sweat pushing them in the swing and running around the park. Her thin T-shirt clung to her body, and a slightly sour smell reached her nose.
“I need a shower,” she said as she rinsed the last dish and plopped it in the dishwasher.
“You look good to me,” Malcolm said.
“I stink!” Karissa mimicked Rosalie’s high-pitched voice.
Malcolm laughed. “You go ahead then. I’ll wipe down the table.”
Karissa kissed his cheek. “Thanks.” She walked to the doorway. “Oh, I just remembered. You never told me that Brionney had been married before.”
His eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know. How ’bout that.”
“She had Savannah with her first husband, and then married Jesse when Savannah was about one and a half.”
“He never told me,” Malcolm said. “Though I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t tell anyone if it was me.”
“What do you mean?” Karissa’s voice was sharper than she meant it to be.
“Nothing. Just that I wouldn’t want people to know if my wife had been married to another man before me. It’s a guy thing, you know.”
It was all Karissa could do to keep her voice calm. “I don’t think Jesse cares about her past. It’s not her fault. Brionney didn’t do anything wrong; her husband left her. I think Jesse’s just grateful to have her in his life.”
Malcolm shrugged. “If that’s so, why didn’t he tell me?”
“Maybe it never came up.”
“Maybe.” Malcolm gazed at her with a question in his eyes. “What does it matter to us? We don’t have any secrets like that.”
Karissa nodded numbly. She’d been right not to confide her secret to Malcolm. If he knew now, he’d only look at her with di
sgust and anger. “I’m going to shower.” She left him, feeling his eyes boring into her back.
She was in the shower a long time, scrubbing and scrubbing until her skin felt raw. Still she did not feel clean. Water could never wipe away her atrocious deed. Her face crumpled and she sobbed uncontrollably, letting the spray from the shower beat against her face and rinse the tears down to the tile and through the drain.
Chapter Ten
When the girls were settled in their room, Jesse sat on the edge of his bed, staring out into the evening light. In Provo it would be already dark, but here in Kodiak during the summer, the days were much longer. Through the window, a group of young cottonwoods stood in the still air. Their leaves were a dark green, and the grass around them was even greener. A rough wooden bench sat under the trees, circled by the lighter green of perennials which were at differing stages of bloom. Lazy hills surrounded the manicured lawn. The whole setup looked like a paradise, but he knew that inside this house things were far from perfect.
“I saw Malcolm smoking this morning,” he said.
Brionney dropped the nightgown she was taking from the tall oak dresser. Jesse wondered if the dresser was something else Malcolm had made in his youth.
“You saw him?” she asked, coming to sit beside him.
He nodded. “I walked into his studio to tell him I was ready to go, and he was standing with his back toward the door, staring at all those guns he has hanging on the walls. He was smoking, all right. All this time I thought the smoke smell was lingering around him because it was embedded in his clothes—like it is in their furniture. But he’s still smoking.”
“What did you do?”
“I did what I should have done in the first place. I went back into the kitchen and waited for a few minutes, then I yelled for him and made a lot of noise on my way through the garage. When I got back to the studio, he was sitting at his desk without the cigarette. I could still smell it, of course, but he didn’t seem to notice.”
“Smokers don’t usually notice the smell,” Brionney said, wrinkling her nose. Her blue eyes brimmed with the sadness she felt at this news. “Poor Karissa. She’s so hopeful that quitting smoking will get them a baby. She’s not going to like this.”
“You won’t tell her, will you?”
Brionney grimaced. “Not me. This is between them. But isn’t there anything we can do? I thought by being here we could help. Maybe I was wrong.”
“I know what you mean. It’s so strange to me to be in this situation. Malcolm was the one who first taught me the gospel. I know he had a testimony. I felt it back then.”
“Yet you weren’t baptized until years later.”
“My fault, not his. I was afraid to hurt my parents.”
“I wonder what happened.”
“From what I can gather, nothing really happened. He simply let it go.”
“So what can we do?”
Jesse’s answer came after a long pause. “Love him, I guess. Just love them both.”
“I already do,” she said softly.
“Me too.” He stood, stifling a yawn. “I guess I’ll go check on the girls.”
* * * * *
Karissa was taking a long time in the shower. Malcolm had finished cleaning the table and counter tops and now slipped up the kitchen stairs, past the room where Jesse and Brionney slept, to the girls’ room. From the light coming in the window he could see Savannah in a bed on one side of the room and the two smaller girls snuggled together in the single bed on the other side. The room was painted white, now shadow-filled in the fading light, and bare except for the picture of a smiling Jesus surrounded by children of every nationality. A little boy with short tightly-curled hair and black skin sat on the Savior’s lap. Of all the pictures Sister Goodrich had brought Karissa, this was Malcolm’s favorite.
“I came to say good night,” he said, glad they were still awake.
Each wrapped her chubby arms around him and kissed his cheek, laughing when his two-day-old beard scratched her. When it was Rosalie’s turn, he sniffed loudly. “I don’t smell anything bad.”
Rosalie giggled. “I got all clean.”
“Where’s Karissa?” Camille asked. Malcolm knew the dark-haired Camille was his wife’s favorite. Since the Hergarters had come to stay, the two had spent long hours together making a list of all the plants in the greenhouse. Camille knew each by name, and carried her own copy of the list in a small notebook Karissa had bought for her. The child couldn’t read the names yet, but pretended she could.
“She’s taking a shower. I’m sure she’ll be up soon to say good night.”
Malcolm hated to leave them. He wished he could shut the heavy blinds to block out the light and tell them stories until each snored softly in her bed. If they were his girls, maybe he’d even curl up next to them so he could hear them breathing in the night, just to make sure they were safe. He would take them camping and fishing, and make commercials with them. He would spend as much time as his dad had spent with him until their estrangement. And how had that happened? Malcolm knew it had begun with his wanting to marry Karissa out of the temple. Later, the breach had been perpetuated by his smoking and drinking, his savoring of the stuff humans were meant to enjoy. Well, he didn’t need his father anyway. So what did it matter?
He spied a pile of socks on the floor, and picked them up to throw into the laundry chute. They felt heavy, and he tipped one upside down. Fine sand poured into his hand. He almost laughed. There had been a lot of sand floating around inside the house since the girls came. It hid inside shoes, socks, and rolled-up pant legs.
“Saving this to make a sandbox in here?” he asked.
The girls giggled. “‘Course not, Malcolm,” they chorused.
“Oh, I don’t mind. But I think our cleaning lady might quit on us if we’re not careful.” More giggles.
He said good night and turned from the room. On the way to the back stairs, he passed Jesse. “They okay?” Jesse asked.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “They’re fine. I went in to say good night. They didn’t come down like they usually do.” He still held the sand in his fist, but he didn’t show Jesse. That was between him and the girls.
“Brionney was anxious to get them in bed. It’s been a long day for her.”
“I bet. They have a lot of energy.”
“They sure do.” Jesse backed down the hall. “I like to check them before I turn in,” he said as if excusing himself.
“I would too, if they were mine.”
An unquenchable desire reared up in Malcolm’s mind. You need something, it told him. You shouldn’t have to suffer your lack of children without some comfort.
He went through the garage and into his studio. Three long strides brought him to the editing desk he had made himself in college. Oak again, his favorite medium. “Karissa won’t be done for a while,” he said aloud. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” His tone was excusatory and Malcolm felt relieved, as if Karissa herself had said the words.
He drew out one of the cigarette packs from the carton he had bought earlier in the week. It was half-empty. He no longer told himself he would quit as he had two months ago; he knew he couldn’t. The thought cut deeply.
The lighter sat in full view on the desk, and in an instant Malcolm breathed in a lungful of smoke and held it inside for a moment. It stung as if he had not smoked for weeks, and yet it somehow seemed to relieve his emotional aches.
He stood up and walked to the back of the room where his weapons hung on the otherwise bare wall. The Browning .300 Winchester Magnum was his favorite of the rifles. He ran a finger over the bluing and then along the smooth finish of the wood. Then his eye caught sight of the semiautomatic pistol his father had given him. He hadn’t shot the Colt Mustang .380 for nearly a year, though he’d cleaned it only last week.
A sharp breath caught his attention. He whirled, instinctively hiding the cigarette behind him. Too late.
Karissa stood in the
doorway dressed in an enticing black negligee and matching silk robe, her brilliant green eyes glinting with hurt. “You’re smoking,” she said needlessly. “I thought you’d stopped.”
“I tried.” Even to his own ears, the words sounded feeble. “I really tried. I couldn’t.”
“Having a baby didn’t mean enough?” She wrapped the robe tightly around her body, crossing her arms over her chest as if she were cold.
“For heaven’s sake, Karissa! My stopping smoking has nothing to do with our having a baby. You’re the one who’s going to carry it!”
“But it’s wrong.”
“Says who?”
“The Word of Wisdom.”
He snorted. “That never bothered you before.”
The muscles along her jaw tightened, and she blinked rapidly as if to stave off tears. The million excuses for his betrayal vanished instantly. He knew he should have been honest about the difficulty he was having quitting, but he hated to admit failure, especially to Karissa. She’d quit so easily, and he hated to appear weak before her.
“I’m sorry.”
When she spoke, her voice was without emotion. “I’ve been feeling so close to you. I thought we were working together, but all this time you were lying. No wonder we can’t have a baby. We don’t deserve one.”
“That’s not true!”
He wanted to tell her what good parents they would make, despite their weaknesses. Despite his weakness. Why couldn’t he be strong like Karissa?
Before he found the words, she was gone. He went after her, but he heard the lock on their bedroom door snap into place as he strode down the hall. He leaned his cheek on the carved surface of the solid wood. It felt cool against his skin. Inside, he could hear nothing.
He thought she might leave Kodiak now. There was nothing holding her here, not really. Tears sprang from his eyes, and the agony in his heart was too much to bear. For a moment, he contemplated breaking the door down and pleading with her on hands and knees.
Would it do any good?
A sharp pain ate into his conscious thought. He glanced at his hand to see that the cigarette had burned down to his flesh. He crushed it between his fingers, ignoring the additional pain. Then he retraced his steps back to the cold and silent studio.
Tomorrow and Always Page 9
