by Donna Alward
Nora wondered if it was because they had been trapped inside so long because of the rain that they gave themselves so completely to an afternoon of playing on the water in the sunshine.
The boat, if it could be called that, was an awkward contraption. It was propelled forward, ever so slowly, by two people side by side, pedaling with all their might. Steering took some getting used to. There was no steering wheel. In order to turn the boat, one person stopped pedaling and the other kept going. The boat would start doing a painfully slow arc.
With much shouting and laughter she and Brendan headed out of the bay into the lake. They had not counted on the wind coming up and creating a tiny bit of chop. They had rented the boat for an hour, but by the time they got it back to the dock they had been wrestling with it, trying to get it back to shore against a headwind and a small swell for over two hours.
“Oh, boy,” he said, “if that was your idea of living dangerously, I’d hate to see dull.”
“It wasn’t dull! It was fun!”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, you pick something dangerous then, if you’re so great.”
“All right. I’ll come for you tomorrow at ten.”
“We’re going to do something dangerous together? Tomorrow at ten?”
“Unless you’re too chicken.”
But she wasn’t. She felt as brave as she ever had. That feeling lasted until the next morning, when precisely at ten, Brendan roared into her yard.
He was on a motorcycle.
* * *
It was dangerous all right, Brendan thought. They had taken the ferry across the lake and he was navigating the road that twisted along the north shore. It wasn’t dangerous because the road had more dips and hollows and rises and falls than a roller coaster. It wasn’t dangerous because of the tourists pulling trailers or boats backed up the traffic, and the locals took incredible chances getting by them.
No, it was dangerous because Nora Anderson was curled against his back, holding him hard and tight, so close that he doubted a piece of tissue paper could be inserted between them. It was dangerous because instead of being the least frightened, she was shouting with laughter and egging him on to new feats of daring.
They stopped for lunch at a pub midway down the lake, and when she pulled her helmet off and freed her flattened hair, her nose was sunburned and her cheeks were rosy from the wind and she was shining with happiness.
She looked carefree and young, and he found himself wishing that she would look like that all the time.
Over steak sandwiches, on a deck that stretched over the blue waters of the lake, they talked of Iggy’s recovery and laughed about Luke eating Deedee’s pie. Brendan told Nora about something funny that had happened at work, but was aware of not saying a single thing about Village on the Lake, which was supposed to be a pinnacle point in his career. She shared some of her ambitions for Nora’s Ark with him.
It wasn’t so much what they said as how he felt. Relaxed. At ease. As if he had known her forever, and she was the easiest person in the world to spend time with.
She sipped a beer; he stuck with water. Navigating the road, and his growing feeling for Nora, was going to take him having complete control of his senses! No impairment of any kind.
“You know what I did last night?” he asked.
“Cleaned licorice splotches off your shirt?”
“After that.”
“Worked?”
He realized he was surprised that the answer to that was not yes. He always worked. But he hadn’t last night.
“I looked up back columns of Ask Rover on the internet.”
She blushed scarlet and took a swig of her beer. “Why would you do that?”
“Curious.”
The blush deepened. “So, now you know. Nut job.”
He frowned. “Are you kidding?”
“No. I never let anyone know I write that.”
“But why?”
“All I ever wanted was to be normal. Not be laughed at. Not seen as eccentric or weird. I wanted to be popular and surrounded with friends. Instead, I had this thing, a strange ability to offer comfort to injured animals. My family used to tease me that I would have been burned at the stake if I’d lived in a different age.
“I can connect better with animals than people. It’s kind of like mind reading, only without words. I pick up on the animal’s energy. My family thought I was strange. The kids I grew up with thought I was a woo-woo. I learned to keep all that stuff that is outside the norm pretty secret.”
“So, when you write Ask Rover, are you picking up that energy thing, even from a distance?”
She scanned his face, saw he wasn’t mocking her at all, but genuinely interested. “I’m not sure how much of it is picking up something from a distance, and how much of it is reading those letters really carefully.”
“There are a lot of letters,” he pointed out slowly, “from satisfied readers who are amazed by how applicable your advice is to their situation. How could you know that dog that had been shaking for a week had a broken tooth? How could you know that missing cat had gone in the appliance repairman’s van?”
“They’re just educated guesses...and a feeling. My weird little gift to the world. I hope you won’t tell anyone it’s me.” She saw something in his face that looked stubborn. “It’s for Luke’s sake, too. So he can have a normal life here.”
“What do you want for him?”
She sighed. “The things I couldn’t achieve for myself. Popularity. A house full of friends. I don’t want the fact that I do something different to make people laugh at him or judge him.”
“You know, Nora, people make judgments. For instance, you know that dark period of history your family talked about, where they burned witches at the stake? They associated cats with witches, so they killed them, too.
“And when they killed the cats, the rat population exploded. And rats carried bubonic plague. Before that was over, twenty-five million people were dead.”
“I’m not sure I get what you’re saying.”
“People make judgments. Lots of those judgments they make are just plain wrong. Somehow, we all have to find our own truth.”
He hesitated. “I liked Ask Rover, but I loved the crossed out rough drafts that I read beside your bed that night. Does any of that stuff ever make it past the final cut?”
“No. Never.”
“I wish it did.”
She laughed, self-deprecating. “I don’t think the world is ready for Ask Nora.”
“That’s where I think you are wrong. The world could use a little more Nora at her brilliant, funny, insightful best. The world could use a little more of the real thing.”
“If I cry are you going to ask if I’m h-having an outburst?” she stammered.
“No,” he said. “I’m going to do this.”
And he did the most dangerous thing of all. He kissed her. He kissed her long and hard and deep. He kissed who she really was, not the tiny piece of herself that she chose to show the world.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, pulling away from her.
“But why?” she asked, her eyes round with wonder and wanting.
He shrugged. “We should go.”
“No. I feel as if, when you read the columns beside my bed, you uncovered part of my heart, whether I wanted you to or not. That’s not fair. Not unless you show me something of yours.”
Brendan looked at Nora, and struggled with it. To show her who he really was. To crawl out from under the crushing weight of his guilt.
Her hand was suddenly on his. He could feel that energy of hers. Promising to lead him out of darkness toward the light, to roll the stone away from the entrance to the cave once and for all.
He still might have res
isted.
If she had not proved one more time her intuition was uncanny. Nora said, “Tell me something about you. That’s secret. Not just any secret. Your deepest secret.”
He was torn completely, between not wanting to trust and for once letting his guard down. He had told her the world needed what was real about her. Could the same be said for him?
Nora knew things. She knew how to heal things. Look at Charlie. Just from being around her, under the same roof as her, the cat was pulling further away from dying every day.
So why had she asked this question? About secrets? The light in her eyes beckoned him in the direction he would not have chosen to go. The light in her eyes made him brave when he wanted to turn tail and run.
The long season of rain was over, and the sun had come out. Could his life be the same?
He took a deep breath. He told her something no one knew about him.
“I feel like a failure as an architect,” he said.
“But you’re very successful.”
“I’ve never, ever, not even once stood in front of a house I’ve completed, and felt pride. I’ve always felt like I missed something. So there you have it, my secret.”
She studied him for a moment. And then she said, “That’s not really the secret. It’s just the first layer of it.”
“What?”
“I’d be willing to bet my newly repaired iguana that that sense of not being good enough has a root somewhere.”
“It’s not like I feel I’m not good enough!” he protested, but her gaze called him out.
He realized he hadn’t even told Becky all of it, but been vague about his beginnings. Wasn’t that part of how he had failed her?
“My mom was never with my dad,” he said, and had to clear his throat to go on. “She got pregnant, he didn’t care. She never said it, but I suspect it was a case of unrequited love that culminated in a one-night stand. Who knows? Maybe she even used the pregnancy to try and trap him. But if she did, it backfired badly and left her young, uneducated and totally on her own. She was tired and bitter toward every man in the world except one, and that was me.”
He shrugged, tried to laugh it off. “So there you have it, a genuine bastard.”
There was something fierce in the way Nora was looking at him, as if she was seeing more, much more than he had intended for her to see.
“No,” she said softly, “That’s still just a layer of it. There’s more. Tell me the rest.”
This was her gift, then, unveiled. Her intuition calling to the broken place inside of him, coaxing it toward her light.
“We were poor,” he heard himself saying. “There seems to be this little trend where its popular to say you were poor, poor meaning you didn’t go out to restaurants to eat, or you didn’t get forty gifts under the Christmas tree, or you didn’t have the cool designer label clothes like everyone else.
“People who were really poor? They don’t brag about it.”
There. That was enough. He’d told her he felt dissatisfaction with his work. That he was illegitimate, and that he’d grown up poor. Those were his secrets.
But not all of them. And she knew. He could feel her energy pulling the words from him. Or maybe they had just wanted out for so long, they could not be stopped now that they had started.
Like the tears, if he ever let them fall.
“We were the desperate kind of poor. My mom worked as a maid at a motel, and in private houses, in the mornings, and a waitress in the evenings. Every penny counted. Sometimes we didn’t have food. Sometimes we got evicted because we couldn’t pay the rent.
“I grew up knowing it would be up to me to make my mother’s every sacrifice worthwhile. She managed somehow—I have no idea how, and probably would have rather she put food on the table—to squirrel away a little money for me to go to university. I worked three different jobs. I got scholarships. She lived long enough to see me graduate.
“Once she died, I moved across the country to Hansen. There was a small architectural firm here. I told myself it was for a job opportunity, but I think it was to leave all that behind.
“And then I met Becky. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t believe a girl like her would look at a guy like me. She had grown up extremely well-to-do, the daughter of one of Hansen’s old rich families. She was the swimming pool in the backyard, vacation home at Vale, finishing school in Switzerland kind of rich.
“I slammed the door on who I used to be,” he said. “I was ashamed of it. I didn’t tell anybody what I’d come from, let alone this rich girl who was crazy in love with me. I thought if she knew it all, she’d never say yes when I asked her to marry me.”
“But didn’t she ask?”
“Of course she asked. I think, at first, she thought it was part of my mystique that I didn’t say much about my past.”
He stopped himself. He was revealing way too much. No one cared about this stuff! But he looked at Nora, and he could see she cared. And he could see that the light in her eyes was not going to let him go, that he would not feel released until he told all of it.
“I felt I had to be worthy of Becky’s faith in me. It wasn’t enough to pay the bills every month. No. I had to succeed. I had to have all the trappings of success.
“When my boss decided to retire, we worked on my being able to buy the firm from him. And then, at the very same time, Becky’s family home came up for sale. It was exactly the kind of house my mom had cleaned when I was a kid. She called them castles.”
It was really time to stop. But it seemed as if that little boy who had promised his mother to buy her a castle was talking, and wasn’t going to be quiet until he’d said it all!
“Sometimes if school was out for the day, or I was home sick, I got to go with her to those fancy houses.
“For a kid who was living in a two-room shack on the wrong side of the tracks, that kind of house was a castle. A special room for dining? Four bathrooms? Hardwood floors and Turkish rugs and good art, and amazing chandeliers. The kids had bedrooms decorated in themes. In one house, the boy had a pirate room and the girl a princess room. I grew up on the phrase ‘when my ship comes in.’”
It seemed to him he could stop right there. That he should stop right there. But it was as if a dam had broken inside him, as if something toxic was flowing out and with each word he spoke he felt cleaner and freer.
It was a free fall. He was free-falling into the light in her eyes, trusting that he could survive the landing. He took a deep breath. He was going to tell it all.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“BECKY, QUITE SINCERELY, didn’t care if we bought that house. But I cared. I felt responsible for keeping her in the style she was accustomed to.
“I was stretched way too thin. I didn’t want her to go to work. I felt that would make me a failure, mean I couldn’t provide for her. I started working all the time, trying to make it all happen.
“She was becoming increasingly frustrated, trying to get through to me. She was beginning to see what she had mistaken for mystique was my inability to connect with her. She told me I wasn’t fun anymore. That nothing was fun anymore.”
And here it was, finally, the worst of it. The part where he’d killed a good woman who had done nothing wrong but love him.
“I didn’t want to have a baby,” he said, his voice hoarse from talking too damn much. “I thought it would just be one more stress. I didn’t know she was beyond caring what I wanted. She was trying to save us, and I didn’t even know we were in trouble.
“She’d booked us a ski weekend. Was I happy about it? No. Annoyed. Why was she spending money on frivolous things?
“But she wanted us to do something fun. She wanted us to be romantic. She had some big news to tell me. News worth celebrating. News worth spending money on.
“The day we were supposed to go, something came up at work. It seemed urgent at the time. Now I wonder if I made it urgent so that she would know I was still annoyed about spending money and taking the weekend off from work. I told her to drive up to the ski hill without me, that I’d meet her there later that night.
“She was upset with me when she left. It started snowing hard while she was on the road. She lost control of the car, skidded off the road and hit a tree. She was killed instantly. I found out her big news, the reason for our celebration, from the coroner. That she was pregnant. The baby died, too. She had stopped taking the pills. I know because I found them in our medicine cabinet after. When I was wondering if there was anything strong enough in there to end my misery, to end the endless question I asked myself.
“Was the fact that she was upset with me a contributing factor in the accident? Probably. And if work was everything before that, it was even more after. Aside from pills in the cabinet, it was the only way I could stop the guilt. The only way.
“You know, a week before she died, she said to me, ‘If I die first, I’ll come back and let you know I’m all right.’
“And I didn’t hear the love in that. I just said, ‘You won’t be all right. You’ll be dead.’
“She never has,” he heard himself whisper. “She never has let me know she’s all right. Because she isn’t. And it’s my fault that she isn’t.”
He waited to feel sorry that he had told Nora, sorry that he had exposed so much of himself to her, sorry that just as he now had a better idea of who she was from reading her column, she had a better idea of who he was.
He waited for her to say the wrong thing.
That he should absolve himself, or that Becky was all right, or that it wasn’t his fault at all.
But she said nothing.
Nora didn’t even look at him; she was looking out over the mirrorlike, serene waters of the lake. Her eyes were pools of deep calm.
He had to let her know who he really was. He had to. It was a compulsion he couldn’t stop.
