Imagine

by Jill Barnett

  After a short while, Margaret turned and gave the baby to Lydia so they could play in the sand. Hank was still standing in the same spot, his back stiff and his gaze lost in the past.

  She needed to do something to bring him back here. To the present.

  She started to trot toward him, then she ran faster and right at him.

  “Hey, Hank!”

  He turned.

  “Any last words?” And she shoved him right into the next wave.

  She laughed, and the kids laughed at seeing him sprawled on his backside in the water, the waves foaming over him.

  But she stopped laughing when his eyes got the same look as the goat. Margaret took off running.

  He shot up and ran after her, chasing her down the beach, laughing as she was. She kicked up sand behind her and shrieked when he made a dive for her feet. And missed.

  She turned around and slowed down, running backward as she laughed at him.

  He lay there, not moving.

  “Hank?”

  Nothing.

  “Hank? Are you okay?”

  He didn’t even breathe.

  She stopped, then slowly walked back.

  “Hank?” She reached out a hand.

  He tackled her at the knees.

  She went down like a potato sack. “That’s not fair!” He pinned her to him and grinned down at her. “I know.”

  “Let me up.”

  “Okay.” He got up and offered her his hand. She put her hand in his.

  He gripped it hard and laughed. “I can’t believe you actually fell for that one.” And before she could do anything but gasp, he slid his arm under her knees and picked her up. “You’re not running again, sweetheart.”

  “Put me down!”

  “No.”

  “You cheated!”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No, it’s not. But it worked.”

  He walked toward the water as she tried to squirm free. She called him names and laughed at the same time. She made threats and promised he’d be sorry if he threw her in the water again.

  Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a long look. She leaned close to his mouth and whispered, “Kiss me.”

  He did. A smack on the lips. “Good one, Smitty. I’d have tried that too in your place.” Laughing, he swung back.

  “Hank!” she hollered. “Don’t you dare!”

  And he threw her into the next wave.

  Muddy bent over the lens of the camera and adjusted the tripod. “Everyone get ready!”

  He watched them through the lens, then straightened and rubbed a mark off the mahogany camera case. He bent back and looked through the lens, sighting the rock near a lush hibiscus bush that had the clear sky and vast Pacific Ocean as a background.

  Lydia and Theodore were elbowing each other. Annabelle was running in circles around Margaret, who was bent over. Hank was staring at her backside.

  Muddy opened the instructions and read them again, then affixed the plates. He put the focus cloth in place. “I’m ready!”

  Lydia pulled Rebuttal into the group, and they all shuffled around for a few minutes. Margaret stopped to retie Hank’s white tie and to adjust her ball gown. Theodore wore the baseball cap backward, and he held the bat, ball, and glove. Lydia wore all her shell necklaces and the combs Hank had made her. Annabelle sat in Margaret’s lap, her fingers stuck in her mouth.

  Margaret sat on a rock, Annabelle in her lap and Lydia and Rebuttal on her left. Theodore was on her right. Hank stood behind her, one hand resting possessively on her shoulder and the finger of his other hand pulling at the collar of the dress shirt.

  Muddy smiled. “One . . . Two . . . Ready?” They all nodded.

  “Three!”

  And Muddy took his first photograph—a family portrait.

  Hank sat on the beach with Smitty, watching the sunset. Annabelle was asleep in Smitty’s lap. Lydia and Theodore were fishing off the rocks nearby. The genie? Hell, he would bait their lines and fly out over the surf and drop the lines in the water. From Theodore’s squeals, Hank knew they’d caught enough fish for a big meal even after Smitty burned the first few batches.

  She was sitting with her legs drawn up, drawing absently in the wet sand. He just watched her, something that seemed to take up a lot of his time lately.

  The breeze was light and warm, and it ruffled the hair that had fallen around her face. Her face was as close to perfection as he could imagine. Watching her, with the baby asleep in her lap, did something to him. She looked down at Annabelle and stroked her head lightly while she slept.

  Hank walked over and stood above them.

  “If you could be anywhere,” she said, “where would you be?”

  He sat down. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I was just thinking.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I figured you were.”

  She smiled. “I know. You think I think too much.” She blinked, then shook her head and laughed. “I think you think I think too much.”

  They both laughed.

  Still smiling, she said, “Sounds like too much thinking all the way around, doesn’t it?”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to think. He just wanted to sit here. He just wanted to be.

  She looked at him. “No answer?”

  He shook his head. “I expect you know where you want to be.”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. I had always thought I’d want to be exactly where I was. I was happy in San Francisco. Content. I had a home and my family—my dad and my uncles. I had my work.”

  “So tell me, Smitty, how does a woman become a lawyer?”

  She looked at him. “The same way we’ll eventually get the right to vote. By making men understand that we are their equals. By hard work and by teaching pigheaded men that they can be wrong.”

  He laughed. “You must be one helluvan attorney, sweetheart.”

  “My dad says I am. He was a brilliant lawyer before he went on to the bench. He’s a California Supreme Court judge.”

  Hank groaned.

  She laughed. “You’d like him. He loved to match his mind against others and win. He taught me his skills. When I was growing up, we’d sit down to supper and he would start a discussion and throw out a point. We’d argue, and he made me defend my view against his questions. Just when he had me cornered, he’d laugh and say, “Now switch sides, my girl.”

  Hank whistled.

  “Then I would defend the very point I had been trying to shoot down just minutes before. He taught me to think. And he loves me very much.”

  “You miss him?”

  She looked at Hank. “I worry about him. I’m all he really has. I wonder what he’s been told. He must think I’m dead. I’m not certain what that will do to him.”

  “Maybe he hopes.”

  She nodded.

  “You still haven’t told me about how a woman becomes an attorney.”

  She scowled at him. “Women can be anything they want.”

  “Not ball players.”

  “Give us time.”

  He laughed.

  “I went to college. Ann Arbor was the first to offer law degrees to women. But you don’t have to have a degree. You can apprentice. I did both. I’m with a family firm. My father and uncles are all senior partners.”

  Hank groaned again.

  “I’ve always loved the law, loved the challenge it presents. Law is never the same. Its interpretations are always changing. Sometimes only in the smallest increments, but still, it’s never constant.” She grew quiet, pensive. She looked out at the sea, then dug her toes into the sand and stared at them. “But you know something? Sitting here, the law is the farthest thing from my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems as if what I was—that other life—was someone else’s life, not mine. And when I look at this”—she nodded toward the sea, then scanned the beach—”I don’t think I would ever want to be
anywhere else.”

  They sat there, neither saying anything. They didn’t need to. After a few minutes, maybe less, maybe longer, she turned to him.

  “Tell me about prison.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s one thing you don’t want to know, and I’m not certain I can tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  He’d known this was coming. He looked at her. “Does it matter?”

  “If you think telling me is going to change how I feel about you, you’re wrong, Hank.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, it matters. It matters to me because you matter.”

  It took him a long time to find the words, a few minutes of silence for his mind to dredge it all up again. “I’d been living in the islands, moving from one to another, never staying too long on any one island. A few months here, a few there. I’d gone to Papeete for a week to pick up a boat I’d bought. The boat wasn’t there, and Laroche, the man I’d bought it from, was conveniently unavailable. It took me three weeks to find the bastard. I found him and beat the crap out of him when he pretended not to know who I was. I spent a week drunk, among other things.

  “I don’t remember much, except that I woke up when the local gendarmerie was dragging me out of my bed and down the stairs. While I’d been drinking and screwing away the last of my money, someone else had put a bullet in Laroche’s head. I had a mockery of a trial a day later, where they told me I was guilty after two people testified that we’d had a fight earlier that week. Hell, I didn’t even have a gun, something my joke of an attorney didn’t mention.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, the trial was in French. I didn’t know half of what was being said, and no one bothered to translate. They gave me the verdict in English. Life in prison. My attorney said I got off lucky. They wanted to hang me.” He paused, then looked down. “Next thing I knew I was in Leper’s Gate.”

  She was quiet for a long time. “How did you break out?”

  He told her. Quietly and with detail. When he finished, Smitty was crying.

  He put his arm around her. She leaned into him. He just held her, feeling like he had a hard grip on the first real thing in his life that wouldn’t slip through his fingers.

  The breeze softly carried the clean, fresh scent of her, washing over him like the sea washed the rocks and the shoreline, touching, holding, seeping in between the small cracks that time and weather and experience had made in granite and limestone.

  He held onto the woman who for him was like the sea that surrounded all the land on earth, hemmed it in, cupped it gently, sometimes raged at it, but was always wearing away at it. Until where land and sea met there was peace. And paradise. For him, she was like the sea. And he knew that where she wasn’t, there was nothing.

  It was a strange feeling to look at a woman and not see her for what he could get from her. Instead he looked at her and saw her twenty years from now, sitting there as she was now, beside him.

  She turned suddenly as if he had spoken his thoughts. The sun glowed a golden pink on her face—the face that cried for him, the same face that made him forget he wasn’t supposed to let himself care about anything or anyone.

  She smiled a slow smile at him. An elemental understanding of who and where they were. Now, at this moment.

  He reached out and drew a finger along her jaw as slowly as she had smiled. And somewhere, lost back in the vague recesses of his mind, he wondered if she knew the power she had.

  He leaned toward her until he could taste her breath. He stayed there, not closing the distance between them. Because with Smitty, he wanted every moment to last. Then he said words he’d never said in forty years. “You know, sweetheart, loving you isn’t going to be very easy.”

  “Loving me?”

  He lifted her chin up with the knuckle on one hand, and he whispered against her lips, “Yeah. Loving you.”

  And she cried again.

  The full moon rode across a cloudless and vast sky spangled with stars, more stars than anyone could ever imagine. Margaret and Hank silently walked along the beach hand in hand, their footprints melting in wet, spongy sand.

  Another day had passed. Then another and another until the days blended into a week and more.

  For Margaret, each day was somehow better than the last. Because of what was happening to her: emotions she’d never thought she could feel. She hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible.

  They’d talked about their childhoods, so different, yet equally lonely in some ways. He didn’t tell all of what he had done in his lifetime. But some of it, the things they could laugh about rather than the ones that made her want to cry.

  She stopped and looked up at the night sky because she was getting teary just walking with Hank. As naturally as if they had been together for years, his arms slid around her and pulled her back against him. He locked his hands around her belly and rested his chin on her head.

  She had the crazy thought that he was the only man she could think of who was tall enough to do that. They fit somehow, the two of them. They had so little in common on the outside but so much in common inside.

  And he just held her. She let her head fall back on his shoulder, and she could feel his breath whisper against her ear, a sound as keen and constant to her as the rumble of the waves.“I’ve never seen so many stars. Thousands of them. It’s as if we were walking through the Milky Way.”

  “Hmmm” was all he said.

  She smiled slowly. “You’re not listening to me.”

  “I heard every word.”

  “Then repeat them.”

  His lips touched her ear. “You said that you had never seen so many stars.”

  “That’s right.”

  He kissed her ear.

  “What else?”

  “If you want to see stars . . . ” He took a deep breath that made his chest press warmly against her back. Then he whispered a string of earthy, elemental, and private things they could do together if they only had about five straight days completely alone.

  Her mouth was dry and her knees a little wobbly when he finished.

  “I promise you that after that you’d see a helluva lot more than just stars. You’d see clear through to heaven, Smitty.”

  She turned and kissed him with every ounce of love she had. Then she pulled back and ran her fingers over his mouth, that sensual mouth that could kiss her senseless and make love to her in ways she never would have imagined. “Are you bluffing?”

  He laughed. “Hell, sweetheart, I just promised you heaven.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve already taken me there.” She turned and slid her arms around his neck. “Take me there again. Past there. Show me the other side of heaven.”

  And he showed her heaven, a hundred different ways for long nights and days, until the breezes changed to winds and time went from days to a week and more.

  Chapter 32

  Margaret carried Annabelle inside the hut. She had toddled over into Margaret’s lap and fallen asleep after a busy afternoon of playing and helping the others bury Hank in the sand.

  Margaret looked down at the baby sleeping in her arms. Her skin had the glow of a child who spent a good deal of time outdoors. Her hair was longer and more curly than it had been before. It had turned a lighter red from the sun. And she was heavier, talking more and running without falling.

  They change so quickly, she thought.

  Still holding the baby, she sat down on a barrel and looked outside at the beach. She couldn’t see the others, but she could see the water and the sunshine and the trees and bushes and flowers of this paradise that was now her home.

  She wondered what her father was doing. Was he in court? Was he in that rambling home? Was he in the study where he’d worked long hours teaching her how to research, how to prepare a case, how to win? And she a cried a little because she knew he didn’t know she was alive. He would think he was completely alone now.

  Through a mi
st of tears she looked down at Annabelle and understood something she never would have before. She understood some of the looks her father had given her over the years. She understood the fear that came with being a parent, the horrid fear of losing a child.

  And Margaret cried, silently, until Annabelle shifted in her sleep, and her fist pressed against Margaret’s rib. She studied the plump and tanned fingers on little hands that each day discovered something new. She made Margaret rediscover it, too. Something as simple as a feather, as complex as the intricate designs of a seashell. The flight of a bird, the smell of a flower. The awe with which a child saw the world.

  Annabelle shifted again, then murmured, “Mama.” Margaret swallowed to assuage the dryness in her mouth, and took a deep breath because tears were coming to her eyes. It was so silly in a way. So sentimental and so wonderful.

  It didn’t matter that she hadn’t conceived Annabelle. It didn’t matter that she had been someone else’s child first. All that mattered was now and the future.

  She looked down and stroked the baby’s forehead again. “I’m here, sweet. Mama’s here.”

  She hadn’t known Hank was there until she looked up. He was standing in the doorway, watching her. She couldn’t see his face. She didn’t know if he’d heard her. But he came inside and stood beside her, then bent slightly and cupped the back of her head with a hand. It was a gesture she’d come to know, a natural and tender gesture from a man who looked as if he could never be tender.

  She gazed up at him from eyes misty with emotion. He squatted down behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. She felt uncomfortable, a little more open then she wanted to be in front of him. She stood, and his hands slid from her shoulders. “Let me put her to bed, okay?”

  She crossed to the nearby corner and lay Annabelle down, then straightened, but she didn’t look at him. She could feel his look, knew there was a question there. She could feel tension between them. It was coming from her. And yet she couldn’t stop it. Her emotions were taut and had been for days now.

  She glanced up at him. He was studying her.

  She moved to the window and rested her hands on the moist, woven grass that was wrapped around the bamboo that formed the windowsill. She stared out at the sea and the sky, both flawless and blue, everything one could ever want. A paradise. “Do you think anyone will ever find us?”