I lift my head and feel his mouth on mine. It’s a dizzying sensation, like drowning in sunshine. He begins to stroke my body with a long, slow movement of his hands, as if he’s a sculptor shaping something beautiful. I press myself against him. Suddenly I can’t get close enough. Something in the back of my mind tells me this is crazy, that he’s going to hurt me and I should get up and run. But I’m intoxicated by him.
“I won’t hurt you,” he whispers. “I’d never hurt you.”
He kisses me again, gently, tenderly. He strokes my hip, nestles against me. “We don’t have to do anything. I’ll just hold you if that’s what you want.”
I don’t know what I want. I need to be close to him, that’s all. I press myself against him and kiss his neck.
He holds me and strokes my back. He kisses my eyelids while I drift off to sleep.
When I wake up, there’s a wash of bright daylight from the windows. He’s standing above me, fully dressed, holding something in his hands.
I try to shade my eyes from the light. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon. Get up, lazybones. I’m starving.”
“What’s that?” I ask, looking at the cone of paper in his hands.
He unrolls the newspaper to show me a bunch of yellow flowers, wild daisies from the ditch along the highway.
“They’re for you,” he tells me shyly. “I really wanted to get you a dozen yellow roses because you’re a golden princess. But this was the best I could do on short notice.”
I pull on a shirt, take the flowers and put them in one of the chipped water glasses. “They’re nicer than yellow roses,” I tell him.
“Why? They’re just wildflowers from the ditch.”
“But you picked them yourself. That’s what makes them so beautiful.”
He smiles happily and my heart aches with love and sadness.
We go about our day, playing with the puppies again, riding downtown on the bike. Later we come back to the motel, carrying our pizza in a box this time, and go to bed. While we eat, we snuggle companionably beneath the covers and talk about everything under the sun. He’s full of plans.
“First we need to buy you some more clothes,” he says.
“No way. You’ve already spent too much on me.”
He brandishes a wedge of pizza at me, frowning with mock sternness. “Quit arguing with me, woman. I’ve still got hundreds of dollars in my wallet. We’re going to buy you some more clothes, and then I’m taking you home with me.”
“Home?” I ask in alarm.
“You’ve got to meet my parents,” he says placidly, so busy with his plans that he’s not even aware of my frightened reaction. “And then we’ll need to find a place to live in Saskatoon before the fall term starts.”
I look at him blankly.
“I have to go back to college,” he tells me, bending to kiss my neck. “You can finish high school there and enroll in some freshman classes next term. You’re so smart, you’ll probably catch up to me in no time.”
It all sounds so simple when he says it like that, as if it were really possible for me to meet his parents, share an apartment with him in the city and go to college like a normal girl.
We eat the last of the pizza while I talk and laugh with him to hide my breaking heart. Afterward, we watch television for a while, and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
I wake after a few hours. The world is plunged into darkness and the only sound is a chorus of coyotes as they hunt somewhere on the prairie. While he’s sleeping close to me, I lie awake and brood about what I’m going to do.
Because of him, something odd has been happening to me. I don’t want to die anymore, or embark on some kind of crazy, self-destructive life. I’m determined to survive and make something of myself.
But to do that, I’ll need to leave him behind. He knows all about my past. If I’m going to have a future, that other life has got to be erased completely, wiped out as if it never existed. I can’t be with anybody who knows who I am or what I used to be.
The old Callie Pritchard needs to die if the new one is going to survive.
Besides it wouldn’t be fair to let him believe we could have a future together. He’s so good and so kind he deserves someone better than me. His parents and his friends would hate me. The thought of leaving him floods me with agony. I feel tears stinging behind my eyelids, and have to bite my lip to keep from sobbing out loud. My mind darts around, trying to think of some other way. But there’s simply no choice, and I know it.
At last I slip out of bed, moving with infinite care so I won’t wake him. I gather my new clothes and dress in the bathroom, then grab the rest of the things he bought and stuff them into the red duffel bag.
I creep around the room in the moonlight, looking nervously at his still form in the bed. He mutters something and turns over, begins to breathe deeply again.
His wallet is lying on the dresser. I open it and take out all the bills, then hesitate. He’ll need enough money to get home. I think he has a credit card, but I still can’t bear to leave him with nothing.
Actually, it would probably be better to take all the money. He’d really hate me then, and be less likely to come looking for me. I waver, trying not to cry. At last I stuff a couple of bills back into his wallet and pocket the rest.
Finally, I shoulder the duffel bag and slip out the door. The night is cold and still, with a pale shimmer of light along the distant horizon where the sun will be rising in an hour or so. I lower the bag to the ground, fighting with myself.
I know it’s crazy, but I can’t keep myself from creeping back into the room and bending over him. I don’t want to risk waking him, so I drop a kiss on the pillow beside his cheek.
“Thank you,” I whisper to his dear, sleeping face. “Thank you for everything. I’m so sorry. I’ll never stop loving you as long as I live.”
Then I leave, closing the door soundlessly behind me. I head out onto the highway and start to jog, turning around with my thumb extended whenever headlights pierce the darkness.
A woman picks me up. She’s middle-aged, sour and tired, heading off to a Bible class she teaches in one of the rural school districts. She preaches at me for a hundred miles while I rest my head against the back of the seat and try to look as if I’m paying attention.
Finally she lets me off and a trucker picks me up almost immediately, taking me all the way to Regina. He’s kind and quiet, and tells me a lot about his three daughters. When I promise him I’ll go back to school and not hitch rides anymore, he drops me at a youth hostel in the downtown core, near the warehouse where he’s going.
My heart is frozen, hard as stone. I know what I’m going to do and where I have to begin. But I know, as well, that I’ll never really be happy. And I’ll never love anybody again.
I always thought cruelty and neglect were the most painful, but I was wrong.
Love is the real agony. Love hurts more than anything….
“QUEEN! What’s the matter? Hey, guys, come and look at the Queen. Oh man, is she crying?”
Camilla came back to reality with a start Three ragged teenage boys stood watching her, their faces puzzled and worried.
She shook her head, rubbing hastily at her eyes. “I was…I guess I must have been daydreaming. What’s happening?”
“A couple of kids want to get in. Have we got enough room?”
“I…I think so. Do we know them?”
“Zippy does. He says they’re buddies of his, and one of them’s sick.”
“Okay. I’ll let them in.”
Still dazed, Camilla got up to unlock the door, dealing mechanically with the new arrivals. When they were settled in the other room and the street door was safely locked again, she came back to the office and sat down at her desk, staring at the final words of Jon Campbell’s essay.
After she disappeared, I went tearing around the country on my bike for a few days, trying to find her. At last I headed for home, got my truck and started to s
earch the whole province, then all of western Canada. I quit college and spent a year looking for her, following up every lead I could think of, going into every little town I passed and asking if a blond girl named Callie had ever lived there. But I couldn’t find any trace of her. She’d dropped off the face of the earth.
After a few years the memories began to fade. Now I can’t even recall exactly what her face was like. But I’ll never forget those two days I spent with her in an old motel room that was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JON STOOD in his bathroom, examining his face absently in the mirror as he shaved. He was thinking about the essay he’d written, wondering if the professor had read it yet.
He frowned and lifted his head to shave his jawline.
What had possessed him to tell that story, anyway? Especially to a woman whose opinion was growing more important to him with every passing day…
She’d probably think it was ridiculous, a boyish, overly sentimental reminiscence about his long-ago encounter with a girl.
After so many years of keeping the story to himself, he should never have broken his silence. But lately, for some reason, he’d found himself thinking about Callie again.
Sweet little Callie. He smiled and moved his head to shave the other side.
Even after all this time, he couldn’t think of her without a powerful surge of emotion. For years, he hadn’t been able to summon up an accurate memory of her face. But he could still see brief flashes of the girl…her sober gray eyes and that glorious mane of silvery-blond hair, her gentle hands, the small shapely body.
Still, it wasn’t just her body that he remembered with such wistful fondness. It was her mind and spirit, the very essence of her. They’d only spent a couple of days together, he and Callie. But in all his life, Jon had never felt such a sense of total connectedness to any other person.
Callie had understood and trusted him, and she’d allowed him to see the depths of her mind, her remarkable intelligence and shy, playful imagination.
He thought about the awful story she’d told him that night, the way she’d been neglected and abused, how she was certain she’d committed a murder.
His jaw tightened with pain.
Ever since that encounter, Jon had found himself unable to bear the thought of children and adolescents suffering any kind of abuse. Nowadays, he was a silent benefactor to a number of charities that assisted runaways and teenagers at risk. He understood a lot more, too, about the devastating effects of neglect and cruelty on young people.
Maybe if he’d known more back in those days, he could have helped Callie and kept her close to him while they tried to work out her problems. But he’d been too young to understand, and had handled the whole situation so clumsily.
As a result, Callie vanished from his life and he’d never been able to find her. The pain had been so devastating that it almost killed him.
Even now, he was stunned by remembered grief.
For the thousandth time, Jon found himself wondering what might have happened to her during these twenty years. He simply couldn’t picture her as a mature adult woman. In his mind she’d be forever seventeen, a shy, sweet waif with her bruised face and wondrous smile. But Callie had been only a few years younger than Jon, so she must be in her late thirties by now.
That is, if she’d managed to survive whatever happened to her after she ran away from him….
He finished shaving, put away his razor and went down the hall, pausing at Steven’s closed door. After a brief hesitation he rapped sharply, then opened the door and glanced inside.
His son lay in bed, looking bleary and annoyed.
“Time to get up,” Jon said. “You’ve got a class at nine.”
“I’m not going today. I’ve got a headache.”
“Why?” Jon came into the room and stood at the foot of Steven’s bed, eyeing the boy steadily.
“How should I know? My head hurts, okay? I’m going back to sleep.”
“No, you’re not,” Jon said. “You’re getting up and going to class. Take a couple of aspirin if your head aches.”
The boy watched him stubbornly from the pillow. For a long moment their eyes locked in silent challenge. At last Steven cursed under his breath, rolled out of bed and trudged toward his bathroom.
Jon followed him to the door.
“Look,” Steven said with heavy sarcasm, “do you think I could have a little privacy? Or is that too much to ask?”
“Where were you last night, Steve?”
“I was out with my friends.”
“Who are these friends? I’ve told you before that it’s about time I met them.”
“Well, maybe they’re not so anxious to meet you.”
Steven ran water into the sink and splashed it angrily on his face. He looked pale, and there were dark circles around his eyes. A soft golden stubble dusted his cheeks.
Jon watched in silence, thinking how passionately he’d loved this son of his when Steven was a baby, a pudgy toddler, an eager little boy full of questions.
“Look, Steve, I want you to stay home for the next few evenings and get caught up on your schoolwork,” he said.
“Come on, Dad, get real! Most of these courses are so easy, I could do them in my sleep.”
“I know you’re a smart kid,” Jon told him quietly. “But that doesn’t mean you should be giving this any less than your best effort. I want you at home for a few nights.”
Steven’s eyes flashed. “What do you think I am, a little kid like Ari? You can’t push me around anymore.”
“You’re living under my roof, and I still make the rules,” Jon said.
“Then maybe I don’t want to be under your damn roof!” Steven gripped the edge of the sink tensely as their eyes met in the mirror a second time.
Jon knew that it was dangerous to press the issue. If his son was pushed too far, he might make good on his threats to walk out.
But he couldn’t forget Camilla Pritchard’s warning about Steven and his unsuitable friends….
To his relief, the boy was the first to look away. “All right,” Steven muttered. “I’ll do the bloody schoolwork if that’s what you want.”
“Good,” Jon said quietly. “I’m glad to hear it. Hurry up and come down to breakfast, okay? You can catch a ride with us this morning if you like.”
“I don’t want to ride with you. I’ll drive my own car.” Steven lathered shaving cream on his face, looking sullen.
On impulse, Jon moved closer and dropped an arm around Steven’s lean shoulders. “You know, you can always talk to me, son,” he said. “If anything’s bothering you, I’ll be happy to listen.”
A muscle jerked tensely in Steven’s cheek but he said nothing, standing rigid and stubborn in his father’s embrace. After a moment, Jon turned away and headed downstairs.
The rest of his family were already at the table, engaged in various pursuits while they ate.
Amy nibbled absently on a slice of toast, concentrating on a Tinkertoy model in front of her, adding little spokes and disks after intervals of deep thought. Beside her, Ari gulped cereal and made notations on a computer diagram of a dragonfly and a helicopter that he was showing to Enrique.
Enrique still looked pale and weak, but he was getting better every day. He’d been with them for two weeks. He now had a modest wardrobe of new clothes supplied by Jon, and was responding well to Margaret’s nourishing meals.
But he was still painfully shy. Though he’d begun to establish a warm relationship with the twins, he seemed frightened of everybody else in the household, particularly Vanessa.
Jon’s elder daughter sat a little removed from the others, reading an issue of Vogue propped next to her coffee mug. She was truly beautiful, with her glossy dark hair and delicate complexion, her slim figure set off by tight-fitting jeans and a black jersey top.
Jon looked at the girl’s bent head and wondered what was happening to his two older childr
en. How could he possibly reach them and start getting close to them again? Once upon a time it had been enough simply to love them.
But not anymore….
“Hi, Daddy.” Amy beamed up at him. “I’m making a hydrogen molecule. Camilla said it’d be a good idea to use my Tinkertoys.”
Jon kissed the twins and settled into his chair. “What does Dr. Pritchard know about hydrogen molecules? I thought her specialty was English, not chemistry.”
“The model’s just another kind of symbol,” Ari said. “Camilla wants us to make a list of as many different symbols as we can find. Ordinary things that can stand for other things.”
“So is a dragonfly a symbol for a helicopter?” Jon smiled his thanks as Margaret set a couple of poached eggs in front of him.
The twins exchanged a thoughtful glance. “No,” Ari said at last. “They’re two things that are like each other, but one isn’t a symbol of the other. That’s not what a symbol is.”
“I see. Van, could you pass me the salt, please?”
Vanessa pushed the saltshaker across the table without looking up.
“Enrique says that where he grew up, dragonflies can grow this big.” Ari held up his hands, the forefingers about eight inches apart.
“That’s a pretty big dragonfly,” Jon said, smiling. “How are you feeling this morning, Enrique?”
“I’m fine, thank you.” The boy cleared his throat and glanced nervously at Vanessa who was reading and paying no attention to him. He lowered his head again.
“All ready for our English class this morning?” Jon said.
“I think so. I finally have the assignments done, and I’m catching up on the reading I missed.”
“Good.” Jon glanced at his watch. “Do you want a ride to school, Van?”
“I can go with Steve.”
“Steve might be a little late today,” Jon said in a neutral tone. “You’d better come with us.”
“Whatever.” She shrugged, then closed her magazine, got up and wandered from the room while the others watched her.
ENRIQUE sat in the back seat with a twin on either side. Amy held a Barbie doll in one hand, frowning as she struggled to fit a pair of tiny plastic shoes on its feet.
Memories of You Page 11
