The You I Never Knew Part 39

"Don't explain this or rationalize it, either. Not to me."

She glared at him. "I wasn't."

"And don't get defensive on me. It's a bad start, especially when you consider what I came to say."

She eyed him warily. "And what's that?"

He took a deep, steadying breath. Held her gaze with his. "For seventeen years you were dead to me," he said. "I had to live my life as if you'd never existed. Then, out of the blue, you come back here."

Her hands twisted in the hem of her painting smock. "I didn't come to torture you."

"True. But your coming here made something happen. Something new and good."

"Sam, that's all in the past."

"Look, if it was just a youthful fling, we would have forgotten, would have moved on. I know, because in seventeen years, I never forgot you, and believe me, it's not for lack of trying. It's because I never stopped loving you, Mich.e.l.le."

She tore her gaze from his, shaking her head. "How do I know I didn't just catch you between 'tryings'? How do I know your sudden interest in me isn't because of Cody?"

"He's a part of this, too. And you know better than I do that he's not an easy kid. But he makes me want to try like h.e.l.l to work this out."

She went to the long worktable by the easel and started cleaning up, her hands moving nervously as she put the caps back on tubes and swirled paintbrushes in jars of cleaner.

"What is it you want from me?" she asked.

"For starters, I want you to sit back down. You're supposed to be resting."

"I'm sick of resting." She worked faster, finishing her cleanup with an air of defiance. That was her way. Finish one thing before starting another. Finish cleaning up the paints before you give your attention to a man baring his soul.

He waited for her to finish. When she finally did, he said, "I've been thinking about you a lot, Mich.e.l.le. You don't seem happy, and your happiness matters to me."

She wadded up her smock between her hands. "Don't pretend this is about me and my happiness, Sam. It's about you-"

"Let me finish, d.a.m.n it." He knew he was stepping out on thin ice, but he'd already decided to take the risk. "You asked what I want from you. Why didn't you ask what I want to give you?"

"Why should I think you have anything to give me?"

"You've trained yourself not to expect anything from anyone. You're the giver, Mich.e.l.le, not the taker. You give Cody every last thing he needs and expect nothing in return."

"It's called parenting."

He ignored that. "You give your friend Natalie a roof over her head when she needs it, a shoulder to cry on. You give your father complete forgiveness for anything in the past, and just in case the world needs a symbol of your daughterly devotion, you give him a d.a.m.ned kidney."

"I think you'd better go. Before we both say things we regret."

He shook his head. This wasn't coming out right at all. "I'll regret the things we haven't said, Mich.e.l.le."

"What hasn't been said?" She stood there, beautiful, challenging, vulnerable.

And he thought back over his life, and the years that had gone by, the path he had taken, and where everything had brought him. In all the places he'd been and people he'd met, he had learned and moved on. But there was one person in his past from whom there was no moving on. Someone he was destined to carry around in his heart for the rest of his days. The truth of it stood out like a scar on pale flesh.

"I love you." The words sounded so inadequate for the size of what he was feeling. "I never stopped."

She sat down and hugged her knees up to her chest as if she'd felt a sudden chill.

His gut churned, and he realized he was scared, scared in a way he hadn't been in a long time. He'd been doing fine, his life had been set, and suddenly she had him walking off the edge of a cliff. "I mean it, Mich.e.l.le. It's not hard to love you. It's one of the only things that came easy when I was young. And it's still easy."

She looked terrified. "But it can't mean anything. It can't change anything."

He put out his hand, cradled her cheek in his palm. "It already has."

"No, not in the way you're saying. That night at the theater-"

"What, you're saying that didn't change anything? The hot springs didn't mean anything?" He took his hand away. "Does that mean you're in the habit of cheating on your boyfriend?"

"I believe that's my cue to smack you across the face."

He raked his hand through his hair. "It was a s.h.i.tty thing to say. But you've got to do better than tell me 'it can't work' or 'it hasn't changed anything.' Because we both know it can. And it has."

She sat silent, pale and tight-lipped with anger. And fear, too. He saw that in her eyes, and he hated being the reason for it.

"Just what do you expect from me?" she asked at length.

"I want you to be completely honest. Do you have the life you want back in Seattle? Or is it just something you settled for?"

"I worked d.a.m.ned hard to get my act together in Seattle-"

"That's not what I asked." He gestured at the canvas. "Do you do that in Seattle?"

She waved a hand dismissively. "When I'm home, I work. This time I'm spending here, Sam, it's not real. I'm not on a sabbatical from work. I'm on a sabbatical from my life. But that's the thing about sabbaticals. They're temporary. And you still haven't been straight with me. What do you expect? You want me to ditch everything I've built for fifteen years and move out here? Be your 'woman'?"

"Now you're talking."

"How about the other way around? How about you drop everything here and move to the city?"

"Is that what I should do, then? Sell my place, set up practice in Bellevue or some nice suburb?"

"You'd do that?" Her voice was small, disbelieving.

"Haven't you been listening? This kind of love doesn't just happen every day. Believe me, I know that. Took me a while to figure it out, but now I know. I loved you when we were young, and I lost you. After all these years, we've found each other. I'm not about to lose you again without a fight."

"This is not a fight." Panic flashed in her eyes. "You haven't thought this through. Say Cody and I decided to live out here. I'd turn into some beatnik studio artist selling my paintings at county fairs. Cody would never forgive me for ripping him away from his school and his friends in the middle of high school. The difference is, he'd have two of us to blame for his misery. Two of us to torture."

"I'm not about to let the kid torture either of us, Mich.e.l.le. Or dictate my life for me."

"Oh, Sam. It's what kids do. It's what they're about. Until you're a parent, day in and day out, facing every crisis and triumph and dealing with him moment by moment, you won't get it."

"Then give me a chance. Give me a chance to 'get it.' "

"What if you decide it's not for you? Then you just move on? Send us back to Seattle?"

"You aren't listening. I'm not saying let's give this a try. I'm saying let's do it. Let's be a family, Mich.e.l.le."

She shut her eyes. "Don't you think we should give this a little more time?"

"Time's not going to change my mind."

"I need the time. It's late, Sam. You'd better go."

He stood, forcing himself to walk away from her. "See you, Mich.e.l.le." He left before she could answer, and stepped out into the cold, clear night. "By the way," he said, turning to see her framed in the warm light of the doorway, "what I said earlier about us being a family-that was a marriage proposal."

Wednesday

Chapter 45.

A marriage proposal. Mich.e.l.le kept her eyes straight ahead, watching the vanishing point of the trail framed between low bramble and bunchgra.s.s trying to push up through the snow. She had gone AWOL. Her surgeon wouldn't approve of her taking a walk so soon, but she couldn't help herself, and she'd picked a day when spring felt like a certainty instead of an empty promise. Physically, she felt fine. Emotionally, she was roadkill.

A marriage proposal. With those three words, Sam had taken her world, her life, and turned it upside down, and then he'd gone home, leaving her stricken by doubts... and aching with hope.

After a restless night, she needed to get out into the wild s.p.a.ces of Montana, to watch spring arrive on a sudden gust of warm chinook wind. Moving slowly and gingerly, she walked a short way to a ridge top. A timberline of towering Douglas firs skirted the mountains. Layer upon layer of snowy peaks stretched out against the endless bowl of the sky. An eagle circled, then dived, and she watched the silent fury of its descent. The mystery and magnificence of the place gripped her. She felt infinitely small and insignificant, yet at the same time a sense of vastness and possibility expanded her soul.

The silence gave way to the sound of a stream. Rounding a bend, she came to a s...o...b..und creek. Awakened by the chinook, the sun beat strongly on the south face of the mountain, and chunks of melting snow and ice littered the trail. Even as she watched, the thaw escalated. The irrepressible power of the flowing water and the relentless glare of the midday sun worked at the stingy trickle. She stooped to drink the icy, numbing water from her cupped hands. The constant, steady swish of the current echoed the flow of blood in her veins.

In the corner of her eye something glittered and instinctively she turned to look. As a trio of hawks spiraled against the blue sky, a ledge of snow gave way above the stream. The avalanche boiled down a natural couloir that curved away from the trail. In its wake, the stream was unleashed. A whitewater cataract sprang from the heart of the mountain, shooting out and down over the rocks, making the sound of someone exhaling after holding a long breath. A rainbow, thrown up by the sun-shot water, dazzled her eyes.

Inside her, something rose up like the rise of the hawks, kettling and then moving off in a different direction.

It was the artist-Mich.e.l.le recognized her exuberance and her darkness. For years she had kept this creature imprisoned, icebound, but she was free now. She was home.

All her life, Mich.e.l.le had tended to hide from things that scared her. Losing her mother and being estranged from her father taught her to avoid facing the rocks and relics of emotional entanglements. But now she had changed; the hurt was still there but not the fear. She let all the feelings in like the cataract tumbling over the rocks, and the exultant pain cleansed her, reminded her that she was alive. Awakened her to old dreams that had never really died. Like the icebound stream, she had been silent, but the current never stopped coursing through her.

Sam's words had hung over her head all night long, and now they nagged at her, unanswered, impossible to ignore. She had been haunted by their last conversation. A marriage proposal. He'd left her stunned, speechless, her tongue numb with the inability to reply to him.

No one had ever proposed to her before. She had tried to savor the novelty, but instead it scared her. Brad had never proposed, even though they had been together, neighbors and lovers, for three years. They had both been extremely adept at avoiding that level of intimacy.

But Sam didn't know the rules. He didn't know how she operated. He didn't know she tended to hide from things that scared her, surrendering her dreams in order to keep herself safe.

As marriage proposals went, his was a doozy. It had done everything it was supposed to do. Gave her chills, made her blush, kept her awake at night, stopped her from thinking about anything but him.

His schedule gave her the gift of this new spring day all to herself, to gather her thoughts and steady her nerves. He was working at the clinic and then at the Flathead reservation, so she wouldn't be seeing him until tomorrow night at the earliest. Maybe by then she would know what to say.

Perhaps the reason she hadn't given Sam an immediate answer to his proposal was that on some level she didn't really trust that he'd meant to ask her. It could be a way of saying he wanted to spend more time with Cody.

As for herself, she had to figure out the secrets of her own heart. Watching the spring thaw, she thought she was beginning to hear what her heart was telling her. Sam McPhee made her feel as starry-eyed as a girl again. Yet in the end she had to acknowledge that she was a big girl now. The grown-up part of her knew the truth-that asking was the easy part.

It was what came after that was so hard.

That was why she was still resisting him. She could look beyond the dizzying whirl of pa.s.sion and see that there was work to be done-and it wasn't the sort of work she and Sam had proven themselves to be good at. After the pa.s.sion, there was struggle, sometimes disappointment, the daily grind of living-could they survive that, year after year?

She tipped her face up to the dazzling brightness of the sun. In that moment she realized that she knew the answer. She'd always known.

Chapter 46.

Tammi Lee Gilmer's car reeked of cigarettes, but Cody didn't mind, because she was letting him drive it. He'd pretty much slacked off smoking because cigarettes were too hard to get in this one-horse burg. The clerks at Ray's Quik Chek knew all the kids by name-and by age. They were a.n.a.l about not selling to minors.

Cody probably could have sneaked a pack or two from Tammi Lee, but he would have felt too s.h.i.tty, stealing from her. She was pretty cool, and he didn't mind hanging out with her now and then. If anyone would have told him he'd actually like having a recovering alcoholic rockabilly grandmother, he would have snorted in disbelief. But the fact was, he and Tammi Lee got along more like friends than relatives, and that was fine with him.

He'd had supper with her tonight because the ranch Jeep was in the shop and wouldn't be ready until McEvoy's Garage closed at eight. It was a gas, driving around here. Cody didn't have to worry about traffic and winos and one-way streets like in Seattle.

Tammi Lee had made fried chicken for dinner, with chocolate mud pie for dessert. After dinner, Cody had to go to the library to get a book on Montana state history for some bogus a.s.signment, and his grandmother had offered her car. She also asked him to return a rented videotape she'd left at the shop. She hated being late. It wasn't just the fines, she'd explained, but the whole idea of being forgetful.

It was kind of spooky, thinking about her lonely existence, and how she stayed up late watching movies and reading paperback novels to keep from wanting to drink again. She'd told him that some days, it wouldn't take much to set her off, make her take another drink.

"While I'm out, I'll get the tape from the shop and return it for you," Cody had offered.

She hadn't hesitated a single second. "Here's the key to my car, and this one's to the shop. I left the tape in the storeroom in the back. Little cubby with my name on it."

Cody was getting too used to this small town. He realized, as he drove along Main Street past the Indian statue in the square, that it was becoming as familiar to him as the palm of his hand. He pa.s.sed the darkened Lynwood Theater, thinking that a movie house would be a huge improvement around here.

In the library, he found the book he needed and applied for a card, the whole transaction only taking a few minutes. Under "Home Address" he had written Blue Rock Ranch, wincing as he did so. When his mom had asked him what he thought of moving here permanently, he'd instantly hated the idea. If she was just checking, she had her answer.

In the parking lot, he spotted some kids coming out of the library, backpacks on their shoulders, shoving each other as they skidded along the icy sidewalk. One student walked alone, slim and straight. Cody leaned across the seat and cranked down the window.

"Hey, Molly," he said.

She tensed, reminding him of Sam's filly. He didn't blame her. They hadn't spoken since the ride incident because he couldn't figure out a way to apologize. He'd never been big on explaining his behavior or apologizing.

She came to the car, tucking a silky black lock of hair behind her ear as she bent to peer into the pa.s.senger-side window. "What's up, Cody?" She didn't look at him the way she had when they'd first met-the sideways, kind of shy-but-interested way he liked. She was neutral now. Guarded.

"I'm running an errand for my grandmother," he said. A ride, yeah, that would do it. He'd offer her a ride home. That would give them a chance to talk. "Hey, you want a lift-"

"Yo, Cody!" a familiar voice called. "Where'd you get the wheels?" Without waiting for an answer, Billy Ho and his sidekick, Ethan Lindvig, jumped in, one in front, one in back. "My El Camino's wasted again. Couldn't get it to start." Billy sent an "aw-shucks" grin to Molly. "You want to come along, cowgirl?"

She shook her head and stepped away from the car. Her face went all hard, her eyes flat and glossy. "See you, Cody," she said, her tone dismissive.

He couldn't very well call her back with Billy and Ethan breathing down his neck. "Where to?" he asked them.