Another Man's Children

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“Sure I do,” Sam murmured. “The best salmon I ever caught was in the pool by that waterfall. You can’t beat spring run up there.”

“Or the winter steelhead,” Zach reminded him just before a spoonful of ice cream disappeared. He looked perfectly comfortable, perfectly…at home.

Her brother’s focus settled on the neck of his beer. “Those are the best streams I’ve ever fished.”

“Better than Alaska?”

“Darn near.” In the flickering light of the fire, Sam backed his quiet agreement by slowly nodding his head. “You know, I can’t even remember the last time I was there.” Trying, looking as if the memory just wouldn’t form, he shook his head again. “When was that, anyway?”

“Before Jase was born, I guess. You know,” Zach said mildly, taking another poke at his ice cream, “the steelhead fishing should be pretty good right about now. There’s that stream right behind my cabin. And you can’t beat the solitude there.”

For a moment, Sam remained silent. He simply contemplated the neck of the bottle in his hand.

“Yeah,” was all he finally said. “Yeah,” he repeated, but this time there was longing in the word.

Lauren could hear it herself. She could even see it in the thoughtful way her brother continued to stare at his bottle. Over a fishing stream, she thought, wondering what it was about such a thing that could leave a guy looking so wistful.

She was still wondering when Sam tipped back his beer for another swallow and she felt Zach’s steady gaze on her.

She hadn’t budged from where she stood by the coffee table. As interested as she was in the outcome of the conversation, it hadn’t occurred to her to move, or to be offended by the fact that she wasn’t being included in it.

Zach clearly intended for her to include herself now. He arched one dark eyebrow at her, his expression plainly saying that she could jump in here anytime now and reinforce her offer to take care of the home front.

Slipping around the table, she lowered herself to the sofa cushion nearest her brother. “It sounds like a place you’d like to see again, Sam.” She had a saying taped inside her Day Planner. When in Doubt, Bluff. Calling on the adage now, she spoke with calm conviction. “Jason and Jenny will be fine here with me if you want to go. I’ll be here for a week anyway.” She nudged his arm, gave him a smile. “You might as well take advantage of me. It’s been years since you’ve had the opportunity.”

She was talking about all the times he bribed her into cleaning his room when they’d lived at home. But remembrances of their childhood were lost on him just then.

“The cabin is yours if you want to use it,” Zach told him.

“I don’t know…”

“You might as well get away for a while, Sam.” Finality slipped into Zach’s tone. “There isn’t going to be that much for you to do here.”

Sam’s glance bounced from his friend to his sister and back again. “What are you talking about? There’s plenty to do. We’ve got all that work on the float plane—”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“You’ll…?

“Your concentration is shot, Sam.”

For a moment Zach simply held his glance. The way Sam was waffling wasn’t leaving him any choice but to bring out bigger guns. But he didn’t need to press his point. Sam was getting the message.

“This is about my taking that manifest today, isn’t it? Anyone can pick up the wrong file—”

“It’s not just the manifest,” his partner calmly replied. “That didn’t cause anything but a delay. This is about you forgetting to tell the mechanic about the problem with the alternator in FE 22,” he said, identifying one of their planes by the numbers on its tail. “And the wrong weights on the freight a couple of days ago.” Zach paused, clearly troubled by the errors and oversights. “You know the regs as well as I do, Sam.”

“It’s about you needing time for yourself, too,” Lauren reminded him. She wanted to keep the focus on his emotional needs. That seemed wiser, kinder than enumerating the things he was doing wrong. “I can see how hard it is for you to be in this house right now. And I know you have decisions to make about how long you’ll stay here. I don’t understand why you’d want to be quite so far away from everything, but if going to that cabin is what you need, then you should go.”

The glance Zach cut her was as sharp as glass. Yet, as he dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward, his expression bore nothing but concern.

“It’s more important that you just come to grips with what’s happened,” he said to Sam. “Once you do that, you’ll be able to concentrate on whatever else it is you need to do.”

It sounded to Lauren as if Zach didn’t think Sam should consider anything at all about his future while he was gone. She wasn’t going to call him on his advice, though. The man seemed to understand her brother in ways she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Part of her was touched by his empathy. Another part was more curious than was probably wise about where that understanding had come from.

Sam hadn’t moved. He was still sitting slumped in his chair, staring at the beer bottle. Only now he was picking at its label. “I’d like to go,” he finally, reluctantly, admitted. “I’m just not sure about leaving the kids.”

Lauren reached over, touched his arm. “I’m here for them.”

“I’m not sure about leaving you here, either.”

He looked up then, his despondent gaze settling on Lauren. A moment later, it shifted to his partner. “She doesn’t know anyone on the island…and it’s a long way from town.” A strip of label curled as he pulled it away. His voice dropped. “Tina really hated that at first.”

For a moment, he said nothing else. He just continued to contemplate his handiwork as his thoughts drifted back to his wife.

Lauren felt her throat tighten at the pain he so valiantly tried to hide.

Zach, looking uncomfortably male, focused on his melting ice cream.

Conscious of them both, Sam cleared his throat.

“I really would like to go,” he repeated, his voice quiet but steady as he looked to his friend. “But the only way I can do that is if you’ll check in on Lauren to make sure everything is okay. I don’t want to have to worry about her and the kids.”

Zach didn’t even hesitate. “You’ve got it.”

“Are you sure you’re okay with this, Sis?”

She didn’t possess Zach’s lack of compunction. Thrown by her brother’s request of the man openly watching her, a couple of seconds passed before she managed a commendably unruffled reply. “Of course. But the kids and I will be all right,” she assured him, certain that if she repeated it often enough it would be so. “Your friend doesn’t need to bother with us.”

Sam didn’t respond to her claim. Zach didn’t, either, though as the men worked out a departure time for the next day and she asked Sam what food she should pack for him, it occurred to her that she shouldn’t have expected a reply. Sam was too preoccupied. And Zach, she realized, now that she was thinking about it, had undoubtedly agreed only so her brother would go. As little as he wanted to do with her, she was dead certain he had no intention of checking up on her.

Sam left at two o’clock the next afternoon for the airport with his duffel bag, his steelhead rod and the week’s worth of groceries Lauren bought for him in town that morning. By three o’clock, Jenny was awake from her nap and fussing for a snack. Since graham crackers were on the “approved” list her mom had left, Lauren settled the toddler in her high chair with a small stack of the brown squares and a sipper cup of milk, finally coaxed a smile out of her by letting her have a spoon to bang with on her tray and turned her attention to Jason, who was crying for his dad.

The only way she could find to distract him was by having him help her make chocolate chip cookies and letting him load up his dump truck to drive the dough to the oven to bake.

That project took as long to clean up as it did to prepare. It also had the advantages of distracting her from the worry she felt about her brother heading into seclusion, and of occupying the kids until supper time. Though neither child was interested in eating what remained of the casserole her mom had left for them, she finally got Jason to eat chicken soup. Jenny’s appetite was as tiny as the child herself. Not sure what she was doing wrong since the little girl seemed more interested in chewing on her spoon than on what was in it, Lauren eventually coaxed a few bites into her and by the time she got them bathed, read Jason a story while rocking Jenny, and tucked them in for the night, she was ready to fall into bed herself.

She couldn’t indulge in that escape, however. She still had to do dishes and throw a load of towels into the washer, since she’d just used the last two clean ones. If she didn’t, she’d have nothing to dry herself off with after her shower in the morning.

There was also something wrong with the furnace.

For the past hour, the air in the house had grown steadily cooler. At first she’d thought it was because, busy as she’d been, she’d forgotten to add another log to the fire and the fire had gone out. So, between Jason’s story and tucking Jenny into her crib, she’d turned up the thermostat in the hallway.

That had been at least twenty minutes ago and the chill had yet to disappear.

Standing in the hall with her arms crossed over the cabled sweater she’d pulled over her jeans, she frowned at the thermostat’s thermometer. It was actually four degrees colder than when she’d turned the heat up.

The thermometer read fifty-nine degrees. Since it was all of forty degrees outside, she wasn’t interested in seeing just how cold the house could get before they all got pneumonia.

The washer and dryer were in the basement. Taking the load of towels down with her, she tossed them into the washer along with the soap and had the machine running when she turned to warily eye the black behemoth of a furnace in the middle of large, cement walled space.

She hated basements. They were cold and damp and shadowy and the corners were inevitably filled with boxes and old furniture that took on sinister shapes when illuminated by a single bare bulb.

Reminding herself that she was an adult, she ignored the set of narrow night-blackened windows high on the wall above the agitating washing machine. The furnace was still running. She could hear the fan or whatever it was that pushed the air to the upper floors. But the air it was pushing was cool.

So was the heavy black metal of the huge contraption when she reached her hand, palm out, toward it.

“Great,” she muttered, then felt her heart knock against her ribs at what sounded like a faint groan above her.

It’s just the house settling, she chastised herself, torn between figuring out what the problem was with the heat, wishing her brother were there and indulging her chronically overactive imagination. She was trying hard not to think about what might be in those woods. She was also trying to avoid the thought that, while she was an adult, she was the only adult around for a lot more miles than a scream could carry.

An instruction manual dangled by a chain from one of the pipes that poked like the arms of a saguaro cactus from the furnace. Spotting it, she pulled it from the plastic envelope protecting it and flipped through pages of schematics and diagrams that were as clear to her as Sanskrit.