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“And,” Wendy said with a defeated sigh, “I got a letter back. He was very polite. He said he was sympathetic to my situation, yadda yadda yadda, but—”
“But he wasn’t interested.” Alison smiled sadly. “Sounds like a message on my answering machine after a blind date with some guy who’s a jerk.”
“That’s just the thing, though. I don’t think he’s a jerk. I think he’s just wrong about not wanting to take me on. If I can talk to him, face-to-face, I can change his mind.”
“Are you so sure this new thing he’s invented can help you? You had your accident years ago. The surgery—”
“The surgery,” Wendy said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “was a disaster. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault. He did everything he could, but pins and plates can’t make up for missing bone. This technique of Pommier’s can.”
“You think?”
“I know.” She tapped her fist lightly against her breastbone. “I can feel it. Maybe that’s not the most scientific appraisal, but it’s what I feel. I just need to talk to him, but he’s wary. And I understand why. Pommier’s being hounded to death by the media, by desperate patients….” Alison raised a brow, and Wendy colored. “Right,” she said, with something close to defiance, “desperate patients like me. That’s why he’s coming to Cooper’s Corner.”
Alison’s jaw dropped. “Huh? Wendy, honey, you’re losing me here.”
“Pommier wants to get away from everything for a few days. He’s coming to the Berkshires to ski. My dad’s a member of the ski club, remember? Well, so’s an orthopedist from Pittsfield who’s a friend of my father’s. It turns out he and Pommier did their residencies together, and Pommier wrote to him, asked him about the town, whether it was as off the track as it seems, and if he could recommend a place to stay.” Wendy caught her breath. “Hey. I bet he’s going to stay at the old Cooper place. Twin Oaks.”
“If he’s this big-deal celebrity, wouldn’t he stay in Lenox? Or in Stockbridge? I mean, I love Cooper’s Corner, but you have to admit it’s not big on glitzy amenities.”
“That’s the point, Allie. The man wants to be just another face in the crowd. No reporters. No microphones and cameras.”
“I see.” Alison let out a breath. It had grown chilly inside the car, and her exhalation puffed out like steam. She turned on the engine and gave a little shiver as heat began to seep from the vents. “So, that’s why you came back. To corner this guy.”
“Yes.”
“And convince him to operate on you.”
“Exactly.”
“Do your folks know? ‘Cause when I spoke to your mom the other day, all she could talk about was how thrilled she was that you were coming home.”
“My dad knows. My mother doesn’t. Don’t look at me that way. Don’t you think I feel guilty enough? I just think it’s best to tell her with my father there as backup.” Wendy sighed. “You have a face like an open book, Alison. You think this is a bad idea, don’t you?”
“I sure do. You said yourself the surgery’s risky. Well, why subject yourself to it?”
“Because I want a life, that’s why!”
“You have one. You lived when they thought you wouldn’t. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, damn it, it isn’t. Look, it’s hard to explain, but I’m not who I used to be. Can’t you see that?”
“Yes,” Alison said after a minute, “I can. So, you’re home just to get to this doctor. Not because of your mom or your dad or Seth—”
“Seth again!” Wendy flushed. “What does he have to do with this? I was eighteen. He was nineteen. Whatever we had was kid stuff.”
“That’s not how I remember it. You guys were always together. You had plans.”
“I just told you, it was—”
“Kid stuff. I heard you. But I was here when we all got word of the accident. How you’d fallen on that practice run—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Wendy said sharply.
“Seth was like a crazy man. He flew to Norway on the first flight out—”
“Stop it! That was a thousand years ago.”
“It was nine years ago, and I’ve never forgotten how he looked, like somebody whose world had been destroyed.”
“It was my world that was destroyed,” Wendy cried, “and I did whatever I had to do to survive.” The friends stared at each other, each breathing hard. Then Wendy turned away and grabbed the door handle. A frosty breath of snow blew into the car. “I can walk home from here.”
“Don’t be a fool.” Alison reached past Wendy, caught the handle and slammed the door shut. The women glared at each other for a couple of minutes and then Alison sighed. “Can we continue this conversation inside?”
No. They couldn’t, Wendy realized. All the talk about Seth and old times…the look on Alison’s face when she’d tried to explain that she couldn’t accept the path her life had taken… It had been confirmation that her original plan was the wisest one. Lie low, stay away from the old hangouts, and avoid going through this horrible little scene and the pity of old friends who couldn’t understand why she wasn’t grateful just to have survived.
“Wendy? Are we going for that burger or not?”
“I think I’ll pass,” Wendy said quietly. “My folks are expecting me.”
Alison nodded. “Of course.” She put the car in gear, backed out of the parking space, then put on the brakes and glared at Wendy again. “I’m your oldest friend! If I can’t tell you the truth, who can?”
“You don’t know the truth,” Wendy said, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush. “I’m the one this happened to. Me, not you, or the doctors, or the nurses, or the therapists with their sympathetic looks and endless exercises.” She pushed down her hood and dragged her hands through her tumbled auburn curls. “Sometimes I wish I’d died that day, instead of waking up in a hospital bed and finding out that—that…”
“What? That you were alive? That you still had both your legs? I don’t understand you. Don’t you ever stop to think how lucky you were?”
“I’m trying to move on, Allie. Don’t you understand that?”
“By pretending Seth doesn’t exist? By trying to force a doctor into surgery that might do more harm than good?”
“Seth’s got somebody. You just told me that. And the doctor will want to do this operation once he talks to me.” Wendy shook her head. “You’re right. I lived. I got out of a wheelchair I was never supposed to get out of. But this woman, the one who can’t do the things she once did—this woman is a stranger. I can’t help it if that sounds selfish. It’s the way I feel.”
“You’re right,” Alison said quietly. “I don’t understand.” She looked at Wendy and smiled, though her eyes glittered with tears. “But I don’t have to. I’m your friend. I’ll stand by you, no matter what. Okay?”
Wendy nodded, even though it was more than okay. The pledge, the compassion in Alison’s eyes… Wendy felt her own eyes fill. For one improbable moment, she thought of letting all the pain inside her spill out. The truth was so much more complex than anyone knew. Maybe if she shared her awful secret…
She knew better. It wouldn’t change a thing.
Her heart, not just her body, had been broken in pieces on a winter’s day nine years ago. Looking in the mirror, seeing her scarred, twisted flesh was a constant reminder of what she’d almost had, what she’d lost, what she’d never have again. Now she could only pin her hopes on a time when she could stare at her reflection and see a whole Wendy instead of a shattered one. Then, perhaps, the agony would turn into a pain she could live with.
“Wendy?” Alison said softly.
She looked up, saw the confusion in her friend’s eyes. “Yes. I heard what you said. Thank you. You’re the best friend in the world.”
The women gave each other wobbly smiles, then Alison scraped her hand across her eyes. “If you make me cry,” she said gruffly, “and my mascara runs, I’m never going to forgive you.”
“Too late. It’s already running.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yours, too, so don’t look so smug.”
They gave each other sharp looks. Then they laughed, reached out and hugged.
“It’s good to have you home,” Alison said, “even if it’s just for a little while.”
“And it’s good to be here.” Wendy pulled a couple of tissues from her pocket and handed one to Alison. “Even if it’s just for a little while.”
Alison wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She started the car again and they drove to Cooper’s Corner, turned down a familiar old street and stopped in front of a handsome house with bay windows and flower boxes that Wendy knew would overflow with pink and lavender impatiens all summer.
She stepped from the car just as the front door opened. Her mother and father stood poised in the doorway. Then Gina laughed and ran down the steps, with Howard right behind her, and just for a moment, as Wendy went into their sheltering arms, she had to admit that home was the best place in the world.
CHAPTER TWO (#u5504f5da-bc27-5d5e-a1d5-857dd60d2db6)
IT WAS, Seth Castleman thought, the worst possible kind of day to be wrestling with Santa Claus on a sloped, snow-covered roof.
Almost six inches of snow had been predicted overnight, and that was exactly what had fallen. Those six inches, coming hot on the heels of an earlier storm, had been enough to make taking down the ten-foot Santa figure a nasty, fairly dangerous job.
“I hate to ask you,” Philo Cooper had told Seth when he phoned at nine that morning, “but I can’t reach the guy who rented it to me up in Pittsfield and it’s due back tomorrow. His answering machine’s on but maybe he’s away.”
“In Florida, if he’s got half a brain,” Seth had said dryly. “I’ll stop by later this afternoon.”
“Thanks, Seth.”
“No problem,” Seth had replied, which wasn’t really true. It was a problem to move around on the pitched roof with ice under your boots. But the job was simple, and he was almost finished. The Santa was now in the back of Philo’s truck and Seth had just one more brace to remove.
Actually, the view from here, twelve feet above Main Street, was pretty interesting. The town looked like a Currier and Ives Christmas card. Spruce boughs, accented with big silver balls that dangled and swayed in the wind, were wired to a cable that stretched from one side of the street to the other, and holly wreaths hung on the old-fashioned lampposts. It wouldn’t be long before all those decorations were taken down, too.
Seth pulled out another nail from the brace.
Cooper’s Corner was beautiful all year, but winter was special. He’d first seen the town in December a long, long time ago. He’d been eighteen then, a sullen kid who’d bounced from one New York City foster home to another, with no bigger plan than to find a job at one of the ski resorts, make a few bucks and then move on. But he’d found something here, not just a job but a way of life that had turned his life around.
Even at eighteen—hell, especially at eighteen—he’d been a cynic, world weary and hard-shelled. At first, he’d scoffed at the town’s old-fashioned setting. Surely it was phony, something carefully constructed for the tourist trade.
After a couple of months, he’d been surprised to learn that the town was what it seemed, a village whose residents cared about each other and even about him, tough guy that he tried to be.
Gradually, without him even realizing it, his carefully constructed walls of cynicism started to crumble. Tough guys weren’t supposed to fall in love, but Seth had, with the pretty little town that time seemed to have bypassed. He’d fallen in love with its solid, old-fashioned houses and quiet roads, with its friendly people…
…with a girl whose hair was the fire of maple leaves in autumn, whose eyes were the blue of a mountain lake in midsummer.
“Damn it!”
Seth mouthed a string of four-letter words as the brace broke free and clipped the side of his hand. Well, that was what you got for daydreaming. You worked with tools, you worked on a slippery roof, you had to pay attention. A mistake could be a lot worse than a bruised hand, and what in hell was wrong with him, anyway, thinking about what used to be? Wendy was history. Ancient history. It made more sense to think about the people who’d left the giant stone heads on Easter Island than it did to waste time thinking about the year Wendy had been his girl.
The giant stone heads, at least, were still around. Wendy sure as hell wasn’t.
Seth shoved the hammer back into his leather tool belt. He had no idea why she’d been on his mind so much lately. Maybe it was because he’d met her this time of year, and lost her the same time, too. No, he thought as he gathered up his tools, no, that couldn’t be it. Nine Januarys had come and gone since then, and except for the first two—okay, the first two or three, or maybe even four—except for them, the pages of the calendar hadn’t triggered memories of Wendy.
Not like this.
He woke up thinking about her, fell asleep the same way. Just last night he’d shot up in bed, yanked from sleep by a dream of her in his arms, her mouth on his, so real that, just for a second, he’d believed she was there.
“Wendy?” he’d said, and Joanne, curled beside him, had sat up, too, and put her hand on his arm.
“What’s wrong?” she’d murmured sleepily. “Seth? What is it?”
The image of Wendy had faded. Joanne’s perfume, a scent still not as familiar to him as the scent that had clung lightly to Wendy’s skin so long ago, filled his nostrils. He’d thrust his hands into his hair, shoving it back from his forehead.
“Nothing’s wrong. I was dreaming, that’s all.”
Jo started to put her arms around him, looking to soothe him, he knew, but he’d drawn away, as riddled with guilt as if he’d actually been about to go from holding Wendy to holding another woman.
“It’s late,” he’d said. “I have an early start in the morning. I might as well get going.”
He’d felt Jo’s disappointment and couldn’t blame her. He never stayed with her through the night, and even though she hadn’t commented on it, he knew damned well she was aware of it, just as she was surely aware that he’d never asked her to spend the night at his house, never made love to her there.
“The roads will be bad,” she’d said softly as he dressed in the dark. He’d kissed her temple and assured her that the roads would probably be clear.
He’d been half-right. The roads were awful, but halfway to the home he’d built for himself on Sawtooth Mountain, he’d lucked out and fallen in behind a state plow going straight up Route 7 to where he made the turnoff onto the long driveway to his house. His truck’s four-wheel drive had seen him safely through those last couple hundred feet.
Once inside, he’d built a fire in the living-room hearth, poured himself a brandy and sat in the flame-lit darkness, staring out the wall of glass that overlooked the valley until the first, faint light of dawn, telling himself there was no reason in the world he should be thinking about Wendy….
And thinking about her all the same, just the way he was right now.
Enough.
Carefully, Seth made his way across the icy roof, then down the ladder he’d left propped against it. He dumped his toolbox in the truck and headed into the store.
The bell over the door jingled merrily and Philo came out from the back room, wiping his hands on his denim apron.
“All finished?”
Seth handed him the braces and nodded. “That’s it until next Christmas.” He smiled. “Still planning to put up George and Abe for Presidents’ Day, same as always?”
“Absolutely.” Philo tapped a key on the old-fashioned cash register. “How much do I owe you?”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
“You sure? If you want me to pay you now—”
“No need.” Seth rubbed his hands together. “But I’ll hang around a few minutes and warm up by the stove, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure. One minute, and I’ll join you.”
Philo disappeared behind the curtain. Seth tucked his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, whistled softly between his teeth and strolled over to the cast-iron, pot-bellied stove that radiated heat throughout the store.
It was a cozy setting. Half a dozen chairs were drawn around the old stove; prints hung on the nearby walls. Seth recognized some—there were lots of Norman Rockwells. No surprise there, he thought, smiling as he rocked back a little on his heels. Rockwell had lived in these parts and his paintings and illustrations had immortalized the hardworking people of the area. One print in particular, of a boy warily dropping his trousers for a physician holding a hypodermic syringe, made him smile.
