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He swore again. And in the space of a second switched from maturing young man to little boy. “You can’t move, Ma! Grainville’s our home!”
Perhaps, but she couldn’t dwell on that. Not if she was going to be able to leave.
“It’s a town with a house. A mostly empty house.”
He was quiet again. Caroline, desperately needing to fill the silence, to tell him the rest of why she’d called, didn’t know what to say. She’d forgotten all her well-rehearsed lines. Her little boy was hurting and she was trapped by life’s circumstances and couldn’t help him.
More trapped than anyone knew.
“So, what is it you aren’t telling me?” His words, when they finally came, were soft, compassionate.
Caroline’s recently rehearsed lines popped into her chaotic brain. “You know I’m adopted.”
“Yeah. So?”
The phone wasn’t the right way to do this. It was, however, her best shot at getting through while standing her ground. An uneducated country woman, Caroline understood her role—to be accommodating and obedient. And fell into it all too easily.
“Jess? Hear me out, okay? Without judgment or commentary?”
A pause. Then he said, “Sorry—yeah, I’ll listen.”
“Remember when I told you last fall about going through all the boxes in the cellar?” That first month after he’d left for school she’d thought she was going to die. Had prayed to die. Newly widowed with her only child gone, she’d never felt so alone. Her life seemed pointless, as if it might as well be over. Burying herself in memories, sorting them, preserving them, had been her only way to stay alive.
“Yeah. You sent me that comic Dad drew in high school.” Randy had only been dead a couple of months before Jesse left for college. But the rift between him and the boy who looked so much like him had been in place long before that. They’d just been so completely different….
“I took some things to Gram one day, too, some old pictures. And after seeing them, she brought up a box from her cellar and gave it to me.”
“What was in it?”
Caroline gave a shove against the ground, scraped the almost threadbare fabric of her jeans with one finger, willing her queasy stomach to calm. “She wouldn’t tell me, wouldn’t let me look until I got home, wouldn’t talk about it at all. It was little—an old stationery box.” It had pink roses all over it. Caroline couldn’t imagine her mother ever having written a letter on a piece of paper covered with pink roses.
“So what was in it?” Jesse’s voice was quiet now. But it still sounded as though he was waiting to take charge.
“A letter. And a ring.”
Glancing at the bare hand growing pink with cold, Caroline studied the ring she’d worn since that day—although normally, when she was with other people, it was on a chain around her neck.
“It’s the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’ve ever seen,” she told her son. “A sapphire. Set in gold.”
“Where’d it come from?” Jesse asked. And then, before she could answer, he burst out, “If it’s so great, why did Gram have it stuffed away in some old box in the basement?”
“The letter—and ring—were from my birth mother.” Caroline blinked as her eyes blurred, still staring at that ring. Jesse was going to think her a fool. Her father—and Randy’s—would surely agree with him. And maybe she was.
Still…
“Who was she? Some teenager who got knocked up?”
“Jesse Randall Prater!” Caroline’s cold cheeks burned, every nerve beneath her skin tensing. Did her son think of her with that same disrespect?
And if so, God help her, what would he think of her now?
“Well, isn’t that why you had me, Ma? Because you knew what it felt like to be given away and you couldn’t bear to do that to anyone else?”
She’d forgotten he knew that. It wasn’t a part of her life that she talked about—it wasn’t part of the reason she normally gave. But once, when Jesse had been about fourteen, and his father had taken his own insecurities out on his son, leaving the child feeling insignificant and unwanted, she’d told him her secret. That she hadn’t just kept him because she’d loved his father and wanted to get married. Or because his maternal grandparents, who’d never been able to have children of their own, were fully supportive of their sixteen-year-old pregnant daughter, offering to help wherever they could to make it possible for her to keep her child. She’d kept him because she didn’t ever want him to feel unworthy of life’s basic necessities—food, shelter and unconditional love.
She’d never, for one second, regretted the decision. But there were times when being Jesse’s mother hurt. A lot.
“I’m sorry, Ma.” The apology came after only a minute of silence. She’d have waited ten if that was what it took. “You’re just freaking me out with all this going-away stuff.”
Jesse was scared. So was she. Terrified.
“My birth mother was well into her forties when she had me. My father was in his early fifties. She’d gone through menopause. They thought pregnancy was impossible.”
“Wow,” Jesse said softly. “You’d think, being that old, they’d have been able to provide for a kid.”
Pulling both knees to her chest, Caroline laid her head on them, the worn denim soft against her cheeks as she gazed out at the yard that had barely changed since she’d moved there at seventeen. The old red maple tree was bigger. But it had already been huge. They’d put up a new fence ten years before. And the mailbox had been replaced when the old one was knocked down by a snowplow when Jesse was still a toddler.
“They did provide for one,” she told her son. “They just couldn’t manage two.”
“Two!” His voice cracked. “You’re a twin?” She almost smiled. It hadn’t taken long for her genius son to figure that out.
“Yes.”
She really should go inside where it was warm. But it was so empty. Unless she counted the memories that wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Cool! Two Mas.” He sounded like he was grinning. Caroline was grateful for the diversion, even knowing it would be short-lived. “Wait. Was the other kid a girl or a boy?”
“A girl.”
“Were you identical?”
“No.” Not that the letter had said one way or the other. Caroline had found out for herself, from pictures in newspaper articles on the Internet about her very successful twin. Her mother had given her the box at the end of September and within a week she’d joined a couple of Internet tracking services and had a folder on her computer filled with information.
“Damn!” Jesse said, quickly adding, “Uh, darn—sorry, Ma.”
“You’re a freshman in college, Jess,” Caroline said, walking over to the porch rail, wondering how many more years it would stand up to Kentucky’s weather. “Certainly old enough to make your own vocabulary choices.”
“It’s just so fantastic.” His voice was more that of her intense little boy than the man he was quickly becoming. “I wonder how they chose which one of you to keep.”
“Birth order,” she told him. “They kept the first. I was born second.”
Silence fell on the line.
“This had to be pretty hard on you, huh?” he asked a moment later. “Here I am, going on like some kind of jerk, not even thinking how this must’ve made you feel. Being the one given away and all.”
“It’s okay, Jess,” she told him, hoping that someday the words would be true. “I’ve always known I was given away.”
“Yeah, but knowing that one was kept—”
A chill swept through Caroline. She brushed some twigs off the top of the chipped porch rail and wrapped her arms around her midriff.
“And there I go again, putting my foot right in it,” Jesse said, bringing a slow grin to his mother’s face.
“So…does this, uh, talk about Shelter whatever have to do with the letter?”
“Yes.” With the thumb of her left hand she reached for the sapphire on her ring finger. According to the letter from Caroline’s birth mother, her twin had been given a ring, too. An opal. Apparently their mother had liked jewelry. “Her name is Phyllis Langford Sheffield. She’s a professor of Psychology at Montford University in Shelter Valley.”
“She married?”
“Yes. To a man named Matt Sheffield, Fine Arts Technical Coordinator at Montford.” She wasn’t too sure about her brother-in-law. She’d found an article about him, too. A disturbing one. Several years before Mr. Sheffield had taken the job at Montford, he’d been charged with statutory rape and sentenced to prison. He’d allegedly impregnated one of his students. That was a piece of news she was definitely not going to share with her son.
“They have any kids?”
“Two.” She thought of the grainy newspaper photo she had in her wallet. “Twins. A boy and a girl. They’re three.”
“Damn!” Jesse said again. “Must run in the genes, huh?”
Her heart gave a little flip at his mention of genetics. “Yeah.”
“Okay, I can see why a trip to Shelter Valley’s important,” Jesse said, almost magnanimously. “I’ll be home for spring recess the last week of March. We can go then.”
Pulling open the buttons on her coat, Caroline went inside, letting the screen door fall shut behind her. Randy had bought her year-round windows for the door a few Christmases ago, so she could leave the big old wooden door open, even in winter, and see out into the yard.
“I’m moving to Shelter Valley, Jess. This weekend.”
“No way, Ma! You can’t! You’re being ridiculous. I get it about wanting to see your sister. Hell, I even get that you’re feeling lonely, what with Dad dying and me gone almost right after, but you can’t just up and move! What about the farm?”
“I’m going to hang on to it for a while. At least until I see how I like Shelter Valley. It’s all paid for and the taxes are practically nothing….”
“We have cattle, Ma,” Jesse said, as though speaking to a child. “They aren’t just gonna wait around to see how you like life on the other side of the country. And we sure as hell can’t afford to pay someone to look after them for us.”
Us. It sounded so good. Too good. Because it wasn’t true anymore. Jesse was off starting a life of his own. And Caroline had her own life to tend to. Whether she wanted to or not. She had some consequences to pay.
“I sold the cattle.”
“You what?”
Even with the phone at arm’s length, she could hear Jesse’s yelp. She’d wanted to talk to him about the cattle—had thought he deserved to be a part of the decision—but she knew he’d talk her out of selling. And going.
And sister aside, she had to go. There was more reason to go to Shelter Valley than she could tell her son. He’d have to know eventually, her saner side kept reminding her.
But there was only so much she could handle at a time. And right now, that didn’t include Jesse’s likely reaction to her other news.
“I sold the cattle to give me enough money to live off until I get settled.”
“I can’t believe this!” He was sighing and whining and groaning all at once. “How do you expect to support yourself?” he asked. “You never even graduated from high school!”
“I got my equivalency years ago, you know that.”
“And that’ll get you a great career for sure,” he said sarcastically.
In the tiny kitchen she’d lived in her entire adult life, Caroline poured a cup of coffee into her favorite mug, careful to miss the chipped part of the rim as she took a gulp.
“I’m planning to enroll in college,” she said quietly, trying to control the fear and the doubts clutching at her heart. There was no one else on earth she’d have dared tell. “The semester doesn’t start for another two weeks.”
“You have to apply, Ma.” Jesse’s voice was equally soft. And loving.
“I did.”
“And?”
“I’ve been accepted, Jess.”
This time the silence was almost unbearable. With a shaking hand, Caroline lifted the mug again, took another sip of coffee that had been kept too hot by the old warming plate she’d been using with the old metal pot since high school. And burned her mouth.
She poured the stuff out. She shouldn’t be drinking it, anyway. Not for the next eight months, at least. Although she’d drunk coffee when she’d been pregnant with Jesse.
“Congratulations, Ma.” The pride in Jesse’s voice was her undoing.
“AH, MERI, HERE I AM AGAIN…”
With an embarrassed look, John Strickland slid into the bubbling spa in his professionally landscaped private and walled yard. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It wasn’t late, just dark. He’d had a long day. But his inner vision wasn’t restful. Meri was there, her memory filling his mind. She was dressed in his favorite red gown, diamonds glittering at her throat and wrist, laughing.
And then not.
Now the glittering came from the lights of the fire truck, police cars, the ambulance. Meri was lying inside the ambulance, wearing the red gown. But she wasn’t laughing.
“Breathe,” he said aloud. “Breathe.” He could almost feel her struggle for air.
And then he opened his eyes. As long as he opened his eyes, she’d still be breathing.
“I know I promised we’d quit meeting like this.” His words fell into the not-quite-freezing Shelter Valley January night, becoming part of the air around him, floating aimlessly in space. Just as he was.
“I’m supposed to be at dinner at Will’s,” he told his wife, as he imagined her sitting across from him. “Instead, here I am again, forgoing life to sit and talk to a dead woman.”
A cold breeze wafted over the water. And his face.
“I need a drink.”
He hoped to God his neighbors couldn’t hear him over the bubbling water. Not that there was much chance anyone would be lounging around a backyard in what, for Shelter Valley, was considered a major cold front. Any time you could see your breath, it made the news.
“I’m still traveling more than you liked.” He squinted at the empty space across from him, an idiot who was weak and disappointing himself even as he gave in to the overwhelming need to connect with the woman who’d left his life more than six years before.
He wiped at a trickle of sweat making its way from his forehead down between his eyes.
“Business is good. Finished another signature Strickland design last week.”
The water was hot, but it didn’t warm the blood in his veins. Nothing was going to do that. He’d resigned himself to the truth.
