It was the perfect lead-in, so why didn’t she take the opportunity to explain that it had come from Jed, who’d inadvertently stumbled upon it by exclaiming the kitten was “pew-ing” the first time it used the sandbox?
It would have been so much simpler had she listened to her conscience and told him in the beginning. But the longer she held the secret inside, the bigger it grew, until it lay like a malignancy she knew must be removed before it eventually killed her. But by now she’d put off telling him for so long that she’d become paranoid about it.
There were times when she looked up to find Sam’s eyes studying her pensively, and she knew he was biting his tongue to keep from asking the question which by now he had every right to ask. Yet, honorably, he didn’t. And the tension built . . . and built.
Until the night he took her to his home to have dinner with his mother. The evening was an unqualified success, and Lee realized it represented another step in their deepening relationship. But she knew too that Sam had not chosen this last evening before her week off without due consideration. He’d done it as if to say—there, another obstacle overcome; now it’s your turn.
All the way home in the car tension grew between them. Outside, a storm raged with great slashes of lightning zagging over the plains followed by awesome thunderclaps. Rain pelted down. The windshield wipers beat out a rhythm and the tires hissed through the rainy streets while inside the car Sam refrained from taking Lee’s hand, which he usually did when he drove.
At the townhouse he killed the engine and the lights, then laced his fingers on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, as if waiting for an explanation.
“Lee—” he began at last.
But before he could get any farther, she interrupted, “There’s no sense in two of us getting soaked. You stay here.”
His silence seemed to say, “On our last night together?” Yet he continued brooding while the tension mounted still higher between them. Finally, unable to think of a graceful exit line, Lee leaned over and kissed his cheek. He sat as stiff as a ramrod, but as she reached for the door handle, his hand lashed out in the dark and grabbed her so roughly that she gasped. Immediately he loosened his grip, and his voice became contrite.
“Lee, I’m going to miss you.”
“I . . . I’m going to miss you too.” She waited breathlessly, but still he didn’t ask the question, and still she didn’t offer an explanation. She wanted so badly to be honest with him, but she was so afraid of looking inadequate in his eyes. The silence lengthened, and the tension in the car seemed ready to explode. Then, just when she thought she couldn’t bear it another instant, Sam released her hand, sighed tiredly, and sank down against the seat. She searched his face in the shadows, and for a blinding second the car interior was lit by lightning. His eyes were closed, and he’d rolled his face away from her while he pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Lee, I’m not sure . . . no, let me start again.” His hand fell away from his nose, but his voice was strained and held an undeniable note of weariness. “I think I love you, Lee.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. Tears sprang to her eyes, and her heart pounded. She reached for his hand on the seat between them, took it in both of hers, and lifted it to her mouth. It was more than a kiss she placed on the back of it. It was a taking in of the texture, warmth, and security of it. And it was an apology.
She straightened the long, lax fingers and pressed her cheek and eyebrow against his knuckles.
“Oh, Sam,” she breathed sadly against his hand, then carried it to the side of her neck and pressed it beneath her jaw where the pulse raced. “I think I love you too.”
Everything inside Lee’s body felt as temptestuous as the storm outside. She ran her fingertips down his inner wrist and felt his wild pulse, but he sat as before, wedged low in the seat.
“What should we do about it?” he asked, and she knew it was as close as he would come to forcing her to tell him why she was about to drop mysteriously out of his life for a week.
“Wait and see. We both said we ‘think.’ ”
But even to Lee, her answer sounded inadequate, and she sensed his frustration mounting. “Wait?” he snapped, anger boiling to the surface again as he demanded in a hard tone, “How long?” His fingers closed tightly around hers.
“Sam, let me go in.”
He seemed to consider a moment, as if calculating the effect of his question before asking, “Can I come in with you?”
Immediately she let go of his hand. “No, Sam, not tonight.”
“Why?” He sat up straighter and seemed to strain toward her.
“I . . .” But she couldn’t explain it. She only knew it had something to do with the boys coming tomorrow and a feeling of her own unworthiness. But before she could conjure up an answer, his voice cut coldly through the tense space between them.
“All right then, come here.” And before she could guess his intentions, he reached for her in an insolent way he’d never before used with her and pulled her roughly across the seat until she fell against his chest. He began kissing her with a bruising lack of sensitivity.
“S . . . Sam, don’t!” She struggled up, recoiling instinctively against him. But he grabbed her by both wrists, and he was frighteningly powerful in his anger as they poised, faced off in a half-prone position across the car seat. His fingers bit into the tender skin where her pulse raced. Tears trembled on her eyelids, and fear swelled up in her throat.
“Why do you pull away? I’m wishing the lady good-bye, that’s all.”
“Sam . . .” But before more words escaped her stiff lips, she was flung backward against his hard chest with her right hand wrenched between their bodies, rendering it useless. And all the while his voice grated near her ear. “I’ve just said I think I love you, and you told me the same thing. Considering that, I think you deserve a proper good-bye.” She fought him with her single free hand, but he controlled it with amazingly little difficulty as he roughly opened the front fastening of her slacks and plunged his hand inside.
“Sam . . . why . . . why are you doing . . . this?” she sobbed.
But he was relentless. “Why?” His hand invaded the part of her body he had never touched with anything but utmost tenderness, but his voice made a mockery of the act. “This is what you keep me around for, isn’t it? This is what you want me for, isn’t it?”
He plundered her with consummate skill while an unspeakable sense of loss washed over Lee. She was sobbing quietly now, and somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she’d brought on this anger herself, for his confession of love had been an invitation for her to confide in him, yet she’d refused once again. Tears ran down her face as she finally gave up struggling and lay passively on his hard, aroused body, letting him do with her what he would.
But just as swiftly as it had come, the fight went out of him. His hand fell still while his chest still heaved with emotion. His heartbeat reverberated through the thin fabric of Lee’s blouse, and he swallowed convulsively. At the sound, she too choked back the thick tears that clotted her throat. Slowly his fingertips withdrew to rest on the soft, warm skin of her stomach. Neither of them spoke.
In those moments, as she lay upon him, feeling him breathe torturously against the back of her neck, she saw the death of a love that might have been. She held back the sobs she wanted to release for the annihilation of something they’d built slowly and carefully, something that had shown such bright promise only a short time ago.
And—oh God, oh God—it hurt.
He had seized upon one of her greatest vulnerabilities and used it against her, knowing full well that his accusation would debase her. She wished she could go back ten minutes and live them again. But she could only fling the back of a wrist over her eyes while her throat muscles worked spasmodically. All the while she lay on top of him like a plucked flower, wilted by the very sun that had once given it life.
She opened her eyes and stared unseeingly a
t the rivulets of rain oozing down the windshield, turning an unearthly green in the intermittent flashes of lightning. For a minute she felt disoriented and removed from herself.
Then she summoned up the will to move and pulled herself up, slowly, slowly, sitting on his sprawled thighs and running shaky fingers through her tousled hair, unable yet to find the strength to remove herself from him completely.
“Cherokee—”
“Don’t!” His rasping utterance was cut in half by the stiffening of her shoulders and the harsh word. She had thrown up a hand in warning but still sat on him, still with her back to him. There followed a deadly silence, broken only by the ongoing thrum of rain on the roof and low growls of thunder.
Then, muscle by muscle, she dragged her weary body to the far side of the seat and untangled her legs from his. In the same deliberate fashion he righted himself behind the wheel, then hung his hands on it, staring straight ahead for several seconds before slowly lowering his forehead onto his knuckles.
She tucked in her blouse, zipped and buttoned her slacks, and reached to slip her shoes from her feet, all with the stilted motions of an automaton. But when she reached for her purse and then for the door handle, Sam lifted his head and placed a detaining hand on her arm.
“Cherokee, I’m sorry. Let’s talk about this.”
“Don’t touch me,” she said lifelessly. “And don’t call me Cherokee.”
His hand fell away, but his voice held a note of entreaty. “This happened because you won’t confide in me. If you go in now and stubbornly refuse to—”
The car door cut off his appeal as she stepped out into the torrents of rain and slammed it shut. A river of water rushed along the curb, but she scarcely felt it as her nylon-clad foot splashed through it. Then she was fleeing blindly toward the door. Behind her the engine started up, and the car tore away at breakneck speed, the tail lights fishtailing down the street on the slick pavement. At the stop sign up the block he only slowed, then tore off again with a second screech of tires and swerving of tail lights that bled off into the distance.
THE night that followed was one of the worst in Lee’s life. She was left utterly decimated by the rift between her and Sam while at the same time she realized she must buck up her spirits to face her sons. She damned Sam Brown for bringing this emotional turmoil into her life at a time that was already rife with it. Facing the boys brought again that sick-sweet lifting of the heart that was half joy, half pain, and as she knelt to greet them, it was with a foreknowledge that this visit was somehow doomed from the start.
Jed and Matthew had grown so much since she’d seen them. At six and eight, they now resisted her hello hugs. Telling herself not to feel slighted, she backed off, realizing she seemed strange to them and that it would take them a while to warm up. They loved her new townhouse, though, and claimed their new beds with exuberance and a few surprised “wows.” They fell upon P. Ewing, seeming to have missed him more than their mother, and she looked on with heartsick emptiness, remembering how she and Joel had decided to get the cat because they’d been fighting more and more and thought the pet would be good for the boys.
Daddy, they said, was fine, and they liked his new wife, Tisha, real good. Tisha made the best lasagna in the world. No, Lee answered her younger son when he asked, she wasn’t too handy at lasagna. How about spaghetti? But it seemed Matthew had lost the fetish for spaghetti she remembered.
They squealed with glee at her suggestion that she take them to a pro football game the second day they were there. But they didn’t know the Kansas City players’ names and before long squirmed in their seats and became occasionally disruptive, teasing each other and punching playfully, their bouncing and boisterousness drawing unfavorable glances from people in nearby seats. They left the game after the third quarter. On the way home Lee learned that soccer was their favorite game now. Daddy was coaching their team, and Tisha came to every game.
On Monday Lee won their hearts by taking them on an all-day outing to Worlds of Fun amusement park. They rode the Zulu, Orient Express, and Scream-roller until Lee’s feet hurt from standing around waiting. But after each ride she shared their renewed delight and robbed her pitifully poor pocketbook again and again for the junkfood they wanted. She forgot to bring suntan lotion, so by the end of the day the boys were both burned, thus irritable and uncomfortable in bed that night.
In her own bed, she thought about Sam and the day they’d ridden the Zambezi Zinger, but the day that had been so happy then only brought a bittersweet pang now and made her cry miserably. She missed him terribly, even while she hated him for the hurt he’d caused her. She considered calling him, but her emotional equilibrium was already strained to its limits by being with the boys again.
The boys. They hardly seemed like her sons anymore, and she felt increasingly inadequate. Nothing she did seemed right for their needs while everything Tisha did must be perfect. Tomorrow, she vowed, she’d make no mistakes.
That day she took them to the sixty-acre Swope Park Zoo with its six hundred animals. But they’d been to Florida’s Busch Gardens last year and had ridden down the African Safari Ride, where elephants spray you while you go past. The Swope trip seemed a definite second best to her sons.
Each night when they were asleep in their twin beds, Lee stepped to the doorway of their room and studied the dark heads on the pale pillow cases, and tears clogged her throat. At those moments, the disastrous days paled and were forgotten. She was desperately happy to have them here. The two sleeping children were hers again, flesh of her flesh, beings of her making. She loved them in a terrifying way, yet knew with a keen, piercing certainty that their stepmother’s love was far more influential than her own. Soon she would become a shadow figure to them. Perhaps she already was.
Matthew had a bad dream the next night and awakened in tears. She sat on the edge of the bed while the backs of his sunburned hands smeared tears across his cheeks and he cried, “Where’s Mommy?”
“I’m here, darling,” she answered soothingly.
But, disoriented and accustomed to the securities of his life in another home, he cried, “No-o-o, I want Mommy.”
By Friday both Jed and Matthew were discussing their friends at home and making plans for what they were going to play when they got back.
On Saturday they produced money “Mommy” had given them to buy a gift for Daddy. Lee took them to the store of stores—Halls, in the Crown Center—where there were items like nowhere else in the world. They bought Daddy a bar of soap shaped like a microphone so that he could sing in the shower.
On Sunday Lee dressed them each in a brand new outfit she’d bought and waited anxiously for their father to come and pick them up. She wondered what her reaction to Joel would be and felt a quailing in her stomach as the doorbell rang. The boys catapulted to answer it. But with him they babbled mostly about all the exciting things they’d done during the week. It was to Tisha, waiting in the car, to whom they ran with arms extended.
Joel looked healthy and happy, watching the boys gallop across the lawn before he turned to her. She surveyed him with immense relief and realized he no longer posed a threat to her emotions. At some point she had stopped loving him, and she could face him now, comfortable with the fact.
“How are you, Lee?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Things are going well with my new job, and I’ve got the house now, and . . .” Her eyes wandered down the sidewalk to the boys, then back to Joel’s face. “You and Tisha are doing a wonderful job with them, Joel.”
“Thanks.” He stood relaxed before her. “We’re expecting another one in February.”
“Well, congratulations!” She smiled. “I . . . well, please tell Tisha the same.”
“I will.” He made a move to leave and for the first time seemed slightly uncomfortable. “Well, I guess the guys will see you again at Christmas.”
“Yes.” The word sounded forlorn.
“Boys,” Joel called, “come and kiss your mother g
ood-bye.”
They returned on the run, gave Lee the required kiss, then forgot everything except getting back into the car as fast as they could.
When they were gone, Lee wandered about the house like a lost soul, hugging her arms. The kitchen smelled like cherry popsicles and she found one melting down the sink, dropped there hastily when she’d said their daddy had arrived. She picked up the stick and threw it away, then rinsed the red liquid down the drain. But the pink stain remained. She stared at it for a long, long time until it grew wavery. A tear dripped down and landed beside it on the almond-colored porcelain, and a moment later she leaned an elbow on the sink edge and sobbed wretchedly. The sound of her crying made her weep all the harder, echoing as it did into the empty room. My babies. She clutched her stomach and let misery overwhelm her, leaning her face against her forearm until it grew slick. Her sobbing became so choppy and prolonged that it robbed Lee of breath, and she felt her knees buckle. She moved to the kitchen table and fell into a chair, dropping her head forward on her arms, crying until she thought there could be no more moisture in her body. Where’s Mommy? P. Ewing came and rubbed up against her leg and purred, bringing a renewed freshet of misery. She needed a tissue, but had none in the kitchen, so she stumbled upstairs and blew her nose and dried her eyes. Clutching a handful of soggy tissues against her nose and mouth, she leaned against the bedroom doorway and felt her grief renewed at the sight of the twin beds and the pennants on the wall above them. Her head fell tiredly against the doorframe, and she cried until her throat and chest ached. I love you, Jed. I love you, Matthew. Her misery seemed to have eternal life. The convulsive sobs continued until her head was bursting, and she dragged herself to the bathroom for two aspirins. But at the sight of her ravaged face in the mirror, more tears burned her swollen eyelids and she thought that if she didn’t hear the sound of another human voice soon, she would most certainly die.
She stumbled down to the kitchen and dialed, seeking help from the only person who could solace her. When she heard his voice, she tried to calm her own, but she lost control and sucked in unexpected gulps of air in the middle of words.