Franny could see by Loretta's expression that she had perceived Chase's mention of a wedding much differently.
"Weil talk about it. You really should have a nice wedding, honey."
"Well, of course she should!" Loretta seconded. "It's the most important day of a woman's life, and it should be something she can always remember. Getting married in front of a justice of the peace simply isn't the same."
Hunter settled dark blue eyes on Franny's pale face. "There must be a wedding, yes? Promises made before God and the Great Ones? Without them, it is not a proper marriage."
Chase cleared his throat. "Franny and I, we need to discuss this privately, Father."
Hunter smiled. "What comes after is for private. The wedding belongs to everyone. You do not mind being married by a priest, I hope? Father O'Grady is very kind, and he will not insist you become—" He looked to his wife for help. "What is the word?"
"A convert," Loretta supplied. "It's the usual thing, of course, that the spouses of Catholics convert to the faith. But in our family, we're a bit unorthodox in our worship. Father O'Grady's given up on us, I think." She touched her chest. "I am a traditional Catholic to the marrow of my bones. But Hunter has his own religious convictions, so we raised our children to believe in both doctrines. Chase and Indigo are—" She broke off and smiled at her son. "Actually, I think Father O'Grady would say they're hopeless. He's content just to see their faces in church on occasion and doesn't insist they do things in the traditional way. That includes marriage. Jake is Methodist, and so far, he hasn't taken instruction. He says he's afraid his first confession would make Father's heart malfunction."
Everyone but Franny laughed at that. Chase cleared his throat and said, "I think we're overwhelming Franny, Ma. I don't think she had a church wedding in mind. We're kind of taking her by surprise."
"Oh, I see," Loretta said softly.
Only she didn't see, Franny thought. None of them did. She couldn't have a church wedding. She could see they were all set on it, but the idea was utter madness.
"I really would like to have a nice wedding," Chase told her softly. "I want to see you in a beautiful wedding gown and walking down the aisle to me on Frankie's arm. I'd like all your family and mine to be there. Your ma and all the kids. My folks, and my uncle Swift and aunt Amy. And Indigo and Jake, of course. I bet Indigo would love to be your matron of honor."
Frozen in mute denial, all Franny could do was stare at him.
He smiled slightly. "A hasty legal ceremony just doesn't—well, you know. Until we say our vows in a church, I won't feel properly married. Will you?"
Franny felt as though her heart were shattering into a million sharp little fragments. A beautiful wedding gown. Being escorted to the altar by her brother. Of course she wanted those things. She yearned for them. What woman didn't? But those were dreams, not reality. These people were out of their blooming minds. She was a prostitute. A pregnant prostitute. If she dressed all in white and walked down the aisle of a Catholic Church, or any other church, for that matter, it would be blasphemous.
As though he guessed her thoughts, Chase said again, "Maybe we should talk about it later."
Franny's face felt prickly, as though it were smeared with drying egg white. Humiliation surged within her, and she lowered her chin, unable to bear meeting anyone's gaze. A wedding. A real wedding. How could he not know how badly she had always wanted one?
Silence fell over the table. An awful, horrible silence. She knew they were all hoping she might say something. But what? That she'd be perfectly willing to make a laughingstock of herself at a church wedding? If Chase wanted a conventional wedding, he should have married a conventional girl. Perhaps that was the problem in a nutshell. They were all pretending she was something she wasn't because they couldn't bear to face the truth.
Franny pushed up from the table. "Please excuse me," she said shakily. "I'm feeling a little weary and believe I'll lie down for a bit."
The words were no sooner out than she whirled away. She could scarcely see where she was going. The furnishings in the sitting area were a blur as she cut across the polished wood floor.
"Franny?" Chase called.
The ladder to the loft loomed before her. She grasped the rungs and hauled herself frantically upward, her feet a flurry of motion, her skirts tangling about her ankles. Oh, God. She wanted to die. She wished she could. Right now, before her heart could beat again. Because this hurt. It hurt so much, she could scarcely bear it.
A beautiful wedding. How could they? More importantly, how could Chase? If he had set out to shame her, he had chosen the perfect way. Once in the loft, she ran to his room. Throwing herself full-length on the bed, Franny buried her face in his pillow to muffle her sobs. How could he be so blind that he couldn't see how impossible all of this was? The man was crazy. His parents were crazy. She was a whore, and all their pretending that she wasn't would never alter that fact. If Chase wanted a pure, virginal bride, he had married the wrong woman.
After Franny's abrupt departure from the table, Chase simply sat there, stunned. He had thought that a big wedding would be Franny's dream come true, that his willingness to have one would make her indescribably happy. Instead, she had looked—
There weren't words to describe the expression he had seen on her face. Like a dog that had been kicked and didn't know why. On legs that felt too shaky to support him, he rose from the bench.
"Jesus. I must be the stupidest bastard that ever breathed," he said to no one in particular. "Of course she wants a big wedding. It's not a case of what she wants. It's never been a case of what Franny wants. Only what she gets dished up to her."
His parents didn't speak, and in their silence, Chase heard the heartfelt regret neither of them could express.
"Well," his mother said tremulously, "we certainly made a mess of that, didn't we? I'm sorry, Chase. I didn't realize you hadn't spoken to her about it."
Chase closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. This wasn't his parents' fault. It was his. This afternoon, he'd taken the bull by the horns and had been ramrodding Franny ever since. It was all too much, too fast. He had scarcely given her a chance to breathe.
Dropping his hand, he said, "I, um, have to go upstairs. Talk to her. Excuse me."
Before he could step away, his mother rose. "Indigo asked your father and me over to her place for dessert and coffee. I think we'll mosey on over and take her up on it."
Chase knew damned well his sister hadn't issued such an invitation. The visiting arrangements between the two households were far more informal than that. "You don't have to leave, Ma. This is your home."
"And yours," Hunter cut in. "We will go. For this little while, yes? It is nothing."
It meant everything to Chase. In that moment, looking back over his behavior toward these two people the last few years, he felt so ashamed. Misdirected rebellion. Anger that made no sense. Obsessions with all the things in life that weren't important. He didn't deserve parents like these. Yet they didn't seem to realize how special they were. No matter how inexcusable his actions, they had continued to love him, waiting, always waiting, for him to finally grow up.
"Thank you, my father." Chase turned his gaze to his mother. "Ma."
"Go," Loretta urged. "We'll see you when we come home."
* * *
Go . . . It sounded simple enough. Only for Chase it wasn't. As he ascended the loft ladder, he thought of a hundred things he might say to Franny and discarded all of them. Lantern light from downstairs seeped up through the planked floor, striping the bare logs with muted amber. Chase paused near the dividing wall, remembering a thousand other times when he had entered this room. As a child. As a young man. In all the years, it hadn't changed. It was home to him, and would always be home. The patchwork quilt. The rag rugs his ma had braided. The clothing rod that hung in one corner. Not much in the way of finery. But there was a lot of love, and that made all the difference. His fat
her would never be a wealthy man. But he had given his family riches beyond compare, all the same.
Moving slowly toward the bed, Chase heard Franny's muffled sobs, and each one sliced through him like a knife. Again, he thought of a dozen or more things he might say. That he was an imbecile. That he was sorry. That he'd never meant to hurt her. But every time he tried to speak, the words became a tangled mess and lay unspoken on his cottony tongue. He wanted her to have all the things life had denied her, and in his mind, she deserved them. The last nine years could be like an autumn leaf blown away on a brisk breeze if only she would allow it. Why couldn't she turn loose of what was behind her? No one could walk forward without falling if they continually looked at the path behind them.
There was so much more to goodness than sinlessness, so much more to God than judgment. But he didn't know how to express those convictions. Not to someone like Franny. His father always drew comparisons between nature and the divine to get his point across, but he doubted she would see the significance if he tried to do the same.
Chase had been taught from childhood that everything had its roots in the mystical. To her, water was wet and ran downhill. To him, it not only sustained all in existence, but whispered of great mysteries and wisdom. To her, sunlight was pretty and warm. To him, it was worthy of worship, the giver of life. Mother Moon, Mother Earth, the Four Directions, the Wind. All were his father's gods. The horizon, the dawning of a new day, the setting of the sun, darkness. Those things were all divine and interwoven with magic. There was no yesterday, only tomorrow. You fixed your gaze ahead and walked forward, never looking back.
There was such a beauty in those simple concepts. Such peace. Only when Chase tried to convey them to someone like Franny, it no longer seemed so simple. Her feet were mired in guilt. There was no horizon ahead of her, only another day like the last, and a reality from which she couldn't escape. How could she hear a song on the wind? It had been all she could do just to survive.
In the end, because words failed him, Chase did the only thing he knew to do, and that was gather her into his arms. He half expected her to resist. Or worse yet to strike out at him in anger. If she had, he wouldn't have blamed her. A wedding. To Chase, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. But he hadn't been raised the way Franny had. In her mind, she didn't deserve a wedding. She was a lost soul and soiled. A soiled woman couldn't wear white, and once soiled, there was no way for her to become clean.
Her sobs shook her whole body. As Chase closed his arms around her, the enormity of her pain washed over him. When she didn't try to pull away, but clung to his neck instead, tears stung his eyes.
"I'm s-sorry," she managed to squeak. "Your parents. I-I'm so sorry. That was unforgivably rude of me, r-running out like that. Now they'll hate me for sure."
"Oh, Franny, I'm the one who's sorry."
Chase tightened his hold on her, a little amazed when she twisted to accommodate him, pressing close to his warmth like a forlorn child. He pressed his face into the curve of her shoulder and breathed in the scent of lavender he had come to associate with only this woman. It struck him that this was the first time, aside from the briefest of touches, infrequent hugs, and the fiasco on the front porch a while ago, that he'd actually embraced her. And it felt as he imagined heaven might feel. Perfect. Absolutely right.
It was on the tip of Chase's tongue to tell her that he had been wrong to suggest they have a formal wedding in a church when he happened to glance up and see the stars beyond the window. Like a million brilliant diamonds scattered across dark blue velvet, they winked and shimmered, each encircled by a silvery nimbus that made him think of Franny's hair ignited by sunlight.
Dammit. If any young woman on earth deserved a beautiful wedding, it was Franny. If only he could make her believe in that.
Wishing on stars. Chasing rainbows. Foolish dreams. Chase rocked her and smoothed her hair, his gaze fixed on the heavens. Those stars were real. All you had to do was look up, and you could feast on their brilliance. Reality wasn't bleak and dull and hopeless. It was whatever you made it.
Gently rocking her, Chase kept his gaze fixed on those stars and began to talk. He told her stories from his childhood, Comanche stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. They came to his tongue easily, every detail memorized, every word recorded in his mind because his father had repeated them to him so many times. After a while, Chase wasn't even sure what he was saying, or whether he sounded stupid or foolish. The truth was, he didn't really care. What mattered, the only thing that mattered, was that he somehow distract Franny and ease her pain.
Eventually the tension began to slip from her body, and her sobs became soft huffs of breath against his shirt. Chase looked down and saw that her gaze was fastened on the window, her expression dazed and dreamy. For an awful instant, he thought she had escaped into that hidden place inside her mind that she had told him about. But then he saw her gaze shift to another patch of starlight, and he knew she was still with him.
Still with him . . . yet floating in dreams. Not secret dreams within her mind, but ones that he had spun around the two of them with softly whispered stories that were a fanciful but intrinsic part of his heritage. Peacefulness settled over Chase. Dream places could become their common ground. They were something Franny understood. She'd been escaping into them for years. Why couldn't he blur the line between the world around them and the ones she created in her head? After all, he had been walking between two worlds all his life.
"Franny?"
She stirred slightly. "Hm?"
"Tell me about your dream pictures," he requested huskily. "Share what they're like with me."
Her breath caught, then shuddered from her on a weary sigh. A leftover sob, he guessed, but one that had lost its force. Running a hand up and down her arm, he willed her to oblige his request. A handful of her dreams, that was all he wanted. All he needed. It wasn't a lot to ask, yet he sensed that for Franny it was everything. To describe the places into which she escaped was to diminish their magic and make them less sacrosanct. Once she did that, she'd no longer have anyplace completely her own where she might go to hide from him.
In a tremulous voice barely above a whisper, she finally said, "I have lots of dream places, but the one I go to most often is the meadow full of daisies."
Chase closed his eyes on that. Her meadow full of daisies. She spoke of sunlight shimmering through raindrops, of tall grass whispering in the breeze, of water rushing over cascades of stones, of flower scents so sweet she wanted nothing more than to stand with her arms flung wide and breathe them in. It was a magical place, she whispered, where no one could follow, where no one could touch her, where there was no ugliness. It was her place. Hers alone, always waiting there for her inside her mind when she needed to separate herself from what was happening around her.
"Papa used to take us to a meadow just like the one I dream of," she admitted. "The times we had there were always so happy. I imagine him there when I go sometimes. Him and Mamma, and all of us kids. Before Jason got measles, before she went blind, before he fell from the steeple. The meadow I imagine inside my head seems just as real to me. Sometimes—" She dragged in a shaky breath. "Sometimes I want to stay and go forward from there. If I could, I'd do everything different. I'd be good and obey my parents. No one would ever get measles. Papa would never die. I'd make it all happen the way it should have happened. I'd never do a single bad thing to hurt all the people I love."
In her dream place, things could happen the way she desperately wished they had, he realized. Chase felt as though he were peeking through a keyhole into her soul, and he wasn't pleased by what he saw there. Guilt. A terrible, overwhelming guilt that he was beginning to suspect had been carefully cultivated. The thought made him feel sick.
"Well," he said softly, "I hope you never follow through on the inclination to stay there. I'd miss you sorely."
He had meant it as a joke. But she
stirred as though it made her uncomfortable.
"What?"
She shook her head slightly. "Nothing. It's silly."
"Nothing you think is silly, not to me."
"It's just that . . ." She moved her hands over the quilt, her fingers plucking nervously at the tufts of yarn. "Earlier today, I went there when I didn't intend to, and if May Belle hadn't reached through and grabbed me, I—" She shook her head again. "It's silly."
A shiver coursed along Chase's spine. "What is?"
"Just a feeling I had that the meadow was real. That it was more real than here, and that I could have stayed if I wanted."
"Only May Belle reached through?"
"Sort of. You know how your mind wanders sometimes when somebody's talking to you? And all of a sudden, they talk louder or something and jerk you back? It was like that. She was calling to me, and when I turned to look, she reached through and touched me. It sort of frightened me. I think I almost got lost in there."
Chase didn't like the sound of that at all. Which was all the more reason for him to create a new dream place, one firmly rooted in reality here with him. "If you like it there so much, why would getting lost there frighten you?"
"Because I'm needed here." She arched her neck to give him a slightly exasperated look. "I'm not crazy, Chase. I know the meadow isn't real. I can't go there and turn back the clock. What happened happened, and my family counts on me. It's just. . . well, wishing. I wish I could go there and change it all. I know I can't."
"You heard May Belle calling?"
"Yes. When I'm in my dream places, I can still hear the people here talking." Her mouth tightened. "If they're saying ugly things, I make up dream happenings and pretend my family is saying them."
With a catch in his heart, Chase whispered, "When do people say ugly things?"
Her fingers plucked more urgently at the quilt. "The men."
Chase closed his eyes.
"They said ugly things sometimes, and when I couldn't close my ears, I just pretended the words into my dreams so they weren't ugly anymore."