19
Thanks to her catnap in Carly’s lap, Penny jarred awake when they reached her room. Carly tried to settle her down but couldn’t. As eager as she was to speak with Ryan, Penny’s needs trumped her own, and she decided to give her a bath with lavender-scented bubbles.
Sometimes the fragrance calmed her, but not tonight. The instant Penny sat in the water, she kicked her feet and splashed with her hands. “I want to go on the boat. I want to go on the boat.”
The chant echoed like a song until Carly helped Penny out of the tub, wrapped her in a towel, and held her tight. “Penny. That’s enough. The boat trip is up to your daddy.”
“I want to go,” Penny repeated. “My mommy rode in a boat to heaven.”
Carly ached for the child, but this wasn’t the time for such a sensitive conversation. Hoping the subject would evaporate with the bubbles, she tucked Penny into bed and read to her. Despite Carly’s soothing voice, Penny couldn’t unwind, and an hour passed before she dozed off. Carly fetched a light sweater from her room, went to the patio to find Ryan, and saw the empty table. Thinking he would return, she sat down to wait.
With the pool bright and the ocean dark in front of her, she lifted her heels to the edge of the chair and hugged her knees. She missed Bette terribly but not the police helicopter. The murderers were still on the loose, though Detective Hogan told her they had a strong lead. The world was such a violent place, such a broken place. Aching for the familiar, she imagined the scent of the loamy Kentucky earth and inhaled.
A whiff of smoke tickled her nostrils. For an instant she worried Eric was sneaking cigarettes. Or maybe the situation was worse. Maybe a careless passerby had tossed a cigarette into the brush behind the house.
She rushed to the fence and scanned the steep hill. Nothing. No flames. No smoke. But in the corner of the yard, the tip of a cigarette flared like a marigold, and she spotted Ryan. Slipping the cigarette from his lips, he looked up and blew out a stream of smoke.
“Ryan?”
Startled, he dropped the cigarette on the concrete and ground it out. “You caught me.”
“You smoke.”
“Occasionally. It’s a bad habit.”
“We all have them.” Nail-biting. Overeating. Cussing. Losing one’s temper and telling a confused FASD teenage girl to just get out. Carly swallowed so hard her throat ached.
Ryan kicked the butt into a flower bed and buried it. “The kids don’t know. They need a good example. Not that I’m setting one by sneaking around. I guess that makes me a hypocrite.”
“Or human.”
“Or just weak.”
“It’s the same thing.” They were back to the faith issue—her belief that human beings made mistakes and needed a savior, and his belief that he controlled his own destiny. She wasn’t ready to talk about Penny, so she steered the conversation to safer ground. “About the trip—”
“Penny can’t go. It’s just not safe for her.”
“Oh.” Carly paused. “So you don’t need me.”
“No, I do. In fact, more than ever. We need to bring Taylor and her sister. After you left, Kyle and Eric got in a shouting match. If we make it ‘guys only,’ Kyle will be miserable, and Eric and Nathan will gang up on him. Kyle doesn’t like the ocean all that much, so he won’t have anything to do. The island itself is just a big rock. If you don’t kayak or snorkel, there’s not a lot there.”
“I see.”
“I need you to chaperone the girls.” Ryan scrubbed his hand through his hair, leaving small furrows in the wake of his fingers. “It’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?”
“Not to me.” In Carly’s experience, teenage girls needed more protection than they typically received. “It’s a good idea, but I’m not sure.”
“I am. I don’t want the boys to bicker the whole time, and I can’t take Taylor and her sister without you.”
“Maybe just you and Eric should go.”
“That’s a last resort. Eric’s always been the little brother, and now he’s the middle kid. For once he wants to be the star.”
“He wants to stand out, and he needs an audience to do it.” As the baby in her own family, Carly knew the feeling. “He’s also the younger brother and competitive.” A lesson from both her psychology classes and Cain and Abel.
“Exactly. Eric’s itching to rub Kyle’s nose in something. This trip is his chance.”
“Boys . . .” Carly shook her head. “I’ll never understand what makes them tick.”
Ryan laughed. “It’s not all that complicated. Boys like to fight, and they like to win. Eric needs this trip the way Kyle needs baseball. The way I needed . . .” He shrugged. “Whatever it was I needed.”
“I suppose.” Except his voice sounded hollow. “If you come on the trip, Kyle can hang out with Taylor and her sister, I can snorkel with Eric and Nathan, and you can cheer for everyone.”
“Oh dear,” she muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cheering for people is my favorite thing to do.” She laid her hand on the black iron and stared into the night. Without Penny, there would be no buffer between herself and Ryan. They’d be a team, a couple chaperoning a boatload of teenagers. Common sense told her to say no, but how could she deny Eric his moment in the sun? She couldn’t. Not when she’d been raised to trust God and be brave. “You sold me.”
Ryan’s eyes lingered on her face. That rubber band feeling was pulling them close, so she raised her fist for another knuckle bump. Ryan copied her, but his hand opened, and so did hers. Instead of bouncing off each other, their fingers laced together and held tight.
“Thank you, Carly,” he murmured. “I can’t imagine this summer without you.”
“It’s—it’s been good.” Weak words meant to hide strong feelings. She loosened her grip, but Ryan held tight. Their gazes locked, and she felt so admired, so beguiled, that she wondered if his feelings for her were as vibrant as hers for him. Maybe, but what did they do then? They were more than just Mars and Venus, or Los Angeles vs. Kentucky. When it came to matters of the soul, they were darkness and light—opposing forces that couldn’t occupy the same space.
She eased out of his grasp and stepped back. The patio seemed to sway like the deck of a ship. Grabbing the fence again, she tried to joke. “I hope I don’t get seasick on the boat.”
“You won’t,” he drawled, as if he commanded the waves. “I’ll get you a motion sickness patch.”
Carly wished there was a patch for lovesickness, because surely that’s what she had. Looking at Ryan now—tall and strong, lonely, troubled, and sometimes cynical—she told herself to just stop it. This wasn’t the forever love that led to marriage. It couldn’t be. She was infatuated with him. That was all.
Forcing air into her lungs, she told him about Penny’s latest remark about her mother taking a boat to heaven. “I didn’t say anything. I have opinions, of course. But she’s your daughter, and it’s up to you to guide her.”
“Yes, it is.” That was all he said.
“Do you mind if I tell her Bible stories, or if we talk about Jesus and believing in Him? I know you don’t agree, but it’s what I believe.”
“That’s fine. Tell her whatever you feel is appropriate. Maybe it’ll help her in the long run.”
“I worry—”
“Don’t.”
“But—”
“Carly, drop it.” He patted his shirt pocket as if looking for another cigarette, then lowered his hand without taking one. “Your faith is your business. I worry about Penny being confused, but she’s confused about a lot of things. That’s my fault.”
She hated his guilt. Hated it. She hated her own with an equal intensity. Like a riptide pulling a swimmer out to sea, guilt dragged her away from the solid shore of God’s love. Why couldn’t she let go of that mistake with Allison?
Ryan gripped the fence again and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. “I’d give anything to free Penny from fetal alcohol.”
Without thinking, Carly laid her hand on top of his. Slowly he turned to her, his stare as piercing as a nail whacked by a hammer. The force of it rattled through her, but she held his gaze with the iron determination to be his friend, nothing more, despite the electricity snapping between them. She couldn’t bear to see him hurting like this. With her throat tight, she took a chance.
“God loves you, Ryan. You’re forgiven.”
She was, too, if only she could believe it. And as for loving Ryan, she knew exactly how God felt about this strong, troubled, handsome man who didn’t love Him back.
She couldn’t hide the truth any longer. She was a lot more than infatuated with Ryan. She was head-over-heels in love with him.
The last thing Ryan wanted to hear was a spiel on Christian forgiveness. Forgiven? By whom? A figment of the human imagination? He knew the theology, thanks to his mother, but religion was the one area where he was firmly in line with his father’s intellectualism.
Sometimes Carly was naïve to the point of foolishness. Surely at the age of twenty-eight, she had a few scars, a few regrets, a boyfriend or two, maybe a broken heart. She couldn’t possibly be that naïve about human failings. People hurt each other all the time, which is why he vowed to remember she was just a friend. It was the only way to protect her from the risk of heartache.
He wasn’t worried about resisting the physical attraction. Past mistakes gave him the control of a robot. What he feared far more was wounding her with his intellect. More than once, he’d seen his father rip his mother’s faith to shreds, leaving her in tears and angry with him. When Ryan tried to defend her, his father cut into him, too. Ryan refused to do that to Carly, but neither did he want to hear her namby-pamby, Jesus-loves-you version of faith.
“Let’s not go there,” he said with a hint of warning.
“Why not?” She lifted her chin high. “I am a preacher’s daughter.”
“I know that.”
“Born and raised.” She gave a little shrug. “My daddy talks about grace all the time. He likes a good fight.”
“A fight?”
“To debate,” she clarified. “If he were here, he’d hand you a fat cigar, and you two would have at it. He’d have the time of his life.”
Ryan stifled a groan. Just what he didn’t need—a snake-handling country preacher bellowing at him.
“Maybe another time,” she said. “It’s late, and Kyle and Taylor are waiting to hear what we decided.”
“I’ll tell him when I go upstairs.”
“Good. I guess we’re done. Good night, Ryan.”
“Good night.”
She took four steps toward the house before he couldn’t stand the stifling silence and called out to her. “Carly?”
She turned so suddenly that her hair swished. “Yes?”
He didn’t have anything in particular to say. He just didn’t want her to leave. “I don’t have to tell Kyle tonight. If you’re not sure, you can think about it some more.”
“I’m sure.”
He wished he could see her face, but her features were blurred by tree shadows. All he could see was the glow of the moon on her white shirt and that tangle of blond hair cascading over her shoulders. He blinked and imagined tunneling his hands through that mane, tipping up her face, kissing her thoroughly.
Maybe he wasn’t a robot after all.
And maybe he wasn’t as much like his father as he thought, because Carly’s soft words—God loves you, Ryan. You’re forgiven—filled him with a yearning so strong he had to grit his teeth to hold it back. Swallowing hard, he fought the urge to call out to her again, to reach for her hand and ask her to stay.
She disappeared into the house without another word, and this time he let her go. Turning his back, he took the second cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and stared through the bars of the fence, blowing smoke rings at the wispy clouds dotting the night sky.
The cigarette tasted stale, so he stubbed it out and went inside. Television didn’t interest him, so he decided to grab a book off the shelves in his office. He skimmed titles, but nothing interested him until he reached the bottom shelf that held his mother’s books, including her Bible.
He lifted it, settled in at his desk, and hoped by some miracle he’d understand the mystery of it all.
He skimmed a few Psalms and deemed them nice poetry.
He read a chapter of Proverbs. A little offbeat, but most of it offered good, practical advice.
Next he turned to the gospel of John and read the first verses. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. It didn’t make sense to him, not in a logical way.
Sighing, he flipped to the book called Revelation, skimmed the strange visions about horsemen and lamp stands, and decided the author was delusional. Who could believe in this craziness?
Carly did.
So did countless people from countless generations. Maybe Ryan was the fool. But logic told him God was a figment of the human imagination, a vain attempt to ward off the fear of death . . . fear of everything. Determined to be strong like his father, he jammed the book back on the shelf and went to bed.
Four hours later, he jarred awake in the dark. Haunted by dreams of Carly, he lay twisted in the sheets with the unwanted images mocking his resolve to control his feelings for her. He had a choice, a clear one. But how did a man resist the tug and pull of nature—the forces that carved the Grand Canyon, shifted the tides, and pushed up mountains with earthquakes? He thought of those Psalms that were just poetry, the advice in Proverbs, the craziness of God made man, dying for sins, and rising from the dead, the God that supposedly gave men the strength to resist temptation.
If that God was watching, Ryan wanted to know. “If you’re there,” he said to the dark, “let the wrestling match begin.”