Chapter 17

My heart skipped, then jolted back into action as we rattled over a row of potholes, leaving the blacktop for a gravel back road that would take us around the far side of the mountain. The car began to hum to the rhythm of the old road. I wanted to lose myself in the song, just close my eyes and drift away. . . .

“Karen?” Why, now that James wanted to talk, was I so afraid?

The car went silent, passing over a short stretch of pavement on a bridge. In that one soundless instant, I understood the source of my fear. Our lives were comfortable—filled with a steady white noise, like the car on the gravel road. It was easy to be lulled into complacency. Friday the white noise had stopped, and I was alone in a quiet I hadn’t experienced in years. The hush of my own soul.

Out of that silence came my first question to him. The hardest one of all. “James, are you happy?”

“What?” He lowered his brows, blindsided.

“Are you happy?” I repeated. “With our life, with the way things are. Do you feel”—I searched for the word, and ended with—“stagnant? Like maybe you’re just going through the motions, and the years are passing, and you’re experiencing life through a layer of insulation?” He didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. I went on, trying to put words to something I didn’t really understand. “Because that’s how I feel. It’s like I just get up every day and I go through the routine, making sure I do all the right things, stay busy, get a lot accomplished. I feel like I’ve been gorging on job promotions and big corporate deals the last few years, only to wake up and realize I’m starving to death.” Tears stung as I felt that hungry part of myself come so close to the surface—the emotional, vulnerable part that needed family, love, a life with meaning beyond just satisfying worldly desires.

James sighed, stroking a hand roughly through his hair, combing the smattering of premature gray at the temples. When he said we needed to talk, he undoubtedly hadn’t anticipated anything like this. “Are you talking about us, or are you talking about your job?” As usual, he was going to dissect the situation, whittle it down to a manageable size.

“Both,” I said.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at Dell’s sleeping form. “I’m not sure now’s the time—”

“It’s never the time,” I rushed out. Outside, the dappled shadows of oaks and sycamores slid silently by, slipping over the car, seeming in no hurry at all. “It’s never the time. We’ve been through eight years of not the time, ever since”—I forced out the last words—“ever since we lost the baby.”

His hazel eyes took on a fog of confusion, and he craned to look at me. “I don’t see what that has to do with the way things are now.”

“It has everything to do with the way things are now.” Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he realize that was the day we stopped discussing the future and started marching blindly through our routines? “Don’t you ever wonder why we never talked about losing the baby, or what we wanted from life after that?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I thought we decided that.”

“When?” I shot back. Dell stirred in the backseat, and I lowered my voice. “When did we decide anything? We just let time go by and let life happen.”

He thought for a minute, measuring his words. “That’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” There was something just below the surface. A truth he didn’t want to say out loud.

“No, it isn’t the same thing. It’s a coward’s way out,” I bit out, trying to bait him. “I’m not saying that we made the wrong choices. I’m saying that we never made a choice. I’m saying that I wanted to talk about it—to talk about how you were feeling and how I was feeling. What we wanted in the future, whether we wanted a family or not. Every time I’ve brought it up over the years, you’ve changed the subject. I guess I just kept thinking you weren’t ready yet, that at some point there would be a perfect time for us to talk about the baby we lost and the future. I thought we’d grieve together and then move on. Now it’s like I woke up and realized eight years have passed, and we’re still stuck with this huge taboo subject between us.”

Exhaling through pursed lips, he shook his head slowly, as if he had known for a long time that this moment would finally come. “I didn’t have all the feelings you wanted me to have, all right? How was I supposed to tell you that? How was I supposed to tell you that when you miscarried, when the doctors found the cancer and said they could operate to remove it, all I felt was relief. We hadn’t planned the pregnancy. We both knew we weren’t ready for a baby at that point. It just seemed . . . like things happened the way they were meant to, I guess. All I could think about was what would have happened if you hadn’t lost the baby. What if the pregnancy had gone on five more months? The doctor said it was probably the change in hormones that prompted the cancer to develop. What would have happened in six more months? How far would it have spread?” He sighed again, the shadows passing over his face. “I’m sorry, Karen. I suppose I thought that if we avoided the issue, over time it would just . . . fade away. I thought it would be better that way.”

The past and the present swirled through my mind in a tempest of emotions—grief over the loss of the baby, anger at the doctors for performing the surgery that meant we’d never have one, anger at God for letting cancer grow inside of me when I was only in my thirties, anger at James for not grieving with me. How could he sit here now and say it was best that things happened this way? How could that be his excuse for not grieving the loss I still felt so intensely? “There’s no way to know if . . .”

“If the cancer would have spread?” He finished the thought, his lips set in a hard, determined line. “There’s no way to know that it wouldn’t have.” I felt the car slow, come almost to a stop as we wound through a valley of overhanging pecan trees. He turned to me, his look intense. “How could I tell you that every time you wanted to talk about your grief over the baby, all I could think of was what if the baby had survived and you hadn’t? I know the baby was real to you. You felt it. You imagined the person it would become, but to me it was still just a thought, an idea, something I hadn’t planned on in my life. I was willing to give up that idea for you to be healthy and here with me. I knew you wouldn’t be able to understand that. I knew if I told you, you’d look at me just the way you’re looking at me now.”

I stared at him, tasting the salt of tears, feeling betrayed. “I would have . . . understood. I would have figured out how to understand.”

“No, Karen, you wouldn’t have.” He focused on the road as we wound up a hill into the afternoon sunshine. “You haven’t even forgiven me for not talking about grieving for the baby. How would things have been if I’d told you I wasn’t grieving—I was relieved that you were going to be all right? I helped my father raise three kids after my mother died of cancer, Karen. I watched how it consumed him. It exhausted him. I know it may be selfish of me, but I didn’t want that kind of life.”

I wiped my eyes, then let my hands fall into my lap as a new rush of tears came. Outside the window, yellowbonnet flowers swept by like an ocean. “That’s why you never wanted to talk about losing the baby, about possibly having a family through some other means—because you were afraid I might not be around long enough to raise a child?” I muttered, dumbfounded.

Nausea spiraled through me, and I rested my head against the seat belt, gulping in the thick, pollen-scented breeze. What would he say if he knew about the tests last week in Dr. Conner’s office?

“I don’t know,” he admitted, sounding weary, confused, scrubbing his forehead as if to wipe away the thoughts. “It was never anything that clear-cut. I never put it into those terms in my mind. It was just easier to let time go by.”

I nodded, understanding. Easier to let time go by. Hadn’t I thought the same thing myself? Only now I was waking up and realizing that sleepwalking through life, never facing the risks and the realities of human existence, wasn’t a solution. The time that had drifted by was lost, like water down a river. My fears were still with me. I was older and still afraid. Living, really living, was about stepping out in spite of fear, about taking a leap of faith.

“We’ve done this too long,” I said softly. “We’ve spent too many years just making a living, but not really making a life—with your family and my family, with each other. We go on a vacation every once in a while. We see your dad, your brothers and sister and nieces and nephews every couple years. Until you started coming to the farm, we never saw Kate and Ben. We’re not really making a life, making real human connections. I had a sense of it on September 11, but I didn’t grab on. I knew those weren’t your flight numbers on the news, but when you finally called me and told me you were on the ground in Denver, I was so relieved. I thought, When he gets home, we’re going to take a long vacation. We’ll just get in the car, and we’ll go see all the places we always wanted to see. We’ll go visit the family instead of sending Christmas cards, and not just for a day or two. This time we’ll really stay. Shaking my head, I wiped my eyes again. Two years ago, I’d had a wake-up call, and I’d let it slip away. “By the time you got home, I was already back at work, figuring out how Lansing could get into the homeland-security business.” A rueful laugh pressed my throat. “A lot of good that did me. I should have taken the time to be with you, to figure out what was right for us.”

He nodded, but he didn’t answer. Stroking a thumb back and forth on the steering wheel, he scanned the horizon slowly, thoughtfully. We turned from one road onto another. I recognized this one. It was the old road that led around the mountain and past the back side of the farm.

“So is that what’s behind this sudden interest in Jumpkids camp and teaching piano lessons?” he asked. “A latent sense of needing to do something meaningful with your life?”

I thought carefully about the answer. It was hard to tell from the question how he felt about it. “I don’t know,” I admitted finally. “That could be some of it, but there’s more.” How could I explain to him? How could I show him this part of me that he never knew, the part that was locked up in the attic, in an old trunk with various recital costumes, old sheet music, and a stack of ribbons from teenage music competitions?

Taking a breath, I plunged into a reality I had yet to explore to myself. “When I sat down at the piano the night I was laid off . . . when I started to play, it was like a door had been thrown open inside me and the music came rushing out. I remembered how much I loved it, how much I lived for it. I remembered how I gave it up when I got to college, when I was struggling to get through the engineering degree. And I thought, Why did I do that? Why did I do that to myself? Just because my parents thought music and theater were a waste of time, or because my professors told me I needed to devote myself to the engineering curriculum? Why was I so afraid to be who I was?” I glanced at Dell, sleeping in the backseat, so unaware of the tempest traveling in the car with her. “And then when Dell came along, I saw how the music brought her out of herself. I realized how special her talent was, and all she needed was someone to tell her that. And while I was telling her, she was telling me the same thing.”

Looking at Dell, I suddenly understood the connection between us. “I realized that the parts of me she admired are the very parts I had decided didn’t matter. These kids don’t like me because I have a six-figure job and a big title. They like me because I can play the piano and do a bad chicken dance. It’s a powerful thing to realize that someone can like you for who you are—not who someone else wants you to be or tells you to be. I don’t want to give that up.”

Craning his neck at me, he drew back a little. “So what are you saying, exactly?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. I felt like I was groping through a dark, unfamiliar place, trying to find the light. “I don’t want to go home and just blindly soldier on, type up a résumé, beat the pavement until I find another job with another Lansing Tech. I want to take some time to . . . to really think about . . . life.”

He started to talk, to analyze my plan, and I held up a hand to stop him. “I know you’re going to say that doesn’t make sense.” He nodded almost imperceptibly, and I went on. “But everything doesn’t have to be logical. It’s not the end of the world if things don’t make sense. Some things you just feel and you don’t know why. All I know for sure is that I haven’t been this exhilarated at the end of a day in years. It’s like I’m operating on pure oxygen, like I can breathe all the way to the bottom of my lungs.”

He scratched his head, torn, I could tell, between being supportive and telling me what he really thought. “So, you’re saying that you want to spend the rest of your life giving music lessons to underprivileged kids?” His hazel eyes took on a slightly scolding, mildly parental expression. “That isn’t very lucrative, Karen.”

“I realize that,” I snapped, feeling eighteen years old, like my father was telling me that taking theater and music classes wasn’t productive. “I’m not talking about forever. I’m just saying that I don’t want to make any permanent decisions right now. I”—the truth came to me in a rush of self-discovery that sat me upright in my seat—“want to stay here through Memorial Day and finish out the Jumpkids camp. “Stay here? For two weeks? I tried to make the idea sound less radical than it was. “Kate has the whole family coming for the holiday weekend. I can help her get things ready, spend some time with Josh and Rose, reconnect. Kate and I haven’t spent more than an hour or two alone, without the family, since I left for college.”

“That’s because you haven’t wanted to,” he reminded me in a flat, slightly reproachful tone. He was so much like my father—logical, analytical, careful. Safe. Always. “Karen, I’ve tried to get you to come down here dozens of times these past two years, and you were completely against it. Now you’re telling me you want to spend two weeks communing with Kate and the kids? That doesn’t make much sense. It sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to what happened Friday at Lansing. Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse, a way of running away?”

No. “Yes.” I knew that wasn’t completely true. I probably was reacting to losing my job and the news from Dr. Conner. “But does it really matter? Am I not entitled, for once in my life, to be a little off plumb? I’ve been floating right on level for years. Is it the end of the world if I have a little . . . breakdown for a few weeks?” I waved a hand toward the brush passing on the side of the car. “I mean, you’re out here on your layovers buying tractors, plowing over cedar trees, and building barns on land we’ll never use. How logical is that? But it makes you feel good. It helps you relax and reconnect with growing up on a farm. That’s what I need—a little time to relax.”

Raising one brow and lowering the other he delivered a comical look that told me we were going to move from arguing to joking again. That was, thankfully, the one way he differed from my father. James could see the humor in things. “You’re going to relax with ninety-seven Jumpkids banging on percussion instruments, a bunch of daffy college students, Sherita skulking around like an axe murderer, and the plumbing backed up in the church?”

“Exactly.” I knew I’d won the argument, and at that moment, I loved him so much for accepting feelings that were still so nebulous. “Sounds great, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

I prodded him playfully in the shoulder. “Oh, come on. You’re great with the kids. They love you. You’re the baseball king.”

He chuckled, and I felt the oppressive emotions fly out the window. “Yeah, well, it’s good in small doses, but I’ll tell you, I’m not sorry to be getting on a plane tomorrow.”

“Wimp,” I joked.

“Nutcase,” he retorted, and we laughed together. I felt like a thousand pounds had been lifted from my shoulders. There was only one gigantic weight remaining. The news from Dr. Conner’s office. I needed to tell James, but if I did, he’d insist that I go right home for the biopsy. And he’d be right. There was no logical argument to combat that—except that I wasn’t ready to go home yet. That didn’t qualify as an excuse, and I knew it.

I could schedule it here, I told myself, trying to absolve a measure of the guilt. I could schedule it here with Grandma’s old doctor . . . what was his name? Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt. By the time James comes back, I’ll know the answer.

I looked up and realized we were passing through the valley where the old wooden bridge used to be, where I had found the mermaid pool and the sister trees. “Oh.” I pointed as we crossed over the new bridge. “Stop. I want to show—”

James pulled into the newly cleared driveway.

“James, what are . . . ?” I looked around for an explanation. How could he know about this place?

In the backseat, Dell stirred and stretched, then put her hands on the window frame. “Are we there yet?” she muttered sleepily.

“This is the place,” James answered. “Just had the new fence put in last week, and I put the gate up this morning.”

My mouth dropped open. “This is . . . We have . . . I didn’t . . .” I babbled, still trying to process the idea that this was our property. When we’d inherited land from Grandma Rose, I had assumed that it was actually attached to the farm, not down the county road. “This is the piece of property Grandma Rose willed to us?”

He quirked a brow at me as Dell hopped out to open the gate. “Yes. I’ve told you about it, remember? It was originally a three-hundred-acre piece your grandparents bought sometime after World War II. The hundred acres on this side of the creek are ours, and the hundred on the other side are your aunt Jeane’s. Your father has the hundred on the north side of ours.”

All of that was familiar. I remembered it from the reading of the will, but in all the times Grandma had taken us here, she never mentioned that our family owned the property. “I knew about the division of the property, but I didn’t realize it was located here. James, this is the place I was talking about—where I stopped yesterday to find the swimming hole Grandma Rose used to take us to. This is the place. The waterfall where Kate and I played is right down there, just down the path a bit, and Grandma Rose’s special place—the sycamore grove that she and Augustine talked about in their letters—it’s just a short walk down the creek.” My mind filled with memories, and I saw Kate moving down the path, trotting ahead of the car, like Dell was now, Queen Anne’s lace skimming her bare brown legs, long dark hair swinging back and forth in the sun. I could feel the past all around me. “I just can’t believe it’s ours.”

“It’s ours.” There was a twinkle of satisfaction in his eye, a pride of ownership. But more than that, he was happy that I was finally taking an interest. This place was special to him, and now it was special to me, as well. I was filled with a sense of something meant to be. James smiled as if he felt it, too.

I wondered if Grandma Rose had planned it this way. If she knew that I would someday come back here to remember the history I shared with my sister, and to learn about the history she had shared with hers. Could she possibly have known that when my world was spinning out of control, I would come here to feel grounded?

James drove to the end of the new gravel driveway, which extended perhaps fifty feet into the property, and stopped beneath a grove of trees where a pad had been cleared. “The barn’s going to go there.” He pointed to some orange construction flags nearby. “Nothing fancy—just a small workshop and a place to keep the tractor for now, until we decide what to do with the place in the long run.”

“We’ll never sell it,” I rushed out, gazing at the flower-laden meadows below, the low sweet peas stretching their blossoms sunward in the dappled, lacy shade. Overhead, the sycamores whispered in a language I remembered and understood. I watched Dell disappear among them. “It’s too beautiful to ever let it go.”

James nodded, seeming pleased. “It’s a beautiful place.” He pointed up the bluff. “There’s a fantastic spot up there for a weekend house. The other day I found an old rock chimney, and the foundation of a log cabin.”

“Amazing,” I whispered, stepping from the car, anxious to explore all the secrets of this magical place. Our place.

James walked to where an old green tractor sat parked, and I followed. “There she is.” He gave the tractor an affectionate pat that made me smile.

“She’s a peach.” I took in the rusty paint job and the big dent in the front-end loader, recalling James’s sister telling me that when he was young, all he ever wanted to do was drive the tractor and other farm machinery. That love for all things mechanical had led him to eventually become a pilot. “What a cream puff.”

He squinted, sensing that I might be making fun of his baby. “Fifty-seven John Deere.” He introduced me to the tractor as I walked slowly around it. A tractor was pretty much a tractor to me, but James, of course, knew his sweetheart inch by inch. “She’s a good old girl. Three-point hitch, live PTO, mint condition, still has good compression and plenty of power.”

“Wow.” I batted my eyes, pretending to be impressed. “What a babe. I think I’m jealous.”

James turned and gave me a slow, flirtatious grin. “You two might have to fight over me.” He was so handsome when he smiled like that—slightly mischievous, slightly wild. Not the straightlaced, sophisticated airline captain. “But you’d better watch out. She can mow over a two-inch cedar tree in nothing flat. She’s tough.”

“I’m tough.” I cut a suggestive glance at him. It felt good to flirt again, to be like we used to be.

“Oh, really?” He grinned over the hood of the tractor. “Show me.”

Raising my arm, I made a muscle to be silly, then ducked away just as he was about to test it. He came after me, and I turned and ran through the field, laughing, as he hollered, “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

He caught me halfway across the field, his arm snaking around my waist and spinning me around midstride, pulling me into the air. He drew me close, and we fell into the tangle of lacy sweet peas, hidden from the world like young lovers. Closing my eyes, I drank in the scent, the feel of the moment, the sound of the breeze, the touch of his lips on mine, the warmth of his body, the exhilarating press of his weight holding me close to the damp earth. I remembered everything I loved about him, and everything I treasured about this place.

I felt young again, and in love with the world.