Double Wedding Ring (7 page)

The only thing clear in her mind was the raging darkness in the eyes of the man.

She had wanted so desperately to help him, to tell him what he wanted to know. But his sudden appearance, his vague familiarity, had created a jumble of thoughts and sensations in her. Joy and excitement and pain had whirled through her. Nothing was clear to her, while he stood there shouting at her, except the small, still voice that said if she could reach him, if he held her in his arms, everything would be all right again.

But he was gone and nothing was all right.

Susan wished she could cry, the way Cody was, with relish and abandon.

“Oh, for heaven's sake! I just knew something like this would happen!”

Betsy's sharp voice broke through Susan's misery. She looked up, feeling inexplicably guilty.

“Didn't I always tell you, Susan Marie Foster, that young man is trouble?”

Betsy snatched Cody out of Susan's arms, set him on his feet and looked him in his watery eyes. “Nothing to cry about, little man. Susan is just fine and so are you. No thanks to Tag Hutchins.”

Betsy bent down to help Susan back into her chair.

“Tag?” Susan asked, remembering the word that had come into her mind so many times since returning to Sweetbranch.

“Tag Hutchins is nothing but trouble. Never has been anything but trouble. He's not to come into this house again. Is that clear? I won't have him disrupting things.”

Susan was breathless now, both from the excitement and the struggle to return safely to her chair. But she had to know. “Who is Tag?”

Betsy looked down at Susan, her square hands on her square hips, her lips drawn into that thin, unyielding line that made Susan wish Yolanda was around to help her pop a wheelie in her wheelchair.

“Tag Hutchins is nobody you need to concern yourself with. If you don't remember, so much the better.” Betsy marched around to the back of Susan's chair and pushed her toward her bedroom. “Now, why don't you have a nice rest. Working so hard at all this therapy business isn't good for you. Rest is what you need.”

“Have to work,” Susan insisted as her mother prepared to close the door to her room and leave her alone once again.

“What you have to do is accept reality, Susan. You'll never be the way you were before. Get used to it.”

The words chilled Susan to the bone. Before the door closed, she called out, “Quilt.”

Betsy sighed heavily. “What now?”

“Quilt. I want my quilt.”

Betsy pointed at the bed. “There's a quilt on your bed.”

“No!
My
quilt.”

“That's the only quilt you've got, young lady. Now, calm down and rest yourself for a while.”

The door slammed shut. Susan felt tears at the back of her eyes again and gave one of her wheels a spin, sending her chair whirling in a circle. She spotted the quilt folded at the foot of her bed, a blue and green Log Cabin she had made for her parents' thirtieth wedding anniversary. But it was not the quilt she wanted. In that incomplete part of her mind that was memory, she could see the one she wanted, a quilt of interlocking circles made up in the colors of pink-and-white azaleas she had seen somewhere.

Susan closed her eyes tightly shut and tried to hold the image in her mind. If she only had that quilt, everything would be better. If she couldn't be held in the man's arms, the quilt would help. She just knew it would.

* * *

T
AG HIT THE BRAKE
, spinning his rear tire and spitting out a shower of gravel. His bike stopped a half foot shy of the rear bumper of Sam's van. As Tag yanked off his helmet and hung it from a handlebar, Sam appeared at the garage door of his house.

“That was almost a grand entrance,” Sam said, wiping flour-dusted hands on his jeans.

“I'll do better next time.”

Tag pretended not to notice Sam's heightened interest once he heard the tone of his uncle's voice. He knew how he sounded, because he knew how he felt. But he wasn't in the mood to talk about it. Or hear one of Sam's lectures, either.

Then what the hell are you doing here?

“I'm hungry,” he growled. “When's supper?”

Sam's response was half grunt, half chuckle. “Just finished rolling out the biscuits. I'll get a juice glass. You can cut.”

If anybody else had expected Tag to cut biscuit dough and lay it out in a baking pan, he would have bellyached clear to Sunday and back. But he could see that Sam had his hands full with the mashed potatoes—no dehydrated flakes, just potatoes and butter and milk—and the gravy he was stirring in the pan where he'd just fried the chicken. Besides, Sam made damn fine biscuits. If Tag could get in on a couple this easily, he was game.

“You must've known I was coming,” Tag said later as they filled their plates and sat at the antique oak table in the middle of his nephew's eat-in kitchen. “All my favorites.”

Sam cocked an eyebrow at him. “I had a hunch.”

They exchanged a look.

“I saw you leaving the Foster house today. You looked...like you might want to talk.”

Tag did want to talk, and he didn't. What could he say to his nephew that would explain the demons that drove him? Instead, he forced himself to concentrate on the satisfying crunch of the fried chicken, the buttery richness of the potatoes. By taking solace in the food, he might be able to put today out of his mind—for now. But today no amount of speed, no amount of wind in his hair, had been enough to rid him of his anger, his bitterness, his images of Susan. The feelings had all but eaten him alive.

And the most intense, most frightening feeling of all was the one that kept insisting his life could at last be made whole if he could once again hold her in his arms.

How long had he fought to accept the fact that would never happen? And how quickly had he abandoned his resignation when he saw her? More important, how long would it take him to resign himself to the inevitable again, now that he knew the truth?

The woman he'd never stopped loving didn't even know him.

Would she ever? The question had haunted him all day. He needed the answer, and he feared it.

“You should have talked to me before you went over there,” Sam said.

“Lots of ‘shoulds' on the road to hell, Sam.”

“What's the story, Tag?”

Tag placed his fork on the edge of his plate, all the fight draining out of him. “It's an old one. We were kids. Thought we were in love. That's about it.”

Said like that, Tag thought, it didn't sound so bad. Maybe, now that he'd seen her, this old obsession would start to heal.

Then the sweet softness of her voice, speaking to him out of some darkness where he couldn't go in to save her, washed over him again. And he doubted he would ever heal.

“And?” Sam prompted him.

“And nothing. I told you. That's it. End of story.”

Sam looked at him skeptically and Tag rewarded his nephew with a stony glare.

“I thought we could...catch up.” He shrugged. “Guess not.”

“She didn't know you?”

Tag shook his head.

“It'll come back to her, Tag. Things are coming back every day.”

Tag almost wished he hadn't heard that. What he didn't want, didn't need, was a reason to hope.

“Tell me what happened,” he said at last, almost against his will.

Sam said things Tag understood only well enough to know that he hadn't really wanted to hear them. Acquired brain injury. Some permanent damage. Recovery slow and difficult. Some motor impairment. Some speech impairment. Behavioral changes. Memories wiped out. Like starting over, an infant trapped in a grown-up body.

“Damn it, Sam.” He clenched his fists between his knees and looked up at his nephew. “Can she...will she...”

“Every case is different, Tag. I've seen some miraculous recoveries.”

Tag latched on to that one word. Miraculous. He'd never had much faith in miracles. Didn't know how to start at this late date, either.

Sam's soothing professional delivery was designed to inspire such faith, Tag knew, so he took little comfort as his nephew continued.

“How much recovery she achieves depends on how severe the damage. And how determined Susan is.”

Without realizing it, Tag smiled. “That's one thing on her side, then.”

“I thought so,” Sam said, smiling back.

“I...should I stay away?”

Sam considered the question and Tag waited, uncertain what answer he wanted to hear. “Hard to say,” Sam said at last. “If seeing you is going to upset her the way it did today...”

On the ride home from Sam's house in the country, Tag had plenty of time to think. He realized he'd forgotten to ask his nephew about the cozy picture he'd made with Malorie Hovis the afternoon before. But he quickly forgot that again, lost it in the memory of the Susan he had met that morning.

This was worse torment, even, than thinking of her all those years with another man.

W
ITH A SHARP BUT
undefinable longing as her constant companion, Susan settled into a routine.

Mornings were the low point of the day. After Susan stubbornly struggled through the laborious process of bathing and dressing on her own, Betsy came in at ten. Stern and unencouraging, Betsy waited to pounce on the slightest mistake while Susan read from a Little Golden Book or practiced printing. Her letters were wobbly and her reading halting, so Betsy had ample opportunity to pounce.

“I can't imagine why you put yourself through this,” Betsy said at least once every morning.

Susan couldn't, either, to be perfectly frank. She only knew that both of them were usually out of sorts by the time their hour was over. Even Cody, playing in the corner, had usually resorted to whining and throwing his plastic race cars by the time he'd listened to enough of Betsy's fussing.

Once Susan tried to ask her mother about the angry man who had come to the house. Over and over again, he came into her head, giving her no peace. She wondered why he was angry. Where he had come from. What she might have known of him in her other life.

But all she could manage to ask was, “Why are you mad at the man?”

Watching her mother's reaction, Susan grew anxious. Betsy grew very still and very quiet, and gradually every tiny bit of expression drained out of her pale blue eyes. When Susan at last became convinced there was no soul left in her mother's body, Betsy said, “What man?”

And then Susan was truly afraid. For hours she'd worried she had invented the man in her mind and made him so real she believed in her own fabrication. And if that were so, how sick did that make her? It wasn't until the middle of the night, when the light from the moon filtered through the bare trees and the lacy curtains played on the far wall of her room, that Susan realized the truth.

The only way Betsy could control the man was to pretend he wasn't real.

Susan couldn't have said why she was so certain of the truth of that, but deep in her heart she knew it was so. And it made her less afraid of her own fuzzy memories of the man.

She didn't mention the man again, and as the days passed, Betsy grew more agreeable in the mornings. Still, she seemed to think her daughter's reading and writing were a waste of time. Susan told herself sometimes that was only Betsy's way of denying another reality. Maybe Betsy liked controlling her daughter, too.

Early afternoons were better than mornings. Addy came three afternoons a week, right after lunch, a basket of fabric scraps and yarn needles and scissors tucked under her arm.

“Got your sewing hat on, Susie-Q?” the neighbor from across the street always asked, pulling a wicker chair up close to Susan's wheelchair.

Susan didn't quite know what the question, or the funny name, meant. But Addy asked it with such infectious enthusiasm that Susan never failed to answer with a nod and a big smile of her own.

Sam had asked Addy Mayfield to come. The first day she came, she brought a big tote bag full of pillows and place mats and even stuffed dolls decked out to look like angels. She made them all and sold them at a gift shop on the highway, she said as she settled into a chair on the side porch.

“It'll help me if you keep me company while I work,” Addy had said that first day. “I understand you did a lot of sewing before your accident. Maybe you'd like to start up again. How'd you like to cut out some patterns for me?”

Susan had looked down at her thin hands, especially the left one, which still didn't like to cooperate most of the time. Right now she was wearing the ugly brace Sam said would keep her weaker arm from curling in, growing even more useless. Then she looked up into Addy's warm brown eyes and all she could say was yes. This was was all Sam's doing, she knew, a way to improve her fine motor skills. But she found she liked both the company and the work. While Susan plodded along with her swatches of fabric and her clumsily wielded scissors, trying to recapture gestures that had once been second nature, Addy clipped and stitched and chatted.

“How many?” Susan asked, incredulous, as Addy talked about her children and gathered a row of ivory-colored lace to create a halo for the angel she had appliquéd onto a pretty pink apron.

Addy eased the lace along her gathering thread. “Five. Two boys, three girls.”

With her soft, cinnamon-brown ponytail and petite build, Addy looked very little older than Malorie. The mystery of motherhood grew deeper for Susan as she contemplated Addy and her five children. “And a husband, too?”

Addy laughed. “Definitely a husband, too. The
best
husband, in fact.”

Susan smiled back at her new friend. She liked hearing that Addy had the best husband, because she already liked the bubbly woman. “All of them look like you?”

Addy's smile dimmed, but only slightly. “No. None of them look like me. They're only foster children, really. Except for one. She's adopted.”

Susan frowned. “Foster children?”

Addy paused. “My foster children, they...they really belong to someone else. I just take care of them until their real parents can take care of them again.”

Susan could see that something about her explanation made Addy sad. “Like Cody. Maybe you should have Cody for a while.”

Addy leaned over to help Susan repin a pattern that had come loose. “Cody has plenty of love right here with you and Malorie. And his grandmother.”

Susan watched and listened as Addy reminded her again how to push a pin through to secure the pattern to the fabric. Handling the tiny pins was hard work for her clumsy fingers, but not as hard as remembering what she was supposed to be doing.

When she grew weary of the task, she placed everything flat on her lap and said, “Tell me again about the best husband.”

By the end of the first week, Susan could cut fabric in a fairly straight line and she knew the names of each of Addy's five children by heart.

Sometimes she rested after Addy left. Sometimes she did the exercises Sam wanted her to do—the bridge to raise her bottom off the floor and the straight leg lifts.

Late afternoons were Sam's time. Susan both dreaded the physical therapy and welcomed it greedily. Some days he had her practice changing Cody's clothes or tying his shoes. She worked in the kitchen, opening soup cans or buttering bread or pouring from a pitcher. Some days she spent the entire hour trying to balance on one leg or the other. Once he tried to coax her into one of her dance steps, but she refused.

Always, her body shook and trembled and perspired. The sessions were sometimes painful and always frustrating, reminding Susan as they did of her body's betrayal. Each muscle, it seemed, carried the memory of a leap, a turn, a dancer's move, for she had danced for her own pleasure since childhood. But her injured brain would no longer process the memory in those muscles.

Susan couldn't dance. She could barely walk.

Without Sam's confidence in her, that realization would have been too bitter for Susan to confront each and every afternoon.

During her forth session, she was standing on her right foot, with the left propped in her chair, trying to catch a large foam ball when he threw it. The trick was to do all those things at once without landing on her backside.

“Can I ever dance again?” she grunted out, breaking her concentration and almost losing her balance.

“Whenever you're ready,” he said.

Susan stared at him.

“You're the key, Susan. You can't do any of this until you're ready.”

“
I'm
ready,” she insisted, stubbornly. “
Legs
aren't ready.”

“They won't be, either,” Sam said, dropping the ball and walking over to steady her as she placed her left foot back on the floor. “Not as long as you spend so much time in this wheelchair.”

She glared at him as she settled back into the seat of the chair. How could he possibly understand how excruciating it was to know that walking from one end of the room to the other—an action the rest of the world took for granted and accomplished in a matter of seconds—might take five minutes. And might land her in an undignified heap in the middle of the carpet, at that.

“You don't understand,” she accused him.

“
I
understand.
You
don't understand. You have to be willing to fail before you'll make any real progress.”

Susan wanted to shout at him that she understood all about failure, that she felt it acutely each time she hoisted herself awkwardly over the edge of the tub for a bath, each time she couldn't manage to lift her own son into her lap. But she couldn't dredge up the right words from the ruins of her brain.

That made her all the more angry.

“Why don't I take the chair away, Susan? You'll progress so much—”

“No!” She started wheeling herself out of the room. “No, no, no!”

But no matter how many tantrums she threw, Sam was always back the next day. He was as stern as Betsy, but he added smiles and encouragement. And that made it possible for Susan to keep going.

Often Sam stayed on after the sessions were over, braving Betsy's brittle reception to sit on the screened side porch outside Susan's bedroom and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine. At least, that's what Susan thought he was there to enjoy. After the third time, however, she realized that what Sam really waited around for was Malorie.

Malorie always showed up about twenty minutes after the end of Susan's sessions with Sam. She glowed, it seemed to Susan. And as soon as Sam saw her, he instantly grew more charming.

“How are you getting along with Mr. Hutchins?” he asked, and they exchanged a look that Susan thought spoke of some shared secret.

“He's a very interesting man,” Malorie said, a little dimple sneaking up at the corner of her mouth. “If you like rough edges.”

“And do you?”

Malorie's cheeks grew pink. “I can take them or leave them, actually.”

“Can you?” He smiled and looked at Malorie as if he didn't quite believe her. “You're sure about that? The Hutchins charm is pretty potent.”

Releasing her long hair from the messy knot that had kept it out of the way all day, Malorie ruffled her honey-colored curls to loosen them. The act gave Susan a bittersweet memory of trying to tame and smooth those waves with rubber bands and hair barrettes in years long gone.

Then Malorie raised her chin and directed her most impudent smile at Sam Roberts. “Are you assuming you've inherited some of that potent charm? Or is it just the rough edges you share?”

He smiled back and stretched his long legs out in front of him, taking up the width of the side porch. “I never thought of it.”

Malorie laughed at that, and Susan couldn't help herself. She laughed, too, although she wasn't quite sure why.

“What commendable humility, Mr. Roberts.”

Then Malorie flipped her shoes off and ran out into the yard in her bare feet. She grabbed Cody up from his solitary game of racing plastic trucks and gave him a big hug. Sam seemed content to watch the two play together for the next half hour. It was only when Betsy came out with her prim reminder that supper would be on the table in fifteen minutes that Sam finally left for the day.

Susan watched as he walked out through the side yard, where he paused to speak to Malorie. She backed away a step as they spoke, but stared after him as he walked to his van.

Watching them stirred up that unidentifiable longing in Susan once again. She remembered...but she couldn't name what it was she remembered.

The next day, Sam brought the puppy.

“For Cody,” he said, letting the short-legged, round-bellied, sand-colored pup loose on the dining room floor. With a delighted squeal, Cody dropped to the floor beside the puppy. “No boy ought to be without a four-legged best friend.”

The afternoon's physical therapy consisted primarily of playing with Cody and his new best friend, who was instantly christened Butch. The only one not thrilled with the new addition to the family was Betsy Foster, who immediately recited ground rules governing puppy ownership. Rules that no one but Betsy even listened to.

When Malorie arrived after work, she acted even more delighted than Cody. Once again kicking her shoes off, she got down on the floor with Cody and Butch, squealing as Cody held her face so Butch could deliver a puppy kiss.

“You look like a woman who's never been kissed before,” Sam said, sitting on the floor and rolling Butch around with one of his broad hands.

Again, Susan noticed, her daughter grew pink in the cheeks. “Not by a puppy.”

“No?” Sam looked at Susan, a stern frown on his face. “Do you mean to tell me your daughter never had a puppy? Not in her entire life? Shame on you, Susan.”

“I want a puppy kiss,” Susan replied.

And Sam delivered Butch into Susan's lap, helped her hold the wiggling, tail-wagging puppy up to her face. Susan laughed when Butch obliged with a warm, wet slurp under her chin.

The three of them watched and laughed while Cody and Butch played. Betsy, after her initial tight-lipped reaction, stayed away from the noisy fun. The only thing they heard from her for the rest of the afternoon was the staccato rap of a butcher knife on the chopping block in the kitchen.

To Susan, her mother's work had an angry, lonely sound to it.

When Sam offered to take Malorie to the grocery store for puppy food and chew toys and other essentials of puppy parenthood, Malorie rose from the floor and shook her head.

“No need,” she said, smoothing her skirt as if she'd just remembered to act grown-up. “I'll go after supper.”

“I'd like to take you,” Sam persisted.

“You've done enough. Thank you.”

“It wasn't much. I like your baby brother.”

Malorie, already standing primly straight-backed, seemed to grow stiffer yet.