Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) (14 page)

Gypsy, in stunned disbelief, stared at Lance’s back as he bent to pick up his sketch-pad from behind the log, Kevin stood dumb by her side, his head drooping sleepily. She took one pace forward and he staggered with her until, bending, she crouched and gave him a piggy-back ride the rest of the way up to the cabin. For all his six years, he was painfully small and thin so the burden wasn’t great.

Behind her Lance said, “I’d do that for you if I could, but you saw, Gypsy! You saw!”

“I saw,” she repeated around the hot lump in her throat, “and in a very few minutes I intend to tell you exactly what I saw, to see if we got the same picture.”

Chapter Five

Lance and Gypsy waited silently until Kevin slept and then walked slowly outside to the porch. Moths bashed suicidally against the window pane, trying to get in to where the lantern hung. One, on its way by, flew into Gypsy’s hair. She ducked and swatted frantically until Lance removed it.

He took her hand and drew her down to the bottom step, out of the line of the moths’ flight-path. They sat in silence, each, she thought, waiting for the other to speak.

Lance, as if unaware of doing so, still held Gypsy’s hand. “You said you’d tell me what impression you got from that little scene,” he reminded her at length.

“Yes… Well…” Gypsy found it difficult to go on. She swallowed, hitched herself into a more comfortable position and crossed her legs. “I saw… A little boy, warm, feeling safe, leaning against someone he trusts, falling asleep and being awakened roughly. That,” she added, looking up at him earnestly, “was my fault. I stood up too quickly. At the moment of waking, he was grabbed by hands is not accustomed to feeling and when he struggled, instead of being soothing, you dropped him and snarled. Lance, I know you were hurt by his screeching for me when you took him, but a little calm talking, a little tenderness might have gone a long way.”

“‘Might’, you say? So you’re not sure, are you? You don’t really believe he would’ve let me carry him up the hill to the cabin, even if I had been… well, tender?”

“No, I don’t know,” she replied sadly, and then looked at him with curiosity. “But wouldn’t it have been worth a try? Tenderness, for all that you find it difficult to so much as use the word, goes a long way.”

“But it comes naturally to most women. I, in case you haven’t noticed,” he sounded peeved, “am a man.”

“And men aren’t supposed to show tenderness? It’s unmanly?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Of course not. But how can you expect me to offer something I don’t have?”

“I think you do have it, Lance. When I was making a fool of myself over that last song you were quite tender when you noticed.” A chill ran over her arms as she remembered the gentleness of his fingertips as he brushed the tears from her cheek, but she ignored it, telling herself it was from the increasing strength of the evening breeze.

His voice was low, strained, far away when he replied. “But that’s a man-woman situation, Gypsy, and as much as I hate it, as much as I’ve tried not to let it happen, we seem to be developing into just that. A man and a woman in a situation.”

“And who needs that?” she countered lightly, trying to quell the hurt his words had stabbed into her. “But I think you’re wrong.” She forced a light smile, a small chuckle. “There’s nothing developing between us beyond a mutual interest in Kevin. How could there be? All I want is to see Kevin happy. It breaks my heart knowing that you have such a need of each other and are separated by who-knows-what.”

“We are separated irreconcilably.” he said testily.

“You are too defeatist,” she accused. “You don’t even try. It isn’t going to happen in a day, Lance, nor even a month. It’ll take a long time and a lot of patience, but at each minor setback, you’re ready to quit.”

“Because I know how impossible it is.” he shot back impatiently, dropping her hand, and she felt cold all over when he let it go.

“We get along for short periods, but only when you’re around. What happens when you’re no longer with us? What happens then, Gypsy?”

“Why, you just carry on, taking him places, doing things with him, trying to get inside his mind, see what he needs. You’re not stupid, Lance, and I’m sure your imagination is good enough to tell you that you’re the one who’s going to have to do most of the changing. He’s only six. You expect too much of him. He needs a lot of loving tenderness lavished on him, more than most kids, probably, because he’s been neglected for so long.”

“He has not been neglected.” Lance squared his shoulders and turned to face her, the glow from the lantern inside gilding the tips of his lashes. “I’ve provided the best care for him I know how.”

“Perhaps you think you have, but I maintain he’s starved for love because he doesn’t get it where he should—in his own home. From his own father. His aunt apparently doesn’t show him much, if any affection, either.”

“That’s not fair. You know nothing about his home life.”

“I know what Kevin has told me.”

“A child’s perceptions of reality are often skewed.”

“Really,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a skewed perception he suffers from. I think it’s too many needless smacks for minor transgressions, like asking a cashier in a supermarket if she is his mother, like throwing an egg against a wall to see if it’ll break, like—”

“Lorraine does not spank Kevin without cause.”

“Lorraine does not, apparently, ‘spank’ Kevin at all, if you mean a swat on the bottom. She smacks him on the side of the head. It used to be called ‘boxing a child’s ears’ and was outdated by the time my brother and I were children. It can lead to permanent hearing impairment.”

“I’m certain she doesn’t do anything that would physically harm Kevin.”

“Then maybe you need to install what’s called a ‘Nannycam’ so you can see what goes on in your own home.”

“But I’m nearly always there. Sure, I work in my studio, but I’ve never heard Lorraine shouting at Kevin, or heard him crying because he’s been punished. It’s not the way you see it.”

“Ah, but is it the way
you
see it? Assuming you see anything outside the walls of your studio.”

He was still, either mulling over what she had just said, or away on some strange journey of his own.

“You may be right about Lorraine not being the perfect nanny. I’ve never thought of her as that, though. She’s just been there for us. She’s family of sorts. Of course, I pay her. It would be unfair not to. I wouldn’t want to take advantage of her kindness, but my friend Keith, the pediatrician I mentioned before, says she’s bad for Kevin.”

“Maybe you should listen to him.” Kindness, Gypsy thought, likely had nothing to do with Lorraine’s holding the position she did in Lance’s home—whatever position that might be.

Again, Lance fell into silence. A mosquito droned nearby. He let it land on his arm then squashed it. “You’re probably right about that. Lorraine isn’t a cruel woman. But she does tend to be… severe. She refers to the neighborhood children as brats, would prefer it if Kevin didn’t play with them.”

“Because he might see how real families live?” Gypsy asked. “Believe me, he already knows. He’s forever telling me about his friend Mickey, Mickey’s little sister, his mom and dad and the things they do together.”

“Then there’s only one solution I can see, Gypsy,” Lance said, sounding inordinately hopeless and defeated. “Either we quit right now, stop all this stuff, all this togetherness plan of yours, or you come home with m—us—live with us and keep us from tearing one another apart. It’s you he trusts, you he loves, as he hasn’t loved or trusted me in a long time.”

She gasped. “What?” So that’s where his thoughts had carried him. “I… I couldn’t. There’s my job! Tony! You… You simply don’t know what he’d say if I threw up my career to be a nursemaid. Why, he doesn’t want me to have a child of our own, not for years and years.”

Lance spun sideways on the step and took her face in his hands, silencing her lips with the flat of one broad thumb which then moved up to stroke with sensuous tenderness the scar on her cheek. “I’m not asking you to be a nursemaid.” His eyes glowed strangely in the dying flush of the fire. “I’m asking you to be there for Kevin. With you as intermediary, we might succeed. Without you, we’ll never get anywhere.”

“Lance…”

“I want you to be a mother to Kevin, and… and…”

A wild fluttering began inside her breast and her heart raced painfully while she waited for him to go on. “And to love him as a mother does, ” he finished in a rush, pushing his hands into her hair, pulling her closer, his lip scarcely a breath away. “I won’t ask you to be my wife, but I can ask you to go through the ceremony which, in the eyes of the world, will make it right for you to be the mother Kevin needs. He can be the child you want, the one your fiancé doesn’t want you to have. He does need you, Gypsy, and I know you love him. I know you’ll never love me, but that doesn’t matter because… Oh, Gypsy, say yes! Come home with me—us—and go on teaching me how to be a parent.”

His face was close to hers, so close she thought for one wild terrifying moment he was going to kiss her and she knew suddenly if he did she would be lost.

He slipped his hands from her hair and let them fall limply to his sides. “No… It was stupid of me to suggest that. I’m sorry, Gypsy. You have your own world… Your friends… Tony. You wouldn’t want anything I could offer any more than—”

Any more that what? she wanted to ask when he broke off. Or should that be
who
? Who was Kevin’s mother? Where was she?

His words echoed and reechoed in her mind as she stared into his face, searching for she knew not what, but his eyes were shuttered, introspective, lids half lowered to make his expression unreadable.
I won’t ask you to be my wife… I know you’ll never love me but that doesn’t matter because…
Because he had no love in him to return? It hurt terribly to know that, because if he were incapable of loving a woman, how could he ever learn to love his child?

Above all Gypsy wanted Kevin to have the same kind of love she and that other Kevin had enjoyed as children, because, despite the tension between their parents, she’d known she and her brother were both loved. What good was it to have found him again, reincarnated in this little Kevin, if he was going to turn out so differently?

Tears welled up and trickled over. She sniffed delicately and Lance looked at her with a slow, sad smile. “Now I’ve upset you and I didn’t mean to do that. Don’t cry, Gypsy. Kevin and I will both survive. All I ask is that we stop this experiment of yours before it goes any farther. It’ll be too painful going on with it. It will hurt too much to be close for just a small time we have left and then go back to nothing after the next two weeks are up.”

“But it could still work,” she urged, hating the thought of seeing him go back to his long, solitary days away from the cabin, hating the thought of allowing him to go back to being his old, taciturn, morose self.

“No. No, Gypsy.” Lance shook his head. “I can’t go on with it… With being together, being close, like a family, all the while knowing it’s only a temporary thing. It has to stop now. Please!”

“No more picnics,” she said, wincing at the desperation in his voice. “No more parties or bonfires? No more fun? No more trying to make this an enjoyable vacation for Kevin?”
For you? For me?

“You can still make it fun for him. Just don’t ask me to participate.”

“All right, Lance,” she said quietly, sadly. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way it has to be,” he said distantly, almost as if he had already begun to forget her existence. “I’ll stay out here for a while. Good night.”

Gypsy was dismissed.

~ * ~

The days slid from one into another sometimes with warm, sunny weather, sometimes with wet and cool and Gypsy set out to make a good time for Kevin, regardless. One morning, while digging through the now much depleted stores of canned goods, she noticed they were fast running out of meat. No wonder, she thought, no one expected to have an intruder helping gobble up the stores. Well, since I’m responsible for the shortage, I’ll have to go see what I can do about it. She remembered the clamshells she had noticed one day in one of the tiny bights along the shore, which Kevin fondly called ‘beaches’. Where there were clamshells, there were undoubtedly clams. She called to him and he left his play to run willingly to her, a smile on his face.

“I thought of something we could do today,” she told him.

“Goody! Are we going to build another driftwood fort?”

“Not on your life.” Gypsy remember the hours of backbreaking work which it gone into the building of the fort and did not want to repeat it. “We’re going out to dig for our own supper.”

Kevin’s blue eyes opened wide with interest. “We are? What? Roots?”

“No, silly. We don’t eat roots.”
Well, apart from carrots and onions and potatoes, but I really don’t want to go there.

“But daddy said you were going to have to eat roots and berries…’Member? When he was still mad at you for coming here, Mother, “he explained earnestly.

“Is he mad at you again?” Kevin asked when she made no reply to this explanation. “We could have another party for him or maybe a bonfire. He did like that, didn’t he?” Kevin frowned, looking worried.

“Of course he liked the party and the cookout, and no, he’s not mad at anyone. He’s just busy. That’s why we aren’t having any more parties or picnics or things with him. But we’re going to dig clams for our dinner. Remember that little beach where the big moon snail was?”

“Yes. Can we go see if the animal inside it has left home so we can take his house?”

“No, I think he still probably lives there so we’ll leave him alone, but there were clams there, too, and we can make chowder out of them.”

“What’s clams? What’s chowder?”

“Clams is… are… little shells with meat inside them and chowder is a kind of stew or thick soup we can make with them.”

“But shells are sort of like rocks and I don’t want to eat rocks. Nah… It’s go play at the pool instead.”

“Oh, come on. We don’t eat the clamshells, just the meat inside. You’ll see. Let’s go,” Gypsy urged, tucking his shirt into the waistband of his pants, then kneeling to roll up the legs of his jeans before doing the same to her own.” His last pair of shorts was due to be washed the next sunny day they had. “We’ll need that blue basin to carry them in, and the rake from vegetable storage closet under the house. I’ll rinse out the basin. You go get the rake.”