Island Hearts (Jenny's Turn and Stray Lady) (13 page)

“Am I?” He glanced back, smiling whimsically. “How’s that?”

“The artist and the fisherman, the Haida and the white man. You’re all of them, more than anyone else. You should do this, Jake, get it down on film.”

“Tow Hill?” His black brows shot up as he gestured to the hill rising behind them.

“All of it. Capture the atmosphere of this place. What’s Island Time? Glenda said everyone out here runs on island time.”

He made a broad gesture, taking in the water, the beach, the ancient forest behind. “Can’t you feel it? People who live on islands have a special relationship with their environment. Time moves slower, hasn’t the same meaning as it does to mainlanders.“

He looked out over the water again, smiling. “I’d love to put it all down on film, but I’d get carried away, you know. To me it’s all beautiful.”

She sat up straight, touched his arm and found her fingers lingering. “I was listening to you and David last night, Jake. It’s such a mix – Haida villages with totem poles and satellite dishes. Fishermen with old nets and new electronic equipment. Jets to Vancouver; mining towns, logging towns, old style homestead farms. And politics, for heaven’s sake! Here we are in the middle of nowhere, at the edge of the ocean, sixty miles from the mainland, and these islands are in the midst of a political explosion with land claims and environment protection protests!“

“We’re a political people. I guess we always have been. A hundred years ago we were terrorizing the mainland, taking slaves. But, Jennifer—” His eyes reflected an odd uncertainty. “Jenny, I wouldn’t know where to start. It takes an outsider to see all that. Or someone like you. You always see the whole.”

“And you see the beautiful pictures,” she said softly, “but you don’t step back and see it all together.”

He caught her hand, admitting, “I know that, but it never mattered. Not while I had you to keep everything in balance.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered as her heart stopped.

“You know what I mean.” He kept his eyes on their linked hands, his voice low. “Without you stopping me, I tend to go off collecting a meaningless jumble of pictures – beautiful pictures, granted, but you’re the one who pulls it all together, gives it meaning.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I need you back, Jennifer.”

“Jake, I—” She stared down at their hands. His were large and brown, engulfing her small white fingers. She wanted to turn her hand in his and let her fingers curl, clinging to his.

She wished she could go back and work with him, but she mustn’t. Something was happening to the barrier she had always kept between them. She couldn’t trust herself anymore. She might reach out for him, clinging, asking for whatever he would give her.

“Will you work on it with me, Jennifer— Jenny?” he corrected himself, his eagerness for the project revealed in the sudden tension of his body. “I’ll shoot the pictures, you direct it, put it together.”

She stood up on shaky legs, pulled her hand away to brush imaginary dust from her jeans. She tossed her hair back and wished she hadn’t gotten George to cut it, wished she could drop a barrier between them by bending her neck forward.

Briskly, she said, “Lunch on the beach, you said, and I’m hungry. I didn’t have breakfast. Just that cup of coffee.”

He got up slowly, his lips parted on words he couldn’t seem to say. Then he shrugged and gestured for her to lead the way back.

They walked back through the campground, passing a family with two young children. The children were busily and inefficiently pitching a tent under the trees.

“We saw a bear,” said the boy, “but it ran away.”

“Just as well,” said Jake with a laugh, catching Jenny’s hand to lead her past the tent.

The beautiful, hard-packed sand stretched on as far as Jenny could see. Behind them, she could hear the sound of the children laughing. Ahead there was only the surf on the hard sand.

“Taking off your shoes?” Jake asked, bending to unlace his.

“Of course!” She slipped off her shoes and moved off, down the slow slope of the beach.

Long waves rushed across the sand, churning froth in an uneven, white line. Jenny walked along the edge of the water, letting the occasional wave swirl around her ankles.

“You’ve changed,” his voice followed her, low and throbbing in her ears. “You don’t look like a Jennifer now, or act like one.”

The sun was bright, its heat in sharp contrast to the cold water around her ankles. She bent down to roll up her jeans, asking curiously, “What does a Jennifer act like?”

“Restrained, contained.” He gestured to her hair as he said, “Long, brown hair dropping across her face, hiding the real woman from any invaders. Jenny is a different girl. Barefoot and elusive, but—” He grinned. “—stubborn.”

She couldn’t help smiling, although she recognized that he was trying to assess her new behavior, to maneuver her into doing what he wanted. “Maybe I got tired of doing everything the way you want it.”

“Everything?” he challenged, his eyes losing their coolness. “Are you sure you know what it is that I want?” As she turned away in confusion, his voice changed, became brisk and almost impersonal. “Jenny, are you going to help me with this film?”

She watched a puffy, white cloud moving slowly towards the west. She should say a direct ‘no,’ but she found herself evading, “You don’t need me to do it. They’re your islands. It’s your story.”

“I won’t do it without you.” He dug his toe into the sand, making a hole that quickly filled with water. “If we did it together, I think we might make another award winner.”

An award winner? Was that the most important thing to him?

Jenny had watched the women come and go, and they never really touched him the way a new idea did, a chance to take his camera and create a mood on film. He’d told her he was going to marry Monica, but right now Monica meant nothing compared to the excitement of a new film.

“No, Jake. If you do this film, you’re doing it alone.” She fought down sadness at the knowledge that she couldn’t work with him again, couldn’t share the excitement.

There was a white sail on the horizon, someone tacking far north of the point at Rose Spit to clear the concealed sand bar.

“If you change your mind…” His voice trailed off.

“I’ll let you know,” she said briskly, refusing to get caught in the melancholy that was threatening her. He was standing still, his hands in his pockets, his feet bare beneath a rolled-up pair of denim jeans. She found herself wondering aloud, “What kind of a boy were you? Did you run barefoot on these beaches?”

“Sometimes. Most summers I worked on my uncle’s fishing boat. What about you? How did you spend your summers?”

She shrugged. “In Campbell River. Getting into trouble with George, mostly.”

“You didn’t go on holidays? With your parents?”

“No,” she said flatly. He was waiting for more, so she found herself saying, “Dad kept taking jobs in places like South America and Africa. They loved moving, seeing new places, but they thought I should have a stable home. I stayed with George and her mother when they were out of the country. When they came home, it usually wasn’t for long.”

“You were a lonely child,” he said, his eyes seeing more than she wanted. She shrugged uncomfortably.

“Come on, Jake. I didn’t suffer. I had a home. Aunt Georgia – George’s mother – wasn’t a dragon. She was a nice lady. She was widowed, and I’m sure we made her life chaos at times, but she didn’t often complain— My ankles are starting to hurt from the cold water,” she muttered, moving abruptly out of the path of the waves and away from him.

He followed. They walked away from the water. Jake took her hand to help her over a log, then failed to release it when they regained level ground.

“I’m just beginning to realize how isolated you were,” he said. “You’ve always seemed so self sufficient, as if you didn’t want anyone close. You learned that, didn’t you? With your parents gone most of the time.”

“I—” She shook her head, confused by his penetrating insight into her childhood. “No, there was always George. She was older, but we were usually together… until she got married— you don’t want to hear all this.” Jenny tugged at her hand, but he held it firmly.

He pulled her hand through his arm so that she was walking close against him, their shoulders and hips touching as they moved along the sand. “What you really mean is that you don’t want to share it with me. When did George get married?”

Off guard, she answered, “I was sixteen, just turning seventeen.” She remembered that summer, the warm happiness that had grown in George’s eyes as the weeks passed. “It was a big romance – George and Scott – very sudden. Aunt Georgia was really upset about it, because Scott was so much older. But George was so happy, and no one could stop her. Aunt Georgia wouldn’t consent, so in the end they eloped.”

“And then?“

Jake’s voice hardly disturbed the thread of Jenny’s memory. “I don’t know. I didn’t see much of her after that. They lived in Vancouver, and I went to the University of Victoria.“

He was silent, thinking. With his probing eyes, he might easily see far too much. She said swiftly, defensively, “That doesn’t tell you anything about me.”

But he’d already seen more than her words. “You worked hard, didn’t you?”

“Lots of people work hard at university.”

“Not much social life?” he guessed. “And once you came to work for me – there hasn’t been anyone. Boyfriends, but not anyone who mattered. Not since Lance.”

Her fingers tensed in a spasm on his arm. How had she gotten into this? Talking to Jake about her past, for heaven’s sake! “You promised me lunch,” she evaded desperately, “and I’m still hungry. I think—”

“It was Lance, wasn’t it? The man who called you Jennifer?”

He wasn’t going to let her get away, wasn’t going to stop asking until she answered. His eyes were watching, waiting.

Somehow, through all the years she worked for him, she’d managed to avoid answering questions like this. She didn’t answer now, or even nod, but he seemed to read the story in her face because his voice softened and he asked, “When was Lance?”

She shrugged, making her voice casual, wishing the lump would go away, the tears stop threatening. “I met him when George was dating Scott. We went out together.”

“And then George got married.” He was filling in the blanks as if he had been there, watching. “You were alone then, weren’t you? No parents, no George. And you weren’t close to your aunt.”

She jerked her arm away, pushing both hands through her short, soft hair. “Oh God! I— w
hy are we doing this?
I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to
think
about him.”

“You’re thinking about him all the time,” Jake accused. “You never forget. You opened up once, to Lance, and you got hurt. So you’re keeping the memory warm, making sure you never let anyone else close enough to get a knife in you again.”

“
Stop it!
I don’t— you’re making a big thing of this. It was only a teenage romance!“

The blue sky and the sand, the ocean roaring over the sand in long, unstoppable surges. And Jake, prying, watching, finding the weak places in her. She said desperately, “You should have brought a camera today. You could have gotten some terrific shots of this beach.”

But he wasn’t going to be distracted. He accused softly, “Hiding again, Jennifer? Running away from yourself? Don’t you think it’s time you talked about it all? You never have, have you?” She was silent, but he was putting the pieces together. “George didn’t know – it was obvious when she mentioned his name last night that she had no idea he meant so much to you.”

“He doesn’t,” she lied weakly.

“Then why not talk about him?”

She muttered, “You’re like a dog with a bone. You won’t stop. What do you want me to say?” She avoided his eyes, then said in a rush, “I fell in love with him. He was older, very impressive to a girl my age. We had an affair. Then he left. It’s an old story. I was seventeen and I cried a lot. Now I’m twenty-seven and it’s ancient history.”

Jake brushed gently at her cheek, as if he were wiping tears away. “Why did he leave?”

She said tonelessly, “Because I told him I was pregnant.“

She felt his shock in the moment of silence before he asked, “And were you?”

Jake was watching her as if her old hurts mattered to him and she found herself talking, unable to stop.

“He wasn’t local. He was a salesman, traveling around the northern part of Vancouver Island. I was always waiting for the next time he came – I was obsessed, I think. I was so lonely after George got married. I didn’t really understand what was happening to me, but Lance seemed like the answer to my dreams.” She laughed bitterly, “I was pretty young, and I guess I thought a man of my own would make everything right.” She took a shallow, ragged breath. “Lance said he loved me. That seemed to be all that mattered. I— we— he was there, and gone again, and I never seemed to know for sure when I’d see him again.

“I was full of dreams. I kept hoping I’d find I was expecting his child. It wasn’t likely. He’d made sure I was on the pill. But I kept dreaming weddings and babies and happily-ever-after. One night we were sitting in his car, parked near the ocean—” She closed her eyes, saw angry clouds hanging low over the stormy sea, pain surging up inside her at the memories. “I didn’t even know I was going to say it until the words came out… I told him I was pregnant.”

She stood in the sand, shivering, unable to get her face into a mask. Jake, staring at her intently, could see everything. He reached out slowly, took her shoulders in his hands, drew her down beside him, sitting in the sand.

“What happened then?” he asked, and his dark, intense face drowned out everything else as he put his arms around her and drew her into his warmth.

“Nothing. I just— I never saw him again. I would have written, making more of a fool of myself, but he’d never given me an address to write to. I guess he was married, but I never thought of that – not at first. I kept waiting for him to call.” She shrugged. “After a while I stopped waiting.”

His arms were far too strong to fight, and his heat was soaking into her. She let herself relax, too weak to struggle.