Joy in His Heart (16 page)

“Joy has a plane en route for us,” his brother Greg said from behind the orthopedist. Greg stepped around the doctor and smiled. He moved toward the bed and carefully hugged Brian. “You were always such an over-achiever. Get in a plane crash and you rescue everyone. Mom and Dad are out there trying to satisfy the reporters clamoring to hear all about brave Doctor Brian Peterson.”

Brian’s spirit brightened but not because his family was there. If Joy was flying him home, maybe she’d changed her mind. Maybe she hadn’t given up on them. “We’re flying home with Joy?”

Greg stared at him, then frowned. “No,” he said carefully. “She’s going home with Jim and Anna. She sent a jet here to Syracuse for us.”

He knew his face fell and Brian didn’t care. “Oh.”

“You’re disappointed.”

He stared at his brother. His pastor. He’d hidden his feelings from his family and himself for years. No more. “I’m in love with her. I have been for years. And now I’ve lost her. Wouldn’t you be disappointed?”

“N
ow there’s a hangdog look if ever there was one,” Joy heard her Uncle George say from behind her. She looked up and caught his eyes watching her reflection in the tinted window.

She looked away from her study of the scenery outside her office window and spun her desk chair back toward him and the pile of papers covering her desk. “Morning, Uncle George. I was just thinking.” Even she heard the sigh in her voice.

“Dangerous stuff, deciding on the fate of the world before coffee. Or were you trying to decide whether you should just shred all this—” he gestured to the untidy pile of papers on her desk “—or handle it?” She noticed the overburdened coffee caddy in his hand. He chuckled. “Of course handling it without coffee and blueberry muffins could be dangerous, too.”

She stared at the coffee cups numbly. It was a good thing it was his day to pick it up at the coffee shop or they’d both be caffeine-starved. She’d arrived at the
field half an hour ago with her brain still not firing on all cylinders. She’d had another restless night, which wasn’t unusual since her sojourn in the Adirondack Forest Preserve.

Shaking off the funk of days past—or at least trying to—she reached out for the coffee. “Oh, bless you. No wonder you’re my favorite uncle. Maybe this will clear the cobwebs away.”

“Two creams, no sugar. Just like always.”

She smiled sadly and accepted the take-out cup across her desk. She took a sip while he set a muffin in front of her. “Um. And I wasn’t contemplating the fate of the world or the paperwork. Just my life,” Joy admitted, needing some advice or at least a sounding board. Uncle George had been hers since her teens.

“You ain’t been yourself since you got back last week.”

“No. I haven’t been myself.” Joy stared down at her hand. The blisters from the crutch and the trek up the mountain were nearly healed. She broke a piece off her muffin and catalogued the rest of her Adirondack injuries. Her shoulder was fine. Her ankle? Not so fine but getting there. Her heart…

“Am I wrong to want to be me?” she blurted. “What I’m wondering is if wanting to be who I am is worth losing a chance to have more in my life. Especially because I’d lose so much of what I have now.”

Uncle George blinked and his face screwed up in confusion. “Say what?”

Maybe that didn’t make much sense without some important information. “It’s Brian. I love him. Still. Again. And he loves me, too.”

“Last I heard love isn’t supposed to make you miserable and, toots, you’ve been miserable since you got back. Same old problem?”

She nodded. “He thinks I can’t be a pilot
and
be a wife and mother. I know it wouldn’t be easy but it wouldn’t be impossible.”

“And?” he urged.

“And nothing.” She smacked her hand on her desk. “I don’t see why I should have to give up Agape Air and stay home just to win him. You know I like nice things and that I have a nice place. I don’t expect to hang a plasma screen on the hangar wall, stick a couch in front of it and call it home for my husband and kids. But I’d be bored to tears with nothing but home to think about. I’m just not good with committees and that sort of thing. It’d be no different than in high school. They’d start acting all catty, my head would explode and I’d tell them exactly what I thought of them. And then Brian’s career would suffer or at the very least his relationships with his colleagues would.”

“You’ve negotiated contracts with some pretty arrogant men who run international companies and you haven’t unloaded on them. You’re not the same girl you were at seventeen. You’ve grown into a woman with a woman’s control—a pilot’s control. I think you could handle a bunch of committee ladies. I can’t help feel you’re sellin’ yourself short, toots. And Brian, right along with you. Have you ever sat down and told him all this? Have you tried to talk it out?”

“Of course I did! I told him I couldn’t change—”

Uncle George raised his hand palm up stopping her
midthought. “Did you tell him how you plan to stay on here and still handle having and raising little ones? Or did you get all huffy?” He used his upraised hand again, stopping her reply. “Don’t answer me. It isn’t for me to know. Just you answer truthfully in your heart. Breaking things off with him back when you were so young wasn’t a mistake, but you’re both older and you’ve both got some experience with life under your belts. Think about it.”

Joy didn’t even notice him shuffling out as she turned away from her desk and looked out at all she and Uncle George had built. She thought back over every conversation she and Brian had had and admitted that they’d never really talked about either of their expectations of marriage this time. And that was her fault. She’d been too busy guarding her heart to find out if he’d changed his vision. And she honestly had to wonder if Brian even knew she wanted children at all.

Was that what he’d been trying to say on the cliff? That he thought it was a shame she’d decided to forego having children in favor of her career because she’d be a good mother? Or had he meant it the way it sounded—that he didn’t think she could have both? She didn’t know. And she’d been too leery of him to talk about her dreams because once before he hadn’t honored them. And so she’d never told him she wanted marriage and motherhood to be in her future.

The memory of the tears she’d seen in his eyes rose up to haunt her. This wasn’t just about her. They were both hurting. And that was just wrong. Especially if it was needless suffering. She pushed herself to her feet.
If she and Brian had to lose each other, it was time to make sure they each knew why.

Joy nearly turned back several times on her way to the hospital, but she pulled into the parking garage, her heart pounding with anticipation of seeing him again and trepidation for the same reason.

She knew Brian had been transferred to the rehab floor after his surgery but only because her brother made sure she knew it. Everyone kept asking her how he was doing, then looked at her askance when she said she hadn’t had time to go see him. She’d had the time; what she hadn’t had was the courage.

Moving slowly toward his room, she entered the elevator and hit the button for the sixth floor. All too soon the elevator stopped and it was either step off or retreat. Joy had no problem with regrouping, but to retreat was another thing altogether. The only thing worse, she knew, would be surrender. So she approached his room determined to state her case and let him choose.

The room was decorated in pastel colors in the cutesy-country theme so many hospitals thought made the patients feel at home. It was brightened by a profusion of flowers covering every surface, but if they were suppose to cover the antiseptic hospital smell they failed. She hated that he’d wound up here fighting for his career when all she’d had to do was file insurance claims and await the result of an FAA inquiry into the crash.

Then she saw him and seriously worried that she would not be strong enough to walk away again no matter what. Brian sat across the room in a chair near
the windows. He looked a little pale and as if he might be in pain. He wore a faraway, sad expression and there were lines of strain around his eyes. Though there was a book in his lap, he wasn’t reading it but was staring at the opposite wall of the little window alcove where he sat.

“Hi, Bri, how is it going?” she asked, trying for a casual greeting when she felt anything but casual. What she felt was desperate for even this glimpse of him. Her stomach churned, her voice felt weak and she was afraid it sounded just as unsubstantial.

Bright sunlight streamed in and sparkled in his golden hair, but the brilliance that came into his dark eyes when he saw her put the sunlight to shame. The strain disappeared and the pain she’d thought she’d seen was a forgotten figment of her imagination in a millisecond.

“Joy! You came,” he said, and as he put aside the book she realized now that it was his much-used Bible. “I’d just about given up hope.”

There was no other chair by the windows, giving Joy a choice of where to sit. She could push the chair by the bed nearer to him, and almost did. But then she remembered the insects that had buzzed too near the flames of their campfire. Her wings were already singed. She’d gone close enough.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here before this,” Joy told him as she perched on the bottom of the bed while memorizing his face for later. “I’d give you the same excuse I’ve given everyone else but you’d know I wasn’t too busy catching up at work.”

“What made you finally come?” he asked, his tone hesitant and achingly hopeful, his gaze fixed on her face.

She felt a sad smile tug at her lips. “Besides missing you? I’m here because I got to thinking that when we were sitting on the ledge I didn’t give you a chance to explain what you meant and I’m sorry. You got hurt because I refused to listen. You didn’t notice you were in danger because you were distracted by our argument.”

Brian closed his eyes for a second and touched his now crinkled forehead. Then he looked up and drew her gaze as no man ever had. “I got hurt because a cliff wall that had been standing there for thousands of years suddenly let go. And if you hadn’t moved when you did, we both could have been killed. So no one’s to blame. Okay?”

She looked at his casted arm and shook her head. “Only after you tell me you’re going to be all right.”

“Lee says I’ll be fine after he and his physical therapist torture me for several months.” He shrugged, but it wasn’t quite the careless gesture she thought he meant it to be. “I was overdue for a vacation anyway,” he went on. “The intense stuff will be over at the end of the week and I’ll go home. Probably to Greg’s house, although with his tribe I don’t see it being particularly restful.”

Relieved, she breathed easily for the first time since moving the rock and seeing his damaged wrist. “Praise God. I don’t think I ever prayed harder than I have this week.”

He grinned. “I’m flattered considering lightning shot a plane out from under you two weeks ago.”

She smiled. “We weren’t in the damaged plane all
that long. I hardly had a chance to do more than call out to Him for wisdom and mercy.”

“It seemed like forever,” Brian said and winced. “That was one whale of a first flight.”

Did he mean—? “Oh, no. Bri, that was your first time in an airplane?” She remembered with fondness his old, beat-up Oldsmobile. “That’s right. You used to drive back and forth from college. I’m so sorry. It really is a safe way to travel.”

Brian chuckled. “I figure since lightning never strikes twice in the same place, I have a sixty-year pass on plane crashes. You, too.”

They’d gotten entirely off subject. And much as she enjoyed talking to Brian about nothing at all, she had to get this settled. The trouble was, Joy was pretty sure she hadn’t been this nervous taking any of her piloting tests. Not even on her first solo flight at sixteen had she been this terrified. Maybe because more than her future hung in the balance. This was about her heart and her happiness—Brian’s, too. And there could be no future for them if they didn’t talk.

“All this talk of planes reminds me of why I came to see you.” She took a deep breath and willed herself to look into his eyes as she asked, “What did you mean about me being wasted as a pilot?”

His deep chocolate eyes looked uncertain. Brian was never uncertain. She hated that she had done this to him.

“I won’t blow up,” she promised. Joy was determined this time to let him say whatever he needed to say no matter how much it hurt—no matter how much she wanted to run from it. She had to know if they had
a chance or at least the full reason why they didn’t. “If we don’t talk this out, it’ll haunt us. Our families are close. If we can’t work this out the two of us are doomed to have every family occasion rip the scab off the wounds or we’ll have to keep avoiding each other. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of turning your brother down every time he asks me to one of his kids’ birthday parties.”

“Me, too.” Brian’s reply was more of a sigh. Then he pursed his lips, pausing for a long moment. It was clear he was as worried about his answer as she was. “I meant that Agape Air has been like your child. And it’s fulfilled you, but that it’s a shame you don’t want kids because you’d be a great mother.”

She tilted her head and frowned. “Bri, where did you get the idea I don’t want kids? I just don’t see why I can’t do both and as far as I know, you don’t see how I can.”

Brian opened his mouth but was interrupted by the click of high heels on the linoleum. They both looked toward the door.

“Well, there you are, Brian Peterson,” a gorgeous woman called out as she floated into the room on three inch heels. Her pink silk suit was the perfect foil for her creamy complexion and blue-black hair.

Snow White meets the new millennium, Joy thought, sourly. But though Joy wanted to hate the perfect creature who’d just entered, Snow’s sweet smile wouldn’t let her.

“I was here earlier,” the tiny woman continued on, “and the lioness at the gate told me you were off to therapy. But she wouldn’t tell me where exactly. She said you couldn’t be interrupted. I wanted to be your
cheer—” Miss S. White’s eyes met Joy’s, widening in surprise. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you sitting there.” She put her perfectly manicured hand out and Joy shook it, conscious of her own blister-roughened palms and her unisex uniform.

“Joy Lovell,” she said, trying not to show how inadequate she felt and how unused she was to feeling that way.

“How
are
you? You were Brian’s pilot. I’m Linda Haversham. Brian’s partner is my husband. I’m in awe of what you do but I can’t imagine doing a job that scares me silly.” She giggled. “Though my kids terrify me on a daily basis.”

Joy found herself smiling genuinely but before she could respond to the joke, Linda Haversham went on. “I hope you don’t mind if I interrupt for a moment. I need to talk to Brian about something Memorial’s ladies auxiliary needs him to do. We all decided on it at a dinner party last night but of course, Brian, you couldn’t be there.”

Joy waved her on, frustrated with the woman’s timing. She tuned out most of the conversation but she got the gist of it. She looked at sweet, warm and perfect Linda “Snow White” Haversham and saw cold reality.