The House Near the River (21 page)

“Shhh.” He placed a hand lightly on her mouth. “You’re in shock. Let us take care of you.”

He and the little boy wrapped her in blankets on the sofa and when guests started to come in, ordered them elsewhere. Dad went into the kitchen and came back with hot tea. He and David were both dressed in shorts and tank tops and the air conditioning was running—Dad quickly turned it off—but she was still shaking with cold.

She told herself she had to stop crying because she was scaring little David. His eyes were huge and he was sucking his thumb and David was
not
normally a thumb sucker.

She tried to pull herself back to rationality, to dismiss that scene on a cold day in Europe. She’d left Matthew and the boy he’d saved back nearly seventy years the past. Whatever had happened, had happened.

“How long have I been gone?”

“Months,” her father answered grimly. He looked at his son, then tried to lighten his tone. “We missed you.”

“Missed you too.” Her shivering began to subside as Dad spooned Ivy’s hot chicken soup, no doubt brought in from the freezer to be warmed, into her  mouth. “But it was important, Danny was sick and then there was the fire . . .” abruptly she stopped. No used trying to make explanations that couldn’t be comprehensible to him.

“You two okay?”

He nodded. “Fine.”

She came down with a cold and was sick and feverish, dragging around the inn for most of a week. As always when she was back at ‘normal’ with her Dad and David and the home she’d lived in since she was thirteen, it became harder to accept the reality of those other experiences.

She couldn’t have been with Clemmie at Danny’s bedside when he almost died. That old doctor  had said he would have died if she hadn’t been there to see beyond the illness that all the children had to realize something different was wrong with Danny.

And that other, harder reality of standing looking over a war torn valley and having to push through the snow to save Matthew and that unknown boy. Maybe she’d saved them. She couldn’t know for sure.

The Cheyenne woman in her dreams had said she would make a difference. Well, she had, maybe. At least that particular visitor hadn’t made a guest appearance in her dreams the last few days.

But how could she and Matthew be so drawn to each other and still be separated. That didn’t feel right. It wasn’t the way things should be.

This time of year, July and August, were slow times at the farm. Even though it was vacation time, not a whole lot of people wanted to bring their kids out and spend their days running around in blazing heat, so each year Dad brought in workers to freshen the painting and make repairs that had gone begging the rest of the year.

So it was that as she recovered from her cold, indulging in a lot of sniffing, coughing and sneezing
, she heard the constant talk of the painters and the pounding of hammers in the kitchen where new granite countertops were being installed.

Even though it was a hundred and two outside, she just had to get out of the house. David was down by the sheds, playing with one of the young goats that followed him around like a dog.

“This is Elle,”  he told her solemnly. “She’s a girl.”

She nodded. “Nothing as cute as a baby goat.”

“Yeah.”

As she strolled in heat that seemed to sizzle on the summer air, he followed her and the little goat followed him. She didn’t mind. It even helped a little to have company in her wandering that seemed as aimless as her life these days.

She had two levels of homesickness. When she was at the farm in Oklahoma she missed
home
and Dad and David. At Prairie
House
  in Texas she was missing Clemmie, Danny and the girls. She still didn’t feel much about Tobe, though he seemed to be good to Clemmie and her kids, he still felt like an  intruder to her.

And Matthew, she missed Matthew wherever she was as though a part of herself was missing. She pictured his lanky form, his thoughtful face until it was almost as though he stood near her.

“Hi, Matthew,” David shouted cheerfully.

She whirled around, stared at her brother. He patted the little goat. “Matthew isn’t here, David?”

“Sure he is.” He pointed down the road to a farm where Hereford cattle grazed. “He lives over there.”

She laughed uneasily. “You’ve seen him, David?”

“Nope, but I can feel he’s there. It makes me feel good knowing Matthew is watching after us.”

This made no sense at all. But she couldn’t just dismiss David’s words. This little boy was the only one she personally knew who had crossed into the time openings. He was an odd little boy, maybe as strange as his sister, even though they did not share blood heritage.

Dad called them in then. He scolded them for being out in the heat in the middle of the day. In this country, people watched their kids to keep them safe from dangerously hot temperatures much as those way up north protected them from extreme cold.

He made them sip glasses of cold water so as not to get  dehydrated and Angie found she didn’t much mind being treated as though she were David’s age. It was rather pleasant to feel she was being looked after by someone who loved her, considering everything that had happened lately.

Her thoughts suddenly hit a brake. David had said Matthew was nearby and watching after them. Was it possible that drawn by his need to find her back in 1946, he’d found his way to where she was now, standing on land so close they could have seen each other if they hadn’t been separated by decades of time.

She would never find the dog
tags. How could she? Buried under the plaster of the old wall that way? And would she even know what they were supposed to mean?

Matthew stacked bales of hay in the little shed he’d built, storing up feed for the cattle to make it through the winter. He hoped by keeping busy he could kick off  this feeling of hopelessness that was creeping all around him.

He hadn’t been so sure lately. Maybe the school wasn’t where Ange was in some future time.

Maybe the school wasn’t even there. In all the years in between it had probably been torn down and
his
dog
tags tossed away in the rubble. Somewhere in some unknown future some farmer with whatever
was
the latest of tractors was plowing his cotton stubble, making the first preparations for next spring’s crop.

It didn’t help any when he recognized the shiny new
Ford
Coupe gathering a coat of dust on its shiny surface as it came up the road in his direction.

If he’d wanted to see anybody hereabouts, it might have at one time been Salina, but weeks back, he’d begun to see she wanted more from him than he could give. To save both their feelings, he’d told her he was not ready for anything more, trying to be tactful to keep from hurting her.

At no time had he a sense that she loved him, but only that she was desperate for life to move on.

He wondered why she would be coming out here now and stood waiting, covered as he was with hay and dirt and telling himself he should be humble enough to realize that an attractive, well-off woman like Salina wouldn’t come chasing after him.

What could he offer that half a dozen young men with good educations and great prospects couldn’t top?

The
somewhat less
shiny car pulled to a stop alongside him and Salina, dressed in some kind of red dress that probably cost the earth,  got out. “Howdy, farmer,” she greeted him jokingly.

He played along. “Howdy, ma’am. You must be from Texas from the way you talk.”

She stopped the pretense, not even bothering to smile at his weak humor.

“It’s his birthday,” she said. “He would have been twenty seven today.”

He didn’t have to ask who he was. It was always about her husband with Salina. She was always talking about moving on, but never seemed to be able to do it.

He didn’t know how to advise her. He couldn’t help thinking daily about how another December 8 was just around the corner, another landmark that Ange was still not in his life.

She stared at him. “I’ve got to do something or die.”

He nodded, understanding that. He felt that way himself  sometimes. “Just think hard about what you’re doing. You know that old saying about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

She grabbed his arm, her face contorted. “I am in the fire right now, Matthew. I’m burning in hell. Do you know what it is to wake up in the morning having dreamed he was still alive and everything was all right. And then, almost instantly, you remember.”

He nodded, but she was too focused on herself to pay attention to him.
He had learned that those in the most pain weren’t always able to be sensitive to pain in others. Their  whole being was consumed by what they were feeling.

“He isn’t coming back, Matthew. I know that know. I’ve been deceiving myself.”

She held his arm so tightly that it hurt, her long fingernails piercing his skin, but he didn’t let on. “Has something happened? Have you learned something new?”

She shook her head, flinging tears in  his direction. “I’ve just faced facts. He’s never going to come through that door to hug his son and kiss me. It’s over. He’s dead.”

He waited, not knowing what she wanted him to say. It would hardly be right to urge false hope on her. Chances were she was right and her husband’s bones lay in an ocean half a world away.
He didn’t want to remind her of that either.

So he waited for what she would say next. “Kirby has asked me to marry him,” she blurted out.

He knew Kirby Fox only slightly. A young attorney, he handled some of her father’s legal business for him. People said he was bright and ambitious, the kind of young man who was going places.

“It isn’t fair to any of us the way we’re living now. My son needs a dad and I need a husband. Oh, Matthew, I need so much to be normal and live like other people.”

The thought that came to him was that he doubted many people felt normal. There was no knowing the secrets hurts they
hid
, the pain that woke them every morning. They only looked okay from the outside.

But she didn’t want to hear that. In the depths of her sorrow, she wanted to believe that something very different was possible. She wanted days so uneventful that they grew boring, days where she didn’t have to worry about anything more than what to have for supper or what pretty dress she should put on the next day.

Her mother had died before she could remember and she’d been the pampered daughter of an adoring parent, then the sheltered wife of a
successful
young man. Life hadn’t prepared her for what she now faced.

“You do what you gotta do,” he said because it was so obviously the truth. He sure had no business judging someone else’s choice.

“But I don’t want to marry Kirby, though everybody says I’m lucky to have a man like
him
take interest in me. He’s pressing for us getting married next month and moving into a house in town. It’s a real pretty house, a big two-story on Pennsylvania Street and close enough to the school that my boy could walk when he’s old enough to go.”

He’d noticed before that she rarely called the child who had been born after his dad’s death by his name. He was always her son  or baby . . . somehow she had not accepted him as a person.
Once he had a name, Matthew guessed from the heart of his own understanding, he became vulnerable. She could lose him as she’d lost her husband.

He’d heard of times when so many people lost children young that they didn’t start to name them until they were four or five years old and they had a better chance at life.

Finally she released her hold on him, staring now up into his face. “If I’ve got to marry, Matthew, I’d rather it be to you than to Kirby.”

Somehow he wasn’t as surprised as he should have been. “Salina,” he said gently. “You don’t love me and I’ll never love anybody but my Ange.”

“I do love you. You are a sweet, strong man who makes me feel safe. You’re the only one I can talk to about how I really feel. Kirby just squirms when I try to say something serious and tells me it’s time to put all that behind me now.”

“You don’t love me,” was the only response he could make.

“I love you. I’m not in love with you the way I was with my husband, but I love you. And I’ve got to do something, Matthew, I think all the time about ways to end it all.”

He cried out in wordless protest, even though he had himself at times come close to this final decision. “You can’t do that to your boy or to your dad. You’d ruin their lives.”

“Sometimes I think the way I am now is ruining their lives. No doubt they’d be better off without me. Anyhow, this is what I’ve decided. I can’t pull out of this myself, just trying to go on. I’ve got to start a new life. If you don’t want to marry me, I’ll say yes to Kirby.

“Nothing wrong with Kirby,” he said slowly, not even sure this was a wrong turn for her to take. Who can tell what would get her started again? But the one thing he was certain was that it wasn’t right for him.