To Begin Anew (Blue Jay Romance) (18 page)

Debra felt a hand on her shoulder and she heard Eric say, “You okay?”

“Huh?”

Eric frowned at Debra and squeezed her shoulder for a second before he took it away. “For a second there, you looked like the Invisible Woman came along and punched you in the stomach. Are you feeling well? It’s hot out today, maybe you could use some water.”

Debra shook her head. “No, no, I’m fine.” When Eric’s frown went from slight to etched into his expression, she forced a smile and continued, “Really, I promise.” Whatever it took, Debra would do her best to convince Eric that she wasn’t about to suffer from heatstroke or some kind of devastating illness that turned a perfectly normal-looking face into a sour lemon pucker.

Eric wanted to argue with Debra, but before he could make a real case with her, his mother, Gladys, came walking up to them with a big grin, her face rosy and cheerful in the light of the sun above her.

“There you are! I was walking all over trying to find you and there you are, clear as day.”

Eric moved to his mother and had the time to give her a quick hug before the boys got hold of her and squeezed their grandmother for all she was worth. As David and Danny decided to let her go, Gladys let her eyes find Debra and Eric had a moment where he’d thought twice, but once too late. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to introduce Debra to his mother - Gladys wasn’t the kind of woman who took to a person easily.

Debra inhaled, stuck out her hand and prepared herself. She felt her back stiffen but not straighten, and she knew that the more she was aware of the older woman reaching out to grab her hand, the more her eyes would seem to glow and contrast with one another.

“You sure do look the way he said you did. You’re a very pretty woman,” Gladys greeted as she took the hand of her son’s girlfriend. She’d only known about the change in their relationship for a few days and, after giving her son a good lecture about heeding a mother’s warning, she warmed to the idea that he had finally begun to live again after his wife’s death. The joy in his voice, the happiness, was worth the very air in her lungs as far as she was concerned.

Debra shook Gladys’ hand and said, “Thank you, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Gladys nodded, smiled and then let go of Debra’s hand. “It’s a pleasure for me as well, but you know what? Let’s have some fun now, shall we? It’s what we’re here for after all.” She looked to David and Danny. “You ready to ride some rides?”

In unison, David and Danny answered, “Yeah!”

~*~*~

Along the course of the afternoon, Eric was happy to discover that the boys took to leading their grandmother around and that his mother was having a grand time thinking she was a kid again and getting on as many rides as her older body could handle. She was so occupied with David and Danny that he had the freedom to enjoy the day with Debra as if they were there on a date instead of an excursion with the whole of his family.

As they walked through the grounds, taking in the sights and sounds and getting their lungs full of clean, fresh country air, it was nothing at all to either of them when Eric absently grabbed Debra’s hand and held onto it. The feel of her palm in his as she kept pace with him made his heart secretly beat to a drum in his chest that made him feel as if the heat of the day had gotten to him. It was only a matter of time before he exploded from all the happiness he had contained inside of him - that and the knowledge that he’d fallen in love. How in the world was he going to tell her? Would she want to hear it? And then what?

“Well, look at that. Who would have thought that the town loony would hook up with the town celebrity? Someone should take a picture.”

Eric felt Debra’s hand leave his as he noticed she’d stopped walking. She was staring straight forward, her two-toned eyes glaring at a woman walking up to them. The more he looked, the more he thought that he knew the woman from somewhere. Inspiration hit him like a waterfall and he realized that she was the waitress from the restaurant he’d gone to with Debra and the boys on the evening he’d hired her as their nanny.

Despite the heat that surrounded her, Debra felt as if she had ice in her veins. Darcy was the kind of woman that no matter what a person did to avoid a confrontation, could provoke a person to spit enough nails to build a house. Debra noticed that Trevor was with her, and even though she wanted desperately to say something smart back to Darcy, she didn’t want to do it in front of the child.

Darcy smiled at Debra and, looking at her son, she pointed over to where his friends were playing with an elderly woman and said, “Go on, go have a ride with them. I want to talk with these folks for a moment.”

Debra’s eyes became slits as she knew her head was about to spin around on her shoulders from all the steam getting ready to spew from her ears. Darcy had ‘Mean’ tattooed on her forehead and venom in her veins instead of blood.

It wasn’t a wonder why the woman was the way she was, Debra understood. She was a selfish, heartless miserable woman who had a husband to match her, and they’d been at each other’s throats since they were both teenagers in high school. It wasn’t until after Darcy’s sixteenth birthday when their friendship had turned sour.

“Is there something I can help you with…” Eric began.

“My name’s Darcy,” she interrupted, her eyes not leaving Debra’s glare. She lifted an eyebrow and addressed Eric without looking at him, “Would you leave us girls alone for a minute, hmm? We have something to talk about.”

Eric did as Darcy asked him to, but he wasn’t about to go out of hearing range. There was something he wasn’t understanding about the two women, and he vowed that it wasn’t going to be a continued ignorance. Debra certainly wasn’t going to illuminate him on the subject, so like a good eavesdropper-detective, he moved to around the corner of a small candied apple stand - out of sight, out of mind, but not so far that he wouldn’t hear every word they exchanged with each other.

~*~*~

“Darcy, I really don’t want to do this with you. Why can’t you just get over whatever you’re mad at me for and let me apologize? I really would just rather get this over with once and for all.” Debra paused feeling exhausted and in tune with the green side of her face that outweighed her blue side and convinced her to do the wise thing for once. There wasn’t a point to fighting anymore even if the fighting had only ever been verbal.

The expression on Darcy’s face was comical, if not in fact downright hilarious. It was as if someone had doused her in ice cold water and put out her fire so efficiently that not even jet fuel would get it going again. Utter confusion painted the color of the light in her eyes. “I’m not the one that has a problem. You’re the one who’s mad at me. It’s always been you.”

Debra had to blink several times as the humor in the situation evaporated. “What? I wasn’t the one who started this, Darce. You’re the one who wouldn’t speak to me, who glared at me when I came by to talk to you or to see you.”

“You blamed me.”

Debra heard the words and felt as if there was ice sliding down her throat and splashing into her stomach. Words failed her, thought failed her and she found that she was staring at Darcy in utter shock. When she spoke, it was as if she was standing beside herself, unable to control what was coming out of her mouth. If she’d been able to express it, she would have been disturbed at how calm her voice was. “It wasn’t your fault, Darcy. I did it, I’m the one who had her out on that lake because I couldn’t control my temper. It had nothing to do with you - I never blamed you for anything.”

Darcy shook her head. “It was my birthday, I wanted you there above anyone else. I practically commanded you to come. When you didn’t show, I got so mad. And then it was in the paper about your parents, that they died on the lake.” Darcy swallowed. “They died on the night of my sixteenth birthday party.”

Still in a kind of haze, Debra said, “I would have gone even if you weren’t so forceful about it, Darce. You can’t help but want to go to a party when you’re sixteen years old and your parents forbid you to be out that late.” Debra looked at the ground, toed the dirt with her shoe and shrugged. “I guess we wasted a lot of time thinking the wrong things about each other, huh? Could’ve saved yourself a lot of breath if you’d just asked me.”

Darcy, uncharacteristic even for her, felt so relieved that she hadn’t been the cause of the deaths of two people - a weight she’d carried with her for over a decade and a half - that she moved to Debra and hugged her in a bear-like vice until she thought she’d heard bones crack. She whispered in Debra’s ear, “This doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

Debra inhaled deeply when Darcy let her go, and she gave the woman a sharp look before she said, “Sure it does.”

~*~*~

Eric stood against the backside of the candy apple stall with a hand to his mouth as if he needed it to keep himself from breathing too loudly or saying something that would be heard by the hugging women just on the other side of the stall. What he’d heard, while mostly confusing, had given him just enough of a revelation that the dizziness he’d felt earlier as he walked with Debra hand in hand was like comparing kittens to lions. This had so much more gravity to it.

It was the first Eric had heard anything about Debra’s mother and father. There wasn’t a picture of them in her house, not a note or phone number or reference to them at all. If Debra was the girl next door and everyone in town was willing to mention a good word about her, they were equally as closed-lipped when it came to talking about the lovely couple that had given Debra life. The mystery of Debra’s parents was like trying to uncover a deep, dirty secret.

The conversation between Darcy and Debra was more than illuminating, it was game changing. How in the world was he going to relate to Debra now - how was he going to keep what he knew about her to himself? He knew that the biggest problem he’d face was to get Debra to understand that her parent’s death was not her fault, no matter how it happened.

There are times in a person’s existence when you experience an event that by itself is harmless, but when coupled with memory and emotion, threaten to tear you to pieces.

Darcy left Debra after another ten minutes of talking, all of which centered around catching up with one another the way normal friends would attempt to do. The surreal part of the entire experience, at least for Debra, was the fact that it felt to her as if she was sixteen again and gabbing away with her best friend. It was as if nothing had happened at all to put that giant wedge between them. When Darcy left to find her son, Trevor, she felt drained and aged as if in the span of the twenty minutes or so that they’d been talking an entire lifetime had passed.

“Hey…”

The sound of Eric’s voice, while soft and gentle, made her want to break apart and crumble into thousands of pieces.  She felt his arms wrap around her and hug her body to him, and she felt sheltered against a storm she hadn’t known was raging.

“You’re okay. It’s okay.”

Eric did the only thing he knew for certain he was supposed to do, which was hold Debra close to him and keep her gently shaking body from shattering. He didn’t have to see her face to know that she was crying. Debra was the kind of woman that let her tears fall in private, and even though she was in need of him now, she wouldn’t be fond of knowing she’d cried her eyes out in front of him.

A few minutes ticked by before Eric was sure that he could let go of Debra in a way that wouldn’t make either of them uncomfortable. When she stepped away from him, her eyes were red and the expression on her face said that he’d better not ask why.

Eric looked to the sky instead of meeting Debra’s eyes. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

Debra wrapped her arms around herself, still needing the feel of something holding her together, and she nodded.

“Let me go find my mother and the boys and tell them I’m driving you back to Blue Jay. I was planning to let them stay here for the weekend. If I know them, they’ll want to stay here so badly that nothing short of a natural disaster will pry them off those rides.”

Debra forced herself to watch him walk away and not run after him and she nodded as he waited for her reply before moving, capable only of making the small head movements to let Eric know she understood what he was saying to her. The small tremors in her arms would definitely be present in her voice, and she didn’t trust her control enough to speak confidently.

So much was running through her head - enough that if Eric could read her mind, she knew he would be worried. Or, at the very least, she hoped he would be worried. Giving voice to the deep seeded guilt she knew festered in her soul was like giving the key to a caged lion and then allowing it to bite her head off.