A Time to Surrender (18 page)
Ben sat up straight in his chair. “Tuyen and I are going to Vietnam.”
Claire felt her eyes go wide.
He said, “She’ll show me BJ’s grave. Where he lived. Where he died. We want to go as soon as possible.” He snapped his jaw shut.
He had no more words, nor did anyone. Long, silent moments passed.
Then Indio sighed, a sound of release.
Everyone began to speak at once. Finally Max’s voice rose above the others.
“Dad, you won’t hike your own back forty but you’ll fly halfway ’round the world and somehow get to some obscure village up in the mountains during monsoon season?”
Ben stuck out his lower lip and nodded.
“Then I’m going too.”
Claire exclaimed. “What?”
“Yep.” Max nodded, still looking at his dad. “We’ll go. We’ll take care of it once and for all.”
Ben gave another nod, quick and final.
Claire met Indio’s gaze. The black eyes were inscrutable.
Her mother-in-law sighed again. “It’s a good plan. Necessary, like Lexi’s walk. If we don’t revisit the past that haunts us and banish it, its control over us will never end.”
Claire shut her eyes and thought of that tandem bike ride with her wild mother-in-law. Indio wasn’t steering this situation, but she might as well have been. Her respected opinion powered up the pedaling and jerked the handlebar. Claire felt as if they’d just rounded a curve and hit a pothole at full speed. The impact threw her equilibrium completely out of whack. The wind whistled in her ears.
She knew what Indio meant. Claire had revisited her own haunting memories, from the night of the fire to childhood traumas to emotional affairs with other men. She’d received forgiveness and healing through Christ.
Now, if she understood Indio’s wink, Ben and Max were headed down that rewarding but most difficult of paths: surrendering. They had to let BJ go once and for all.
Claire looked around the table. Her eyesight felt different. She saw all of them letting go . . . Jenna of the life she had wanted with Kevin. Skylar of whatever it was that kept her from settling down. Danny of his prejudices. And Lexi now, in trekking up to the gold mine, would let go of the terror from that night of the fire.
Perhaps even she herself would do some surrendering. The thought of Max being gone triggered old resentments from his many absences through the years. Why not let them go?
“Claire.” Indio smiled at her. “We just pray, dear.”
Okay.
The matriarch prayed. She would. Just at soon as she let go of her fear that Indio was passing the tandem’s handlebars to her.
A
fter the family breakfast, Jenna wanted to join Lexi’s hike with the others. She wanted to be excited for Papa’s travel plans. But wanting did not supply the necessary energy. She went to one of the Hideaway’s guest bedrooms and crawled between cool, crisp sheets.
They were blue floral.
They reminded her of the small room at the hospital.
She kneaded the pillow beneath her head and looked up at oak beams across the ultrawhite plaster.
They reminded her of Amber looking up at ugly, gray ceiling tiles. Not that she could see them. As of a few hours ago, her friend still lay in a coma at the hospital.
Jenna rolled onto her side. Outdoors the sun shone, making for a miserably hot September day. The old hacienda room was comfortable, though. Its thick adobe walls and shuttered windows locked in the previous night’s cool. Mingled scents of wood furniture and lavender sachets added another layer of serenity.
Nothing like the antiseptic odors at the hospital.
The guest room was at the farthest end of the courtyard, away from the family commotion taking place in the kitchen. She would sleep.
Just as soon as she forgot about the hospital with its gruesome odors and the blue floral print wallpaper . . .
Had she really kissed him?
Jenna shut her eyes, but the mental video recorded last night rolled on . . .
A
fter talking with Joey in the middle of the night, Jenna laid her head on Cade’s shoulder. She did not cry more. Her tears had been all used up, shed while on the phone first with Kevin, then with Joey. Nor did she sleep. Her earlier nap on the couch in the waiting room had taken the edge off her exhaustion.
What she did was move into a new space. All defenses and pretenses fell away, leaving her more
real
than she’d ever been in her life. As she had told Kevin, it was time to admit and to accept their current situation.
Like writing a grocery list, she listed the elements with a cold practicality.
One, Kevin was overseas, fighting in a war.
Two, she was on her own, teaching, and befriending Amber. At long last she was embracing her role as a Marine’s wife, which meant, basically, that she lived day in and day out inside an emotional combat zone.
Three, people offered their appreciation, privately and publicly, for her and Kevin’s sacrifice. They honored them.
And they exploded bombs near them. Both of them. At home and over there.
Four, damage was done. Physical, mental, emotional. Untold. Irreparable. Collateral.
Five, steps were taken to ease the pain. Stitches were made, comas induced, phone calls exchanged, rules broken, prayers offered, courage summoned, comfort sought.
The list was finished, its elements admitted and accepted. She understood that she was a casualty of the emotional combat zone in which she lived.
Coherent thought fled, taking with it the ability to step back and coldly assess the damage. Pain crashed through her, physical, mental, emotional.
She could take meds for her arm and for her head. For that deeper, unfathomable hurt she could only turn intuitively to the comfort close at hand.
She tilted her face up toward Cade, her mouth centimeters from his.
“Jenna.” The dim lamplight cast shadows over his eyes, but his tone was clear. It cautioned.
But she didn’t move.
He waited.
She waited.
He lowered his face. His lips grazed hers.
Her hurt began to ebb away.
And then she kissed him back . . .
T
he mental video ended.
In the safe harbor of her parents’ home, Jenna rolled to her other side, angling her left arm so that it would not be squished underneath her.
Yes, Cade had kissed her and she had kissed him back. For long, sweet moments, the intimate contact eased her deep ache.
Now, in the light of day, she saw it as the result of a glitch in the system. When a happily married couple was torn apart and thrown into the chaos of war, one or both could quite easily turn for desperately needed comfort to another.
Like Uncle BJ did in Vietnam. Away from his beloved Beth Russell, he turned to a woman who comforted him, the one who would in time give birth to Tuyen.
Jenna thought her heart stopped right then and there.
That which she so feared had become her reality.
Of course Kevin could—if put into Uncle BJ’s position—respond the same way. Of course he could. Danny kept saying it would never happen. But it could.
And of course she herself, surviving a bombing and watching over a comatose friend, could respond in the same way.
Had
responded in the same way.
Similar way, she corrected herself. Similar. Not the same. A few kisses of comfort from Cade Edmunds did not signify a thing. The physicality was morally wrong, yes, but also the result of a glitch in an unfair system.
It was, even, part of the whole abominable scene. She shuddered at the memory of the funeral, the explosion, Amber falling against her, both of them bleeding, the ambulance ride. The needles, the pills. Amber’s head swathed in white. Listening to men cry on the phone. Cade being there at that precise moment.
Yes, Cade’s comfort was for the time of utmost anguish, a time that was past. She’d reached the other side of the glitch.
Jenna succumbed at last to sleep.
T
he pickup truck hit a rut at what would be considered full speed on a country highway.
“Ouch!” Skylar clutched the side of the truck bed and bounced. Even with a thick layer of blankets beneath her, she felt every bone jarred loose.
Danny’s arm rammed against hers. “Lexi always did have a lead foot. The story goes she almost outdrove the fire that night.” He half turned and banged on the back window. “Lex!” he shouted. “Slow down!”
His sister and her friend Nathan rode inside the cab, Lexi at the wheel. They both looked over their shoulders at Danny and Skylar, cupping a hand at their ears as if they couldn’t hear.
Danny turned back. “Two pods in a pea.”
She raised her brows in question.
“Lexi used to call us twins ‘two pods in a pea.’ I think the phrase applies to them now.”
“You mean those moony, gooey-eyed lovey-doveys?”
He grinned.
Skylar couldn’t help but smile in return.
Dog tired, guilt ridden, and spooked at the thought of her old acquaintance Fin being in the same city, she
smiled
. What was it about these crazy Beaumonts that got to her?
Indio loved on her like she’d been hurt as badly as Jenna. Claire fed her and reiterated that she was not to cook or clean for others, no matter how many people showed up that weekend. Everyone accepted her at the breakfast table as if she were
family
. They talked freely in front of her about deep hurts and tragic events and their plans to address those things.
Last night—
No. Smiling had nothing to do with last night and Danny’s holding her while she bawled. It had nothing to do with his concerned voice on the phone later when she had called him as promised after getting home. It had nothing to do with his invitation that she join them on this hike that began with a bumpy truck ride.
For certain it had nothing to do with his dark eyes peering at her now from under the brim of his ball cap. Or the way his curls stuck out every which way. Or the mouth that really did have Wally Cleaver’s smile down to a
T
.
He broke eye contact and looked toward the end of the truck bed. “We’ll be parking soon. The trail gets too steep and rocky for driving.”
Skylar studied the rough terrain. Every shade of green vied with blacks and grays. New life was forging its way through death and destruction. But there was evidence of old-growth chaparral killed. Manzanita that looked from their breadth to be maybe a hundred years old lay broken. Thinking about the loss of vegetation and wildlife added weight to her heart already heavy with grief.
“How did the fire start?” she asked.
“Wind blew down a power line in an uninhabited area. Conditions were just right for one spark to take off before anyone spotted it. Actually it started several miles from here, going a different direction. Then the wind shifted.”
“And Lexi, your mom, and grandparents were trapped?”
“Yeah. Along with three firemen.” He looked at her again. “Let’s jump to the happy ending. They all got out safely.”
“Where were you?
“In some sort of limbo hell. There was no communication with them. Dad, Jenna, Kevin, Erik, and I got up as far as that lookout turnout along the highway. We could see entire mountains on fire.”
“How awful! And they were out here, in the middle of the night, fire all around them, trying to escape?”
“Yeah.”
She shuddered involuntarily. “Why couldn’t they get out?”
“There’s just the one road in and out, the driveway. The fire had circled around and felled trees across it. Hindsight says they should have left sooner, even though there was no direct threat.”
“It could happen again.”
“Sure. It’s happened often. The fires just never hit the house or barn. Papa grew up here, you know. He’s evacuated plenty of times. Nana, Dad, and Uncle BJ too. Based on past experience, Papa thought they were okay. I remember evacuating once when I was a kid staying up here for a couple weeks. We could hardly see the smoke, but Papa said he knew best.” Danny smiled wryly. “It’s one of the perks of living surrounded by all this peace and beauty.”
She bit a fingernail, seeing that night in all its vivid horror. It did not take much effort to imagine. She knew firsthand the roar of fire . . .
“Skylar, what’s wrong?”
“N-nothing.”
“You look scared.”
“I’m fine.”
“The night did have a happy ending.”
“So you said.”
“And this year we’ve had above-average rainfall. Conditions are nowhere near what they were. Papa and the neighbor are working on a path between the properties. It really is safe to live here, I promise. Safer than going to a protest. You won’t leave, will you?”
“What?”
“You won’t leave the Hideaway? Mom says she’d have to close up shop if you left.”
Skylar’s throat tightened. She was on overload and dangerously close to spilling again.
“You are upset.”
“Stop telling me how I feel—”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You could have stayed home. It’s obvious you’re worn out.”
“Danny, don’t you ever shut up?”
“Not much.” He went quiet.
In the silence between them she heard something. Like birdsong that was there all along but undetected until a noisy lawn mower was turned off, she heard it.
It was the sound of Danny’s unspoken thoughts.
The guy liked her.
Skylar scrunched herself as far into her corner of the truck bed as possible. Next time she’d let him yap as long as he wanted.
F
ive minutes into their hike in some far-flung corner of the estate’s three hundred acres set in the middle of nowhere, Skylar accepted the fact that avoiding Danny was not a possibility. She didn’t exactly have anyplace else to go for the time being.
Like a tour guide, Lexi led the way up unmarked rock-strewn, almost-vertical paths and described—not without a few tears—what had happened the night of the fire. Nathan stayed close beside her. They all carried water bottles; the guys carried lanterns as well.
Skylar liked the lovey-doveys. Lexi was quiet; when she spoke she had something to say. Nathan was, in Lexi’s words, the boy next door—simply an all-around nice, solid guy.
