Mariner's Compass (32 page)

He walked out of the kitchen, his face concerned. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Emory called you, didn’t he?”

He nodded, not denying it.

“What did he say?”

“Only that you’d been out to see your mother’s grave. That you were having a hard time.”

Suddenly, without warning, I felt myself start to shake. Before I could stop them, sobs swelled up from deep inside me, and my legs buckled. Gabe caught me before I hit the floor, holding me close to his dry, solid body. I buried my face in his sweet-smelling T-shirt and let the tears flow freely. Scout whined and nudged his nose between our legs, upset at my burst of emotion.

“Scout, lie down,” Gabe said. The dog obeyed him immediately, sensing that this was no time to argue.

Murmuring softly in Spanish, Gabe helped me into our bedroom, closed the door, started peeling off my wet clothes, drying me with a thick white towel. Soon I was under our flannel-covered down comforter, my freezing body pressed up against his warmth. Tears trailed down my cheeks while I tried to explain about my father and my mother, about Jacob Chandler and who I thought he might be. Disjointed apologies tumbled out of my mouth for what I’d done, what my family had done, how hard it must be for him . . .

“Shhh,” he said, putting a finger on my lips, stopping me before I could get a coherent story out. “It doesn’t matter. Just lie here with me.” He held me close, my face wetting his chest as I cried for him and all he’d had to suffer in his life, the ugliness he’d seen, the humiliation he’d experienced, for the mother I would never have, the father I never knew, and for the one I did.

He kissed my lips, my cheeks, licking the salty tears staining my face, his large, familiar hands stroking a slowly rising heat into my arms and legs. I arched toward him, aching to feel his strong heavy body on me, inside me, to forget all the things I’d learned in the last few days, to lose myself in this pure physical moment, to never have to go back and think about who I thought I was, who I might be. At that moment, all I really knew for certain was I would go anywhere on earth with this man.

His broad hand cradled the small of my back, lifting me toward him. When I cried out, his voice murmured words of reassurance,
“Tu puesto es aquì. Ahora y siempre. Todo serà bien
.Everything will be okay.
No te preocupes, estoy aquí. Te amo, te amo.
I love you.
Mientras yo vivo sólo a ti amaré.
”

Filled by his warmth, I lay spent and exhausted in his arms, wanting just to sleep for days and, when I woke up, to be living somewhere else, anywhere other than this town where everyone thought they knew everything about me.

His rough knuckles gently caressing my cheek startled me awake. “Sweetheart, it’s almost eleven. You have to go.”

I bolted up, gripping the sheets to my chest, confused for a moment about my surroundings. Gabe sat on the edge of our bed dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt. He touched his lips to my temple. “You have to go,” he repeated.

Still drowsy and disoriented, I lay back against the pillows.
This is where you belong
, I told myself silently.
This is your bedroom, this is your husband
. “No. I don’t care about the house or anything of Mr. Chandler’s. I give up. Let the government have it all.”

He studied my face a long time before answering. “I can’t let you do that. As much as I’d like to, I can’t. You have to be back in Morro Bay before midnight.”

“Just like Cinderella,” I said, my voice bitter.

“Benni, I don’t know what happened between you and your dad at the cemetery, but whatever it is, I know one thing for certain, you’ll never forgive yourself if you quit now. I want you to stay here with me, heaven knows, I want that with every fiber of my being. It goes against everything I am to let you go back to that house. But this thing, whatever it is, has to be resolved before you can go on with your life. Until then, we can’t go on with ours.” He leaned over, kissed my lips, then the hollow of my throat. “I’ll be here waiting. My life is braided with yours,
niña,
in a braid so tight nothing will loosen it. Remember that.”

I realized that my disjointed rambling when we were making love hadn’t made sense to him. He deserved an explanation. He deserved the truth. “I . . . it’s . . . my dad ... and you and what you’ve . . .”

He weaved his hands into my tangled curls and made me look straight into his deep set eyes. They were gray with fatigue but resolute. “Not now, Benni. Tell me later, when you’ve had time to think about it. Right now, we just need to get you back safely to Morro Bay.”

A rush of love for this man struck me like a blow, and the thought of life without him filled me with an overwhelming despair. In that moment, I knew, if something happened to him, if he died before me, I’d simply want to die, too. “It’ll all be over soon,” I said. “One way or another. I promise.”

He stood up, holding out a hand to me. “You’d better get dressed. I’m going to follow you to Morro Bay.”

At Mr. Chandler’s house, Gabe walked through it, turning on the heater, checking the place out, his eyes vigilant and searching. Finally satisfied, he locked the door behind him, and through the front window I watched him drive away, the sound of his Corvette growing fainter until only the sound of the wind remained.

I lay in bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. The night wind rustled the bushes outside my window, while next to me, in his cedar-chip bed, Scout snuffled and growled in his sleep, his front paws busy and diligent, digging dream holes to China, or maybe dreaming of the strange man whose scent still permeated this room. The man who had invaded my life so completely. The man who might possibly be my father.

14

I LEFT FOR Los Angeles at four a.m. While I dressed, I realized that during last night’s turmoil, I’d forgotten to tell Gabe where I was going today. Not wanting to wake him this early, I called his office and left a message on his voice mail, giving him my destination, but not why I was going. His promise that he’d step back and let me do what I needed, explaining it all to him when I was ready, removed a huge weight from my shoulders. Slowly we were working out this balancing act of a relationship, this struggle to be our separate selves while trying to become connected. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this enigmatic, often exasperating man who filled a place in my heart that no one ever had, but I also couldn’t lose myself in him, something so tempting at times with his confident, unwavering view of life.

I knocked on Rich’s door, feeling awful for waking him, but I didn’t want to leave Scout alone again.

Bleary-eyed, he brushed aside my profuse apologies. “I’ll watch
el lobo.
You just be careful,
comprende
?”

“Yes, sir.” After a few minutes of wrangling with a stubborn Scout, who didn’t want to leave me, I was on my way south down Interstate 101.

The drive was easy and pleasant through Santa Barbara, Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo. Then I hit Thousand Oaks. It had been years since I’d driven down to the L.A. area. Like most Central Coasters, I tried to avoid it as much as possible. As I gripped the truck’s steering wheel and inched behind the thousands of cars on their way to jobs in Los Angeles and Orange counties, I remembered why. The only good thing was that the molasses-slow traffic gave me plenty of time to think about what I would say to Gloria Carrell. It was a little past ten-thirty when I found the correct off-ramp and pulled over in a strip mall parking lot to check my Thomas Bros. street map again. Gloria Carrell’s house was only six blocks away. I called her on my cell phone, hoping she hadn’t given up on me. She answered on the first ring.

“Ms. Carrell? This is Benni Harper. I’m sorry I’m late. I forgot how bad the traffic is down here. I’m only a few blocks away.”

“That’s fine, Ms. Harper. I work at home, so it’s no problem.”

I pulled up minutes later in front of a fifties ranch-style house across the street from a busy red-brick hospital. An older Dodge van was parked in the driveway, and evidence of teenagers—basketballs and soccer balls, in-line skates and a fat-tired bicycle—was splashed across the front lawn. Gloria Carrell was obviously watching for me, because she was waiting on the tiny front porch before I could get my truck locked. She appeared about my age and was tall and dark-haired with a face full of rust-colored freckles. Her denim overalls were worn white in spots from age. She wasn’t smiling, but her expression was mild and congenial.

I held out a hand. “Ms. Carrell, I’m Benni Harper.”

“Nice meeting you. Let’s drop the formalities. I’m Gloria.” She reached out her own hand, stained dark brown. “Don’t worry, it won’t rub off. I’ve been working on some walnut dining chairs this morning.” Her handshake was firm and dry. “That’s what I do. Refinish furniture.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt your work, but I’m sure what I have to ask your aunt won’t take long.”

She shifted from one bare foot to another, studying me with an open frankness. “We can go see her right now,” she said. “But as I told you on the phone, she’s in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s. I don’t know what she can tell you.”

“I’ll try not to upset her. It’s just that she’s my only lead at this point.”

“Lead?” She tilted her head in curiosity. “You make it sound as if a crime’s been committed.”

I backpedaled quickly. “Sorry, habit. My husband’s a police officer. His slang slips into my vocabulary.”

One eyebrow arched slightly, its meaning unclear to me. “Let me get my shoes, and we’ll head on over to my aunt’s residence.” She slipped on some brown leather clogs next to the porch swing and closed the front door without locking it.

“Want me to drive?” I asked.

“No need,” she said, giving me a half smile. “We can walk.”

I followed her across the street to the back of the hospital parking lot where a large, tree-shaded building stood. A gold-lettered sign in front said, “Hillside Convalescent Hospital.”

“I don’t know why on the earth they label them convalescent homes,” she commented as we walked into the pale lavender lobby. “They make it sound as though old age is a disease for which there is a cure.” A teenage Hispanic girl at the front desk smiled and waved at her, then went back to her whispered phone conversation.

“Fidela has a new boyfriend,” Gloria said as I followed her down a hall of glass-encased offices toward a set of elevators. Next to the elevators were bulletin boards decorated with colorful Mother’s Day construction paper art created by young children. “Unfortunately she hasn’t informed her old boyfriend yet, so trouble lurks on the horizon.”

“I wouldn’t be that age again for all the cattle in Texas,” I said.

“I hear you there.”

We rode up to the third floor and walked down an aisle crowded with elderly people in wheelchairs. Some called out names when I walked by them, my face causing a stir of memory, remembrances from a past that still burned bright in their cloudy minds. Gloria greeted many of the residents by first name, stopping to shake a hand, kiss a cheek. It was obvious she was a regular and much-welcomed visitor.

She stopped in front of room 317 and turned to me. “She tires easily,” she warned me, “and much of what she says is incoherent. Don’t expect much.”

One of the beds was empty, though a white afghan laid across the thin blue bedspread and some pictures of children tacked on the wall told me that the bed had an occupant somewhere. I followed Gloria to the other side of the curtain, to the window bed, where her aunt sat in a wheelchair, staring out at the emerald-green foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

“Aunt Gwen, it’s Gloria, your niece,” she said in a normal voice. A respectful, noncondescending voice I’d noticed that she’d used with all the people she’d greeted in the hallway. “You have a visitor.”

Her aunt didn’t react, but continued to stare out the window. Gloria kept talking as if her aunt had responded. “She’s related to Alice Banks. You remember Alice? You knew each other back in Arkansas. You went to the same church. Alice was a waitress at that diner you used to tell me about.”

Gwen Swanson Felix slowly turned her snowy white head and stared at Gloria with filmy blue eyes the same pale shade as the cloudless sky outside her window. “Alice had a kitty.”

“She did?” Gloria said. “Well, now, I didn’t know that. What kind?”

Gwen looked beyond Gloria at me. Her blue eyes filmed over with tears. “Oh, my,” she said. Her age-spotted hand reached up and covered her mouth. “Alice, the kitty died. I’m sorry.” She held out a trembling hand. I looked up at Gloria for permission, and she nodded. I went to her aunt, knelt down next to her, and took her cold hand.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“He just cried and cried,” she said, her voice cracking.

“It’s all right,” I said, looking up at Gloria, who just smiled and nodded at me.

I held her aunt’s hand for a moment, then asked softly. “Mrs. Felix, do you remember anything about a man named Garrett?”

She stroked the top of my hand with her other one. “Alice, you need your Jergen’s. Your skin is so rough.”

“I will,” I said, not knowing how much I should press her for memories. “Do you remember Garrett?”

She pulled her hands abruptly back. “Garrett’s dead. We’re supposed to say that.”

“You’re right, I forgot. Tell me why again. Why are we supposed to say Garrett’s dead?”

She folded her hands primly in her quilt-covered lap. “He’s just like his daddy. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Her voice dropped down to a murmuring, words and phrases that made no sense. Then she looked up. “Alice, where’s the bow for my hair? You know I always like the red one with that dress.”

“Garrett,” I prompted her. “Why are we supposed to say Garrett’s dead?”

Her eyes filled up with tears again. “We loved him, Weezie, didn’t we? He said he would come back.” Her gnarled hand hit the handle of the wheelchair. “Oh, Weezie, the kitty died. I tried to save it, but the kitty died, and he never came back for me.” In a few seconds, heartrending sobs came from deep in her chest.