Only By Your Touch (36 page)

Go,
Nan had told her.
Follow the path he walks, and see where it leads you. Learn the truth now. If it is more than you are prepared to accept, then leave this
place. If you linger and go later, you’ll take his heart with you.

The warning had come too late, Chloe realized. She already held his heart in her hands. She saw his love for her in every fleeting expression that crossed his dark face, in the fear that shifted like shadows behind the pain in his eyes.

He hooked his thumbs over the leather belt that he’d recently begun wearing because of her son. Bending his dark head, which he’d had shorn for the same reason, he dug at the earth with his boot heel. Watching him, Chloe’s insides twisted and ached, for this was not the same man she’d fallen in love with. Slowly but surely, he’d altered himself, trying to make himself pleasing to her and acceptably normal—so he could fit into her world.

In that moment, it hit Chloe like a fist in her solar plexus that he now looked more like a white man with a good tan than the descendent of a great Shoshone chief. He’d stripped away everything that made him special. Even worse, she’d watched him do it, and God forgive her, she’d been secretly glad. She hadn’t wanted her son to mimic an eccentric and become a laughingstock at school.

Tears stung Chloe’s eyes, and regret sliced her middle like glass. What had she done to him? And, oh, God, how could she have been so stupid? The sash he no longer wore and the moccasins he’d retired to his closet hadn’t been mere articles of clothing to him. They’d been his identity, and she’d let him toss them away. She hadn’t understood when he’d failed to leap for joy when he’d been asked to be the 4-H vet. Now she understood all too well. The kids in the stock program were raising animals for auction and eventual slaughter. Taking such a position would go against everything he believed.

Looking at him now, she yearned to have the old Ben back. He didn’t need to be accepted in her world. Half the time, she wasn’t very fond of it herself. There’d never be a finer man than Ben Longtree for her son to emulate. If Jeremy grew to adulthood, holding fast to the values and convictions that Ben believed in so strongly, he would become an extraordinary individual, a son to make any mother proud.

“I think we need to have a long talk, Ben,” she said carefully.

He dug at the dirt again. “I know.” He smiled sadly. “I’m just not sure how to start.” The tendons along his throat convulsed as he swallowed.

“Have you dreaded talking to me that much?”

“I think
dread
is the wrong word.” He thought about it a moment and shrugged. “I was married once. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that. When my ex-wife, Sherry, found out about my gift, she wanted nothing more to do with me. What’s to say you won’t feel the same way?”

“Oh, Ben.” She took a step toward him. “I’m not Sherry. I promise you I won’t feel the same way.”

He held up a hand. “Don’t, please.” The words were so faint she almost didn’t catch them. “Now that you’re here—now that you’ve seen this much—I’ve got to tell you the rest, and I’d rather you kept your distance until you’ve heard me out.”

She noticed blood on his forearm. “Were you doing surgery? If I’ve interrupted, finish up, and I’ll wait.”

“I was just changing a bandage. A rabbit took a bullet in her haunch. She was lying outside the cave yesterday when I got here. I dug out the slug. Today I cleaned the wound and rewrapped it. In one so small, it’s a serious injury. She’ll be lame for the rest of her life.”

Chloe knotted her hands and took a bracing breath.
A part of her felt silly for even thinking it, but she had to say the words anyway. “Why don’t you just heal her?”

He shot her a wary look. “I’m trying.”

“No, not with medicine and veterinary skills. Why don’t you heal her the way you did me?” She splayed a hand over the upper swell of her left breast. “I would have had a scar. The gouge from Bobby Lee’s fingernail was really deep. You took it away with a brush of your knuckles.”

His eyes deepened to a stormy blue. For a moment, he just stared at her. Then in a gravelly voice, he asked, “How long have you known?”

C
hloe could have given Ben the simple answer, that his mother had told her in a roundabout way. But she realized now that she’d begun to suspect long before that. It had just seemed easier and more rational to believe the believable, that Rowdy had miraculously recovered on his own, that her breast had never actually been gouged and the blood on her clothing had come from Bobby Lee’s nose, and that her son’s breathing problems had gone away simply because he was finally recovering emotionally.

“Oh, Ben,” she said shakily. “You’re so good at making all the rest of us face our demons. Why can’t you face your own?”

His jaw muscle started to throb. Chloe was beyond caring if she made him angry.

“You talked to my son about the essence of a man emerging from its chrysalis. You forgot to tell him that some men hide inside their cocoons all their lives because they’re afraid no one will accept them for who and what they really are.”

“It’s not quite that simple for me.”

She was beginning to realize that nothing had ever been simple for this man.

“If I lose you over this, Chloe, I don’t think—”

“You aren’t going to lose me, not over this or anything else.”

“You don’t comprehend the magnitude of it.” He swung a hand. “What you’ve seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg.”

“Then perhaps it’s time to show me the rest, Ben, so I can judge for myself.”

Shuffling his feet like a weary old man, he moved past her to sit on a fallen log. Patting the surface, he invited her to join him. Chloe went over to take a seat. He braced his arms on his knees, letting his hands dangle between them, his gaze fixed on the woods.

“To understand me, really understand me, you need to hear it all, I think—from the time I was a kid until now. If I try to start later, it’ll be like plucking memories from a bag, and none of it will make sense.”

Chloe swallowed to steady her voice. She glanced cautiously at the cougar lying a few feet away, still not quite able to believe it hadn’t harmed them. “I’ve got time to listen.”

He angled her a look. “Remember my telling you about my father shooting Bandit?”

“Yes.”

“I was twelve then and just beginning to realize the true extent of my power. I had experimented with it a few times—on wounded birds and other small animals. It was pretty heady stuff for a kid that age, being able to heal injuries. I started to think I could fix almost anything with just a touch of my hands.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “My father shot Bandit in the head with a high-powered hunting rifle at close range.”

Chloe’s stomach lurched, but she kept her mouth shut and said nothing.

“Except for my mother and grandfather, I loved
that dog better than I’d ever loved anything, Chloe. He was my faithful friend and confidant. Whenever I was sad, which was most of the time back then because of my father, he was always there for me. When Dad shot him, I didn’t think, I just reacted, and I laid my hands on the wound.”

Chloe’s heart had started to race. “You could heal so serious an injury? A hunting rifle does extensive damage, doesn’t it?”

“Extensive, yes. And yes, I healed it.” His face had drained of color. “But that was all I could do, heal the torn flesh and tissue, and stop the bleeding. I couldn’t replace what had been”—his mouth twisted—“blown away.”

“God have mercy.”

“That was the catch, don’t you see? We can’t play God. Afterwards, Bandit was still breathing, but he shouldn’t have been. In a way, he was very like Roger, alive but only an empty shell. One side of his head was—just
gone
.”

Chloe hugged her waist and rocked forward over her knees, imagining the horror of it. “Oh, Ben, what an awful thing for a child to go through.” As she said that, she dimly accepted. All of it. As incredible as it was, she believed every word he was saying.

“I know you think my father was a drunk and flew into rages for no reason. I’ll never justify what he did to me—or say it was right—but there was more to it than you know. The power is passed down through the males of the Longtree family. Not all of them have had it, but my grandfather did, and so did my father, who passed it down to me.

“When my dad was young, about twenty years old, his mother got a cancerous brain tumor. My grandfather warned him that some things were best left up to God, but my father couldn’t bear to watch her slip
away from them, suffering such terrible pain. Toward the end, not even morphine made her comfortable. One afternoon when my grandfather was gone from the house, he healed her.”

Chloe knew what was coming next, and for the first time, she felt a measure of pity for Hap Longtree. “Oh, Ben, no. Cancer eats away tissue.”

“Exactly. My father healed his mother of the cancer, but he couldn’t replace what it had destroyed. She didn’t die until I was sixteen years old. He’d turned her into little more than a vegetable. He had to live with what he’d done to her. The agony of it made him turn his back on everything Shoshone from that moment on, and he despised his gift as an evil thing. When he knew for certain that I’d been born with it, too, he did his damnedest to drive it out of me. He hated my rapport with the wild animals. He punished me if he so much as suspected that I was using my gift to heal them. You’re right about me hiding inside a chrysalis, Chloe. I learned at a very young age to be secretive and sneak around, using my gift only when I was certain no one might find out. Hiding that side of myself became second nature to me.”

Chloe could finally see why. “I understand now. I’m sorry for taunting you that way. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you for that,” he said softly, “but you still don’t understand. Not really. It was a horrible situation for everyone—my mother, my sister, and me. And in a way, horrible for my father, too, I think. Sometimes love turns into something ugly and injurious and sick. In his determination to spare me the same kind of suffering that he had endured, my father was cruel and unreasonable and sometimes downright vicious. Now that I’m older, I honestly believe he thought he was doing it for my own good—that someday I’d thank him.”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, that afternoon after I laid hands on Bandit, he handed me the rifle and said, ‘You made the mess; you clean it up.’ And he left me to finish him off.”

Chloe splayed a hand at her waist, battling back nausea. “He made you shoot your own dog?”

Ben nodded. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I loved Bandit too much to leave him the way he was.

“After I buried Bandit, I stood over his grave and vowed to him that I’d never use the power again. My father had finally won. I understood in a way I’d never comprehended before that miracles could backfire in horrific ways. From that day forward, I turned my back on my gift, and I never deliberately allowed myself to use it again. Until I met you and Jeremy.”

He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “You’ve seen how the animals come to me. Even after I denied my power, they continued to come to the yard if they were hurt, trusting in me to help them. And often they came just to say hello, I guess, drawn to me by something I’ve never quite understood. My father feared that I might waver in my determination not to use my power again, and in his usual, twisted way, he decided I couldn’t be tempted if the animals grew afraid and stopped coming. Of a morning, he’d stand on the back porch and pick them off with a rifle. Sometimes he was still a little drunk from the night before and he’d miss his mark, wounding them instead of killing them. When that happened, I’d wait until he left or wasn’t paying me any mind, and I’d go into the woods and try to find his latest victim. It was frustrating and heartbreaking business. I wouldn’t use my power, so all I could do was try to help them in more conventional ways. I had no medical knowledge, so I lost more battles than I won.”

Finally the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place for Chloe. “So that’s what led you to become a vet.”

“Yes.” He smiled and shrugged. “I was born to be a healer, Chloe. It’s in my bones, I think. Losing more animals than I saved haunted me, and by the time I was fourteen, I dreamed of going to college where I could learn veterinary medicine. The day I turned eighteen, I left the ridge and swore I’d never come back. If life hadn’t thrown me so many curveballs, I probably never would have.”

Chloe smoothed her hands over her denim-sheathed thighs. “Is that where you met Sherry? At college?”

“Yeah. She was studying to become a vet, too.” A distant look came into his eyes again. “She was as dedicated as I was. We got along well and had a lot in common. She was bright and analytical, always hungry to understand the why of everything. To her, the world was a scientific puzzle, and there were no questions that couldn’t be answered, no mysteries that couldn’t be explained. I guess you could say she didn’t have much poetry in her heart.” He smiled slightly. “I remember once, we saw a gorgeous sunset, and instead of simply admiring it, the way most people would, she started spouting facts about atmospheric conditions, the angle of the sun, and the reflective properties of cloud masses.”

Chloe couldn’t imagine Ben being happy with someone like that. As though he heard her thought, he said, “At the time, I thought she was exactly what I needed in my life for balance, a dedicated biologist who rationalized everything. I had cut myself off from the mysticism that my grandfather had drilled into my head, and I was determined never to use my power again. For that reason, I didn’t see any point in
mentioning it to Sherry. In my mind, it was part of my past, something that would never enter into our relationship.

“I wanted to be normal and live a normal life. Now that I’m older, I realize that most young people have those feelings. For obvious reasons, they were stronger in me. I saw Sherry as my counterweight, someone who would keep me on the straight and narrow, with my feet planted in reality and my mind pondering facts, not wondrous mysteries. She was my guarantee, of sorts, that I’d never be tempted to use my power again. If I’d told her that I could heal with my hands, she would have laughed and told me to find a good shrink.”

“Were you happy with her?”

“For a time,” he replied. “We graduated together, interned together. We had big dreams of opening our own clinic, and eventually, when we’d saved enough money, we did exactly that. We shared a grand passion.” He flicked her a sidelong glance. “Not the kind you’re thinking. We were both passionate about veterinary medicine. We celebrated our successes together and comforted each other after the failures. We were happy, if not madly in love, and I thought we’d stay that way. We were even trying to have a child.”

“What happened?”

“Me. I’m what happened. We’d had our own clinic for just over three years. We were raking in money, remodeling the kennels and drawing up plans to add on. Life was great, and then in one afternoon, everything went to hell. We had these regulars—a nice old couple named Foster with a Yorkie they worshiped. Every time the dog twitched a whisker wrong, they rushed him in for an exam. I grew really fond of them. They were such nice old people, and still so much in
love, always patting each other and holding hands. I used to watch them together and wish Sherry and I could be that way.”

He passed a hand over his eyes. “The day everything started going wrong, old Mr. Foster keeled over with a massive coronary. He and his wife were out working in their yard. Tootles, the Yorkie, was with them. When the old man went down, Mrs. Foster called an ambulance, and when the paramedics got there, they didn’t think to close the yard gate behind them. Tootles got loose, ran out in the street, and was hit by a passing motorist.”

“Oh,
no
.”

“When Mrs. Foster brought the dog to us, she was hysterical. Her husband was dead, and Tootles was barely hanging on. Both Sherry and I went right to work, hoping to save him, but when we saw the X rays, we knew there was no hope. The little guy was busted up really bad, inside and out, and we suspected internal injuries. It fell to me to tell Mrs. Foster. Another emergency came in. Sherry left the room, and there I was, facing this poor old lady and trying to think how I was going to tell her that Tootles should be put to sleep.”

Chloe braced for what she sensed was coming next.

“I didn’t intend to do it,” he said softly. “I was standing there with my hand on the dog. You know? I wanted to be anyplace but there. She was crying and begging me to save her pet, saying he was all she had left. And somehow, without consciously releasing the power, it just—happened. Tootles sat up and gave his head a shake, acting like his old self. Mrs. Foster was overjoyed. Right about then, Sherry walked back in. She insisted on X-raying the dog again. I tried to talk her out of it, but she was hell-bent on it. She kept saying, ‘This is impossible. You saw the damage.” ’

Chloe’s mouth had gone as dry as cotton. She was sitting beside a man who could mend broken bones with a touch of his hand? It seemed incredible. And yet she believed. How could she not?

“When Sherry compared the second set of pictures with the first, she kept telling me, ‘This isn’t possible, Ben. Just
look
at this. It isn’t possible.’ But the dog was fine.” He fell quiet for a moment. “She knew, I think. Even before I talked to her later, I think she knew. There’d been incidents—injured dogs that showed up at the clinic, as if they knew they’d get help there—and raging bulls or frantic horses that immediately grew passive when I approached. Sometimes I caught her looking at me oddly. I’m fairly sure she suspected something. She just refused to believe what her mind was telling her.