THE GIFT (16 page)

“No, it doesn’t. You’ve just been drinking it so long that you’ve forgotten how good the real stuff tastes,” he countered. Amanda sat looking at him. She knew he was right. The regular chai did taste better, but she wasn’t giving in that easily.

“You sir, can take your cow chai and go sit on the other side of the room,” she told him.

Suddenly, his face was serious as his eyes squinted at her. He leaned down toward the table and said quietly, “Do I really have to, blue eyes?” Amanda felt the force of this simple question ripple through her body, sending tendrils of excitement along her nerve endings and causing her stomach to do a complete somersault, or so it felt.

“No.” It was all she managed to say. She watched as he slid into the chair beside her and pulled his cup of chai closer to him, seeming to hold it for reassurance of some sort.

“Amanda, I’m sorry. This isn’t the way I meant for all of this to go,” he told her.

“I don’t know how you meant for all of this to go,” she said.

“I know you don’t and I don’t want to talk about it here, with all of these people around and with your father looking at me like I’ve robbed his cradle. Can we go for a walk? I want to show you something,” he told her. She nodded her head yes and they left the shop. Amanda nodded silently to her father that she was okay as they stepped out.

They walked several blocks without saying a word. Finally, Amanda couldn’t take it anymore and broke the silence.

“I don’t understand why you did what you did and why you could just tell me what happened. You just waited for me to find out on my own and be devastated by it,” she told him.

“I know. I didn’t realize just how much that must have hurt until I walked into your shop and was told you were getting married. It felt like someone had punched me in the gut,” he admitted.

“I was never getting married,” Amanda told him.

“Yes, I found that out later,” he replied.

“My father told you when you asked about it later. Here’s a weird question. If you thought I had gotten married, why did you still come back in looking for me again?” she asked.

“No, I knew you didn’t get married before that. I saw you in the park. I saw your friends get married,” he told her.

“Oh, my God! What is it with you and the constant stalking?” she asked.

“I wasn’t stalking you, Amanda. I was walking Stella,” he said.

“Since when do you walk Stella yourself,” she retorted, not sure if she believe him.

“Since I realized how stupid I have been about many things. I’ve let the memory of someone cloud everything in my life to the point that hardly anything made any sense. I realized how pathetic it was that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk my own dog because Cassandra and I used to walk her together,” he said.

“So, you admit that you are too hung up on Cassandra to function with someone new,” Amanda said.

‘I don’t know, Amanda. What do you think? Did it seem like I wasn’t functioning with you? If you hadn’t found out about her by accident, would anything about me have tipped you off that something was wrong?” he asked.

“It’s hard to say. At this point, I can’t remember what I had noticed before and what I only realized after I knew. It all blurs together and then I just get angry or sad and can’t really wrap my head around it anymore. I met this great guy and thought we really had something special going, but then I found out that he had apparently been stalking me for months because of my eyes. Did you even realize that my eyes weren’t brown like hers?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ve always known your eyes were blue,” he said quietly.

“What? How?” she said.

“At the hospital, before the surgery. I saw you when you came in. They were scarred horribly, but you could still see the magnificent blue color around the edges. I could imagine how beautiful they must have once been,” he said, looking embarrassed that he had been there even back then.

“I wondered if you knew about the contacts or if you thought the brown color was hers,” Amanda told him.

“I couldn’t see them for a long time behind the dark glasses and mostly from a distance. When I finally saw you in contacts, I thought at first that they were hers. They were a very similar color and it almost spooked me, but I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed anything other than the fact that you weren’t in glasses anymore, but I had done all sorts of research on the procedure while you were recuperating and knew that they couldn’t have taken on her color. I assumed they were contacts and wondered why you chose to cover up such beautiful eyes,” he said.

“I didn’t like seeing the little dots in my eyes where the stitches had been and the clear lenses weren’t enough to hide them. Plus, the darker contacts where specially designed to protect me from getting too much light. My eyes were very sensitive for a long time,” she told him.

“It’s funny how things begin to make sense if you just take the time and talk them out, isn’t it?” he said with a weak smile.

“Yes, it is,” she replied. They walked a little further in silence and Amanda began to wonder where they were going but he only told her she would see in a few minutes when he asked.

“I know that I owe you a lot of explaining. What I did must seem so strange to you. I wish I had done things differently, Amanda. These weeks without you have been pure hell. Not long after things went so bad for us, I got a call from the authorities in Uganda. My sister was very ill. She had contracted some disease in the village she was working in and it was resisting antibiotics. I was afraid I was going to lose her too. I hopped the next plane down and ended up having her med-flighted out to a regional hospital where they could properly attend to her. Without her, there was no doctor in the village and she would have died,” he said.

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Jagger. Is she better now?” Amanda asked.

“Yes, she is weak. She’s back in the states now, getting better by the day. As soon as she is well, she will go back and I will worry about her all over again, but it is what she does. She didn’t like that I took her out of the village, but she conceded that many more will die there if she isn’t better so that she can get back to them and treat their illnesses. I can’t fathom the dedication it takes to go back to something like that once it has almost killed you,” he told her.

“No, me either. She must be an incredibly special woman,” Amanda said.

“I tried to call you many times while I was gone, but I could never get through. I would get busy signals or messages telling me all the circuits were busy. After a while, I decided that maybe it was best that I leave you alone and let you get on with your life. I had to do a lot of soul searching to consider if what you had said to me were true. Had I really pursued you because you had a small piece of Cassandra or had it been something more? I spent a lot of time thinking about that,” he told her.

Jagger stopped and turned to her. His eyes looked tired and his shoulders slumped. He looked incredibly vulnerable and her heart broke all over again, for both of them. They had both been through so much in their lives and wasn’t this just another torrid chapter of bad endings for them? It was such a mess, that she wasn’t even sure there was anything more he could say to make it better at this point.

He was quiet as he pushed open a large iron gate and reached for her hand, pulling her into the poor lighting of the lamps that stood in sort intervals but didn’t put out much light. She had been here before and wasn’t pleased about being here again, especially at night. She peered down a long line of concrete markers. Exactly twelve markers down was where you would find the other love of her life.

“Why are we at the cemetery?” Amanda asked as they made their way along the path that led away from where Dan was buried, now flanked by his mother who some would argue died of a broken heart rather than cardiac arrest.

“You will see in a moment,” he told her, but that was all he offered as he continued to lead her along the path to the newer section that had been added on several years ago when space had begun to fill up in the original plot acreage. They stopped at a single monument with the name Cassandra Ann Philipps on it. She had been only twenty nine when she died and Amanda felt saddened by anyone having died at such an early age. She found herself reflecting back to Dan, who had barely been eighteen when he died and her heart ached for him.

“I was going to break off our engagement. Things weren’t going well between us. I had planned to sit down and talk to her, but before I could, she came home crying. She had been to the doctor because she was having some difficulties that worried her. They found a mass on her lungs. There were tests and consultations. It was lung cancer and it was already advanced. She was devastated. There was no reason for it. She didn’t smoke, hadn’t been exposed to anything cancerous that she was aware of and yet, here she was,” he said.

Amanda could see that he was struggling and put her hand on his arm to comfort him, but didn’t try to interrupt or ask questions. It was best just to let him tell his story in his own way, in his own time. This was what she had been waiting on. Answers to why he had done what he had done.

“I did love her. I just thought that we were way too different in all the ways that mattered most. She was materialistic and wanted to be the center of every room she walked into. We bought that penthouse apartment because she wanted it. That is why I never wanted to take you there. It wasn’t because it was our place and you didn’t belong. It was because I hated it and never felt at home there. Your place was so sweet and cozy. I could sleep well there and didn’t feel like I needed to wipe everything I touched down with a cloth,” he continued.

“Okay, I can understand that,” she told him, still trying not to say too much, for fear she would redirect this thoughts and not get the full story she so desperately needed.

“Anyway, when she told me about the cancer, I couldn’t leave her knowing that she was dying. I couldn’t abandon her like that. She had no one but me. I stayed with her until the end. I didn’t want her to feel unloved and she would have if I had stepped back, if I had played the “let’s be friends” card. She wouldn’t have understood, would have thought it was because she was sick,” he said, now in tears.

“You feel guilty. Everyone sees you as the broken-hearted lover and it still bothers you. You did what was right by her, Jagger,” Amanda offered, still not understanding why he was telling her some of this, not entirely. Perhaps he had just told her too little before and felt that he now needed to tell her everything.

“I felt terrible. I thought I was a horrible human being and that maybe this was somehow my fault for not loving her enough. I was ashamed that I had played a role that I did not feel, that I was dishonest in a most important way to a dying woman. I know I felt I was sparing her pain, but I couldn’t help but believe that I owed her honesty instead, no matter what. I was really messed up about it all,” he confided.

“You did the best you could....” Amanda offered.

“I found her again in her illness, Amanda. It is sad, but in her weakened state, she became the sweet woman I had fallen in love with again instead of the social climber determined to make a name for herself in society. I felt love for her again, though I still wasn’t sure if it was the kind of love she deserved. You know?”

“Yes, I know,” Amanda said, not knowing what else to say.

“After she was gone, I realized that I did love her so much. Maybe it wasn’t in the way that one should love a woman he was supposed to marry or maybe it was, but she was a part of me and she was gone. I was there when the doctors told her she could donate her eyes and she said yes, so when she passed, I had to know where they were going. I hung out in the surgery wing to see who they took in and you were the only one. So, I waited to see you when you came out, to see where they took you,” he said, looking embarrassed that he had stalked her as he did.

“I understand. You were in pain,” Amanda told him.

“I kept hanging around. I came back to the hospital again and again and watched you sleep through your blinds when they were open or I just sat in the waiting area. I saw you when you left, but I couldn’t see your eyes and I wanted to see them. It wasn’t because I thought they would look like hers. It was because I hoped that the blue would return to them and that Cassandra’s gift would change your life. So, I followed you home and after that, I watched you from afar. I was obsessed with seeing your eyes, but I never could. The glasses were too dark. I tried to keep my distance, but that damned bike nearly ran you over. I couldn’t let you get hurt,” he said, looking at her solemnly.