From This Day Forward Page 20
She restored her house to order, but not her thoughts, and not her life.
The telephone-company repair crew finally arrived and replaced the housing covering the connection outside, assuring her that no longer would her line be vulnerable to moisture.
The kids began popping in again—first Debby with a new story idea, then Ron with a new record she “just had to hear,” and then, it seemed, all of them, one at a time or in groups. And although none of them asked her, she knew that by now they, as well as the rest of the population of Pleasant Gap, had to have heard most of the details of the four-county manhunt and guessed the rest.
And eventually, Cassie’s road was clear enough so that she could come to town. And she did ask. While they were seated at opposite ends of Ginnie’s couch, each curled with a second cup of coffee. After Ginnie had talked about everything she could think of, except the happenings of the past week.
“What are you going to do now, Ginnie?”
“Do?” Cassie’s question was reasonable, something Ginnie had asked herself countless times since Neil left. She leaned back, propping her elbow on the the couch cushion, and cradling her head in her open palm. “I don’t suppose I’m going to do anything, Cassie. Except try to pick up from where I was Christmas Eve and go on.”
“But can you do that?”
“I have to, don’t I?”
“I don’t know, Ginnie. Do you? Or do you only think that’s what you have to do? When you love someone as much as you obviously love Neil—no, don’t deny it–you ought to be able to find a way to be together.”
“Oh, Cassie. We tried. Each of us tried.”
“But did you try together?”
“No,” Ginnie admitted. “I guess that’s the one thing we never did.”
“Well?”
“Well. It takes two to try together.” She lifted her head and dropped her hand along the back of the sofa. “Not one. Not just me.”
“Well?” Cassie persisted.
“Neil has made a new life for himself. That’s obvious. And there’s no place in it for me. Except on the very outskirts. He wants my help professionally, Cassie, not personally. He regretted that our marriage ended. He regretted the way our marriage ended. But that’s it, you see. Past tense. It has ended.”
“And is that the way you feel, Ginnie? That it’s all past tense?”
“I don’t think what I feel matters now,” Ginnie said. “I survived losing him once. I’ll survive this. What I couldn’t survive is being around him every day and only being someone who used to mean something to him.”
Ginnie’s hand lay along the back of the sofa between them. Cassie reached over and clasped it. “What I think is that you’ve lost sight of something pretty important. The vows that you and Neil made to each other. Shared memories. Shared pain. Shared love. I know that you have to protect yourself, but are you absolutely sure that isn’t what Neil is doing, too?”
“Cassie,” she cried, “you weren’t here. You can’t know.”
“No. I wasn’t here. But I was at my house Christmas Day. And because you hadn’t told me anything about him, I didn’t have any preconceived notions. All I know about Neil Kendrick is what I saw that day, and he didn’t act like a man who thought about you in the past tense.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Ginnie admitted, sighing. Oh, how she wished it were true. “But he certainly didn’t act like a person who thought there was any future, either.”
“Did you?” Cassie asked. “I’m sorry, Ginnie. I’m prying where I don’t have any right to pry.”
Ginnie smiled at her, a wan little smile. “I know you don’t mean to hurt me, Cassie, but don’t you think I’ve been over all this in my mind? Look, let me get us some more coffee and let’s change the subject.”
“No,” Cassie said. “No, thanks. I hate to leave you now, but I really ought to get me and my groceries home. Are you going to be all right?”
“Of course I am,” Ginnie told her.
“Will I see you at church tomorrow?”
What Ginnie needed now more than anything else was solitude, not the well-meaning questions that were sure to be asked by all her friends.
“No. I don’t think so. I have two days before school starts. What I’d like to do is spend some time by myself, maybe even get away for a little while. Would you mind passing the word around to the kids that I really don’t want company?”
“I’m not sure that will work,” Cassie said, laughing, “but of course I’ll do it. Do you need anything?”
“No,” Ginnie told her. “Nothing except time.”
Time. Time to heal. Time to forget. It had worked well for her once. But Ginnie had forgotten, until now, how much time it took to heal. How much time it took to forget.
She sat alone on New Year’s Eve with only soft music, the glow from the fire and the sleeping puppy for company. When she heard the church bells and the fireworks and the few scattered shots at midnight, heralding the new year, she put the screen in front of the fire and went to bed.
Two days alone were a mistake. She admitted that long before they were over, but the hectic rush of starting back to school after break didn’t seem to be much better.
“Damn you, Neil Kendrick,” she cried one sleepless night, pounding her fist into the pillow. “Why didn’t you stay out of my life? Why did you have to come here? I had everything just the way I wanted it before you came back. Now it’s not,” she moaned. “Now it’s not.”
Neil called her on Friday morning, six weeks later. He caught her between classes and devastated her with just the sound of his voice over the telephone line.
“I have to see you, Ginnie.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Neil,” she managed to say.
“I’ll be there this afternoon.”
“No, Neil. Don’t.”
“This afternoon, Ginnie.”
The rest of her classes passed in a blur. She put Debby in charge of the newsroom, got in her car shortly. after lunch and then realized that she didn’t know where to go.
Not home. Not yet.
Not just to sit and wait for Neil.
She had recognized the determination in his voice. She’d heard it too many times before to mistake it. But she didn’t know the cause of it.
Was he coming to push her into joining him in that impossible venture of his? If so, the answer would be no. Painfully, finally, no. She could not do that to herself.
Or was he, as she had caught herself wondering in the middle of the night, wanting more from her than that?
She had tried. Lord, how she had tried to make their marriage work. It hadn’t. She’d loved him then, and it hadn’t been enough. And had anything really changed?
She found herself at the park. She set the brake on her Bronco and sat there looking over the barren landscape. How fitting, she thought grimly.
She pocketed her keys and climbed out of the car, shrugging into her coat as a harsh wind bit at her. It was February, and spring would be here soon. But it wasn’t here yet. Not just yet.
Her legs carried her automatically—she could have found this path blindfolded—to a solitary bench beneath a still-bare oak.
She pulled her collar up around her face and stuffed her fists into her pockets as she sat on the bench. So much had happened to them at this very spot. So much promise. So much disillusionment. So much happiness. So much pain.
It will be wonderful, she had promised in the exuberance of youth. And she had tried. And he had tried.
But did you try together?
Had they?
And you, Ginnie, did you ever really reach out to me?
Had she?
She stared across the park, at a solitary tree. Soon, when the leaves budded out, she’d make a special trip to this park to find out what kind of tree that was. As much as she had stared at it, she ought to know what kind of tree it was.
She loosed one long, quavering breath. Too much had happened. Too much. For better or f
or worse, she had promised. And she had certainly seen the worse.
Why couldn’t Neil have told her some of what he felt then, instead of waiting until it was too late? Why, after it was all over, did he show her a side of him that she had searched for, for years? God, she wanted to hate him. It would be so much easier if she hated him.
But what about forgiving him, Ginnie?
Forgive him? Even as the words whispered through her mind, she knew that anything she had not already forgiven Neil, she had when she watched him holding Todd unconscious in his lap.
It would be so much easier if she could blame Neil for all that had happened. If she could blame Todd for all that had happened. But she couldn’t even take solace in that anymore.
If you can’t blame Neil, and you can’t blame Todd, who do you blame, Ginnie? If you’ve forgiven Neil, who have you not forgiven? Because it’s in you still.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I tried. I really tried.”
“I thought I might find you here.”
Ginnie jerked her head around at the sound of Neil’s voice. He stood watching her for a moment, then slid onto the bench beside her. He was so solemn, she thought. She hadn’t seen him laugh in years, except—except Christmas Day, with her, and that morning just before Todd came back.
What had happened to them? What in God’s name had happened to them?
“I was trying to gather my courage,” she admitted to him. “And to find some answers.”
“Have you?” he asked.
“Neil...” Her voice broke. “Did I—could I have done things differently? Could I have stopped what happened?”
He put his arm over her shoulder. She felt that she ought to draw away from him, but she couldn’t quite remember why.
“You’re asking the same questions I asked myself,” he said with incredible tenderness. “And the answer is, probably not. But maybe. Maybe we both could have.”
A sob caught in her throat.
“If we had been different people. Or even if we had known what to do. But we weren’t. And we didn’t. Can you forgive me, Ginnie?”
“Forgive you?” she asked on a sob. “I have. I already have.”
“Then,” he said, drawing her to him, “what you have to do now is forgive yourself.”
That was it. Oh, God, yes, that was it. The answer to the question she had only today been able to bring herself to ask.
“How?” she whispered. “How?”
He pressed her face to his chest, holding her against his warmth. “Each of us has to find our own way,” he told her. “It’s easier, much easier, to forgive someone else. I’d help you if I could. I’ll be there for you if you’ll let me be. But you are the only one who can do it.”
She thought of the years of anguish, and of Todd playing with the collie puppy under the Christmas tree. Could she do that? Could she find a way?
“I have to,” she moaned.
“Yes,” he whispered, brushing her hair from her forehead, “you do. And you will.”
He held her quiet and still in the warmth of his arms. “Ginnie,” he said softly, “you asked me once why I lost my powers of speech around you, and I was afraid to tell you because I didn’t know how you would react to my answer. I still don’t know how you’ll respond, but I have to tell you. Partly because of the things you said, but mostly because I need to say it.”
She twisted to look up at him, but with gentle pressure he held her head down, her face against his chest.
“I’m told that at times I can be eloquent,” he said, and she heard a wry humor in those words, a humor that quickly faded. “I don’t know about that. I don’t really care about that. But I do care about you. I’ve never been able to tell you what I really mean, Ginnie. Not in the important things. If I manage to say anything, it usually comes out twisted and garbled. The strangest thing happened to me the first time I saw you. I wanted you, then and forever, just like that. And I barely managed to ask you to have dinner with me.”
He took a long, deep breath. “And when I left here over a month ago, I still wanted you—then and forever.”
Her heart lurched painfully in her chest.
“But I couldn’t say it. Instead, I got out some garbled words that must have sounded like a job offer. I love you, Ginnie. I’ve loved you since the day you first interviewed me. I don’t know how to make you believe that. I have trouble speaking with you, only with you, because what you think and what you feel and what you answer is so important to me.
“I thought, after I came up here at Christmastime, that I was probably the biggest fool in the world because you had made a new life for yourself. There didn’t seem to be any room for me in it. Until you came to me that night. You would never have done that if you didn’t love me, too.”
His arms tightened around her, almost as though he was afraid she’d move away. “And if I had thought the years since our divorce were hell, I found out these past weeks that I didn’t know the meaning of the word.
“I went home and looked around my empty apartment, and I looked around my empty life, and then I looked ahead into the empty years to come. Ginnie, I don’t want to spend those years without you.”
She pushed away from him, and he let her go. There was a flurry in the tree above them, and a raucous squawking from the squirrel perched on a branch, swishing his tail in indignation.
“I’ve made you so many promises I haven’t been able to keep,” she said. “I’m afraid, Neil.”
“Oh, God, love, so am I. I don’t want to fail you again.”
“Have we ever admitted that before?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, Ginnie. I’m ashamed to admit this now, but I don’t think I ever let myself be that honest.”
“Neither did I,” she whispered. “Neither did I.”
“It won’t be easy,” he told her. “I’d be lying to both of us if I told you it would be. But we can do it, Ginnie. Together, we can do it. We’ve proved we can survive the worst.”
He stood up. “You once told me that I had never reached out my hand to you and asked you for your help.” He held his hand toward her. “Well, I’m doing it now. And I’m offering mine to you.”
She looked at his hand, strong, tanned and capable, as he stretched it forth to her. Yes, she had said that. She had prayed for that. And now that he was doing it, did she have the strength she needed to reach out to him? That she would need to face the future with him?
Where is your faith, Ginnie?
She remembered their hands as they had been locked together during the prayer on Christmas Day. Maybe neither one of them was strong enough, alone. But together they would be. They had been tempered, and tried. Oh, yes. Together, they were.
She looked up into Neil’s eyes. Clouded now. Waiting. A hesitant smile softened his features, and she felt her own answering smile, as hesitant as his.
Knowing that she had no other choice, that this was what she wanted above all else, and that this was what Neil wanted above all else, Ginnie stretched out her slender hand to his.
She felt the strength in his clasp. She felt the strength in hers.
“Ah, Ginnie, we’ll not be sorry,” he promised.
She rose from the bench. Still holding his hand, she walked back into his arms and welcomed him back into her life.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-7961-2
FROM THIS DAY FORWARD
Copyright © 1996 by Modean Moon
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same nam
e or names. They are not even distantly Inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Neil whispered.
Letter to Reader
Books by Modean Moon
About the Author
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Copyright