“Now, I also know Cole worries about my heart. So after he got over being boiling mad over the bargain I stuck him with, he decided it would be better, for my sake, if the two of you pretended you actually give a damn about each other. Are you with me?”
She nodded warily.
“Good, because now we’re coming to the part that scares the hell out of me.”
“What’s that?”
“Yesterday he was up at the house driving everybody crazy about every little detail so it would be as nice for you as it could be. He was giving a damned good imitation of a man who thought a whole lot of his wife. I got real excited to meet you. Last night, he couldn’t keep his eyes off you. But I’ve gotta tell you straight out, Diana, I didn’t get the idea you shared his feelings. Yet, this morning, he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve, so I figure you had something to do with that last night.”
He paused for emphasis, his voice turning insistent as he reached the real issue: “Don’t go playing around with his heart, girl. Either take all of it or leave it alone. Don’t go taking little bits and pieces, when it suits you—and if it suits you. I don’t think it’s in you to be mean or cruel, but sometimes, if a woman doesn’t know how a man feels, that could happen.”
Diana collapsed back against the sofa, laughing softly, hugging Cole’s picture to her chest. She turned her face to the elderly man who loved her husband, too, and said, without shame or pretense, “Cole isn’t wearing his heart on his sleeve. That is my heart.”
He looked fifteen years younger . . . and belatedly embarrassed. Looking around for some way out of the situation he’d brought on himself, he got up and went over to the fireplace. “That picture you have is Cole when he was sixteen. Here’s two others.”
He presented them to her with great care, and Diana held them that way, but her smile began to fade and her heart began to ache. She’d looked at enough photographs at the magazine to notice things quickly, and the dark-haired little boy with his fingers shoved into the heavy coat of a mixed-breed collie at his side was looking at the camera with a very solemn expression. Much too solemnly for a six- or seven-year-old. She took the other picture.
“He was nine there,” Cal said. The collie was on one side of him, and another mixed-breed dog was on his left. Diana scarcely noticed the dogs; she noticed that although he was trying to smile, he didn’t look happy. And his pants were several inches above his ankles in both pictures. He was standing beside an old tire swing in one shot and in front of a shack of some sort in the other.
She forgot about all that when she suddenly realized that Cal could give her tidbits of information about Cole. “Even when I knew him before,” she confided with a smile, “he was frustratingly secretive about his past.” She patted the seat beside her. “Tell me everything. Tell me what he was like when he was little and what his mother was like and—everything.”
“What’s he told you?” Cal asked warily.
“Nothing! I know he had a brother who was two years older than he and another brother who was three years older, and they both died in an accident right after Cole went to college. I know his mother died of cancer when he was in his first year of college. He never told me when his father died. He’s had so much tragedy,” she added quietly.
She waited for Cal to talk after he sat down, but he seemed deeply troubled and genuinely at a loss. He kept looking over at the piles of reading material. “I like psychology,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Do you believe in it?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe it’s good for a person to keep bad things bottled up inside of him, and to hide those things from the woman who loves him—And go on doing so for as long as he lives?”
Diana knew with absolute certainty and grave foreboding they were talking about Cole. She wanted to help, but she didn’t want to pry.
“I—I wouldn’t want him to feel I pried into anything.”
“I’d call it lancing a wound, not prying.”
“I don’t like wounds that don’t heal,” Diana said. “The question is, can I help them heal?”
“You couldn’t hurt.”
She looked at the picture she was holding and thought about lying in Cole’s arms last night. He had so much love to give, and she wanted it all. She didn’t want to risk losing any of it. “If what you’re going to tell me is really bad, then how will Cole feel if he knows I know it?”
“He won’t have to worry that you’d change if you found out. He won’t have to wonder how you really feel. Dr. Richenblau calls it ‘cathartic.’ It won’t take long to tell. What you do about it is up to you.”
Diana drew a deep breath and nodded. “Tell me.”
“Well, you said he’s had a lot of tragedy in his life. The biggest tragedy was that he was born with the name Harrison.”
That was the last thing Diana expected him to say. “Why?”
“Because in Kingdom City, where Cole grew up, that name is a curse. For as long as anyone can remember, the Harrisons have been wild and worthless. They’re drunkards and cheats and hell-raisers, the whole worthless lot of ’em, and Cole grew up with that stigma. When Cole’s mama eloped with Tom Harrison, my brother cried. He couldn’t believe his baby girl had done it. Turned out Tom had gotten her pregnant, and in that day and age, in these parts, girls who got pregnant had to get married. No two ways about it.”
Diana watched him bend down and straighten magazines and generally stall; then he straightened and said, “Cole’s two brothers got killed the year after Cole went away to college. They were in Amarillo, and they were drunk, and they wanted to get even drunker, but they didn’t have any money. So they beat an old lady half to death for her purse; then they jumped in their car and took off. They ran a red light, and the cops went after them. They were going over a hundred miles an hour when their car hit a lamppost. Good riddance to ’em, I said then and I say it now, too.
“Cole’s daddy liked those two boys of his, though. They were chips off the old block.”
When he paused, Diana said flatly, “But Cole wasn’t.”
“Never was. Never could be. He was smarter than all three of them put together, and they knew it. They hated him for it. About the only friends Cole had in those days were his dogs. Dogs and horses and cats—Animals just loved that boy and he loved them right back. They understood each other. Guess maybe it was because they all knew how it felt to be helpless with no one to turn to.”
“So Cole was the only one who went to college,” Diana said aloud.
Cal gave a mirthless laugh. “He was the only one to make it past the tenth grade.” Tipping his head back, he said, “You know the collie that was with Cole in the picture?”
“Yes.”
“About a week before Cole left for college, his brothers gave him a little going-away present.”
Diana knew it wasn’t going to be good, but she wasn’t prepared for what she heard.
“They hung the dog in the barn.”
Diana moaned and clamped her hand over her mouth, half rising from her seat; then she made herself sit back down.
“They disappeared afterward and didn’t come back until after Cole left. If they had, I think he’d have killed them.”
“Wasn’t there somewhere else he could live?”
“He could have lived here, but his pa wanted him right there, doing a man’s work. He said a thousand times that if Cole moved away from home, Cole’s mama would pay for it. And Cole’s mama—poor, weak soul that she was—wouldn’t leave that bastard. By the time Cole left for college, she was so sick she didn’t know where she was half the time, and she wasn’t worth abusing for Tom.”
Diana was still a little sick from the thought of the collie. “And what about Cole’s father. How long ago did he die?”
“Last week.”
Diana slowly made the connection between the conversation at breakfast and this piece of information.
“I told Cole he has to go back to the old pla
ce in case there’s something of his mama’s there for him. Truth is, I wanted him to see it as a man. In one of my books, it said that when adults confront the ‘evils of their childhood,’ they often feel better. I think, whether he’s there or not, it would be a good idea if he knew you’d seen the place and it didn’t matter. Personally, I think he’ll go there.”
“Will you draw me a map?” she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek and startling him. “I’ll run up to the house and get the keys to the truck.”
Cal started to offer her Letty’s car since Cole had his, but Letty had left to do the grocery shopping.
Chapter 50
COLL STOOD NEAR THE FRONT yard of the place of his birth, a four-room shack with rotting boards for a floor—an ugly scab on a piece of barren earth.
His birthplace. His heritage.
He wasn’t certain why he had come. His mother hadn’t survived this place, so there was no reason to think anything of hers would be here for him. Perhaps he’d come to confront its ghosts and then to burn it down. . . .
There were no happy memories to preserve here; the only bearable ones were of his mother. She had died just after her forty-second birthday, while he was in his first year of college. He’d been with her for the birthday before that, though. He’d hitched a ride to town to buy her a birthday present, and he was late getting back. The house had been quiet, and for a minute, he’d harbored the false hope that his father was drunk in the barn or preferably further away than that. He’d almost reached his mother’s room when his father’s voice had uncoiled like a bullwhip from a darkened corner of the front room. “Where the hell you been, boy?”
He had reached for a light switch to dispel the gloom while mentally gauging his father’s mood as ugly but not physically brutal. He’d been an expert at gauging his father’s moods, because any mistakes in that regard would have dire results, not just for Cole, but for his mother.
“I had to go to town.”
“You’re a fucking liar. You’ve been over to Jeffersonville with your asshole uncle, lettin’ him fill your head with all his fancy notions. I told you what I’d do to you if I caught you hangin’ around with him again. You’re just askin’ for a lesson, boy!” Cole downgraded his mood to potentially brutal. As a child, he’d thrown up from sheer terror at moments like these. Later, his primary fear was that someday, he’d kill the man and spend his life in prison for it.
His father’s attention was diverted by the flower-printed gift wrap on the box Cole was holding. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a present for Ma. It’s her birthday.”
Amused by the sentiment, his father reached for it. “What’d you get her?”
Cole held it back, out of his reach. “Nothing you’d want—a fancy brush and mirror.”
“You bought her a fancy brush and mirror?” he taunted. “A fancy brush and mirror for that skinny old crow? That’s even funnier than you thinkin’ you’re gonna become a fancy fucking college boy.” His disposition improved by that, he picked up the bottle of whiskey from the table beside him, and Cole went into his mother’s room.
She was dozing, propped up on pillows, her face turned away from him. On the scarred table beside her was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich. Cole turned on the lamp and sat down beside her hip. “Is this all you had for dinner?”
She twisted her head on the pillows and looked at him, blinking her eyes to adjust to the light. She smiled, but even her smile was somber. “I wasn’t hungry. Was that your father yelling a few minutes ago, or did I dream it?”
“He was yelling.”
“You shouldn’t upset your father, Cole.”
Her continual, lifelong submissiveness to his father’s ugly disposition and vile temper was something that Cole had never understood. He hated the fact that she continually tried to placate the man, to make excuses for him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from berating her for not standing up for herself and defying him. She wouldn’t leave him, and Cole wouldn’t leave her there.
“I brought you a birthday present.”
She brightened, and for a moment he could almost imagine the dark beauty that his Uncle Cal said had once been hers. She lifted the present and shook it a little, prolonging the excitement; then she carefully removed the wrapping paper and opened the box. “It’s so beautiful!” Her gaze flew to his face. “How did you pay for it?”
“Why should I pay for it when I can steal it?”
“Oh, Cole, no!”
“I was joking! C’mon, Ma, if I stole it, do you think I’d wait around to get it gift-wrapped?”
She relaxed back onto the pillows and held the mirror up to study her face. With girlish embarrassment, she confessed, “I used to be very proud of how pretty I was, did you know that?”
“You’re still pretty. Listen, Ma. Things are going to get a whole lot better in a couple years after I get out of college. I’ve got big plans, and Cal thinks they’ll happen if I want them bad enough to work hard. In a few years, I’ll build you a special house out at Cal’s place—one that’s made of stone and cedar with lots of windows—and I’ll put it over on the side of that hill with big porches all around it, so you can sit up there and look out all day.”
She seemed to press back into the pillows as if she were trying to hide, her fingers clutching at his arm. “Don’t go dreaming dreams! When they don’t come true, that’s when you end up like your pa. That’s why he’s like he is. He used to have dreams.”
“I’m not him!” Cole said, appalled by her reaction. “I’m nothing like him.” The only time his father ever talked about “dreams” was when he was looking for an excuse to go on a drunken tirade and he couldn’t think of any other reason.
* * *
The orange truck died when she turned off the road, and Diana left it there and walked, picking her way through deep ruts that constituted a driveway. She saw Cole ten minutes later when she rounded a sharp bend—a tall, solitary man standing with his shoulders squared, completely motionless except for a breeze that ruffled his hair. A few steps more and she had a clear view of her husband’s birthplace, the home of his youth. What she saw made Diana feel like retching. She’d expected something unappealing; she hadn’t been prepared for squalor. The house was a rotting wooden shanty that crouched at the base of a hill and was surrounded by broken fences and decades of accumulated litter. In blinding contrast to his surroundings, Cole was immaculately groomed, with brown loafers polished to a mirror shine, pressed khaki slacks, and a pristine white oxford shirt with the cuffs folded back on his tanned arms. He reached behind his neck to massage the muscles at his nape, and his shirt stretched taut across his broad shoulders. Shoulders that Diana wanted to put her arms around and lay her cheek against.
He didn’t seem aware that she was there until she was right beside him, and then he said in a dead voice, “You shouldn’t have come here.” He looked at her then, and Diana swallowed in shock at the transformation. His face was completely expressionless; a face made of stone, with a jaw of iron and eyes of cold steel. And now she understood where that hard core had been forged. It had been here. It had given him the strength to break free of this place. “I had to come,” she said simply, watching his face begin to relax as he broke free of the grip of this place. “You had to know I had been here and seen it.”
“I see,” he replied, his heart aching with tenderness. “And now that you’ve seen it,” he added with an attempt to sound indifferent, “what do you think?” He turned to walk away, expecting her to come with him.
What did she think? In response, Diana did the only thing she could think of to vent her wrath and express her opinion. Looking around on the ground, she picked up a heavy rock and with all the force of her raging animosity, she hurled it. Cole turned to look at the exact moment the rock blasted through the front window. In open-mouthed shock, he stared at her beautiful, irate face and then at the broken window of the hellhole he had lived in. “That,” she informed him, daintily du
sting off her hands after having thrown a pitch that would have done credit to Sandy Koufax, “is what I think of it.”
Cole’s shout of laughter exploded louder than the window. In a sudden burst of exuberant freedom, he swooped her up into his arms and tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. “Put me down,” she laughed, wriggling.
“Not until you promise.”
“Promise what?” she giggled, squirming.
“That you will never, ever, get mad enough to throw anything at me.”
“I cannot make a promise I may not keep,” she advised him solemnly.
He whacked her on the backside and continued down the road. He started to whistle. She started to laugh.
The merry sounds rolled backward to the hovel he had lived in. The only remaining piece of glass left in the window frame in the house crashed to the dirt floor inside it.
* * *
The lighthearted days and passionate nights became a routine during the rest of their stay at Cal’s.
When the time to leave arrived, Cal drove them out to the airstrip and watched while the plane took off, his hand lifted in a wave. His heart felt heavy in his chest because they were leaving, but it did not feel weak. It felt very strong.
Diana’s heart did not feel quite as strong when Cole left her at her apartment so that he could continue on to Washington. “I miss you already,” she said. “This two-city living arrangement isn’t going to work.”
Cole tipped her chin up. “We’ll work things out in a couple of days, as soon as I get things settled in Washington. The time in between will pass very quickly.”
She furrowed her forehead. “How can you say that?”
“I’m trying to convince both of us.”
“It isn’t working.”
Cole crushed her against his length. “I know.”
“Don’t forget to call me.”
He smiled at that absurdity and held her tighter. “How could I possibly forget to call you, darling?”
Chapter 51
SAM BYERS WAS SITTING IN his car with the engine idling and the windshield wipers running when the Gulfstream streaked out of the sky and touched down on the rainswept runway at Dulles International Airport. He watched the plane taxi to a stop at a junction of the runways, waiting for instructions from the tower; then it finally executed a ninety-degree turn and rolled right past him. When the pilots got off, he pulled his raincoat up around his ears and ran forward through the puddles.