Читать книгу When Love Walks In - Suzanne Carey - Страница 11

On the chilly December night she and Danny had chosen to elope, Cate’s father had driven her to Brenda’s house for a sleep-over. As usual, he’d ordered her to keep out of trouble. Meekly agreeing to behave herself, she’d blown him a kiss as he’d driven off down the snow-dusted street—an unaccustomed gesture she would later regret.

Taking Cate’s overnight case and setting it to one side in her living room, Brenda had rolled her eyes in silent exclamation over its weight. For its modest size, the case had been fairly heavy. Convinced that she wouldn’t be able to return to her parents’ house for any personal belongings after eloping with Danny, Cate had stuffed the modest little case full, cramming in extra socks, underwear and a change of clothing, along with as many personal mementos as possible.

She’d also withdrawn a hundred dollars from her savings account, afraid that, if she asked for more, the bank teller would tell her father about it. In a town like Beckwith, everyone knew each other’s business. Adults gossiped about their children as a matter of course. Thinking ahead, she’d decided that, if her father learned of the withdrawal anyway and demanded to know why she needed the money, she’d explain it as cash to buy Christmas presents.

I wish things hadn’t been so complicated, so fraught with difficulty, she thought now, punching her pillow into a more accommodating shape. That my parents had liked Danny—made him welcome at our house. Instead of sneaking around to see each other, we could have dated openly. We’d probably have waited to get married until after I graduated. I might not have gotten pregnant when I did.

Even if they’d made a baby under those circumstances, she believed things would have worked out for them. Of course, Brian, as she knew him, might not have made it into the world. They might have had a different child instead. Though she’d have loved that child just as much, Brian had turned out to be worth every bit of the anguish his conception had produced. Despite his teenage foibles, which she regarded as a passing phase, he was smart, affectionate and loyal, an amazing, wonderful kid.

Meanwhile her what-ifs came down to a single question. She still wanted to know why Danny had abandoned her seventeen years earlier, leaving her alone in such a predicament. Would he have dumped me eventually, anyway, even if our elopement had succeeded? she asked herself. Or would we have been happy together? Why did he fail to come back for me, as I believed and hoped he would?

When she’d gone downstairs to meet him in her side yard earlier that evening, neither of them had broached the topic of how they’d parted. She only knew that he’d seemed to feel the hunger, the unmitigated urgency to reconnect that she still felt. Of course, the heated kisses they’d exchanged might not have meant as much to him as they had to her. Maybe they’d simply connoted the appeasement of long-denied curiosity, a romantic interlude undertaken to add zest to his sojourn in Beckwith.

As she lay there with empty arms and a thousand questions competing in her head, Cate couldn’t keep her thoughts from returning to the past as if they were drawn there by a magnet. Surely it holds some answers, she told herself. Yet she’d gone over the events of the night they’d eloped and then parted a million times, without coming up with an adequate explanation for Danny’s subsequent behavior. Powerless to resist with him so near, just a few miles away at his grandmother’s house, she dove back into the well of remembering.

Jittery over the agitation their elopement would cause and worried that they might not be able to pull it off, Cate had settled with Brenda in front of the Hales’ TV set. The latter had gotten out her Monopoly game to pass the time, and they’d begun to play somewhat distractedly while Brenda’s mother had dressed for her Friday night bingo game.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think the two of you were up to something,” Miriam Hale had observed with an indulgent smile as she’d put on her coat. “You both seem fairly wired tonight.”

According to Cate’s parents, Mrs. Hale, a widow, had been an indulgent, irresponsible parent who gave Brenda far too much leeway.

Guilty as charged, Cate had blushed. With less at stake, Brenda had kept a cooler head. “How can you say that, Mom?” she’d demanded with her usual insouciance. “The worst thing we could do around here would be to cheat at this game. And if we agreed to cheat, that wouldn’t really be cheating, would it?”

Miriam Hale had laughed heartily and shaken her head as she’d picked up her purse. “You think like an attorney,” she’d told her daughter affectionately. “A real Philadelphia lawyer. Too bad I don’t have the money to put you through law school.”

As soon as she’d gone, Cate had leaped to her feet. “I should call Danny,” she’d blurted with a churning sensation in her stomach.

Sudden tears had welled in Brenda’s eyes. “You know I want you to be happy,” she’d whispered. “But the truth is, Cate, I don’t want you to go. We’ll never get to see each other. Can’t you wait until you’re eighteen? You and Danny could stay here in Beckwith.”

“I’d give anything if we didn’t have to leave,” Cate had answered. “But it’s getting too difficult for us to see each other. My parents are watching me like a pair of hawks. Besides, Danny and I each want to get an education. Good jobs. Things that just aren’t available here. We won’t be apart forever, Brenda…I promise. Next summer you can come and visit us. In the meantime, we can write each other.”

It had sounded good. But they’d both had misgivings. Several years might pass before they saw each other.

Meanwhile Cate had made up her mind. She’d been tired of sneaking around, of lying to her parents. She’d wanted to be with Danny openly. Let the whole world know about their relationship. “I’d better call him,” she’d repeated, a little more firmly. “We should leave as soon as possible…before my parents get a hunch something’s wrong and decide to come over and check on me. We’ll be in really big trouble if they catch us.”

It had been a gross understatement. Her mouth still warm from Danny’s kisses as she waited for their son to come home, Cate recalled his light tap on the horn as he’d pulled up at the curb outside Brenda’s house that night…the hurried squeeze she’d given her friend before snatching up her bag and running down the steps. Ensconced in the old-fashioned double bed where she’d slept alone since Larry’s death, she relived Danny’s embrace and his deep-pitched growl, “Maybe we’d better get going, sweetheart…”

Nestled in the curve of his arm as he drove, Cate had kept glancing over her shoulder to make certain they weren’t being followed. For his part, Danny had tried not to be too obvious as he’d checked the rearview mirror. “The coast is clear,” he’d reassured her at one point. “Everything’s going to work out. You’ll see…as soon as we find a place, you can register and finish high school. Or take your GED. Either way, you’ll start college in the fall. I’ll work days, sign up for a couple of night classes if possible. We’ll get in touch with your parents on your eighteenth birthday. When they realize how hardworking and happy we are, they’ll come around.”

Cate had strongly doubted it. In her opinion, they would never forgive her, let alone make their peace with him. The product of a poor, somewhat eccentric family, he struck them as the antithesis of everything they’d hoped for her.

Ironically, the farther they’d driven from Beckwith, the more convinced Cate had become that her mother and father were nipping at their heels. Oh, she and Danny had found a justice of the peace willing to hear their vows without much trouble—a funny, rumpled man already wearing his bathrobe who’d gone through the motions.

A short time later Danny had slowed the car as they approached the Heart’s Desire Motel—a shabby, inexpensive-looking place some twenty miles east of the Cincinnati city limit. Its Vacancy sign had been lit as if in invitation.

Cate hadn’t wanted to stop. She’d begged Danny to keep driving across the state line into Kentucky or Indiana if possible, wrongly convinced they’d be safer in another state. Eager to make love to her, he’d argued that her parents had probably retired for the night. Insofar as they were concerned, he’d insisted, she was safely ensconced at the Hale residence, chatting away with Brenda. Meanwhile, the two of them were about to make love for the first time in a real bed.

“I’ll park around the side, behind that Dumpster,” he’d ordered in an attempt to quell her fears. “If your parents are right behind us, they won’t spot it there.”

Telling herself that if her mother and father were nipping at their heels, they were likely to slow down, scan the handful of cars in the parking lot and drive on without seeing Danny’s rundown Ford in the shadows, Cate had acquiesced. They’d been at the crux of their lovemaking, crying out and clutching each other in the throes of completion, when they’d been electrified by the sound of someone attempting to turn a key in the lock of their motel-room door.

A moment later the securely bolted door had come crashing in. Like modern-day bounty hunters, her parents and an armed sheriff’s deputy had burst into the room, followed by the cringing motel clerk. Only then, with her mother weeping and her father yelling profanities at the top of his lungs as she and Danny had scrambled to cover themselves, had she realized that they’d forgotten to use protection. It had been the one time in their history together that they’d been so careless.

Crisp and authoritative, the deputy had ordered them to get dressed. Wrapping the bedspread around herself for modesty’s sake, Cate had gathered up her clothes and put them on in the motel room’s cramped bathroom while her mother had wept and browbeaten her. She’d emerged to find Danny wearing handcuffs.

“No…please! Take those things off him!” she’d begged the deputy, tears running down her cheeks. “He didn’t do anything wrong! We’re married! You can’t arrest him!”

The scowl on Danny’s face had ordered her not to beg on his behalf.

Taking his cue from her parents, the deputy had declined to relent. “Sorry, miss,” he’d answered. “But you’re underage. I’m afraid you, your parents and your boyfriend will have to accompany me back to headquarters.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband,” she’d whispered, her steady flow of tears undermining her stubbornness.

Huddled miserably in the rear of her parents’ Oldsmobile, while Danny rode with the deputy in the caged back seat of his squad car, Cate had begun to realize the seriousness of their situation. Given her age, she’d guessed, Danny could be charged with statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, maybe even kidnapping. He could be subject to a jail sentence. Maybe even a prison term. With either on his record, the successful future he hoped to attain would be compromised. Somehow, she had to keep that from happening.

She hadn’t been worried on her own account, though she’d realized at once that her parents would separate them. For as long as they held sway over her, Jack and Susan McDonough would see to it that Danny Finn didn’t come within a thousand feet of the daughter who had so disappointed them.

On their arrival at the Clermont County Jail, Cate and her parents had been ushered into one interview room, Danny into another. The break between them had been complete. Her stomach in knots, Cate had wanted to charge down the hall and defend his honor to the stern, uniformed deputy, make him see that the young man he’d taken into custody wasn’t a criminal. Maybe if she took the blame…

Her father’s looming, wrathful presence had barred the way. As she’d huddled without speaking in a battered wooden chair, he and her mother had taken turns berating her.

“How could you have done this to us?” Susan McDonough had wailed, her words harsh with self-pity and condemnation. “Everyone’s sure to find out. We’ll be the town laughing stock. Your reputation…not to mention ours…will never recover from this!”

“Do you think she cares?” Jack McDonough’s mouth had contorted with fury and disgust. “All the little bi—” In response to the expression on his wife’s face, he’d checked himself before the slur could completely pass his lips. “All she cares about is her trashy, so-called husband,” he’d added instead. “Not the parents who raised her.” He’d turned to Cate. “To think a daughter of mine would give her virginity to someone like Danny Finn, a young man of questionable family with no prospects! Well, I promise you, girl…your mother and I are going to press charges to the fullest. Danny Finn’s going to jail for his part in this. And he’ll be there awhile.”

Hearing her father describe what would happen in so many words had made it seem even more threatening. The stories she’d heard about what befell young, good-looking men in jail or prison settings had made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t allow her parents to place Danny in that kind of jeopardy, no matter how much they hated him. I’ve got to make them relent, she’d realized. Promise whatever it takes to make them drop the charges. Unbending as he seems, that deputy was a teenager once. I can’t believe he’ll charge Danny with a crime if my parents don’t insist on it.

Brian came home, humming a song that was popular among teenagers at the moment and noisily burping pizza. His occasional, deliberate rudeness was part of the differentiation process, Cate guessed. A moment later her son turned on his stereo and her ears protested.

“Brian?” she called out, raising her voice so that it could be heard over what he euphemistically referred to as his “music.”

A moment later he materialized in her partly open doorway. “Yeah, Mom?” he asked with studied nonchalance, clearly aware that the volume at which he’d been playing his stereo would have awakened the dead, let alone a sleeping parent.

Though he wasn’t as forthcoming as the youngster he’d been just a year or two earlier, Brian still liked checking in with her. He just didn’t want it to be his idea.

“Did you have fun?” she asked.

He nodded. Grinned. “We met a couple of girls. One of them gave me her phone number. The pizza was pretty good. Yours is better, though.”

She smiled, too, despite her welter of conflicting emotions. “Thanks for the compliment,” she answered. “Sleep well. Don’t forget to use those earphones we talked about.”

On the night she’d eloped with Danny, Cate had been six months shy of her eighteenth birthday. Yet the short amount of time that had remained until they could marry legally had seemed like an eternity to her. She hadn’t wanted to be parted from the man she loved for a single moment. Yet, unable to consult him, she’d decided that their honeymoon would have to wait.

She’d thrust out her chin, unconsciously mimicking her father’s pugnacious attitude. “If you press charges against Danny, and he goes to jail, I’ll run away again, just as soon as I get the chance,” she’d threatened. “I don’t need Danny to leave. I can do it on my own. You and Mom can’t keep an eye on me every second.”

“You little ingrate!” The veins standing out against his temples, Jack McDonough had raised a hand as if to knock her off her feet.

“No, Jack!” Susan McDonough had exclaimed, clutching at his sleeve. “The police will arrest you, too, if you start hitting her! Everyone in Beckwith will find out if you’re charged with battery. We won’t be able to hold our heads up.”

She doesn’t care about me, Cate had thought. Just Dad, and what people will think of them. My feelings don’t count. “On the other hand,” she’d added, as if her father hadn’t spoken, “if you tell the deputy you don’t want Danny arrested, I’ll do whatever you want. Give him up. Stay home and finish high school. Go to college. Or work full-time in the hardware store. You won’t even have to pay me…”

Glancing at each other, neither of her parents had said anything for a moment. Then, “I’ll be damned if we’ll stake you to college, miss, after the way you’ve behaved,” Cate’s father had snapped. “Henceforth, you’re on your own where higher education’s concerned.”

“I’m not asking any favors for myself,” she’d answered. “Just that you let Danny off the hook.”

His mouth closing in a thin, hard line, he hadn’t responded.

“She’s shamed me beyond what I thought was my capacity to be shamed,” Susan McDonough had interceded. “But she’s our daughter, Jack. We’re responsible for her welfare. We’ll never be able to live it down if she runs away again and people say we pushed her into it.”

Once again it had seemed to Cate that her mother was concerned only for herself and Cate’s father. All that had appeared to matter to her was their standing in the community.

Meanwhile, Jack McDonough hadn’t moved a muscle. “All right,” he’d conceded tightly at last. “If that’s what you want, Susan. I’ll go and talk to the officer. You—” he’d pointed at Cate “—keep your damn mouth shut!”

During his absence, she’d all but held her breath.

He’d returned with an even deeper scowl on his face. “It’s done,” he’d told his wife with an air of disgust. “The deputy has agreed to drop the charges against the Finn boy. I asked him to throw a good scare into him before letting him go…order him to stay away from Cate. As for you, miss—” he’d transfixed Cate with a baleful stare “—you’re not to say a word to Danny Finn as we go out, do you hear? Or even glance in his direction. If you so much as look at him, the deal’s off. I’ll see to it that he’s prosecuted to the fullest.”

He’d left her with little choice. Her heart aching, she’d assented, allowing her parents to lead her past the open door of the interview room where the young man she loved was being questioned by the deputy. She’d felt Danny staring at her, demanding that she meet his gaze. Keeping her part of the agreement, though it had almost killed her, she hadn’t turned her head. I’ve got to trust him, trust his belief in me, she’d thought. Surely he knows I wouldn’t leave without a glance at him if I had any choice.

With her peripheral vision, she’d read his shock and disillusionment. His wordless plea that she say or do something to reassure him had cut her to the quick. She’d wept disconsolately in the back of her parents’ car as they’d burned up the highway back to Beckwith.

Her eyes and nasal passages had been all but swollen shut by the time they’d reached the brick neo-Tudor bungalow on Sycamore Street where she’d lived since babyhood. It’ll be my prison now, she’d thought, until Danny comes back to rescue me.

“What tipped you off…made you come after us?” she’d asked in a low voice, stumbling slightly over the doorsill as they’d entered the house.

She hadn’t really expected her father to answer.

To her surprise, he did. “That kiss you blew me when I drove away from the Hale place,” he’d responded with cold hostility. “You haven’t done anything like that since you were a baby.”

Affectionate gestures have never been my family’s style, Cate thought now, switching off her bedside lamp and wriggling deeper beneath the covers. They still aren’t. Whenever I’m around Mom and Dad, I feel as if I have to maintain my emotional distance to keep from getting hurt. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever forgive me for what I did. With Danny back in town, they’ll be watching me, wondering if I’ll make a fool of myself over him.

On the night of her attempted elopement with Danny, Cate had built an emotional fortress around her heart that her parents couldn’t penetrate. Somehow Danny will manage to get in touch with me, she’d reassured herself, remaining in her room except to eat, go to school and crane her neck in an attempt to view the afternoon mail. At the moment he’s just biding his time. He’d never go off and leave me without an explanation. She’d tried hard not to think too much about the fact that she’d appeared to injure him that way.

Day after day she’d continued to wait for him. And day after day she’d been disappointed. Incredibly, he hadn’t contacted her. There’d been no letter, no hasty, surreptitious phone call so they could make new plans. Though she’d done her best to cling to them, gradually her hopes had faded. The fear that maybe he wouldn’t come back for her had crept into her imagination.

At first she’d tried to tell herself he was playing it cool, attempting to throw her parents off the scent. Yet, as the days had stretched into weeks, marking a bleak Christmas and a bereft New Year’s, a feeling of dread had invaded her gut. Maybe he hadn’t understood. Or decided she wasn’t worth the indignities he’d had to suffer. Maybe he’d simply abandoned her.

A short time later, she’d come down with what she’d initially regarded as a case of the flu, brought on by her disheartened emotional state. Against her wishes, her mother had insisted she see their family doctor. Shock waves had reverberated through Cate’s anguish when the kindly, gray-haired physician had informed her she was pregnant. Her need for Danny had escalated to critical mass in less than a single second.

Predictably, her parents had gone crazy at the news. Her father had stormed and raged, threatening variously to murder Cate, Danny and anyone even remotely related to him, the first person who dared to look at them sideways once the story got out. Susan McDonough had wept copious tears and accused Cate of breaking her heart.

For her part, painfully convinced at last that—for whatever reason—Danny wouldn’t come back for her, Cate had sunk into an anguish so deep daylight couldn’t penetrate it. Meanwhile her parents had circulated the story that she was suffering from mononucleosis and needed bed rest. Forbidden to attend classes or work in her father’s hardware store, she’d sunk into a helpless lethargy punctuated by fits of weeping. She’d spent most of her time in an upholstered chair beside her bedroom window. Staring down at the occasional passing car and the bare trees that framed Sycamore Street’s snowy ruts, she’d tried to imagine a future for herself and the child she was carrying.

It had been around that time that quiet, deferential Larry Anderson had overheard his employers anguishing over their daughter’s dilemma and astonished them by stepping forward with an offer to marry her. Cate’s parents had relayed his proposal to her that evening at the dinner table. “We won’t force you to accept,” Cate’s mother had told her with a quick, imploring glance at her husband. “But we think it would be for the best. The Finn boy isn’t coming back, and your baby needs a father. Larry may not mean anything to you, but he’s decent and hardworking. He promised us he’ll love and care for you and your baby if you’ll only let him.”

Flabbergasted, Cate had stared at her parents. “How did he find out…that I’m pregnant?” she’d demanded. “Did you tell him? Offer him money to take me off your hands?”

Susan McDonough had denied it with a violent shake of her head. “He overheard us talking about your…situation,” she’d insisted. “And volunteered. We were as surprised as you are. We’d never guessed he felt that way about you. It would resolve a lot of things.…”

Cate had cast a surreptitious glance at her father. “Better think it over, miss,” he’d warned. “The way I see it, you don’t have any other options.”

Stunned by Larry’s proposal and unable to imagine herself married to anyone but Danny, Cate had asked for a little time. To her astonishment her parents had granted it, provided she didn’t draw out the decision-making process too much. The following day, a Sunday, she’d borrowed her mother’s car without asking permission while her parents were at church and driven out to the Finn place, determined to find out whatever she could concerning Danny’s whereabouts. It had been then that Ned Finn had made his taunting remarks, then that Danny’s grandmother had snatched up a broom and chased her from the premises.

A few days later, at her parents’ urging, she’d accepted Larry’s proposal during an oddly formal meeting in the McDonough living room. Though she hadn’t known him well or even given him much thought, Larry had always seemed like a decent person to her—the kind of principled young man who would make some young woman a good husband. They’d been married shortly afterward, in a bare-bones ceremony at the Catholic rectory in Ryersville flanked by both sets of parents, and left immediately for Minneapolis.

Unaware of the true situation, their neighbors in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where they’d landed had befriended them. One of the men had helped Larry find a job and fix up their rental house. The women had rounded up baby clothes and dispensed advice on how to have a healthy pregnancy.

At its inception, Cate’s married life had been a quiet one. No one but she, Larry and her parents had known she was carrying another man’s baby. Or that their union hadn’t been consummated. Later, it had been, of course. Aware that eventually, intimacy would be part of the bargain, she’d submitted to Larry’s gentle lovemaking without complaint. And after a while it hadn’t felt so strange to her. To her surprise she’d even enjoyed the closeness it brought. But she’d never climaxed, never felt the sweet, self-annihilating pleasure Danny had taught her to crave.

The McDonoughs had insisted Cate and Larry mustn’t tell his parents they were expecting a child until a few months had passed. Similarly, they weren’t to send out birth notices until their baby was at least five or six months old. People could count and, if they wanted to move back to Beckwith someday without revealing their child’s true parentage, it was essential to falsify his or her age. That way, people wouldn’t talk. Should he ever return, it wouldn’t occur to Danny Finn to seek the child’s custody.

Larry had decided for the sake of keeping peace in the family, that they should comply with the McDonoughs’ wishes. And Cate had deferred to him, though she’d been uncomfortable about the subterfuge. For as long as she lived, she would never forget the embarrassment she’d felt over the Andersons’ exclamation about what a big boy Brian was for his age the first time they’d visited.

She and Larry had remained in the Minneapolis area until Brian was officially ten years old. At that juncture, recently diagnosed with leukemia, Larry had broached the subject of “going home.” He liked small-town life and wanted Brian to finish growing up near his parents, given the fact that he himself might not be around to help raise the boy to adulthood.

Loath to return to a place where memories of Danny might catch her by the throat, yet with a heart aching for her husband, Cate had allowed him to talk her into it. Though Brian’s height had caused some comment about a possible starring role on the local basketball team when he reached high school age, it wasn’t so far out of range that anyone guessed their secret.

By that time, Cate had long since finished high school and gone on to college, where she’d earned her baccalaureate degree in English and qualified for her teaching certificate. Beckwith High School had been only too happy to hire her. His health as yet only moderately compromised, Larry had taken a sedentary job as a police dispatcher.

No one had mentioned Danny to Cate. And Cate hadn’t asked about him. Pleased to be near Brenda again, she’d discouraged any mention of him in their private conversations. Settling back into a life she’d once hoped to escape, and doing her best to be a good wife to a man she liked a great deal but could never love the way she’d loved Danny, she’d focused on making a home for him and Brian. Helping him deal with his illness. The everyday routine of their life together.

I can’t start over with Danny now, even if I’m still wild about him and Larry’s gone, Cate told herself miserably for the second time that evening. If I did, Danny would have to know the truth about Brian. And that might be more than Brian and Larry’s parents could accept. Somehow she’d have to make Danny understand that the past was past—not to be tampered with.

If only she could make herself believe it. The sensations that flooded her body as she relived his kisses didn’t help.