One More Knight

Chapter 10

October 18, 1977

Dear Diary,

Well, it was a big night for Mourning Spring High School. It was Homecoming, and we played Parksville and won. Bobby made two touchdowns and Richie even made one, which is pretty good considering he plays mostly defense. The way it happened was, he intercepted a pass and ran it all the way back for a touchdown. It was really bitchin’. Kelly Grace got junior princess-I knew she would. So she and Bobby get to be in the Queen’s Court at the dance tomorrow night. I’m going with Richie, natch.

I should be really happy, right? Well, I’m not. I’ve never been so miserable in my life. I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do. I can’t talk to anybody about this. I haven’t even told Kelly Grace. I know I have to, eventually, but…you know what? Sometimes I think I’d rather die.

I have to tell Colin. (Oh, by the way, the marching band did really well tonight, too. They did a whole medley from Grease, since this year’s theme is the fifties. It was bitchin’.) I haven’t seen much of him since school started. We don’t ever talk anymore like we used to. Guess I’m going to have to pretty soon, though, huh?

Thought for the Day: I guess there’s nothing like sex to screw up a good friendship.

She’d imagined it a thousand times. Dreamed about it. Made up romantic scenarios in her head. Especially in the early years, when she was still young and naive enough to believe in happy endings. Then had come the working years, when the struggle to get through college, then law school, bar exams and her first, dreadful job with the public defender’s office had kept her too busy and physically and emotionally exhausted to dwell on personal heartaches.

But in the past few years, when adoption stories were so often in the headlines and searches for both adopted children and birth parents seemed to have become the latest yuppie fad, she’d begun to think about it again. She’d even gone so far as to consult one of the senior partners, who had given her the names of a couple of lawyers he knew of who handled such matters, and also the names of some reputable private investigators. She’d carried the numbers around in her briefcase for weeks, waking up in cold sweats after nightmares filled with anguish, rejection and shame. She discovered that somehow in growing up she had lost the ability to tell herself those fantasy stories wherein she composed both sides of the dialogue, and could always count on things to come out the way she wanted them to. In the end she’d thrown the numbers away.

Maybe someday, she’d told herself. But first she had to go back to Mourning Spring. After that…she’d see.

But oh, God, in her wildest dreams and worst nightmares she had never imagined this.

My son. Mine and Colin’s.

Colin Stewart Phelps.

Cutter. He’s called Cutter.

The ICU nurse was talking to him now, touching his arm, guiding him away from the glass partition. Charly could hear his voice, muffled but tense with anger. She could see the tension in his strong, young body, the flush of anger on his smooth cheeks, the shadows of exhaustion and fear around his eyes-Colin’s eyes-as he twisted around to stare back at her.

Flinging her father a last, desperate look, Charly started after her son. But she seemed scarcely to be moving. Oh, God, she’d had this nightmare so many times-her body weighted and weak, her heart trying to leap out of her chest as she strained to run, to reach out, to pursue! Her throat aching with the pressure of her own voice screaming his name…and making no sound at all.

But she must have made some sound, because just as he reached the waiting-room doorway he turned his head and saw her. For a moment he seemed to freeze. Then he pivoted and came back a few steps, holding up a hand like a traffic cop to stop her in her tracks.

It worked. She halted, and a few feet away from her, so did he. Even with that distance between them, she could feel his body shaking. Her heart melted, aching for him.

Dear God, she thought, I’ve already hurt him so much. What am I doing here?

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded in a cracking voice. Such a young voice. “This is family.”

“Cutter,” Charly said in a sticking voice, trying out the name for the first time. “I’m-”

“I know who you are,” her son cut in. He had his grandfather’s voice, Charly thought. And his manner, too, as he bulldozed right over her feeble attempt to respond. “What the hell are you doing here? Haven’t you done him enough hurt? You want to kill him, is that it?”

“Cutter!” Dobrina stood just inside in the waiting-room doorway, her face the color of old ashes, her eyes shooting fire from the shadows of their sockets, a high priestess about to call down the wrath of the gods upon all their heads. “Cutter Phelps, you mind your language and your manners, you hear me, boy?”

Cutter stood his ground, his eyebrows lowering in a way that reminded Charly so much of the judge it almost made her smile. “She’s got no right,” he muttered, riled and furious. “He wouldn’t want her here.”

“How do you know?” Dobrina demanded. “He tell you that?”

“Look,” Charly began in an airless croak, “I don’t-”

Her son rounded on her then, jerking away from Dobrina’s restraining hand. “Well, I don’t want you here, okay? So you can just go back to wherever you came from. You are not needed here, understand? You are not welcome here. So you can just…go. Right now. Go on, get out of here. Leave us alone!”

I don’t want you here. The words were like a wind in her ears, drowning out even the sound of her own pain. She could see Dobrina’s lips moving, knew her own throat must be forming words in reply, but she heard nothing.

Go…now. Cold as she was, numb as she was, somehow she found a way to make her body obey. Just as she had twenty years before, Charly left her son, walked away from him down a hospital corridor and did not look back.

“So that’s about the size of it,” Troy said into the phone. He gave a half-embarrassed chuckle and lowered his voice even though there wasn’t anybody around him to hear it. “I’m tellin’ you, little brother, I’m startin’ to feel like maybe I’ve bit off more’n I can chew.”

“Well, now, that’s a new one,” said Jimmy Joe.

“I mean it. I used to think I could handle myself in just about any situation, you know? But this…ah, hell, I think I’m outta my league here, man.” He let his breath out in a hiss of frustration and ran a hand over his hair. “I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on.”

“Goin’ on? With what? Who? You mean-”

“I mean with her-Charly.”

“Ah.”

“She’s got…stuff goin’ on here. She’s havin’ a pretty hard time with it-I don’t just mean her dad havin’ this heart attack, either. I’m pretty sure it’s more complicated than that. Anyway, I’d like to help her, you know? Only she won’t tell me much about what’s goin’ on, and I…well, hell, you know how it is. I don’t want to be stickin’ my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but…”

“Uh-huh,” said Jimmy Joe. And then for a few minutes there was silence, while all sorts of things flew back and forth along the wires unspoken, the way they do sometimes between guys who are close to one another but unaccustomed to expressing their deepest feelings in words.

Then there was a little throat-clearing sound, and Jimmy Joe said, “I ever tell you how I came to meet Mirabella?”

“I heard the story,” said Troy cautiously. “Picked her up in your truck, right? Somewhere out in the Texas Panhandle in a blizzard? Delivered her baby on Christmas Day and made the national news.”

His brother chuckled. “Well, there was a little bit more to it than that.” He paused. “See, I’d run into her before all that happened, over in New Mexico. I noticed her right away-hard not to, you know, pregnant as she was, and lookin’ like she does. Anyway, I kept wonderin’ about her-what she was doin’ out there like that, pregnant and all alone, so close to Christmas. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense to me. And the more it bothered me. But I was like you-I didn’t think it was any of my business, didn’t think it was my place to ask.”

“Uh-huh,” said Troy, listening intently now.

“Well, then, of course, the more I got involved with her, the more I wanted to know about her. And I kept tellin’ myself it still wasn’t any of my business. And then somewhere along the way I came to a point where…”

He paused, and Troy prompted, “Yeah?”

“I knew it was my business,” said Jimmy Joe.

“Ah,.” And there was another of those silences, vibrant with unvoiced truths and revelations. Presently Troy let out a breath and said gruffly, “So, how do you know?” He coughed. “When you’ve reached that point, I mean.”

His brother’s chuckle was one he’d never heard before-gentle, contented and wise. “You’ll know.”

After that there wasn’t much Troy could do but say his goodbyes and sign off, feeling not a whole lot less frustrated than when he’d dialed. He was just hanging up the phone when he saw Charly coming down the hallway. He shoved his calling card back in his billfold and started toward her, still jabbing with it at his hip pocket. Took a couple of steps, got close enough to get a good look at her face and stopped, while his insides turned to ice water.

“Bad news?” he asked softly.

“What?” Her eyes lost their glaze and focused on him. “Oh, no, no, it’s okay, he’s asleep. No point in staying. Let’s go, okay?” Her voice sounded breathy but with a little catch in it, as if, he thought, she’d been running with the hounds of hell on her tai.

As tuned to her as he was, it took him a beat longer than it should have to notice the two people down at the end of the corridor by the ICU, the place Charly had just come from. But he still had a lot of his SEAL reflexes, and when a distant movement flicked at his peripheral vision, he glanced that way first, then focused in a little harder. He could see it was the housekeeper-Dobrina, was it?-standing in the entrance to the waiting area. But who was the guy with her? A young guy, real young. Hardly more than a kid.

“Who’s that?” he asked, keeping it as casual as he could.

Charly didn’t even look, just hunched her shoulders and muttered, “Nobody. Let’s just go, okay?” She sounded as if her jaws had been wired together.

Which was about the way Troy felt, too. There was a red-hot poker of tension shooting up through his neck muscles, right between his jaws and into his temples. He kept having to remind himself to unclench his teeth.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked politely when they were outside in the soft purple dusk, with the breeze lifting their hair and offering up in return the summer smells of honeysuckle and rain, and the music of frogs and bugs and night birds.

Halfway across the concrete apron where the ambulances parked to unload their passengers, she suddenly halted, swaying up on her toes with the abruptness of it.

“I don’t know,” she breathed on a long exhalation, lifting her face to the sky so that her hair brushed the upper part of her back. He didn’t want to notice the way it slithered across the bare skin above that little black top she was wearing, but he did. And it made his stomach curl, “I don’t care. I just want to get away from this place. I hate hospitals.” He noticed then that her eyes were closed.

He didn’t think about what he did then-maybe it was just a kind of self-preservation thing, because it had become too damn hard to look at her, seeing all the little telltale signs that told him how bad she must be hurting. The way her mouth didn’t move quite right, twisting when she wanted it to smile; the way she kept grabbing those quick, shallow breaths, like a child trying not to cry; the way she hid her eyes from him, as if even in the purple twilight they might give away more than she wanted them to. Then again it could have been from motives as pure as the instinct to comfort another human in need, or as impure as his own need to answer that curling in his belly with some kind of action. What did it matter?

In the end probably not at all.

He stepped up behind her and brushed the powdery soft skin of her upper arms with his palms. When she shivered, he slipped his arms around her and pulled her against him with a sigh, not realizing until he’d done it how much he’d been longing to.

“Don’t know anybody who doesn’t,” he murmured, slurring his words against her hair, “hate hospitals…”

She didn’t answer with words, but moved against him in a subtle way and tilted her head to one side in unspoken invitation. He didn’t need to be asked twice, though he did pause for a moment before taking her up on it to enjoy the view from where he stood, letting his eyes feast on snowy slopes and sweetly rounded hills…disappearing into black silk not quite soon enough to hide their rosy seashell crests. And with his hands where they were, it was so easy to turn his palms up and cradle them both and thus encourage them even more fully into his sight. And then to explore with his thumbs those hard little peaks, through the covering of silk that shielded them from all other eyes but his.

He did those things, and when he heard her gasp, then he finally lowered his mouth to take what she’d offered him-the most vital and vulnerable part of herself…the side of her neck. Closing his mouth over the taut cords, he pressed his tongue against her pulse, timing its frantic cadence to his own. And then began to suck gently.

Heat and pressure weighted his body; his head seemed to fill with a soughing sound, like the rush of wind through trees. Still, he felt her trembling, heard her voice saying, very faintly, “Oh…God.”

And then another sound. A long, eerie wail.

Bubba.

Troy held himself still while the breath drained from his lungs and his head slowly cleared.

“What is that animal?” Charly growled. “A damn wolf?”

“He knows we’re here,” mumbled Troy. “Musta heard us, I guess.” He eased his arms from around Charly’s body, half of him thinking he’d like to kick the damn dog into next week, and the other half telling him it was just as well he’d interrupted when he had. He didn’t know what it was about that woman, but in close enough quarters she was downright dangerous. Touching her did have a way of making him forget where he was.

He kept his hand on her back, though, as they made their way through the Emergency parking lot to where he’d left the Cherokee.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked, fishing for his keys. “You hungry?”

“Lord, no,” she said in a voice thick with revulsion, clip-clopping along in her high heels. She threw him a look. “Are you?”

“Nope.” Not for food, anyway. “Just askin’.”

He unlocked the doors for her, and she climbed in while he was giving Bubba a halfhearted scolding and getting him settled down in the back with the suitcases.

“Why don’t you put him in the middle seat?” Charly asked, sounding impatient. “There’s more room.”

“You want him slobberin’ all over you?”

She made an angry, snorting sound. “I’m washable. Those suitcases aren’t.”

“Well, okay,” said Troy, “but remember, you asked for it.”

Naturally Bubba was thrilled to be allowed back into the seat he considered to be rightfully his. And the first thing he did was wallow on over to personally thank the woman responsible for his good fortune, which meant burying his nose in her hair and licking and snuffling on the very same part of her Troy’d had his own mouth on a few minutes ago.

Charly stood about a minute of it, then muttered, “Okay, dog, that’s enough. Sit.”

To Troy’s amazement Bubba instantly went and flopped down on the seat and stayed there, grinning from ear to ear.

Shaking his head and muttering “I’ll be damned,” Troy climbed behind the wheel and started up the truck.

Charly angled a look across her shoulder to him. “Let’s go back to the motel. I’d really like to get out of these clothes.”

Well, now. He thought there were probably half a dozen ways she could have said that, and most of them wouldn’t have meant anything other than what the actual words said. But the way she chose wasn’t one of those ways. Her voice seemed to come from way deep in her throat, with a certain burr to it that affected him about like long painted fingernails drawing lazy patterns on his naked back.

He paused with his hands on the wheel and turned his head toward her. He couldn’t see her eyes, since they were in shadow. But in the lights shining in from the parking lot he could see sweat glistening on her throat and across the top of her collarbone, giving her skin a translucence that reminded him of the insides of seashells-what was it called? Mother-of-pearl.

“Okeydokey,” he said. And noticed, as he put the Cherokee in gear, that the same burr that had been in her voice seemed to have taken over his now, too.

Young as the night was, B.B.’s Barn was already jumping when they pulled into the Mourning Springs Motel and parked in front of number 10. A good ol’ rockabilly beat was thumping, and faint whoopin’ and hollerin’ sounds could be heard even from across the street. A couple of MSPD patrol cars were parked out front

“Well, it’s Saturday night,” said Charly when Troy remarked on the activity, eyeing the patrol cars. “What did you expect?”

“You want to go over for a while? Have a beer? Bite to eat? Dance?”

She shook her head, then swiveled it back to him. For a long moment they looked at each other, just looked…and listened to the sounds of distant revelry and intimate tensions, of drums and pulses and breathing sounds all mixed together. Without his being aware of movement, the space between them seemed to shrink…the beat of the drums got louder, became deafening. No-not drums. It was his own heartbeat he heard.

Her mouth was there, his for the taking, and there was probably nothing short of a missile barrage that could have kept him from it. He pushed his hand under her hair, cradling first her sweat-damp nape, then moving on up to the back of her head, weaving his fingers through her hair like a shuttle through a skein of silk. And slowly, slowly, he brought his. mouth to hers. It was a journey of inches that seemed to take a lifetime, while inside him the heat and hunger mushroomed and the suspense became an exhilarating high, like the rush of adrenaline just before a jump.

Their open mouths met, melded. Became one indistinguishable whole. Her breathing quickened; her pulse throbbed beneath his fingers. Their body rhythms merged and accelerated, rising to the same inevitable crescendo.

She felt lush and ripe in his arms. The sweat on her skin gave it a slippery, giving feel, as if he could melt right into her and lose himself there. It wasn’t the first time he’d kissed her, God knew, but it felt like it. And at the same time, it felt like coming home.

He wasn’t sure what it was that stopped him; his brain wasn’t exactly capable of analytical thought just then. But suddenly there he was, pulling back, easing himself away from her, turning slowly in his seat until he was facing front again, and his whole body pulsing and pounding like an overheated steam engine. He sat there staring through the windshield, trying to focus his eyes and get his mind functioning again-and all he could hear was that damn hillbilly band across the street.

That must be it, he thought, feeling dazed and jangled, like a man who’d just come within an eyelash of walking over a cliff. There was something about a honky-tonk bar and a cheap motel that sure could make a man lose sight of the paths of righteousness.

He didn’t know when he’d ever felt so lousy. He could feel Charly shivering in the seat next to him and knew that in another second she was going to say something-ask him what was wrong, or maybe suggest they go inside. If she did, he didn’t know what he was going to tell her. He didn’t know what was wrong, and he sure as hell didn’t want to go inside.

Which was hard to figure, considering he’d never wanted a woman as much as he wanted her, not in his whole life. If it was possible for a man to die from an overdose of desire, then he was surely a goner. But-and this was what didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him-he didn’t want her like this. Not a repeat of last night, mind-blowing as it had been. That had been then. This was now. The closest he could come to explaining it was that there’d been a lot of water under the bridge since, and for him, at least, it had brought them to an entirely different place. Much as it surprised him to realize it, mindless sex just wasn’t going to do it for him. Not tonight. Maybe never again.

It was then, as he sat there with the cold shakes of adrenaline withdrawal crawling through his insides, that he heard it: his brother Jimmy Joe’s voice.

You’ll know.

And he felt something inside himself shift, as if his own personal compass had just spun around and the needle was pointing steady and true at due north, and for the first time in a long time he knew exactly where he was and where he was going.

Still staring straight ahead, he cleared his throat and said tensely, “You want to tell me what’s goin’ on?”

Her laugh was dry, sardonic. And not entirely steady. “I thought that was pretty obvious.”

“Don’t try to snow me,” he snapped, “because it ain’t gonna work.” He wasn’t angry, but he didn’t care if she thought he was. What he wanted was to break through that brittle shell of self-control she’d wrapped herself in, and if getting her angry back at him was what it took, that was fine with him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said in a voice just a little too breathy for the icy disdain it was trying to portray.

“You’re wound so tight I can hear you squeak. Look, I don’t know what’s goin’ on with you-”

“Jeez, my father just had a heart attack!”

“Don’t give me that-this isn’t about your father. Not all of it, anyway. Maybe you and your dad have some issues-”

“Issues?” She said it on a note of mocking laughter, as if it was a word she hadn’t expected to hear out of a Georgia redneck like him.

“Hey,” he said, “you’ve been in this shape ever since I met you. You think I can’t see it? Lord, woman, what kind of fool do you think I am?”

For a change she didn’t lash back at him but sat instead in hunched and sullen silence. He touched her shoulder and felt her flinch.

He took a breath and said more gently, “Look, we both know what happened last night was…I don’t know, some kind of escape thing. You as much as told me so, remember? You said you’d had a hell of a bad day, and all that. And I can understand that. And today hasn’t been so great, either. I understand that. But let me tell you, if you think you can…if you think I…” He stopped there, his hand clamped across his mouth, realizing finally that no matter how he said it, it was going to come out wrong. That any way he did it, it was still going to be a rejection.

“I didn’t hear you objecting.” Her voice was soft and dangerous.

He gave a huff of painful laughter. “No,” he said through his fingers, “I didn’t have any objections. Then. And just so we understand each other…the only thing I’m objecting to now is your motives.”

She muttered something both sarcastic and profane under her breath and lunged for the door handle. He caught at her arm, but not in time. She twisted out of his grasp and wrenched the door open.

“Where do you think you’re gonna go?” he asked quietly. “Room keys are in my pocket.”

For a long, tense moment she stayed poised there, like a bird about to launch herself skyward. Then she slammed the door shut and jerked herself around, tense and shaking. Bubba, finally roused by the noise and the hope of freedom, came to snuffle inquiringly at her hair. She twitched it angrily away from him and said, “Stop it!” in a choked whisper, then gave up and sat with her eyes closed in silent misery while the dog expressed his sympathy and concern for her in the way that dogs generally do.

Troy watched while strange sensations-aches and tuggings, softenings and tightenings-followed one another through his chest. Finally, taking pity on her, he barked, “Quit it, Bubba.” And then, gently stroking her wet cheek with the backs of his fingers, he said, “Look, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? All I want to do is help.”

Oh, God, Charly thought, please don’t do this to me. She could take just about anything except his gentleness…that damn… kindness. First the dog and now him.

Please God, don’t let me break down. Don’t let me start to cry. If I do, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop.

“Who was that in the hospital?” His voice was soft, inexorable. “The kid I saw talking to Dobrina? Somebody you know?”

The pressure in her chest was terrible. In desperate need of air, she caught at a breath-but there was no place to put it, and she had to let go of it unsatisfied.

“No,” she whispered, “I don’t know him.”

“Seemed like he knew you,” Troy persisted, staring ahead through the windshield. “Whoever he is, looked to me like he hates your guts.”

Pain stabbed her like a knife. She gave a high squeak of laughter. “Well, he probably does.”

His head jerked toward her. “But you don’t know him.”

“Nope.” She met his gaze defiantly, eyebrows arched, ironic little smile firmly in place. But she couldn’t hold it. The instant before it crumpled, she turned her face away.

“I only saw him once before,” she said, in a voice that ripped through her throat like claws. “That was on the day he was born. The day I gave him away.” She listened to stunned silence for a moment, then produced a laugh that tinkled in her ears like things breaking. “He’s changed a lot in twenty years.”

“You mean to tell me-” he had to stop to huff out air “-that was your son?”

“Yep, that’s what I’m telling you. That was-is-my son. Colin…Stewart…Phelps.” She drew the name out, then added, “They call him Cutter,” pronouncing it the Southern way: Cuddah.

“Good Lord,” Troy whispered. He shook his head like a dazed fighter. “But, hold on a minute, didn’t you tell me you gave him up for-?”

“Adoption. Yep,” said Charly, “I surely did. Signed the papers right there in that very same hospital, as a matter of fact. Then I…hopped on a Greyhound and skipped town.”

“Charly, why-?”

“Why? Well, see, there wasn’t really much use in my stayin’ around here, was there? Not after I drove my child’s father-who also happened to be the only son of the town’s oldest and most beloved family, not to mention my best friend-to commit suicide. Was there? My father sure didn’t think there was, and most of the townfolk agreed with him, Kelly Grace bein’ just about the only exception. Oh-and Dobrina, of course. Like I said, I think she loved-”

“Come on, Charly.” His voice was harsh as a slap. “Why are you doing this?”

She swiveled her head toward him. It seemed to take all her strength, as if the moving parts had rusted. “Doing what?”

“Talkin’ like this. Tryin’ to pretend like it doesn’t-”

“What do you think I’m doing?” The sound of her own voice shocked her. It sounded like the cry of an animal in pain. “Lord, what I’m tryin’ to do is survive!”

Bubba was on his feet again, whimpering. Charly threw up both arms to protect her face from another tongue-washing while Troy stuck out his arm to hold the dog back, and somehow or other, the next thing she knew they were tangled up with each other, his arms were around her instead, and she was fighting him, using her upraised fists to push him away, pummeling mindlessly at his rock-hard chest.