His Darling Bride (Echoes of the Heart #3) (18 page)

“And now?” he asked.

“Now?” She swept her arms wide, encompassing her new pieces, one failure after another. “This is all I’ve been able to do since I promised my family I wanted to stay.”

Mike captured her arms and crossed them over her chest, hugging her close.

“Then stay,” he said. “So your life and your art are different now.
So what? Figure out what staying means now—to you and your
paintings. Let them take you in a new direction. It’ll be the adventure of a lifetime, I promise you. I know it’s scary, but you can do it. What
you create is always about where you are. And right now, you’re not
sure about your place with your family. I get how hard that can be.”

His drifter’s gaze made her think of the stormy sunset images on his office wall.

“But trust me,” Mike said. “You can create beyond your anger and your fear and any other emotion blocking you. You already proved that to yourself when you were a teenager. You’ll get your light back. Your dreams. You’ll be able to show how you see the world and want to change things for the better. The only thing your paintings can’t be about anymore is—”

“Pretending,” she said, swept along by the passion in his voice. His heart. This stranger. This generous artist who understood. A man who saw and seemed to cherish even the stormy parts of her.

“Once you break through,” he said, “you’ll create the most beautiful things you’ve ever painted.”

“The way your brother’s illness inspired your photography?” She was thinking of the priceless photographs Mike had taken of Jeremy’s hat—his brother’s memory—posed in wondrous places Mike had traveled to alone.

He ran a hand down her arm.

His fingers tangled with hers.

“Jeremy’s life changed mine. As hard as it was to watch him keep fighting and grow weaker and sicker and finally lose his battle with CF . . . it was inspiring. He made whatever time he had a good thing. He made me promise to make a difference, the way he couldn’t.”

“You do. And because of you, so many other artists get to make that difference, too.” While Mike kept to himself. “Through your co-ops, and the volunteer work the resident artists do, and the money you donate . . . Jeremy’s why you work with people like Joe, too, right?”

Mike nodded. “I can’t . . .”

“Not help people?”

“Don’t romanticize my life. I’ve been furious with my own childhood for a long time. I’ve made my own mistakes. I’ve wandered the globe for years—”

“Disappearing from everywhere you’ve been before you could get too attached?”

Mike caressed her face. “See? We’re not so different after all.”

“No,” she agreed, “we’re not.”

He’d never been a stranger. Not really. Not when he could talk about her art so honestly, and about escaping and coming home for real. Not when he could promise her she’d create again, and she found herself believing him. Not when every time they touched, the same recklessness took over, making her want more, even if Chandlerville was just a temporary stop on the way to his next adventure.

“That’s what’s scaring me,” she said as she kissed him.

Mike returned Bethany’s kiss, letting her take the lead. This was her show, her choice. But, God, he hoped she didn’t slam the door on them again.

He’d reminded himself on the drive over that he was coming to talk about him continuing to work with Joe, and about her continuing with her residency. He’d made it clear that he didn’t expect anything more. Then while Bethany’s sister had been distracting her, he’d slipped into her studio after glimpsing it when he’d walked inside. And once Bethany had followed him in here—and stayed, talking to him about her art and her past and her fears for the future—there’d been no way he could keep his distance, short of Bethany tossing him out on his ear.

When she stopped kissing him and stood and moved out of his reach, he let her go, watching her stare at her paintings. She wore baggy overall shorts and a neon-pink tank top layered under a man’s flannel shirt that had been ripped in several places. Everything was too big on her, except for the tank, which looked shrink-wrapped to every tantalizing inch of her upper body. She’d gotten taupe wall paint all over herself.

He wanted to capture her with his camera so he could show her how amazing she was to him, even scattered and disheveled and looking lost as she frowned at her niece’s half-painted face.

“I dreamed the other night,” Bethany said, “about washing soft pastels over this. A rainbow of them. Like the colors in one of Camille’s quilts, the ones she and Selena’s mother are so into. This is the first portrait I tried to paint. I’ve been looking at it for months. But I can’t . . . get it right.”

“And more color would make it right?”

He’d seen Camille’s pictures of her quilts. He was intrigued by the challenge of merging something like one of their patterns with the little girl’s image.

“I have no idea.” Bethany moved on to a barely begun group portrait of what looked to be her and Dru and Oliver when they were teens.

Mike joined her. It always surprised him how tiny she was—despite her over-the-top personality and determination to bulldoze through every challenge.

“Maybe you’re not supposed to know yet,” he suggested. “Maybe it’s time to play, instead of worrying about things being right. Playing is different from pretending, Bethany. It can get you through a lot when you’re blocked. Whatever you end up doing with all of this will be unexpected, but it will wow people the same as your teenage paintings. Even more. Because there will be more of you in your work now. Trust that, and just play for a while.”

“Because being afraid is no way to live your life?” She kept searching her canvases. “That’s what I told Shandra.”

“It’s no way to live your art, either.”

“I’m afraid of you.” Bethany peeked sideways at him. “You came from out of nowhere, and now you’re a part of all of this somehow. My father’s recovery. My painting. My . . . feelings. It’s way too much, too fast.”

“The fear is mutual, love.” She had him quaking in his hiking boots.

“But you’re still here.”

“And you keep letting me in.”

“So far.”

“Fair enough.” He motioned to her treasure trove of new beginnings. “Let me spend some more time with you and your work. I think I can help.”

“Just my work?” She stared into his eyes, challenging him. “My art’s why you brought me strawberry cupcakes?”

“I got the scones, too.”

“Because . . .”

He shook his head. “Because I want to get to know you, Bethany,
for real this time.”

“But only for as long as you’re in town?”

Mike wished he had a different answer to give. “I don’t expect you to trust me. I’m a work in progress, too,” he warned. “I liked things the way they were before I came to Chandlerville. But now . . .”

The sensitive fingers of an artist glided over his cheek, the way he’d caressed her earlier. “No more pretending for you, either?”

“I don’t seem to have a choice. Not with you. I see all you have, and how fiercely you’re fighting to hold on to it. And it makes me think I don’t really know anything about myself anymore. Except that I need more of you in my life.”

She studied him with the same intensity as she had her paintings. “And once Joe is better?”

“My photography can take me anywhere in the world when I’m doing a new series. But I’m here now. And I’d like to spend that time with you.”

Her gray eyes narrowed. “How long has it been since you’ve been honest with someone this way, about who and what you are?”

“Too long,” he admitted. “Thank you, by the way, for asking
your family to keep the details of my professional life to themselves.”

“It seemed important to you.”

“
You’re
important to me, too.” Something he hadn’t let happen with any of the women he’d briefly dated since his engagement.

“Another dream to play with?” She led him back into the living room, walking lighter with each step, smiling brighter.

“Another adventure not to quit,” he countered, “until we see where this can take us. I get how that’s not your comfort zone.”

“Evidently, no matter how hard I try to sometimes, I’m not a quitter either. Just like my foster father.”

She opened the front door and motioned Mike out with a sweep of her arm.

“Is . . . that a yes?” He joined her, accepting that he had to go, even if he’d dream tonight of bubble-gum-pink lips and strawberry cupcakes.

“You’d better saddle up, cowboy,” Bethany said as she shoved him out the door. “That’s a yes.”

Chapter Ten

“Only your part of the mural is uncovered,” Bethany said to her and Shandra’s Sunday youth center class. “Let your creativity go.”

She smiled, thinking of all the glorious work that had gone into the wall-sized project, the rest of the painting already completed by her other classes. A community canvas was emerging, with just one more section to go.

“The floor’s covered, too,” Shandra added. “So don’t worry.” She grabbed a brush and smeared paint on the transparent poncho she wore, identical to the kids’. “You can’t mess up your clothes. You have the images you’ve practiced. Now all you have to do is paint them on the wall.”

“This is your day,” Bethany said. “Show us what means the most to you in your life, your neighborhood, your family. Ready. Set . . .”

“Go!” screamed the kids in her youngest class, ages six through eight.

Their eardrum-splitting enthusiasm rang through the Midtown Youth Center’s common area, where Bethany had commandeered a wall for this quarter’s curriculum. She let herself take a few moments to enjoy the mayhem that followed. It was exactly what she’d hoped for. Kids enjoying being kids and enjoying art the way they did other games. The project was her brainchild, and what she’d written her Artist Co-op residency essay about.

She’d give anything for Mike to be there, seeing it come to life. A reality that was still possible, since as far as she knew the mural would stay up indefinitely for the kids and their parents to marvel at each time they came to the center. She could bring him by, assuming that she and Mike kept seeing each other. Their first date was tonight, once he finished working with Joe and she dropped Shandra off at her foster parents’.

But Bethany had another pressing matter to attend to first, as she watched Shandra kneel beside Darby Parker. One of their youngest painters, Darby had been an enthusiastic, budding artist the first few weeks of class. And she’d quickly attached to Shandra as her teacher of choice.

She hadn’t wanted to paint, though, the last Sunday Bethany and Shandra had taught together. And when she eventually had picked up a brush, the images she’d created as she’d practiced for her piece of the mural had concerned Shandra enough to show them to Bethany before they’d headed home. The volunteers who’d subbed for Bethany and Shandra last weekend had said Darby didn’t come to that class at all. And today, as the kids had practiced one more time, Darby had painted the same thing as two weeks ago.

Now she was sitting at a worktable instead of rushing to the wall with her friends. She didn’t look up when Shandra slipped off her poncho and sat next to her. Bethany inched closer, easing out of the vinyl protecting her own clothes.

“Can you tell me what you’re going to paint?” Shandra asked, her voice low and soothing, the way she and Bethany had discussed.

Each of the kids had been allowed to select three cups of paint to work with—most of them opting for bright primary hues like green and red and blue. Darby had wanted only red and black the last time, and she’d asked for the same today.

“Is this where you live?” Shandra asked. She smiled at Darby’s nod, even though the girl hadn’t looked up from her work.

The outline of the room was red. Big brushstrokes. Layers of the same color swiped on with a natural eye toward texture and dimension and depth. It could have made for a cheery result, if it weren’t for the black.

Black outside the window. Black to represent the taller stick people inside. A black caption cloud beside the tallest of the adults. Black, angry-looking swirls inside the cloud, presumably depicting whatever one grown-up was saying to the other—a smaller adult figure wearing a skirt, her arm in a sling while the taller one held a stick or something else raised as if he were going to hit her.

It could have meant almost anything or possibly nothing at all. Except Shandra had watched Darby labor over the same image two Sundays ago. And just before the little girl had run across the room to leave with her single mom as soon as Ms. Parker arrived, Shandra had said she’d seen Darby slash a huge black
X
across the tall, angry figure, as if erasing it from the picture.

“You said . . .” Darby threw her brush on the table. “You said to paint what we wanted.”

Shandra nodded. “Whatever you like best about your family.”

“I don’t,” Darby insisted. “I don’t like my family anymore.”

“That must be really hard,” Shandra reflected back to her young friend. “I remember not liking a lot of the families I’ve been with.”

Darby finally looked up. The students had been told Shandra was a foster child and what it meant. Darby crawled into Shandra’s lap now, hugging her, the noise and craziness around them fading for Bethany as she watched her little sister, who’d needed love so badly when she’d come to the Dixon family, become another child’s hero.

“Did people ever get . . . hurt in your families?” Darby asked.

“Sometimes.” Shandra stared at Bethany, wide-eyed and a little scared, but she held on so Darby wouldn’t know. “And it was hard for me to talk about. For a really long time. Until not talking about it got even harder. Is someone hurting you?”

“Not . . . me.”

You are so wrong, my friend,
Bethany thought. She caught the glint of tears in her foster sister’s eyes, proof that a young child’s pain could last forever—even in the strong, brave, beautiful adult they could become.

“Who’s getting hurt, Darby?” Shandra asked.

“He said not to tell. Me and my mom don’t tell anyone. He’ll get mad. That’ll make it worse. But he’s so mad again anyway, and he said he wouldn’t be anymore, when my mom said he could come back.”

Shandra turned Darby until they were looking at her painting together. She pointed at the taller stick figures.

“Who hurt your mommy?” Shandra asked.

Shawn Carlyle, the youth center’s activities director, stepped to Bethany’s side.

Other volunteers were seeing to the now madly painting kids, while Shandra and Bethany and Shawn created a protective semicircle around Darby. Shandra and Bethany had shared their concerns with him. He’d told them to keep a close eye on Darby, but that he couldn’t speak with her mother in an official capacity, or contact the police or family services, unless there were visible signs of abuse, or Darby gave them more details.

“My mom . . .” Darby turned her face into Shandra’s shoulder. “Her arm hurts. He doesn’t mean to, but he gets so mad.”

“Is he a friend of your mom’s?” Shandra looked like she was going to cry or scream or hit someone herself, while she gently stroked Darby’s baby-soft brown hair.

Darby didn’t answer, quietly rocking in Shandra’s arms. Bethany knelt next to them, so proud of her sister’s courage, of the volunteer work Shandra was doing with her free time. She checked with her sister to see if she was okay. Shandra nodded.

“Are you afraid of him?” Bethany glared up at Shawn. No way was he keeping her from talking with Ms. Parker now, whether or not Darby said another word. “Are you worried that if you tell, he might hurt you?”

Darby nodded, practically curling into a ball in Shandra’s arms.

“Your mom is scared, too?” Bethany asked.

Another nod.

“Adults can be scary sometimes,” Shandra said, imparting teenage wisdom that Bethany wished to God her sister didn’t have. “And it can feel like there’s no way we can stop them, when you’re small and everyone else is big and no one knows what’s happening. But I’m big now. So is Bethany. We can help if someone’s hurting your mom.”

Shawn knelt and rubbed a comforting hand down Darby’s back. “We’d all like to help.”

Darby stared at him, quiet and serious, looking so lost the rest of them fought even harder to keep their rage from showing.

“Tell us how to help you and your mom,” Bethany said, realizing anew how lucky she was to have had the love Marsha and Joe had thrust into her life. “We’ll do everything we can, Darby. You’re not alone in this.”

“Can you help . . .” The last of Darby’s control crumbled, making her words hard to hear as her tears fell like cleansing rain. “Can you help my brother stop being so mad?”

“Like we discussed.” Mike was wrapping up his latest ninety-minute session with his frustrated therapy patient. “Your best bet at this stage is to walk as much as you can. Twice a day is the ultimate goal.”

“I’ve been walking.” Joe struggled to a sitting position on Mike’s portable massage table. He swung his legs over the side.

“Twice a day? Every day?”

“Is that really the expert advice my insurance premiums are paying you to give me? It’s been two weeks, and you’re still mostly taking my pulse and pressure, when you’re not twisting me into a pretzel.”

“Yoga, floor exercises, light weights, massage . . .” Mike looked up from the clipboard, where he recorded Joe’s steady but slow progress. “Your flexibility and range of motion are improving.”

“Because you’ve got me doing the same damn exercises in between our sessions, too. What do I need you for, if this is all we’re ever going to do?”

“Once we improve your core strength, we’ll up your cardio work. It’ll be less of a challenge to your balance then. You’ll get more benefit for your respiration and stamina. Walking more will help that process along faster. Walking also works a different set of muscles than the more contained exercises we do together. And fresh air can be a miracle drug for some people.”

“Are you telling me if I walk, I can nix the blood pressure meds and the other scripts that are making me feel like I’m moving in slow motion?”

Joe mopped at his forehead with a towel, sweating profusely despite the air conditioner running constantly, its thermostat set to arctic. He walked to the antique bed in the Dixons’ master bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress, workout clothes soaked through with exertion.

“Then I’m in,” the man sniped. “The side effects of the drugs
they’re giving me are worse than the symptoms. How am I sup
posed to work and live like a normal person while I’m taking them?”

“You’re determined not to take an extended leave of absence?” Mike folded the massage table.

Voluntarily taking time off work to focus on his recovery remained a non-option for Joe. Just as, despite Mike’s recommendation, his patient had insisted on having their sessions indoors. Mike’s eye was on the back patio for future workouts—assuming Joe kept at his recovery. And assuming his embarrassment ever eased at the thought of his family watching him struggle.

“I’m already missing more days than I’m showing up to do my
job,” Joe said while Mike packed his exercise bands in his duffel,
along with the foam brick he’d shown his patient how to use to mod
ify basic yoga poses. “When I am at the office, I’m heading home
early in the afternoons. I’m tired, grumpy. I can’t focus on anything.
I need you to help me stop that from happening. Instead, you keep telling me to take my meds and take leave until I get better.”

Mike nodded. “The symptoms you’re describing could be from the drugs.”

“So this is just the price I pay,” groused the gentle, patient man everyone in Chandlerville adored, “for following my doctor’s orders so I won’t have another heart attack?”

Mike sat on a vanity bench—its fabric upholstered in an ultrafeminine floral pattern—careful not to jostle the dainty table behind him. A rainbow of pastel perfume bottles perched on top, plus a deeply patinaed silver brush, comb, and mirror set. The entire thing reminded him of something from a classic movie.

“The problem is,” he said, “your doctor can’t reduce your medication until your vitals improve.”

“Or maybe you’re all just making excuses. Things are getting worse, not better. I’m even more tired since you and I started. More sore. My HR manager at work keeps popping in to check on how I’m doing, like she’s afraid I’m going to collapse. She started talking about early retirement the other day—which isn’t something I can take and be able to support my family.”

Mike consulted his records of Joe’s progress.

“Your pressure’s too high,” he said. “Your oxygen levels and lung capacity are low. Your body’s not processing fluid properly, hence the diuretics. Your balance issues and the tremor in your hands and legs are likely a result of both of those factors. And you’re right. The medication could be a contributing factor to the lack of concentration, fatigue, and loss of muscle mass. But those symptoms are also likely due to your overdoing it, trying to get back to your old life.”