Storm the Author's Cut (15 page)

"Daddy! We're not getting married at all. The engagement's off!"

Laurie's words echoed in the silence. A burning log shifted on the fire, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.

Laurence Mather took a deep breath, his face creased with worry. "You've had a disagreement? I'll talk to Ken."

"Daddy, I broke it off. I don't want to marry him."

"Ken's a good man. He's steady, Laurie. You'll be safe, protected."

"Safe from what, Daddy? Ken wants to make all my decisions for me. He wants me to quit the station."

"You're going into a marriage, honey. You have to do some sacrificing. Time for you to settle down, raise a family."

"Is that what marriage is? Sacrifice?" Was that what her mother had done? Turned her powerful artistic talent into a petty hobby, for the sake of the man she loved?

He leaned forward in his seat, intent on her, his distress lining his face. "You're building a family. You have to think of the children you will have, of your husband. Would it be good for your new family for you to be running around the country with a microphone? Your children are going to need stability. It's past time, honey, for you to have your own family. You can't spend your life alone, can't get love and care from a microphone, a radio audience."

He patted her knee. "Go to bed and get a good sleep. When you wake up in the morning, everything will come clear."

In the last four days she had experienced wild swings of change. Friday, she had been happily engaged. Saturday, she had made wild and passionate love with a strange man. Sunday, she had spent the day in turmoil; and now, on Monday, she had determined to end her engagement. What would she feel like on Tuesday?

"You're right, Daddy. I will sleep on it." He smiled his satisfaction, the worry lines easing. "I am tired—exhausted." She felt suddenly so weary that all the coffee in the world could not keep her awake.

"Go ahead, dear," her mother spoke for the first time. "Do you have to go in to work in the morning?"

"Yes. Can I borrow an alarm clock? I have an early ride to catch. I left my car in Queen Charlotte. I just didn't feel like driving."

"I'll phone Ken," her father offered. "He'll come pick you up."

He would. And the argument would start all over again. She would be caught between her father and Ken, and together they would bend her to their will.

Perhaps they were both right. In a day or two this terrible turmoil of rebellion and confusion might die down, she might once more feel able to marry Ken, to bend to his will.

Her mother had bent.

"No, whatever I decide to do, it has to be my own decision. Promise me you won't call Ken, Daddy."

"Laurie, it could be the best thing. If you two could talk..."

"Larry!" Her mother's voice was sharp. Her father frowned and Julia turned to her daughter. "Don't worry, dear. We won't interfere. Now go off to bed and have a sleep. I'll bring in the alarm clock in a minute."

What a day this was for escapes! Luke had swept her away from Ken's protests, now her mother shielded her from her father's attempts to make her see reason. She felt as if she were floating, tossed about by the waves. She had been trying to make a decision about her own life. Now she had been sent to bed. When she was a child, how often had her decisions been greeted with a suggestion that she sleep on it?

When her mother came into the room, Laurie was under the covers, sitting propped against two pillows. Her mother sat on the bed.

"Are you all right?"

"What a question. Mother! I've just broken my engagement." How could she even begin to tell her mother what had happened? "Mother, why did you give up your painting? How could you bear to?"

"I haven't totally given it up. I still dabble."

"I was twelve years old when the man from the gallery came here, asking you to do another exhibition. But it never happened. Why not?"

The stairs creaked. The soft footfall of her father in his slippers passed her door.

"It's not as if I was a great artist," her mother said with a smile. "An exhibition—I wasn't that good, and it worried your father."

How many of Laurie's own decisions had been the result of persuasion and unwillingness to hurt her father? Certainly the decision to take business courses at college had not been hers. What about the decision to marry Ken? Her father had actively encouraged Ken; had taken her aside to tell her how much he would welcome Ken as a son. Restoring her father's happiness meant relief for her own feelings of guilt in Shane's death. "Have you never had second thoughts? You could start painting again, put your work in the local gallery."

"Of course I've had second thoughts, but none as important to me as Lawrence. I don't imagine you remember his mother?"

"Grandma? I just barely remember. She came out here once." She remembered a tall, thin woman who had frightened her as a child.

"She was a hard woman. Your father loved her, but I don't know that she ever returned that love. You know she was an actress? She gave it up to marry your grandfather, but I think she always missed it. Your father was very young when she went back to the stage. He watched her going away from him, more and more involved in her career. She didn't care for either of them—Lawrence or his father. He knew she didn't love him, and to him it always seemed that her career took her away from her family.

"He never asked me to give up that exhibition, but I saw it in his eyes. He was afraid I'd grow away from him, stop loving him."

There was no way she could have known about the ghosts that haunted her father. "That's why he doesn't want me at the radio station?" She loved it so much, he was afraid she, too, would grow away from him. If she married Ken, had children, then her father would feel more secure. It felt to her like a child's logic.

"Make your own decisions, darling. If you'd be unhappy married to Ken, then don't let your father be responsible for your unhappiness."

Laurie smoothed the covers over her legs. She shivered a little in the cotton nightgown she kept here for overnight stays.

"I don't love Ken enough. If I gave up the radio station for him, I think I would end up hating him. I don't think I would ever want to love anyone as much as you love Dad. It terrifies me, being that vulnerable, that dependent on someone else."

Her mother smiled softly. "It's wonderful to love a man who makes you want to give up everything, do anything, just to be with him."

Luke Lucas had come to her on the cliff and she had gone with him. She would have gone anywhere with him that night.

She shuddered, suddenly cold in the thin nightgown. "No," she whispered. "No!"

Chapter 10

Laurie slipped quietly out of the sleeping house. She had woken at four-thirty with the northern sun already up. An hour later the air was still cool, slowly warming as the sun climbed higher in the eastern sky.

The night before, she had said goodbye to her mother. She had told her that she would be moving, that she was thinking of buying a house. She had left her plans vague, wanting still to savor the idea of the house on the beach north of Skidegate.

Buying property was a big step. She could make a mistake, could regret a hasty decision. She could hear her father's calm, reasonable voice in her head, warning her of the risks of venturing out alone.

The radio station was the only place where she had felt free to be herself, to reach out and experience the life around her. She had turned on at ten each morning when she walked through the door of the radio station.

Then, after the six o'clock news, she had turned off again, walking out of the station into a make-believe life where Laurie Mather had become a pale, ghostly shadow of Beverly as a child.

Now, in the clear, cool morning, it seemed that it was Bev's life she had been trying to live these past six years. Bev had always radiated an inner serenity in those days—something Laurie had not yet achieved for all her striving. Back when they were young girls, Beverly had been the one who accepted what life gave her without question. Beverly was the friend Laurie's parents approved of most. "Why can't you be more like Beverly?" had been the constant echo of her childhood.

Now, standing on the sidewalk, watching the sun over the ocean and waiting for her taxi, she felt she had a clear view of herself for the first time. The day Shane died, she numbed herself, frightened by a world that punished her girlish carelessness so cruelly. Frightened, she had turned inward, trying to hide her own restless nature from even herself. She had gone to college on the mainland, worked hard, and modeled herself on the docile Beverly of her childhood. Ironically, Bev moved to Vancouver and broke away from the mould of her teens, while Laurie stopped experimenting with life.

When she returned home after the college course, she had even tried to work in the hotel. She might have stayed there forever had she not felt a constant inadequacy—Shane was the one that her father wanted at his side. It was Laurie's fault that Shane was not there.

Her father had always been a little alarmed by his daughter, loving her but never quite able to understand the forces that drove her. While he claimed to like her working with him, she felt always that he did not trust her judgment, that he feared she would do some wild thing to destroy his business. When Laurie got a job at the radio station he was alarmed, but she wondered if he had not also been relieved. Whatever the reason, she had been able to leave home without her father's opposition. She moved into the McDonald home in Queen Charlotte, becoming a docile daughter of the house to Mrs. McDonald.

Ken had not fallen in love with Laurie, but with the mask of docility he wore. Laurie had loved Ken as a child, the blind hero worship of a girl for her friend's mysterious older brother. As a woman, she found him a fitting mate for the make-believe role she was playing. She had deceived both herself and Ken.

Then, explosively, she'd woken from her trance. Saturday her role of searcher had been almost like a penance, as if she could undo that other tragedy by helping to avert death in the present. Saturday night on Hot Spring Island the past had been unfolding before her eyes until the past and the present all came together in the midst of the storm. When Luke touched her she went up in flames.

She couldn't think of it yet without her face burning, her body feeling the touch of passion again. Time would tame the memory, but right now it burned as if the flame between her and Luke could never be extinguished. It had been a freak event: an explosive combination of the missing plane, the storm, and the proximity of an attractive man on an isolated island. Thank God it was Luke she had been with that night! Another man might have caused all sorts of complications.

This morning, she felt only relief that she was free of Ken. It was humiliating that she had lost control of herself in a stranger's arms; but the strong emotion had been like a cleansing of the guilt that had been with her for so long.

The taxi drew up outside the Mather house silently. The driver reached over to open the passenger door.

"Hi, Brad!" She slipped in beside him. She had known him since she was ten years old. She would never have considered riding behind him, in the back where the passengers technically belonged.

"Where's your car? Break down on you?" He talked around the pipe in his mouth, turning the wheel to back out of the driveway. When Laurie was a child, he had been a lively man with a full head of unruly grey hair. She didn't think he had changed at all in the last fourteen years. "Told you to get a Chevy, not one of those imports."

She laughed. This was a good-natured argument they had indulged in ever since she bought her Honda. "The car is fine, Brad. I'm flying this morning. Can you take me to the seaplane base?"

He shifted into gear. " Doing an interview for the radio? I sure liked that one you did on the Haida villages around here. You know, some people—white people—have lived on these islands all their lives, and never been to see the deserted villages."

"I only knew bits myself," she told him. "I had no idea how rich the history and art of the Haida people was until I started talking to the elders and visiting the old sites."

They talked on, exchanging news about mutual acquaintances. A schoolmate of Laurie's had married, another had left the islands. So long as she saw Brad a few times a year, she would never fall behind on the local gossip.

She saw the twin-engined Goose circling the harbor as the taxi wheels crunched on the gravel parking lot of the seaplane terminal. When Brad had the vehicle stopped, Laurie slipped her fare on to the seat and opened the door. She watched the sky, wondering. Was it Luke? When he said to come at six, had he meant that he would be there? Or was it one of his other pilots, offering her a lift because he happened to be coming this way?

"You all right, girl?" Brad was beside her, concern in his face. "You still afraid of the airplanes?"

She had come out of the house singing, had come down here in the early morning, knowing that Luke would be coming for her. Then, seeing the unfamiliar Goose, she had felt the sharp sting of disappointment. She hadn't known how much of her early morning happiness was at the prospect of seeing Luke.