Always on My Mind (21 page)

“He does like to blame you
 
—” Oh. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

His mouth lifted in a smile, however. “That’s okay. I sort of liked how you defended me last summer.”

“He was always poking at you, criticizing you. If I remember correctly, it was you, Captain Casper, who led our dragon boat team to victory.”

It swooped to her mind then, the memory of him standing in his shorts, holding a paddle high, the wind in his hair, his shirt rising a little to show off his tanned, sculpted stomach.

He looked away from her, toward his coffee, as if he too remembered it. “That was a good race,” he said quietly.

She sipped her orange juice, soothed her suddenly dry throat.

He lifted his gaze, latched it on to hers. “How are you?”

The quiet of his words, the way he didn’t flinch or break away as if her answer meant something to him, pushed her heart into her throat, raw and aching.

See, this was why she should have turned him down, begged an excuse. Because the man simply knew too much about her, knew how to find her frailties.

Her eyes burned. “I’m . . . fine.”

She saw his hand move as if he might touch hers. But suddenly he pulled it back. She glanced up, and his expression could take her under. Kindness, nothing of accusation.

“Are you? Because . . . you did a brave thing, but I know it isn’t over. It must sort of feel like you’re walking around with this emptiness inside, your heart on the outside of your body . . .”

She caught her lip, reached up, and wiped the wetness on her cheek.

Casper frowned at the gesture. “I’m sorry
 
—I didn’t mean
 
—”

“It’s worse than that. Because I’ve actually given my heart to someone else and have no idea how . . .” Her breath shook and she drew it in, found solid ground. “How she might be doing. If she’s okay and happy and healthy.”

Raina closed her eyes, the words so freeing that it seemed a band had released around her chest. When she opened her eyes, he still wore that expression. Kindness. Friendship.

“I really believe what I did was right.” She said it without her voice shaking.

“I agree.”

She blinked at him. “You do?”

He nodded. “I think what you did was loving your baby the best way you knew how. I know it took incredible courage. And I . . . I understand.”

She stared at him, testing his words. “But you wish I hadn’t.”

His mouth twisted and he shrugged a shoulder, shook his head. “My feelings don’t matter. And frankly, I don’t know what I wish.” He swallowed. “Actually, I do.” He sighed, then met her eyes with a sad expression. “I wish that I had been braver and not so easily hurt.”

Oh.

“I wish that you’d felt safe with me and my family. Safe enough to tell us what happened with you and Owen. And safe enough to know that you deserved more from us. From me.”

He seemed to struggle over his next words, whether trying to dredge them up or
 
—no, trying to deliver them without embarrassing them both. His eyes turned glossy, but he kept them on hers. “I’m so sorry for the way I treated you.”

Raina drew in a breath and, on the edge of it, found a smile emerging, a warmth spreading through her. “I forgive you.”

Casper nodded, looking away fast. Blinking.

Then the waitress arrived with their food.

“I’m starving,” Raina said. “I feel like I have a hole right through the center of my stomach.”

Casper laughed, so much warmth in it that it lifted the shadow between them. “Thanks for helping me today, Raina. I’m glad you came with me.”

“Me too.”

Casper hadn’t realized how sorry he truly felt until Raina started talking. Or until she sat down. No, before that, when he met her at her front door and realized she was backing out on him.

He didn’t know why, didn’t want to consider it might be because she was afraid of spending time with him.

As he’d turned to go, he felt the tug on his spirit.
Pray for her.

The thought pulsed through him. Of course. After all, he’d hurt her the last few times they’d been alone together. So he’d lifted it quickly.
Please help her to feel safe, Lord.

With him, yeah, but maybe there was something more. Then she’d changed her mind and invited him in. His gaze had fallen on the sweater hanging over a chair but he said nothing, because really, it was none of his business.

But the impulse to apologize grew as she sat at the table, and the whole thing came crashing down on him when he realized he
should
have made her feel safe. Last summer, she had confessed that she longed for safety
 
—and he’d just been trying to figure that out when he’d discovered her past. When he’d turned on her.

He’d given her anything but safety.

The apology felt natural and honest and freeing.

For himself, it was as if with the forgiveness, light sifted into his dark wounds.

He was aware of Raina close behind him now as they followed a Naniboujou employee into the basement under the lodge and to the vault that housed artifacts and remnants along with other items.

Judy, the front desk woman, tall and thin, wearing a green sweater emblazoned with the lodge’s emblem on the shoulder, pointed at the boxes of pictures
 
—three cartons of them and books and books of old hotel registers. “We keep them for posterity. We never really know when we might need them, but we have no room for them upstairs, so we keep them down here. Feel free to look through them or even bring them up to the solarium if you’d like.”

“What was this place?” Casper asked.

The vault, six feet by six feet, forged out of the stone foundation and lined with cedar, emitted a musty, ancient smell. “We
think it must have been an old bootleggers’ hideout, although the lodge was built at the very tail end of Prohibition, so maybe that is our imaginations talking. We use it for storage now. Make yourselves at home.”

She left them, her feet echoing as she walked up the stairs. The heating units, water pumps, and other mechanical devices housed in the basement rumbled to life.

“Wow, look at this stuff.” Casper took down a box and opened it. Inside, shoe boxes piled high contained pictures in neat rows. Polaroids, black-and-whites, some large, others small. He took out a box and sifted through it. “It looks like this is from the MacNab era. From the attire and the cars, it might be 1938–1939.”

“That’s too late,” Raina said.

“But look at this.” He handed her a picture. It featured the front of the lodge and two women linking arms, wearing hats and sensible dark dresses, one holding a bouquet of lilacs as if they’d been on a picnic. Neither of them smiled. They stood in front of a Model T.

He started riffling through more pictures, handed another one to her. “That is most definitely the fifties.”

The photo featured a couple. The man in jeans, a white T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, slicked-back hair, long sideburns. The woman wore pedal pushers, her shirt tied at the waist, brown hair under a bandanna. They sat atop a 1957 Thunderbird.

“I might have enjoyed living back then,” Raina said. “It seems so carefree.”

“I don’t know,” Casper said, taking out another. “They had a war and problems just like us. But here on the north shore, people could sneak away from their trials in life with their families, find a place to hide, just for a moment.”

“Not everyone is hiding,” Raina said.

He glanced at her.

“Well, some of us are, I suppose.”

He laughed. “I might have been hiding out last summer, but going to Roatán made me miss Deep Haven.”

She handed the picture back to him. “So you’re not leaving again?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “My boss likes me, and I’m busy at Wild Harbor. We’re having a sale next week.”

“Wow, that’s . . . normal.”

“Don’t judge me. I know it’s not Indiana Jones, but a guy can’t exactly make a living hunting for treasure. He has to grow up
 
—”

“That sounds like your father talking.”

“Maybe he’s right.” He stood, closed the box, dusted off his knees. “I never did find anything in all my days of treasure hunting. I know I cleverly disguised it as studying archaeology, but the fact of the matter is that I just wanted to
 
—”

“I know
 
—find something priceless. Something that others have missed and only you have figured out.”

He looked at her sharply, then frowned. “You remember that?”

“Of course I remember.” A smile lifted one side of her mouth and the slightest shade of color pressed her lips. She pointed past him to another box. “Try that one.”

He opened the lid. “Envelopes this time. Manila.” He pulled one out, removed a stack of pictures. “We might be getting closer here. This looks like a shot from the 1920s.”

The photo displayed a couple dressed in swimsuits
 
—his more of a short tunic, hers a long one-piece dress with flounces at the hips and stockings and a matching ruffled headpiece.

“Oh, my,” Raina said. “Fetching.” She reached for the pile.
“Give me half and let’s see what we can find.” She began looking through the pictures.

Casper sat next to her, the hum of the furnaces like a serenade.

“You know, I . . . I named her. Just for myself. Nothing official.”

He stilled. She looked up, her eyes, big and brown, falling on him. Testing him. Then quickly went back to the pictures.

“You named her
 
—”

“Layla. I thought it was a good name. It means ‘dark beauty.’”

Trying to act casual, not wanting to scare her with how much he cared, he picked up a picture of what looked like Babe Ruth and two other men. “It’s a beautiful name.”

“I think about her every day.”

“I figured that.”

“Do you . . . do you think she’ll be mad at me?”

Oh, Raina. He put down the pictures, tried to catch her eyes. “I can’t answer that, Raina. I think if she understands love, she’ll understand what you did.”

That seemed to resonate because she swallowed and let the silence, the hum of the basement, fill the moment.

He picked up the pictures again.

“Thanks, Casper, for letting me talk about it.”

He kept sifting through, not really looking. “I told you, anytime. And I meant it.”

More silence. Then, “You know, when I first got pregnant, I thought I would keep her. I had this crazy dream that somehow I’d live in Deep Haven in a cute little house
 
—not Liza’s house, but my own, and I don’t know
 
—I . . . I would raise her and we’d take picnics on the shore and I’d teach her about cooking and how to . . .” She sighed. “How to garden. But there was no one else in the picture with me, so . . .”

No one?

The words edged his lips, but he held them back, fighting off this sudden spurt of disappointment.

No. He wouldn’t let his thoughts go there.
Lord, help me be a friend to her.

So he stayed silent, letting her have room.

“You know my mom died when I was nine.”

“I didn’t know that. I knew she died, but I didn’t know you were only nine.”

“She had cancer. She’d had it for a few years, but we thought she’d beat it. The end came too fast. My brother was six, and my father was so angry, he began to drink and go out on the road for long periods of time . . .”

She picked up a picture, squinted at it, put it back. “One year he just dropped us off at my grandmother’s house. She lived in Iowa, on a pig farm
 
—imagine that. I’d never been around pigs. She was a large woman, four hundred pounds, hair black as coal, fat fingers. Her house was . . . quiet. And small. Dainty, with china. But she loved me and my brother. For all of her fussing at us to keep her house clean
 
—on a pig farm, of all places
 
—she fed us and tucked us in at night and sometimes sang to us. And I thought . . . what if I could be that kind of mother?”

Casper saw it then, her tucking in Layla, pushing back her dark hair, singing softly, and the image made him ache. He found words, however, to move them past it. “Do you remember your mother?”

“Sure. Fuzzy memories. I remember her making us frosted graham cracker treats after school. We lived outside town in a trailer house, but she was there every day. She worked the second shift at the hospital, so we’d come home and she’d kiss us and then leave and we’d eat the graham crackers. Daddy would come home an
hour or two later, and if he didn’t, it was okay . . . because she’d leave dinner and I’d tuck in Joey and climb in with him and we’d wait, chasing the shadows from the room until we heard her car drive in. Usually she was home by midnight. But always by morning. Making me pancakes.”

He came upon a picture of a pretty girl in what looked like the gown he’d found at the historical society, standing outside the lodge, next to a roadster. He looked at it closer. It could be the same dress.

Raina held out a picture. “What about this one?” Similar to the one he held, but this one was formal, the man sitting on a chair, the bride beside him, her hand on his shoulder, staring resolutely at the future with a grim look. “I didn’t see any pictures this young in Aggie’s house, but it could be her. Does that look like the same dress?”