The Winter Lodge (41 page)

He’d clearly made an attempt to clean up; she could see the comb furrows, smell the fresh soap, but it didn’t matter. This time, Joey was gone.

She started to sink, her knees suddenly liquid. Rourke grabbed her arms, propping her up.

He was talking to her, and he looked like a different person, someone who had been damaged almost as badly as Joey. She could see his lips moving as he explained what had happened. She could even hear his words: Joey had jumped on the first train to New York and then out of the city, the express to Kingston. The ink was still wet on his discharge papers. At Kingston, he’d rented a car to drive the rest of the way to Avalon. He wanted to surprise her.

Surprise.

Food for Thought

by Jenny Majesky

Mourning Meal

Whenever a cherished friend passed away, the family would call my grandmother because she was a genius at putting together a menu for a crowd on short notice. The centerpiece of the meal was, of course, the funeral hot dish—a savory mixture baked in a roasting pan that resembled a small bathtub. Here is a version for a smaller crowd. It doesn’t cure sadness, but it’s said to comfort an aching heart.

AMERICAN LEGION FUNERAL HOT DISH

1 pound ground beef

1/2 onion, chopped

1 cup frozen sliced carrots

1 cup frozen cauliflower

1 cup frozen chopped broccoli

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 can cream of chicken soup

3-4 stalks celery, chopped

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

1 12-ounce bag chow mein noodles

Preheat oven to 325°F. Fry hamburger and onion in large cast-iron pan, breaking hamburger up into small pieces. Drain and place in large baking pan. Mix vegetables, soups, celery, soy sauce and pepper, then combine with meat in pan. Fold in 2/3 of chow mein noodles (8 ounces), cover and bake for about an hour. Sprinkle remaining chow mein noodles on top. Put cover back on and bake another 15 minutes.

Thirty-Two

T
he wind had stopped and the snow drifted straight down in big flakes, wrapping the lodge in a cushion of silence. Jenny pulled the cuffs of her sweater down over her hands to warm them. “I do want to know, Rourke,” she said. “I do want to know what you’re thinking.”

He shook his head. “Not important. Are you all right, Jen?”

She nodded. “Is it strange that I’m not crying hysterically?”

“No. She was gone for a long time.”

“I feel…relieved in a way. At least I know. When you first told me about her, it was like something cold and tight unraveled. Now I know why—it’s because I don’t have to be angry anymore. I spent years being angry at her, thinking she simply didn’t love me enough to come back. When in reality she was trying to save the family business, and she was desperately unhappy but doing the best she could, and something terrible happened to her. I should have loved her all along instead of being angry and resentful. It makes me wish…” She didn’t quite know how to finish the thought. “It makes me wish I’d spent my emotions differently.”

“Or not at all,” he muttered.

And that, of course, was the way Rourke saw a situation like this. Don’t get involved and you won’t get hurt. She shifted uncomfortably as he kept staring at her with haunted eyes. She felt a squeeze of regret because she understood him all too well; he looked as lonely as she felt.

After Joey was killed, they could have—should have—turned to each other for comfort. Instead, they turned their backs on each other. They’d both been so damaged by the past—afraid to love, afraid to lose themselves, to be hurt, to entrust their hearts to another’s keeping. “It’s because of Joey, isn’t it?” she whispered. “That’s why you never let yourself get close to anyone.”

“That’s why I never let myself get close to
you.
”

“Rourke, that makes no sense—”

“He knew about us.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“No. He knew, though.”

“And that’s what you’ve lived with all these years.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you forget. He loved us and we betrayed him and he knew, and the second he died, we were frozen there, with no chance to…We can never fix it.” Something in his face reminded her of the boy she’d once known—anger and vulnerability and a stark yearning that had touched her heart. Even then, he’d been both damaged and overprotective. It came through now in his refusal to forgive himself for something he couldn’t change.

“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I talk to Joey all the time. I’m not going to torture myself over whether or not he knew about us. I refuse to do that, and I wish you would, too.”

“It’s not a choice for me,” he said. “I could have prevented his accident the night he died.

I could have dropped everything, driven down and given him a lift.”

“God, Rourke, will you listen to yourself? You can’t save the world. It’s not your job.”

“Oh, sorry, I thought it went with being a cop.”

The ideal role for him. Save people and then walk away. Not this time, she decided. This time, she wouldn’t let him. “You do the best you can,” she said. “We all do, and yes, sometimes it’s not good enough but that’s the way things go. You say we shouldn’t be together, we’ve never been good together, and I say you’re wrong.”

“Bullshit. It should have been you and Joey. You and he were perfect together. It was the way things should have been.”

She glared at him. “That’s something
you
decided. You didn’t even give me a vote. For your information, Joey and I weren’t ‘perfect.’ Nobody is. I loved him, but never in the way I loved you.” The admission rushed from her before she could stop it. She took a deep breath, mortified yet curiously relieved. Finally, she’d told him the truth, and so far, the world hadn’t come to an end.

His reaction was less than encouraging. He swore and glared at her, got up and went to the window, standing with his back to her. Darkness gathered over the lake, and outside there was not a single glimmer of light. “Bad idea,” he commented at last. “You didn’t want to be with me. I got word my best friend died and all I could think about was the fact that now I could fuck you.”

She knew he was being deliberately crude. His temper had never fazed her. “That’s not what you were thinking and you know it. That’s a story you’ve been telling yourself to make sure you spend your life feeling guilty about what happened. What you really felt, what we both felt, was the loss of someone we loved with all our hearts. Someone we loved so much that we didn’t let ourselves love each other because of him. The problem is that you and I
are
good together, and we tied ourselves in knots trying to ignore that. And every time we pretended, every time we denied our feelings, we made things worse. Are you seeing a pattern here?”

Rourke turned from the window to face Jenny. Her words took hold of his heart, squeezing until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Crossing the room in two strides, he put his arms around her and pulled her close, and she fit perfectly in his arms. Her soft, flowery smell enveloped him and in the midst of what was probably one of the worst moments of her life, he felt a terrible surge of affection for her.

When she tilted her face up to his, he kissed her delicately, the taste of her impossibly warm and sweet. She kissed him back with an ardor he’d dreamed about for years, and they didn’t speak anymore but strained together, pressing close until Rourke nearly shuddered with need, but at the same time, he had to wonder if this was a replay of the other time, when they thought they’d lost Joey. With an effort he pulled back and asked her with his eyes. She said nothing but took his hand and led him into the bedroom, where a light burned low beside the bed.

And there, finally, he showed her his heart in the only way he knew how.

The snow came down in slanting sheets, piling against the side of the lodge until it nearly reached the windowsill. In the middle of the night, Jenny lay on her side next to Rourke, watching him.

This night had been so long in coming. When they finally let themselves go, it had been an explosion of emotion and it was better than dreams and left her feeling a contentment so deep it made her eyes tear up. The intimacy they’d shared was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and the piercing sweetness of it caught her unawares. Her feelings for him eclipsed the pain and grief that had surrounded and insulated her.

A weak glimmer of light struggled through the gray dawn. She’d lost count of the number of times they’d made love, learning the landscape of each other’s bodies in a slow series of discoveries. At some point he had phoned the station to tell someone they were all right; they’d return after the storm had passed.

And for some reason, as she lay listening to his breathing and the beating of her own heart, the tears wouldn’t stop. His eyes fluttered open and he touched her cheek with his thumb. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You don’t understand,” she said, trying to sift through the emotions spilling out of her.

“That’s not…I’m not sad. Just…relieved, in a way. Not just about my mother, but…about us.”

All right, she thought. Might as well go for broke. “I’ve wanted this for so long. Didn’t you know?”

He offered a half smile, his expression soft in the dim light from the stove in the other room. “That’s why I tried so damn hard to stay away. What we did—what happened with Joey

—how could we ever be happy together after that?”

“How? Like this.” She gently touched his face, the faint beard stubble and the wave of blond hair on his brow. She kissed the crescent-shaped scar on his cheekbone. “Remember the day this happened?”

“The day we met. I got in a fight over you.” He studied her for a long time, but it didn’t make her self-conscious. She liked having him look at her, because when he did, he couldn’t hide the lust and affection in his eyes.

“I never needed you to protect me. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I just need you…”
To
love me.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.

“Okay,” he said, as though she’d spoken it aloud.

There was a world of meaning in that one word, and she laughed and moved into his arms as he laid her back on the bed. “It’s going to be another snow day,” he said.

“Perfect,” she answered.

Much later in the morning, the wood for the stove ran low and Rourke went out to get more. There were several cords stacked next to the main lodge a couple of hundred yards away.

He put on his boots and snowshoes and a pair of work gloves and a Mackinac jacket. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

She squinted out at the landscape, a wilderness of white mounds and the endless flat expanse of the lake. The woods and other buildings were shadowy blurs. “Don’t get lost,” she warned him.

He laughed and kissed her. “After last night? Are you kidding?”

She shut the door behind him and leaned against it. Dragging an old toboggan behind him, he headed out, Rufus bounding at his side. She watched until his figure faded and gradually disappeared. She felt a happiness so intense, it stole her breath.
Finally.
She knew loving him for the rest of her life wasn’t necessarily going to be easy, but it was exactly what she wanted. And that made all the difference. Her discontent and restlessness had never been caused by her ties to the bakery and to Avalon. Everything made sense now that she was with Rourke.

She shivered and went to check the stove. The last log had burned to embers and it was getting cold in here. She went to the bedroom to put on a few more layers—some thick socks and a pair of sweatpants, a sweater and her warm slippers. She paused to glance in the mirror.

Her hair was wildly mussed, her lips mysteriously full and…was that a stubble burn along her jawline? Even in her disheveled state, she had never looked more supremely happy than she was in this moment. Smiling, she picked up Rourke’s shirt. The smell of it made her dizzy with wanting him again. On impulse she pulled the soft cotton shirt over her head. She touched his other things

—the wool gabardine of his jacket, the leather of his sidearm, now securely snapped into its holster.

The wind picked up, howling with an almost-human voice across the lake and through the trees. Jenny wished Rourke would hurry. He’d been gone maybe fifteen minutes, and she already missed him.

Happiness was such a simple thing, Rourke thought, leaning into the wind as he dragged the toboggan to the woodshed. Why hadn’t he figured it out until now? It consisted merely of knowing where you belong in the world, and whom you belong with. The irony was, he’d known it from the first moment he’d seen her, a kid in pigtails and unlaced sneakers. But knowing it and achieving it turned out to be two different things.

Achieving it meant facing up to some hard truths, like the fact that he could never change the past, and serving a self-imposed penance did nothing but feed his own bitter disappointment.

He finally got it. The way to come to terms with Joey’s death wasn’t to run from happiness but to run toward it. He used to avoid Jenny because he didn’t think he deserved Joey’s happy ending.

After last night, he realized there was a different way to see it. Being happy with Jenny wouldn’t change what had happened, but at least it was a way to face a future that was suddenly bright with possibility. He needed to marry her. The thought was simply there, fully formed; it wasn’t a matter for debate. It was the simple truth he’d been hiding from himself for too long. He wondered if she’d think it was sudden, or if she would understand. He didn’t want to scare her, though.

The old wood was stacked under the eaves of a utility shed a hundred yards from the lodge. The huge rounds were knit together with cobwebs and had not been split. Great, he thought. He hoped there was a maul or ax in the shed.

Rufus wanted to play. The snow made him frisky and he leaped and bounded, barking an invitation. Rourke laughed and chased him around for a while, working up a sweat despite the weather.

Later, he found a maul and got to work on the wood. He wasn’t sure how much they would need, but if it turned out he and Jenny were snowed in forever, it would be fine with him.