Where My Heart Belongs (20 page)
“Not at all.” Sylvia’s sympathetic smile was reassuring. “Kathy, you’re worn out. You’ve sacrificed the past dozen years for your parents—far more than most adult children are called to give at your age. You’ve sacrificed having a family and life of your own. You’ve watched first your mother and now your father deal with ravaging illnesses. Of course you’re relieved. Don’t feel guilty about that.”
Kathy lowered her voice even more. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you, but I called Kyle.”
“You did?” Sylvia gave a chuckle. “Well, it’s about time.”
“He was taking off for England, or I’m pretty sure he would have been here.” Kathy raised her gaze to meet Sylvia’s. “It was like we’d never been apart. We talked so easily.”
“You never should have been apart. I’m glad that at least this part of your life can be altered and corrected.”
Kathy frowned. “I know most people didn’t understand me, but I always felt you did.”
Sylvia shifted her purse and crossed her arms. “I did to a point. But really, there’s no use rehashing the past. What I want to know is what is the future going to look like?”
“I’m hoping it will look like a wedding in Colorado Springs,” Kathy said rather boldly. It wasn’t like her to make such predictions, but Kyle’s sweet spirit and obvious desire to pick up where they left off made her hopeful.
“You’d better give me plenty of warning. I’ll need time to warn Tony. Better make it a winter wedding too, so we can have things wrapped up enough on the farm to leave for a few days.”
“Anything else?” Kathy teased.
Sylvia grinned. “If I think of it, I’ll call you immediately. Tony has already arranged for us to have one of those unlimited long-distance plans. He very sweetly told me that with you moving to another state, he knew it would be hard on me.”
Kathy squeezed her hand. “I know you’re right and that things will change, but I’ll never stop loving you like a sister. You were always there for me.”
“And I always will be,” Sylvia promised.
A few more townspeople made their way to Kathy and offered their condolences. Most were older folks who had known her mother and father on a first-name basis. Kathy knew them as Mr. This and Mrs. That. She had been raised to show the utmost respect, and even now, even as an adult on equal footing, she couldn’t bring herself to call them by their first names.
Kathy was saying some final good-byes when she caught sight of her sister. Sunny stood off to one side of the highly polished oak casket. She seemed uncertain of what she should or shouldn’t do, so she did nothing but stand there, twisting her hands and looking at the ground. Kathy noted that hardly anyone was stopping to speak to her.
“Excuse me,” Kathy said, pulling away from the collection of people.
She walked to where Sunny stood. “I think Dad would have been pleased, don’t you?”
Sunny looked up rather surprised. “I . . . uh . . . yes. Yes, I think he would have been very pleased.”
“I saw you over here by yourself and thought maybe we should head for the church dinner.”
“They hate me,” Sunny said, meeting Kathy’s gaze. “They hate me and blame me for Dad’s cancer and Mom’s heart attack. They blame me for keeping you from getting married like Sylvia—married with a bunch of kids.”
“Now’s not the time, Sunny. We can talk about all of that later. Just be brave and deal with the situation. You knew it wouldn’t be easy, but this day is about honoring Dad’s memory. Let them think what they will. It doesn’t change the truth.”
“I know,” she whispered, tears in her eyes. “That’s what bothers me the most.”
For Sunny, her father’s funeral had been harder than any other funeral. She had buried Randy and baby Gary in the midst of tragedy, and the shock of the time had kept her from feeling anything too deeply or keenly. Each time the feelings had returned weeks later and caused severe depression, whereas this time the sorrow and depression were her staunch companions.
Now three days after the funeral, Sunny felt the stupor begin to lift just a bit. The farm still hadn’t sold, but Kathy had decided to move as soon as possible. As she pointed out to Sunny, she wasn’t able to even earn money in Slocum to pay the mortgage. At least in Colorado Springs she could get a job and try to pay the bills with what she earned.
Sunny knew Kathy was worried, however. She would never talk about what the farm was worth or how much the mortgage amounted to, but Sunny knew it had to be quite a bit.
Kathy seemed to bear it all with such strength. Sunny had thought about telling Kathy that she was leaving. There were things Sunny needed to take care of, but she’d made a promise to their dad that she would stay. He had hoped Sunny would help Kathy bear the load, and Sunny was willing to try. She wasn’t so sure about Kathy’s willingness, however. Sunny wondered if her sister resented the promise they’d made Dad. Would she have shown Sunny the door if their father hadn’t insisted on them promising to get along?
Returning to the house after taking an early morning walk, Sunny was surprised to hear a commotion coming from upstairs. She made her way up and found Kathy already at work in their mother and father’s room.
“Good morning,” Sunny announced.
“Morning,” Kathy said from where she knelt in front of a plastic tub. “I thought I’d better get to sorting through this stuff. The auction people will be coming to assess everything in a few days.”
“Can I help?” Sunny didn’t want to start the day off by irritating Kathy, but she felt rather useless.
Kathy looked around and shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you to do. We need to organize things into groups. Clothes with clothes, knickknacks with knickknacks, books with books. Like that.”
“Well, I can figure out what goes together.” Sunny walked to the dresser and picked up a framed photo of their parents on their wedding day. “They looked so young—so hopeful.” She couldn’t keep the regret from her voice.
“We all had our hopes,” Kathy said simply.
“You blame me for Kyle and your broken engagement, don’t you?”
Kathy seemed taken aback. She quickly turned her attention to a box of books. “I don’t think I want to talk about that with you.”
“Why?” Sunny didn’t want to make things worse, but she felt almost driven to ask.
Kathy stiffened. “I’m trying hard to put the past behind us. I’m willing to try to sweep it aside, but I can’t do it by wallowing in the ugliness of the past.”
“There’s a difference between dealing with the past and pretending it never happened,” Sunny said. “I had to learn that one for myself. You can ignore the past—hide it away— and never have dealt with the issues at hand. It then becomes like a cut that’s gotten infected. It might heal on the outside, but down deep it’s still festering.”
“So you think that if we don’t hash out all the gory details, I’ll go on harboring ill feelings and anger toward you? Is that it?”
Sunny could hear the defensive tone in Kathy’s question. “I just think it would do us both good to at least talk through the last twelve years.”
“You weren’t so willing back in June when I asked about whether you had someone waiting for you somewhere—if you had a family.”
“I know. I was wrong to react the way I did. It’s just that things are very complicated right now.” Sunny put the photo back on the dresser. “When I married Randy, I finally knew what it was to be loved and cared about just for being me.”
“We loved you that way,” Kathy said matter-of-factly, “but that wasn’t good enough.”
Sunny hated the way the conversation was going but didn’t know what else to do but push ahead. “I thought I would always be happy. I thought that at last I’d found what it was that was missing at home, and then Randy died. I wanted to die too. I told you they put me in rehab, but what I didn’t tell you was that for the first thirty days I was on suicide watch. I didn’t care about life—it just seemed too painful.”
Kathy opened her mouth, then must have decided not to comment. She dusted a couple of books while Sunny tried to figure out how to share the truth of her life.
“Rehab was hard. Not so much because I had to give up the drugs, but because I felt that I had no one. I had to make this work on my own. I had to care enough to quit and stay clean, or it wasn’t going to do any good. The problem was, I hated my reality. Being clean wasn’t pleasurable to me, because when I was clean I could see my miserable life for what it was.”
“But why should you be any different than the rest of us?” Kathy asked. Her tone had softened and the look on her face suggested she genuinely needed an answer to that question.
“Didn’t it ever dawn on you, Kathy, that some people just can’t take the pressure? Not everyone is cut out to succeed. Not everyone has the ability to be the next president or Einstein. I always hated it when they’d tell us in school that if we worked hard we could be anything we wanted to be. That’s not true and you know it. I could have worked as hard as humanly possible and I still wouldn’t have ever been able to be a doctor or a scientist. Those things weren’t in me.”
“But they told us we could be anything we wanted to be,” Kathy reiterated. “
Wanted
to be. You didn’t want to be a doctor or scientist.”
“Maybe not, but what if I had wanted to be the president of the United States? There’s nothing that says that by trying my best, as suggested, I could do that. We only get one president every four years. So far most have been lawyers. What are the chances that it could be me—an uneducated woman? One percent? Half a percent?”
“But if you give up, the chances are zip—zero.”
“That’s how I felt when the doctors told me I could have a great life if I got clean. Nothing felt great. Nothing looked good. I felt the chances were so small on recovering that I was my own worst enemy.”
“So what happened?” Kathy put aside the books and gave Sunny her full attention.
“I was in my last week of rehab. I had kicked my habits and could honestly say that I had no desire to go back to them. Why bother to get high? You’ll just come down and have to get high again in order to keep from facing the truth of the situation. So I felt it was all in vain. Life. Death. Family. Independence. Totally in vain.”
Sunny walked to the window and pulled back the dusty drape. Outside, rain clouds were gathering to the west. She knew farmers were hurrying to harvest the last of the wheat and murmured a silent prayer that they could complete the job before the weather turned bad.
“I was sitting outside the rehab center, reading a book, when a man approached me. It turned out to be another doctor. He was there visiting a friend who was kicking heroin.”
She dropped the drape and leaned against the wall beside the window. “Brian Dennison was unlike anyone I’d ever spent time with. He was educated, gorgeous, kind, and gentle. He really seemed to have it all. And to my surprise, he wanted to know me better. He helped me get an apartment when I got out of the hospital. I had been pleasantly surprised to realize I had money left. Between Randy’s funeral and my rehab, I had figured to be broke. I sold our house and felt like I could manage financially for a time— at least a short time. California prices are outrageous and leave a great deal to be desired.”
Kathy watched her with intent interest but said nothing. Sunny wondered how she’d take the news she was about to share. “Brian and I dated and had a whirlwind romance. He was very well off. He came from old money, and his practice as a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon was making him wealthy in his own right. Before I knew it we were planning a wedding. A Beverly Hills wedding that spared no expense. I think the final count on all the bills came to over $450,000.”
Kathy gasped. “For a wedding?”
Sunny laughed, but there was no joy in it. “Yeah. Sounds pretty crazy, doesn’t it? My dress alone cost $50,000, and it was hardly more than a strapless tube created by a designer who everyone wanted for their next creation.”
Kathy shook her head. “I can’t even begin to imagine such a thing. When did this happen?”
“Five years ago. I was twenty-five and he was forty.”
Kathy wasn’t about to leave it there, and Sunny had known she would want more information. Maybe that’s why it was so hard to be honest about this part of her life.
“So what happened?” Kathy finally asked.
Sunny frowned. The pain threatened to take the very air from her lungs. “I didn’t get to be president.”
SUNNY’S MEMORIES PASSED BACK through the years once again. She could easily place herself back in the elegant Beverly Hills home her husband had bought for them. It was a safe and welcoming home—one that made Sunny feel completely happy. Life had seemed so good. She wore Christian Louboutin shoes and carried an Herme’s bag. She was courted by every important designer, often finding herself traveling in private jets to have fittings and see new ideas. It was a privileged life that she had only dared to dream of— a life that Sunny found both exciting and foreign.
Pacing impatiently, Sunny waited for Brian to come home from work. He was married to his job as a plastic surgeon, every bit as much as, if not more than, he was to Sunny. When they had married, he’d promised to cut back and spend more time with his new wife, but that hadn’t happened. Sunny had tried to be patient as he cancelled one getaway or evening out after another. She knew that what he contributed to the world was important—much more important than anything she had to offer. But Sunny had news that she hoped would change all of that: she was pregnant.