Rachel Lee (13 page)

Yeah, right, thought Hardy. Like the whole ladies' group from the church didn't keep her in a positive social whirlwind. This house was full of middle-aged women most evenings. But there was something more important than that. "Mom, maybe it wouldn't make things better for Joni if she stays with us. You know how Witt feels."

"Witt doesn't have to know. I'm not telling him, and neither are you.

And I don't think Hannah will, either."

"But I was just going to leave town," Joni protested. "Find a job somewhere else."

Barbara shook her head. "Not right now you aren't. Your mother will probably need your help the next few weeks. Because you know who's going to take care of Witt, don't you?"

Hardy looked at Joni and saw a trapped expression in her eyes, as if she were some small animal caught in a snare.

"Besides," said Barbara all too wisely, "running never got rid of a problem. You won't feel one bit better if you put a continent between you and Witt. When that idiot decides to come around, you need to be here."

Joni shook her head, but she didn't argue any further. A short while later, Barbara returned to bed, leaving Joni and Hardy at the table.

"How do you feel?" he asked her.

"Terrible. I feel like I'm messing up everyone's life."

"You're not messing up mine," he said gently.

"Right. You really want me under your roof."

"I invited you, didn't I?" Then he said something calculated to annoy her, hoping it would drive away some of the self-pity she was drowning in. "I'd do the same for a stray cat."

Her head jerked up, and he saw her blue eyes flare, and for an instant she looked so much like Witt that he was amazed. But just for an instant, because the person she truly resembled was Hannah, and after the flare, her composure returned. "You're a jerk, Hardy." It was a phrase from their high school days, a way she had teased him over nonsense.

And he gave the same reply he always had. "I work at it."

A smile flickered over her tired, pinched face, then faded like autumn color. "There's no way to fix this," she said. "No way. I was so stupid."

"Well, I was, too. Nothing you did would have made a lick of difference if I hadn't submitted that bid."

"Why did you? You were so certain this would happen."

What could he say to her? That a part of him hadn't wanted to disappoint her? In the scheme of things, that was probably as important as not being able to pass up such a great opportunity, no matter how remote. He would never have forgiven himself for not trying. But it would have been even harder to forgive himself for disappointing Joni.

He couldn't tell her that, though. So he sighed and shrugged and said ruefully, "I guess I'm every bit as impulsive as you are."

She nodded slowly. "I feel guilty."

"For giving me the bid prospectus?" He already knew that and wondered why she needed to say it.

"Yes, but for other things, too. I feel guilty for still being alive when Karen's dead."

"Me too." He'd recognized that a long time ago and figured he deserved the self-inflicted emotional flogging. Like Witt, he would probably never forgive himself for going against Witt's wishes.

"I felt like this was something I needed to do for Karen," Joni continued, her voice low and thick. "I felt I owed it to her. It sounds so silly now, but..." She shook her head. "Twelve years is a long time. You'd think we'd all be past this crap by now. But I'm not, Hardy. I'm not at all. I feel like something inside me is frozen in time. And I guess I gave you the bid package to make time stop standing still...."

Her voice trailed away into tears, and she pushed her mug aside, putting her head down on the table. He hesitated a few moments, listening to her sobs, then, helplessly, he went to her, kneeling beside her chair and gathering her into his arms.

She turned to him, seeking comfort, clinging to his neck while her tears soaked the shoulder of his flannel shirt. He let her cling, enjoyed her clinging, and realized that her grief was reaching him in places that had been ice-cold for a long time. Making him ache.

Making him want to cry, too.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed over and over. "I'm sorry."

He didn't know exactly what she was sorry for, so he guessed at it from the things she'd said. Sorry that Karen's death had had such an emotional impact on her that she somehow had been unable to grow past it? She wasn't the only one with that problem. Witt certainly hadn't.

And Hardy himself . well, in some ways he'd been frozen in the ice of that night, too. It was like they were all going through the motions, a bunch of automatons who'd had something essential cut out of them.

Her tears were hot as they soaked his shirt, and he welcomed them. At least one of them could still feel something besides anger. Because Hardy was angry. He didn't like to look at that, and he pretended it wasn't so, because he didn't want to be like Witt. But he was angry through and through at the rotten blow life had dealt him and Karen.

Angry through and through that she had died so young and he'd been left to face her father's wrath. Angry that he couldn't get past those fateful moments in time.

Angry that the only way he could ever have Joni was to hold her while she wept. Angry because he knew Witt was going to forgive her but would never forgive him, and he would have to give her back to her uncle. And angry at himself for having such muddled, selfish thoughts.

When all was said and done, Hardy Wingate hadn't liked himself at all since the moment he had realized that he wanted Joni more than Karen.

And he had hated himself since Karen's death. God, what a tangle.

"Sorry," Joni said again. But her sobs were easing, and finally she pulled back from him, hunting up a napkin to dry her tears.

"Stop being sorry," Hardy said, and was relieved that the words didn't sound harsh. He hadn't wanted them to be, but in his current emotional turmoil, he couldn't be sure that anything he said was going to come out right. "You don't have to be sorry for crying. You don't have to be sorry for feeling guilty you're still alive--God knows, I'm feeling it, too-and you don't have to be sorry for anything else."

She didn't answer him, just sat there scrubbing her cheeks with a paper napkin until they looked red. "It's weird," she said minutes later.

Deciding she was through crying and being held, he straightened and pulled out a chair beside her. just in case. "What is?"

* "What a mess we all are. People die, Hardy. Even young people. I've known others who've lost sisters and school friends. Witt lost his wife and brother. You and I both lost our fathers. But there was something about what happened with Karen...."

Maybe in his case, thought Hardy, it had something to do with the fact that he had a big ugly secret inside him. One that would probably plague him forever. He didn't know about Witt and Joni, though. What would they have to be feeling so guilty about?

But the suggestion made him think about Witt a little differently.

Maybe Witt wasn't just being unreasonably angry at Hardy over something that Hardy, had he had a choice, would have given his own life to prevent. Witt hadn't gotten that angry at the mugger who killed his brother.

Then he realized that he was sitting there silently, lost in thought, not saying a word to Joni. "Sorry," he said, shaking himself. "I have a tendency to get lost inside my own head sometimes."

"It's okay. I do sometimes, too."

"I don't know what to say," he admitted. "Maybe it is weird how we've all reacted. That frozen-in-time feeling you mentioned ... yeah, I feel it, too. When you said it, I all of a sudden recognized the feeling. I've been living with it for a long time and didn't even realize it. It's as if something stopped that night."

"Exactly. That's what I was hedging around when I came up with all those other reasons for what I did. I knew something was wrong.

Something... Jeez, Hardy, none of us have been completely right for twelve years. Maybe it has something to do with the way Witt's reacted. I don't know. I just know ... I've been marking time.

Waiting, always waiting. Going through the motions."

"Yeah." He felt that way, too. So much of his life was spent just going through the motions. As if more than Karen had died that night.

"Anyway..." Joni shook her head and wiped at an errant tear. "I made something happen. I made us all ... I don't know. But it wasn't what I hoped would happen. I didn't think I'd nearly kill my uncle."

"I'm not sure you can blame yourself for that heart attack, Joni. I don't think anybody can build up enough crap in their arteries in ten minutes of being mad to cause a heart attack."

"Maybe not. But the stress ... that played a part, Hardy. So I'm going to be leaving. Just as soon as I can find a job somewhere else."

He didn't know how to argue with her, though he very much wanted to.

The little time they'd spent together since she'd hatched her scheme had made him realize that he was still very interested in her. That he still liked her a whole lot.

Not that that mattered. He didn't deserve her and never would. He was too hollowed out by his guilt, and by the recognition that if he just hadn't been such a chickenshit, Karen wouldn't have slipped out with him that night.

He couldn't inflict himself on anyone else. And Joni sure as hell deserved a whole heart, not the gutted remains of one. But a man could dream, and dreaming about Joni was easy. Even now, with her eyes all red from crying and her nose stuffy, he still wanted her close. Closer still. But he had no right to reach out, certainly not just to satisfy himself.

He also reminded himself, in a moment of blinding wisdom, that he didn't really know Joni anymore. He knew his memory of her, but those twelve years had still passed, no matter how familiar she seemed to him. He didn't really know the woman she had become.

All of those thoughts were hopping around in his head like a case of fleas, distracting him from the Joni who was sitting there beside him right that minute. It was a bad habit of his, to grow introspective even in the midst of conversation. He hadn't always been that way, but since Karen. Everything in his life seemed to be "since Karen." God.

They were all basket cases.

But Joni, too, seemed to have turned inward. She sat with her forearms on the table, the forgotten cocoa between them, twisting her fingers as she frowned. An array of emotions swept over her face, moving too fast for him to identify. She was thinking about Witt, of course, about his heart attack. And castigating herself for her part in it.

He couldn't really blame her for feeling that way. The heart problem must have been brewing for a long time, but the explosion of rage had probably precipitated it. He wanted to reach out and take her hand, to give her silent comfort, but he didn't know if he would be overreaching.

Shit. Why was he making so much out of this? She was a friend, albeit one he hadn't been close to for a while, and she needed a temporary port in a storm. That was the only way to look at it. Anything else was wistful dreaming based on things long gone.

"Look," he said, "you don't have to sort it all out tonight. You go home in the morning and talk to your mom. She knows Witt better than anybody, and she can help you make up your mind about what to do."

She lifted her head and looked at him so sadly he felt his chest ache.

"Which room is mine?"

"Top of the stairs, left."

"Thanks." She rose to leave, but in the kitchen doorway she paused and looked back. "I know what I have to do. I have to leave. I can't stand this situation anymore."

Then she turned and was gone. And he sat there, wondering if she might not be right about it after all.

Hannah was home and sound asleep when Joni returned at seven in the morning. She must have stayed at the hospital most of the night, Jodi thought.

Joni, who'd slipped out of Hardy's house before she had to face either him or his mother, started a pot of coffee, then sat at the dining-room table while it perked. At least she didn't have to go in to work. She wouldn't have trusted herself to count pills or do anything else accurately. She was exhausted, and far too upset.

Part of her wanted to go over to the hospital and see Witt. She wanted to stand beside his bed and, when he opened his eyes, tell him she was sorry. The rest of her knew that would be both foolish and risky. If he was still angry with her, he wouldn't be able to handle it. No, going over there would be a selfish thing to do. Purely selfish, and she'd already been too selfish about this situation.

It was time to put Witt first. And Hannah. To make sure that they were okay. What did it matter that she had some wild, crazy feeling of having been encased in glass for twelve years? Frozen in time. Heck, she was surprised that Hardy hadn't told her she was crazy.

Anybody else would have. And they would probably have been right.

Regardless, she was getting the hell out of this town. Soon. Away from all this. Into a world where everything hadn't stopped because one person had died.

The coffee finished brewing, and she got up to pour herself some.

After she filled the mug, she turned back toward the dining room and was startled to see her mother, wearing a white terry-cloth robe, standing there. "Where were you last night?" Hannah asked, dark rings beneath her eyes.

"I stayed with a friend."

"Do you have any idea how worried I was?"

"I can't seem to do anything right anymore." The words came out bitterly. "I'm sorry. I figured you'd be too preoccupied with Witt."

"Not too preoccupied to notice you weren't here when I came home. I went to your room to fill you in,"

"How is he?" "Much better. Mind if I get to the coffeepot?"

Joni wasn't accustomed to that kind of sarcasm from her mother, and it hurt. She stepped quickly aside to clear the way, then returned to the table.

Hannah joined her. The two of them sat there quietly for a while, then Hannah offered, "They said Witt probably didn't suffer too much permanent damage to his heart. There's some, of course. They think he might have been having the attack when he came over here so angry."