A Gift Of Grace. Inglath Cooper
“I think he liked you, too.” Caleb looked into the child’s clear blue eyes. She smiled at him, a shy child’s smile, and in that single moment, Caleb saw her. Dark arching eyebrows contrasting with sunshine-blond hair. The small square chin.
He took a near stumbling step backward, as if he’d been delivered a blow to the chest. Snapshot memories of Laney as a little girl flew through his mind. Not possible. A too-long stretch of silence dropped over them like a blanket trapping all available air beneath it.
“How old will you be, Grace?” he asked, his voice unsteady.
She held up three fingers. “This many.”
Her birthday was Saturday. The twenty-second of April.
The day Laney’s child had been born.
The day Laney had died.
CHAPTER THREE
HE WAS LOSING HIS MIND.
No other explanation for it. Things like this didn’t happen. The world was too big a place.
When Caleb arrived back at the store, Macy stood at the front counter, sorting invoices.
She looked up, started to say something, then stopped. “Caleb, you look like you just saw a ghost. What’s wrong?”
“Dr. Owens. Is she married?”
Macy closed the folder in front of her. “Divorced. I know a graduate student who helps out as a part-time nanny to her daughter. Ann Whitley. Really nice girl. She says Dr. Owens has inspired her to adopt a child some day.”
The words hit Caleb at a decibel so high he thought he might have imagined them. The truth fluttered down, registered. He gave an abrupt nod, told Macy he had some work to do at the farm, then called Noah and got in the truck, heading home with little memory of how he’d gotten there.
In the driveway, he jumped out, loping into the house and up the stairs to the second floor. At the top and to the right was another smaller staircase that led to the attic. He opened the door, a whoosh of heat hitting him in the face. Sunlight cut through the dormer window on the far wall. Boxes covered the floor, lined the walls. All Laney’s. He’d put everything that belonged to her in this room. Out of sight. Unable to throw any of it away, equally unable to look at it.
He hadn’t opened this door once since the week after her funeral when he’d hauled it all up here. Box after box until he’d collapsed, exhausted, in the bed they had shared. He had slept for three days straight.
He weaved his way into the room and knocked over a tall box, spilling two of her competition swimsuits and a pair of goggles. He put them back where they’d been.
Most of the boxes were sealed and unmarked. He moved to the far wall, pulled out a couple of smaller ones, using his pocketknife to slit the tape. Inside was a quilt her grandmother had made her for college graduation. A half-full bottle of Chanel No. 5. A set of electric hot curlers. The next box held books and a headset she’d used for running.
He opened a half dozen more, dumping their contents onto the floor, reaching for another when he didn’t find what he was looking for.
Finally. There.
A dozen or more framed photographs he’d pulled from their living-room walls three years before, pictures of them both as children, as high-school sweethearts, as husband and wife.
He lifted them out, one by one, each picture creating its own well of pain. He and Laney at junior-year homecoming, her hair long, blond and straight. He and Laney on the rocks at Badger Creek playing hooky from school. There were pictures of him as a boy, an elementary-school photo when he’d decided to give himself a crew cut with his dad’s horse clippers.
And there were pictures of Laney. Prom queen. Preening with Alice and Amy, her two best friends from high school.
At the bottom of the stack was the one he’d been looking for. Laney as a toddler standing next to her father.
Caleb flipped the frame. On the back she had written: Me and Daddy. Three years old. Me not him!
He turned it over again, stared at the little girl in the picture. If he’d needed proof of the resemblance to the child he’d met today, here it was. Same silky blond hair. Blue eyes with their long, dark lashes. Even the mouth was the same. Wide and full.
Caleb sat down on the wood floor, propped his head on one hand and stared at the picture.
How could this have happened?
His life had finally begun to even out, to settle into something he could accept as living. Now, all the old pain was back, rushing through his veins like injected poison.
He sat for a long time, his eyes closed, head against the wall behind him.
An extraordinary sense of calm slid over him, as it had the other times just before he sensed her presence.
He kept his eyes closed, knowing that if he opened them, she would slip away.
A single touch to the back of his hand, and he knew she was there. As she had been countless times in the past three years.
He wondered if these moments were the only thing that kept him going. Wondered if all this time he had been straddling the line between the sane and insane, if visits from a dead wife automatically put a person in that category.
He had told no one about it. Not his mom or dad. Not his doctor or pastor. As real as he knew her presence was, he could not bring himself to share it with anyone else for fear that maybe he really was going crazy.
He sat for a long time, the peace inside him the only proof he had that he wasn’t losing his mind. It had been like this when she’d been alive, as well, Laney’s ability to soothe, to bring reason and calm to the times in their lives completely void of either.
With the calm, the feel of her touch receded, and he was alone again. He opened his eyes then, stared up at the slow-twirling ceiling fan above him. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell onto the glass covering her face.
CATHERINE TUCKER SAT in a striped lawn chair, enjoying the sun’s warmth.
The backyard of Betsy Marshall’s modest, but immaculate, North Carolina ranch-style home was full to overflowing. Jeb and his brother Saul were in charge of the grill. The smell of sizzling hamburgers and hot dogs threaded the late-spring breeze.
Jeb came from a large, extended family. The opposite of Catherine, who had been an only child. His sister Betsy was the third in a family of five children, and she was the most like Jeb’s mother in that she loved to get the whole family together, seemed happiest in the middle of so much talking and laughing.
Jeb stood by the grill now, smiling at something his brother had said. He looked more relaxed than she had seen him in a long time. Unfair though it might have been, a wave of resentment washed up through her, made her face too warm, like the hot flashes she’d had after she’d stopped the hormone-replacement therapy a couple of years ago.
In that moment, she saw the two of them on either side of a huge divide, she still immersed in grief, he ready to move on. He wanted her to go with him. Catherine knew this. And yet it was as if her feet were planted in concrete. No matter how desperately she tried to pull herself free, she couldn’t.
“You’re awfully quiet.”
Catherine glanced up. Betsy stood in front of her, holding two red cups. She handed one to Catherine. “Iced tea. Sweet like you like it.”
“Thanks,” Catherine said, taking the cup and lacing her fingers together around it.
“Could we talk?” Betsy asked, her voice candid.
Catherine had known the gesture was not of the freestanding variety. With Betsy, they never were. “Sure,” she said, waving a hand at the chair beside her.
Betsy sat down, took a sip of her tea,