“No, not right. I merely meant your anger is understandable. But you were going to tell me why I have earned it. Surely, you understand why I am staying.” I rubbed my knee.
“And that’s supposed to make it easier? Okay, Viktor, look: I’m a hick from the sticks. Horses, I get. Nature, I get. People, relationships, that sort of thing-I don’t get. Not since Dad died.” She picked up a long twig from the ground and began to strip it of its bark. “I … depended on Dad. He was … the foundation of my safe little world. When he died, the world crumbled and I was alone. I’ve been alone ever since. Until now.”
“Your mother was still alive, I thought.”
She laughed-a sharp, unpleasant sound. “If you could call it that. I was never as close to Mom as I was to Dad, but our relationship was okay. Better than okay. I loved her and I thought she loved me. But after he died, everything I did was wrong. Everything I said. I was too tomboyish. Too much like a guy-”
“Too much like your father, perhaps?”
She looked as if I had punched her and left her breathless. “Whoa. Wow … Now that you mention it, yeah. She said that a lot: ‘You’re just like your father.’ I started to wonder why she’d ever loved him at all if he had so many flaws. You’re saying I was…”
“Your father’s ghost.”
She pondered that for a moment. “Now, that would explain a lot.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “we fool ourselves into thinking that a cold, hard shell around the heart will protect it from the fire of grief. Perhaps it can, though I have doubts. I do know that such a shell can also protect the heart from the warmth of other things: love, joy, closeness.”
She turned to look at me again. “Who’s that aimed at, Doc? Me, Mom… or you?”
I smiled. “Just a hick from the sticks, eh?”
“Yeah, okay. I’m not that dense. It’s too little, too late, but I guess I understand that Mom was just dealing with her grief the same way I was. Badly.”
“Too little, too late?”
“She died about eleven years ago. Cancer.” She poked the now naked twig into the mat of leaves, grass, and cedar needles on which we sat. “I guess what I’m most mad about is that I’ve let myself get attached to other people for the first time in years.”
Odd. What sparked anger in Colleen touched me only with a warm, bittersweet sorrow. “I, too, am attached, Colleen. But I am not parting company with you forever. And you will still have Cal and Goldie. You are, I think, especially attached to Cal.”
Now, she looked away from me down the hill. Shadows flirted in the underbrush and danced counterpoint to nodding boughs and singing chimes. “Yenta,” she said.
Surprised into mirth, I laughed. “Yenta?”
“I learned it from Goldie.”
“But, I am right, of course.”
She didn’t answer directly, but shrugged and said, “I
don’t know what to think of Cal. I’m … attracted to him. I admire him… a lot. He’s a great guy… a good man. But sometimes I feel like I have more in common with you or Goldman, if you can believe it. Cal and I are so … so terminally different.”
“They say that opposites attract.”
“Uh-huh. But he’s such a … such a square peg, you know? He’s the kind of guy I try to avoid. All that white knight crap, true-blue, honor-driven, stand-up …” She shook her head. “That’s for clingy bimbos. I can take care of myself.”
“I would not argue that point. Except to say that in every human being’s life there will be times they need other people. As Cal needs you and Goldie and Enid to help him find Tina.”
“He needs Goldie and Enid. He needs you. Why does he need me?”
“You are the rock, remember?”
Her twig speared a leaf. “Oh, yeah. How could I forget?” She pulled the unfortunate leaf from the sharpened twig and crumbled it in her hand. “This is gonna sound weird, and I’m not sure it makes any sense, but here it is: I do have feelings for Cal. But at the same time, it seems like-when it comes to this team of ours-I’m the odd man out.”
“Perhaps this is because you are a woman?”
“Don’t be funny.”
“I would never.”
“I feel… isolated. Okay, okay-” She raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I isolate myself. I get that. But what I don’t get is that somehow, in spite of that, you make me fit.”
Now it was my turn to be startled. I understood what she had said about attachment. I understood her fear of it. And I had begun to suspect that I had stepped into the void of her father’s absence. But that I somehow reacted with her as if we were two chemicals, that I had not considered.
“It isn’t me, Colleen,” I said. “You make yourself fit.” She shook her head, brandishing the twig as if it were a pointer. “Uh-uh. No, no, Doc. This time I got you. Goldie thinks I’m a freak of nature, and he’s probably right. Hell, I even scare myself sometimes. Cal… I don’t know what Cal thinks. But you-you accept me, as is. Which sometimes feels really good and sometimes makes me damned uncomfortable. And you know why? Because you make me think about myself. About who I am and what I’m doing. And why I’m doing it. Like right now. You keep me honest.” She turned her face toward me and her eyes filled with the moon’s ghost-light. Even so, I could not see all the way to the bottom of them. “When you’re gone, Viktor, who’ll keep me honest?”
“You will keep yourself honest, Colleen,” I told her. “Because Cal will need your honesty.”
She nodded and flipped the twig end over end into the night. “Yeah? Well, I think he deserves yours.” She turned on me, her eyes glittering in the moonlight. “Why are you really doing this? Staying behind. You’re not afraid of being crippled. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”
Stunned, I shoved words from my mouth. “What I told Cal-”
“You told Cal shit. Don’t think I didn’t notice how careful you were to not say anything that was an outright lie. And you’re not afraid of dying, either. You’ve faced death over and over with us. With us,” she repeated fiercely. “What is it, Doc? What are you afraid of?”
I couldn’t answer her immediately. The words simply would not come. When they did, it was with great difficulty. “I am very afraid of death, Colleen.”
“Oh, bull-”
I grasped her shoulder. “Listen to me. Perhaps I am not afraid of dying, but I live in constant fear of causing death. Even before this injury I was a liability. At Grave Creek you and Goldie threw yourselves into danger to rescue me. At the mounds, at the mill… I was an albatross, over and over putting the rest of you in harm’s way. How many times can I do that before the worst happens?”
“I suppose as many times as the rest of us are around to bail you out.”
“You should not have to ‘bail me out,’ as you put it.” “Why not? You do the same thing for us.” She patted her ribs. “I have a neat little row of stitches to prove it.”
“It is different with me.”
“How? How different? What-the rest of us are allowed mistakes, but you’re not? The rest of us can limp along, but you can’t?”
“Colleen, if I were to be responsible for harm coming to any of you…” I shook my head. “I can face death. I could not face that.”
“I see.” She sat in silence for a moment, arms wrapped around her knees, staring into the darkness. “Are you going to tell Cal the truth?”
“Cal would not accept the truth any more than you have.”
She turned to look at me again. “He shouldn’t accept it. Don’t do this, Doc. Please don’t do this. We’re weaker without you than with you. You could bung up both legs and that’d still be true.”
I had no reply. I could only wallow in keen awareness that this hurt more than I had expected.