It Had to Be You (Christiansen Family) (36 page)

Because of him. Because of the way he’d treated her. “I’m so sorry
 
—”

“It’s not just you, John.” She picked up a rock, threw it into the water. It splashed, unseen, in the distance. “It’s . . . guys. I should have listened to Kari.”

“What did Kari say?” He had a feeling he knew, though, and his throat tightened.

When she looked at him, he knew he’d guessed right.

“Ingrid
 
—”

“Stop, John. I know you’re sorry. I forgive you, okay?”

“How can I make it better?”

She shook her head. “You can’t. It’s just . . . I’m a silly, stupid girl.”

He didn’t like how that sounded, and his voice lowered, the timbre of dread in it when he asked, “What happened?”

She went quiet then, and he felt the silence string around him, banding his chest. “Ingrid
 
—”

“I didn’t go to prom.”

Huh?

“I mean, I was asked, but . . . my date wanted to go out before prom to ‘get to know each other.’” She finger-quoted the words. “Which meant, well, getting to know each other.”

He stilled. “Please, don’t tell me
 
—”

“Nothing happened. I mean, something happened, but not enough for Michael.”

He couldn’t deny the crazy relief that flooded through him.

She swallowed. “He canceled a week before the dance and asked someone else. A girl from another school. Someone prettier.”

He had this terrible urge to track down the guy and take him out at the knees.

“I still have the dress. My mother made it for me, spent weeks finding the right pattern, the right material, getting it just right, preparing for the perfect night.” She shook her head again. “See, I’m a silly, stupid girl.”

He felt sick. “No, you’re not, Ingrid. Not every guy is like that.” Oh, he wanted to mean that.

She met his eyes then, her wounds in her gaze. “I wish I could believe you.”

He had no words, his shame thickening his throat.

“I just want a man who wants what I want. A home, family. Small town, yes, but a man of honor, who wants me, not Kari and not . . . Well, I want someone who is willing to wait for me.”

Her words stirred something inside him. “Please give me another chance, Ingrid.”

She considered him, and in the space of time, he felt his heart bang against his ribs. Then, “Were you serious about writing to me?”

He was nodding even before the words crested her lips. “Every day.”

Her gaze was in his, testing. She was so close, if he simply leaned forward, he could kiss her. Just brush her lips with his like a whisper. He could hardly breathe with the desire for it, the taste of her suddenly real and bold and unquenchable.

But he didn’t. He just stilled and watched her, holding his breath until . . .

Until she nodded. “But only if you promise to get back in the game.” She pointed to his leg. “I want to see you play football, John Christiansen.”

He smiled. “I’ll send you tickets to my first game.” He held out his hand. “Friends?”

She hesitated a moment, then took it. “Friends.”

Maybe he could start over after all.

1980

Thanks for the news clipping of your spring scrimmage with the Gophers. I knew you’d make it back on the team! And yes, I’ll take you up on your offer for tickets next fall. I can’t wait to see you play. I can imagine how much hard work it took to get back into shape, but that’s who you are, so I’m not surprised.

We finally finished the roof on the school. It’s a shiny tin that’s already turning to rust in the rain and sunshine of the mountains. Sometimes I sit on the back porch before English classes start, drinking a cup of tea and watching the mist lay low over the Andes mountains. There’s a smell here, a ripeness in the air stirred up by the wet breezes of the rain forest. Humid and almost moldy, so different from the pine of Minnesota, but I’ve learned to love it. There’s a parrot that’s taken roost near my dormitory
 
—it wakes me up every morning with a squawk, like it’s warning me not to miss the day. I long for the loon call across the lake.

Ecuador is colder than you’d think, especially here in the mountains. I love the U of MN sweatshirt you sent me for Christmas
 
—even if I got it in March!

It’s been harder than I thought to go away for a year. I thought I’d love the Peace Corps. I used to think, when I watched slide shows from missionaries in our church, that I wanted to be a humanitarian aid worker. I didn’t realize how much of that time would be digging wells
and giving TB shots. I’ve discovered, however, that people here want the same things we want
 
—safety, health, family . . . love. It’s made me realize, too, that I probably don’t have to leave home to do something that changes lives.

You’d be proud of me
 
—I learned how to drive a clutch! Phil Samson taught me (although I thought he might kill me before I got it). Now I’m driving the Jeep for the team, transporting people to Quito and back. The new team flies in a few weeks before our annual retreat to Evergreen
 
—I hope to make the trip with my family again this year. I don’t know your plans, but I’d really love to see you.

Ingrid

John could see her sitting cross-legged on the ground, her notebook in her lap, her lip caught in her teeth as she wrote to him. Her long blonde hair would be caught by the cool Ecuadorian wind, her skin a deep brown, her arms shaped with muscle. When he’d read about her learning to drive the Jeep, a crazy, unbidden tightness grabbed him around the chest. He couldn’t bear the thought of her laughing with this Phil guy.

John should have been the one teaching her how to drive a clutch.

Maybe he’d take her out on his motorcycle tonight, lean over her shoulder as he taught her how to shift gears, put his hands on her hips. She wouldn’t even notice as he’d breathe in her smell, let her soft, silky hair slip through his fingers.

Maybe he could even hide how he’d started to thirst for her letters this year. How he longed, as his physical therapy bore down on him, to jump on a plane and escape his so-called dreams and find new ones.

With Ingrid.

But she’d be back tonight, and because of that, he’d returned to the resort for the summer, guiding fishing trips and preparing Duluth Packs and repairing cabins and cutting firewood and hoping, waiting for her to return.

Holding his breath for their Saturday night.

When her parents arrived a week ago
 
—alone
 
—he could admit to a layer of panic. So much that he’d managed to casually ask, one night by the campfire, if she might be coming home. The fact that she would drive up when her flight came in set a swirl of heat in his gut, one he couldn’t seem to douse.

He rinsed his razor in the sudsy water, then scraped another layer of whiskers off his cheek. He’d never seen the guy in the mirror quite so well groomed. In fact, he hadn’t seen so much of his face in years, but he liked the shorter cut, especially since it hid the fact that he’d begun losing his hair. And it revealed the rather-gnarly scar above his eye.

He’d probably end up like his grandfather, bald at thirty. But maybe Ingrid wouldn’t notice his lack of hair. He rinsed his face, dried it, then dressed in a clean pair of jeans, a gold T-shirt. He’d grown another inch this past year and put on fifteen pounds of muscle.

She might even be impressed. He hoped she’d see more than the guy from last year, ready to throw himself into the lake, or the kid in his foolish high school years who’d actually thought Ingrid Young might be forgettable.

Right. With every letter, Ingrid lodged further in his brain, his heart, until she dogged him at practice, stalked him in the library, edged into his dreams. Her belief that she could change the world irked him until he realized she’d changed him, made him long to be the person she saw.

He kept every piece of mail, found himself responding on notebook pages, hastily scribbling his thoughts
 
—who knew what he really wrote
 
—and shoving them into an envelope before fear turned his letter into a crumpled wad.

Ingrid Young was about as forgettable as the sunrise.

John glanced out his window and saw a new car in the lot, an old Dart parked beside the Youngs’ station wagon.

He experimented with some cologne, then grabbed his jacket and headed downstairs.

His mother took a batch of cookies out of the oven and let them rest on the cutting board on the counter. He swiped one.

She stopped him with a touch to his arm and pointed to her cheek. He obliged with a kiss and headed outside.

For a moment, before he hopped on the bike, he debated walking down to her cabin, knocking on her door, asking if she might want a ride. But . . . but tradition created magic. He wanted to spy her at the dance across the crowded street, make his way to her, see the anticipation in her smile.

He found Nate at the Deep Haven Realty booth handing out brochures.

“How’s your mom?” John asked, taking a brochure. Nate’s picture on the back evidenced his friend’s hard work this past year
 
—and his future.

“In remission. We’re hoping she’s licked the cancer.” Nate glad-handed a tourist couple, turned his attention to them. “Are you looking to buy land in Deep Haven?”

John purchased a fish burger from the Lions Club booth, keeping a casual eye out for Ingrid as twilight slid over the harbor in shades of lavender and rose. Behind him, the smells of the remnant summer, grilled hamburgers, cotton candy, and the sweet tang of ice cream hung in the air. The street band, set up on a stage in the park, began to warm up.

He was watching a family of towheaded boys losing a war with their ice
cream cones when he spotted her, wearing a pair of jeans, a sleeveless shirt, her back to him. A little thinner than he remembered, but that’s what overseas living did. She stood with a cadre of longtime guests from Evergreen, laughing. He caught her profile briefly as he headed toward her, tasting his heart.

“Ingrid?”

She turned, and for a moment, everything stopped. The sounds of the band leaning into the first few bars of Blondie’s “Call Me,” the cheers of an enthusiastic, eager audience, the stir of the summer wind, his pulse.

Not Ingrid. Kari. She had a hint of a burn on her nose, her face clean and tanned, looking every inch the beauty he knew she’d be. And in the way her eyes lit up, the smallest memory of her invading his dreams revived.

He whispered her name almost involuntarily, and she laughed.

“Really? You’re that surprised to see me?”

“I thought . . . Well, is Ingrid here?”

Kari stepped close to him, blew out a ring of smoke. Only now did he notice her T-shirt, the neck ripped down to reveal too much untanned flesh. How could he have ever confused her for Ingrid? “Ingrid didn’t come home.”

He frowned. “But . . .” He swallowed his words, fought against the tenor of disappointment. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. She just said she was staying. Who knows why Ingrid does what she does.”

He knew why. Because Ingrid cared about people more than fun. If she didn’t come home, she had a good reason. Like the new team hadn’t shown up, or they needed help at another village, or maybe even that she couldn’t bear to leave the youngsters she’d invested a year in.

He moved away from Kari, but she caught his arm. “John. Really. Ingrid? Listen.” She moved herself against him, her hand around his neck. “Once upon a time, you chased me through Deep Haven, remember?”

He wished he didn’t. He unlaced her arm from his neck. “That memory faded long ago.”

She pouted, something false and dangerous. “Let me remind you.”

But he stepped back, shaking his head. “Tell Ingrid, if you write to her, that I’ll be here next year.”

She rolled her eyes, but he headed to his bike, lifting a hand to Nathan. His friend frowned, but John didn’t look back as he drove toward Honeymoon Bluff.

If there were any memories he longed to stir, it was the ones of holding Ingrid in his arms. And the strange, lingering hope that he might again.

They hadn’t made promises to each other. In fact, if Ingrid could recall their last face-to-face interaction, she’d reminded him that they would be friends, just friends.

She’d even sealed it with a handshake.

Apparently those words sank in, found fertile soil.

So she shouldn’t have thought, despite the warmth in his letters, that over the year they’d tacitly agreed to be more.

She tucked her knees up into her sweatshirt, now fraying around the cuffs, and rested her chin on her knees while her fingers creased the edges of Kari’s letter to a razor-sharp edge.

To the east, sunlight began to spill into the valley, ribbons of light dropping into the tangled green forest, thick with spires of bamboo. From where she sat, two giant steps would plummet her into a gulley a thousand feet deep.

Times like this, she liked to sit at the edge.

Even if John hadn’t felt a shift in their correspondence, that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have told her about his night with Kari. Lies by omission still counted as lies.

The wind chased up the hill, tugged at the letter. She nearly let it go but then gripped it tight, crumpling it in her hand.

She might have to read it a dozen more times before she believed it, before Kari’s descriptions touched her bones.

He mentioned you, so apparently he considers you friends. It’s nice you two can stay in contact for now.

I probably shouldn’t kiss and tell, Ings, but the truth is, he was worth the wait. He took me to Artist’s Point, and we watched the waves roll in all the way to dawn. I hope you don’t mind, but I figure with you off digging wells and giving TB shots, you had more important things to worry about.

I hope to see you at Christmas!

Love,

Kari

Worth the wait.
Ingrid closed her eyes, felt the moisture burn her cheek, wiped it away before it fell. Yes, indeed, he would have been. She could see him as Kari described him. Tall, his hair cut shorter
 
—he’d mentioned how he liked it out of his face, although honestly, she’d miss the forelock of dark hair
 
—muscles stretching the sleeves of his maroon University of Minnesota T-shirt.

He would look at her with his too-handsome smile she missed and ask her to go for a ride on his motorcycle.

She’d dreamed of it for months actually.

And he hadn’t helped, not with the suggestions he’d made in his last letter that she might mean more to him. She’d received it two weeks before she intended to leave Ecuador, two weeks before the torrential rain that cut off all communication. She’d barely been able to get a telegram to her parents.