Losing Gabriel (37 page)

She liked the couple as people too. They were kind and friendly and often turned their small stage area over to newbie musicians, giving newcomers the opportunity to sing for an audience. Sloan earned good money serving food and liquor, but when Noreen learned that Sloan could play and sing, she told her to bring her guitar and try out for a Saturday-night spot. “We're always looking for new talent.”

“I'm not a soloist. I was with a band.”

“Come on. Give it a try.”

After Sloan performed in a private audition, Noreen studied her thoughtfully. “You have a great voice. And I can tell you're no beginner. What happened with the band?”

“It just didn't work out.”

Noreen asked for no other details; she simply stood and said, “Band's loss. Plan on doing a few numbers next Saturday night. I know talent when I hear it.”

On her days off, Sloan wrote music, sad ballads that sent ripples through her heart, still battered and bruised over memories of Gabe. Once, when she went to the grocery store, she bought a box of Cheerios, tore open the inner bag in her kitchen, and buried her nose in the scent of oats with a touch of honey, the fragrance of the breath of the child she'd loved and lost.

When the weather warmed, Sloan attended a street craft fair where she found a girl who made jewelry from wire, glass beads, and feathers. She paid the artisan to restring Gabe's baby bracelet onto stainless steel wire and add new beading to enlarge it and a sturdy safety clasp. The bracelet became the only jewelry she ever wore.

She thought too of Dawson, who was probably one of the best things that had ever happened to her, and her decision to walk away from him. Maybe one day, with enough time between them and what had happened, they'd meet again, and she wouldn't walk away.

Maybe.

L
ani remained in Alaska almost four months, fretted over by her worried parents while wrapped in a cocoon of warm blankets and endless nights. Melody returned to Windemere after Christmas but called every few days to chat. Mel had confiscated Lani's cell phone before they'd gone north, insisting that the device would just badger her with calls from well-meaning people drilling questions at her. Lani shuddered with the thought. Escape and regrouping meant leaving everything else behind, including Dawson. Especially Dawson. He was never out of her thoughts.

Lani returned in April. She missed home, and her long rides on Oro, which had helped heal her after Arie died. Perhaps riding would help heal her again.

“Because you missed your
horse
! What about me, Sister of the Year, who didn't rent out your room?” Melody teased as she drove Lani home from the Nashville airport.

“I missed you too!” Lani said with a laugh. “Make any changes in the apartment?”

“Took down the Christmas decorations.”

“Progress, I reckon.”

Melody reached over and took Lani's hand. “Welcome home.”

A day later, Lani drove to Bellmeade, with a bounce in her spirit too long missing. Soldier, Bellmeade's longtime guard dog bounded up to her car, tail wagging. “Still remember me, boy?” She petted his thick white coat.

Ciana, dressed in jeans, a heavy barn coat, and work gloves, came out and greeted her with a hug. “You're home! Welcome back.”

“How's Oro?”

“Fine. I ride him twice a week.” Regular riding of saddle horses was good for a horse, and exercising others' horses had been one of Lani's jobs when she worked at Bellmeade. “Oro will be glad to see you,” Ciana added.

“Thank you. I…I appreciate—”

Ciana waved her hand. “No need. You've been in a hard place. I truly understand.” Of course Ciana understood. Arie had been Ciana's best friend, and the loss of her had upended Ciana for some time.

“How did you do it? Get over Arie's dying? I…I can't…Gabe…It hurts so much.” Lani blinked against a swift rise of tears.

“I never ‘got over it.' I miss her still, but good memories of her always sneak in to help me feel better. I still see her as she was in high school, her pretty smile, her love of life. Talking about her, our good times, also helps. Our friend Eden always calls on special days, like Arie's birthday or the day we lost her. No matter where she and Garret are in the world, Eden never forgets. We cry a little, laugh a little, then get on with our lives.” Ciana's gaze swept the land, her land. “And sometimes when I ride, I feel like she's watching over me.”

The day was bright with sunlight, and after the long nights of Alaska, the world looked fresh and new.
Perspective,
Lani told herself. Life needed perspective. “I owe you feed money for Oro. Let me work it off.”

They had been meandering across the lawn. “Your sister paid his bills. You owe me nothing, but if you want your old job again…” Ciana stopped. “Wait. I forgot. You're in college.”

Lani wasn't yet ready to talk about leaving the nursing program. “Still trying to figure things out, but for now, I'll take the job if you're serious about it. I've missed”—Dawson's image formed in her head, and she shook it away—“everything.”

“The job's yours.” Ciana's cell phone dinged with an incoming message. She read it and broke out in a smile. “How would you like to come with me and see something amazing happen?”

Lani welcomed the interruption. “What's going on?”

“Follow me.”

They jogged down the path leading to the exercise track and the several new stables built since the tornado. Lani saw Jon's truck alongside another, parked next to a small freestanding enclosed unit that housed stalls designed for horse breeding. Nolte, the great black stallion rumored to have been a wedding gift to Ciana and Jon from a man in Italy, stuck his head over a corral fence and whinnied at Ciana. With a laugh, she called to the black stallion, “Your work's done, big guy. We're here for the main event.” She quietly led Lani inside the building.

Jon and the vet who had saved Oro from the snakebite were standing beside a stall, their forearms crossed on the upper railing. Jon turned. “Not much longer now.” He acknowledged Lani with a welcoming nod, beckoned them both closer, and stepped aside.

Lani took his place, peeking over the top of the stall. A chestnut mare with a swollen belly was breathing hard, her sides heaving. Lani caught her breath. “For
real
?”

“Not long now,” Ciana said softly next to her.

Lani glanced at the vet. “Is she all right?”

“I'm just here as a precaution because it's her first.”

The dark horse in the stall lay down on the fresh straw. Her legs stiffened, and Lani watched, awestruck, as a fully formed foal slid out of the mother's birth canal and onto the straw, wet from the womb and dark as night. The foal lay motionless.

“Breathe,” Ciana urged, just as the animal's sides puffed outward and its front legs curved, seeking solid ground.

The foal struggled up onto all fours, wobbling and blinking with the light. His dam rose awkwardly and began to lick him, nudging him with her nose until he turned into her, nuzzling his way to her hindquarters and beginning to nurse. Jon, Ciana, and the vet broke into applause and broad smiles. “From what I can see, I think we have a boy,” Jon announced, and lifted Ciana off the ground in a bear hug.

Lani couldn't take her eyes off the suckling foal, his long spindly legs already strong and ready to run had he been born in the wild. Life re-created. “He's beautiful.”

“What would you call him?” Ciana asked in her ear. “Your first thought.”

“Pure Magic,” Lani answered without hesitation.

“Then that will be his name.”

As twilight fell, Lani parked across the street from Dawson's house. She sat gazing longingly at wicker furniture never put away in the fall and front windows that should be aglow with lamplight but instead were dark and as blank as closed eyelids. The house was empty, lifeless. She took a shuddering breath. How she had loved the people in that house! Had it only been just over a year since she'd taken the job as Gabe's caregiver? It felt like a lifetime ago.

Lani picked at a rip in the car seat's upholstery.
Where are you, Dawson?
She missed him, but Melody had been right in urging Lani to leave her phone behind…so many calls and questions from friends, coworkers, admin at MTSU, human resources at the hospital, Mrs. Trammell, urging Lani to return. But it was Dawson's texts and voice mails that had made her regret the decision. Now that she was home, she wanted to reach out to him, let him know how sorry she was, how much she wanted…
what?
she asked herself as a sliver of silvery moon shone through her windshield. What could she give him except a speech about how sorry she was? And what of Sloan? Had they gone off together? Had Gabe brought the two of them together once more? She didn't know and was afraid of finding out.

Lani pressed against her eyes, brimming and burning with unshed tears.
Gone.
All was gone. She shivered, turned on the engine, and edged away from the curb, driving away from her dreams and all she'd once held so dear.

D
awson remained in Chicago long after the holidays. “Not ready to go back,” he told Franklin. He didn't think he ever wanted to see Windemere again. “Sorry about crashing on you and Connie. I'll get a job and promise to stay out of your way.”

“Not a problem. Stay. We both work and are gone a lot.” Franklin was returning to his classroom position and Connie to her job at Chicago's venerated Field Museum. “You'll never be in our way, Daw.”

But it was Connie who offered a win-win solution for the three of them. “I own a condo over on Wells Street. My ex bought it for Justine when she attended the Art Institute. The place was big enough for her and roommates, so it more than paid for itself. Now that she's married and overseas, I was about to put it on the market. Why don't you use it until you sort things out in your life? It's fully furnished. You'll just have to pay utilities.”

Dawson gratefully accepted and quickly found a job at a gym in the downtown area that he could walk to from the condo, so his car rarely left the parking garage. The gym catered to the young business crowd, city dwellers, many like himself in their twenties. He did grunt work, keeping the men's locker room clean, laundering wads of towels, and manning a small juice bar, where he prepared a menu of smoothies and protein shakes for members, mostly women in spandex after yoga and exercise classes. The women were attractive, fit and flirty, often dropping folded pieces of paper or business cards with their phone numbers into his tip jar. He couldn't say he wasn't tempted, because it had been a long time since he'd been with a woman, but he wasn't a one-night-stand kind of guy, nor was he interested in anything long-term.

A good thing about his gym job was that he had access to the machines, weights, boxing bag, and gloves. He grew a beard, kept it trimmed and neat, but with his dark shaggy hair and dark chocolate-colored eyes, he thought his mirror image reflected the darkness that lay inside of him. In the heart of winter, he took up running again, choosing a path along Lakeshore Drive where the wind whipped off the ice-edged water of Lake Michigan. When he ran, he wore a black ski mask, black gloves, and a couple layers of dark running clothes that wicked sweat off his hard, lean body. He ran in the bitter cold, his lungs on fire, with frost settling around the mouth and nose holes of the ski mask from his breath. He ran regardless of brutal weather—the harsher the better. He ran to forget.

April came, and with it a late snowstorm that laid down six inches of new snow. As soon as the streets and sidewalks were plowed, he went for a run in Grant Park and afterward ducked into a coffee shop. He was sipping hot coffee and staring out the shop's front window when a bus groaned past, a large poster anchored to its side. The sign was advertising a drug rehab center that posed a question:

Are YOU living in the valley of the shadow of death?

The words struck him as if he'd been slammed against a wall. Dawson Berke knew this valley well because it was where he was living every minute of every day since Gabe's funeral.
In the shadow of death.
The image of the brass plate that marked Gabe's grave flashed in his head. Name and dates…birth and death. Too brief a time line between the two numbers. And he asked himself,
Who will brush snow off Gabe's marker?
Or autumn leaves, or summer's mown grass? And then an answer:
Gabe's father should.
But Gabe's father had checked out. Gone away. And yet leaving Windemere had not stopped the pain of loss, merely transferred it to another city.

He stepped outside, breathing hard from the emotional body slam. He wanted out of the valley. The wind had stopped; the cold was numbing. He walked across the street to the park, where he eased his cell phone from his pocket. He tapped his photo icon and thumbed through the pictures—Gabe in his arms, swaddled in a blue baby blanket; Gabe at three months, and six months, nine months old. Dawson watched a video of his son at one year old, on his feet, lurching from one piece of furniture to another, babbling and saying “Dada,” the first word Gabe ever said.

In every photo, Gabe grew, changed from baby to toddler to child, ever smiling, ever happy. He stopped thumbing the photos when he came to one from Gabe's third birthday party. Lani was holding Gabe, both of them laughing joyously into the camera lens. The image threw sunshine across the shadows of his heart.

He touched Lani's face on the screen with his thumb. Here in the quiet of the new-fallen snow, he thought of the times he'd wanted to hold her, kiss her—and had not. He thought of her day-to-day presence, the way she'd hurry through the doorway, all smiles, her brown eyes dancing. He missed how she covertly looked at him when she thought he didn't notice. He wanted to see her. The want was like an ache, a deep, unremitting need to be with her, and it triggered something in his spirit that whispered,
Home.
Windemere, the place he'd fled, the place he'd once hated. It had given him Sloan, Gabe…and Lani. He shoved the phone deep into the pocket of his ski jacket, then turned and began to jog with renewed purpose. Like a car stuck in a rut helplessly spinning its tires, sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward.

Lani was mucking out stalls when her phone rang. She looked at the display screen and felt as though she'd been shot through the heart. Dawson calling. She answered with “Hello,” and hoped her voice wasn't shaking as much as her hand.

“How are you?” His voice, deep and soft.

“I'm just fine.”
Liar…
“How are you?
Where
are you?”

“At the house. Been in Chicago since December.”

She wanted to weep from the simple pleasure of hearing his voice, of knowing he was nearby. “Good to hear from you.”

A brief silence, then, “I'm calling to ask a favor.”

Anything!
“Of course. What can I do?”

“Dad wants to put the house on the market. He's asked me to clear it out…get rid of furniture and stuff.” Her stomach twisted. He would leave again. “No heavy lifting,” he added quickly. “I…um…I just need your help to clear Gabe's room.” Long pause. “And…well, I'm not sure I can face it by myself.”

She closed her eyes, rocked back on her heels, knowing that the task would hurt like crazy, but she could refuse him nothing. “What time?”

“Maybe two o'clock?”

It was now noon, so she'd have time to go to the apartment and clean up. “I'll be there.”

“All right. And thanks, Lani.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. He disconnected, and she pressed the phone to her breast, hoping she had the courage to lose Gabe and Dawson all over again.