Mermaid (16 page)

“Um-hmm. I guess so.” Still she felt ashamed of her cowardice. She loved this man. Why was it so hard to show him all of herself, all of her naked, imperfect self?

“Jillian, I understand, you know. This must have been very difficult for you. It was the first time, wasn’t it? Since—”

Silently she nodded.

He smoothed her wet hair back from her face, kissed the top of her head. “Do you know how honored I feel that you’ve given me so much love, so much trust?”

She felt a sob rising up in her chest and choked it down. Now was not the time for tears. That time was past. It was a time for rejoicing, and she lifted her face to his, her eyes aglow.

“I love you, Mark. Did I tell you how much I love you?” Then, shy again, remembering that she had said those words over and over just moments before, she dipped her head once more and hugged him tightly.

He chuckled. The sound was deep in his chest and rumbled pleasantly against her ear and filled her heart with gladness. “It seems to me that I did hear you mention it a time or two. But you’re free to say it as often as you like.”

“You won’t get bored with hearing it?”

“I won’t get bored with anything you do.” He lifted her face and looked at her. “You’ve made me very happy, Jilly. Is it okay for me to call you Jilly? I know your mother does, but...”

“All my family does, Mark.” She touched his face and brushed her fingers over his lips. “I mean, all the rest of my family.”

When she awoke in Mark’s bed, she knew many hours had passed. Through the open drapes, she could see that twilight had faded the sky to white and inked in the trees as black silhouettes. She was tangled in the sheet he’d pulled over them after they’d made love again. One light burned at the bedside, and in its pale glow, she could see he wasn’t in the room. She sat up, and called Mark, but there was no reply, so she got out of bed and with the aid of a chair, went into the adjoining bathroom where they had showered together earlier. He had left her a note saying that he’d be back soon. No word of where he’d gone, just that he’d be back. Oddly enough it was all she needed to know.

Smiling, she saw that he had left out another white terry robe for her. How many did he own? She still had that first one at her house. She took a quick bath and wrapped herself in the warm, thick garment, which came only to her knees. Her eyes widened and her heart started to hammer when a door slammed somewhere in the house and she heard Mark’s footsteps approaching.

“Jillian?” He had seen the empty bed. “Jillian, where are you?”

She opened the bathroom door and stood there, holding onto the knob, watching him cross toward her, a suitcase in one hand, and a world of love in his eyes. Slowly she breathed again, not realizing until then that she had been holding her breath, waiting for some kind of reaction from him—one that never came.

His gaze swept over her from the top of her head to the tips of her single set of toes, and still all she could see in his face was the warmth of love that made her complete even in her own eyes and suffused her with gladness.

“Hi,” he said, and kissed her until she was dizzy.

“Where have you been?”

He grinned. “Mmm. I like that. You sound like a wife already. It’s going to be wonderful having someone care about where I go and what I do and when I come home. And, since I have permission to marry you, you have my permission to sound like a wife.”

She had to laugh. “Of all the evasive, sneaky answers I’ve ever heard, that beats them all. You still didn’t tell me where you—What do you mean, you have permission to marry me? Whose?”

“Your mother’s and your daughter’s. Your mother packed some things she thought you’d need tonight. I’ve already checked. She packed a couple of things you won’t need, too, but she meant well.” He lifted her with one arm and carried her to sit on the bed where he handed her the bag and her prosthesis.

After a moment of sick-feeling horror, she met his calm eyes, saw no disgust, no revulsion. Then, slowly, she reached for the prosthesis, complete with articulated ankle and running shoe, and strapped it on to her thigh.

“You’ll find the other shoe in the bottom of the bag,” he said. “You get dressed. I’m going to fire up the barbecue.”

After a long moment, she grinned. “Now you’re starting to sound just like a husband. Bossy. Domineering.”

Leaning casually in the doorway, he looked her and down as if imagining her without the thick bathrobe covering her. His gaze made her tingle. “Just getting in practice,” he said with a grin, then asked, “When?”

Drawing in a tremulous breath, she said, “Yesterday?”

He laughed. “I’ll work on it, Mermaid. I want it to be that soon too.”

“Talk about a whirlwind romance!” Jillian, who perched on the arm of a chair in the living room of their Seattle home, set the phone down with one hand while the other stroked through Mark’s thick hair. “Do you know who that was?”

He smiled. “Well, the impression I got is that it was your mother, and that she’s getting married. I can’t say I’m surprised. That day I went there to get your things for the night, I discovered that Edward had canceled his dinner date with his daughter because he’d finally met his match in Scrabble and didn’t want to leave. I take it they’re well-matched in other ways, as well.”

“But Mark! They’ve known each other for a month and a half! Six weeks! And they’re getting married!”

He tumbled her onto his lap and nuzzled his face into her neck, sending shivers of delight down her spine. “And who are you to talk, Mrs. Forsythe? What about us? We were married four weeks after we met.”

She laughed as she responded soberly, “That was different. We were never strangers.”

“Maybe Shirley and Edward feel the same way,” he said.

Indeed, it turned out the older couple felt exactly the same way.

On their wedding day, Edward asked both children if they’d consider calling him “Grandpa,” and explained that if he wasn’t their grandpa, he wouldn’t be allowed to spoil them. “Grandma,” he said, a faint complaint in his tone, “won’t let me.”

Readily, both children agreed.

“All right, ‘Grandpa’ ”, Mark said, “I’ll permit my kids to call you that on one condition.”

“Condition, sir?”

“If you’re to be my stepfather-in-law, you no longer call me ‘sir’.”

Edward huffed. “Oh, well, now, sir. I don’t know...”

“
Dad
,” Jillian said with a grin, “I think you’d best give in. This husband of mine is as stubborn as your bride.”

“I am not,” her mother protested. “I merely expect, within our family, we do not stand on ceremony. Edward, my son-in-law is no longer to be called ‘sir” by my husband. Clear?”

Edward sighed long and loud. “Yes, dearest. Quite clear.”

“Well then?” she prompted.

He sighed again. “Very well. “M-Mark. But you,” he added facing his former employer, “will not be calling me ‘dad’. Is that also clear?”

Mark clapped him on the shoulder and grinned widely. “Yes, sir!”

Long after the newly-weds had left on their honeymoon to St. Petersburg, Florida, a pair of tired children had gone to bed, but their mother and father continued to pick up dishes, glasses and crumpled napkins.

“I wonder,” Mark said, “if they’ll...well, you know.”

“Consummate their marriage? That, my love, is none of our business.”

“Hmm...I suppose you’re right,” he conceded, drawing her away from the vacuum cleaner she’d pulled from a closet. “But
this is
our business.”

As she responded to the growing urgency of his kisses and touches, adding a few embellishments of her own as they went along, he didn’t waste any more time speculating about his mother-in-law and Edward.

Nobody but he and Jillian had ever felt quite this way about each other. Nobody could have, or the world already would have come to a halt.

In the few weeks that they’d been married, it seemed that all they ever did, ever wanted to do—and ever would want to do—every chance they got was love each other.

He carried her off to their bedroom, closing the door tightly and setting her down gently in the middle of their big bed. She sighed in perfect happiness as they began to take each other’s clothes off, and then murmured in ecstasy as their bodies finally came together in a wonderful union they had made uniquely theirs.

While the nights belonged to them, their days belonged to their children. Sleeping in was a luxury they had been denied after their brief, week-long honeymoon. But as Mark got up to open the door to a knock the next morning, and Jillian sat against the headboard smiling at the two kids who stood in the doorway, neither of them minded. “This is the last day of your vacation, Dad. What are we going to do?”

Chris, under the umbrella of love spread by his father and stepmother and little stepsister, had become a changed child. He still grieved for his mother but no longer believed that Mark had deliberately killed her or had wanted him out of the way too. As he’d said to Jillian one day when the two of them were talking quietly together about it, “I think I was a little bit nuts, Jilly. I just missed my mom so much, and I was scared to love Dad in case he went away too.”

“It’s the last day of yours and Amber’s vacations too,” said Mark, the sound of his voice bringing Jillian back to the present. “Suppose the two of you decide and then let us know.”

As the kids left, he closed the door and clicked the lock in place. Turning back to the bed, he shucked his pajama bottoms and slid back under the covers, drawing his wife into his embrace. The decision-making, he was certain, would take at least half an hour.

That would be long enough. Just.

Jillian looked at the clean bathroom and backed out of it. It was the last room of the eight she had scrubbed or vacuumed to within an inch of its life, and there was nothing more to do. It was only eleven-fifteen in the morning. The day stretched ahead of her endlessly, as had all the other days except weekends, for the past three months. The Thanksgiving festivities were behind them, and her Christmas shopping was all done. The packages were all wrapped and stored neatly away. She had read all the books she’d been wanting to read for years, also watched a hundred or more DVDs of movies she’d been wanting to see. Next, she supposed, were daytime game shows and soaps.

Wandering into the spotless kitchen, she spent an hour baking cookies then another twenty minutes cleaning up again. She sighed, sat down, and idly turned the pages of a magazine. She could go shopping, she thought, but she didn’t need anything. She didn’t want anything. Neither of the kids needed anything. Mark didn’t need anything. Nobody did.

But more important, nobody needed her for anything at all.

She sat blinking hard to hold back tears as she let that thought sink in, but the tears flowed anyway. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? She was redundant in all their lives.

The kids had school all day. Chris went to soccer practice a couple of afternoons a week, guitar lessons once a week, and the other days he was out playing with his friends.

And Amber went to school, to ballet and karate, and talked about her teachers and how wonderful they were. She had made lots of friends in the months they had been there and was one busy little girl.

Mark, of course, had his work. While his “elves” were excellent at the jobs they did, they still needed supervision and guidance, so Mark didn’t take very many days off, even though he could afford to. He had an able assistant who could and did take over when necessary, but his workers trusted looked up to him, and he liked to be there for them.

She and Mark had a fairly normal social life, and from within his circle of friends, she had made some friends of her own.

But going out to lunch with a friend once or twice a week wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she needed. Now, in this moment of tearful introspection, she asked herself what it she needed, but she couldn’t come up with an easy answer, only one that she recognized as being impossible.

She needed a job, but she hadn’t seen any ads for mermaids in a long while.

She quickly brushed her tears away as she heard Mark’s key in the door. But as he entered, he frowned, knowing right away that she had been crying. Crouching in front of her, he drew her into his arms. “What is it, love?”

She shook her head. If she didn’t have an answer for herself, how could she give one to her husband?

“Nothing, really. Just a minor case of the blues. It’ll get better,” she assured him.

It didn’t get any better. Day by day it got worse. Even the kids noticed and started tiptoeing around as if they had done something bad to make Jillian so sad. But she struggled to put on a cheerful demeanor for their sakes and Mark’s. Often, she could convince the children that there was nothing bothering her, but Mark was a different story.

At night he held her, loved her, traveled with her to their secret, wonderful place, and then lay awake when she thought he was asleep, watching silent tears run down her face. But he couldn’t get an answer out of her about what the problem was. Maybe it was just the adjustment to a different kind of life, to marriage, to being a homemaker, to having two children rather than one. Maybe she missed her mother.

And maybe he had been right all along, that he made a better bachelor than he did a husband, because clearly he wasn’t making her happy. What they had together wasn’t enough.

When Christmas came and her mother and Edward, the two children, and even Chris’s grandparents sat down to dinner with them and complimented her on the wonderful job she had done, Mark thought perhaps it would be the turning point.

She glowed under their praise and watched with pride as Mark carved the golden-skinned turkey she had spent all afternoon basting and fretting over.

On New Year’s Eve, she laughed like an excited girl as she kissed him in the crowd of swaying, dancing friends, with streamers and confetti and music swirling around them, and he thought that now, at last, she had made the necessary adjustments and would be happy again.

But when the kids were back in school and Mark back, at work, the sadness descended upon her once more, even though she was growing better at concealing it.