Authors: Sally John
Rain beat against the many windows now. She turned on a lamp and sank onto a cushioned wicker couch. Such a comfortable, peaceful room . . . paid for by miners who lived in horrible poverty.
By the time Sheridan met Eliot, she had all but disowned her father and Calissa. They did not impact her life except when someone asked her about her family.
“We’re estranged,” she said to Eliot when he asked. It was on their first official date, two days after they met. “My family and I. When I was seventeen, I left home and have yet to find a reason to go back.”
It was her standard explanation of family relationships. Friends she made in college and after knew little about her childhood. She avoided at all costs mentioning her father’s position because people invariably wondered what it was like to grow up with such an
important
man. She would dance a two-step around the real answer, that personally he was an
impossible
man. Despite everything, she refused to rat on him. The art of politicking must have been ingrained in her at an early age. The ironic thing was, that probably was what made her a good diplomat’s wife.
She remembered Eliot’s response to her reply about being estranged. He turned and gazed out the window toward an extraordinary view of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline. Of course he’d taken her to The Signature Room atop the John Hancock building. She’d already begun to sense that everything he did was first-class.
A smile crept over his face, a gentle one. No teeth showing, the cheeks rounding, the crow’s-feet creasing slightly. Then he turned back to her. His blue eyes twinkled as if a fairy had dusted them. “Ah. You have issues, then. I suppose I should hightail it the other direction.”
“Yes, you should. Definitely.”
“But you don’t know
my
issues.”
“Therefore I should hightail it out of here also?”
“Yes.” He grinned, a quick show of perfectly straight teeth. “Sher.”
She all but swooned. How naturally he tagged her with the nickname that others used occasionally. With him, though, it wasn’t so much an abridging of her name as an endearment made extra lovely in his clipped, faintly British inflection.
A tickle danced down her spine. She was doomed. Good grief. It was only their first date. He was old enough to be a big brother on the tail end of the previous generation, and although his blond curls were quirky and his mouth nicely shaped and wide, he was not all that good-looking. But there was . . . something.
He went on. “Who doesn’t have issues? Who doesn’t have rubbish piled up from the past? It’s why Jesus said to those men who wanted to condemn the woman caught in adultery, ‘he who is without sin, cast the first stone.’”
His reference to Jesus racked up points for him right then and there. She could almost feel her deceased mother reach down from heaven and tickle her ear.
“Pay attention to this one,”
she would be saying.
“Jesus?”
Eliot smiled. “As in God’s Son. He is all about forgiveness.”
Is.
Present tense.
“Yes, I know. I just haven’t heard much from Him lately.”
“Not to sound preachy, but are you listening?”
“No.” She smiled at him. “My mother would like you very much.”
“But you’re estranged.”
“So to speak.” She wasn’t ready yet to trust him with the loss of her mother.
“I’m sure you’ve been told this before, Sheridan, but your brown eyes glitter with gold flecks. Truly stunning. I am mesmerized.”
More points for being in tune enough to know when to change the subject.
In late April on their third date, the one with the white tie and tails and the United Nations gala, he told her more about his family. He was an only child. His mother had been forty when he was born, his father fifty. Both were now deceased. He still adored and respected them.
She listened in rapt attention. “I am so envious. Your parents obviously loved you beyond measure, didn’t they? Completely, totally, unconditionally. Do you know how rare that is?”
His expression turned somber and she knew she’d revealed more about her story than she had intended.
By May they were talking daily, usually by long distance. Through June and July their friendship blossomed into an intense whirlwind of a courtship. He was forty-two, in between overseas assignments, living in D.C. She was thirty and for the first time in forever was not teaching or taking a class. Her volunteer social work all but disappeared from her schedule because he filled it.
That was when she accepted the inconvenient fact that she had fallen in love with Eliot Logan Montgomery III.
And he hadn’t even kissed her yet.
The kiss came soon after, though. They had been to an incredible outdoor jazz concert in Grant Park and meandered down to the lake. Their spirits high from the music and the newness of discovering yet another common interest, they strolled along the broad walkway at the lake’s edge, under the stars. The summer night air was thick with humid scents of earth and water. In the distance the lights of Navy Pier twinkled.
Eliot reached over and took her hand as if she were an extension of him.
And just like that, she was.
Before that evening there had been the brushing of shoulders, the press of his hand at the small of her back or at her elbow, the physical closeness of lips to ear for a whisper. But not this intimate touch.
He exhaled a solid, manly hum of contentment. “Somehow I knew that holding your hand would give me the sensation of kicking a soccer ball past the goalie and, bam, right into the net.”
She laughed. “I was thinking more along the lines of fireworks.”
His hearty laugh rang out. Like the rest of him—cute blond curls aside—it was distinguished, deep and rich and full.
He kissed in the same way. And she was awash in something grander than fireworks.
In late July she visited him in Washington. They kissed at the airport, in the limo, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and on a park bench.
He smiled. “Welcome to Washington.”
“Thanks.” She giggled like a teenager, thoroughly embarrassing herself.
“You’re blushing, dear.” His eyes did their fairy dust shimmer again. “Sher, you are a glorious surprise to me.”
She knew Noelle hovered in his statement. He had told her that he never imagined himself in a relationship after his wife of ten years was killed in a car accident. Added to his suffering was the regret that she had not wanted children. It was through his pain that he’d found peace and hope in the God of his youth.
He said, “Sorry. I don’t want to scare you away.”
She shook her head. “You can’t, Eliot.”
“We’ve known each other such a short time, and I’m leaving soon for overseas, you know, and—”
She touched his lips. “Shush. You can’t scare me away.”
“I love you, Sheridan Ysabel Cole.”
“And I love you, Eliot Logan Montgomery the Third. And by the way, I think you should hear about my family.”
“Ah.” A moment passed, his eyes studying hers. “The issues.”
“Yes.” She had already told him parts of her story, about her mother being from Venezuela and the light of her life until she died. She had told him about her older sister’s dominance, her father’s emotional absence, her grandparents gone long before her birth, the horrible loneliness of home. She had told him that she had never wanted for physical comforts but ached for heart connections. She had told him how she buried herself in studies and work and found fulfillment in those relationships.
Now she told him the rest. “My father is Harrison Cole, a representative from Illinois. I always hated it when people asked me what it was like to live with such an important man.” She shrugged. “I got tired of making up pleasant stories, and so I estranged myself and stopped talking about him.”
Eliot gently wiped at the tears streaming down her cheeks and pulled her to himself. “Dearest . . .” He held her for a very long time. . . .
The storm grew loud, drawing Sheridan back to the present moment. Thunder boomed. The wind flung sheets of rain against rattling windowpanes.
Loneliness stabbed at her again, all too familiar in the surroundings of her childhood home.
Maybe it wasn’t the house. The ache was familiar because she lived with it in Topala.
How was it that she had married a man who emotionally distanced himself from her exactly as her father had?
Topala
Eliot should have quit the moment he saw Padre Miguel behind the steering wheel of the car as it lurched up the hill to where he stood at their front gate. Javier was supposed to be in that seat. Javier was a spacey artist, but at least he was young and coordinated, and although he drove infrequently, he’d driven more times in the past year than the padre had in his entire life.
The priest set the brake and climbed nimbly from the small car, grinning. “Javier is busy.” He gestured down the hill. “Look at the crowds.”
The town square at the bottom of the hill was indeed full of tourists, the people who paid Javier’s bills.
“Padre, we can wait.”
“Nonsense.” He pried the walker from Eliot’s hands, deftly folded it, and popped it into the trunk. “Get in, señor.”
Before Eliot could protest, the old man basically folded and popped Eliot into the passenger seat. A moment later Padre Miguel was depressing the clutch at the wrong time and grinding gears. He killed the engine three times before he had the car turned around and pointed downhill.
He chuckled. “Javier only had time to give me one lesson in finding reverse. Now we are set. Do you think this is first here?”
Eliot clutched the dashboard with both hands as they began the descent in free-fall mode, around the square, past shops and homes, past Davy’s. Much to his surprise, they made it to the highway without hitting a pedestrian or a donkey. The whole time Padre Miguel laughed and waved.
If the desire to hear Sheridan’s voice did not feel like a knife stuck in his chest, he would have ended the trip right then and there.
“Are there four or five gears?” The padre’s eyes were glued to the gear stick.
Eliot crossed himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.
“Good idea.” He crossed himself.
“Uh, five.”
“Five?”
“Gears.”
“Oh. Right.” As the car gained speed on the two-lane, he shifted here and there, at last engaging the right spot. “And we are on our way. What exactly is wrong with you?”
“You mean besides my heart pounding in my throat right now?”
Padre Miguel laughed long and hard. “Yes, besides that. Why can’t you walk very well without support?”
“I was shot. You probably knew that?”
“Yes, it was all over the papers, in the archives.”
“There’s nerve damage. It screwed up my balance.” He really did not want to talk about this.
“Where exactly is the problem?”
“What?”
“In your back? In your leg?”
“It’s in a variety of places.”
“Here?” He reached over the console and touched the left side of Eliot’s hip.
“Look out!”
The padre jerked the steering wheel and guided the car back into the right lane. A semi barreled past them, the driver laying on the horn and offering a hand signal.
“Bless you!” the padre called as if the other man could hear him.
Eliot’s heart hammered in his throat and head and chest. His breathing came in huffs and puffs. He wanted to shut his eyes but dared not. He wanted to tell the priest that he was a meddlesome noodlehead but dared not.
It didn’t seem quite proper to bellow demeaning remarks at a man whose mere touch had twice now left a burning sensation on his skin.
* * *
Mesa Aguamiel, Mexico
“No answer?”
Eliot jumped at the voice of Padre Miguel behind him. He turned from his seat in the kitchen to see him silhouetted in the front doorway.
They had made it to Mesa Aguamiel, to the tiny house that belonged to Mercedes’s aunt Maria, the relative with the telephone. He had wanted to use a public pay phone, but again the priest overruled his desires. The priest said Mercedes and her entire extended family would be mortified if he refused their gift.
“No, no answer,” Eliot said.
“Well, when it comes to God’s clock, there are no accidents of timing. He has a good reason to prevent you two from talking with each other right now.”
“Or else there’s a sunspot interrupting transmitters. Or she just happens to be between certain skyscrapers on a certain block, in a dead zone. Or traffic noise is too loud for her to hear the ring. Or planets and moons are not aligned just so. There are a dozen reasons she’s not answering the phone which she said she would carry with her at all times.”
“Exactly!” He smiled. “The good Lord uses all sorts of means to do His business. Did you leave a message?”
“No.” What could he possibly say to Sheridan’s voice mail?
Greetings from some stranger’s house, where I’m sitting, looking like a complete imbecile. First off, I listened to a lunatic whom I’ve managed to avoid for nine months. Secondly, I trusted in cellular service, of all things. I must be going now. Hopefully I’ll get home alive. Don’t worry. Ta-ta.
“She’ll want to hear your voice, señor. That you miss her.” He looked crestfallen.
Eliot could not form an answer from the sputters in his mind.
“Well.” The priest smiled brightly. “Let’s do our other errands, and then we can come back and you can try again.”
“‘Other errands’?”
“Didn’t I mention . . . ?”
Eliot stopped listening. What on earth had he gotten himself into?
Wilmette
Seated on the couch, Calissa drummed her fingers on the coffee table, empty except for the white box. Like a bomb it sat there, loaded with incriminating evidence, ready to explode facts all over their heads, shrapnel that would cut more deeply into her own heart because of her sister’s reaction.
Assuming her sister came back into the living room.
There were sounds indicating that Sheridan was in the bathroom now. Bram was in the kitchen, making tea and probably throwing together crumpets. He could be such a mother hen.