This Love Will Go On (2 page)

Being away from Jade was a welcome reprieve. Raine got involved in schoolwork and a few years later, she went to work for Julia and had occasional dates with Jade's brother Marc. Then the year Raine turned twenty-one, Michele became pregnant.  This time, Michele's pleas to Raine were insistent and then tearful. Michele wouldn't be cut off from humanity altogether. She needed Raine. Couldn’t Raine please come out to the ranch and stay for a few weeks? In the end, it was Jade's request that Raine come out to keep her sister company that brought her to the ranch.

When Raine arrived with her suitcase, Jade carried it up to the spare room, his lips clamped together, his back straight. He said nothing, but Raine was painfully aware of his cool reception.

In the days that followed, she watched as Jade tried to placate his unhappy wife.  Raine saw how gentle he was with her, how patient, how long-suffering. He wanted the baby, that was obvious.  But Michele was inconsolable. She hated being on the ranch, and she hated being pregnant.  She became petulant, and Raine spent hours riding around the ranch, using the excuse that she needed the exercise, when in reality what she needed was to give her ears a rest.  She suspected Jade of employing similar tactics to save his peace of mind.  Since Raine was in the house, he spent more and more nights on the range, nights Raine was quite certain he could have spent at home.

After writing a short piece about the kindergarten play, Raine returned home around ten o'clock that night.  Julia had gone to bed, but Raine was in the kitchen drinking coffee when the doorbell rang.  Raine answered it, knowing it could only be her sister.

Michele stepped into the narrow living room with its embroidered doilies and old-fashioned furniture and somehow managed to make the very air in the room crackle. Unlike Raine, Michele was dark-haired and vibrant and walked with an energetic gracefulness.  “I got the part.” Michele's dark blue eyes glittered and her voice was husky with the strain of the tryout and her excitement.

“Congratulations. When do rehearsals start?”

“Day after tomorrow.” She sat down in the chair next to the sofa and let her eyes wander over Raine. “How did it go this afternoon?”

“Tate did beautifully.”

“Not Tate,” she said, waving her hand impatiently in a stagey gesture that dismissed her own son.  “What did Jade say?”

Disappointment in Michele made Raine's voice sharp. She met Michele's blue eyes with a spark in. her own gray ones.  “He knew where you were. And he knew you had told me.”

“Absolutely clairvoyant, isn't he?”

“He knows you,” Raine said shortly.

Michele's eyes narrowed on Raine.  Raine had showered when she came home, then she had changed into jeans and a T-shirt and pulled her hair back with a leather and wooden barrette. Her face was bare of makeup. She knew exactly what she looked like. At twenty-seven, she'd long ago given up competing with her beautiful sister.

“He doesn't know me at all,” Michele said slowly.

Raine stared at her. She had the distinct feeling it was a stage line, delivered for effect. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's cryptic,” Michele said, smiling at her suddenly.  “Isn't that one of the things that's so deadly boring about this prairie town? Everybody knows everything about everybody else. No one has any secrets.”

“If you knew about them, they wouldn't be secrets,” Raine said dryly

Michele ignored her.  “That's what we learned from Tony, our director, tonight.  He told us that every character has a secret.”

“What's Tiffany's secret?” Raine mocked. “She really doesn't use brown ink, she uses green?”

Michele gave her a scornful look.  “Tiffany's secret is that she needs a man who sees beyond her beautiful body and loves her for herself.”

“There’s an original idea.”

“Go ahead. Make fun of something you don't understand.  That's typical small-town thinking.”  She stared at Raine.  “I won't be like that, I just won't.”

Raine rubbed a hand over her jeans.  “Jade's probably worried about you.”

Michele's lips moved in a mocking smile. “Is that a polite hint for me to go home?”

“No,” Raine said softly. “You know as well as I do that Jade worries.”

“Ah yes,” Michele said, watching her with eyes like a tigress, “we both know Jade worries. The difference is,” her voice went very soft, “I don’t care what he thinks…and you do.”

Raine averted her eyes, fastening them on Michele and Jade's wedding picture.  “You cared once. What happened?”

“I got bored. Married life is boring. I'm going out of my mind.  If I had known what it was really like…”

Raine looked at her.  “You knew what life was like on a ranch.”

“Did I?” Michele shrugged her shoulders. “I'd always lived in town with you and Julia.” She studied Raine, a peculiar look in her eye. “You're the lucky one. You're free. You could walk away from this town tomorrow. I can't understand why you stay here.”

Raine shrugged. “Where would I go?”

“Anywhere where people are,” Michele said passionately, “a city where there are nightclubs and you can walk into a restaurant and order
coq au vin
or
duck a l'orange
.”

“Have Jade take you on a trip.  He can afford it.  Have him take you to San Francisco or New York City.”

Michele flared angrily.  “I don’t want a trip. I don’t want to go and see what I’m missing and then come home to this…provincial backwater.”  In her excitement, she pushed herself up out of the chair, twisted, and walked toward the door.  “If I ever get a chance to get out of here, I…”

Raine, alarmed, made a sound of distress and jumped up.  To her sister’s back, she cried, “Michele, listen to me.  You can’t…leave.  You have too much to throw it all away.”

Michele turned suddenly and faced Raine.  A mere nose length away, Raine could see in Michele’s eyes a dark, primitive emotion.  “But suppose I throw it in your direction?  You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Shock immobilized her.  “I wouldn’t…”

“Oh, yes, you would, sister mine.”  Michele’s eyes glittered.  “Why do you think I’ve stayed on this godforsaken prairie for six years?  Because I knew,
I knew
, if I left, you’d fall into Jade’s arms like a plump peach, all ripe and ready to squeeze.”

The shock dissolved into anger.  “That’s not true!  You have no right to say that to me.”

“I have every right.  I’m his beloved wife.”  Michele laughed and whirled around.  She exited on that line, perfectly timing her escape while Raine grappled with the nausea that threatened to climb her throat and the cold, self-hatred that gripped her.

Grimly, Raine went up the stairs to her room, thinking that the talent for acting must have been given to only one member in the Taylor family.  How long had Michele known?  Right from the beginning? She had spent hours with Michele, but they had never been close, not really.  They disagreed about so many things. They had only one thing in common.  Jade.

She saw Michele only once during the next few weeks. Her sister came into the print shop with a promotional article about the play and chatted with Julia as if nothing had happened. She was civil to Raine, and Raine tried to match her sophistication, but her stomach churned. She was relieved when Michele, with an airy goodbye, walked out of the shop.

Two weeks later, during the last week of July, when everyone was suffering from a heat wave that seemed to have no end, Raine lay in her bed in her short nightie and, for the first time in her life, thought seriously  about leaving Verylon. Was she a fool to stay? What future was there in loving her sister's husband?  Perhaps if she got out, got away, she would forget him. The perspiration collected on her back. Her room, on the west side of the house, had been like an oven since Monday. If it weren't so hot, maybe she could think. A cold shower might help. Would it disturb Julia? She threw back the light sheet and was out of bed when she heard the soft ring of the kitchen phone. She padded down the stairs in her bare feet, hoping to stop the ringing before it woke Julia.

“Tate's sick,” Jade said in her ear, and even hearing his voice on the phone made her blood race in her veins. “I don't know what to do. I've called the doctor, but all I get is that confounded answering service and he hasn't called back.”

“Does he have a temperature?”

“I don't know.”

Raine made an exasperated sound. She'd seen Jade sit up all night with a newborn foal or a weak calf and stay as calm as a glassy sea, but whenever anything happened to Tate, he went into a tailspin. “There's an oral thermometer in the upstairs medicine cabinet. Have you been giving him aspirin?”

“No. I'll start giving him some right away…” 

“No, don't. Just give him a cool sponge bath.”

“How do I do that?”

Worry about Tate and her own leaping nerves made her say sharply, “For heaven's sake, Jade. Just pretend he's a sick calf.”

“If he was a sick calf, I'd douse him with disinfectant and put him in with his mother.”

Raine recoiled from the cynical words. It wasn't the first time she had felt the backlash of Jade's anger toward Michele. And even though she wasn't her sister's keeper, she felt inexplicably guilty.

“Take his temperature and call me back,” she told him coolly, fighting to keep her conflicting emotions under control.

He hung up, and she walked to the stove to fill the kettle. As she put it on the burner, the phone rang again.

“This thermometer doesn't work.  It says his temperature is below normal.”

She sighed. “You didn't leave it in his mouth long enough. It's hard to get the correct temperature of a young child with an oral thermometer. Get him to hold it under his tongue for at least three minutes and preferably five.”

There was a silence. Then, through gritted teeth, “There's no answer at the number Michele gave me. When she stayed with you last weekend, did she say anything about her rehearsal schedule?”

Shocked dumb, she tried frantically to make sense out of Jade's words.  When she did understand them, a hard knot formed in the base of her throat and she couldn't force a word past it.  The silence hummed over the telephone lines.  “No, no, she didn’t,” she said at last, the words too quick and anxious.  “She didn’t mention a thing to me.”  Truth surrounded by the biggest lie of all.

The answering silence made her wonder if she had fooled him.  “I’d better go and see if I can get a correct reading on this damn thing.”

“If he only has a temp of a hundred, or a hundred and two, give him a cool sponge bath.  If it's above that…” her voice faltered, “you'd better take him to the hospital. He could go into convulsions.”

He thanked her and the click in her ear told her he had hung up the phone before she could take the receiver away.

The tea kettle began to bubble and she snatched it off the stove before its strident whistle woke Julia. She sat drinking her cup of tea, wishing she had told Jade to call her back. When another hour went by, she could stand it no longer.

The phone rang several times before Jade answered and when he did, his voice was even huskier than usual.

“Did I wake you?”

“I was just dozing.”

“How is he?”

“Good.  The sponge bath took his temperature down and he's sleeping here in the bed with me.”

She closed her eyes to shut out the mental picture. “I'm glad. I was imagining him in the hospital.”

Jade said nothing for a moment. When she opened her mouth to tell him goodnight and hang up, he said in a soft voice, “I should have called you back.  I forgot that you would worry.  I owe you an apology.”

The deep, quiet warmth in his sleep-thickened voice warmed her from the ear next to the receiver down to the toes that were trying to curl into the kitchen floor.  “That’s all right.  I know you were too worried about him to think of anything else.”  Quickly, before he could reply, she hung up the phone.

When she called the next day, Tate’s fever had broken…and Michele had come home.

A week later, on Friday, the bell on the door of the print shop tinkled and banged.  “Hello, Benjamin Franklin.  How’s the almanac business?”

Jade's brother stood just inside the door. He was a tanned, slim young man with a shock of wheat-colored hair and a wide grin on his face. “Hello, Marc. Just getting by from day to day.”

He groaned, twisted a chair around in front of her desk and straddled it backwards. “How are you and the monster getting along?” he asked, nodding his head toward the Linotype machine.

“Okay. A few of the mats stick, but other than that…’’

“Mats?”

“Matrices. The brass molds that make the lead slugs of letters.”

He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the hot lead that still lingered in the air. “When are you going to convert to phototype and offset press like the rest of the world?”

“When my rich uncle bequeaths me eighteen thousand dollars to buy a phototypesetter and another eight thousand for a camera, not to mention an equally generous amount for a new press…”

Marc held up his hand. “I get the picture.”

She plucked at the collar of her smock. After the discovery that Michele had lied to Jade about her whereabouts, Raine had avoided Jade. Now she was even self-conscious with Marc.  Marc smiled at her and appeared not to notice.