What Dreams May Come (7 page)

"And now?
You said you didn't know what you wanted or needed then. Do you know now?"

Another tough question.
"Partly.
I know what I don't want. I don't want to live through somebody else. To do what others expect me to do, be what they think I should be. I have to make my own choices, my own decisions. I have to control my own life, at least as much as any of us can."

"Kelly ... I never intentionally tried to make you be something you weren't."

"I know." She looked at him steadily. "But you needed me to be something I wasn't, Mitch, and I felt that even then. I'm not blaming you; none of us can help our needs. And I was more than willing. I needed the security of a dominant partner because I was afraid of being alone, afraid of testing my own strength. What you have to understand is that I don't need that anymore. Or want it. And if your needs haven't changed, you won't find what you're looking for in me."

The click of the tape deck turning itself off was loud in the silence. Then, quietly, Mitch said, "I have changed, Kelly. I went to sleep in my twenties and woke up in my thirties. I lost an eye, my best friend, and the girl I was going to marry. The father I never made peace with has died. The whole world is so changed, not an hour goes by that I don't notice I'm out of step in some way. I'm rebuilding my life almost from scratch. How could I not be different?"

Kelly felt the pressure of hot tears behind her eyes, and her throat was aching. His voice had held steady, the eloquent words not a plea for compassion but a simple statement of what had happened to him. It moved her in ways she hadn't expected, made her feel his losses as keenly as she felt her own. For the first time, she was aware of her guard wavering, as if one or both of them had taken at least a small step to begin crossing the years between them.

She didn't know what would happen when—or if—they met again somewhere in the present. Every step would be tentative and painful, the way carrying them across old hurts and new, unexplored ground. But if they did finally meet, it would be as two adults who had learned to see each other clearly.

Kelly was afraid of the distance yet to be crossed. She was afraid of opening old wounds. But she couldn't deny even to herself the knowledge that the attempt was something she couldn't walk—or run—away from.

Finally, she swallowed the ache in her throat and said, "Neither of us is the person we were ten years ago. And we can't go back. The only way is forward."

Mitch drew a short breath. "I want you to understand that even though I'm not sure of everything I need yet, I do know it isn't what I needed ten years ago. I guess I wanted security just like you did, but in a different way. I'd seen my parents fight a tug-of-war all my life, and it was like being caught up in a storm of bitterness that never died. I suppose that I believed if only one controlled in a relationship, there'd be peace."

"You don't think so now?"

A
faint, rueful smile tugged at his lips. "I think control is an illusion we build to protect ourselves, and the larger we try to make that circle, the weaker it gets. We can't control our own destinies, much less someone else's. And even the illusion is so fragile, any change can destroy it.

"I don't want peace, either, not that kind. Not the false calm of one person's individuality sacrificed. I saw the struggle my parents went through for years, and you've made me see what my own blindness would have done to us. But there must be a compromise between the two. There's a balance, Kelly, and that's what I hope we can find.
A partnership.
I don't want us to be together because either of us is afraid. We have to be whole
before
we can share what we are with each other."

She knew what he meant. For years she had felt incomplete. Finding her own strength had helped, but there was still, at the core of
herself
, some uncertainty she didn't want to examine too closely.

"Are you whole?" she asked hesitantly.

"No." His answer was immediate, his voice steady. "There are still too many pieces missing. I have to come to terms with what I lost and how it's changed me."

In a sudden moment of understanding, she said, "You knew that before you came here. You knew what we had
was
gone. But I am the only emotional tie left to your past."

Mitch nodded, his gaze holding hers. "I've been thinking about it ever since we talked earlier today. And in a way, you were right about that. But so was I. It's something I have to feel, to accept. I can't go forward until I stop looking back. I can't reconcile past and present yet. You're the only one who can help me do that, Kelly."

"So that's what you need from me now?"

He hesitated briefly. "Yes.
For right now.
You've had ten years to find yourself, and I think you have. But for me, the present's blurred because there's too much of the past standing in the way. I do have to close that chapter of my life and put it behind me."

He had, she realized, carefully talked about what he hoped they could find together before saying anything about closing the door on his past. It seemed he still believed she would be a part of his life no matter what he came to understand about the past and the present.

Her eyes still on him, she said, "You think that by spending time with me you'll be able to do that."

"Yes."

It was what she'd already agreed to, but the strain of this first day had stretched her nerves taut, and there was a request she had to make. "Mitch, I know we have to talk about all this.
For both our sakes.
But I—I don't think I can take much more right now. Can we try to forget about the past for a while? Tackle it slowly?"

The crooked smile softened his hard face. "I'll do my best."

She uncurled from the chair and found her discarded shoes, then got to her feet. "It's been a long day," she murmured, wryly aware of the understatement. "I'm going to bed."

"See you in the morning," Mitch said.

Kelly went up to her room. Without thinking very much, she closed the wooden shutters at the windows around the sunken tub in her bathroom and took a long, hot bath, trying to soak away the tension. When the water began to cool, she got
out and dried off. She dressed in a fresh nightgown from the small bureau, then opened her bedroom window an inch and crawled into the big four-poster.

The wind outside whined softly, and the ocean was a distant roar, rhythmic and soothing. She turned out her nightstand lamp and lay watching the moving shadows in the room as the trees outside filtered the moonlight.

Mitch had changed, she thought, but the enormous strength in him had withstood the years and all his losses. It was an emotional strength, the inner toughness of someone who had grown up in the midst of other strong personalities; he had
learned
young to assert himself, to avoid being overshadowed. That quality in him had awed her once, but now she simply respected it because she'd found her own brand of strength.

He seemed more patient now, more willing to listen to what she had to say.
And more willing to talk about his own feelings.
She thought the last year had changed him in those ways. Not so much the coma itself, but the shock of awakening.

He'd said the past and present were blurred for him, and in a way she was coping with the same problem. The last years had taught her to resist the kind of man Mitch had been, to protect her individuality fiercely, and that lesson had been a hard one; she would never again be weak or submissive. If he had come back into her life with the manner she remembered, she would have ignored her own unresolved feelings and ended it between them no matter what he said.

But he hadn't demanded, hadn't tried to overpower her or make light of her objections. He hadn't tried to impose his will on her; he had
used reason, not domination. He seemed to her just as strong-willed as he had been ten years before, perhaps even more so, yet he was also watchful and quieter and more self-contained. She didn't quite know how to react to this Mitch, her past knowledge warning her to keep a distance between them even as she was conscious of feeling drawn to him.

She had never looked at him through a woman's eyes, not really. Not until today. And today he was different.

Kelly turned onto her side and stared toward the window, trying to relax, to stop thinking. It occurred to her only a long time later as she was drifting off to sleep that it wasn't just her mind and emotions that were drawn to Mitch. With all the tensions between them, she hadn't realized how her body had reacted, how she'd been vibrantly aware of his every movement.

Except for when he had lifted the gold chain she wore, they hadn't touched at all. Yet she'd felt every glance, felt his voice like some strange, taut vibration in the air that brushed her skin softly.
New, unfamiliar, and unnerving feelings.
And those feelings followed her into sleep, prompting dreams like none she'd ever had before. . . .

He drew his thick jacket tighter and turned up the collar, mildly annoyed by the coldness of the wind. From his position in the lower level of the garden he could see the house clearly, had watched lights going out downstairs. She'd taken a bath, he thought, but had closed the wooden shutters so he couldn't see. Modest little bitch. They were all like that, though, at least to hear them talk.

Protesting the lights being on, acting uncomfortable about dressing and undressing around him.
Trying to hide from him even when they were his to look at as much as he damned well pleased.

Then her bedroom light had gone out, and he had seen the dim glow in another bedroom, realizing that the two in the house weren't sharing a bed yet. The very thought of the bastard in her bed made bile rise in his throat, and he spat into the bushes angrily. Ghosts were impossible to kill, but Mitchell was flesh and blood.

He stared up at the bedroom window, barely able to make out a shadowy form,
then
glanced toward the cliffs. He'd looked the place over thoroughly, and knew there were wooden steps leading down to the narrow strip of sand. After a while he leaned against a tree and watched the window, waiting patiently for that other watcher to go to bed.

Mitch stood at his bedroom window, staring out into the shifting landscape. The trees tossed restlessly, blown by the fractious coastal winds, and now and then he caught a glimpse of the dark gleam of the sea. The hardwood trees were naked branches moving eerily, and the pines whispered and sighed as they swayed. It was a lonely sight.

He found it difficult to trust sleep now, to relax and give
himself
up to it. The therapists had told him that was natural and that one day he'd be able to close his eye without feeling the dark stirrings of fear. Doctors had assured him that there was no likelihood of his slipping back into a coma. Not likely at all, they'd said with quick smiles.

But then, it hadn't been likely that he would ever awake from the coma at all.

He hadn't wanted even to close his eye in those first days, his resistance almost obsessive, until sheer exhaustion had taken the choice out of his hands. It hadn't gotten any easier in all the months since. The sensation of drifting toward unconsciousness, so pleasant for most people, was for him a stoic leap of faith. And each time he opened his eye, his muscles were braced, the single thought in his mind like neon.

Just a
night.
Please, just
a
night. . .

Even now he found it impossible to sleep through the night. He woke often, peering in the darkness at the digital watch whose red numbers kept track of time and day and month and year.
A reassurance that would allow him, minutes or hours later, to take the leap yet again.

So little control.
That had been hardest to accept, that even his own mind and body could betray him. That fate could step in without warning and steal years. And that there was not
one
single, damned thing he could do to stop it.

That was why he had so quickly seen and understood what Kelly had talked about. Ten years earlier he had sought control in order to avoid the bitter struggles he remembered so vividly. Perhaps unconsciously he had fallen in love with Kelly because she'd been so young and adoring, so pliant to his wishes, because, as she'd said, he needed that. But now he knew only too well what an illusion control was.

More, he was beginning to realize that even the illusion was a cheat when it surrounded two people, and a twisted one at that. He would have fought like a tiger to avoid even the suggestion of
surrendering his own individuality to another's, yet he had—unconsciously—expected Kelly to do just that. To be swallowed up by him, to live through him.

It made him a little sick now to think of it.

He stood by the chilly window, still dressed because he wasn't yet prepared to risk giving himself over to sleep, staring out without seeing because he was looking back at the past and inward at himself and his life. It came to him slowly, with a distant shock, that his father had been terrified of losing his mother. A naturally possessive and willful man, he'd seen his wife's need for
independence as a threat, and had either loved too much
himself
or trusted in her love too little.
Perhaps both.
Rather than risking losing her, he had held on tighter, demanding that she belong only to him.

She had fought him for years, and Mitch realized now that the struggle had gone on so long only because his mother
had
loved his father, and
had
sought to preserve her marriage without losing herself. In the end, unable to live through her husband as he demanded, she had chosen, painfully, to live without him. She had told her son that he could come to her as soon as he was of age; Hugh Mitchell would have fought tooth and nail if that battle had gone to court.

She had died in a plane crash two months later.

With her gone, Mitch had launched a war of his own, blaming his father and rebelling at the slightest show of authority. He hadn't understood the complexities of relationships then, and had seen only the results of his father's domination. Now, looking back, he realized that it had been largely a case of history repeating itself. Hugh Mitchell
had held on tightly to his son out of fear, and Mitch had pulled away all the harder. Until, finally, the decision to marry Kelly had caused the final break between them.