True Colors

“She’s pregnant?”

“Already. Even I’m surprised, and I usually expect the worst.”

Luke got to his feet and walked over to the fire, staring down at it.

“A baby,” he said, in a sad, soft voice.

Winona could have kicked herself. It was one of her worst traits, the way she could focus so much on the minutiae that she completely missed the big picture. She kept thinking he’d be over Vivi Ann by now. She got up and went to him. “I’m sorry, Luke. I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have told you about it like that.”

He glanced away from her, looked past the tree to the rainy black night beyond the window. “I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“I thought I could stick around and watch Vivi Ann love someone else, but I can’t.”

“But . . .” Winona didn’t know what to say, how to frame her sudden fear into a cogent appeal. “You can’t leave . . .”

“What else can I do, Win?”

She felt like one of those old Eskimo women who’d been set out on an ice floe. She knew that if she didn’t reach out, grab for him, she would float away, alone. “Luke, please . . .”

“Please what?”

She swallowed hard, battling her own fear. It was terrifying to tell him the truth—she wasn’t ready; he wasn’t ready—but there was no choice anymore. She dared to touch him, take hold of his wrist. “I know you’re not ready to hear this, Luke, but . . . I love you. If you’d just try, we could be happy together.”

She saw his answer before he spoke. In the silence, with a fire crackling beside them, she saw his surprise. Then came the pity.

Her stomach twisted in on itself. She had handed her assassin a knife and bared her chest. If there were any way to stop him from speaking the words aloud, she would have done it, but the wheel was already turning.

“I love you, too,” he said, lowering his voice to add, “as a friend.”

She pulled away from him and turned her back. “That’s what I meant,” she said dully, though they both knew it was a lie.

“I think I’ll go back to Kalispell,” he said, staying by the fire.

“Maybe you can find a nice skinny girl there,” she said, reaching down for her coat.

He came to her then, took her by the shoulders, and turned her around. “Winona, you know it’s not about that. It’s just . . .”

Try as she might to control her tears, they came anyway, stung her eyes. Pathetic. And in that instant, she was the fat girl begging for her mother’s horse all over again. “I get it, Luke. Believe me. I get it.”

The following Monday, she heard from Aurora, who’d heard from Julie: Luke had moved back to Montana.

Chapter Twelve

On the water, time passed in currents, rippling closer and closer to the shore. In winter, the waves were bolder, angrier, tipped in white; wind whipped them into a frenzy and rain fell almost daily. Color faded the landscape. Even the evergreens lost some of their rich hue, appearing black against the gray sky, gray clouds, and gray water.

Sunlight changed all that, and in May, when the rains paused, bright pink and purple azaleas bloomed overnight, and everywhere was lime-green new growth—on the lawns, in the shoots of fragile leaves along the roadsides. At night the sound of frogs croaking to one another was so loud that all through town, people got up in the middle of the night to shut their windows.

In June, the summer people came back. Along the banks of the canal, docks began to reappear, as did the boats that were tied alongside them. The diner extended its hours and added a few trendy vegetarian sandwiches to the menu, and the seasonal shops reopened. Hanging baskets of purple lobelias and red geraniums were returned to their hooks on the streetlamps.

Vivi Ann noticed every change. For years, it seemed, she’d taken all that for granted, seen each alteration in the seasons as nothing more than the passing of time.

Her pregnancy had changed her perspective. Now she marked time in the smallest increments—a day, a week, sometimes even an hour. It wasn’t just her body that was changing, either. Everything felt different lately. She had never been as excited for anything as she was for the arrival of this baby. She was equally terrified. On a daily basis she missed her mother, and not in the ephemeral, little-girl way that she’d always missed her. That ache had turned into a hot, sharp pain. She had so many questions and no way to get the answers she needed.

Her fear—a new thing—ran deep and dark. At night, when she lay in bed with Dallas, listening to him sleep, she worried that she was too selfish to be a good mother, too immature to guide another human being through life. She worried, too, about his or her Native American heritage and how she would help her child to feel accepted by both worlds. In the ten months since her marriage, she’d learned very little about the man she loved. He loved her—that was obvious—but the rest of his emotions he kept in close check. Anger was the only thing that sometimes came to the surface, and on the rare occasions when she saw that side of him, she was afraid.

Remember, he’d told her once when they were fighting, abuse can make an animal mean. I tried to warn you. He’d wanted to push her away; she saw that now. The only thing in the world that scared him was their love.