Honey Moon (56 page)

After one of her early sessions with the therapist, the two of them had talked.

"I love the girls so much," she had confessed, "but I've realized that the only times I'm really comfortable with them is when you're around to supervise. I wish I could be Auntie Mame."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You know. Fly into town. Shower them with presents. Kiss them like crazy.

And then disappear, leaving you with the business of raising them. Do you think I'm horrible?"

He had shaken his head. "I don't think you're horrible at all."

He knew Lilly was coping with the events in her past in the best way she could, and so far the girls had been accepting of their mother's appearances and disappearances in their lives. His disappearances were another matter, however, which was why he'd been forced to bring them to South Carolina.

"Do you ever have nightmares?" Rachel asked Honey.

"Sometimes," Honey replied.

"Scary ones?"

Honey's eyes flickered toward Eric. She quickly looked away. "Pretty scary."

Rachel regarded her thoughtfully. "Are you going to marry my daddy?"

"Enough questions, Rach." Eric signaled for the bill.

As the waiter walked toward them, the knot in his gut confirmed that he didn't want to hear Honey's answer.

32

Honey kissed first Rachel and then Becca on their foreheads. "Night, girls."

"Sleep tight," Becca murmured, before snuggling down into the covers.

"Night, Honey." Rachel blew three loud kisses.

Honey slipped out of the bedroom while Eric said his good nights. She had been flattered when the girls had insisted she participate in their bedtime ritual, but now that it was over, she felt empty and alone. Dash had been wrong not to let her have a child.

Eric addressed his daughters from the doorway behind her. "Honey and I are going to take a little walk outside. We won't go far. The window's open, so I can hear if you call."

"Make sure you come back, Daddy," Rachel said.

"I will, Rach. I promise. I'll always come back." The emphatic quality of Eric's response indicated that this was a frequently repeated ritual between the two of them.

Honey didn't want to take a walk with him, but he was already at her side lightly clasping her elbow and leading her to the door. It was the first time that he had touched her.

The night was warm and the moon hung so low in the sky it looked as if it had been stolen from the backdrop of a high school prom. Eric had left his jacket and tie inside, and his shirt gleamed blue-white

in the light.

"You were great with the girls. Rachel's so demanding that most adults tend to overlook Becca."

"It was my pleasure. You've done a good job with them, Eric."

"These past few months have been tough, but I think we're on more solid ground now. Lilly's given me full custody."

"That's wonderful, although a lot of men would regard that as more of a burden than a pleasure."

"I love being a father."

"I know you do." Once again she thought of how much she had always wanted to have a family of her own and to create for someone else the childhood she wished she'd had. The desire to be part of a group of people who loved each other had been the driving force behind her life for as long as she could remember, and she was no closer to obtaining it than she had ever been. Only during her marriage to Dash had she known what it was to be part of someone else, and the gift of love he had given her had been so precious that her life had ended when she lost it.

They walked for a few moments in silence until they reached the clearing that bordered the lake. Eric glanced back at the Bullpen. His actor's voice, usually so much under his command, sounded ragged. "Don't take that coaster ride tomorrow, Honey."

The prom-night moon hung behind him, outlining his head and shoulders in silver and making him look larger than life, just as he did on the screen. But this was no movie star who stood before her, only a man. An awful war began inside her—the irresistible urge to slide into his arms battling against the despair that even considering such an act of betrayal produced.

"Eric, I've given up everything to do this. I don't have anything left."

"You have a career waiting for you."

"You know more than anyone how much that frightens me."

"But you made your deal with me anyway," he said bitterly. "You sold your soul to the devil so you

could take your magical mystery ride."

I sold my soul to an angel,
she thought, but she couldn't risk saying any soft words to him, so she kept silent.

He gave a snort of disgust. "I can't even come close to filling Dash's shadow, can I?"

"It's not a competition. I don't make comparisons like that."

"Lucky for me, because it's not hard to figure out who'd be the loser." He spoke in a voice that held no trace of self-pity; he was merely reciting facts. "Dash will always wear the white hat, with a shiny tin

star pinned to his vest. He stands for everything good, everything noble and heroic. But I've always walked too close to the dark side."

"Those are movie parts. They don't have anything to do with real life."

"Who are you trying to convince, Mrs. Coogan? Me or yourself? It comes down to one simple, inescapable fact. You've already had the best man, and you're not going to settle for second best."

"Don't even think that about yourself," she said miserably. "You don't have to take second place to anyone."

"If that's true, why is it so important for you to ride that coaster tomorrow morning?"

She had lost the vocabulary to explain. In the light of his relentless hostility, her belief in the power of a roller coaster ride seemed ridiculous. She had tried and failed to make him understand that she wanted back the faith in God she had lost, the belief that love was a more powerful force in the universe than evil.

She could never make him understand her certainty that she could once again find hope in the

eternal on that ride, and, in the process, say her good-byes to Dash. In frustration, she spoke words

that were damaging instead of healing.

"I have to find him! Just one more time."

His eyes darkened with pain, and his voice was a hoarse murmur. "I can't compete with that."

"You don't understand."

"I understand that I love you and I want to marry you. And I understand that you don't feel the same

way about me."

A rush of emotion so intense that it left her weak coursed through her. Eric was a man who had erected

a million defenses against the hurts of the world, and all of them had come tumbling down. It made her love him more—this beautiful, tortured man who had been born with too much sensitivity to walk unscathed through the evils he saw around him. Except she wasn't free to love him. Her heart was still shackled by another love, one that she couldn't let go.

She turned her face up to his. "Eric, I'm sorry. Maybe after tomorrow morning I can think about the future, but—"

"No!" he exclaimed. "I'm not going to compete with a ghost any longer. I want something better than that."

"Please, Eric. This doesn't have anything to do with you."

"It has everything to do with me," he said fiercely. "I can't build my life with someone who's looking backwards." He shoved his fists into his pockets.

"Bringing the girls here was a terrible mistake. They've had enough instability in their lives. I knew how much they'd like you, and I shouldn't have taken this risk with them. If it were just me, maybe I'd stand around and hold your hand for the next ten or twenty years while you decide whether or not you're going to climb out of the grave. But they've been cheated too many times, and I can't let anyone in their lives who doesn't have something better to give all of us than leftover love."

She wanted to shut out his pain. If only she didn't understand so well what he was feeling. "Don't you realize I want to give you something better than that?"

she cried. "Don't you realize how much I want to love you back!"

Again, the bitter twist to his mouth. "Tough job, isn't it?"

"Eric—"

"Don't take that ride tomorrow morning," he said quietly. "Choose me, Honey.

This time choose me instead of him."

She saw what it had cost him in pride to ask, and she hated herself for the pain she was giving him. "I'll do anything else you ask me," she said desperately.

"Anything but that. It's the one thing I can't give up."

"And it's the only thing I want."

"I need that ride to set me free."

"I don't think you want to be set free. I think you want to hold on to Dash forever."

"He was the center of my life."

The beautiful planes of his face were bleak, bereft of hope.

"When you take your ride tomorrow morning, I hope you have your epiphany

—or whatever it is you're expecting to happen—because otherwise you'll have paid an expensive price for nothing."

"Eric, please—"

"I don't want your pity. And I don't want your leftovers. Love has to be freely given, and if I can't have that, I don't want anything." His eyes held a sad dignity. "I'm tired of walking on the dark side, Honey.

I want to walk in the light for a while."

He turned away from her. Her skin felt as cold as the grave as he walked back to his children and left her standing alone in the still, silent heart of her dead amusement park.

* * *

That night when she couldn't sleep, she pulled on her work clothes and made her way to Black Thunder. Fog had rolled in during the night, and the coaster was an eerie sight. The geometric lacework of the bottom half had an unearthly sulfurous glow from the yellow security lights that hung inside the frame. But the upper half had disappeared into the swirling fog, so that the tops of the great hills looked as if they had been snapped off.

She hesitated for only a moment before she began to climb to the top.

Streamers of fog enclosed her,

and before long, she could no longer see the ground. She was alone in the universe with the coaster she had given up everything to build.

When she reached the top, she sat on the track and drew up her knees. The night was as silent as death. She let herself drift far above the earth in a world of wood and fog. She found herself remembering the little girl she had been, the child who had once ridden the great wooden roller coaster straight through the valley of death. But she was no longer a child. Now she was a woman, and she couldn't hide the fact that she loved him.

Just Eric. Not the dangerous stranger with the black eye patch, not the pirate clown she had convinced herself it was safe to love, and not the millionaire movie star. His identities had been stripped away.

There were none left for him to hide behind. Nothing left behind which she could hide her own feelings about him.

She pressed her cheek against her bent knee, huddling miserably into herself as tears leaked from the corners of her eyelids. He was right. Her love for him wasn't a free and joyous offering, as love should be. Instead, it was shadowed by the past, by the love she couldn't forget, the man she couldn't give up. Eric deserved something better than the leftover love she was offering. But the only way she could hope to free herself from the past was to ride the coaster, and if she did that, she would lose him forever.

Dash, I need your wisdom. I can't go on if I can't put you to rest. Tell me how I
do that without betraying everything we meant to each other.

But the barrier of death remained impenetrable, and once again, he refused to speak to her.

She stayed at the top of the lift hill throughout the night. In the inky blackness before dawn, the silence was broken by the shrill screams of a child. The sound was distant—it came from the other side of the park—but that didn't make it any less chilling as over and over again Rachel Dillon screamed out the terror of lost innocence.

* * *

The sky was pearly gray, poised at that precise moment just before the full break of morning. Tony Wyatt, the board operator who would be running Black Thunder that day, walked toward Honey through the wet grass. The fog from the night before had lifted, and steam rose from the Styro-foam coffee cup he held. As he nodded, he looked as if he were barely awake.

"Mornin', Miz Coogan."

She stepped down off the bottom rungs of the ladder and greeted him. Her body ached from weariness. She was chilled, and her eyes were scratchy from lack of sleep. "I already walked the track," she said. "Everything looks fine."

"That's good. Heard a weather report driving over. It's going to be a nice day."

He headed off to the station house.

Honey stared up at the coaster. If she took her ride, she would lose Eric, but if she didn't take it, she would never be able to come to terms with her past.

"Honey!"

Startled, she spun around and saw Rachel flying through the trees toward her.

She was dressed in jeans and a pink sweatshirt that was turned wrong side out.

Her hair hadn't been brushed and her expression was fierce with anger.

"I hate him!" she cried, coming to a stop in front of Honey. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, her mouth trembling, but mulish. "I'm not going home! I'm going to run away! Maybe I'll die and then he'll be sorry."

"Don't say that, Rachel."

"We were supposed to stay for the celebration, but Daddy woke us up this morning and said we're going to the airport. We just got here yesterday! That means I won't get to ride Black Thunder."

Honey tried to blunt her pain at the news that Eric truly was leaving by concentrating on Rachel. "He wasn't going to let you ride it anyway," she reminded her gently.

"I would have made him let me!" Rachel exclaimed. Her eyes slid along the length of the coaster. "I have to ride it, Honey. I just have to."

Honey felt as if Rachel's need were her own. She didn't try to understand the kinship she experienced with this child; she simply accepted it. As she stroked her between her shoulder blades, she felt like