The Color of Love (The Color of Heaven Series) (21 page)

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m glad you’re telling me this.”

He squeezed my hand. “I wish you didn’t have to go.”

All at once, I sensed in him a desperation, not unlike what I’d felt in the courtyard earlier when I allowed myself to acknowledge the inexplicable yearning I felt.

I felt it again now.

“Our flight leaves in an hour,” I said, running my hands over his, noticing all the calluses.

He nodded, accepting that I had no choice.

We gazed at each other for an intense moment until those blue eyes of his made me feel like I was floating. My body felt weak and shaky.

“Do you mind if I bring Kaleigh in now?” I asked, stumbling over the tangled mess of my emotions. “She’s waiting in the lounge and wants to say good-bye to you, too.”

“Of course,” he replied.

I rose from my chair and quickly left to fetch her.

o0o

“I’ll miss you,” Kaleigh said, bending forward to hug Aaron. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” he replied. “And I won’t forget to send you that list of books. I’ll need your email address,” he said to me.

Kaleigh glanced over her shoulder at me, but I was distracted and flustered. “Of course.” I dug into my purse for a pen and paper, wrote it down and handed it to him. “My phone number’s there as well.”

“I should go,” Kaleigh said. “Gram says bye, too.” She turned to walk out.

“Tell Gram I’ll be right there,” I whispered to her, then I moved closer to the bed and held out my arms to embrace Aaron.

It was awkward because I had to lean over the bedrail. Or maybe that’s not why it was awkward. Maybe I knew there was something gigantic between us that I wasn’t prepared to openly acknowledge.

As I turned to leave, he sat up. “Carla, when I get back to Boston, can I see you? Can we have dinner or something?”

I blinked a few times and my heart began to pound. “I want to,” I replied, “but I probably shouldn’t. I’m… I’m seeing someone right now.”

I simply couldn’t lie.

Aaron’s lips parted. He stared at me blankly. “I’m an idiot.”

“No, you’re not,” I replied. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I thought you knew that.”

Why would he know? I hadn’t told him.

He relaxed against the pillows. Although relaxed probably wasn’t the right word. It was obvious he was disappointed. Even that word was an understatement.

“So now I know,” he said. “Have a good flight, and I’ll send that booklist to Kaleigh as soon as I can.”

“Thank you, Aaron. Bye.” I hesitated, then turned and walked out.

o0o

Shortly after takeoff, I gazed out the window at the full moon reflecting off the cold North Atlantic water below.

The starboard wing dipped sharply downward as the pilots steered the plane toward the south.

The glistening dark sea held me mesmerized. All I could think of was Aaron and the terror he must have felt when the plane was going down. I thought of every word we’d spoken to each other over the past two days, and my heart ached as we ascended into the sky and headed for home.

Three Months Later

Chapter Fifty-six

Kaleigh

Shortly after my thirteenth birthday—while I was enthralled with my weekly group guitar lesson on Friday nights and becoming infatuated with a darkly handsome, seventeen-year-old student with a lip ring—my mom was doing her best to pretend she was in love with a cop who tried way too hard to be perfect husband material.

And perfect father material.

Empirically speaking, I suppose I couldn’t deny that Josh was a pretty good catch. He was good-looking by most women’s standards, he held down a steady job and wore a uniform. Most importantly, as far as Mom was concerned, he lived here in Boston, had a large, closely knit family, and held no secret ambitions to run off to the Himalayas and scale mountains.

Mom liked that he was so committed and reliable, and it didn’t hurt that her friends and co-workers were all thrilled for her, including Aunt Audrey and Nadia, who loved the idea of welcoming a cop into the family.

“He has so many great stories to tell at dinner parties,” I heard Audrey say one night when I went to the kitchen to make popcorn for me and Wendy while they were drinking wine in the living room. Audrey gushed over how great Josh looked in his gun belt, and how wonderful it was that Mom had finally turned a corner and let go of my dad.

Meanwhile, I was the only one who knew the real truth—that Mom had been deeply affected by our brief encounter with Dr. Cameron in the hospital a few months earlier, and she hadn’t forgotten him. Not by a long shot.

I’d been affected by it myself, and I still wasn’t sure why that experience seemed so colorful in my otherwise lackluster life.

I couldn’t stop wondering if it had been our voices that brought Aaron back from the abyss. Or my mom’s touch? And why did all of this happen? Were the three of us meant to cross paths? Had it been fate?

I didn’t mention anything like that to Mom because I knew what she’d say: that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I was a thirteen-year-old girl with an overactive imagination who had been reading too many books about mystical things.

But I’d seen them together with my own two eyes, and I knew my mother better than anyone.

Something in her had changed after we flew home. She’d grown quiet and adopted a habit of staring off into space. Sometimes I would catch her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter while a pot of something boiled over on the stove, right beside her. She wouldn’t even notice. She was a million miles away.

I often asked her what she had been thinking about. A few times she admitted openly that it was Aaron. She said she was imagining his flight from the polar bear, or his climb up the iceberg with the killer whales circling below.

Though we didn’t hear from Aaron at all, except for the list of books he sent via email, we did hear from Gladys about the journal.

Two months after we arrived home, she called Mom and said that although Aaron had stubbornly refused to hand over the journal to anyone, he had been kind enough to transcribe the early entries Seth had written on the island. Aaron had mailed the pages to her, which she photocopied and shared with Mom, who shared them with me.

The last entry was written under the tree when they were lost and trapped in a storm. My father’s final words were:
I said another prayer.

He died the next day, and I’m pretty sure God must have been listening because that was around the time I had the dream about my dad. He’d seemed at peace about saying good-bye. He’d almost seemed happy. I suspected he was climbing a mountain somewhere in the high altitudes of heaven.

We didn’t talk about the journal again.

o0o

“Why don’t you send Aaron an email just to say hi?” I suggested one evening over dinner.

It was
me
who brought Aaron up that night. Probably because Mom was talking about Josh too much lately and had asked if I wanted to spend Saturday night with Emma at Nadia’s house. I suspected Josh had something romantic planned.

Mom shook her head at me. “I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

I poked at my carrots with my fork. “Why not? Unless you’re referring to the fact that he asked you out on a date before we left, and you said no because you were seeing someone else.”

She picked up her water glass and narrowed her eyes at me. “How would you know that?”

I inclined my head. “Seriously, Mom? You must have known I would eavesdrop outside the door.”

She chuckled softly and focused her attention on cutting her pork chop. “Well…I
am
seeing someone else.”

“Which is why you don’t want to lead Aaron on,” I finished for her, even though it drove me nuts that she might be missing out on something that could be her destiny.

Okay, okay…

Maybe I
was
overly romantic and thought I knew everything about love because I’d found my perfect soul mate—the mysterious and aloof guitar player named Malcolm from my Friday night practice sessions. Unfortunately he didn’t seem to know I existed, but I had a plan for that.

I had a plan for Mom, too. I wanted her to be with Aaron, not Josh, so I wasn’t going to stop mentioning him. Not if he was destined to be the great love of her life, maybe even a match made in heaven.

Most of me knew how silly that sounded, but I’d been thinking about Aaron a lot lately, maybe because I was starting to worry that Mom was forgetting him. It had been almost three months since we’d seen him.

I didn’t
want
her to forget him. And I don’t think she did either.

Twelve Days Later

Chapter Fifty-seven

Carla

Sometimes I wonder if things are meant to happen a certain way, or if there is something in us—maybe some sort of psychic ability—that leads us to do a certain thing, even if we don’t understand why we’re doing it at the time.

I’ve often asked myself that question regarding the day I left work early because of a sinus infection that had come on rather suddenly.

I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t very serious and I probably could have suffered through the last two hours at my desk. But I didn’t tell my boss that. I exaggerated my symptoms, just a tad, and threw in a migraine headache to go along with it.

I wasn’t making it up, not entirely. The stuffy nose really was uncomfortable, but later I wondered if there was more to it than that. If somehow fate was poking at me.
Hey you. You should go home.

I’d been having a hard time concentrating anyway. Earlier that day, Josh had texted and asked if I could have dinner with him that night. He wanted to take me to one of the most expensive restaurants in the city.

When I asked what the occasion was, he texted me back and sent this reply: I want to ask you something.

From that moment on I was pretty useless at work because I couldn’t stop thinking about what he might want to talk about.

“You think he’s going to propose, don’t you,” Audrey said when I called her during my lunch hour. “If he does, will you be ready for that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, sitting down on a bench in the mall with a bag full of shampoo and toothpaste I’d just bought. “We’ve only been seeing each other for six months, but he’s an amazing guy. I’d be crazy to say no.”

“Yes, he is an amazing guy,” she replied. “But I know you, Carla. You’re not sure. I hear it in your voice.”

I switched the phone from one ear to the other. “I can’t help it. It’s a big step and I don’t want to rush into anything. And there’s Kaleigh to consider. I don’t want to force a new dad on her and I know she’s not crazy about Josh. She just tolerates him.”

“She’s only thirteen and girls that age are known to be prickly.”

I glanced up at the crowds walking past, everyone hurrying back to work.

“Let me ask you something,” I said into the phone as I rose to my feet. “Did you have any doubts about marrying David?”

Audrey answered the question without missing a beat. “It was my second marriage,” she said, “and sure, it’s not easy to let go of all the baggage that comes with having been married before, no matter how the first one ends. But when David opened that ring box and got down on one knee, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be his wife and be with him forever. He barely had a chance to finish proposing before I said yes.”

I slowly headed back toward the bank. “I was kind of hoping you’d tell me you had doubts.”

“Sorry,” she replied. “But if that’s how you’re feeling, maybe you need to tell him that.”

I paused. “I don’t want to lose him. He’s a good guy.”

“
A good guy
?” she responded. “There are plenty of good guys out there, but that’s not why you marry someone. You marry him because you love him and he’s your soul mate and you can’t imagine your life without him.”

I thought about that for a moment. “I can’t really imagine my life without Josh in it.”

“Is that because you love him, or because you don’t want to be single? There’s a difference.”

I rounded the corner in the mall and entered the bank. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I replied, and sneezed.

“Bless you,” Audrey said. “And maybe that’s exactly what you need—a cold to buy yourself time to think about this. You could always tell Josh you’re sick and suggest he wait until the weekend.”

“Would that make me a coward?” I asked as I headed down to the staffroom.

“No, it just makes you cautious, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But let me ask you something else,” she said.

“Sure.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Are you still thinking about Iceberg Man?”

I reached the bottom of the steps and smiled distractedly at one of my co-workers. “All the time.”

“Then you should give him a call,” Audrey said. “Go and visit him. Now that he’s back in the real world, see if there’s something there, because you can’t marry another man until you know for sure he’s the one. Or not the one.”