The Ocean Between Us (4 page)

Josh thought,
Lauren.
Only a minute ago he’d been confused about her. Now, with the same crystal clarity with which he could see the tumbling night sky, he knew exactly what he wanted.
Lauren.
The beginning and the end of his trip interval.

He took a deep, bracing breath. Then he gave the order he knew he had to give.

“Eject! Eject! Eject!”

Whidbey Island, Washington
7:30 a.m.

Lauren Stanton woke up in the same state of mind she’d gone to sleep in—thinking of Josh. He had only been at sea for a few weeks, but it felt like forever.

She grabbed his pillow and hugged it, her eyes shut and her heart about to break. “Josh,” she whispered into the feathery depths. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she believed it still held his scent.

She of all people should know better than to fall for a Navy guy.

Groaning in protest, she swam to the surface of the covers and got out of bed. It was one of those perfect spring days on Puget Sound when winter seemed nothing more than a soggy, unpleasant memory. The sliding glass doors of the bedroom framed a view of the sapphire water and distant Cascades, the fiery pink of sunrise painting the vanilla ice-cream peak of Mount Baker.

She pulled on her robe, lingering at the window to watch a blue heron at the edges of the bank, lifting each foot and setting
it down with great deliberation. In its beak it held a wisp of grass; it was nesting season.

She made the bed, which was a simple matter. She slept neatly, disturbing no more than a small portion of the covers. When Josh stayed over, the morning-after bed looked like a rummage sale at closing time—sheets ripped from their moorings, twisted and damp, pillows tossed willy-nilly. Josh made love and slept like he did everything else, with his whole self, with total abandon, his energy boundless and infectious.

Even through the ache of missing him, she couldn’t help feeling a warm spasm of remembered intimacy at the thought of their lovemaking. It was as though he had reached across the Pacific Ocean and caressed her.

“You’re a sick woman,” she muttered, heading into the bathroom. Josh’s toothbrush was still in the holder. He’d planted it there, as though staking a claim, the first time they made love in her bed. His absolute, unwavering self-assurance had both annoyed and thrilled her. “Just so you know,” he’d said. “I’ll be back.”

She dressed quickly for class—no shower for her until afterward—in black spandex shorts and a turquoise top. Then she checked her gym bag to make sure she had music, shoes, towel, water bottle. Everything in order. She had grown so cautious, so deliberate after Gil died. So excruciatingly neat and unobtrusive about everything she did, from sleeping without disturbing the covers to weighing the portion of organic granola she ate with yogurt every morning for breakfast. If Josh were here, he would tease her about it, threaten her with bacon and eggs, and she would start the day laughing at herself.

Ah, Josh. Whether he was in bed with her, on top of her, inside her or thousands of miles away, he dominated her life. He was the blazing sun to her moon. Even when she eclipsed him, moving in to cover his center, he was still so much bigger and brighter; he burned around the edges.

She put out fresh food for the stray cat who showed every sign of turning into a permanent resident. Then she did the breakfast
dishes, such as they were—one bowl, one spoon, one juice glass—reflecting on how small her life seemed since Josh left. When he was here, breakfast tended to be an explosion of creativity and hilarity. He might carve through half a watermelon trying to make a model of a fighter plane, or use up a whole box of pancake mix, laughing at her misgivings about the calorie count.

As she wiped the kitchen counter, Lauren burst into tears.

This shouldn’t be happening to her. She’d finally gotten her life on track, her emotions under control after a three-year struggle with depression after Gil died. Now along came Josh, with his burning ambition, lofty dreams and his huge, insatiable appetite for everything in life—most especially her.

“Idiot,” she said, defiantly using two Kleenex to blot her cheeks. “Quit making everything into a tragedy.” She marched outside, filling her lungs with the special flavor of springtime on the island. A hint of raw salt air, new grass and the light, fragrant promise of budding lilacs.

Later it would rain, she knew. The forecast promised a change in the weather, and clouds were moving in on the morning sun.

She picked up her paper, shaking the dew off the cellophane bag, and waved to Mr. Carruthers, her across-the-street neighbor who came out to get his paper the same time she did each morning. To stare at her in her spandex, Josh had pointed out.

The night before he left, he’d asked her to marry him. It was all she thought about, consuming her like a giddy fever that kept her in its relentless grip. She hadn’t given him an answer to his proposal. The issue was not nearly as simple as she wished it could be.

He was not a man to settle for half measures. He wanted everything from her. She wasn’t sure she could live with his intensity, with his rocket-powered ambition. She didn’t know if his dreams could somehow mesh with her own.

In the wake of unbearable grief, she had fashioned a life for herself here. A small and tidy existence she happened to like very much. She had none of Josh’s scenery-eating hunger for adventure, for everything. She wondered why that was—because she
couldn’t handle having her dreams come true, or because she was leery of wanting something too much? She couldn’t decide what scared her more, marrying Josh or losing him forever.

He was everything she wasn’t supposed to want, a Navy man who spent half his life at sea and the other half moving like a gypsy from place to place. He was a heartache waiting to happen.

The cheerful
brrring
of a bicycle bell sounded. She looked down the street to see Patricia Rivera peddling toward her. She was exactly what people meant when they said pregnant women bloomed. Patricia’s cheeks were flushed the color of a rose. Her slick dark hair shone. Her legs were ropy with muscle as she glided to the end of the driveway and squeezed the hand brakes. Even the bruise-colored starburst of varicose veins behind her knee looked as though it belonged there, every bit as appropriate as her protruding stomach.

Lauren held the plastic-wrapped paper away from her to let it drip on the ground. “You’re looking chipper this morning.”

Patricia smiled and smoothed a hand down her belly, draped in a polyester top that screamed Wal-Mart but only managed to play up her fragile beauty. “I have news.”

“Let me guess. You’re pregnant.” Lauren spoke lightly, but deep in a hidden place inside her, a terrible envy howled.

“Very funny.” Patricia opened the top of her water bottle and took a swig. “Congratulate me. It’s a boy. He was finally turned in the right direction during the ultrasound.”

The knife twisted. Still, Lauren found a smile of genuine happiness for her friend. “Congratulations, Patricia. That’s great.”

“Thanks.” Patricia put her water away. “The doctor says I can keep coming to fitness class so long as I take it slow. No restrictions other than common sense.”

Lauren congratulated her again and watched her friend ride away. Patricia had a husband she adored and a baby on the way. She looked like Catherine Zeta-Jones, but she was impossible to dislike. She was kind and bright, and she’d been one of Lauren’s favorite people since the day she’d walked into the fitness studio
last fall. And she was not without her sadnesses, either. Her husband was half a world away on the same carrier as Josh, and she was bursting with the news about their baby.

Lauren looked down, startled to see that she held both hands lovingly on her stomach. She shook her head and went back inside. The phone rang as soon as she stepped into the kitchen.

She glanced at the clock over the stove. It was the middle of the night in Josh’s part of the world. She picked up on the fourth ring.

“Mrs. Stanton?” A vaguely familiar female voice used her married name, which she heard so seldom that the sound of it startled her.

“That’s me.”

“I have Dr. Hendler on the line for you.”

The receiver in her hand was suddenly drenched in sweat. It nearly slipped from her grasp. This was the call she had been awaiting with terrifying hope and dread.

She was aware of everything around her with razor-edged clarity: the pink-toothed profile of the mountains against the morning sky; the perfect flight of wheeling gulls patrolling the beach; the sound of radio music drifting from the bedroom.

“Yes?” she asked in a strange and distant voice she didn’t recognize.

“Your test results are back,” said the doctor.

She tried desperately to read his tone. Was it good news or bad? She stopped breathing. She wanted to stop the world. “Yes?”

“I’m afraid it’s not what we’d hoped for,” he said. Softly, gravely. “Lauren, I’m so sorry….”

Whidbey Island, Washington
2:30 p.m.

Grace Bennett drove off the ferry from Seattle and merged onto the country highway that formed the long, crooked spine of Whidbey Island. Fat raindrops ran backward on the window, like tears blown sideways on a face pushed into the wind. It felt as though the storm was driving her home.

As she sped up the main road, the wind and rain gradually abated. By the time she pulled to the shoulder and paused to get the mail from the box, tentative slices of sunshine shone through the clouds. She turned into the driveway and sat in the car for a moment, gazing at her house. In all her years as a Navy wife, she’d lived in a lot of places, but this was the only one she’d ever loved. It was a little bungalow on a bluff with an arbor of old roses and a view of the Sound. Some would call it dated, tacky. But Grace didn’t care. It was
hers.

She couldn’t believe she’d bought it without Steve. But lately, she’d done a lot of surprising things—and the person she surprised most of all was herself.

Especially today. With a pleasant shiver, she picked up her purse and the stack of mail from the seat beside her and slid out of the car. She ducked her head to avoid drops from the ancient cedar trees that arched over the drive and skirted puddles to keep from ruining her new shoes, then let herself in through the front gate. She had just bought the ensemble of expensive skirt and blazer, and a pair of kitten-heeled pumps. The only outfit that had cost her more was her wedding dress.

On the porch, she stopped to sift through the mail, finding an assortment of bills, letters to the kids from prospective colleges…the usual overabundance of junk mail.

In the past, she used to sift through the mail with fevered eagerness, looking for a familygram or precious letter from Steve. These days, no one sent letters anymore, just e-mail. What was gained in speed and frequency with the Internet came at the sacrifice of the cozy, ineffable intimacy of a handwritten letter.

In a letter, Steve’s presence used to be a tangible thing. He had a charming habit of making his point with swiftly drawn strokes, an extension of his energetic personality. He used punctuation marks no one had ever heard of, yet she could practically hear his voice when he wrote, “I
you 1000x more than flying, girl
”

She used to sleep with his letters under her pillow.

And she used to spend an hour each evening writing aerograms, watching the shape of each word on the thin blue page as it appeared behind her pen. Her letter-writing was a sort of handicraft, a way to weave her love into every word she wrote. E-mail was different. Faster, to be sure, but different. And completely inadequate for fixing what was wrong between her and Steve. But after today, she had finally figured out what to do. All that remained was to tell him.

Juggling the mail, her purse and keys, she let herself in. Daisy, who had yet to grow into her paws, scrambled in to greet her, sneezing and wagging her feathery tail as though Grace had been away for a decade. A crystal vase of roses on the hall table filled the house with their soft, evocative scent. The flowers had been
delivered yesterday for her fortieth birthday. They should have been sent by Steve.

But they weren’t.

Her leather-soled shoes made a satisfying tapping sound on the hardwood floor. She heard the light beep of the answering machine, indicating a number of messages. She’d check them in a moment.

She went to the kitchen and let the dog out. As she shut the door, she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass.

The image startled her briefly. She was a different person, and after today, there would be more changes afoot. Her encounter with Ross Cameron was everything she had hoped it would—and would not—be.

She still couldn’t believe she’d gone through with it. It was hard to get her mind around the idea of Grace McAllen Bennett doing something like that, yet she’d been heading in unexpected directions ever since a stranger named Josh Lamont had dropped like a bomb into the middle of their lives. That wake-up call had jolted her out of the life she thought she had and shoved her into unknown territory. With Steve at sea, Grace had started down a road of her own.

She set aside the stack of mail, took off her raincoat and put her keys on the counter, pausing for a minute to study the little sterling silver anchor key chain, a gift from Steve a lifetime ago. She hung it on a hook by the door. Though the house was quiet, a trail of kid clutter formed a path from the back door to the den. When they were little, it was composed of Fisher-Price pull toys and G.I. Joe action figures. Now it consisted of sports equipment and schoolbooks.

Grace glanced at the clock. They’d be home soon. She wondered if they would notice the new dress, the hair and makeup. Katie would, and she’d worry. That was Katie, the worrier. Change upset her, an unfortunate trait in a kid whose childhood consisted of moving every three years. She’d probably look at Grace and think demons had possessed her mother.

Brian would be oblivious, of course. At eighteen, he was
oblivious to everything but baseball and drawing, his two reasons for breathing. Fortunately, they were also his reasons for getting into college, so she couldn’t complain. When Brian first explained his college plans, Grace had been worried about how Steve would react. But slowly, as she grew into her new self, she quit trying to turn this family into an adjunct to Steve’s career.

And Emma? There were days when Grace actually thought her older daughter had slipped away somewhere, leaving a secretive stranger in her place. She and her twin brother would be leaving home soon, yet sometimes Grace had the feeling Emma had checked out months ago, not long after Grace and Steve’s marriage exploded.

A terrible heat filled her, and for a moment she had trouble breathing. Even now, she thought, stunned by the powerful grip he still held on her heart. Even now. Flush from seeing Ross, she thought she finally knew her heart, but doubts kept seeping through the cracks and crevices that had appeared in the foundations of her life.

Nothing would be resolved until Steve came back and they made some sense of what had happened. She released a sigh, her breath a series of jerky exhalations.

Breathe, she reminded herself. Lauren, her trainer, had shown her how to find the deepest reaches of her breathing apparatus, capillaries only one cell thick, yet capable of sending a burst of oxygen into every panting, air-starved region of the lungs. Breathing was a learned art, so they said.

She headed into the study to check her messages. The answering machine was blinking an ominous number thirteen. She left the island for a day in the city and suddenly everyone needed her. Her e-mail box was sure to be exploding.

Sitting at the secondhand oak library desk that served as her company headquarters, she touched Play and picked up a pen.

The first few messages on the machine were strictly business. She was currently handling the relocation of three families and juggling delivery times, tonnage estimates, shipping contracts. Then came Katie: “Mom, I’m going to Melanie’s tonight, okay?”

“Actually, it’s not.” Grace had a list of chores she’d been saving for Katie.

“Okay,” said the voice on the tape. “I’ll stop by after school. Bye.”

Melanie. The Corpuz girl, Grace recalled. She had a Ping-Pong table and an older brother Katie considered “hot.” Katie wanted a boyfriend in the worst way. It was one of the hazards, Grace supposed, of being the brainy younger sister of the prettiest girl in the school.

“It’s a boy!” the answering machine blared in the vibrant voice of Patricia Rivera. “I just got back from the doctor’s, and he confirmed it. Call me and talk me out of these terrible names I keep coming up with….”

Next, a crackle of static and then Steve’s voice on the carrier satellite phone. “Hey, guys.”

Grace’s grip tightened on the pen. In spite of everything, just the sound of his voice still touched her. Still infuriated her. Still made her dizzy with memories.

“It’s your old man calling from the wrong side of the international dateline. Guess what? I’m giving a tour to a reporter from
Newsweek….
”

A reporter, thought Grace. What’s that about?

“Brian,” continued Steve, “I guess you’ll be getting word on your Naval Academy appointment any day now. I’m pulling for you, buddy.

“Emma-girl, check your e-mail. I sent you some digital photos of a pod of whales we spotted. Katydid, how’d that science project turn out? Bet you made an A-plus. And Grace…sorry I missed you on your birthday. I tried calling, but there was no answer. Hope you had a nice time. Okay, y’all give your mom a hug from me. Hug one another while you’re at it, you hear? I sure do miss you. Over and out.”

Grace massaged the sides of her jaw, trying to force herself to relax.

The next message was work-related. A crisis with an overseas shipment—an entire sealed container had been dropped overboard in Seattle. Someone’s whole household was bobbing in the drink.

A simple matter compared to the sticky complexities of her family.

Then Lauren Stanton. She sounded congested, or maybe she’d been crying. “Grace, hi. It’s Lauren. I—um—look, I canceled fitness class today and couldn’t find anyone to cover for me. Sorry about that.”

Grace winced at the emotional pain she heard in Lauren’s tone. Josh had been gone only a few weeks, and already Lauren was falling apart.

Grace hurt for Lauren. The two of them had their ups and downs, that was for sure, but extraordinary circumstances bound them together into an uneasy sisterhood of shared hopes and fears.

She had the phone in her hand, ready to start returning calls, as the final message played. “Hello, Grace. It’s Peggy from Buskirk Law Offices. I just wanted to let you know that I sent the packet over by messenger.” The voice paused as though, in the midst of a routine procedure, the speaker felt the weight of it. “The papers are ready to sign. Good luck, Grace.”

Good luck.
Grace felt a strange sort of dread. What did she think she was doing? What
was
she doing?

She set down the phone, not quite ready to talk to Lauren—to anyone—just yet.

As she sat there, trying to make sense of everything she was feeling, teetering on the edge of taking a major step in her life, she heard the muffled sound of a car door slamming. Then another. Frowning slightly, because she wasn’t expecting anyone, she stood and went to the vestibule to see who it was. As she passed the hall tree mirror, she caught another glimpse of herself and smoothed her hands down her pencil-straight, raspberry-colored skirt.

Through the antique lace panel covering the front door, she saw the wet black gleam of a Navy vehicle, a common-enough sight on base, but fairly rare beyond the confines of the Naval Air Station.

The front gate opened. Between the tall hedges of climbing roses, two men emerged.

When Grace saw them, every cell in her body came to ringing
attention. She could hear, far away in another part of the house, the sound of a faucet dripping and Daisy scratching at the back door. The scent of roses and orange-oil furniture polish hung in the air. The wispy lace covering the front door softened and distorted the features of her visitors, but even so, Grace knew exactly what she was seeing. The nightmare every military wife dreaded.

A Navy chaplain and the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer, coming up the walk.