Dream Man Read online

  She staggered out of the bathroom, glad to find Sharon there. Her wobbly legs needed all the help they could get to reach the bed her sister tucked her into.

  On the windowsill were vases and vases and vases filled with bright yellow daffodils. Daffodils? In October? Or was it November now?

  “Max?” Jeanie whispered with the last of her strength as she lay gratefully back against the pillow, exhausted.

  “About three rooms down the hall. The nurses said the two of you were the dirtiest patients ever admitted, that you both looked like coal-miners.”

  Jeanie made herself laugh, but it wasn’t easy.

  “When can I see him?” she asked, but realized maybe patients weren’t allowed to see each other in hospitals.

  “I’ll ask the nurse.”

  “I don’t know why I have to be here.” Suddenly Jeanie’s eyes filled with tears, and she was crying again, sobbing as if she would never be able to stop. “I’m not sick and I want to go home and I want to see Max right now!”

  “I know, I know.” Sharon’s voice was soothing.

  “You don’t know! I need Max!”

  The nurse came in on the scene. “Ms. Leslie, you’re badly malnourished, and it’s best if you stay here for a little while to get built back up.” She wiped Jeanie’s tears with a tissue. “Look now. You’re right beside the biggest window we could find. Mr. McKenzie insisted that we put you beside one before he’d let us do anything to him. I promise you’ll get to see him soon, too, if you just cooperate with us. I need to hang a new I.V. bag. Once that’s dripped in, and you’ve eaten a few more meals, we’ll try to get you to his room. You wouldn’t want him to see you looking like this, would you?”

  Jeanie didn’t bother to tell the nurse that Max had seen her looking a heck of a lot worse in the past few days and had made slow and wonderful love with her in spite of that.

  “Promise me one more thing,” she bargained.

  The nurse’s lips twitched. “What’s that?” she asked warily.

  “Get him a hot fudge sundae. He really, really wants one. Get him one every day.”

  The nurse laughed. “You two are quite a pair. Him concerned that you needed a window because you’re claustrophobic, you demanding a sundae for him.”

  “I’ll get it for him,” Sharon said. “And what about you? What do you want?”

  “To see Max, to see Jason and Roxy, and to have a three-scoop banana split with chocolate syrup, coconut and ten cherries.”

  “Oh, this is heaven!” Jeanie felt her chin wobble and steadied it with difficulty as Sharon spooned in the first ambrosial mouthful of ice cream, banana, coconut and chocolate sauce. She’d already eaten the cherries. Except for the two she’d seen little Roxy eyeing with longing.

  Jason, whose mother had wheeled him in with his sister at his side, had held the banana split on the cast that went from his foot to his thigh. “Everybody looked for you, Aunt Jeanie. They looked and looked and looked.” His chin trembled. “And then they quit. I thought they were just going to let you die.”

  “They had to, sweetie. They probably thought we were already dead.”

  “But you’re not, Auntie Jeanie,” Roxy said. “They should have kept looking.”

  “They didn’t know we were alive. They can’t search forever, putting other people’s lives at risk.” She accepted another big spoonful from her sister, let it melt and slide down her still raw throat. She swallowed. “But I don’t understand why they didn’t find your cave, Jason, or at least where it had collapsed. You did tell them about it as soon as they found you, didn’t you?”

  Jason looked mystified. “Aunt Jeanie, I don’t have a cave.”

  She stared at him. “What? But Jase, we followed a trail that ended at a big cedar tree. I looked under the low branches, hoping you’d be there, and saw another trail. And then I saw a little slot in the cliff. I shined my light in and saw a bit of red cloth. I thought it was your jacket, so I went in after you.”

  Sharon’s eyes widened. “You went into that cave voluntarily?” The spoonful of ice cream she held began to drip. “Jeanie, you’re afraid of small places! You won’t even use elevators! Why in the world would you go into a cave?”

  “For Jason! I saw something red. I thought it was him. I had to. Don’t you see? I had to do it, only it wasn’t his jacket, it was his sleeping bag—the one I bought him for his birthday last year.” She leaned back wearily on her pillows, shaking her head when Sharon shoved another spoonful toward her mouth. “Let the kids finish it. I really thought it was Jase’s bag, but I guess any red sleeping bag looks the same as any other.”

  “My sleeping bag’s at home, Aunt Jeanie,” Jason said around a mouthful of banana split. “I don’t go into caves. You and Mom have told me often enough how dangerous they can be.”

  “Some child planned on spending the night in that cave,” Jeanie said. “He had left his sleeping bag, a can of beans, a stack of comics, and a bag of cookies.” She bit her lip in consternation, but Sharon, face-reader that she was, allayed her new fear at once.

  “There are no other people missing.” She smiled. “No people missing at all, now that you and Max have been found.”

  Sharon touched her sister’s face with a gentle hand, her joy shining clearly out of her jet black eyes. “But imagine you diving into a cave, Jeanie! It boggles the mind. I thought you and Max had fallen in through the hole at the top! Everyone thinks that! The doctors are all saying what a miracle it is you don’t both have multiple fractures and the PEP people are ready to string Max up for not tying markers to the area you were searching!”

  “It wasn’t Max’s fault! None of it was. He was fantastic, Sharon. He tried and tried to dig us out. Once we got into the cavern with the hole in top, we shouted and shouted, but we finally figured we must be in the middle of the woods and no one was ever going … to … hear us.” Her voice wobbled before she steadied it. “Then, last night, we heard the harmonica man. Who is he, Sharon? I want to meet him, to thank him for being out there in the woods in the moonlight playing his harmonica. He was playing The Hawaiian Wedding Song.”

  Sharon didn’t answer. Jason did. With a defiant look on his face he said, “His name is Marc Duval. He’s my friend. I wanted to see him the night I lied and told Mom I was going to Mark’s— the other Mark’s. But I had to go across the field and into the woods in case Mom was looking, before I turned back and went to Marc Duval’s camper. It’s right next door and he’s gonna teach me to play the guitar.”

  Jeanie felt horror rising as goose-bumps prickled her skin. “But… if you said you were going to spend the night at Mark—your other friend’s—house, does that mean you meant to spend the night in Marc Duval’s camper? Jason! Your mom and I have—”

  “I wasn’t going to spend the night there, Aunt Jeanie. He’d never let me do that without Mom’s permission. I was going to come home and tell Mom I’d had a fight with Mark. The kid Mark, with a K. The other one’s Marc with a C. He’s neat, Aunt Jeanie. You’d like him. So would Mom, if she’d just get to know him like I do.”

  “Jason,” Sharon said, her face set into stubborn lines, “we won’t discuss it right now.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “Jason. You do not know Mr. Duval. He is not your friend. He is an acquaintance you made without my knowledge, and I don’t consider him a proper friend for a young boy. Now, I know you’ve been lost and injured and worried about your auntie Jeanie, but that doesn’t mean you can get away with disobeying me. You are not to have anything more to do with Mr. Duval. We are all very grateful to him for being where he was when he was, and finding Aunt Jeanie and Max, but that is as far as it goes. Do you understand?”

  Jason drew in a long breath, and Jeanie, her eyes darting from mother to son, fully expected a rebellious tirade. But her nephew nodded. “Yeah. Okay, sure, Mom,” he said, then he blurted out to his aunt, “He makes music all the time, just like Mom used to do. I like to hear him. I miss the music.”
r />   Jeanie saw Sharon’s face turn white and pain flood her eyes, but before she could mediate the brewing battle, there was a commotion in the hallway that distracted them. She heard a man say, “She may be sleeping. Just let me check,” but the door was thrust open without ceremony, and Max strode through, pushing an I.V. pole before him. His hands were as thickly bandaged as hers, but his dressing went halfway up his arms. His eyes went at once to Jeanie’s face.

  His own closed for a second, and he swayed on his feet, reached out to clumsily balance himself on the back of Sharon’s chair before slumping to the edge of Jeanie’s bed. Apparently not minding that anyone else was present, Max gathered Jeanie into his arms and held her. “Oh, Lord,” he said softly, his face buried in her still damp mass of curly hair. “Oh, Jeanie, Jeanie, Jeanie.”

  When Jeanie looked up moments later, they were alone in the room and the door was shut. He was clean, but still wore his short, dark beard. His eyes shone like bright blue lights from under his brows. “Thank you for the daffodils. They’re what convinced me you were really alive. But … are you all right?” She gently touched the point where the I.V. needle went into his skin.

  “I’m fine. That’s just for some antibiotics. My fingers are infected.” He indicated her I.V. line. “You too?”

  “I’m fine. That’s for nutrition, they tell me. My stomach’s shrunk. A little pudding, an orange, and half a tiny milkshake fill me to the brim. I ate about one fourth of a banana split I begged Sharon for, then let the kids have the rest of it. Have you been eating?”

  His smile deepened. “Everything in sight, plus the two hot fudge-sundaes your sister and her kids brought me. I’m told I have you to thank for that.”

  She stroked his fuzzy face with her bandaged hand, wishing she could feel it with her palm. She settled for rubbing her cheek against it. “And thank you for my window, too. Max, it’s all over, isn’t it? We aren’t dreaming this?”

  “We aren’t dreaming, Jeanie, but no, it’s not all over. It’s only beginning.” Holding her hair down at the sides of her head, he kissed her. “When, sweetheart? When can we get married?”

  She was silent for a long moment, staring at him in utter dismay. “Married?” She echoed his word in a troubled whisper. “Max, we can’t. I can’t. No. Please. I…”

  “But you said it!” he protested. “In the cave you said you would marry me if we were going to live, and, Jeanie, we are! We’re going to live.”

  “But … not together.” Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back. She had cried enough to last for the rest of her life.

  “Ahh, Jeanie, you said you would. You did. I wasn’t dreaming that. I want you, Jeanie. I need you. Don’t turn me away. Remember, you dreamed me up first.” He tried to smile, tried to joke, but pain filled his eyes. “I’m your hero, remember? How can you possibly turn down a hero?”

  “I said if we were going to live, I’d want to marry you. But then I thought we were going to die. I said it to give you something. Max, to comfort you, to ease your suffering if only a little, to give back to you some of the pleasure you’d given me.”

  “You said you loved me.”

  She swallowed the hard, high lump in her throat and met his gaze. “I do,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I know you hate it when women do that, but it’s not something I can help.”

  “I don’t find myself hating it when you say it.”

  “But you can’t say it back to me, can you?”

  Misery made his shoulders droop. He let his hands fall and slipped from the side of her bed to the chair Sharon had used. “I would, Jeanie. If I could. If I knew what it meant, if I wasn’t sure it was just words, then I’d give them to you the way you gave me your promise of marriage. But if I did, it would mean exactly what your words meant: Comfort, ease, an attempt to give you back some of the pleasures you’ve given me.”

  “If you love me, if you’ve figured out what it means, and if it’s something so big and so wonderful that it can go on forever, then why not marry me and have forever? It’s what I’m offering you.”

  “No. What you’re offering me isn’t enough. And I truly don’t want marriage. Max, my freedom is important to me. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make you understand. When we were in that cave, all I wanted was out. I think if I were locked into marriage, I’d feel the same. And I don’t want to do that to you. I’d fight against you and our marriage, the boundaries it would erect around me as hard as I fought against the walls of that cavern.”

  “I would let you be free, Jeanie. I wouldn’t try to stop you from being you. We are free, free of that cave, free of whatever barriers society might expect us to erect around each other. We can do whatever we want, make our own rules with the unit our marriage would make.

  She looked out the wide window at her side. There was a world out there. It was open and it was hers, and she knew she had to walk through it without anyone to hold her back, build her fences—make dark closets. Slowly, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Max. So sorry.”

  He got to his feet, one hand wrapped around the I.V. pole for support.

  “I’m sorry, too, Jeanie. Sorry for you. Because whether you know it or not, you’re still locked up in your grandfather’s basement closet, and I don’t think you’ll ever find a way out. You’re still trapped, but I’m free. Free to get over wanting you,” he added bitterly. “And I will.”

  “Good. There are plenty of women out there willing to help you make life easier for your brother. And I’ll get over loving you.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, his eyes somber on her face. “But you’ll never get over being a coward, Jeanie. And whether you like it or not, you’re still trapped in a cave of your own making. A cave of fear. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the trap you fear the most is the one that holds you the tightest?”

  “It’s just as ironic that the love you despise so much is the one thing women want most to give you. And yet you won’t give it in return because you fear looking like a fool. Well, you may never look like one, my beautiful, blue-eyed hero, but you are one, Max. The biggest fool of them all.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away, green hospital bathrobe flapping at the back of his hairy legs, silly paper slippers scuffing along the floor. As the door closed, Jeanie’s eyes closed, but even that didn’t stop the stupid, helpless tears from escaping again.

  The next morning, they let her go.

  “Jeanie, you’re going to have to eat something. If anything, you’ve lost weight since you came out of hospital. And when are you going back to work?”

  “Tired of me, Sharon?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes! I’m tired of you dragging around here looking like a wraith. So you had a fight with Max. Don’t you think it’s time you made it up? Emotions were bound to be running high in the hours and days after your rescue. Whatever he said, whatever you said, probably meant nothing at all. Why don’t you call him? Tell him you want to see him.”

  “Because I don’t want to see him.”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire…”

  Jeanie smiled.

  “Seriously, you have to pull out of this depression you’re in. The way you have yourself locked up so tight, you might just as well have stayed in that cave.”

  “He said that’s where I am.”

  Sharon shot her a look. “What does that mean?”

  “He said I’m trapped in a cave of my own making. That I’m all locked up in my own fear of being trapped, just as surely as I was locked up in Grandpa’s closet.”

  “Why did he say that? What is it he thinks you’re afraid of?”

  “He wanted me to marry him.”

  Sharon stared. “And you wouldn’t? It’s obvious that you’re madly in love with him, and he with you. So whyever did you turn him down?”

  “He’s not in love with me. He doesn’t believe in love. He wants to marry me so that women will stop chasing him and start chasing Rolph.”

  Sharon threw back her head an
d laughed, the clear, tinkling sound rising up to bounce back off the rough beams that formed the ceiling of the living room. “Of all the crazy rationales for a proposal! And are you really so dumb as to think that’s his real reason? Jeanie, no man would marry to give his brother a clear run at the field. If he told you that, it’s because he’s scared to death to admit he loves you.”

  “He told me that the second time I’d ever seen him. He proposed to me after spending roughly two hours in my company.”

  Sharon’s eyes widened. “No kidding? The guy must really have been smitten. Love at first sight.” She sighed and smiled happily like the true romantic she was.

  “Sharon! I just told you. He was nothing of the sort. He wants to give Rolph a break. Rolph actually suggested that it would help if Max took himself out of circulation.”

  “Listen, baby sister, you met Rolph. The guy’s gorgeous. He can’t be having trouble attracting women, no matter how handsome and charming his brother is. Surely, there are enough women to go around that they could both take their pick.” She paused and shook her head in disgust. “And Max McKenzie, whether he knows it or not, has taken his pick. And you my beloved sister, are it. Now, are you going to spend the rest of your life sitting here sulking, or are you going to get off your duff and go after what you know, deep down, is the only man in the world for you?”

  “He’ll try to control me.”

  “Sure he will. Don’t let him. You’re not me. You have more guts.”

  “He’ll order me around, like Ellis ordered you around. He’ll turn me into a—” Her gaze fell and she stared at her hands linked in her lap. She rubbed them together. Ever since she’d come home from hospital, her hands had been so cold, she thought they’d never get warm again. They were scabbed, and peeling, and ugly, no matter how much lotion she smoothed onto them.

  “Ahh, so that’s it.” Sharon got off her chair and knelt before Jeanie, taking the thin, cold hands in her own warm ones. “Listen, baby-girl. You never did understand about me and Ellis, did you? You saw the bad parts but never the good ones.”