Chapter 10 #4
She knew the way well; they’d walked it many times in the past. But she held tight to his hand and let him lead.
Only when they reached the stream did she let go, moving to the water’s edge, squatting.
She felt Cutter’s presence beside her. Something about his solidity and his warmth was so genuine, so strong, so like Eugene’s that everything she’d tried so hard to keep inside for so very long filled up and overflowed.
Tucking her face tight against her knees, she began to cry.
Cutter murmured something, but the sound was lost, just beyond the realm of her misery.
Then he put his arms around her and, jacket and all, drew her close to give her the comfort she’d been wanting and needing.
He didn’t speak, didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t cry.
He hugged her more tightly when the sobs came faster, stroked her hair when they eased, pressed her face to his chest when low, mournful moans came in their stead.
In time, her hands relaxed their grip on his shirt. She sniffled but didn’t pull away. With her cheek flush to his chest, she whispered, “I miss him, Cutter. I miss him so much.”
He scooped a swirl of hair from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I know. I do, too.”
She’d guessed that, which was probably why she had needed so badly to see him.
“In Boston, there’s just this awful emptiness when I think of him.
” She took a hiccuping breath. “I thought it would be better here, but when we were driving up today, I kept remembering all the times I knew he’d be waiting for me.
Then we drove through the center of town, and everywhere I looked he was there.
Only he wasn’t. The house was just the same, but so different, and I thought I’d die if I didn’t find you.
I ran through town like I was crazy. That’s what people must have thought. ”
“Nah. They’d never think that. They love you.”
“They loved Daddy.”
“They miss him, too.”
Her thoughts flew back to the day of the funeral, when so many of those people had come out to say goodbye. Remembering their faces, remembering the huge coffin and the way it had disappeared into the ground, she started crying again. “I’m sorry,” she whispered between sobs.
“Don’t be.” He sounded as distressed as she felt. “You need this. So do I. It helps me with all I’m feeling myself.”
“You hurt, too?”
“I loved your daddy,” he said, and there was a sudden fierceness in his voice. “He did more for me than any other person on this earth ever did. I loved him like I’d’a loved my own daddy if he’d been worth a dime—” His voice broke.
Pam held tighter to him until she felt she was in control, but even then she didn’t pull back. Cutter’s heartbeat was the most reassuring thing she’d heard in four months.
After a time, he asked about Patricia, and she told him.
She also told him about John and how he was in charge of everything, and about Hillary and how good she’d been, and about school and her friends and Marcy.
When she asked, Cutter told her about things on the mountain and how they’d tightened under John’s command.
He told her about her old friends, who was doing what and how.
By that time they were facing each other in the dark, no longer touching but closer than ever. “What are we going to do, Cutter?” she whispered.
“We’ll go on. That’s what he’d have wanted. We’ll go on and do the best we can.”
“But it’s so hard sometimes. Sometimes I just want to yell and scream, I get so angry. It isn’t fair, all that’s happened. It isn’t fair that Daddy died, or that my mother’s in a hospital, or that I’m stuck with John. Life shouldn’t be like that.”
“But it is, and it’s the strong ones who survive. You’re a strong one, Pam. You’ll do fine.”
“But it hurts so.”
“I know.” He pulled her close for a final minute, before standing and drawing her up. “I’d better give you a ride home.”
“We’re here for the weekend. Can I see you again?”
“You bet.”
They’d gone about halfway back to the cabin when she said, “Daddy loved you, too. He really did.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“He did. He wanted to leave you something in his will. Did you know?”
After a pause, Cutter said, “He mentioned it once. Little Lincoln.”
“I don’t know what happened.” She remembered the argument her father and John had about it.
“I heard him tell John and he was so definite. He wouldn’t change his mind.
Not about that. I think he wished you were his son, not John—and John knows it.
” She looked up at him. Lit by the moon, his face was all hard, bold angles that should have looked harsh to her, but didn’t, couldn’t.
Cutter was special. “He would be mad as anything if he knew I ran out here first thing.”
“Well, you’re not gonna tell him,” Cutter vowed, looking defiant, “and I sure ain’t, so unless he’s got spies up here, he won’t know. Right?”
For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Pam smiled.
She did more smiling that weekend. She saw all of her friends, and while there was always an awareness that someone was missing, being with them was healing.
Being with Cutter was the best part. His life was so different from hers, but somehow he understood what she was feeling and thinking.
When she was with the others, she felt well tended and guarded as those people who loved Eugene would guard his daughter, but still there was an element of loneliness.
When she was with Cutter, she didn’t feel alone.
For that reason, she squeezed every possible trip to Timiny Cove out of John.
It turned out to be easier than she had thought it would be and had nothing to do with either kindness or compassion on John’s part.
On the weekend of that first party in April, he discovered that he liked having the townhouse to himself, which he told her bluntly.
She didn’t care. Going to Maine meant the world to her.
She was happier there than she could ever have been with John on Beacon Hill.
Cutter was her dearest friend. Sometimes they talked at his cabin or walked through the woods to the stream.
Sometimes they went to the mountain he was working so that he could show her through the mines that had been opened since she’d been there last. Sometimes he watched while she doodled with a stick in the dirt or with a pencil on the back of his pay envelope.
He kept all her sketches posted on the wall by his bookshelf and was particularly enthralled by those she made of tourmaline in each stage of discovery.
“I’d wear this one in a ring,” she told him once, and when he asked what the ring would look like, she drew that, too, then took delight in his appreciation.
She knew of his reputation for toughness, but she saw none of it.
She saw his eyes harden when he was angry, saw him grow guarded when he was in town, but in the next breath he’d look at her and everything in him would become gentle.
That made her feel special. She liked the exhilaration she felt when she was with him.
Like Eugene, he was spontaneous, not programmed.
He liked to talk about books he read, or about what Washington was doing to help out the local dairy farmers.
He hadn’t ever traveled, hadn’t ever gone to the theater or the ballet or the opera, didn’t own a suit, wasn’t thinking of leaving Timiny Cove or moving up in the world.
Still he was the most interesting person she knew.
John found out that she saw him, of course. She wasn’t sure how, but when he confronted her, she lied. She said that she’d bumped into him by accident, and that it wasn’t her fault he happened to be walking along the sidewalk at the same time she was.
John warned her that it wasn’t to happen again. She nodded and said that it wouldn’t. And her smile was that much wider the next time she arrived in Timiny Cove and went straight to Cutter’s cabin in the woods.