Chapter 9 #3
The cork popped with a sound as festive as champagne.
They toasted each other, the baby, the absent Sunny, the past and the future.
Cal joined them, drawn in by their pleasure in each other.
Here was one more thing that time hadn’t changed, he thought.
The giddy delight a coming baby brought to people who wanted it.
He’d never thought very seriously about starting a family. He’d known that when the time, and the woman, were right the rest would fall into place. Now he caught himself imagining what it would be like if he and Libby were toasting their own expected child.
Dangerous thoughts. Impossible thoughts. He had only a matter of days left with her—hours, really—and families required a lifetime.
Even as he yearned for one life, watching Libby’s parents together reminded him of his own family. Were they watching the sky, wondering where he was, how he was? If only he could let them know he was safe.
“Cal?”
“Hmm? What?” He blinked and saw Libby staring at him. “I’m sorry.”
“I was just saying we should build a fire.”
“Sure.”
“One of my favorite spots here is in front of the fire.” Caroline hooked her arm through William’s. “I’m so glad we stopped by for the night.”
“For the night?” Libby repeated.
“We’re on our way to Carmel,” Caroline decided on the spot, and gave William’s hand a vicious squeeze before he could speak. “I craved a ride along the Coast.”
“What she craved was a cheeseburger under her alfalfa sprouts,” William said. “That’s when I knew she was pregnant.”
“And being pregnant entitles me to an afternoon nap.” Caroline sent her husband a slow smile. “Why don’t you tuck me in?”
“I could use a nap myself.” With his arm around her shoulders, they started out. “Carmel? Last I heard we were spending a week here. Since when are we going to Carmel?”
“Since four’s a crowd, dummy.”
“That may be, but I haven’t decided if I like the idea of Libby being with him.”
“She likes it.” Caroline walked into the bedroom and was flooded with memories.
The nights they’d shared, and the mornings.
They’d made love in that bed, argued politics, planned ways to save the world from itself.
She’d laughed there, cried there and given birth there.
She sat on the edge and let her hands run over the spread.
She could almost feel the murmur of memories.
Will, his hands tucked in the back pocket of his jeans, paced to the window.
She smiled at his back, remembering how he had been at eighteen.
Even thinner, she recalled, even more idealistic, and just as wonderful.
They had always loved this place, being children there, having children there.
Even when things had changed, they had never lost that cocksure certainty of who and what they were.
She understood him, heard his thoughts as if they were in her own head.
“A cargo pilot,” Will muttered. “And what the hell kind of name is Hornblower? There’s something about him, Caro, I don’t know what, but something I’m not sure rings true.”
“Don’t you trust Liberty?”
“Of course I do.” He looked back, insulted. “It’s him I don’t trust.”
“Ah, the echo of time.” She cupped a hand to her ear. “The exact words my father once spoke when referring to you.”
“He was a poor judge of character,” Will muttered, and turned back to the window.
“Most men are when it comes to the choices their daughters make. I remember you telling my father that I knew my own mind. Let’s see, was that the first or second time he threw you out of the house?”
“Both.” He had to grin. “He said you’d be back in six months and that I’d end up selling daisies on a street corner. Fooled him, didn’t we?”
“That was nearly twenty-five years ago.”
“Don’t rub it in.” He fingered his beard. “Doesn’t it bother you that they’re here—together?”
“You mean that they’re lovers?”
“Yes.” He dug his hands in his pockets again. “She’s our baby.”
“I remember you telling me once that making love was the most natural expression of trust and affection between two people. That hang-ups about sex needed to be eradicated if the world was ever to experience true peace and goodwill.”
“I did not.”
“You certainly did. We were crammed into the back seat of your VW, steaming up the windows, at the time.”
He had to grin. “It must have worked.”
“It did, mostly because I’d already decided you were the one I wanted.
You were the first man I’d ever loved, Will, so I knew it was right.
” She held out a hand and waited until he’d clasped it.
“That man downstairs is the first Libby’s ever loved.
She knows what’s right.” He started to object, but she tightened her grip.
“We raised them to follow their hearts. Did we make a mistake?”
“No.” He laid a palm on the gentle slope of her belly. “We’ll do the same for this one.”
“He has kind eyes,” she said softly. “When he looks at her, his heart’s in them.”
“You always were overly romantic. That’s how I caught you.”
“And kept me,” she murmured against his lips.
“Right.” He toyed with the hem of her sweater, knowing how easy it would be to slip it over her head, and exactly what he would find beneath. “You don’t really want to sleep, do you?”
With a laugh, she overbalanced so that they both tumbled onto the bed.
***
“It’s so strange.” Libby dropped down on the grass beside the stream. “Thinking that my parents are going to have another child. They looked happy, didn’t they?”
“Very.” Cal settled beside her. “Except when your father was scowling at me.”
She laughed a little as she rested her head on his shoulder. “Sorry. He’s really a very friendly man, most of the time.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He plucked at a blade of grass. It hardly mattered if he had her father’s approval or not. Soon Cal would be out of his life, and out of Libby’s.
She loved it here beside the water, which ran fresh and cold over the rocks.
The grass was long and soft, dotted along the bank with small blue flowers.
There would be foxglove in the summer, growing as tall as a man and bending over the stream with its purple or white bells.
There would be lilies and columbine. At dusk deer would come to drink, and sometimes a lumbering bear would come fishing.
She didn’t want to think of summer, but of now, when the air was as fresh as the water, with a clear, clean taste to it. Chipmunks raced in the forest beyond. She and Sunny had hand-fed the friendlier ones.
Wherever she went, to remote islands, to desert outposts, she would remember those early years of her life. And be grateful for them.
“That’s going to be a very lucky baby,” she murmured. Then she smiled as a thought struck her. “To think, after all these years, I might have a brother.”
He thought of his own, Jacob, with his flaring temper and his sharp, impatient mind. “I always wanted a sister.”
“There’s something to be said for them, too. But they always seem to be prettier than you are.”
He rolled her onto the grass. “I wish I could meet your Sunbeam. Ow.” He rubbed a hand over his side where she’d pinched him.
“Concentrate on me.”
“That’s all I seem to do.” He braced his arm beside her head as he studied her face. “I have to go back to the ship for a little while.”
She tried valiantly to keep the sorrow out of her eyes. It had been easy to pretend there was no ship, and no tomorrow. “I didn’t have a chance to ask you how it was going.”
Quickly, he thought. Too quickly. “I’ll know more when I check the computer. Can you make an excuse to your parents if I’m not back when they get up?”
“I’ll tell them you’re off meditating. My father will love it.”
“Okay. Then tonight . . .” He lowered his head for a gentle kiss. “I’ll concentrate on you.”
“Concentrating’s all you’ll do.” She linked her arms around his neck. “You’re sleeping on the couch.”
“I am.”
“Definitely.”
“In that case . . .” He slid down to her.
***
Later, during the night, when the fire was burning low and the house was quiet, Cal sat alone, fully dressed. He knew how to get back. At least he knew how he had gotten where and when he was and how to reverse the process.
With a few more repairs, basically unnecessary ones, he would be ready to go. Technically he would be ready. But emotionally . . . Nothing had ever torn him quite so neatly in two.
If she asked him to stay . . . God, he was afraid if she did, it would swing the balance of the tug-of-war he was waging. But she wouldn’t ask him to stay. He couldn’t ask her to go.
Perhaps when he made it back and offered the data to the world of science a new, less dangerous way would be created to conquer time. Perhaps he could come back.
Turning his head, he looked into the fire. More fantasies. Libby was facing the facts, and so would he.
He thought he heard her on the stairs. But when he looked it was William.
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked Cal.
“Some. You?”
“I always loved this place at night.” Because he loved his daughter, as well, he was determined to make an effort to be civil, if not exactly friendly. “The quiet, the dark.” He stooped to add another log to the fire. Sparks flew, then winked out. “I never pictured myself living anywhere else.”
“I never imagined living in a place like this or realized how hard it would be to leave.”
“A long way from Philadelphia.”
“A very long way.”
He recognized gloom when he heard it. William had courted it early in his youth, mistaking it for romance. Unbending a little, he dug out the brandy and two snifters. “Want a drink?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
William settled in the winged chair and stretched out his long legs. “I used to sit here at night and ponder the meaning of life.”
“Did you ever figure it out?”
“Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t.”
It had been simpler, somehow, when his main concerns had been world peace and social reform.
Now, God help him, he was nearing middle age—that area that had always seemed so gray and distant.
It reminded him that he had once been a young man, much younger than the one facing him now, with his head in the clouds and his mind on a woman.
The times they are a-changing, he thought wryly, and swirled his brandy.
“Are you in love with Libby?”
“I was just asking myself that same question.”
William sipped his brandy. He preferred the traces of doubt and frustration he heard to a glib response. He’d always been glib. No wonder Caroline’s father had detested him. “Come up with an answer?”
“Not a comfortable one.”
Nodding, William lifted his glass. “Before I met Caro, I was planning to join the Peace Corps or a Tibetan monastery. She was fresh out of high school. Her father wanted to shoot me.”
Cal grinned. He was beginning to enjoy the brandy. “I had a minute to be grateful you didn’t have a weapon this afternoon.”
“Being a pacifist by nature, I only gave it a passing thought,” William assured him. “Caro’s father thrived on the idea. I can’t wait to tell him I got her pregnant again.” Relaxed now, he savored the idea.
“Libby’s hoping for a brother.”
“Did she say that?” Now he grinned, lingering over the idea of a son. “She was my first. Every child’s a miracle, but the first . . . I guess you never get over it.”
“She is a miracle. She changed my life.”
William’s look sharpened. Hornblower might not realize he was in love, he thought, but there was little doubt about it. “Caro likes you,” he commented. “She has a way of seeing into the heart of people. I only want to say that Libby isn’t as sturdy as she seems. Be careful with her.”
He rose then, afraid he might start to pontificate.
“Get some sleep,” he advised. “Caro’s bound to be up at dawn fixing whole-wheat pancakes or yogurt-and-kiwi surprise.
” He winced a little. He was a man who would always yearn in his heart for bacon and eggs.
“You won points by the way you dug into that tofu amandine casserole.”
“It was great.”
“No wonder she likes you.” He paused at the foot of the steps. “You know, I have a sweater just like that.”
“Really?” Cal couldn’t suppress the grin. “Small world.”