“One of these days,” her father was saying, snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his checkered wool coat and water pooling on the freshly waxed floor around his feet, “I’m going to have to fell those pine trees, Janet, whether you and Mallory like it or not. If I don’t, one of them is sure to come down in a windstorm and crash right through the roof of this house.”
Mallory and her mother had only exchanged smiles, knowing that Paul O’Connor would never destroy those magnificent trees. They had already been giants when the island was settled, over a hundred years before, and that made them honored elders.
With reluctance, Mallory wrenched herself back to the eternal present and retreated into the bedroom. There would be time enough to tell Nathan that Diane wanted him to call, she thought, with uncharacteristic malice. Time enough.
Mallory crawled into bed, yawned and immediately sank into a sweet, sound, dreamless sleep.
When she awakened much later, the sun was high in the sky, and she could hear the sizzle of bacon frying and the low, caressing timbre of Nathan’s magical voice. Grinning, buoyed by the sounds and scents of morning, Mallory slid out of bed and crept to the kitchen doorway.
Nathan, clad in battered blue jeans and a bulky blue pullover sweater, stood with his back to her, the telephone’s earpiece propped precariously between his shoulder and his ear. While he listened to the person on the other end of the line, he was trying to turn the fragrant bacon and keep an eager Cinnamon at bay at the same time. Finally, using a meat fork, he lifted one crispy strip from the pan, allowed the hot fat to drip off and then let the morsel fall to the floor. “Careful, girl—that’s hot,” he muttered. And then he moved closer to the mouthpiece and snapped, “Very funny, Diane. I was talking to the dog.”
Mallory stiffened. Suddenly, the peace, beauty and comfort of the day were gone. It was as though the island had been invaded by a hostile army.
She went back to the bedroom, now chilled despite the glowing warmth that filled the old house, and took brown corduroy slacks and a wooly white sweater from her suitcases. After dressing and generally making herself presentable, she again ventured into enemy territory.
Nathan was setting the table with Blue Willow dishes and everyday silver and humming one of his own tunes as he worked. Mallory looked at the dishes and remembered the grace of her mother’s hands as she’d performed the same task, the lilting softness of the songs she’d sung.
Missing both her parents keenly in that moment, she shut her eyes tight against the memory of their tragic deaths. She had so nearly died with them that terrible day, and she shuddered as her mind replayed the sound of splintering wood, the dreadful chill and smothering silence of the water closing over her face, the crippling fear.
“Mall?” Nathan queried in a low voice. “Babe?”
She forced herself to open her eyes, draw a deep, restorative breath. Janet and Paul O’Connor were gone, and there was no sense in reliving the brutal loss now. She tried to smile and failed miserably.
“Breakfast smells good,” she said.
Nathan could be very perceptive at times—it was a part, Mallory believed, of his mystique as a superstar. The quality came through in the songs he wrote and in the haunting way he sang them. “Could it be,” he began, raising one dark eyebrow and watching his wife with a sort of restrained sympathy, “that there are a few gentle and beloved ghosts among us this morning?”
Mallory nodded quickly and swallowed the tears that had been much too close to the surface of late. The horror of that boating accident, taking place only a few months after her marriage to Nathan, flashed through her mind once more in glaring technicolor. The Coast Guard had pulled her, unconscious, from the water, but it had been too late for Paul and Janet O’Connor.
Nathan moved to stand behind her, his hands solid and strong on her shoulders. It almost seemed that he was trying to draw the pain out of her spirit and into his own.
Mallory lifted her chin. “What did Diane want?” she asked, deliberately giving the words a sharp edge. If she didn’t distract Nathan somehow, she would end up dissolving before his very eyes, just as she’d done so many times during the wretched, agonizing days following the accident.
He sighed and released his soothing hold on her shoulders, then rounded the table and sank into his own chair, reaching out for the platter of fried bacon. “Nothing important,” he said, dropping another slice of the succulent meat into Cinnamon’s gaping mouth.
Mallory began to fill her own plate with the bacon, eggs and toast Nathan had prepared. “Diane is beautiful, isn’t she?”
Nathan glowered. “She’s a bitch,” he said flatly.
Mallory heartily agreed, in secret, of course, and it seemed wise to change the subject. “My contract with the soap is almost up,” she ventured carefully, longing for a response she knew Nathan wouldn’t give.
“Hmm,” he said, taking an irritating interest in the view framed by the big window over the sink. The dwarf cherry trees in the yard looked as though someone had trimmed their naked gray branches in glistening white lace.
Mallory bit into a slice of bacon, annoyed. Damn him, why doesn’t he say that he’s pleased to know I’ll have time for him again, that we should have a child now? “Well?” she snapped.
“Well, what?” he muttered, still avoiding her eyes.
Mallory ached inside. If she told him that she wanted to give up her career—it wasn’t even a career to her, really, but something she had stumbled into—it would seem that she was groveling, that she hadn’t been able to maintain her independence. “Nothing,” she replied with a defeated sigh. She looked at the food spread out on the table and suddenly realized that the makings of such a meal hadn’t been on hand when she arrived the night before. “You’ve been to the store.”
He laughed at this astute observation, and at last he allowed his dark, brooding eyes to make contact with her green ones. “My dear,” he imparted loftily, “some of us don’t lounge about in our beds half the day with absolutely no concern for the nutritional needs of the human body. Which reminds me—” His wooden chair scraped along the floor as he stood up and reached out for a bulky paper bag resting on the kitchen counter. From it, he took six enormous bottles containing vitamin supplements. Ignoring his own rapidly cooling breakfast, Nathan began to shake pills from each of the bottles and place them neatly beside Mallory’s orange juice. Finally, when there was a colorful mountain of capsules and tablets sitting on the tablecloth, he commanded sternly, “Start swallowing.”
Mallory gulped, eyeing what amounted to a small meal all on its own. “But—”
Nathan merely leaned forward and raised his eyebrows in firm instruction, daring her to defy him.
Dutifully, his wife swallowed the vitamins, one by one. When the arduous task had been completed, Mallory had no appetite left for the food remaining on her plate, but she ate it anyway. Clearly Nathan meant to press the point if she didn’t.
Once the meal was over, they washed and dried the dishes together, talking cautiously about things that didn’t matter. As Mallory put the last piece of silverware into the appropriate drawer, however, she bluntly asked a question that had been tormenting her all along.
“Nathan, why didn’t you make love to me last night?”
He looked at her, and their eyes held for a moment, but Mallory saw the hardening of Nathan’s jawline and the tightening of his fine lips. He broke away from her gaze and once again took a consuming interest in the cherry trees outside.
“I was tired,” he said after a long pause. “Jet lag, I guess.”
Mallory was not sure whether what she felt was courage or just plain foolishness. “Are you having an affair, Nathan?”
He whirled, all his attention