Muriel Jensen - Man With A Message

It was dark now and all he could see of the carriage house, a replica of the main building but smaller, were its white columns, caught in the floodlights that illuminated the small parking area in the front. He pulled up beside a van, gave Fred a dog biscuit and spread his blanket on the seat. “Relax, buddy,” he said, patting the dog’s head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Fred, just happy for the attention, cooperated.

Cam grabbed his basic tool kit and went to knock on the front door. He could hear a great commotion on the other side—children shouting, feet hurrying.

The door opened with a jerk and a little blond girl wearing neon-orange pajamas stood there, pale and breathing heavily. Behind her children ran up and down the stairs with towels and buckets. He heard a boy yelling from upstairs, “Turn the cutoff…it looks like a faucet!”

A younger male voice yelled back, “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!” he said again.

The little blond girl turned to shout up the stairs, “He’s here!”

“Tell him to hurry!” the boy replied.

Cam experienced a weird sense of unreality, as if he’d blundered into a world occupied only by children. Not one adult was in evidence.

“Come on!” The little blonde grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside.

He allowed her to tow him up the stairway, its carpeting soggy. There was water everywhere, inches of it in the narrow upstairs hall.

Water rushed from the bathroom through a large hole in a pipe visible because of the broken tiles in the shower stall.

“Hey!”

The boy’s voice made him look down. He saw a woman lying on her back, apparently unconscious, the boy’s arm keeping her head out of the water. Her face was familiar. Cam had seen her around the school while scoping out the kitchen in the main building.

He dropped his tool kit on a sink and fell to his knees.

“You’re not the ambulance guy?” the boy asked. He was about ten, his dark eyes panicky, his face ashen.

“No, I’m the plumber,” Cam replied, putting two fingers to the pulse at the woman’s throat. He couldn’t detect one, but then, he could never find one in himself, either. “What happened?”

The boy appeared close to tears. “I busted the pipe looking for gold. She came in, slipped on a towel in the water and fell and hit her head. I’m not supposed to move her, right? I mean, she could have broken something.”

Gold? Cam didn’t even take the time to try to figure out what that meant. He did a cursory exploration of arms and legs and detected nothing out of place. She didn’t seem to be bleeding. He decided that getting her out of the water took precedence over maybe causing her further injury.

“Is there a dry bed anywhere?” He slipped his arms under her and lifted her. She was small and fragile. Water streamed from her all over him as he stepped back to let the boy lead the way.

“In here!” The boy beckoned him into a room two doors off the bathroom. Cam noticed absently that the doors had hand-painted signs with kids’ names on them.

A pack of children followed them and gathered around the bed as Cam lay the woman down.

She looked younger up close than he’d thought. Her dark hair, now drenched, was pulled back into a tight knot, and she wore a silky, long-sleeved blouse, through which he could see her lacy bra. A long blue cotton skirt lay clumped around her, also heavy with water. She’d struck him as stiff and matronly when he’d seen her at the school. How different his impression of her now.

He wrapped the coverlet around her.

He leaned close to tell if she was breathing. He felt no air against his cheek, heard no sound. Where was the ambulance? He’d taken a CPR course a few years ago, but he couldn’t remember it now. So many pumps, so many breaths.

“She’s gonna die!” one of the little girls said tearfully.

“No, she won’t!” the boy said.

“She won’t!” another boy repeated.

“She won’t!”

Cam glanced up, wondering why he kept hearing double, then realized he was seeing double, too. Twins.

The woman made a scary, choking sound and the children cried out in unison.

Knowing he had to do something, he shooed the children aside, leaned over the woman, pinched her nose and placed his mouth over hers.

She was cold and still in his arms, like a marble statue.

He blew air into her mouth, raised his head to see if it was having an effect. When he couldn’t detect one, he covered her mouth again and breathed into it. After several more breaths, a curious thing happened. He felt the first infinitesimal sign of life as a small, almost sinuous exhalation swelled the breasts under his chest.

Disbelieving, he breathed into her again, and that same subtle ripple occurred in the lips under his.

He put a hand to her ribs, feeling for an intake of breath, even as he gave her another one of his.

When he felt the probing tip of a tongue in his mouth, he thought he was hallucinating—giving her too much of his air, not keeping enough for himself.

Then her lips moved under his, and before he could raise his head in surprise, one of her hands went into his hair in a caress that paralyzed him momentarily into helplessness.

As he hovered above her in shock, her body arched up to his and she expelled a little moan. “Ben,” she murmured against his lips.

For an instant, everything in him rose to the challenge. Yes! This was what life was supposed to be about! Man and woman entangled, seeking solace and pleasure in each other, their bodies a mutual haven. He’d have given a lot at that instant to be the Ben she sighed for.

Then reality reclaimed him and he sat up abruptly, the children all staring, not sure what they’d seen.

His heart was beating hard, then his brain snapped to attention. This kind of thing won’t work for you, it told him. You have a past. Allison had thought it wouldn’t matter, but eventually it did. You’re starting over, but you’ll only get half the dream….

The woman opened deep brown eyes, and after a moment of searching the room, a puzzled line between her brows, she focused on him. A small smile of what appeared to be—he wasn’t sure…surprise? delight?—curved her pale lips.

No one had ever looked at him that way—as if he represented home at the end of a long journey. He still leaned over her, a hand on the mattress on either side of her, unable to move or speak.

MARIAH SURFACED FROM her chilled dream to find that the last year had all been some kind of terrible misunderstanding. Ben was back the way she remembered him at their wedding—the loving, solid partner around whom she’d centered her hopes, rather than the angry and confused man he’d become after she’d lost four babies and refused to try again to get pregnant.

Then his mouth had been hard and condemning. Now it was pliant and…life giving.

But why were they surrounded by children? They’d never be able to have their own. And he hadn’t wanted to consider adoption—

“Mariah?”

She turned at the sound of her name and focused on…on Ashley? Of course. Ashley. She looked at the children circling the bed and remembered that they were not her children, but the Manor’s. The kid fix she’d sought when she couldn’t have her own.

The euphoria of a moment ago collapsed, and with it came the bitter disappointment that always returned to take hold of her when she allowed herself to think about her marriage, her divorce, all the things she wanted that she’d never have.

She gazed into dark-lashed hazel eyes set in a handsome face crowned with very short dark brown hair.

She put her fingertips to her mouth, recalling those nicely shaped lips on hers and the renewal she’d thought he’d brought to her life.