Chapter Fifteen
Jane put her passport in the front pocket of her suitcase because it zipped and her purse didn’t, and she thought it would be safer there. But what if something happened to her suitcase? Shouldn’t she keep her passport with her at all times?
Of course she was going to Canada, not China or the Middle East. She spoke the language, and it was a friendly government. But still.
She checked the time. Caleb would be here in twenty minutes.
That’s what she was really nervous about. Not losing her passport, but being in a car with Caleb for two days.
And if that wasn’t enough, they also had to haul a ceramic urn to the top of a mountain in Maine. Owl Mountain, to be specific. Sam had been very clear about that in the letter they’d found with her will and other papers.
“How do you know I haven’t already done it?” she’d asked Caleb that night at dinner.
“I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars you haven’t.”
“You’d actually make a bet about my sister’s mortal remains?”
He’d grinned at her. “Sam loved a good bet, as you very well know. She’d approve. What she wouldn’t approve of is you keeping her in the back of a closet. I’m surprised you haven’t heard a little voice from in there singing ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’”
She’d laughed in spite of herself and then felt horrible for laughing. How could she find anything about her sister’s ashes funny?
“Hey,” Caleb had said, looking at her with that way he had—his way of making it seem like everything would be all right. “Sam would’ve loved that joke, and she would’ve loved that you laughed at it.” He’d paused. “And she’ll love that you’re going to scatter her ashes from a mountaintop, just like she wanted.”
And now here she was, about to take a thousand-mile journey with a man she lusted after but would never have, to scatter Sam’s ashes from the top of a mountain she was terrified to climb, all so she could meet a man she didn’t know to tell him the woman he’d fallen in love with was dead.
It sounded like a recipe for disaster.
She wished she hadn’t let Caleb talk her into the hiking thing. Yes, she owed it to Sam—but there was no rush, was there? She’d been planning to wait until summer. If not this year, then next. Or even two years.
She opened her closet door and looked up. There it was, tucked away at the back of the shelf: the gray ceramic urn her parents had chosen to hold Sam’s ashes.
She was afraid to just reach up and grab it. What if it fell?
With morbid images of ashes on the bedroom floor filling her mind, she dragged a chair over and climbed up on it, closing her hands carefully around the urn and hefting its weight for a moment before—
The chair wobbled, and she had a split second to realize she was going down before she did.
She landed on her butt with the urn in her lap. It was cradled in her arms and she was hunched over it, protecting it with her body the way she would have protected a child in a fall.
It was fine. The lid was still on, and everything was fine.
She set the urn carefully on the floor beside her. Then she got to her feet, a little shaky, and took a deep breath.
And then, suddenly, she started to laugh.
She’d been worried about riding in a car beside Caleb Bryce, the human match to the gasoline of her sex drive. But she’d forgotten that she’d be travelling with the world’s best mood-killer.
A ceramic pot full of human remains.
It felt good to laugh. And this time, she knew that what Caleb had said the other night was true: Sam had loved to laugh, and to make other people laugh, and she would have loved hearing her sister laugh now.
Twenty minutes later, she met Caleb at the door with the urn in her arms and her suitcase beside her.
He raised his eyebrows at the burden she carried. “I guess I’ll carry this down, then,” he said, picking up her suitcase and waiting for her to lock her apartment and precede him down the stairs.
“You seem surprised,” she commented, standing on the sidewalk as he popped the trunk of his rental car—a dark blue four-door sedan. He put her suitcase in beside an old, beat-up pack.
“I guess I thought you’d have the urn in a box or a bag or something,” he said. “Do you think it’ll be safe in here?” he asked, shifting things in the trunk experimentally. “I guess we could wedge it in with—”
“No,” she said firmly. “I want it in the back seat.”
He raised his eyebrows again, but he closed the trunk and opened the rear passenger side door for her before going around to the driver’s side.
She set the urn down on the butter-soft leather. For a moment she studied it, a glazed ceramic pot with white seagulls painted on a gray background, resting like a squat, rotund passenger on the seat behind hers. Then, on impulse, she pulled the seat belt around it and hooked it in.
“That looks really weird,” Caleb commented, watching her in the rearview mirror.
“This whole trip is weird,” she said as she slid into the front seat and buckled her own seat belt.
“Scattering your sister’s ashes according to her wishes is not weird. Traveling with them in the back seat is a little weird. Going to meet a total stranger on a bridge in Canada is extremely weird.”
They pulled away from the curb, and the early-morning sun was directly in their eyes for a moment. Jane blinked and pulled down the visor.
“I respectfully disagree, but I’m not going to fight about it.”
“Well, that’s a nice change.” Caleb reached for the knobs on the radio and fiddled for a moment, but Jane swatted his hand away and pulled out her phone, plugging it into the port on the dash.
“You’ve got a playlist?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
“You’ll see,” she said, opening her audiobook app and then settling back in her seat.
A female voice with perfect enunciation came through the speakers.
“Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery.”
Caleb looked at her sideways. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“You’re going to make me listen to a kids’ book.”
“Yep.”
“A kids’ book for girls.”
“Yep.”
“Chapter one. Mrs. Rachel Lynde is surprised.”
He sighed as he pulled up at a red light. “How long is this thing?”
She squinted at her phone screen. “Ten hours.”
“Jesus.”
She grinned at him. “Don’t worry, you’ll love it. Everyone does.”
“I won’t.”
“Want to bet?”
“Hell yeah. How much?”
“Loser buys dinner tonight.”
“Deal.”
He ended up hooked on the damn thing.
He didn’t pay much attention to the first chapter. But when Matthew Cuthbert showed up at the train station to meet the orphan boy he and his sister were expecting and found scrawny, red-haired Anne Shirley there instead, he started to listen. And when Matthew and Marilla were deciding whether to keep her or send her back, he actually paused the audio at a tollbooth so he wouldn’t miss anything.
It made the time seem to fly by.
Jane looked smug when he suggested they stop at a drive-through for lunch so they could eat in the car and keep listening. On their way through Massachusetts, Gilbert Blythe teased Anne in school by calling her “carrots,” and she cracked her slate over his head. Crossing the border into New Hampshire, Anne accidentally made her friend Diana drunk by giving her currant wine instead of raspberry cordial. By the time they reached Maine, Anne had flavored a cake with anodyne liniment instead of vanilla.
“What the hell is anodyne liniment?” he asked, and Jane Googled it.
“It’s an old remedy for pain relief. Let’s see. It was considered good for coughs, colds, colic, asthmatic distress, bronchial colds, nasal catarrh, cholera morbus, cramps, diarrhea, bruises, common sore throat, burns and scalds, chaps and chafing, chilblains, frost bites, muscular rheumatism, soreness, sprains, and strains.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of ailments.”
She read a little further. “The main ingredients were morphine and alcohol.”
He grinned. “Well, that explains it. That recipe would make you feel better no matter what ails you.”
They had a long drive through Maine to the motel they were staying at that night. Halfway there, Matthew gave Anne a dress with puffed sleeves.
When they stopped for a bathroom break, Jane showed him a picture of a dress from 1910 to explain what the hell puffed sleeves were.
He shook his head. “I’m with Marilla on this one. Those things look ridiculous. Thank God women’s clothes have gotten more practical.”
Jane laughed. “Not really. Do you remember the blue silk dress in that store window? Wear this and find the man of your dreams? That had puffed sleeves. Not this big, but they were definitely puffed.”
He shook his head again. “I don’t get why you’d want to wear something that serves no useful purpose.”
“You mean like a cowboy hat?”
“Are you kidding? My Stetson keeps my head cool and shades my eyes. It’s the definition of useful.”
“Well, the point of art and fashion and all that isn’t just to be useful. It’s like the Book of Kells.”
Her mind had made one of those leaps again, leaving him struggling to follow.
“The book of what?”
“It’s this medieval illuminated manuscript. The calligraphy and illustrations are incredibly elaborate. Irish monks spent years on it, sometimes taking months to decorate a single letter.”
“And your point?”
“They didn’t need to do that. It wasn’t useful. I mean, the text was the four Gospels of the Bible. They could have just written out the words. But they spent years, maybe decades, illuminating them with this gorgeous calligraphy. To the glory of God.”
“I refuse to believe that puffed sleeves have anything to do with God.”
Jane laughed. “No. But doing more than what’s strictly necessary is part of what makes us human. We make flourishes. Gestures.”
“If you say so.” He turned the audiobook back on. “I just want to see what happens next.”
What happened next was that Anne had to cut off her hair, after accidentally dying it green.
She also nearly drowned in the Lake of Shining Waters (at least now he knew what that was) and had to be rescued by Gilbert.
In the book, the lake was originally called Barry’s Pond. But Anne, who had an imagination like Jane’s, had a habit of renaming places and had christened it the Lake of Shining Waters instead.
“And it’s a real lake? I mean, a real place in real life?”
Jane nodded. “Well, a pond, anyway. In a town called Cavendish, which is what Avonlea is based on.”
“Is that scene the reason Horn-Rims picked it for his meeting? Because Gilbert rescues Anne there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“I guess you could consider that romantic. Except that Anne snaps at Gilbert even after he rescues her.”
“But she—”
“She always snaps at Gilbert. Or pretends he doesn’t exist.”
“That’s not—”
“For a mistake he made five years before and totally apologized for. And she broke her slate over his head when it happened, so they should have called it even.”
Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jane gathering herself up to deliver a stinging defense of her favorite book. Then she must have noticed the quirk at one corner of his mouth, because she relaxed and contented herself with a dignified glare.
“I’d be happy to turn the book off if you’re so unimpressed with it.”
She’d called his bluff.
“You might as well leave the damn thing on now. I mean, we’ve made it this far.”
By the time they pulled into the parking lot of the Owl Mountain Motor Lodge, Anne had won a scholarship to go to college, and she and Gilbert still hadn’t made up.
He turned off the engine but not the power, waited for a break in the narration, and paused the audio. “How much more is there to go? Maybe we should stay here and listen to the end.”
Jane grinned at him. “So you’re buying dinner, huh?”
He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out the way he used to, giving her braid a quick tug. “Yeah, you win. It’s a good story. So should we listen to the end or what?”
She shook her head. “I’m starving, and there’s forty-five minutes left. We can listen to the rest tomorrow.”
“Fine, whatever. Don’t encourage my newfound love of literature. See if I care.”
She rolled her eyes at him, and he realized suddenly that after ten hours in the car listening to a hundred-year-old children’s book, things between them were as close to normal as they’d been since before Sam’s death.
Relief spread through him as he reached to unplug the phone, and she reached out at the same time.
Their hands touched.
How many times in his life had his hand brushed a woman’s? Whether it happened accidentally or on purpose, that one hint of contact could tell you everything you needed to know about your chemistry with another person.
Touching Sam had felt secure and familiar, like touching a sibling. Touching the last woman he’d dated had felt anonymous, as though if he’d taken her hand in the dark, he wouldn’t have been able to tell her apart from anyone else.
But he would know Jane’s hand with his eyes closed in a roomful of strangers.
It wasn’t just the electricity that made the fine hairs on his forearms stand up. It was the feel of her skin and her faint, unmistakable scent, like sunlight and cinnamon. It was the click that happened somewhere deep inside him, as though magnet and metal had come together.
His fingers closed over hers before he knew what he was doing. Their eyes met for one instant, but Jane’s expression was startled and wary. She pulled her hand away and opened her door.