Paradise Valley

With his hands on her soft bottom, her lips on his neck and shoulder, he struggled to catch his breath. She probably wouldn’t understand how much he had needed a connection like this with her. He’d been lonely in general, but specifically for Muriel, the woman he’d begun to think of as his other half. Talking to her, touching her, got him past the edge of despair, but it was like this, deep inside her, loving her man to woman, that fed the part of him that was so hungry.



“Thank you, Walt,” she whispered. And he laughed.



“I think I can squeak in a couple more of those before the landing gear goes up on that Lear.”



“Oh, my heavens….”



He rolled onto his side and took her with him, holding her against his body. “Is this normal?” he asked her. “Are we supposed to be having wild, insanely satisfying sex at our age?”



“Yes,” she said.



“Someone should have told me,” he said. “I’d have taken better care of myself.”



“You’re very well cared for. I have no brain left. You drove it out of me. I can just see the tabloid headlines. The famous Muriel St. Claire found with her brains screwed out in her old farmhouse. Only one suspect comes to mind….”



“I thought people, especially men, petered out as they got older….”



“Didn’t you have regular checkups in the army? Didn’t your doctor ever ask you how things were working?”



“Yeah,” he said. “My heart, my ears, my eyes—”



“What about that god-awful prostate exam I’ve heard tales about?” she asked.



“Yup. That was part of the drill. No pun intended. But the closest he ever got to my sex life was asking me if I could still pee over a jeep.” He heard her giggle. He ran his hand along the hair at her temple, brushing it back. “I needed to be with you like this, Muriel. For a while after you left I was afraid I’d imagined the whole thing—our relationship. Thank you for coming back to me. I was starved for your body, your laugh.”



She locked her fingers together behind his neck. “I know,” she said. “I wanted to be there for you. But I have to be honest, darling. I needed you. Just as damn much.”



“What’s it like? What you’re doing now?”



“The movie?”



“The movie.”



“It’s barely begun. We haven’t started filming, but for me it’s well under way. It’s like giving birth—it’s a creation for me. I become another woman. I feel her, channel her, give her the space to grow. And when we’re finished and if the editing is good, I’ll see something I made as surely as if I gave it life. She won’t be me, though the character is about as close to my own as I could get. She’ll be a completely new being that I shaped. It does something for me that’s really close to my heart. My soul. To you it will be just a seven-dollar ticket and two hours of your life you’ll never get back, but to me it’s conception, gestation and delivery.”



He was quiet for a moment. “Then you can’t ever stop doing it,” he said.



“I don’t know about that. I was a full-time actress for forty years and I worked whenever I could get work, which, fortunately for me, was very often. Now if I work, it will be for something I consider very important, very much worth my personal investment. I put a lot of myself into these roles, it’s not just showing up on the set. I’m lucky—I like this life I have here and I no longer have to work full-time to make ends meet. For someone in my business, it’s a huge luxury.”



“I hope the way I say this doesn’t come out wrong,” Walt said. “I hope you have lots of chances to do something that fills you up like that. And I hope you don’t.”



She smiled. “We’re going to work this out, Walt. There are lots of options for us. You can always travel, too. Come to me.”



He stiffened in shock. “Muriel, can you honestly see me on a movie set? With two dogs following me and a pitchfork in my hand?”



It made her giggle. “I can see you almost anywhere.”



In only a couple of days, Rick’s pain management was greatly improved. As long as he didn’t get behind on the drugs, he’d be relatively comfortable. And while he wouldn’t get his final prosthetic leg for two to three months, he’d begin rehab immediately and have a temporary limb he could work with in a few weeks. They were going to ship him out to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego to at least start his rehab until they could find a facility closer to home. But he didn’t necessarily want to be closer to home.



“If it can be worked out,” Jack said, “I’d like to bring you home to Virgin River to stay with me and Mel. We can get you to rehab several times a week—”



Rick looked down into his lap. Every time he did that, the stump shocked him. “Listen,” he said quietly. “I appreciate it, I do, but I already told the caseworker I didn’t care where they sent me for rehab. Because I don’t want to go home with a walker or crutches. Without a leg.”



Jack was mute for a second, staring at him. This was the first he’d heard of this. He grabbed a chair from across the room and pulled it right up to Rick’s bed and spoke quietly so as not to be overheard by the other patients. “That’s not necessary, Rick. It’s not as if you can keep this a secret. I called Mel, told her your condition so she could tell all those people waiting to hear. It had to be done.”



“I know. I’m not trying to keep it a secret. I’m alive, that’s enough. But if there’s going to be a struggle, I don’t need everyone watching.”



“You sure you want to take that route?” Jack asked. “Because I don’t see a lot of watching, but maybe a lot of supporting. We’re on your team. You can’t be as happy to be alive as we all are to have you alive.”



“Listen, can I just do this my way? This isn’t going to be simple. Do you know how much is involved in getting a leg? Learning to use it? I just heard a little about it this morning and it sounds like— It takes a long time, it hurts, it’s hard to manage, do you realize that?”



“I absolutely do,” Jack said. “Me and Liz, we’ve been reading up. Talking to people. Learning the ropes. So we can do whatever you need us to do.”



Rick looked away. “I need you to leave me alone.”



Jack was speechless for a second. Then he gathered himself up and spoke. “Okay, I’m done screwing with this. You have to see Liz now. Today. A couple of days ago you—”



“I know,” he said, not making eye contact. “It was the pain. I know I overreacted. I’ll see her. I’ll tell her I’m sorry about how I acted.”



“Look at me,” Jack said sternly. When Rick met his eyes, Jack said, “I know you’re not in a good place right now, but this will pass. I’m going to send Liz in. At the least, tell her you didn’t realize you were being mean and that you appreciate her coming all this way and sitting in a hospital lobby all alone, scared to death to show her face around you.”



“Listen, Jack,” he said, meeting his eyes. “Don’t you get it? I’m bad luck. I’m not good for people.”



Jack’s head jerked to attention. “What?”



“Bad things happen to me, around me. Things don’t go right when I’m around. It started when I was two.”



Jack was astonished. “What the hell are you talking about?”



Rick shook his head. “My parents died. My grandma got real sick. One strike and I got my girl pregnant. Her baby died. I went into the Marines and the squad clearing the street for us died. I got blown up. Come on. I’m a walking disaster.” He laughed unkindly. “No, I’m a disaster who can’t even walk.”



Jack leaned toward him. “You’ll get a new leg that will work almost as good as the one you lost and you can get on with your life. It’s the stuff of life, we have some shit to deal with and we move ahead. You’ll move ahead, too.”



“Did your parents die when you were barely two? Did your first baby die? Did you get blown up in the war?”



Jack had a tempting moment. He never focused on the things that had gone terribly wrong—it was hard enough to put them away when you didn’t think about them all the time. It was a horrible trap, letting yourself list the stuff in the negative column. He’d always stayed away from that. But Rick’s questions were like a challenge and he wanted to stand up, bear down on him with a glare and shout, Yeah, I held more than one Marine while he was fucking dying and there was no way to save him—it gets me screwed up sometimes. I couldn’t find a woman to bond with till I was forty! My mother died too young! My baby sister was raped and beaten! My wife, my heart, almost died of a hemorrhage! My boy Rick got blown up in the war. It wasn’t the same stuff, but it was nasty stuff that made me weep. Instead, Jack calmly looked at Rick and said, “A lot of what happened to you—it happened to me, too. Because I was there with you. Someday you’re going to find out that when someone you care about suffers, you suffer right along with him.”



“That’s why,” Rick said. “That’s why I want to be left alone. So you don’t have to. Suffer.”



Jack stood up. “Not that simple. Sending me away isn’t going to make me feel a lot better, but I’m not getting into that with you till you have some time to adjust. I’m going to tell Liz to come in now. Be nice to her. I’m going to take her back to California and I don’t want her crying all the way home.”



Rick made a face that was most definitely a grimace. As he looked up and saw the determined set to Jack’s jaw and his narrowing eyes, he knew there was no way out of this. It terrified him. If he couldn’t hang on to the anger, he was going to break down and cry like a girl. He would not cry in front of Liz; he would not cry in front of these wounded soldiers. “Fine,” he said to Jack. “Tell her to come in.”



Rick took a lot of deep, fortifying breaths while he waited. Then he looked over his shoulder and saw her standing uncertainly in the doorway to the ward. God, she looked more beautiful than he’d remembered, than the vision of her in his dreams, of which he had far too many. He scowled. He wasn’t sure he could do this. He stared at her and crooked a finger, bidding her to come closer. She walked slowly across the room until she stood in front of him.



For a second he almost hated her; at least he hated the look of pain in her eyes. He wanted to shout, You think it hurts to get yelled at? Try this!



He attempted a small smile and said, “Be careful, Lizzie. Don’t get too close. If you rub up against the wrong place, I’ll go through the roof.”



“Can I kiss you? If I don’t touch any other part of you?”



Bad idea, he thought. But he was stuck—everyone in the room was watching. Without even looking he knew Jack was standing in the doorway, making sure Liz was safe from him. “Lean over toward me. Real careful.”



“I know about the phantom pain,” she said. “I read all about it. I’m staying far away from where the leg was.”



He tilted his head and studied her for a minute. This was going to be harder than ever because she wasn’t put off by the sight of the bandaged stump. There was no question about it—nothing in her feelings had been changed by this. And that was such a big mistake on her part.



He put out his hand, on his left side away from the amputation, and pulled her closer to that side. She leaned toward him and he met her lips for a short, unsatisfying peck of a kiss. Behind eyes he briefly closed he remembered making love to her, before and after the baby they’d lost. Wonderful, beautiful, fantastic love that could sustain him for a lifetime. It all came back to him in a colorful, sensual flash; he could smell her skin, taste her sweet body. And then in an equally quick flash, he tried to picture making love to her without his leg.