Fifty
Lori drafted Wendy to watch the house for the balance
of the evening. She left the house without bothering with a coat or gloves
despite the recent snowfall and drove the freshly plowed highway to Jumer at
thirty miles an hour. Her heart pitter-pattered in her chest like a frantic
canary all the way.
Trent was waiting for her as she came through the door
of his old blue house. He handed her a letter addressed to Janice Winters
of Clayton, postmarked Los Angeles, and stepped back out of her light to let
her read.
Lori unfolded the letter and read,
Sis,
Heard everyone thinks I'm dead. Met an old friend
who says I should write and let everyone know we're still alive and
kicking. Remember Kim?
I guess we all mellow with age. I owe you at least
this much, and probably a lot more, but I've got a life here and probably
won't be back. We'll see each other again someday, though. Can’t say when
or where. Big secret. Say hi to Trent for me. Tell him that I still think
of him as our brown-eyed stud muffin.
Robin Foster
Lori didn't buy it for an instant. She handed the
letter back to Trent, her hand visibly shaking. "Are you sure it's for
real?"
"Janice Winters says the handwriting belongs to Robin
and that the brown-eyed stud muffin thing was a reference nobody could have
known about." Trent grinned sheepishly. "It was a long time ago."
Lori tried an unsuccessful smile. Reeling with
confusion, she looked around for a place to sit.
Trent grinned with unrestrained joy. "I’ve always
thought that if even one of the girls shows up alive somewhere, then they're
all probably alive and well. At least it wasn’t anything like I thought it
was. It was a nightmare, Lori, a waking nightmare that lasted ten long
years."
Lori burst into tears. She sat on Trent's cheap sofa
in the living room and sobbed uncontrollably. Confused, Trent knelt at her
side to wait out her binge of spilled emotion. Lori cried until her chest
ached and then sat staring numbly at the floor.
"It was all my imagination to begin with," Trent said,
hoping for confirmation. “You said so yourself.”
Carol had to be responsible for the letter. Lori had
no other explanation. Could she live with it, the biggest lie of all?
She decided in short order that she could, and for
Trent’s sake, she recovered quickly. The horror of the dream of the glass
eye and its aftermath would haunt her for the rest of her life, but Trent
did not have to share that with her. Better by far that his own nightmare
should appear to fall apart in the light of day and that he return to the
ordinary world where he could be happy.
Trent lifted her to her feet and tilted her chin back
with a forefinger. "I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't sleep. I
didn't mean to run off on you like that. It just never occurred to me
before to check the records in Clayton for something that might have
connected with Laura's disappearance. I discovered a number of missing
person's reports that were never resolved and thought for certain she was
dead. Are you angry with me for the way I've behaved?"
She could only shake her head and fling tears in all
directions. "No, I'm not angry with you."
"Has anything bad come between us that can't be
resolved?"
With a tinge of shock, she realized perhaps there was
an issue still to be monitored, or was the emotional stress during the past
month responsible for a missed period? She choked back laughter that such a
crazy thought would come to life now. "Just a little thing, maybe. It can
wait.”
He grew solemn. "My photography?"
She beamed a smile at him. "Your photography is
beautiful."
He looked doubtful, but nothing more needed to be
said. Lori rested her face against his chest, shivering with exhilaration
that they had managed to regain their footing in a world gone mad. Trent
gathered her into his arms and gave her a lingering kiss. Passion flared
like a spark touched to dry kinder. He broke free and looked at her in
astonishment. "Lori, we're never prepared for this. We're going to get
ourselves in trouble."
It hardly mattered. It had been so long since she had
made the proper kind of love to a man, to spend the rest of her life with
this particular man would be paradise.
"Lori?"
He grasped her bruised arm and held it out with an
agonized expression of confusion. Lori quickly told him her story of the
accident in the parking lot of the Highway Thirty Diner. “I just got
knocked down not watching where I was going, and I got a bit scuffed up.
I’m okay.”
An hour later, they lay in bed together in the dark.
All but one major kink remained to straighten out for their relationship to
proceed as Lori had dreamed it might. She waited for Trent to bring up the
subject.
"I've decided that I don't want you to move to
Clayton," he announced after a time. "Maggie would liked to have seen a
real family in Jumer after all these years. Move here with me. The kids
need room to grow, and I could use the furniture."
"Sounds like a fair trade," she conceded. "We'd love it
here."
At some point later in the night, Trent murmured the
name of his dead wife in her ear. Lori stirred against his warm body and
only smiled in pride. To be mistaken for Laura at this stage of the game
was more than she could have hoped for. In time, her own roots would grow
deeper in Trent's soul than destiny had ever allowed for Laura Scarelli.
During her deepest sleep that night, a collection of
voices from the past cheered her victory. By morning she had forgotten
about them, feeling only a lingering sense of triumph and satisfaction.
