The Family They've Longed For

Her job as a resident pediatric orthopedic surgeon provided her with enough money to live on and pay for this kind of repair stuff. And now that she’d passed her boards she’d be making a lot more. Assuming she got the permanent job—which was another reason to get back to LA as quickly as possible for her interview, before someone else snagged it away from her.

Even though it was barely six thirty, the vibrant golden sun was already setting in Eudemonia, Alaska—long before it would be in LA. She gazed at the fading orb, loving the way fingers of light slipped through the branches and lit the yellow leaves and hills. Up on the mountains the brilliant reds of the moss and lichen in the tundra glowed beneath the setting sun, and Rory was surprised at the warm nostalgia that filled her chest. It was so completely different from the warm temperatures, the concrete roads, the masses of cars and buildings and people that made up LA.

Thinking of the warm temperatures made Rory shiver as the chilly air sneaked down inside her jacket, and she shook her head at herself. Her friends here would laugh at what a wimp she’d become, thinking it was cold now, in early October. They’d probably all still be wearing shorts and T-shirts and thinking it felt downright balmy—but, hey, when she’d left Southern California earlier that day it had been almost eighty degrees. Anyone would feel the contrast, right?

She turned the knob and the door squeaked open. No surprise that her mom hadn’t locked it, since Rory didn’t think it had ever been secured in her whole life. In fact, thinking about it, she wasn’t sure it even did lock. And wouldn’t her California friends be flabbergasted at that?

“Hello? Mom? Twinkle-Toes?”

The light in the small living room was so dim it was hard to see, and she peered at the worn chairs, not seeing any sign of her mother’s small frame. Sounds of marching band music, of all things, came faintly from the back of the house, and Rory had started to move toward her mother’s bedroom when she appeared in the hallway outside the living room, with a small, curly-haired brown dog trotting beside her. Rory hadn’t met him yet.

“Aurora! I’m so happy you’re here! Come give your mama a big hug.”

She hurried toward her mom, partly because she looked a little unsteady, walking with the pink cane she held in her hand. “Mom. Twinkie.”

She gently enfolded her in her arms, being careful not to squeeze, and her throat clogged with emotion at how good it felt to hold her. Until this moment she hadn’t even realized how much she’d missed seeing her and being with her. The pain of being in Eudemonia was so intense, the pleasure of seeing her mom often just wasn’t enough to counteract it.

No doubt about it, she was a coward. A weakling.

“You shouldn’t be wandering around with no one here. You just got out of the hospital this afternoon. What if you fell?”

“I knew you were coming. I knew you’d be here to take care of me, marshmallow girl.”

Marshmallow girl. It had become her nickname after they’d filled her hot chocolate cup to overflowing with them one Christmas. It had become a tradition, with the various pups they’d had over the years gobbling up the marshmallows that had scattered on the floor. Why that had stuck in her mother’s mind she had no clue, but she’d always kind of liked it when she called her that, remembering all the silliness of her home life.

“Yeah. I’m here to take care of you.”

She pressed her cheek to her mother’s soft, warm one, thinking of all her years growing up, when she’d played parent to her mom instead of the other way around.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I had a knife stabbed in my tummy—that’s how!” She looked up at Rory with a mix of a grimace and a grin on her face. “Can you believe I had a bad appendix? After all the special herbs I eat and drink to stay healthy!”

“Yeah. Who’d have thought it? Maybe your appendix has had too much fun all these years, just like you, and got plain worn out.”

“I’m not even close to worn out.” She grinned and playfully swatted Rory’s arm. “So I’m just as happy to not have a boring appendix. Good riddance to it, if it couldn’t keep up with the fun and appreciate all the special teas and foods I gave it, right?”

“Right. Good riddance, appendix!”

Rory had to chuckle as she led her mom to what she knew was her favorite chair. No point in getting into a discussion on the subject of herbal supplements, and which ones her mother might avoid, since she’d never been interested in her daughter’s opinions in the past.

She reached down to scratch the dog’s ears as he wagged his tail. “Is this Toby? You described him to me, but he’s even cuter than I expected.”

“He’s the best little doggie. He keeps me company and protects me just like the talismans.”

Noting that the dog hadn’t even barked when she’d walked in, let alone come out to see who was there, Rory smiled inwardly. Her mother believing the dog protected her was more important than whether or not it actually did.

The fact that she’d only started worrying about that after Rory’s father had died had been a surprise, since her sweet dad had been an invalid for so long he’d hardly have been able to deal with an intruder. But in her mother’s eyes he’d been a superhero. And she’d been right. The way he’d tried to be there for them even while bravely dealing with his illness had made him one tough, heroic man.

“I’m glad you found such a wonderful dog to be here with you.” She tucked her mom into the chair and kissed her forehead. “Are you hungry? I’m going to find you a little something to eat. And later I want to take a look at your incision. But before that I need to see all your hospital dismissal papers and read the instructions. Where are they?”

“In the kitchen somewhere. Linda brought me home and put them on the table, I think.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here in time to get you from the hospital. They told me you were being released tomorrow, and then when I called from the airport they told me you’d already left. That really makes me mad, by the way. I wanted to be there for you.”

“I know. I was hoping you’d see the hospital gown they had me in—it was a powdery blue, with these funny little cats on it that were too cute. One reminded me of our old Brutus...” Since nothing much ever irritated her mother for long, she gave with a smile and a shrug. “But you’re here now and I’m here now. We’ll have lots of big fun once I’m feeling better.”

Fun. The name of her mother’s game. It was going to be nearly impossible to feel like having fun while she was here, but she’d give it a try for her mom’s sake.

“You’re going to have to take it easy on the fun while you heal. They told me the rupture was an emergency and they had to use a full traditional incision instead of doing it laparoscopically, so it’s going to be a while before the pain is gone.”

The thought of how serious that might have been had Rory reaching for another, longer hug.

“I’m going to see if there’s food in the kitchen. If not, I brought some stuff in my bag to tide us over until I can get groceries from the store tomorrow. Sit tight for a minute.”

The kitchen light was an overly bright fluorescent strip in contrast to the low living room lights, and Rory made another mental note to get more lamps in the other room, so her mother didn’t trip over something.

Two gritty, slippery steps into the kitchen brought her to a halt.

From the look of the coffee cans full of colored sand all over the table, her mother’s newest creative project was sand art. Glass containers were filled or partially filled in landscape scenes, and Rory recognized one of them as being the Alaska Range they could see from the back of their house—those beautiful mountains she’d always stared at as a child, dreaming about climbing them someday and crossing over them to somewhere different and big and amazing.

She picked up the jar with the mountain scene and ran her finger across the glass, looking at the brown and green sand topped with fine grains of white. She’d done that, hadn’t she? Crossed that mountain. Become the kind of doctor few women were.

She’d thought she’d be looking at those mountain ranges forever, together with Jake. She’d thought they’d make a home and a family in Eudemonia, that they would work as doctors here and in Fairbanks and live happily ever after.

Except their “happy” had died, leaving an “ever after” impossible. She’d run hard and fast away from here—because she hadn’t been sure she would survive if she’d stayed. She’d made a new life for herself—going to medical school in LA instead of Anchorage, like she and Jake had planned.

But her life still felt hollow. Full to the brim with work to keep her mind busy and her heart detached from the rest of the world. That detachment had taken a lot of time and effort to achieve. It was exhausting.

She drew in a deep breath and glanced around the kitchen to see that there was as much sand on the floor and the table as there was in the cans. Crunching toward the refrigerator, she peered inside, deciding she’d better get the floor cleaned up as soon as she’d taken some food to the living room and read the discharge papers, so her mom wouldn’t slip on all the tiny grains. The last thing her mother needed was to fall and rip open her stitches.

The refrigerator was bare of anything but milk. There was also a little cheese, so Rory sliced it to serve with some crackers she found in the cupboard. She shook sand off the bottom of the hospital papers Linda had put in the middle of the table and went back to the living room.

“Here’s a snack for you. I’m going to read through this stuff, then get some more food from my bag.”

“This will be plenty. I’m not very hungry.”

“Just eat what you can and we’ll go from there. I understand if you’re not feeling like it, but you do need at least a little so you get your strength back.”

Rory straightened from putting the plate on her mother’s lap, and was about to sit in the only other chair that had a decent light when she heard the front door open and looked up.

Her heart stuttered, then slammed hard into her ribs.

Jacob Hunter.

She didn’t want to look at him for more than a moment, yet she found herself staring, riveted. He looked like he always had—and yet he didn’t. A little older but, impossibly, even better. He was still tall and lean, with angled features that were still startlingly beautiful: dark eyes that could see right through a person, and lips that were almost too full and yet perfect for his face. The black silky hair she’d loved to run her hands through long ago, when it had spilled to his shoulders, had been cut short enough to be respectable for the town doctor, but still it brushed his collar, not fully tamed.

He held a bag in one hand and, yeah, just as she would have expected, despite the chill in the air he was wearing a slightly shabby T-shirt that showed his shoulders and biceps were even more muscular than seven years ago, at her father’s funeral. No shorts, but the jeans he wore fit his physique perfectly, making him look more like an Alaskan cowboy than a medical professional.