It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

He pushed her up, away from him, lifting her chin so that she had to look directly into his eyes. He had eyes that some people might have found scary—eyes that could seem too burningly intense, eyes that were almost inhumanly pale. As he looked at her searchingly, she felt nearly seared, but at the same time, she could see beneath to his all-too-human vulnerability.

“Just say it,” he said. “Just tell me. Come on, Nell. Point-blank.”

She opened her mouth and it all came spilling out. “Daisy’s been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. It’s malignant, it’s metastasized. The doctors have given her two months, absolute tops. It’s more likely that it will be less. Weeks. Maybe even days.”

She’d thought he’d become still before, but that was nothing compared to the absolute silence that seemed to surround him now. She could read nothing on his face, nothing in his eyes, nothing. It was as if he’d temporarily vacated his body.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, reaching out to touch his face.

Her words, or maybe her touch, seemed to bring him back from wherever it was that he’d gone.

“I missed Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, talking more to himself than to her. “I got back into town that morning, and there was a message from Jake on my machine asking me to come out to the farm, but I hadn’t slept in four days, so I crashed instead. I figured there was always next year.” Tears welled suddenly in his eyes and pain twisted his face.

“Oh, my God. Oh, God, how’s Jake taking this? He can’t be taking this well….”

Crash stood up abruptly, nearly dumping her onto the floor.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to…I need to…” He turned to look at her. “Are they sure?”

Nell nodded, biting her lip. “They’re sure.”

It was amazing. He took a deep breath and ran his hands down his face, and just like that he was back in control. “Are you going out to the farm right now?”

Nell wiped her own eyes. “Yeah.”

“Maybe I better take my own car, in case I need to get back to the base later on. Are you okay to drive?”

“Yeah. Are you?”

Crash didn’t answer her question. “I’ll need to pack a few things and make a quick phone call, but then I’ll be right behind you.”

Nell stood up. “Why don’t you take your time, plan to come out a few hours before dinner? That’ll give you a chance to—”

Again, he ignored her. “I know how hard this must’ve been for you.” He opened the door to the hallway, holding her jacket out for her. “Thank you for coming here.”

He was standing there, so distant, so unapproachable and so achingly alone. Nell couldn’t stand it. She put her jacket down and reached for him, pulling him close in a hug. He was so stiff and unyielding, but she closed her eyes, refusing to be intimidated. He needed this. Hell, she needed this. “It’s okay if you cry,” she whispered.

His voice was hoarse. “Crying won’t change anything. Crying won’t keep Daisy alive.”

“You don’t cry for her,” Nell told him. “You cry for you. So that when you see her, you’ll be able to smile.”

“I don’t smile enough. She’s always on my case because I don’t smile enough.” His arms suddenly tightened around her, nearly taking her breath away.

Nell held him just as tightly, wishing that he was crying, knowing that he wasn’t. Those tears she’d seen in his eyes, the pain that had been etched across his face had been a slip, a fluke. She knew without a doubt that he normally kept such emotions under careful control.

She would have held him all afternoon if he’d let her, but he stepped back far too soon, his face expressionless, stiff and unapproachable once again.

“I’ll see you back there,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

Nell nodded, slipping into her raincoat. He closed the door quietly behind her, and she took the elevator down to the lobby. As she stepped out into the grayness of the early afternoon, the rain turned to sleet.

Winter was coming, but for the first time Nell could remember, she was in no real hurry to rush the days to spring.

Chapter 2

“What you want to do,” Daisy was saying, “is not so much draw an exact picture of the puppy—what a camera lens might see—but rather to draw what you see, what you feel.”

Nell looked over Jake’s shoulder and giggled. “Jake feels an aardvark.”

“That’s not an aardvark, that’s a dog.” Jake looked plaintively at Daisy. “I thought I did okay, don’t you think, babe?”

Daisy kissed the top of his head. “It’s a beautiful, wonderful…aardvark.”

As Crash watched from the doorway of Daisy’s studio, Jake grabbed her and pulled her onto his lap, tickling her. The puppy started barking, adding canine chaos to Daisy’s shouts of laughter.

Nothing had changed.

Three days had passed since Nell had told Crash about Daisy’s illness and he’d gone out to the farm, dreading facing both Daisy and Jake. They’d both cried when they saw him, and he’d asked a million questions, trying to find what they might have missed, trying to turn it all into one giant mistake.

How could Daisy be dying? She looked almost exactly the same as she ever had. Despite being given a virtual death sentence by her doctors, Daisy was still Daisy—colorful, outspoken, passionately enthusiastic.

Crash could pretend that the dark circles under her eyes were from the fact that she’d been up all night again, painting, caught in one of her creative spurts. He could find an excuse for her sudden, sharp drop in weight—it was simply the result of her finally finding a diet that she stuck to, finally finding a way to shed those twenty pounds that she always complained were permanently attached to her hips and thighs.

But he couldn’t ignore the rows of prescription medicines that had appeared on the kitchen counter. Painkillers. They were mostly painkillers that Crash knew Daisy resisted taking.

Daisy had told Crash that he and Jake and Nell would all have to learn to grieve on their own time. She herself had no time to spare for sad faces and teary eyes. She approached each day as if it were a gift, as if each sunset were a masterpiece, each moment of shared laughter a treasure.

It would only be a matter of time, though, before the tumor affected her ability to walk and move, to paint and even to speak.

But now, as Crash watched, Daisy was the same as always.

Jake kissed her lightly, sweetly on the lips. “I’m going to take my aardvark into my office and return Dex’s call.”

Dexter Lancaster was one of the few people who actually knew of Daisy’s illness. Dex had served in Vietnam when Jake had, but not as part of the SEAL units. The lawyer had been with the Marines, in some kind of support-services role.

“I’ll see you later, babe, all right?” Jake added.

Daisy nodded, sliding off his lap and straightening his wayward dark curls, her fingers lingering at the gray at his temples.

Jake was the kind of man who just kept getting better-looking as he got older. He’d been incandescently, gleamingly handsome in his twenties and rakishly handsome in his thirties and forties. Now, in his fifties, time had given his face laugh lines and a craggy maturity that illustrated his intense strength of character. With deep blue eyes that could both sparkle with warmth and laughter or penetrate steel in anger, with his upfront, in-your-face, honestly sincere approach and his outrageous sense of humor, Crash knew that Jake could have had any woman, any woman he wanted.

But Jake had wanted Daisy Owen.

Crash had seen photos of Daisy that Jake had taken back when they’d first met—back when he was a young Navy SEAL on his way to Vietnam, and she was a teenager dressed in cotton gauze she’d tie-dyed herself, selling her drawings and crafts on the streets of San Diego.

With her dark hair cascading down her back in a wild mass of curls, her hazel eyes and her bewitching smile, it was easy to see how she’d caught Jake’s eye. She was beautiful, but her beauty was far more than skin-deep.

And at a time when the people of the counterculture were spitting on the boots of men in uniform, at a time when free love meant that strangers could become the most intimate of lovers, then part never to meet again, Daisy gave Jake neither disdain nor a one-night stand. The first few times they’d met, they’d walked the city streets endlessly, sharing cups of hot chocolate at the all-night coffeehouses, talking until dawn.