Never Too Late

Her hand rose shakily to her neck. “Ugh. My throat.”

“I know. It’s from the intubation. Here, have a little sip of water.”

The cool liquid was welcome but swallowing was very hard. “What? What?” she asked.

“A car accident, Clare. Do you remember anything?”

She shook her head.

“You got broadsided in an intersection. Your injuries were the worst—you lost your spleen and your pelvis is cracked. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned.

“You’re going to make a full recovery, but it’s not going to be an easy road.”

“Who hit me?” she was able to ask. “Drunk driver?”

Maggie shook her head. “Nothing as cut-and-dried as that. A young woman in an SUV was fussing with her baby in the car seat while her light was green. When she looked back at the road, it was red and you were in the intersection.”

“Oh, God,” she said, closing her eyes. “The baby?”

“They’re both okay—baby’s fine, Mama had a few bruises. She had the SUV. Your Toyota is toast. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get you out. You don’t remember anything?” Clare shook her head. “Well, your head is all right, so I guess it’s just a stroke of luck that you can’t remember.”

Clare nodded off again and when she woke Maggie was still there, holding her hand. She stood from the chair she’d been using and leaned over the bed. Seeing her there made Clare feel so cherished. Maggie, a lawyer, wife and mother kept a killer schedule. She couldn’t imagine that she’d just drop everything. “Have you been here long?”

“Just a few hours. Today.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Clare whispered.

“I’m going to leave soon,” Maggie said. “I just wanted to be sure you’re back.”

“Did I almost die?” she asked.

“I don’t know about that, but your injuries were definitely life threatening. Is the pain terrible?”

It was, but she shook her head. “Roger?” she asked.

Maggie got a look on her face as if she wanted to spit something out. “He’s been here. Do you want me to leave word that you want to see him?”

She shook her head. “I want him to stay away.”

Maggie obviously couldn’t resist a satisfied smile, but all she said was, “Sure.”

As time passed, so slowly, Clare saw the faces of all her loved ones leaning over the bed at one time or another, but they were careful not to tire her. Jason was very emotional. He cried and laid his head on her hand and said, “God, Ma, I was so scared. If you died, what would I do?”

She said, “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.” And she had it on firm authority from the other side. She had things to do. Things to do?

Her younger sister, Sarah, was holding up, but she looked a little wild-eyed behind those thick glasses, as though this close call had terrified her. She had been twenty-one when their mother died and definitely took it the hardest. Clare touched her hand and said, “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s going to be okay.”

Sarah gave a wan smile. “That’s so you,” she said. “You’re in the hospital, but you’re comforting me.”

Looking at Sarah now, dishwater blond hair pulled severely back, black-rimmed, old-fashioned glasses, no makeup—it was hard to imagine the younger wild child. Maggie and Clare used to call her slut-in-training. Their mother’s death had changed all that; had changed Sarah completely.

But another trauma had changed Clare. It was no coincidence that she’d be thinking about that quite a lot while in the hospital. After all—she’d just seen Mike in that ghostlike, after-life appearance he’d made. It caused her life to literally flash before her eyes, sending her back in time over and over.

Right until she was twenty-one Clare had lived a charmed life. She’d been a happy kid from a happy marriage, even as the middle child. Maggie was bossy and Sarah had that sense of entitlement that comes from being youngest, but Clare had good looks, humor, intelligence and luck. She’d done well in school, been popular and was never afraid. She’d hung out with a great group of friends who had all grown up together and at the age of fifteen she fell in love with the star quarterback and homecoming king, Mike Rayburn. He was two years older than she and went to college in Reno, just a short drive from their hometown of Breckenridge, Nevada, a beautiful little town nestled at the base of the majestic Sierras below Lake Tahoe. With the green, plentiful valley filled with crops and grazing animals under snowy peaks, it could pass for Switzerland. It was a sweet life in a magical place where they had played at the lake all summer, skied the mountains all winter.

There was no question but that Clare would go to school in Reno, too, and their romance was hot and steady right through college. After Mike graduated he went into the Air Force, separating them for Clare’s last two years, but he gave her a shiny big diamond and told her to spend her last year of college planning their wedding.

Then there had been a hiccup. Er, earthquake.

Mike’s younger brother, Pete, who was Clare’s age, had been one of her best pals and buddies all through high school. They had graduated together. Pete had never been much on school while Mike had been an honor student. Pete concentrated on having fun. He and Clare would get laughing so hard and so long that Mike, annoyed, would threaten to pound them both. And like big brother, he was a gifted athlete. But because he was more of a fixture in detention than the honor roll, after graduation he had taken a full-time job and some classes at a community college in Breckenridge. Then at the age of twenty-one, ready to finish a degree, he was university shopping. He went to Clare’s campus and she was more than thrilled to be his hostess while he looked around.

In the way young men are a bit slower to mature than young ladies, she always thought of him as a kid—skinny, lanky, goofy. She’d been busy doing other things while Pete was maturing and she was a bit shaken to find this kid came to her a grown man, just as handsome and sexy as his older brother. Maybe, just maybe a little more so.

Pete stayed with her and her two roommates while he toured the school, met some of the teachers and coaches, talked to counselors and in general had a look-see. She introduced him to her friends and took him out to the local pub when it was crowded with people and he had a wonderful time…and all her girlfriends went gaga. Then her roommates left for the weekend. Clare fixed Pete a nice big spaghetti dinner and he bought a jug of Chianti as big as a horse’s leg. They ate, drank, laughed and told stories late into the night.

Then something happened. She began remembering how much she liked him; realizing how much she’d missed him. They were a little bit drunk when she felt the vibrating tension of his muscular thigh against hers. He touched her hand, he looked into her eyes, he kissed her. He kissed her again. To this day she wasn’t sure what happened. It wasn’t exactly the first time she’d had a little too much wine, nor the first time a guy had come on to her. She had never cheated on Mike, had never even been tempted. But she was suddenly swept up in some kind of crazy passion right there on the couch with Pete, who was no longer a little brother but a very strong, able and experienced man. Every kiss sent her soaring; his touch thrilled her and she responded with need of her own. Her brain and her judgment took a hike.

Before she knew it she was beneath him, opening herself to him, begging him to come inside, to finish, to give her everything he had. He told her he wanted her, that he couldn’t stop, and the fact that he seemed slightly out of control only made her want him more. He thrust and she answered each one with wild craving. He nibbled, caressed, teased and brought her to a shattering climax right in time with his own.

They came slowly to earth and suddenly she was stunned. Mortified. She gasped in horror and said, “Oh my God!”

“Clare, I—”

But she couldn’t listen. What had she done? To Mike? To Pete? To herself? She fled from that apartment couch into her bedroom, slammed the door and was racked with sobs of remorse through the night. All the while she was thinking that if she felt that terrible, he must hate her for what she’d encouraged him to do to his brother. After all, she had begged him! In the morning when she got up she found a note under the aspirin bottle. “Let’s never talk about it. It didn’t happen. Pete.”

She didn’t talk about it, that was for sure, because she was thoroughly ashamed. Clare froze up inside. She had trouble putting together the wedding guest list, couldn’t stand to talk about the reception, didn’t register her gifts and when she went for a bridal gown fitting, she burst into tears. She was completely miserable and a long way from getting over it. Of course she didn’t hear a word from Pete—and she didn’t know if that made things better or worse. And if he didn’t hate her, at the very least, he would have lost all respect for her.

Mike seemed not to pick up on the trouble during their phone conversations, either because he had so much going on at flight school that he was preoccupied or maybe she was becoming the master of deception. Either way it hardly mattered because just a couple of months later his F-16 went down and he went with it.

Clare was plummeted from despair into a deep well of grief and regret. It was the blackest time of her life. She wondered if she would die of it. She never once met Pete’s eyes during the memorial services, not even when she embraced him and they sobbed on each other’s shoulders. It was a long, long while before she stopped feeling she had killed Mike with what she had done.

It was two years before she could even manage a girls’ night out with her friends, and she adamantly refused any fixing up. There was such an ache in her heart. She wouldn’t consider letting herself be that vulnerable again. When she ran into Pete, she could barely talk to him, and he ducked his head away from her eyes. It was obvious to her that his pain was equal to her own.

And then she met Roger; smooth, good-looking Roger. She was lifted up out of the darkness, laughed, looked forward to events and dates. He was such a clever flirt; he could charm the paint off an old Buick. He pursued her with such gusto. She didn’t even know she had it in her to be seduced and she felt alive for the first time since Mike’s death. When she realized that days passed without her thoughts turning to Mike or her sin against him, she saw in Roger a chance to start her life over. More than that, she fell for him, hard and fast. That was the Roger she had always had trouble leaving—the sweet, sensitive, fun-loving man who pulled her up out of the darkness and into the light. Clare would be forever grateful to him for that. Her friends and family were so relieved to see her smile again, they wholeheartedly encouraged them. They loved Roger, and so did she. She accepted his proposal, which came a little too soon into their relationship, but he had always moved fast. Jason arrived immediately.

Then came the late-night meetings, the trips out of town, being unable to reach him during the day because he was tied up with a client. Once he was home, he could smooth things over with ease—he had this way about him. Irresistible and always so desirable, he banished her edginess in no time.

But it was not how she thought it would be, not how it had been with Mike who was far less charming and fun loving but more reliable. There were lonely times in the dark of night when she rocked her baby—often waiting for Roger to come home hours later than she expected him—that she would fantasize she was waiting for Mike and that she rocked their child. Because of that dirty little secret, because of what she had done before, she worked as hard as humanly possible at being a good wife.

Clare felt guilty about fantasizing Jason was Mike’s, until years later when she learned that Roger had first been unfaithful while she was in her pregnancy. There had been a reason why he was always unavailable and late, and her name was Jill. As far as Clare knew, Jill was the first one.

Instead of being her knight in shining armor, Roger became her cross to bear. Her penance.

Much of her adult life had been manipulated around the mere fact that she had made love to her fiancé’s brother. Every time she ran into Pete she remained aloof and cool and he looked at her with the saddest eyes—it appeared neither of them would ever recover from what they’d done. She even tried counseling and was honest as a heart attack during her sessions, but still she floundered on in a marriage that wasn’t true.

That was another reason she kept taking Roger back—because if she couldn’t be forgiving, she couldn’t be forgiven. That, and she wanted her life to be worth something. She wanted the family she’d made to survive. And of course there was the fact of Roger, a seductive and charming flirt to the end—and it had worked on her for years.