Little Black Dress with Bonus Material (13 page)

She glanced up to find Hunter Cummings—smartly dressed in a pinstriped shirt and navy blazer—gazing down at her, a relaxed expression on his rugged face.

“So does this mean you understand about my relationship with Evie?” he asked and, when she didn't answer, added quickly, “Well, whatever the reason, I'm glad you decided to try out the place even though I think Eldon went a bit overboard on the exterior. I'm more into crisp and understated while he leans toward overblown and gaudy. So? What do you think?”

As his hand came to rest on her shoulder, Toni opened her mouth to say, “Believe me, this wasn't my idea,” only nothing emerged. Not a peep.

Instead, she felt frozen in place as the odd hum beneath her skin increased a hundredfold and blood rushed to her head, dizzying, until everything around her—the people, the piped-in music, the art-glass fixtures, and the giant wall of windows—dissolved to black.

Just as she began to panic and think,
I've gone blind,
a flash of light filled the dark and she watched a scene swiftly unfold in her mind; a moment, not a memory. She saw herself drinking wine on a fuzzy rug in front of a crackling fire in a big stone fireplace. A man sat in the shadows beside her. No words passed between them, just a look, and then he took her glass from her fingers and put it aside. Wrapping her in his arms, he gently lay her down on the rug beneath them. He kissed her, held her so passionately that Toni began to shiver. It was Hunter Cummings, she realized, the vision real enough to start a gentle throbbing between her thighs.

Oh, Lord, what's happening to me?

“Antonia, are you all right?”

With a gasp, she jerked back to the present as the scene swiftly faded, the room coming into focus around her. Before she could find her tongue to speak, her mind cleared enough to wonder,
What the hell was that?

“So you know this guy?” she heard Greg saying. “Is he dating your mother?”

Hunter ignored him, flagging down a passing waiter and asking, “Could you get Ms. Ashton some water, please?” The server nodded before scurrying away.

“Babe, are you okay?” Greg's brow creased above his spectacled stare. “What's going on? Is this man bothering you?”

Toni finally found her voice, although it cracked like a thirteen-year-old boy in the throes of puberty. “No, I'm not okay,” she said, “and yes, I know this guy, and no, he's not dating Evie.” She finally dared to look up at Hunter before shifting her eyes away. “Greg McCallum, this is Hunter Cummings. He owns this place.”

The men acknowledged each other with grunts and nods, although a still-puzzled Greg asked, “So how'd you say you two met?”

“The truth is that Antonia and I grew up together in Blue Hills,” Hunter explained before Toni interrupted.

“His grandfather stole eighty acres of our land, my aunt smashed his dad's heart, and apparently he's turning my mother green,” she said, watching Greg squint and Hunter grin.

Toni still felt woozy and strange, and not at all in the mood for a verbal pas de trois. She turned to Greg. “I'm seriously not feeling well. Can we go?”

“Now?” He frowned.

“Yes, now. I'd like to leave.” She grabbed her coat, tugging on the sleeves with trembling fingers.

“But we haven't even ordered yet—”

“We can eat at home.”

“Déjà vu. Haven't we done this before?” Greg grumbled as he reached for his wallet to drop some cash on the table. “This is starting to become a habit,” he added unhappily.

“Antonia, please, don't leave,” Hunter pleaded and reached for her arm, but Toni pushed her chair back before he could touch her again. “Did I say something wrong? And I hoped you'd forgiven me.”

“No, it's not you,” she tried to explain. “It's just that I'm having”—
hallucinations,
she was about to say but grabbed for other words instead—“a really horrendous headache.”

“A migraine?” Hunter asked, concern dark on his face before it brightened at the sight of the waiter with a goblet of water. “Ah, here we are.” He set the glass down in front of her. “Take a sip, and I'll go find some aspirin, if you'd like.”

Toni gazed at the lean fingers wrapped around the stem and blushed, feeling eerily as if they'd so recently touched her in such intimate places. What the hell was going on? Was she having some kind of nervous breakdown?

“No aspirin,” she finally responded, adding, “I'm sorry, but I have to go.” Toni scrambled to her feet and snatched up her purse. “It's not your fault,” she reiterated, her cheeks hot as she met Hunter's eyes, so afraid he'd see something in her face that she didn't want him to see. “I'm just not myself tonight.”

“Please, stay,” he asked softly.

But that would have been impossible.

“Good-bye,” she said and was halfway to the door when Greg caught up with her, grumbling, “I have to get my coat, for goodness' sake!”

It wasn't until she'd settled into the car and fumbled with her seat belt that she realized she'd done up her coat buttons wrong. She noticed something else as well: the strange humming beneath her skin was gone.

“What the heck is happening to you? You're acting weird,” Greg grilled her the second he got behind the wheel and shut the door. “Do you want to discuss it? Like who's this Hunter Cummings? An old boyfriend?”

“He's nobody.”

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yes, that's my final answer,” she snapped at him.

“Well, all right then.”

They drove home in silence—except for Diane the talking GPS incessantly giving Greg directions back from whence they'd come—and Toni closed her eyes, hearing her heart pound, her thoughts so confused she couldn't begin to sort them out.

When they finally arrived at the Victorian, after Greg had parked and they had scrambled through the cold and into the warmth of the foyer, Toni did the only thing she could do, the only way that she might possibly forget what she had seen when Hunter's hand had touched her arm.

“C'mon,” she told Greg, jerking her head toward the stairs. “Let's go to bed.”

“Right
now
?” He looked baffled. “But I'm hungry. Can't we get something to eat first?”

Toni narrowed her eyes. “Do you want to have sex with me or not?”

“Yes, please.”

So without another word, she took her boyfriend upstairs and tried her damnedest to wipe her mind clean of the disconcerting vision of herself getting busy with another guy. Maybe if she'd been a better woman, it would have worked.

A
fter three years of marriage to Jon, my faith in the magic of the black dress had been shaken. The last vision it had shown me still hadn't come to pass. Regardless, every time I closed my eyes, I saw that vision again: Anna with short hair, looking on as I held a baby in my arms,
my
child. I kept waiting for that moment when my life would be filled with such unimaginable bliss. But, so far, I had only known loss.

I miscarried just after Christmas when we were still newlyweds, and I wondered if it was my fault for being on my feet too much. Although Dr. Langston, the kindly town doctor who could've passed for my grandfather, promised I should have no problem getting pregnant again and carrying to term. He had found nothing wrong with me physically except a tipped uterus, which he insisted did not make bearing a child impossible, and he suggested stress might have played a part in things.

That wasn't hard for me to believe, as I had so much more to do than teach my fifth-grade class and care for my new husband.

My mother had been sinking deeper and deeper into depression, and my father had hired a local woman named Ingrid Dittmer and her daughter, Bridget, to look after Mother when I couldn't. I knew them both well enough, as Ingrid had cooked and cleaned for our family on and off for years. When I'd first met them—after Grandma Charlotte had passed—I was a child of eight, and Bridget was five, exactly Anna's age. Ingrid would bring Bridget over and the two girls would play together, making me feel like a third wheel; although I'd occasionally tried to worm my way into their games.

“You be the princess, and I'll be the queen,” Anna would instruct the redheaded Bridget, who'd nod, gladly doing anything that Anna requested.

“I want to play, too,” I'd say, and my sister would sigh and look me over.

“All right, Evelyn Alice, you can be the wicked witch,” Anna would tell me, and I would scowl because I saw no reason why I couldn't be a queen or a princess, too.

“Why do you always want me to be bad?” I'd ask, and she would smile ever so sweetly.

“Because I should imagine it's very tiring always being so good, isn't it?”

In the end, I would leave the two to play alone until dusk fell and Mother called us for dinner, and Ingrid packed Bridget into the car and drove off.

I was never sure exactly when Ingrid was widowed. I'd once heard that her husband had died in Korea. Some in town whispered that she'd never been married at all. For as long as I'd known her anyway, she'd raised Bridget single-handedly in their cottage on stilts halfway across the river on tiny Mosquito Island, accessible only by boat. They had a wood-paneled station wagon they drove to and from the docks where they tied up their skiff.

Occasionally, if Ingrid's arthritis acted up, Bridget came across without her; but typically, they arrived together. Bridget did much of the vigorous housework and the cooking, while Ingrid tended to my mother. She was good with women and children, and knew enough of herbal remedies and midwifery to have a devoted following in Blue Hills, including Helen von Hagen, most of whose brood she'd delivered.

On Sundays, when Ingrid and Bridget were not there, I stayed with Mother, feeding her, bathing her, and talking to her even when she would sit and stare at the wall, seeing—and probably hearing—nothing in particular. I had wished then as I'd wished so often that Beatrice Evans had more spunk in her, “more McGillis,” like Anna and Grandma Charlotte. Perhaps she would have weathered Anna's absence better, soldiering on rather than lying down and giving up. If I could have done anything to bring her out of it, I would have. Begging and crying had no effect.

“Her spirit started slipping away the day that Annabelle left,” I told Jon, and I meant it. I didn't like to think she loved me any less than she did Anna, but it was hard not to believe it. Else, I figured, she would have tried harder to stick around.

As ghastly as it might sound, it was almost a relief when Mother died in her sleep in mid-winter. I think my father felt the same, though it was not something we ever talked about. What Daddy didn't tell anyone but me was that he'd found an empty bottle of sherry and a near-empty bottle of her pain pills at her bedside. “She didn't want to stay, Evie,” he told me, shadows dark beneath his eyes. “Not even for us. It just hurt too much.”

When I'd tearfully reached for his hand, holding it tightly as my mother's casket was lowered into her place in our family plot, he'd uttered dully in my ear, “This is
her
fault.”

By “her,” I realized whom he meant, and it wasn't Beatrice Morgan Evans, his wife through twenty-seven years and mother of his two children.

I wondered if Anna had any inkling of how much she'd damaged those she'd left behind. I wondered, too, if she ever thought about us, cared enough to try to find out how we were, even if she didn't have the nerve to speak to us or show her face in Blue Hills again.

Whatever sorrow she'd carved into my heart had begun scarring over with resentment. Rather than see my younger sister as rebellious and free-spirited, I'd begun to paint her as a self-centered dreamer who'd abandoned us for greener pastures, leaving me to patch together all the pieces of her shattered relationships.

“You're a strong woman, Evelyn, far stronger than I ever gave you credit for,” my father told me as I stood in the kitchen with him while I played hostess to the friends and neighbors who appeared at the house for food and drink following Mother's interment. I noticed the number of guests who came to pay their respects was far smaller than the hundreds who'd RSVP'd to Anna's wedding. And, of course, we didn't hear a word from the Cummings clan, who'd been too hard-hearted even to mail a note of condolence. Despite their disfavor toward my family, it would have been nice for them to acknowledge us in our grief.

When everyone had gone, and I'd put away as many casseroles and molded salads as the tiny icebox could hold, my father asked Jon and me to sit with him for a moment in his den. He lit his pipe and settled into the worn leather club chair. Then, without further ado, he proposed that we move out of the cozy house that my great-grandfather Herman Morgan had built just up the graveled road, where we'd been residing since our wedding, and come live with him in the Victorian.

“Oh, Daddy, I don't know,” came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think, and Jon likewise murmured, “That's very generous of you, sir, but that would make for some very close quarters.”

Much as I loved my father and desperately wanted to please him, I knew this was something we couldn't do. Jon and I both wanted to start our life together without prying eyes, something that would've been impossible inside the Victorian, where we would be constantly tiptoeing around my grieving father and the ghost of my sister.

“We'll always be near,” I answered as Jon nodded in agreement. “We won't ever go farther than the cottage, I promise.”

I knew that one of my father's greatest fears was that Jon and I would pick up and relocate somewhere miles away from him, leaving him squarely alone. He appeared to accept our decision good-naturedly and, in fact, condoned our need for privacy.

“Newlyweds should have space to themselves,” he agreed, although I figured there was a motive behind his quick capitulation, and there was. “You'll be giving me grandchildren soon, I hope. It would be wonderful to hear the sound of laughter again and the pitter-patter of little feet.”

“We're trying, sir,” Jon replied as I blushed.

My father didn't know about the loss of our first child. It had happened so early in the pregnancy that Jon and I hadn't told anyone. “We will try again soon,” I promised my husband when we left the Victorian and walked hand in hand up the graveled road to our home.

And we did try, often and joyously. We loved each other fiercely, and we weren't shy about it when we were in private.

By the fall of our second year as man and wife, I had quit my teaching job to work at the winery, helping my father with the bookkeeping. I didn't mind the change, because it kept me near Jonathan. He'd long since left his position as a mechanic repairing engines on riverboats and barges. Just after our honeymoon, as it were, my father had discussed with Jon the possibility of his becoming part of the family business. Jon had taken him up on it instantly, sealing the deal with a handshake.

Daddy had seemed sincerely grateful.

My excitement for the new direction our lives had taken made it vaguely easier to accept the heartache I seemed to rack up, one after the other. Besides, I had plenty to be grateful for, namely my father's acceptance of Jon into the fold and the fact that my husband would no longer come home smelling of the river. Not that I minded what he had done for a living—it was honest work, and he was good at it—but breathing the odors of mud and fish on his skin and his clothes reminded me too much of the day that Anna had left Blue Hills and the dress had nearly drowned me.

At first, I feared that Jon would hate working with my father; but they seemed to get on well enough. Jon was good with his hands, good at fixing anything mechanical, and Daddy had put him in charge of updating the machinery at the winery. My husband had even suggested using newfangled refrigerated stainless-steel fermentation tanks. “I've read research that says it's much safer, sir, and shouldn't affect the taste,” I heard him tell my father one day when I was in the office, updating the books.

Once my dad learned that Archibald Cummings was still using wooden vats for fermenting, he agreed, and as word spread about the Morgan winery modernizing, other area vineyards scrambled to follow suit.

After that, I think Daddy would've done anything Jon wanted him to do. It seemed a match made in heaven and nearly had my father forgetting that Jon and I couldn't seem to produce him an heir.

“You're all I have left, Evie,” he frequently reminded me, which only served to increase my anxiety. I wanted so badly to have a child while my father was still living, to give him hope for the future; to give us all hope.

But by the end of that year, I had miscarried for a second time, and I feared that having babies might be something I wasn't equipped for. Even Dr. Langston changed his tune. “Some women just can't seem to go full-term, Miss Evelyn,” he informed me. “Their bodies reject the fetus for reasons we may never fully understand. I'm sorry to say that may be the case with you.”

While I heard him, I didn't listen.

Amidst the summer of our third married year, I knew I was again with child. It had been nearly two months since my last monthly flow, and I had the same morning nausea I'd had twice before. When I saw Dr. Langston, he took a blood sample and solemnly suggested I not get my hopes up. When his nurse phoned two days after to confirm that I was pregnant, I already knew it for a fact. By then, I had missed two periods, and I felt confident enough that I would not lose this child that I told my father.

“Evelyn, sweetheart, that's the best news I've had since your mom and I were blessed with you,” he said and hugged me so tightly I thought he might never let go.

Jon and I did ask him to keep mum until another few months had gone by, just to be on the safe side. Daddy crossed his heart and said he would.

Each night as I lay my head on my pillow, I put my hands on the slope of my belly and prayed that everything would be okay; that I would bear the sweet babe that I saw in my vision. Since I wasn't teaching school, I could rest more and put up my feet, and I made sure to sit comfortably when I was working on the accounts at the winery. I ate well and napped often, and I was feeling fairly confident that I'd reach a full trimester when it happened again.

The cramps awoke me before sunrise one morning in early June, and I doubled over in bed, clutching my stomach and groaning through my gritted teeth. It felt like the worst menstrual pain I'd ever experienced.

Jon opened his eyes and reached out for me.

“Evie, my God, what's wrong?” he asked, as I rolled into a fetal position and rocked myself, desperate to protect this tiny being within me, hoping the pain would stop. The earlier miscarriages had not been so vicious, mostly hurting my soul; this one hurt my body as well, enough that something inside me understood it would be the last.

“It's happening,” I whispered, and Jon knew precisely what I meant.

“Towels,” he said, thinking aloud, and then he vanished to the linen closet.

I felt the gush of blood between my legs, clots of it, wetting my underwear and my nightgown. The cramps stabbed at my lower abdomen, one after the other until they blurred together in an ache that wouldn't cease. If hours passed, I didn't know it. I could only stay curled up tight, moaning, while Jon hovered, as unsure of what to do as each time before.

“Should I call the doctor?” he had asked at some point, gently nudging a fresh towel between my thighs. From the corner of my tear-filled eyes, I could see him frantically pulling on pants and a shirt. “We could meet him at his office. I could carry you to the truck.”

But all I could do was sob, because I knew it was too late.

He crouched beside me, holding me awkwardly, pressing his cheek to my hair. “Not again,” he whispered. “It isn't fair, Evie angel. Damn it, but this isn't right when we want it so badly.”

It seemed forever and a day before I could bear to unfurl my tired body and get up. But when the worst had passed, when the cramps softened up and the blood became spotty, I dragged myself from bed and ran warm water in the claw-foot bathtub while Jon changed the linens. As I cleaned myself up in the tub and ignored the pink stain that ran down the drain, I tried not to consider what Jon would do with the sheets and towels too bloodied to clean; I tried not to think about anything.