Page 4 of I’m Not Yours

Apple trees have been around forever.

They have an interesting history. Eve and her apple eating—naughty lady. Johnny Appleseed. Sir Isaac Newton and the apple. Apple pies.

On my dad’s property in Schollton there are Jonagold, Gala, Honeycrisp, and Granny Smith apple trees. When I arrived five weeks ago, suitcases in hand, it hurt to see them. Yes, it hurt to see the apple trees.

How could he? I thought, stomping through the orchard west of his hundred-year-old, two-story, white, run-down home the first day I explored the property.

There were two bullet holes in the house.

One in the floor, one in the wall. I wasn’t surprised.

He probably put them there in a blast of self-righteous anger.

I zipped up one row and down the next, steaming mad. Why would he buy a dilapidated house and land with an apple orchard and leave it to me? Was he mocking me to the very end? He knew I loved apples. He had seen me eat them by the dozen. He knew why I ate them by the dozen.

“Spike me in the heart and twist it, Dad,” I whispered into the orchard.

Then I decided not to whisper. I would not let him smother my voice any longer.

I picked up one apple after another and pelted them through the rows, swearing every single time an apple hit a tree.

“You jerk . . . you were never a dad . . . you were horrible to Mom . . . you never even hugged me . . . and now you have an apple orchard? Really? An apple orchard?”

I threw those dead apples until I was sweating, my hair falling all over my face, my chest heaving. I started kicking the apples on the ground, sending them flying. When I was totally exhausted I collapsed against a tree, an apple tree from my stupid dad, and sobbed.

I sobbed for him, for us, for what he’d done to our family. I sobbed because I was so angry. So frustrated and resentful. And guilty. I felt guilt. He didn’t deserve for me to feel guilty, but I did.

I composed the letter later that night. I sent it to the top of the ladder.

Hopefully a wrong would be righted.

She shouldn’t be allowed to give people nervous breakdowns.

At dusk, my bandages tight on my thigh, I limped out to my dad’s creaking deck and stared at the orchard as the sun sank down over the blue-gray hills in the distance.

Margaret and Bob, my dad’s brown and white furry mutts, played together in the grass.

Marvin, a gold cat, and Spot the Cat, a black cat who had no spots, perched on the rail of the deck, side by side.

I saw Spunky Joy the horse in the field, she neighed at me, and I rolled my eyes.

“Hey you, menopause horse!” She swished her tail. “You gave me a bunch of stitches. Do you know that? Cool it with the hormonal swings and we’ll get along better.” She neighed again.

“I don’t like men, either, Spunky Joy, but that’s no excuse for your hoof coming up and kicking me in the thigh.” She neighed.

“Yep. Women are better on their own, I agree with you there.” I shook my head at the irony here.

From retail executive supervising hundreds of employees, wearing outfits that cost hundreds of dollars and heels so high I could have broken an ankle if I fell, to an apple orchard, farm animals, and a sagging house where I sat on a deck and talked back to a horse.

The sky was a painting full of shining colors folding over the mountains. I swallowed more pain-reliever pills. I hate taking medicine, but I did it anyhow. Without it my bruised and cut leg would be throbbing.

I thought of seeing Jace at the hospital, letting him handle my thigh, talking to him again .

. . and I smiled. Then I cried, some of the tears I’d dammed up forever spilling over.

I cried as other memories slipped back in about a trailer awash in fear and domination and a young man in a lake who hugged me close.

Next I thought of the deranged man who had burst through the emergency room doors wielding a ferocious temper.

“I thought you were working for Mackie’s Designs, Allie.” Jace made a couple of final stitches, his hands sure, capable.

“I was. I was fired.”

Jace’s eyebrows rose. “You’re kidding.”

“No.” Fired and my dad died. In one day.

“Why were you fired?”

“My boss pushed me to the edge of the cliff and I decided to jump instead of continuing to work for her. I told her what I thought of her and the way she treated other people. She didn’t appear to like my input, and I left with a pair of designer heels.”

“How did she treat people?”

“Worse than cattle. If she’d had a cattle prod and a red-hot branding iron, she would have used it.”

He asked more questions. Jace was always curious, always wanted to know more about me, what I thought, my life. Most people don’t. Bare essentials are enough for them.

“Way to go out in a blaze of glory, Allie.” Those dark eyes said it all. He respected my decision. “Good for you. What do you want to do next?”

“I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long, but it feels like that person, who I was, is a strange and mysterious creature; and who I’ll be in the future is also a strange and mysterious creature.”

“Do you want to go back to retail management, back to being a VP?”

Aha! He knew that about me, too! I felt a bit giddy. “No, I don’t want to.” I thought of my bank account. I could not be poor again—could not. “If I had to go back to being an exec, I would. The thought makes me feel ill. I was not happy.”

“Why weren’t you happy?”

“Besides my boss, who arrived on a chariot from hell with a whip, my whole life was marketing and selling clothes. Choosing lines. Working with designers, public relations, managers, traveling. I love clothes, I love style.” At least I used to love style.

Wearing the latest fashions and four-inch heels allowed me to hide the “trailer trash” girl my father always told me I was.

“Yet there was no substance to my job. There was nothing of value. I figured out how to sell expensive clothes to expensive people. I was exhausted all the time and I didn’t have a life.

” I stopped. “Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because I asked.”

“I know, but I haven’t seen you in years and here I am, yammering on.”

“We’ve always yammered on together.” He smiled, and I saw sadness in his eyes, probably the same sadness that lived in my eyes. “If you could do anything, what would you do?”

“Bake pies. All day. I’d bake pies.” I laughed and pushed a strand of hair back behind my ear. How I wished I’d washed my hair in the last three days, but I hadn’t. Turmoil does that to a woman. “I’ve hardly baked pies at all for years, but I used to love it.”

“They were delicious.”

“Thank you.” I blushed again . “My whole life needs a reset. After I was fired and my dad died, I decided to move out to his house in the country. My condo sold really fast. I don’t know how to take care of apple trees and I now have two dogs, Bob and Margaret.

Bob thinks squirrels are his sworn enemies and Margaret has to sleep with a stuffed pink bear in her paws or she won’t sleep at all.

I was up for thirty minutes the other night looking for that dumb pink bear. ”

We both laughed, and as we talked I continued to pretend I was confident. I pretended I was brave. I pretended I was in control, amusing. And I pretended I wasn’t completely spun up about seeing him; that my insides weren’t shaking.

“I’m so glad you’re a doctor, Jace. I really am. Congratulations.”

He looked at the floor for a second, then met my gaze.

“Thank you.”

“Tell me about medical school, where you did your residency, everything.”

He smiled and told me about medical school.

He made it short; he didn’t talk about the newspaper articles that had been written about him, humble as always.

I wanted to hug him. I wanted to cry on his shoulder.

I wanted to tell him all my worries and problems. I was with the very best friend I had ever had in my life.

Only he was so much more than my best friend, because I wanted to climb into a naked hug with him.

I actually envisioned that, and could feel my face getting hot.

I tried not to stare at his mouth. Tried not to remember kissing him, holding him close as I lay down and he lay on top of me in a tent, or by a river, or in a field on a blanket.

I tried not to remember what that black hair felt like running through my fingers, and how that slight razor stubble would grate against my cheek in a way that turned me on even more.

I tried not to remember what those hands had done to me, what he’d said to me, how there had been this huge fire blazing between us.

I tried not to remember us . I tried hard.

In the end, before the deranged man walked in, it came out in my tears, which he gently, sweetly wiped away. I saw tears in his eyes, too.

We smiled at each other, one of his hands resting on my thigh where he’d fixed me up, burning me through, but comforting at the same time.

Then all hell broke loose in the corridor.

Instantly, Jace whipped around, threw open the curtain, and was gone.

I heard yelling, swearing, and a man’s voice bellowing, “Let me go and be free,” and “You can’t make me go in this prison,” and “Shut up, weasels.”

I followed Jace, worried about him, about what was going on, when I saw a young man being restrained by two medical personnel. He was thrashing about, head back, eyes wild.

Jace walked right up, his white doctor’s coat billowing out behind him, and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. Behind the young man I could see two people who were clearly his distraught parents.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Rios.”

The young man swore at him, stumbled a bit, then said, “I don’t want to be here!”

“I hear you, man,” Jace said. “A lot of people get the sweats walking into hospitals. I’m here because they pay me to be here. If there wasn’t a paycheck involved, I’d never set foot in this place. Never.”