The House Near the River by Barbara Bartholomew

and grabbed him and that was when you and Clemmie spoke to me, one after the other, and you called me Ange. That was what David had called me.”
    She began to lose track with the conversation, even the words she was saying. Looking up at Matthew as she was, she began to look past him.
    Just beyond him a few feet, a sparkling ember began to grow and enlarge into a lighted sliver, a crack that seemed to draw all her attention. She felt an almost irresistible tug as though it were a magnet and she a sliver of metal being sucked in. She watched in horror as she realized what she was seeing. As she had that day when she’d witnessed David in another time, now she saw a young woman with curly blonde hair and a cute, slightly freckled face standing there, obviously not seeing her, but looking at some other scene.
    It was her cousin Amanda and her normally cheerful face was clenched in a frown. Lines cut into her forehead and her mouth was set in a straight line. She looked worrie d .
    “Amanda,” she whispered the name, but her cousin didn’t seem to hear. She found herself sucked, mentally and physically, to that opening through which she could see her childhood playmate, her grownup friend. She guessed Amanda knew now that she’d gone missing and was trying to find her.
    She didn’t like worrying her and possibly Dad and Grandma as well, but she didn’t want to go back right now, not without David. The pull was overpowering and she knew that any second now, she would be flung toward that opening and would have no choice in the matter.
    “No,” she wasn’t sure whether she whispered or shouted the word. Instinctively she reached out to throw her arms around Matthew, burying her face in his shirt and feeling the warm real person within. She clung to him until she felt the storm pass and knew the opening that had sought her was gone.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Angie was holding on to him and without intention or conscious effort, he folded his arms around her, keeping her safe against his own body.
    He couldn’t guess what had so frightened her, but every fiber within him urged him to take care of her.
    “It’s all right, Ange. Nothing can hurt you here.” Then he lost his head and went on to murmur, “You are my life. I have loved you since that first moment I saw you and will for as long as I live.”
    She seemed to nestle against him and then, as though a shock ran through her body, she pulled away, but only by a step . She still stood within the circle of his arms and he didn’t want her to leave him.
    As long as she was there the horrors of the world were distanced, put aside by what lay between the two of them.
    She smelled of scented soap and shampoo and her own lovely skin and he drew breath, feeling the weight of oppression that had landed on him sometime in the last years lightened as it was replaced by unfamiliar joy.
    Matthew was a farm boy, but unlike the generations that had gone before him, had been taught at a good country school where the numbers were low enough for him to profit from the attention of dedicated teachers. One teacher had taught him to love words and the stories they could ma k e, another had delighted in his mathematical abilities.
    His grandparents had possessed an essence of poetry within them that allowed them to appreciate the beauties of the natural world in which they lived and worked . H is education had given him the words and ideas to bring those inborn abilities to life. He was better equipped as a citizen of a larger world than the settlers who went before him, though he would never match their talent for sheer survival.
    They had carved a farm out of the prairie for him and now it was up to him to make a living from it.
    Strength surged through him from the woman standing so close . He was not so wounded from the war years that he could not build a life with her.
    She was everything. She was all that mattered.
    “Ange,” he murmured.
    All that had happened to them on that wonderful