This story is also from Tracy and Wolf. I had long believed them all lost, but I found these few to share with you. :)
Tracy had been upset all day. She knew Wolf loved her, and thought her beautiful despite her scars, but the thought kept coming back to her that he would be better off without her. She wondered what things would have been like if she had never come to live here, had never fallen in love with Wolf.
That night she took ages to get to sleep, and when it did come it was a disturbed and restless sleep, and then the dream began.
*****************
As Tracy left the hospital, her wrists heavily bandaged, there was no one waiting to pick her up. She had a long walk under the hot sun before she was finally home, and as she walked in the door, only Jenny seemed to know she had come home.
She was treated worse than a slave, and her parents looked at her with hate in their eyes. Jenny was her only friend, and their parents made even that difficult, by punishing Jenny when she talked to Tracy. They had to talk secretly at nights.
Tracy was so very lonely. The other kids at school called her names and hated her too, and only one boy seemed interested in knowing her, and she clutched at his friendship like a drowning person at a straw, desperately needing love in her young life, and soon the two were lovers.
On her 14th birthday she had a baby that she named Jessica Rose, but her young boy friend could not take the responsibility of fatherhood and left her, his parents moving to another state to make sure she did not contact him again.
Her own parents treated Jessica Rose the same as they treated her, and it was just a short time before she took Jessica Rose and left home forever, carrying her pitifully few belongings in an old suitcase.
The street was her home now, and a young girl with a small baby was easy prey for the sharks that swam those waters. They took her in with promises of a better life, and of love, but insisted that she repay them by selling herself to the strangers on the street. To make sure that she co-operated, they filled her with drugs until she could no longer live without them. Even Jessica Rose began to need them, developing an addiction from her mother's breast milk.
So very lonely. Standing on a street corner, attracting only the men she had grown to despise. Knowing her baby was lying at home in the filth that was her only refuge from this world, alone in the single, dirty room that was all she could call her own.
An old newspaper blew against her feet and with a need to occupy her mind she grabbed it from the ground and began to read. The name William Watson caught her eye. That was her Uncle Wolf. She had never had much to do with him, as her parents never liked him, but she had always felt strangely attracted to the big, rugged mountain man.
He had died in an accident in the mountains, trying to save some children who had fallen down a cliff and needed help. He had saved the two young boys, but died himself in the process. He was to be buried next to his old friend Indian Joe.
She did not know why, but suddenly she was crying.
******************
Tracy woke covered in sweat. The tears from her dream were still running down her cheeks. Barely able to see through the streaming tears, she raced from her room to where Wolf was sleeping, to see if he was really there.
It was a very scared girl who half-slept on the foot of his bed for the rest of the night. Reaching out to touch him to know he was not a dream whenever she awoke. She was too scared to dream anymore that night.
She had seen what her life would have been like without the love of this big man, and she knew that neither of their lives would have been better.
She walked quietly to where his head lay on the pillow and whispered into his ear, while her fingers gently stroked his sleeping cheek, "I'm staying right here. When my Jessica is born, she will have a father. Thank you for waiting outside the hospital. Thank you for your love."
*****************
Outside a tiny wolf's howl awoke her once again from her fitful sleep. And with a hand resting on Wolf's exposed foot she listened carefully. It seemed to come from very close, and it seemed so young.
A wolf cub?
