Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance

by Braden, Magdalen

  “Yeah, I slept on the plane.” A little. Enough. “And I stopped frequently on the drive south.” For coffee, bathroom breaks, and to fight missing him.

  “So you’re okay. Under the circumstances.”

  His voice made her ache for him to leave Philly now, fly west, meet her in this special cell-phones-permitted waiting room down the hall from ICU, put his arms around her and make everything all right. Only he wouldn’t come. Or if he did, he’d resent her for being needy. Just think of all those phone calls to Dad after the move to Oregon. They hadn’t worked either.

  Elise swallowed hard, shoving all that longing as far down as she could, leaving her hollow and chilled. “Yup. Under the circumstances.”

  He sighed. “What do the doctors say?”

  “That she’s lucky. Her neighbor brought her to the ER yesterday afternoon. Grace. That’s her neighbor. I gather she told them Peggy had been ignoring symptoms for a while—you know, out of breath, nausea, pain in the left shoulder and up in her jaw.”

  “Your mom’s name is Peggy?” His tone reminded her that most people weren’t on a first name basis with their parents.

  “Calling her Peggy was my adolescent shred of rebellion that no one seemed to care about. She’d object but I—I don’t know. After a while it was just her name.” Elise couldn’t stop herself from sounding defensive.

  Jack didn’t say anything for a moment. “Okay. So what else did the doctors say?”

  “They had to put in three stents, but they can’t know how much damage the blockage did to her heart muscle for a couple of days. It could be she comes out of this essentially unchanged.”

  “Except for changes to her lifestyle.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

  Her face flushed hot. Did she even know what risk factors her mother had? Peggy could have started smoking and Elise wouldn’t necessarily hear about it. Or taken up yoga. Or skydiving. Until Peggy woke up, Elise wouldn’t know.

  Time to change the subject. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  The silence grew into an awkward pause.

  “I’m worried about you. And missing you. I wish I’d gone with you,” he said.

  “There’s no point,” she told him in a rush. “The doctors are pretty clear that she’s going to be okay. All the drama was over by the time I arrived.”

  “Elise, there’s more to this situation than just the question of whether she’s going to live.”

  She frowned at the tenderness in his voice. She wished he’d stop trying so hard to comfort her.

  “Elise?”

  “I’m here. I’m just exhausted.” A true statement. Emotionally and physically exhausted.

  “Okay, what happens now?”

  “They’ve got her sedated but they’ll start to take her off the meds so she regains consciousness gradually. She should be awake and alert later today. They’re talking about transferring her to the cardiac unit in a couple of days.”

  “Oh. Well, that sounds good, I guess.” From his reaction her voice must have gone back to sounding computer-generated.

  She pushed her hair back and stared hard at an anodyne poster of the Oregon coastline. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m not doing a very good job of conveying this. Really, the news is good. I’m just numb with the effort of getting here. You know?”

  “I understand.” His voice softened. “And I’m sorry. It’s the impotence of being here in Philly when I desperately want to be there for you.”

  Such a Boy Scout. Remembering Jack’s penchant for helping little old ladies across the street made her smile crookedly.

  She rubbed her forehead, then glanced at the clock. “Look, I need to take my suitcase to my mother’s condo, okay? And I have a sneaking suspicion you called a recess so that you could talk to me. While I’m honored that you would do that, if I were one of the lawyers stuck in that courtroom, I’d be tapping my foot waiting for the judge to come back.”

  He laughed, a more relaxed and reassured sound. “You’re far too perceptive. Call me this evening when you can. Call my cell any time.”

  His cell phone. In his pants pocket. He probably had it set to vibrate while he was on the bench.

  Just like that, you’re back to sex. The pang, the ache of missing Jack, remembering him in her house, her bed, her body, flooded her senses for a second. The tension of the trip, anxiety about Peggy’s surgery, her not wanting to leave Philly—all dissolved in the memory of sex.

  So good to be back on familiar turf.

  “Ooh, by ‘later’ you mean I should call you after you’re in bed? I could help you get to sleep,” she said in her sultriest voice.

  This time the silence felt completely different. She grinned. Finally he said in a strangled voice, “You are incorrigible. Go be with your mother.”

  “Aren’t you glad that black robe is nice and loose?”

  “Scamp.”

  “Yes, Judge.”

  Elise listened to the clicks as Jack disconnected before finally turning her phone off. A second later the pain of missing him slammed back into her chest.

  Elise was working through deposition transcripts when her mother finally woke up. Peggy Carroll had been gradually improving, her progress measured by the diminishing number of devices keeping her alive. She was still on a ventilator, though, and when she finally opened her eyes, Elise could tell how it panicked her to find she couldn’t talk.

  “Hi, Mom,” Elise said, grabbing her mother’s hand and squeezing it gently. “Don’t try to talk. I’ve pressed the button and the nurse will be here in a moment.”

  Peggy squeezed back and blinked a couple of times.

  “Ah, here’s Heather now.” Elise moved away to let the nurse, an older woman with compassion and experience carved into a weathered face, take her place. They looked at each other for a moment. Heather’s eyes suggested she’d seen everything more than once and could still laugh about it. Elise felt better just looking at her.

  “Hey there, Peggy.” Heather’s husky voice was pitched low and intimate. “You had heart surgery a couple days ago, okay? I’m going to get a doctor to check you out. As soon as she says you’re doing as well as we think you are, we’ll remove the intubation. Squeeze my hand if you understand.”

  Peggy’s eyes were still wide with emotion—stress? nerves? fear?—but she calmed down at Heather’s reassuring tone. Heather took a long time explaining Peggy’s condition, the operation, and her stay so far in the ICU. Eventually, Peggy’s eyelids drooped and she appeared to be asleep.

  “She’ll wake up again in a little while,” Heather told Elise. “I’m hoping they’ll let her go off the vent today. She still won’t feel much like talking, but the sore throat improves pretty fast.”

  Elise nodded. She wanted her mother well as quickly as possible, but she was ambivalent about having her mother able to talk again. In Elise’s last few visits to Eugene, she and Peggy had been like dogs circling each other, neither wanting to make the first move lest it be misinterpreted as hostile.

  Peggy’s long salt-and-pepper hair had been combed and braided neatly to lie over one shoulder. It gave her the look of a peacenik from some bohemian Portland coffee shop, which was ironic because she was pretty dismissive of Oregon’s former hippie cliché. For her job as an account manager, she wore her hair in a complicated bun that was both chic and old-fashioned at the same time. Away from work, it was invariably in a ponytail. Even running errands on the weekend, she looked neat and proper.

  Elise took her mother’s hand, careful not to wake her up. The fingers were cool and soft. Her skin was aging well. Still supple and creamy pale with no brown spots. Good genes or an elaborate skin care regimen. Elise made a mental note to ask her mother when the opportunity arose. She hoped it was good genes—that would be a nice harbinger for her own middle age.

  Elise put Peggy’s hand back on the blanket—a loose white cotton weave with the hospital’s name worked in blue in the bottom third. To prevent people from stealing the blanket wh
en they left the hospital? Who’d want to sleep with the same blanket they’d nearly died under?

  Elise went back to her seat. There was a pile of papers next to the chair by the window, and a discarded FedEx box leaned against the wall. Kim had bundled up all the work Elise could think of that was portable, and overnighted it to the hospital. Elise took comfort from the boring routine of reading deposition transcripts and taking copious notes. Focusing on a lawsuit beat worrying about Peggy’s health. Or missing Jack. Although she never stopped missing Jack.

  A small cadre of doctors trooped in to stand close to her mother’s bed on the side with most of the equipment. The cardiothoracic attending, Dr. Rahman, looked to be in her forties. Behind her was the senior cardiothoracic resident, a guy in his thirties, still youthful-looking despite a thinning hairline. Then a junior resident, and last in line was someone who looked like she should be in high school. Could be a med student. They ignored Elise.

  “Hi, there, Peggy,” Dr. Rahman said.

  Elise had spoken with the surgeon several times, not counting the nightmare phone call on Sunday. Had it really been only two days?

  “Peggy? Can you open your eyes for me?”

  Peggy opened her eyes slowly, looking at each of the doctors and then around the room.

  “I’m here, Mom,” Elise said, standing and moving closer so Peggy could see her. Her mother blinked slowly and deliberately.

  Dr. Rahman went over the operation again, this time with more details than Heather had provided. She explained that they were going to get Peggy off the ventilator next. While Dr. Rahman was talking, Peggy kept squeezing Elise’s hand, not hard but over and over, as though Elise were a talisman.

  Eventually Dr. Rahman stepped aside to let the other doctors deal with the ventilator. She walked over to Elise. “Your mother’s very lucky. We were putting in a stent when her artery dissected. That was the worst bit, but we managed to patch that up and get another stent in place.”

  “Is her heart damaged?” Elise had been reading up on heart attacks.

  Dr. Rahman shook her head. “We don’t think so, but we’ll keep a close eye on her going forward.”

  There was a noise halfway between coughing and retching. When Elise looked over her shoulder, her mother’s lips were moving, although she wasn’t making any noise.

  “Ellie?” Peggy whispered.

  “Hi,” Elise said softly.

  “You came.”

  “Of course I did. Dr. Rahman called me on Sunday and I flew out.”

  “Thanks,” Peggy breathed. She closed her eyes. Elise waited but it seemed her mother preferred to sleep.

  After a settlement conference yielded a surprisingly quick agreement between the parties, Jack felt he could declare the end of his official workday. He checked his watch. He’d already started subtracting three hours from every timepiece he saw, imagining where Elise was and what she was doing. As he sat at his desk, flipping through bench memos, correspondence and phone messages, he resisted the urge to call her. He’d told her she could call any time—that Brenda would get him off the bench if necessary—but none of the pink phone message slips had her name on them.

  He was glad she’d called on Monday morning. She’d seemed happier than on Sunday and more relaxed at the end of the conversation than at the beginning. As she promised, she also called him close to bedtime. Unfortunately, that phone call hadn’t been quite what he’d hoped. She dodged all his efforts to talk about how she was doing and instead went into seductive mode.

  Phone sex, he discovered, was a profoundly unsexy activity when what he really wanted to do was wrap his arms around his woman and take all her troubles away. He’d sensed, though, that Elise wanted to think about anything other than hospitals and operations. His choices had been phone sex or talk about some dreary litigation Elise was working on. Discussing Delaware case law on piercing the corporate veil had lost to talking dirty, although it was a close call.

  He looked at his watch again. Three twenty in Eugene. Elise would be at the hospital but working on papers her secretary was sending by FedEx. A slave to billable hours was how Elise described herself. Her mother’s condition seemed stable, from everything she had told him. He worried about what she hadn’t told him.

  Elise didn’t seem to want to talk about her mother. He’d learned that Peggy was an accounts manager for a large regional market research firm, that she’d never remarried, lived alone and had two cats who were currently staying with a neighbor. His prosecutorial interrogations of stone-cold criminals had yielded more information than his conventionally polite questions about Elise’s mom.

  As for Elise’s childhood, Jack didn’t think he’d gotten more than a “fine” out of her. Oh, he knew that she went to high school in Ohio with her dad’s second family, and when Jack asked if she got along with her half-brothers, Elise seemed genuinely proud of them. She talked about her dad with a cool admiration, and had only nice things to say about her stepmother. Maybe it was a pack of lies, covering up some dark horror, but that wasn’t the impression Jack got.

  Which left her childhood with her mother. He had no sense of what led to the decision to move Elise permanently from Oregon to Ohio for high school. Maybe her mother had health problems? A drug addiction? Conviction and incarceration? A stint in a mental hospital? Jack’s imagination ran to even more far-fetched scenarios—the CIA! Witness Protection! exotic dancing!—but he knew they weren’t the answer. Elise would have talked about stuff like that. At the very least, she’d have explained why she couldn’t talk about them.

  Funny how the heart attack was forcing him to face facts. Elise loved him in bed and she loved his hair. That might be the sum total of her feelings for him. She didn’t trust him with the truth about her childhood or her mother’s situation or even why she’d cried at Libby’s law school graduation.

  He leaned into the palm of his hand, staring at the papers on his desk without seeing them. Without trust, what did they have? Sex. And his love for her. Which wasn’t enough. He’d thought it would work out. He’d thought there had to be a connection, some bond between them that—when given room to grow—would make it clear how good they were together, how much in love they both were.

  Instead, he was just forcing himself on her. Demanding something from her she didn’t have to give. He was good at working out the facts of a case, and he rarely made a wrong assumption. The facts here suggested that he’d gotten it wrong for once. She didn’t love him and wouldn’t love him. He’d be guilty of selfishness if he pushed for a commitment she didn’t feel. Selfishness was the one character trait he couldn’t abide.

  Thank God she enjoyed sleeping with him.

  Jack swiveled around to look out over the Constitution Center, lit up already for some evening event. He checked his watch again, pulled out his phone and hit the speed dial. It was pathetic, but hearing her recorded voice asking him to leave a message was better than nothing.

  Elise called him back at bedtime again, but this time Jack had stayed up late watching the Phils in St. Louis. No matter what devious come-on she employed, he was determined to have a regular conversation that did not require a nearby supply of tissues.

  “So, how’s your mother doing?”

  Elise paused before answering. “She woke up and they removed the ventilator. She can talk now.”

  He could hear hesitation in her voice. He tested the waters gingerly. “Has she said much yet?”

  “Not really. She’s still pretty dopey, and they threw me out not long after she woke up. Or maybe I thought they threw me out. I don’t know.”

  Time for the cautious approach. “Got tired of seeing a lawyer working in their hospital?”

  Elise laughed. “That could be it. By five o’clock I’d pretty well papered the floor with transcripts and notes.”

  “They must worry that you’re preparing a malpractice suit against the surgeon.”

  “That’s me—a scum-sucking ambulance chaser.”

  Wh
en the laughs died away, he tried another tack. “How are you holding up?” He expected one of her usual breezy denials but when the silence spread, he was afraid he’d lost her.

  “Elise?”

  “I’m here.” Her voice was quiet.

  “Sweetheart, are you okay?”

  Another tunnel of nothing.

  “Yeah, I’m—I’m fine. I think I’m more nervous as she gets better. You know?”

  He had no clue but he was hardly going to admit that. He took a wild stab. “Hard to talk to her, huh?”

  “Yes,” she exhaled in relief. “We’re not strangers, exactly, and I do love her, but we’ve spent a lot of time apart. I haven’t kept—I’m not sure I know that much about her life now.”

  He propped his feet up on the coffee table. He watched Rollins get thrown out at second. “Well, that solves one problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “What to talk about. Ask her about her life.”

  “I’m supposed to know all about her life. She’s my mother.”

  “Does she know all about your life? Does she know you’re dating a judge?”

  “Of course not!”

  “So why are you so certain that you’re supposed to know everything about her life? Just make conversation.”

  After a moment, Elise said in a tight voice, “Being right is not your best look.”

  He laughed. “You’ve told me that before, you know.”

  There was a huffy breath, then she laughed too. “I’ve hated you for so many reasons, and now I’ll have to add that you can make me laugh.”

  “What are the other reasons?”

  “All those good looks, to start with. Your killer smile, and that spicy scent you have which I’m convinced should be banned by the FDA, and your great cooking and…and there’s more,” she trailed off.