by Peggy Jaeger
“My poor body gets stronger everyday because of all the training and rehab. You know Sam would never push me beyond what he thinks I’m capable of.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do.” It took everything in me not to roll my eyes at her. “You’re the one who hired him, claiming he was the best in his field. And he is, so stop worrying about me.”
A noise remarkably like a snort blew from her. “That’s like telling me not to breathe, Aurora.”
I shook my head and pulled her into a hug. “It’s times like these I really wish you and daddy had had more kids. Then you’d be able to spread all that angsty love around.”
I eased back and stared down at her lovely face. “Go have lunch with your bestie. Gossip about whose face has had the latest work done and who’s cheating on their spouse. Get a little buzzed from a few midday cocktails. Have fun.”
Her mouth pulled into a pout with a touch of indignation mixed in.
“Mimsey and I don’t gossip, Aurora. We merely discuss people we know and current events.”
“Call it whatever you like.” I grinned at her. “But go and enjoy yourself.”
That line deepened between her eyes. “You’re sure you’re okay to walk all the way home?”
“Yes, but if it makes you feel any better, I promise to stop if I feel tired and get a cup of tea somewhere. Okay?”
She told me it was, then, with a final kiss, she got into the waiting car. After Murphy settled her in he said to me, “If you get tired, Miss Aurora, just shoot me a text and I’ll come pick you up.”
“Et tu, Brute?”
He grinned and tipped his hat.
I stood for a moment, watching the back end of the car pull away, then started walking.
There isn’t any place in the world I’d rather live than in New York City. It’s the best town, anywhere, with the best people.
When I was a kid, Maeve had told me stories about when she’d arrived in New York as a fresh faced, naive eighteen-year old girl. She’d never been out of Ireland before and when she’d landed at JFK the first thing she did after checking in with the nanny agency who’d brought her over, was take a day trip to the Statue of Liberty. Of course this was before the 911 tragedy and she’d been able to see the World Trade Towers shining across the bay in all their glory. She’d worked for another family before my mother poached her to be my nanny.
Maeve arrived the day I was brought home from the hospital and hadn’t left once to go back to visit Ireland. Even while I was in my coma, she’d stayed by my side, every day, for ten years, according to my mother.
I was thinking about that kind of love and devotion when I spotted a familiar face coming toward me on the sidewalk.
Well, a familiar face fifteen years ago.
I stopped, folded my hands into my jacket pockets and waited. I had to take a few deep breaths to calm my suddenly shaking insides.
Head bent, gaze concentrated on the street, hands shoved in the pockets of a spring jacket as mine were. Every few steps a stop, a glance inside a shop window, then moving again. I wasn’t noticed until she almost knocked into me.
The blue eyes I’d remembered always being lit with some modicum of annoyance mixed with laughter were dead serious as they gaped at me. Evidence of crying was on her cheeks and in the reddened vessels in her eyes. We were the same age, but she looked a decade older. Harder, somehow. Unhappy.
A quick widening of her eyes as she focused in on me, than, “Rory. Holy shit.”
Not the greeting I was expecting, but…
“Phil.” I summoned up a smile for the woman who had been my best friend for the first two decades of my life.
She winced, dropped her gaze to the ground and shook her head, her hair swishing around her face. “No one’s called me that in…years.” She sucked in a breath and bit down on her bottom lip as she looked back up at me.
“It’s been a minute,” I said, still smiling.
Her mouth pulled tight at the corners when the words hit home. She was thinner than I’d remembered, painfully thin from what I could see through her jacket. Her hair was a duller version of the shiny ash blonde it had been. Still long, but now it hung lifeless down past her shoulders, devoid of the body and bounce those weekly professional conditioning treatments we used to get at our favorite salon gave it.
“Rory, I—” She shook her head. Her lips slammed together.
I didn’t remember her ever having trouble speaking before. No, usually she’d have bouts of verbal diarrhea overlaying her normal chatterbox ways. But a decade and a half can change a person. Once upon a time we’d been joined at the hip. My Thelma to her Louise. Her Rachel to my Monica.
Now? We were strangers and I had no idea why. I hadn’t seen nor spoken to her since the night of my twenty-first birthday. I’d asked Maeve and my mother a few times about Phil since I woke up. They’d never given me an answer that satisfied my curiosity.
“You look…good,” she said.
I nodded, unable to return the compliment.
“Where are you heading?” I found myself asking.
She shrugged and averted her eyes for a moment, letting them drift somewhere over my shoulder. When she answered, she pulled her gaze back to me. “No place, really. Just on my way home from an…appointment.”
An appointment that had upset her.
“Do you have a few minutes to spare, then?” I asked. “We could grab a cup of coffee. Catch up.” The old Rory would have suggested a mid-day cocktail.
The look Phillipa greeted my request with was worrisome. And intriguing. She looked…scared.
I pointed across the street, not giving her any time to say no, because it certainly looked as if she was going to. “There’s a little place we can sit down for a bit. Come on. It’s a beautiful day and I haven’t seen you in a lifetime.”
Phillipa always had an expressive face. She’d never been able to hide her emotions, or what she was thinking, from me. Things hadn’t changed in the time we’d been separated. I could tell from the way she gnawed on the inside of her cheek and the stooped way she stood, she didn’t want to join me. The girl I used to be would have waved her off and walked away, ignoring her mood and forgetting about her as soon as she was off my radar.
The woman I’d become couldn’t do that. Besides, I wanted answers to why she’d ghosted me.
I started walking toward the café, hoping she’d follow.
When she did I gave myself a hidden pat on the back for pushiness and persistence.
Seated at one of the outside tables for two, we ordered—tea for me, black coffee for her—and I took stock of her. Dressed from head to toe in Chanel, the clothing was several years out of style but maintained beautifully. Classic, my mother asserted more times than I could remember, never went out of style. The jacket hung from her shoulders, though, and her pasty complexion had me thinking she’d been ill.
“So,” I said as I sat back and folded my hands in my lap. “How have you been? Like I said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you.”
She winced again and wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Okay,” she said at last.
She didn’t ask the same of me.
“How are your parents? They still traveling all over the place?”
“Yeah.”
Certainly not a chatterbox anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then stopped as the waitress brought our drinks. I smiled and thanked her. Phil didn’t. Some behaviors, I guess, never change.
“About your dad,” she continued when we were alone again. “I heard about what happened to him.”
During year seven of my suspended state, my father, one day out of the blue, told my mother he wasn’t feeling so hot while they were having breakfast. In the next second he fell, face forward, into his oatmeal. By the time the paramedics arrived he was gone. Maeve told me the autopsy showed he’d suffered a cerebral aneurysm.
“My parents came home for the memorial. They s
aid it was a beautiful service.”
I’d been told that, too.
“Thank you.”
An awkward silence stretched between us as I sipped my tea.
“So what have you been doing with yourself?” I asked. The ring on her bony left hand was huge, so I pointed to it. “You’re married?”
She nodded.
“That’s great. Any kids?”
This time the head shake told me no.
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
She cradled the ceramic coffee mug in both hands. As she brought it to her lips her hands were trembling. Her nails were bitten to the quick, which was surprising since in the past she could have supported a half dozen nail salons with her twice weekly manicures.
“You know…Trey,” she said, after swallowing.
“Oh, wow. How long have you been married?”
Coffee sloshed from the cup onto the saucer when she banged it down. In all honestly, it looked liked she’d lost her grip at my question.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Um…it’ll be…fifteen years in July. The fifteenth.”
My eyes went wide before I blanked my expression again.
My birthday had been in April and there was no talk of the two of them marrying at that time.
That was a fast engagement.
I wanted to ask why the rush, but Phillipa bolted upright.
“Look, I’m - I’m sorry, Rory. I’ve got to…go. I just remembered I’m meeting…someone. Crosstown.” She pulled a ten dollar bill from her purse, tossed it on the table, then slung her bag strap over her shoulder. “It was great seeing you. You look…good. But…”
A quick shrug and then she was gone before I could even get a word in.
The last glimpse I had of her was as she slid into a cab and drove away.
From the time we’d first become friends, Phillipa’s temperament had been mercurial. One minute she’d be laughing so hard at something she had to grip her sides because it hurt so much, the next she’d be moody, tossing verbal barbs and nasty-grams at everyone around her.
From her behavior today it seemed there was more going on with her than normal irritability. Her excessively thin appearance, the way her hands shook, the furtive glances she kept tossing me, even the inability to answer questions with more than single word replies all spoke to some kind of underlying stress or mental issues.
New York may have been filled with eight million plus people, but Phil and I had grown up in a relatively small, insular group of families with blue blood lines, old money, and societal prestige. It was true when I was a kid and was still true now, so the fact that my old friend and I had never once run into one another since I’d woken was…strange. We hadn’t seen each other at any society events, shopping, weddings, or even just haphazardly, like today.
Had she been avoiding me, purposefully? On the surface it seemed that way.
The question I needed answered was why? What had I done, if anything, to make her not want to be in my life again?
I finished my tea, paid the bill, leaving Phil’s ten for the waitress’s tip, then started back on my original trek home, the twenty-minute side trip replaying over and over in my head.
Because I was a good daughter I dutifully texted my mother the moment I walked through the door of our townhouse. Her quick reply was a string of kiss-face emojis and three wineglasses.
Well, her lunch was certainly going well.
I found Maeve in the kitchen reading a book, a cup of tea in front of her.
“Any good?” I chinned toward the book while I got a glass of water.
“Not bad. She’s a new author for me so I’m just getting a feel for her writing.”
A quick glance at the book told me what I’d already suspected. Two smiling twenty-something’s locked in a cuddled embrace graced the cover.
“You do love your romance books.” I grinned.
“I must admit, I do. I love all the anguish and drama and knowing in the end the two lovers will be together for eternity.”
“It’s not predicable to you? Every book ends the same way, just like every fairy tale. And they lived happily ever after.”
“Sure, but it’s the journey that matters, doesn’t it? How the two get to that happy ending. The trials they go through, all the conflicts and obstacles they need to overcome. That’s the true worth of a good romance. Even if they go through hell, they’ll come out of it stronger and more in love.”
I settled a hip against the counter, the glass of water still in my hand, and took a good look at her.
Maeve had come to me when she was twenty, a fresh faced, skinny as a rail, red-haired girl, looking to make her way in the world. The moment I’d been placed in her arms she’d known where that place was as she’d told me many times. At fifty-five, she was still a good-looking woman. Skin that was mostly unlined due to shunning the sun like a vampire, her once red hair was now impossibly white, kept in a short style that should have looked too masculine on her, but actually was very flattering for her bone structure.
“Maeve Capshaw, you’re a true romantic,” I said.
She shrugged.
“How come you never found your own Prince Charming? Someone to go through all that hellfire with?”
A small pink flush settled over the apples of her cheeks as she lifted the cup to her lips and took a healthy sip. Her silence was telling.
“Oh, my God, you did.” I flew across the kitchen and parked myself into the chair next to her. “Tell me. Who was it? When? Why aren’t you still together?”
With a shake of her head, she laid her cup back down. “You always were such an inquisitive child.”
“I’m right, though, aren’t I? You did meet your prince.”
“I don’t know that he was a prince,” she said after a few moments lost in thought, her gaze softening. “More a regular Joe.”
“What did he look like? Was he handsome and hot?”
She rolled her eyes again, and shook her head.
“Handsome for sure. His mother was black Irish, his father from Puerto Rico, so he was blessed with dark hair and skin, but his eyes were blue. Deep blue.”
She stopped, her own eyes taking on a dreamy, faraway look.
“So, tall, dark and handsome?” I said. “Sounds dreamy and sexy.”
“Dreamy, he was. Had the most beautiful manner of any man I’d ever met. Quiet. Calm. He had a way to draw you out of yourself, make you tell him all your thoughts and…dreams. And he really listened, too. He simply was a lovely man.”
“How come I never met him or even knew about him? I don’t ever remember you not being around when I was a kid. You never went out at night, even on your days off you stayed close to home. When did you get to see him? Have your little romance?”
She glanced down at her now empty cup and I felt the heaviness of her sigh all the way to my toes. In that moment I realized why I never knew about her mystery man.
I slipped one of my hands into hers. With her head cocked at a questioning angle, she squeezed it.
“You met him while I was in the coma, didn’t you? That’s why I never knew about him.”
“Inquisitive and”—she shook her head—“smart as a whip.”
She stood and took her cup to the sink. While she rinsed it, she said, “It’s true. We met while you were…as you were. At first I didn’t think he was being more than just kind to me.” She tossed me a look over her shoulder. “In the beginning, right after you were admitted to the hospital, I was a basket case.” Shaking her head again, she put the now clean china in the drying sink. “Your mother was, too. Thank goodness your father was able to keep his head. We were both useless. If he hadn’t been so clear headed and steadfast, I think the two of us would have fallen to pieces completely.”
“I can’t picture either of you like that. I’ve never even seen you cry.”
“I did a lot of it while we waited to find out what was going on with you. Your mother, as well, shed more than her share of t
ears. Worry choked us to the point sometimes we couldn’t speak. Once you were stable and they’d found out what had been done to you, that worry turned to anger like quicksilver.”
She came back to the table and took her seat.
“But anger never solves anything, so while your father soldiered on, your mother and I settled into the new normal of spending our days in rotating shifts with you. I took mornings, your mother the afternoons.”
“Is this when you met your mystery man?”
There was a slight hesitation before she nodded. So slight, if you didn’t know her, you would never have noticed it.
But I did know Maeve. She was, for all intents and purposes, my second mother and I knew every little quirk and habit.
“Same time period,” she said.
“So what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t it work out between the two of you? I know it didn’t because”—I swiped my hand around the kitchen—“you’re here instead of in your own married home with a gaggle of kids.”
“Life, unfortunately, isn’t like a romance novel, Aurora. We wanted different things, he and I, and neither was willing to change or sacrifice what we wanted for the other.”
“What things weren’t you willing to sacrifice?”
She nailed me with those clear, crystal eyes of hers. “You.”
I think I gasped. I know I felt a pit drop inside my stomach the size of a basketball.
“M-me?”
She inclined her head, her eyes moist with sadness. “The first year he was understanding of my need to be at the hospital every day and never said anything about it but ‘go. I know you need to be with her.’ The second year he was less understanding, more…tolerant, is the best word, I guess. By the fourth year, when you were moved back home where you could be privately taken care of by the experts your parents hired, he felt I should give you up to their care and start—in his words—living my own life.”
I nodded, understanding completely.
“Why didn’t you?”
She reached out and took my hand this time. While she cradled it in both of hers, her eyes grew misty. “I could no more give you up to someone else’s care as I could chop my own leg off. I may not be your mother, Aurora, but you’re the closest thing to a daughter I’ve ever had or wanted.”
