“She was here in Oakland,” he concluded, coming around the car to join her.
“No,” she said, speaking carefully. “Her records were here, but she was in a mental institution.”
“Napa State?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Vacaville,” she said, as if the word alone were enough to make her tongue bleed.
“Holly,” he said, repulsed as much by her discovery as by the ordeal she must have gone through to make it.
She opened the outer door and walked in.
“She didn’t belong there. She hadn’t hurt anyone, she was just... sick. It was the first available bed, someplace to dump her. I couldn’t bear seeing her there, so I spent the next four years with doctors and lawyers and judges, trying to get her out. What a terrible place,” she muttered, taking the stairs. “It took every penny I could scrape together and more time in courtrooms than I’d spent in classrooms all through college, but I finally got her out. About three years ago. St. Augustine’s isn’t the Ritz, but it’s clean and they treat her well... and we can afford it.”
“We?”
“Me and the State of California. We struck a deal—I leave them alone forever, and they pay half her expenses, which are as much as they’d be paying for a state facility anyway, only now they have another bed for some other poor soul that no one knows what to do with.”
She knew she was being awfully hard on the practice of psychiatry, a field of medicine few understood and fewer still could tolerate. She knew it was an area of limited choices for the doctors, the families, the victims. She knew her option to take Carolann out of the institution wasn’t available or advisable for everyone. She knew... but it didn’t change the way she felt.
“Do the Spoletos know about all this?”
She nodded as she slipped the key in the lock.
“I finally had to tell Mama,” she said, walking in, kicking off her shoes, and shedding her coat all at once. “When I got sick—remember I told you about when I died that time? I couldn’t pay my hospital bill. I’d listed her as my next of kin where I was working, so the hospital went to her for the money.
“She paid it, of course, but then she came for a visit,” she said, rolling her eyes heavenward. “I’d been flying back and forth and telling her everything was fine and wonderful and I was making all this money and... well, she came to see for herself.” She motioned about the room with her arm and then slid down onto the couch. “You wouldn’t believe the fit she had when she saw this dump.”
Oliver’s brows rose. So, it wasn’t a deep-seated political statement against the system. She didn’t live in a hole-in-the-wall by choice! He wanted to fall on his knees and give worship. There was hope yet for a bigger bedroom and a mattress without lumps.
“...and you know she never travels alone,” she was saying. “Bobby and Tony came too. Two more fits. The neighbors thought the Mafia was invading and wouldn’t open their doors for days. Lord, what a mess it was, and I was still sick.” She shook her head. “I didn’t stand a chance.”
“They do give you money, then? They help out with Carolann?”
“They did for a while, until I got her settled and found a job I could keep. I kept getting fired for taking too many personal days and skipping out to see lawyers,” she mentioned as an aside. “I wasn’t an ideal employee. But later, when I could manage, I asked them to stop.”
“Why?”
“The Spoletos are kind, loving, and generous people. They’re also very proud people. They make it on their own. They don’t live off one another; they make their own lives. And I’m as much Spoleto as I am Loftin. I can manage on my own.”
Another puzzle piece found its niche. He thought it ironic that along with an overdose of the Spoleto pride, she’d also picked up more than her share of the generosity and was absorbed in giving away every nickel she earned.
“Were they hurt when you told them what you’d been doing for Carolann?” He sat down beside her.
“I think the boys were, a little, maybe. Maybe they felt they hadn’t been enough to make me happy or they’d somehow let me down in some way that made me go looking for her. But Mama understood. Right from the beginning, she knew why I couldn’t hate her anymore.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. It all seemed so simple now, so obvious. “She gave me life,” she said. “And she didn’t have to. It was the late sixties, of course, and abortion wasn’t legal, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t readily available. Especially to people like her.”
“How do you know what she was like?”
“I read her files. The first thing I had to do in all this was declare myself her sole relative and get custody of her. Then I could get into her files and talk to her doctors and hire lawyers.” She shuddered. Her aversion to doctors and lawyers was nearly as great as it was to money people. “She was a... a runaway—from some dinky town in Idaho. A hippie, I guess. A nothing. Someone who fell through the cracks.
“There were a bunch of drug arrests before I was born. And by the time my birthday rolled around, we were both heroin addicts. That was in my file too. I was premature and sick for a long time—I was lucky they could find so many foster families to take me,” she said thoughtfully. “I suppose that also accounts for all the not-so-nice people I met in Chinatown when I first came up here, and for the obsessive-compulsive tendencies in my personality.”
His chuckle was a snort of agreement. She smiled too. She couldn’t deny that working too hard could be as harmful to your health as shooting drugs, but she did prefer to think of it as a more productive means to the same end. She was still working on that flaw.
“There for a time, though...” she started, then seemed to get buried in the thought.
“What?” He shifted his weight to extend his arm across the back of the couch, his fingers immediately tangling in her shiny dark hair.
“There for a time, she was in and out of clinics, hospitals, rehab units as if she were trying to get clean? Like maybe she was trying to get straight so she could be with me? I don’t know. Maybe it’s what I want to think. Maybe I want to believe that she okayed the private schools because it was good for me and nixed the religion and the adoption because she wanted me back. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself, I don’t know.” She sighed. “I’ll never know. By the time I was seventeen she was psychotic from the drugs. A paranoid schizophrenic averaging nine months a year for the next four or five years on psych wards and in mental institutions. She was catatonic for two years before I found her.”
“So, she doesn’t talk? Ever?”
“Nope. She’s pretty quiet most of the time. She gets excited once in a while, and you have to sort of scrape her off the ceiling, but... not too often. And the people at St. Augustine’s are pretty cool about keeping her. I mean, it’s not as if she’ll ever get any better. And that is pretty much the general idea behind the word ‘convalescence.’”
“Those people are going to get well?” he asked, trying to imagine it, thinking of miracles.
“They’re all trying. They all want to. Some will even go home for short periods. None of them are considered permanent residents—except Carolann. You weren’t comfortable there, were you?”
“No,” he said, feeling coldhearted.
“It’s okay, you know. To feel human. It’s scary to see yourself in those people. The trick is to look at them with your heart and not with your mind. I used to do that with Carolann all the time. I look at her and wonder...”
“What?”
“How she got that way. Not the drugs, but... Why? Why her and not me? Why some people’s lives just run down like clocks till they stop. Why some people get tossed away like old tennis shoes. Didn’t anybody tell her what was happening? Couldn’t anybody see what was happening to her? Didn’t anybody love her the way I was loved?”
Oliver lapsed into silence, trying to digest all that he’d heard—the story, the emotions in Holly’s voice, Carolann’s plight. He d
idn’t know what to say. Something in him wanted to apologize, but how could one man ask pardon for the whole world? He would have given anything to make it all different for Holly, for Carolann too.
“So? What do you think?” she asked, sitting up and turning to face him. “Can you still love someone who sees fried eggs with a side order of bacon and thinks of her mother?”
The gentle smile in his eyes told her first, but then he closed them, cursing life. Why should she have to ask? Why would she wonder? Why didn’t she simply know, take it for granted, assume it, take it as a fact as solid and unchangeable as needing air and water to survive?
When he looked at her again, his gaze was direct and unwavering, twinkling with humor, dark with the determination to settle the issue for all time.
“If that someone is you, I can still love her,” he said, stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers before he turned his hand over and curved it around her neck. “I could love you if you had a horn growing out of your forehead,” he said, kissing her there. “I could love you if had one big eye here, instead of two beautiful eyes, here and here. I could love you if you had a nose like an elephant or lips like a platypus.” Her giggling made kissing them difficult, so he pulled away to look at her. “There’s only one thing I could never tolerate.”
“What’s that?” she asked, glancing down at his fingers as they began to swiftly work the buttons down the front of her shirt.
He stopped to tip her chin upward, to make her look at the truth in his eyes.
“I could never tolerate not loving you,” he said, clear, plain, and simple.
And maybe because it was so clear, plain, and simple, she believed him. She didn’t ask herself why or what it was about her that he loved. She didn’t question his sureness. She didn’t speculate on a time span or examine the difference between them. That they loved each other was a truth written in stone by the firm hand of Fate, fixed, preserved, unalterable.
He kissed her with confidence, slowly, firmly, deeply. With a possessiveness originating long before they shared a plane ride to L.A., long before he yearned to find his soul mate, long before the creation of man.
He peeled the woolen shirt from her shoulders and grabbed at the cotton T-shirt beneath it, and when he couldn’t get close enough to her, when he couldn’t spread her body out beneath him, to toy, to tease, to tantalize, he muttered an oath and stood up.
The shock of cool air on her heated skin and the sudden tilting of her careening senses as he grabbed her hips and pulled her flat onto the couch, opened her eyes. It amused her to watch him fighting with the cuffs of his shirt in his eagerness to put flesh to flesh.
“What’s your hurry?” she asked, grinning.
“No hurry,” he said absently, nicking his belt buckle open and pulling her hips lower in the time it took to blink.
She waited for him to lower himself over her, to see his eyelids grow heavy with satisfaction, to feel his heart pounding against her breast, to wallow in the rapacious expression of his face when he had settled his body comfortably, perfectly atop hers.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said shrewdly.
He grinned. “Good. I’m a little too far gone to take the time to explain it.”
“No, I meant that I know what you’re really doing.”
He tilted his head to one side and scanned her face.
“Okay. What am I really doing?”
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“That’s right. I am,” he said, lowering his face to the curve of her neck. Her body trembled as he tasted her. It shuddered as he kissed her and took tiny nipping bites of her soft, sensitive skin.
“It isn’t going to work,” she said, her voice hardly convincing.
He looked at her with a smirk on his face, his eyes asking, “Wanna bet?”
“It isn’t,” she insisted, unaware that she was grinning back at him when she sternly continued. “I know what you’ve done, and this isn’t going to work.”
That took care of the smirk and had him frowning.
“You forgot to bring dinner, didn’t you?” she said. “And now you’re hungry and thinking that if you give me a little lovin’ I’ll forgive you and jump up afterward to make you something to eat.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, tipping his head from side to side. “It just so happens, Ms. Smartypants, that when I’m responsible for the meal, we have it my way, and I prefer dessert before the main course. However, in this particular instance, dessert is the main course.”
“Huh?”
“You said dinner at seven and we’ll eat at seven. It’s... six-fifteen now, so lie back, shut up, and enjoy this.”
“Wow, you’re bossy,” she said, laughing, squirming with delight as he plopped fat wet kisses across her chest until his mouth covered her breast.
He suckled till he heard the low moan in her throat and felt the arc in her spine, then his head turned to enjoy the other, and he muttered, “You’re a pain in the ass.”
Dinner was served promptly at seven... on delicate china, from silver serving trays, by tuxedo-clad waiters from Won Chow’s, a very elegant Cantonese restaurant in San Francisco. Candles were lit and four dozen roses were set about the room in cut crystal vases. Sterling silver utensils were laid out on fine linen—but Holly was accomplished at chopsticks and had more fun feeding herself, and then Oliver, as they lay wrapped in sheets, happy and replete on her lumpy bed.
“Here, you read yours first,” she said, handing him a fortune cookie.
He shimmied up in bed, broke it open, and read, “You will get lucky again tonight.”
“Oh, stop. That’s not what it says. Give me that.”
“No, no. You’re right. It says, ‘If last name rhymes with “Jerry,” you will get lucky again tonight.’”
“Oliver. Let me see that.”
“No, no. This is my fortune, and I like it. Read your own.”
She popped half the cookie in her mouth and chewed as she unfolded the tiny piece of paper, scooting down in bed beside him. She clucked at him in disgust and then laughed.
“How did you do this?”
“Read it.”
“‘If first name rhymes with “trolley,” you’ll get lucky too.’”
Nine
“ARE YOU SURE THIS dress is all right?” she asked again, turning herself in the mirror, frowning over the color.
“It’s perfect,” he said, trying not to sound surprised. Other than the floral print dress she’d been wearing when they first met, he hadn’t seen her in anything but jeans. The red dress she wore was a definitive statement in simple elegance—and a relief, as it was one less thing for her to be troubled about since he’d invited her to his home for Christmas Eve dinner. “You’re perfect. Stop worrying.”
She let him turn her from the mirror and allowed one heartening kiss, but her mind was beset with misgivings. The dress being the least of them.
Oliver was unaware of the workings of the Carey Foundation, but his aunt, Elizabeth Carey George, was not. This she’d discovered long ago after many phone calls and meetings with the finance managers. The committees held their collective breath for a thumbs-up or -down from Elizabeth George, for without her support and fund-raising endeavors their hands would be tied with short purse strings.
Then, too, there was the cold reception she’d received from Elizabeth when the family had come to Spoleto’s at Thanksgiving. She didn’t really care what his family thought of her; they didn’t have to like her or welcome her into Oliver’s life with open arms... but it would be nice.
And finally, there was Oliver. He was calling the affair a family dinner, not because it was family only, she gathered, but because it was a smaller do than was usually launched at his house, and because only the family and fifty or sixty of their closest friends were invited—no strangers. No matter what he thought of her, or how highly he regarded her, she would be a stranger tonight—a poor, unconnected, socially uncelebrated stranger fro
m Oakland.
Oliver knew who and what she was. He knew where he was taking her. He knew the risks. She sensed enough of the old arrogant, rebellious Oliver to know that if she didn’t make a good impression on his friends and family, he’d turn his back on them before he turned it to her—at least at first. But there was still a chance that his ties to his world were much thicker than the material money was made of. He could come to resent the fact that she couldn’t fit into his world as easily as he’d slipped into hers... maybe not consciously, but certainly subconsciously, and then what?
It was a test they had to put to their love sooner or later. A test that shouldn’t matter, but did. A test she could pass with ease if it weren’t for people like Elizabeth George and Barbara Renbrook, who also, it so happened, held the fate of the Paulson Clinic in their hands.
“Take a deep breath and relax,” he said, handing her out of the car in front of the house. It looked like the Library of Congress. “You’re as stiff as a mannequin. If I’m crazy about you, they’ll be crazy about you. And I’m very crazy about you.”
“Oh, Oliver. You’re not really thinking that way, are you? You’re in for a big disappointment if you think all these people—”
“These people are a lot easier to please than I am, believe me. I didn’t think there was a woman worth loving until I met you. Trust me. You’ll have them eating out of the palm of your hand in an hour. Even my aunt will come around, once she gets to know how much you have in common with her. Cause is her middle name, and Lord knows you have your share of them.”
“Her middle name is Carey, Oliver,” she said, thinking old, proud money and blue bloodlines.
“Holly, my name is Carey, and I love you.”
He did. And it was important to remember that. If she walked in the huge double doors cringing, she’d never pull it off.
“Okay,” she said, stopping beside some tall shrubs she thought would conceal her. She shook her hands and drew in a deep breath and then another. She straightened her spine and affixed a bright smile to her lips. “Okay. I’m ready.”
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