Eyes in the Sky
Page 6
Tawny wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. She couldn’t think of anything to say that he wouldn’t refute, dismiss, or argue about. Maybe all she could do was listen. Didn’t seem like enough.
He moved past her into the bedroom, carrying the kit. “This racket’s got another twist—don’t just treat the patient, treat the family. Nice way to tack on an extra twenty grand in fees.” He stuffed the kit into the duffel he’d already packed for the trip to Yellowstone and zipped the bag closed. “Got to postpone our vacation. Sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize. You have to take care of Mimi.”
“Can you picture it? Chell and me rock-climbing for parents’ therapy? She might break a fingernail. Only question is, which one of us will push the other off first?”
She stroked his cheek. “At least try to go into this with an open mind. Otherwise, Mimi’ll know your heart’s not in it.”
He grunted but wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on her head. “Chell and I have to meet with the intake counselor at the hospital this morning.”
Tawny held him, and felt the chill of his icy fingers through the t-shirt she was still wearing since she had no other clothes. “Got to start someplace. The journey of a thousand miles…”
“Don’t you try feeding me that woo-woo crap.”
She pulled away and gazed up at him but couldn’t read his eyes, the expression purposely blank. As if he were questioning a hostile witness and didn’t want to tip his hand.
Finally he said, “I’ll make it up to you, Tawny.”
“It’s OK. Yellowstone will still be there when you’re through the program.”
He stared down at her. “Yeah, but will you?”
Chapter 5 – Pandora’s Box
“Chell, can’t you just lend her some goddamn sweats?” Tillman glowered at his ex-wife, who was seated at a desk in her home office.
He nearly filled the double door entry while Tawny stood outside in the hallway. With all her clothes back at the hotel, she felt naked and vulnerable in his t-shirt and golf sweater.
Rochelle glanced up from her tablet. “What about that lovely green dress you bought her?”
The dress was filthy and torn which, of course, Rochelle knew.
“Tawny saved your daughter’s life!” Tillman’s shout reverberated in the high ceiling. “What is wrong with you?”
Rochelle’s cold gaze swept over Tawny. “I’m sure she’d be delighted if you bought her more new clothes.” She tapped on the tablet. “Tawny’s such an unusual name. Brings to mind a pole dancer.”
Mortified anger heated Tawny’s cheeks.
Beside her, Tillman’s forearm muscles looked like knotted leather whips. Fists hardened into rocks. As embarrassed as she was, she couldn’t let him escalate the fight. She pressed against his bicep to hold him back.
Rochelle’s voice remained controlled. “Excuse me, but I have less than an hour to send notifications to more than four hundred guests to let them know the bar mitzvah is postponed. Plus canceling the wait staff and bartenders. I’m sure you’ll find a way to solve your little wardrobe problem.” She returned to tapping on the tablet.
Tillman stormed down the hall.
Tawny wished she could think of a stinging retort to the woman but her mind remained a blank white slate of anger. Don’t get caught in the middle. She turned to follow him.
“I do appreciate what you did for my daughter.” Rochelle’s words were barely audible.
Tawny stopped and faced the woman, wondering if she’d heard right. “Excuse me?”
Rochelle’s concentration remained riveted to her tablet. Maybe she did feel grateful but refused to show it in front of her ex-husband. “Thank you, Tawny,” she said, as quietly as falling snow.
****
Tillman stood at the entrance of Mimi’s walk-in closet and waved at the hanging clothes. “There’s got to be something in here you can wear.” He pawed through the drawers of the dresser, pulling out underwear and neatly folded sweaters, which he flung on the bed.
Tawny squeezed into a pair of Mimi’s leggings almost tight enough to cut off blood flow to her feet. A child-size sweatshirt fitted her snugly, too short in the waist and sleeves, but temporarily doable. On an upper shelf, she spotted a duffel and brought it to Tillman. “She’ll need a bag for your trip to the…retreat.” She couldn’t bring herself to say suicide camp, as he sarcastically referred to it.
Rage still contorted his expression. “She has no right to treat you like shit.”
“It’s OK. She’s scared, too. Besides, women are funny about lending clothes.” She wanted to kid him out of his black mood. “It’s like if a guy borrows a condom and returns it used.”
Her wisecrack startled him enough to diffuse his anger. He snorted. “I always wash it out before I return it.”
Tawny grinned and gave him a play-shove in the chest. He pulled her into an embrace and slipped his warm tongue between her lips, a promise of the ecstasy he could always arouse in her. She forced herself to lean away. “Not the time or place.”
Past his shoulder, she spotted Judah and Arielle in the open doorway to the hall, staring.
Tawny nudged Tillman to turn around. No one spoke for a frozen instant. Then Arielle burst into giggles. Judah elbowed her but couldn’t suppress his own grin. Together, they moved out of sight, whispering down the hall.
“Well,” Tillman said, “that was awkward.”
Tawny smiled up at him. “Could’ve been worse. Our kids walked in on Dwight and me more than once when we were a lot farther along than kissing.”
He shook his head. “Hell, I don’t think my kids ever caught Chell and me so much as holding hands.”
His words saddened Tawny. How could a family be so cold and disconnected?
He flicked one hand toward the closet. “Would you pack a bag for Mimi? I live half my life out of a suitcase but I don’t have a clue what a young woman needs.”
Tawny nodded and set to work, gathering underwear, makeup, and hair accessories.
When she finished packing, he said, “Come on, I’ll drive you to the hotel.”
As they started out the long driveway in his Mercedes, Tawny remembered the man with the rifle. “Tillman, last night when I was walking on the bluff, I saw someone watching your place from the Spanish house over there.” She pointed.
He braked. “That one across the ravine?”
Tawny nodded. “See that window in the center on the third floor? He was out on the deck. Scared me at first because he was pointing a rifle toward your house. But now I think he might have been sighting through the scope.”
He studied the house for a long moment. “Place is for sale, been vacant for months. Maybe federal surveillance. They’re always pissed when I beat their sorry asses in court.” He glanced sideways at Tawny. “Don’t worry. I’ll get Zepruder on it.”
****
At the Northern, Tawny changed from Mimi’s borrowed clothes into her own green Henley top and tan corduroy jeans. How helpless she’d felt, stuck in the strained setting of Tillman’s house, naked without her clothes.
She repacked the few items she’d taken out during the brief stay in the hotel suite and zipped the bag closed. “OK, I’m ready to leave.” Lord, was she ready to leave!
Tillman had been working on his tablet while she changed and now looked up over his half-glasses. “The only first-class flight to Kalispell leaves at six this evening. Connects in Salt Lake. You’ll arrive home around midnight.”
No surprise there—flying in and out of Kalispell, the end of the line, was never direct or easy. She moved to where he sat in the barrel chair. “I don’t need first class.”
“The firm is paying so you’re going first.”
She bent to kiss his dark curls. “You spoil me.”
He hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. “The shuttle will pick you up downstairs at four.” He nibbled her neck. “Hours and hours from now…”
He heaved a big sigh. “Yeah. But, first, I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“Come on. You’ll see.”
After they had retrieved his SUV from the valet, Tillman drove out of downtown, turning diagonally past Moss Mansion and onto Broadwater.
“Where are you taking me?”
He glanced sideways. “Don’t you trust me?”
“After yesterday? Hell no! I should know better than to even get in a car you’re driving.”
Tillman pulled to the curb, parked, and got out. He walked around to open her door.
Tawny peered up at him. “What are you doing?”
“Since you don’t trust me, you drive. If I direct you someplace you don’t like, you just keep going.”
She rolled her eyes but felt half relieved at his offer. He was not beyond dropping her into another awkward situation.
Seats switched, she merged into traffic. “OK, where?”
“Straight about two more miles.” Several minutes later, he pointed to the right and said, “Turn into the parking lot here.”
She read a sign: St. Pius X Catholic Church. What was he up to?
“Park over there, next to the cemetery.”
“Why? Are you going to let me kill you?”
He grinned and spread his hands wide. “You’re driving, do whatever you want.”
She pulled into the church parking lot and shut off the engine. “Now what?”
“Come on.”
They got out of the SUV and walked past shrubbery bordering the church building into a small graveyard. Daffodils and tulips decorated a number of the headstones. At the far end, a line of lilac bushes divided an adjacent section of ground, also a cemetery but somehow different. Then she noticed the grave markers had Stars of David instead of crosses. Tillman continued toward his destination with a purposeful stride.
“Beth Aaron Cemetery.” He stopped at two graves joined by a large marble slab between them. “My maternal grandparents.” The normal boom of his resonant voice had muted. Only rarely did his usual fierce expression grow gentle. On those few occasions, Tawny had to blink to be sure it was the same man.
She asked, “Your grandparents who grew wheat near Great Falls?”
He nodded. “The only good times in my childhood were at their farm.”
Tawny squeezed his cold hand and studied the headstones. Pessie Shayndee Katz 1933-1989, Nissan Chaim Katz 1929-1989. “They were so young when they died.”
“They had hard lives. Bubbe was in Stutthof concentration camp. Zaydeh was conscripted into the Russian army when he was thirteen, same age as Judah. Can you imagine my son, bayonetting Nazi soldiers?”
A lump formed in Tawny’s throat, as she thought of her own son, Neal, serving in the Army. “Thank God, he doesn’t have to.”
“They died within a month of each other. Bubbe first from a stroke. Then Zaydeh just laid his head down on the breakfast table one morning and never got up. Broken heart, I think.”
“I’m sorry I never knew them.”
“That’s why I brought you here. They wanted to meet you.”
His odd words surprised Tawny. He had never seemed particularly religious, observing only a few traditions, like Judah’s bar mitzvah. As cynical as Tillman was, she wouldn’t have expected mysticism from him, nor his belief that the spirits of his dead grandparents would ask to meet her.
She didn’t know what to say, so she simply held his hand, overcome that he trusted her.
After several minutes, he spoke: “They like you but I knew they would.” His smile twitched with mischief. “How could they not fall for you?”
She hugged him. Then they walked in silence through the side-by-side cemeteries, one Jewish, one Christian, united by reverence for their ancestors.
At the Mercedes, she handed him the key fob, wanting the magic of the moment to last.
They drove back the way they had come but, when he passed the hotel without slowing, she said, “Where are we going?”
Unreadable hardness had returned to his expression. He didn’t answer.
About a mile beyond the Northern, Tawny spotted signs for Deaconess Hospital.
No. He wouldn’t do that to her. Not again. Shove her into a corner, forcing her into his family’s problems.
Instead, he parked on the street beside a sports field across from the hospital. On the console, he tapped through music selections on a Springsteen track until “Glory Days” played. He sang along softly for a few lines then gestured toward the baseball diamond. “This used to be Cobb Field. I played here when I was a kid. Hit a home run over that fence one night, cracked the windshield of a car. I was a goddamn local legend.
“Now my daughter’s in the hospital, wanting to die. I swore I’d never be the lousy father my old man was. He showed me what not to do but damned if I know what I should do.”
Tawny stroked his neck. “Things will get better.” What a lie, she thought guiltily but Tillman needed reassurance right now, as Arielle and Judah had needed it last night.
“Thanks, Pollyanna.” His sardonic tone said he knew it was a lie, also.
“What’s next?”
“Chell and I are driving Mimi to suicide camp tomorrow.”
“Maybe she’ll get the help she needs there.”
Silence.
She knew he’d already dismissed the treatment as a waste of time. But what else could a parent do for a child who tried to kill herself?
“When they took the tube out of her throat,” he said, “she asked to see you.”
Tawny jerked as if he’d slapped her. “What?”
He leaned close, his voice husky. “I told her you’d saved her life.”
Fear welled in Tawny’s chest.
Performing CPR had been an instinctive reaction to crisis. But the idea of talking to the suicidal girl frightened Tawny. What if she said the wrong thing? Tillman was expecting too much from her.
Suddenly, she recognized what the last hour had been about. He’d softened her up, taking her to his grandparents’ graves, and made her feel sorry for him because of his failings as a father. Now he was springing the trap, like she was a gullible juror he manipulated. “Tillman, this isn’t fair!”
His tone remained even. “It’s a package deal, Tawny. You got me, you got my kids.”
A package…like Pandora’s box.
She flung open her door, jumped out on the sidewalk, and headed toward the hotel. Regret, doubt, and sorrow brawled inside her.
It was her own fault—she’d known better than to cross the line with her boss but had done it anyway. Why hadn’t she kept the professional distance between them? Just do her job and cash her paycheck. Nod sympathetically when he confided his troubles but stay the hell away.
But she hadn’t. She couldn’t. This infuriating, frustrating, yet endearing man had worked his way into her heart.
Now, fear paralyzed her—she wasn’t strong enough to deal with his overwhelming problems.
Footsteps behind quickly caught up to her. She didn’t slow her rapid pace. He effortlessly fell into step with her, long legs scissoring. “I’m not asking for myself. It’s Mimi. She wants to thank you. I’m not bullshitting you, Tawny.”
She stopped. “I’m sorry for Mimi. My heart breaks that she hurts so much. But I can’t do her any good. Me being here only makes the situation worse because Rochelle wants to kill me. That doesn’t help your kids. Please, Tillman, leave me out of this.” Tears burned and she blinked hard, not wanting to break down.
He stared at her, lips pressed in a tight line, as if fire might come out if he opened his mouth.
She began walking again, faster, almost jogging, toward the Northern. This time, he didn’t follow. She heard the thunk of the SUV door slamming and didn’t look back. Two blocks farther, she paused, leaning against a bus bench, gulping air.
An older gray Crown Victoria sat parked, complete with spotlight and heavy black wheel rims.
A cop car was following Tillman and her. Even though the sun reflected on the windshield, she sensed the driver’s gaze was locked on her.
The man lowered the visor, blocking his face. He appeared to be tapping a phone.
Dammit. She should tell Tillman. Whatever the reason he was under surveillance, he needed to protect himself. She walked past the Ford, turned the next corner, and ducked into a doorway. Out of sight, she pulled her cell from her pocket and called his number.
“What?” he snarled.
“Gray Ford, about two blocks from you, parked.” She rattled off the license number.
A pause. The surly tone disappeared. “I saw it back when we turned into the cemetery, too.”
“OK, I just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“Thanks.”
She started to disconnect but heard him say, “Tawny?”
With a sigh, she lifted the phone to her ear. “Yeah?”
“I’m asking. Please. For Mimi, not for me. Just let her thank you. If she’s grateful to be alive for even a few minutes, maybe that means she can come back from this.”
Tawny leaned against the building and closed her eyes, the rough brick texture grating through her shirt, like Tillman grated on her soul.
She remembered when her daughter, Emma, at fourteen, had plunged into depression after breaking up with her first boyfriend. Tawny and Dwight had taken turns staying up, night after night, holding her. They never knew what to say. Their well-meaning reassurance usually sent her into sobbing hysteria. Yet somehow they’d gotten past the crisis, just holding on, not letting go.
If Mimi really had asked to see Tawny, a rebuff could tip her over the edge. No matter how terrified Tawny was of saying the wrong thing, she couldn’t turn away from Tillman’s daughter. Otherwise, she couldn’t live with herself.
“Five minutes,” she answered into the phone. “Then I’m out of there. And only if Rochelle isn’t anywhere near. I don’t want her to see me because that only makes things worse.”
Relief lifted his voice. “I’ll be right there.”