by Julia Kent
Krysta snorted. “If he gave me a sock I’d take it and run back to Boston.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Krysta didn’t even try to argue. She knew when she was bested.
“Kitchen slave isn’t the kind of submission I want to subject myself to, if you know what I mean.”
“Please do not talk about my baby brother like that!” Lydia shuddered. Gross.
“We’re all adults,” Krysta taunted.
“At least you finally acknowledge your crush.”
“What crush?”
“Ha ha.”
Jeremy waltzed past, staring at his phone, head bent over like a data zombie. Lydia and Krysta traded raised eyebrows.
“What’s that about?” Krysta asked.
“No idea. But I’ll go find out.” Jeremy hadn’t pulled his phone out since…well, ever here at the campground, so the sight of him looking like a teenager at the mall, head down and engrossed in his phone, was a bit disconcerting. His long legs took him down the main road at a fast pace, forcing her to hoof it to catch up.
“What’s going on? You testing your data plan?”
“What?” he yelped, clearly startled by her, losing his grip on the phone and throwing it in the air. She caught it with such grace it seemed planned by a divine force.
“Saved!”
“Good hands.”
“You would know.” She flipped the phone over and looked at the screen, then her blood turned cold.
Mike?
“You’re texting with Mike?”
Snatching the phone back, he swallowed hard and seemed to grope for words.
Hurt took over her shock. “No explanations. You’re your own person and can do whatever you please. I didn’t mean to invade your privacy by looking at your phone,” she said in a robotic, flat voice. Turning away, she walked as far as she could, blinded by the nine thousand emotions passing through her like a flock of pissed-off hummingbirds.
“Hold on, Lydia! It’s not what you think.”
“It’s never what I think. It’s always worse.”
“Here.” He shoved the phone in her hand. “I wasn’t hiding anything from you. Look through every text I’ve had for the past…whatever. I’m an open book.”
That made her stop. She pulled her neck back in disbelief and skepticism. “You don’t have to appease me.”
“I want to appease you.” He frowned and shook his head. “Besides, appease is the wrong word. I was going to show you the texts. Mike’s alive and fine. Terse, but fine.”
Scanning the messages, she got what Jeremy meant. “Closer than you think.” What did that mean. Was Krysta right? Was Mike actually here?
Her turn to come clean. Just as she opened her mouth to tell Jeremy about Krysta’s suspicions, Miles pulled up in his red golf cart, driving so fast Lydia wasn’t sure he’d stop before hitting them. Miles never sped. Never.
Something was wrong.
Gravel spat at them as Miles slammed on the brakes.
“I need help. Get in.”
She and Jeremy obeyed on instinct, Miles’ tone of voice giving no wiggle room. “What happened?”
“It’s Grandma. She had a heart attack.”
Chapter Six
Lydia had never seen Sandy so scared. Fear was not an emotion Lydia attached to her mother. Concern—sure. Distress—rarely. Worry—of course. But unadulterated fear carved a frightening sculpture into Sandy’s features with a heavy hand that Lydia didn’t like.
Pete was back at the campground along with Miles, doing what they could to keep the talent show going. Dan and Adam were trapped in Dallas, some giant hurricane-like storm closing down airports. They’d called and confirmed they were safe and out of the storm’s path, but stuck in FAA shutdown hell. With hundreds of guests arriving in the next twenty-four hours, they couldn’t just cancel the talent show. Various friends in the area began offering to be an extra set of hands as word spread that Lydia and Sandy had left the campground.
Here at the hospital in Boston, in the intensive care unit, Madge was hooked up to so many tubes, monitors beeping at erratic intervals, measuring processes that kept the heart of who she was alive in a body that made Lydia weep when she saw it. Grandma didn’t get sick. It was family lore. At eighty-four she was the Energizer Bunny. Madge just kept going and going, from mouth to feet.
This time, though, it was the in-between that wasn’t working right.
“A patron at the restaurant where she works said she just grabbed the cash register and told her to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, she was unconscious. Another patron performed CPR for about a minute before the ambulance crew took over. She’s very lucky the restaurant is so close to the hospital. The blockage…” As the doctor explained the details to Sandy, Lydia could only look at Madge, taking in all the medical technology that covered her helpless body, her eyes closed, a tube running in her mouth, breathing for her.
If Lydia could have given her heart to her grandmother, she would.
Grandma couldn’t die. Crazy Madge was a living legend and Lydia had left for Iceland assuming that Grandma would just be there when she got back. Because Madge was a living legend, Lydia had always thought of her as timeless. Immortal.
Another illusion shattered.
Yet another doctor rolled in, this one wearing scrubs and a deeply concerned look on his face, carefully ushering an old man into the room, speaking to him in a low, soothing tone of voice.
“Ed!” Sandy said, walking over and giving him a huge hug. Lydia took a moment to realize it was her grandma’s boyfriend, Ed Derjian, and the doctor with him must be his grandson, Alex. Madge had nattered on and on about the wunderkind, and how Lydia should hook up with him, but fate had never intervened.
Meeting him under these circumstances was less than ideal. Besides, according to Madge’s most recent report, the young doctor was snatched up by a weird, hyper woman whose best friends were in some sort of threesome arrangement.
Nothing wrong with that.
“Alex Derjian,” he said, introducing himself to Sandy, his arm strong and peppered with dark hair, the smile restrained and sympathetic. The wide, friendly face with kind chocolate eyes—like Ed’s—made her do a double take. Whomever he was dating was lucky. Very lucky.
He turned back to Ed, who was now talking with Sandy in hushed tones, Ed’s shoulders shaking slightly as Sandy patted his arm softly. Whatever they were telling him just about broke Lydia’s heart.
“My Madge,” Ed said, his voice shaking. Alex led him to her side and Ed’s hand tentatively touched Madge’s, daunted by the tubes running out of her, wide patches of tape covering the thick veins of the back of her hand.
“She looks so tiny. So frail,” he rasped. Tenderly touching three fingers, he held them as the machine hissed and groaned, pumping air into her grandma’s lungs.
“Madge is sedated, Grandpa. She can’t talk or react, but you can say whatever you want and some part of her will know you’re here and that you love her,” Alex said.
That did it. Sandy’s eyes filled with tears as she gripped Lydia’s hand, and Lydia’s throat swelled with emotion.
“She’ll pull out of this, right, Alex? My Madge is so strong.” Ed’s plea made Lydia’s chest tighten, and she saw Alex react with as measured and professional a response as he could, while trying to balance his own emotions.
Sandy’s shoulders shook with great sobs that would soon turn to a keening, Lydia feared, setting the room into chaos. Turning her mother toward the door, she and Alex shared a surprisingly intimate look, one of comfort and knowing, one she would remember years later. It was exactly what she needed, his eyes shifting from hers to Sandy, then nodding, a confirmation that she was doing the right thing, an acknowledgment that this was so, so hard, and a recognition of her own humanity.
Somehow he conveyed all that in just one look.
“She can’t die,” Sandy whispered fiercely. “Not before Karen gets here.”
Lydia’s aunt Karen lived in Wisconsin, a professor of biology at a small college. Sandy was the eldest of the two sisters and Karen came back every few years.
“When is she arriving, Mom?”
“Sometime tonight. She said she was arranging coverage for her classes and going straight to Chicago to catch a direct flight.” Lydia made a mental note to make sure someone picked Karen up.
Her mom’s only sibling, Karen was a force of nature. Sandy and Pete had taken the brood to Wisconsin only once, a crazy two-week trip that Lydia remembered fondly for the day-long adventure in Niagara Falls. Luke had nearly fallen over into the spray and they’d all gotten food poisoning from some cheap diner Pete had insisted on trying. The road trip was known as “The Puke Vacation,” and Aunt Karen had been the one to travel to them after that.
“Is it that bad? What did the doctor say?”
“The cardiologist says that she has an eighty-five percent blockage in one artery, and they’re looking at the others to see how pervasive the damage is. Right now, they think she went no more than ninety seconds to two minutes without oxygen, but until they lessen the sedation and get her breathing on her own, we just don’t know.” Sandy’s last word came out as a sob.
Seeing her mother like this was killing Lydia. Killing her. Standing in the hallway, she wrapped her arms around Sandy and just held her, letting her mom sob in her arms. Jeremy rounded the corner in front of her and gave them both a look of such sympathy and compassion that she felt her own tears come again. To see someone so big, so imposing, have his face crumple like that…
Without hesitation he marched over to them both and added a third set of arms to the hug, taking deep breaths and just being there with them. For the next two minutes they stood in place and felt what they needed to feel as the world continued on without them.
Which was exactly what Lydia needed right now.
“What’s going on?” Mike asked, approaching Pete and Miles as they struggled with a tent pole. Tomorrow the talent show would begin, an all-day extravaganza culminating in the big show under the tent, and as throngs of men he didn’t know poured in to set up the stage and the enormous circus tent, the atmosphere was decidedly less celebratory than the previous day.
“My mother-in-law had a heart attack,” Pete said, now looking up as he and Miles tried to move the heavy cylinder into place. As he jumped in, Mike’s extra strength made the difference, the three men grappling with the pole until it was centered and secured.
Madge? He nearly blurted her name out, then realized what a faux pas that would be. He had no reason to know her name under the current circumstances. “I’m so sorry,” was all he could offer.
“Thank you. She’s a tough old bat, and I sure as hell hope she pulls through. I’ll go to Boston on Friday, but in the meantime, Lydia and Sandy are there with her.”
“Lydia?”
Miles gave him a very narrow look. “My sister.”
“Mike wouldn’t know her,” Pete said in a calm, hollow voice. “She just got here a few days ago with her new boyfriend.”
Gut punch. Her new boyfriend.
“She went to Boston with Sandy?”
Both nodded.
“That’s good. Sandy will need the support.” And so will Lydia.
“Her boyfriend, Jeremy, drove them. I didn’t want either of my girls driving. Not when they’re this emotional.”
“Is the prognosis good?”
Their faces went from grim to horrid. “We don’t know,” Miles said, a hangdog expression making him look darker than usual. “We’re waiting to hear.”
“She’s in CICU and she’s eighty-four. Madge is a fighter, but…” Pete let out a ragged breath. “The show must go on,” he said, cracking a shaky, morbid grin.
“How can I help?” Mike asked.
Pete sized him up. “You already have, man. Let’s just keep going.”
Jeremy felt like a completely useless bag of flesh in situations like this. All he could think to do was to fetch coffee and give sympathetic looks. Hugs for Lydia, too. Lydia’s grandmother was Madge—the Madge from Jeddy’s—and a pang of reminiscence from his college days kicked in. When did she get so…old?
Running a hand through his hair in frustration at his own lack of power to do something, he remembered the grays he’d seen in there recently. You’re getting old, too.
The thought used to terrify him, and likely drove all the sand-hopping adventures he’d indulged in this decade. Old. Who wanted to get old? Your body began to break down, your mind dulled, you ended up unable to eat anything that required chewing and in the end you watched reruns of Matlock and Murder, She Wrote on TV after Wheel of Fortune was over.
No thanks.
Madge was different. Lydia and Sandy seemed to handle their worry with two speeds: funny stories about Madge, or quiet sobbing. He could handle the former better than the latter.
“Remember when Grandma called us from jail? She got arrested at that sex club, the one where the lion got loose. They thought she was a dominatrix.”
Sandy stayed silent, cheeks turning pink. Uh-oh, Jeremy thought, the discomfort level in the waiting room shooting up to a screaming level.
“Mom?” Lydia hissed, eyes wide and intrigued. “You always said she was just goofing around at Halloween and that she was there to protest the abuse of the animals.”
“You were too young to explain it to,” Sandy muttered.
Jeremy stifled a laugh. “She sounds like quite the character.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” the two women said simultaneously, then chuckled.
The young doctor who was Madge’s boyfriend’s grandson—Adam? Ansel?—came over, his eyes sad and down turned. Oh, shit.
All three stood, and as the doctor scanned their faces, his expression shifted and he put his palms out. “Oh, no—no worries. I don’t have new information. I’m not even on the case.”
Sandy blew out a sigh of relief and Jeremy saw Lydia’s eyes change from alarmed to warm, a look passing between her and the doctor that made his throat tighten. What was this?
“Alex,” she said fondly, and he reached out to touch Lydia’s arm, a friendly touch of acknowledgment that made Jeremy want to go back in time and feed him to that lion in the sex club.
Where was this coming from?
“Hi, Lydia.” Alex turned to Jeremy and offered a hand, which Jeremy accepted, his grip like steel. Alex returned it in full, dark eyes suddenly on guard. They were at eye level to each other, though Jeremy was about an inch taller, both of them looming over Sandy and Lydia.
“How is your grandfather?” Lydia asked, genuinely concerned. Jeremy couldn’t help himself, taking a step closer to her and putting his arm around her. It felt like an eighth-grade move, a primal instinct and a display of possession that was laughable.
But he really couldn’t control it.
Lydia leaned into him, her cheek against his shoulder, and he relaxed, tension draining out of him as Alex focused on her question.
“He’s confused. Keeps asking what happened to Madge. He has Alzheimer’s, though it’s under reasonable control with medication. Madge is his rock.”
“And he is hers. She talks about him all the time,” Sandy interjected, placing her hand on Alex’s forearm. “I’m sorry I haven’t been in the city more lately. We really should have met before this.”
A forty-something woman tapped lightly on the doorway to the waiting room, interrupting the four of them. “Hello?” Wearing flowing clothing that looked like something between an Indian sarong and a high-end Newbury Street outfit, she had a natural beauty to her, a woman who aged with grace, with twinkling eyes and a sophistication that wasn’t pretentious or showy.
And her eyes were all on Sandy and Alex.
“I’m Meribeth Derjian. Ed’s daughter,” she said, aiming for Sandy. Relief filled Sandy’s eyes as she took Meribeth’s hand, then pulled her into an embrace.
“I have wanted to meet you for
so long!” Sandy said, her voice muffled in the woman’s shoulder. Stepping back, she looked at Meribeth, then at Alex. “I see some resemblance…”
“Not much,” Alex said through a smile.
“But you look exactly like a young Ed,” Sandy insisted.
“He really does,” Meribeth said, now looking at Lydia and Jeremy. “Are these your kids?”
Jeremy choked, the sound a sputter that was so socially awkward that a pain formed between his eyes, making him pinch the bridge of his nose. Could he add to the enormity of this awful occasion any more?
Lydia snickered. “I’m Sandy’s daughter, but this isn’t her son. If it were, our relationship would be illegal.”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up, but he said nothing.
Meribeth stepped forward to shake Lydia’s hand. “So you’re the famous Lydia. Madge’s roommate. Dad and Madge talked about you. Madge is so proud of your career accomplishments.” Meribeth flashed her son a look that said the same. Who wouldn’t want a handsome, successful doctor for a son?
His own parents, for one. They’d pushed, but computer science had trumped medical school, much to their chagrin.
“And I’m Jeremy. Jeremy Forster. Nice to meet you, circumstances excepted.” As their palms touched he caught a whiff of perfume that made him think of a bakery and spices from a foreign land. Her necklace was a complicated strand of gold and gemstones, with dangling earrings color-coordinated with flecks of earth tones in her clothing. He could watch her for hours, like a work of art in human form.
And she was motherly, to boot. Nothing like his own mom, who had thought the height of fashion was Christmas lights with a battery pack on her seasonal sweatshirt. Being a late-in-life baby meant having a mom who had gone completely gray by the time he graduated high school and who began collecting Social Security before he graduated college.
Alex’s mother was the polar opposite.
“Nice to meet you as well, Jeremy, though you’re right.” She frowned and made careful eye contact with each of them, a studied, compassionate series of movements. Her sad eyes were riveting. “What’s Madge’s prognosis?” Her eyes settled on Alex.
