Boy, this stinks with both socks on, he thought. He'd never ratted on anyone in his life. Still, what he'd just seen had left him appalled. He might as well have been watching the girl holding a grenade with the pin pulled out. Maddie would have to be told.
"Were you home earlier?" he asked, though he knew she wasn't.
"No ... my car was here, but I was off at a planning meeting with one of the contributors in the lighthouse project. He got a flat on the way back and didn't have a spare, so we had to wait for a tow truck. I called Tracey to tell her we'd be late. She was supposed to stay inside; I'm very annoyed that she didn't."
Hawke didn't hear anything after the word contributor. Contributor! A surge of almost inane relief went through him, but it made it even harder to say what he had to say.
He decided to give it to her straight. "Look, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know what goes and what doesn't go with parents nowadays, but I'm pretty sure that kids, drink, and drugs are still a no-no."
Her response to that was a complete blank; she didn't know what he was talking about.
He was only an arm's length away from her now. He felt his blood run predictably faster at the nearness of her.
But he was there for the sole purpose of giving her really rotten news, so he plowed on stoically. "I just found Tracey and Julie and a couple of kids—brothers; the younger one's name is Ross—in the lighthouse tower, having a little picnic. They had everything but the ants," he added, hoping she'd get his drift.
She did. "Alcohol?" she whispered, stunned. And then, without waiting for his answer, "Which drugs?"
"Pot, as far as I could tell. I didn't frisk 'em."
Not for a million bucks, he thought, thinking of Julie's savvy comeback.
"I see." In a voice that was trying hard to stay calm, she said, "The lighthouse. It's always been a favorite place for the kids to hang out. Whenever we have a community beach cleanup, that's where we find the most empty liquor bottles—you know, the airplane-sized ones? Somehow we've never found any half-smoked joints, though," she added in a painful attempt at levity.
It was her way of absorbing the hit—rattling on about the lighthouse instead of her daughter. Although he knew it was small comfort, he said, "It's a rite of passage for some kids, Maddie."
She let out a sharp sigh of distress. "But the kids do it so much more ... so much younger ... God, I can't believe this! I—"
She checked herself and said in a numb tone, "I was hoping it would never come to this. I was hoping so much."
Her voice was filled with such sudden, bewildered emotion that he wanted to take her in his arms on the spot and tell her he'd make it all better, which would be a little like a stagecoach driver offering to fly a 747. All he knew about kids was what he knew about himself as a kid, and since he'd chosen to forget most of his childhood, that wasn't a whole lot.
He stood there feeling helpless as she murmured, "I can't go in there now; I can't. I feel too much like shaking her until her teeth fall out. I have to calm down ... have to stay cool ... or we'll end up bitter enemies."
"Walk with me," he said on the spot. "We'll work on a plan."
Her head shot up. In the dark, he could only imagine the frown on her face. The skepticism came through in her voice, though, loud and clear. "You don't have children, do you?"
"You know I don't," he said tersely. Actually, there was no reason for her to know one way or the other.
She seemed to falter, then suddenly got defensive. "Well, take it from me: every parent in America is wrestling with this problem."
"Every parent?"
Just as suddenly, her bravado collapsed. "No ... not every one," she said. He could hear tears welling in her voice. "Sometimes I wish it was all of them. I'd feel less of a failure then."
"That's nuts," he said, amazed to hear her talk that way, especially now that she'd explained about the Corvette. Hawke had followed her comings and goings close enough to know that she carted Tracey and her friends around everywhere and then remembered to pick them up again. That put her way ahead of any mother he ever knew.
Nonchalantly, he began to mosey down the flower-filled lane, praying that she'd fall in with his step. She did, and his heart went cartwheeling down the path ahead of them. Maddie was close enough to touch; Maddie was walking alongside. Maddie was talking with him again. Maddie, the one, the only, the great, great love of his life.
Maddie, my Maddie. I love you.
Convinced for a second that he'd said it out loud, he felt his cheeks do a sudden burn and was grateful for the cover of darkness that was wrapping them both with its warm, honeysuckle breath. Tongue-tied out of fear of saying something that might make her skitter away, he waited for her to speak first.
"I don't know what happened," she said in an achingly frustrated voice. "One day she was a sweet, outgoing, loving kid, and the next day—this. I blame the divorce, I blame the murder. I can't blame her."
The allusion to her divorce cut through Hawke like a blade; she shouldn't have married anyone but him. He put the thought aside and concentrated on the rest of her remark. "Maybe she knows that she has immunity," he suggested. "Maybe she's testing it."
He saw her turn toward him in the dark. She said, "That's very perceptive, coming from a nonparent."
He shrugged, pleased to be considered a perceptive non-parent. "I know how it was with me, although in my case the immunity came from the fact that my parents didn't give a shit."
"I remember," said Maddie. "You said they weren't around much for you."
"Not at all."
They walked along in silence for a bit, with Hawke getting newly drunk on the sweet scents around them. How had he not noticed the overwhelming fragrance during the parade down to her house?
"Honeysuckle," he said, as though he were laying a bouquet of it in her arms.
"And wild roses."
He smiled. He was so happy. They walked a little farther down the lane, which was about to end in the blacktopped road that led to the lighthouse. Why did they make dead-end lanes so short?
He slowed to a crawl.
She matched his pace.
Her voice became low and musing. "You never married, then."
"Married?" he repeated, rather stupidly. "Who?"
"Whom," she corrected, and he heard the first smile she'd allowed herself since seeing him.
"Whom. You're right; I screw up my whoms in broadcasts all the time." It made him joyously, deliriously happy to have his grammar corrected by her.
As an afterthought, he came back and answered her question. "The right one never came along, I guess." Actually, she came along but then she went.
"Maybe because you're always on the move."
"And maybe not."
He sensed her stiffen and immediately cursed himself for being a blockhead. She didn't want to hear about him and her and what they used to be or might have been. She wanted to solve the problem that was Tracey. And he, big shot, had promised her a plan.
"Peer pressure is everything at that age—don't you think?" he suggested.
"But Julie's the one that Tracey hangs around with most, and Julie's not wild."
"She struck me as a little more street smart than your daughter," he hazarded.
"Oh, that's just the black nail polish and all the bracelets. She's really fairly sweet."
Or a damned good actress, he thought. He said, "Do you know her mother?"
"Definitely. She's a stay-at-home mom, very dedicated."
"Divorced?"
"Do you think it makes all that much of a difference?" she asked a little testily.
It was hard for him to say, "A bit," but he did.
"Well, we can't all be the Waltons," Maddie answered, more in sorrow than anger. "And besides, Julie will have a stepfather and a stepbrother soon; her mother's getting remarried."
"Great," Hawke said with faked enthusiasm. In his mind, merged families meant a whole new set of problems. "And the boys, the brothe
rs—what's the deal with them?"
"Well, Ross seems harmless enough. He and Tracey took sailing lessons together at the Boys and Girls Club last summer. But Kevin ... Kevin's fifteen going on twenty-one. I can't pin it down, really. It's not as if he has a rap sheet or anything; it's more an attitude."
"Oh, yeah. Kevin had plenty of that."
It occurred to Hawke that he may have seen a little too much of his own attitude in Kevin for him ever to trust the boy. When Hawke was fifteen, he was—what? Cooling his heels in juvenile court for smoking dope. Was that before or after he'd got thrown out of school? He had to think.
Before. After he was thrown out, that's when he was arrested for car theft.
Maddie sighed and said, "I won't let her see Kevin anymore, naturally. That should be more than enough to put me in her all-time Witches' Hall of Fame."
She had another thought. "Were you able to tell whether Kevin was more interested in my daughter, or in Julie?"
"Couldn't say," he answered honestly.
What he could say was that Tracey seemed a little more star-struck than Julie, who had no doubt promised her heart to a thirty-year-old pen pal in a federal prison somewhere.
They had arrived at the dreaded blacktopped road; it was either turn around and retrace, or part company.
Call it the honeysuckle or call it the roses, but by now Hawke was fairly pulsing from the nearness of her. Her favorite perfume used to have a flowery scent, and he had come to associate flowers with making hot, sweaty, mind-bending love. In the past two decades he'd had sex in many gardens, trying for that ecstasy, but it was never the same.
Tonight, it could be the same. He was overcome with a surge of desire so strong that it left his voice shaky as he said, "Maddie, have you ever wondered—"
"Dan, no," she whispered, cutting him off at the knees. "Please don't."
Too soon. He knew that; he knew that, and yet he'd let himself be pulled along by his dick.
Shaking for another reason altogether now, he said lightly, "Don't what? I was going to ask if you've ever wondered how they get those model ships inside those little bottles."
Her laugh wasn't a laugh at all; it was a small sound of sorrow. "Thank you for bringing Tracey back ... and for not calling the police—"
"I'd never."
"And most of all, for letting me vent. I feel a little better now. It really does help to talk about it."
"Even with a nonparent?" he asked, his smile as mournful as her voice.
"Even."
"Well." He bobbed and shucked like a country boy, then said, "Good night, then."
"Good night."
She turned and walked resolutely away while he waited for a car half a mile down the road to go by before he crossed. He was watching her, watching the way she held her head up and kept her shoulders back just the way she always did. He knew her so well. He loved her so much.
Sweet dreams, Maddie. Dream, dream of me.
When he couldn't see her anymore, he struck off in the direction of the lighthouse. It was only then that he realized he hadn't thought about nicotine since finding the kids in the tower.
****
Maddie was in turmoil. Dragging Dan directly into a family crisis was so much more boorish than ignoring him as a neighbor. She was deeply grateful that he'd handled Tracey with a firm but discreet hand, but she was mortified that he'd had to deal with Tracey at all. And it wasn't fair to him. Was there anything more awkward than having to tell a former lover that her daughter was a disobedient little shit?
And worse: it felt natural talking with him about Tracey, easier, in some ways, than talking with Michael about her. With Michael, every time that Maddie admitted to either failure or frustration, it was one point to him. But Dan didn't have an agenda. He was nonjudgmental; at least, he acted that way.
Funny, how Michael's name never came up between them. Maddie had made the one quick allusion to her divorce, and Dan had let it go by. He never did trust Michael back in college, probably because Michael was a Boston Brahmin. But there were no I-told-you-so's just now, and Maddie was grateful to Dan for that as well.
Her thoughts veered back to Tracey's wrongdoing and then, after a moment of hurt and anger, veered right back to Dan again.
She remembered, out of the blue, her wedding. She still had no idea how Dan had found out about it. The sterling candlesticks from him had arrived from London beautifully wrapped and with a gracious note. After one shocked glance at his handwriting, Maddie had tossed the card. The candlesticks she donated to a charity auction. She'd felt guilty about doing that—he'd had so little money back then—so she'd sent him a thank you card with her formal signature and nothing else. It might as well have been a bill of lading.
And that was the sum total of their communication until now. Yet he knew about the divorce. Did he understand Michael well enough to know why it happened? She'd never been able to talk about Michael's faithlessness with anyone. But she could've talked about it tonight with Dan.
She could have walked to Provincetown and back with him—just for the pleasure of his company.
And the realization shocked her.
It was Tracey's fault. Tracey's little escapade had caused Maddie to drop her defenses. There had been no such distractions when Dan had walked over to Rosedale the other day for—for what? Maddie still didn't know. Whatever his motive, she had sent him packing. She'd been able to do that because she'd been able to focus on her hostility. Not so tonight.
Tracey.
She felt her blood pressure rise at the thought of the coming confrontation with her daughter. What was she going to do about Tracey? Punishment didn't work; scolding didn't help. She'd sat Tracey down, despite the child's bored looks, and tried as reasonably as possible to explain the dangers of drink, drugs, and sex. She'd even made a point of not villainizing marijuana. So what did Tracey turn around and do?
A number.
Maddie was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn't pay much attention to the dark sedan that drove down Cranberry Lane, except to get out of its way. But the car came back quickly; it was then that she recognized that it belonged to Julie's mother. Julie was in the front seat. Deborah sounded a friendly toot-toot on the horn and kept on going.
After tonight Maddie had to consider whether Julie was trying to pull a fast one by having her mother whisk her away. If so, the girl was only postponing the inevitable by about fifteen minutes.
Maddie found her daughter in her oversize pajama T-shirt, sitting cross-legged in bed with a book in her lap. Fuzzy Mr. James, looking cozy and well-loved, was snuggled on the pillow beside her. A glass of milk sat on the marble-topped nightstand by the white iron headboard. It was a scene right out of Normal Rockwell, and the heartache of it was, Tracey looked exactly right in it.
"Mr. Hawke told me what he found," Maddie said in her most authoritative voice. "Would you care to offer your side of the story?"
Tracey's face had a kind of puzzled innocence which tore at Maddie's resolve as she said at once, "I'm sorry, Mom. I know it was wrong."
Wow. If it was possible for a horror story to have a happy ending, then this was it. Maddie's emotions were a mess by then, anyway. Having her daughter apologize without being goaded made Maddie want to hug her till she burst.
She sat down on the same side of the bed as Mr. James, all too aware that Tracey might feel pressured if her mother got too close. Very calmly, she said, "Do you want to talk about why you did that?"
Tracey made an unhappy face and said, "It kind of just happened. I didn't know they were going to have that stuff with them."
"What did you plan to do in the lighthouse in that case? Sit around sharing a Pepsi?"
Too suspicious. Back off.
"Well ... by then I knew. But it was my first time with, with, um, marijuana, Mom. Honest."
"Did it bother you that you were going to try something that you're maybe too young to handle?" She threw in the "maybe" for Tracey's benefit.
> Tracey stared at her book. "I was nervous, yeah," she admitted, fanning the corner pages.
"And excited?"
Tracey looked up. Her eyes, blue like Michael's but darkly lashed like Maddie's, searched her mother's face, trying to fathom a correct answer there.
"A little excited, maybe," she confessed.
"Well, there's no doubt about it. The first time for anything can seem nervous and exciting, especially when it's against the law. But—"
"But I didn't drink anything tonight," said Tracey, eager now to please.
Tonight? Maddie's heart sank. "This time, you mean? Have you drunk anything before?"
Please God, let her say no.
"Yes," she said with downcast eyes. "At a party once." She looked up again, and volunteered a time and place. "At Mark Menninger's birthday."
"That was during your father's weekend, wasn't it?"
Maddie saw a veil come down over those blue eyes. "I don't ... maybe. Yeah. I guess it was."
Maddie let it go at that for the moment. "You know, Mr. Hawke could've simply handed you all over to the police. Trespassing, underage drinking, illegal drugs. You broke a lot of laws at once tonight."
"Well, he's the one who left the door unlocked!"
"It's still trespassing, Tracey," Maddie reminded her without sarcasm. "I know I've said this so many times that you hardly hear it anymore, but truly, you can get into so much trouble drinking or doing drugs. I don't just mean with the law.
"I'm talking about when you lose control over your ability to make a decision," she went on. "Don't you know what happens then? Someone else—someone who doesn't necessarily care about your best interests—is going to make your decisions for you. And that's not fair to you. You're too smart to put your future—maybe your life—in someone else's hands."
Tracey put down the book and picked up her teddy bear, idly pinning Mr. James's ears back against his head. She murmured, "I wasn't going to lose control, Mom. Honest, I wasn't."
"Honey, you have to trust me on this. When you drink or when you do drugs, you are not in control."
The girl yanked the bear up by his ears. "How do you know?"
How indeed? It wasn't the time to tell Tracey that Maddie—and Michael—and Dan—and just about everyone else she knew back then had at one time or another drunk to excess and experimented with pot.
A Charmed Place Page 11
