Miracle

by Danielle Steel

  3

  THE PLANE LANDED IN SAN FRANCISCO RIGHT ON TIME, and Quinn passed through customs quickly. Despite his long absence from the States, he had nothing to declare, and he looked somber as he picked up his valise and briefcase, and hurried outside with his head down. He wasn't looking forward to getting home to the empty house, and he had realized with a pang on the plane, that he had managed to time his return to just before Thanksgiving. It hadn't even occurred to him when he made his plans, but he had no choice anyway. His charter of the Victory had come to an end, and he could no longer come up with a valid reason to linger in Europe, particularly if Alex refused to see him.

  She had been polite but firm. Her outbursts at him had occurred before and after the funeral. And since then, any contact he'd had with her had been distant, formal, and chilly. In her own way, she was as stubborn as he was. She had been furious with him for years anyway. She and her mother had discussed it endlessly, and despite all of her mother's efforts to soften her point of view, Alex had continued to maintain her harsh, judgmental position. She claimed her father had never been there, for any of them, not even when Doug died. Quinn had come home for three days for the funeral. He'd been in Bangkok, concluding a business deal, when he got the news, and turned around and left again the morning after the funeral, leaving eleven-year-old Alex and her mother to grieve and mourn, and cling to each other in their solitary anguish.

  He had been gone for a month that time, putting together an enormous deal that had made headlines in the Wall Street Journal, returned briefly again, and then took off to spend two months in Hong Kong, London, Paris, Beijing, Berlin, Milan, New York, and Washington, D.C. Now that she was an adult, Alex said she could hardly ever remember seeing her father, let alone talking to him. Whenever he was home, he was too busy, exhausted and jet-lagged, and sleep-deprived, to spend time with her or her mother. And in the end, he had managed to cheat her of even a decent amount of time to say good-bye to her mother. Quinn had heard it all before, during, and after the funeral, and would never forget it. There was no turning back from what she'd said and the bitter portrait of him she had painted. And the worst of it was that, as he listened to her, Quinn knew without a doubt that he couldn't deny it. The man she described was in fact the person he had been then, and was until he retired. And whatever changes had occurred since then, most of them positive, Alex was not willing to acknowledge.

  Quinn had tried to make up to Jane for the long years when he'd been busy and absent, and thought he had in some ways, as best he could, during the year and a half they had shared after he had retired. But there was no way he could make it up to Alex. It was also noticeable to him that she had married a man who scarcely left home, except to go to the office. She had married a Swiss banker right after college. They had gone to Yale together, and married almost minutes after they graduated, thirteen years before. They had two boys, lived in Geneva, and Quinn had commented to Jane right from the first that it was Alex who told Horst what to do, and what she wanted. They were inseparable, and seemed happy, sedate, and secure, though uninspired and unexciting. Quinn found his son-in-law painfully boring. Alex had been careful not to fall into the same trap she thought her mother had. Instead, she had married a weak man, to do her bidding, as different as possible from her father. Horst rarely, if ever, traveled, and worked in the bank his grandfather had founded. He was a responsible young man, who loved his wife and sons, and had no great ambitions. Alex had known when she married him that she would never be sacrificed to his career or accomplishments or passions. To Quinn's practiced eye, Horst had none. He simply existed, which was what Alex had wanted.

  Her sons were six and nine, two beautiful little blue-eyed towheads, just like their mother, and Quinn scarcely knew them. Jane had gone to Geneva frequently to visit them, and Alex had brought the boys to San Francisco once a year to visit her mother, but Quinn had rarely been around when they came to town, and he always seemed to be in some other part of the world when Jane went to Geneva. Often, when Quinn was away, Jane took the opportunity to visit her daughter. Looking at it in retrospect, it was easy for him to see why Alex was angry. And she had no intention of letting her father make up for it, or atone for his sins, both real and perceived. As far as Alex was concerned, she had lost not one, but two parents. Quinn had died in her heart years before she had lost her mother. And the trauma of losing her brother when she was eleven years old had remained an open wound for her. It made her particularly protective of her children, despite her husband's pleas to give them just a little more freedom. Alex was convinced she knew better. And more than anything, because of her brother's accident, she hated sailboats.

  Jane had never been fond of them either, but Quinn suspected she would have been happy for him, about the new boat he was building. Jane had always wanted him to be happy, to fulfill his dreams, and to achieve everything he had wanted to accomplish. Alex no longer cared what he did. As a result, Quinn was a man with no family, no ties to anyone, he was as solitary as he looked as he stepped out of the cab on Vallejo Street in a cul-de-sac filled with trees that all but obscured the house he and Jane had lived in for their entire marriage, and that Alex had grown up in. He had wanted to buy a bigger one as his fortune grew, but Jane had always insisted she loved this one. And Quinn had too while Jane was still there to come home to. Now, as he turned his key in the lock of the big rambling English-style house, he dreaded the silence.

  As he stepped into the front hall and set his bags down, he could hear a clock ticking in the living room. The sound cut through him like a knife, and felt like a heartbeat. He had never felt as alone or as empty. There were no flowers anywhere, the shades and curtains were drawn, and the dark paneling in the living room, which had once glinted and shone, now made the room look tomblike. He couldn't remember the house ever seeming as dark or as depressing. And without thinking, he went to the windows, pulled back the curtains, opened the shades, and stood staring into the garden. The trees and hedges were still green, but there were no flowers, and it was a dark November afternoon.

  The fog had come in while they were landing, and it was swirling through the city. The sky looked as gray as he felt, as he picked up his bags and walked upstairs. And when he saw their bedroom, it took his breath away. She had died in his arms in their bed five months before, and he felt a physical pain as he stared at the bed, and then saw her smiling in a photograph next to it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, with tears rolling down his cheeks. It had been a mistake to come home, he knew, but there was no one else to sort through her things, and his own, if he was to sell the house in the spring. And he knew there was work to do on the house. Everything was in good order and worked well, but thirty-seven years in one house was almost a lifetime. He felt he had to organize the work and sort through their things himself, no matter how painful. Some of the rooms needed a coat of paint, and he wanted to consult a realtor to find out what he had to do to sell it.

  It was a long hard first night home for him, and he longed for Jane with such loneliness and agony that at times he wanted to run into the street in his pajamas, just to flee it. There was no escaping. He knew he had to face it. There was no reprieve. His life without her was his sentence. Life without parole. He knew his solitude was forever, and felt he deserved it. And that night, he had the same dream he had experienced frequently before he left on his travels. It was a dream in which Jane came to him, held out her arms, pleading with him, and she was crying. At first the words were indistinct, but even without them, the look on her face tore his heart out. And then the words would come clear to him, and they were always the same, with subtle variations. She would beg him not to leave her, not to abandon her again. And each time he had the dream, he promised her he wouldn't. And then like a nightmare, not a dream, he would see himself pick up a suitcase and leave anyway, and all he could see after that was her face, crying after he left her. He could still hear her sobs when he woke up, at whatever hour, and her words would echo in hi
s head for hours afterward, “Quinn, don't leave me… Quinn, please …” her arms outstretched, her eyes devastated. And whenever he woke from that dream, he felt panicked. How could he have done that to her? Why had he left so often? Why had his own pursuits always seemed so important? Why didn't he listen?

  The dream entirely dismissed the reasons for his trips, and swept away the empire he was building. And all that was left afterward, in the dream, was his own crushing sense of guilt and failure. He hated the dream, and the fact that it had returned almost immediately, as soon as he came back to San Francisco. There was something so tragic about Jane in the dream, although in real life she had been tenderly empathetic and understanding, and had never reproached or implored him the way the woman in the dream did. Quinn hated the dream, and in some ways, he knew that guilt was the chain that bound him to her, as much as love had. But the fact that the dream had returned with a vengeance the moment he got home did not cheer him. It was a burden he knew he had to live with.

  The next morning, he showered, shaved, dressed, swallowed a cup of coffee, rolled up his sleeves, and began digging into closets. He was still trying to get the dream out of his head, and felt haunted by it. He began with the easy closets downstairs, where Alex had stored all the mementos of her childhood. Jane had been urging her to take them for years, but she preferred to leave them with her parents. There were ribbons and trophies from her horseback riding days, and a few for tennis tournaments she'd been in, in college. Endless photographs of her friends, most of whom Quinn didn't recognize, from kindergarten to college. There were tapes, and home movies, a few battered old dolls, and a teddy bear, and finally a box at the back that he wrestled toward him. It was sealed and he used a penknife to open it, and when he did, he found that it was full of photographs of Douglas, many with Alex. The two of them laughing and smiling and cavorting, several of them skiing, and a whole pack of letters from him, when he had gone to camp in Maine, and she had gone to one in California, closer to home. And as though directed to by angels' wings, Quinn found himself opening a brittle, yellowed old letter, and he saw with a start that the date was the one on which Doug had died. He had written to Alex only that morning, hours before the sailing accident that had ended his life at thirteen. Tears streamed down Quinn's face as he read it, and suddenly he realized what they had all felt afterward, what he hadn't allowed himself to feel. In spite of the fact that he had loved his son, he had kept him at a distance. Quinn had barely allowed himself to know him.

  Doug had been a handsome boy, happy, kind, intelligent, and looked just like his father, but Quinn had always put off getting closer to him. He had always thought they'd have time “later.” He had fantasized their becoming friends as men, and instead the boy had slipped right through his fingers. And even then, he hadn't properly grieved him. It had been too painful to admit that he had missed the chance to know Doug better. And once again, guilt had consumed him, and he had fled so as not to face it. Each reminder of the lost child was like a silent accusation. In fact, he had insisted Jane put Doug's things away as soon as possible, and strip his room. Quinn had thought it would be too painful for her to leave Doug's room intact and treat it as a shrine. He had left for Hong Kong and insisted that everything be packed and gone before he came home the next time, supposedly for her sake. And dutiful wife that she had been, she had done it, just to please him, at God only knew what cost to her.

  Quinn found almost everything that had been in the boy's room the following afternoon, when he went through a large storeroom behind the garage. It was all there, even his clothes, his sports equipment, his trophies and other memorabilia. She had saved every single thing, right down to his underwear. Twenty-three years later, she had saved every bit of it, and he even found three of Doug's sweaters tucked away at the back of Jane's closet, when he began taking things apart upstairs.

  It was a sentimental journey that enveloped him for weeks. Again and again, he found himself confronting memories and realizations about himself, and Jane, that were excruciatingly painful and made him feel even more guilty.

  Thanksgiving came and went, and he dutifully called Alex on the holiday, although she didn't celebrate it in Geneva. Her responses to him were brief and cursory. She thanked her father for calling, in a voice that was icy cold, and Quinn was so put off by her, he didn't even ask to speak to Horst or the boys. Her message was clear. Stay away. We don't need you. Leave me alone. So he did.

  He didn't bother with a turkey, since he had no one to share it with, and he did not even bother to let any of their friends know he was back in the city. As painful as his mission was to weed through their belongings and sell the house, it would have been even more painful, he thought, to socialize with people. Jane had been his link to the social world. It was she who kept in touch with everyone, who loved to entertain their friends, and gently encouraged Quinn to slow down for a moment, and enjoy a quiet evening among people they knew well. And most of the time, he had done it for her. But without her softening influence and warmth, he preferred his solitude. He was alone now, and would forever stay that way. He had no interest whatsoever in seeing anyone. It would only make her absence more acute, and more painful, hard as that was to imagine.

  By day, he was going through her closets, her treasures, her memories, and his own. And at night, he sat in bed, exhausted, reading her journals and poems. He felt as though he was steeped in her essence, like a marinade he was soaking in, until everything she had thought, felt, breathed, kept, loved and cherished was now a part of him, and had seeped into his skin. She had become his soul, as though he had never had one of his own before, and now theirs had joined and become one. He had never felt closer to her than in those final months before her death. And now again, as he waded through everything she'd owned, not only her papers, but her evening gowns, her gardening clothes, the faded nightgowns that she slept in, her underwear, her favorite sweaters. And as she had done with her son's sweaters hidden at the back of her closet, Quinn found himself putting things aside to save, the things that had meant the most to her. He could barely bring himself to part with any of it, and now he understood only too well what it must have done to her when he had insisted she take apart Doug's room. Life had finally turned the tables on him, and he felt that what he was experiencing now was suitable punishment for everything he had done to her. He embraced the task with reverence and humility, and accepted it as the penance he deserved.

  It was mid-December before he had brought some semblance of order to what was left, and had decided what to throw away and what to keep. There were piles of things to give away, or box and store, all over the living room. And it was still too big a mess to call a realtor in. His only distractions were the calls to Tem Hakker every week to check on the progress of the boat they were finishing for him. Quinn had had a nice letter from Bob Ramsay by then, congratulating him on his new acquisition. He was also delighted to be off the hook, and free to pursue his much larger new sailboat. According to the Hakkers, things were going well, and on schedule. For the moment, taking apart the house in San Francisco seemed a much bigger job to him, but Quinn was glad he was doing it himself. It gave him some sort of final communion with Jane, a sacred ritual that he could perform that kept her close to him. And every night, he read her words, in her firm, slanting hand. More often than not he dreamed of her afterward. And two or three times a week, he had the dream where she begged him not to leave her. Even by day, he felt haunted by it.

  He had come across thousands of photographs of them, from the early days when the children were small, on their travels, at important occasions, and more recent ones from their last trips. And she had kept every single newspaper article that ever mentioned him. Nearly forty years of them put away in files and boxes, some of them so frail that they fell apart when he touched them, but all of them organized chronologically. She had been meticulous in her respect and admiration of him. So much more than he had been of her. Seeing his accomplishments described in the cl
ippings, he realized again and again how selfish he had been, how totally absorbed in his own world, while she loved him from afar, waited for him to come home, forgave him everything, and made excuses for him to the children. She was an admirable woman.

  Although he was not a churchgoer, Quinn went to church on Christmas morning and lit a candle for her. He did it mostly because he knew it would have meant something to her, and she would have been pleased. She had lit thousands of candles for Doug over the years. And whenever anything worried her, or she had some special concern, she went to church and lit candles. He had teased her about it, and now he was surprised to find a strange sense of peace steal over him as he did it for her. As though the warmth and bright glow of the tiny candle would somehow make a difference in some unseen way. And then he went home, feeling slightly relieved. The things he was donating were in boxes by then. Those he was keeping were in sealed cartons piled up in the garage. He was going to put them in storage at some point before he left, along with whatever furniture he was keeping. They had had some fine antique pieces, and if nothing else, he thought he should keep them for Alex. He doubted that he would ever have a home where he would use them again. If all went according to plan, he had every intention of living on his new boat for the rest of his days, once it was ready.

  On Christmas night, he finally indulged himself. It had been a hard month since his return. He drank most of a bottle of fine old red wine he had found in the wine cellar, polished it off with two brandies, and went to bed. And he felt better for it, despite the hangover he had the next day. He was glad that the holidays were almost over. He spent New Year's Eve at his desk, going over papers that his attorney was going to file in probate court after the first of the year. He worked for hours, as he listened to a driving rain battering his windows, and he could hear the wind whistling through the trees. It was midnight when he finally got up and glanced outside, and saw that the slimmer trees were being pressed almost level to the ground with the gale force of the wind. He didn't bother to turn the television on, but if he had, he would have discovered that it was the fiercest storm to hit northern California in more than a century, and there were power lines down all over Marin County and the East and South Bay.