by Meg Donohue
She looked back and forth between the two of us. Understanding dawned in her expression, as well as, I was relieved to see, a smile. “Oh, okay, you two. Riiiight.”
There was a faint knock on the door and then Evie was peering tentatively into the room. “Could we . . . would you mind . . . is it okay if Lucas and I come in?”
I was about to say that actually yes, I did in fact mind very much if she brought a dangerous stalker into my daughter’s hospital room, but Nic spoke first. “Lucas!” she cried. And there he was, behind his mother: the infamous Lucas Holt. I could see immediately that he was a teenage girl’s dream: brooding eyes, a dark flop of hair, chiseled cheekbones. I saw, too, how very young he looked. It was hard to picture this boy smashing Roy’s car headlights in the dark of night.
“Oh, Nic, are you okay?” he asked, hurrying to my daughter’s other side. “Is your head hurt again? I am so, so sorry.” His head was buried into her shoulder. One cast-covered arm poked out from his side.
“I’m fine. Really, I am. How is your arm?” Nic asked softly. She kept her hand on his cheek as she spoke to him. Their faces were inches apart. Her green eyes searched his face.
Evie and I glanced at each other, shifting uncomfortably.
Denny cleared his throat.
Evie spoke first. “Lucas,” she said firmly. “I brought you in here because you said there was something important that you needed to tell Nic’s mother. Something you needed to set right?”
Lucas faced me, straightening. The color seemed to have drained from his face. He glanced at Nic and she nodded encouragingly. “She knows,” I heard my daughter whisper. “It’s okay.”
“It is definitely not okay,” I said loudly.
Lucas swallowed. “I owe you an apology, Ms. Gideon. I was looking for someone to blame for what happened to my family, and I found you.”
“Lucas,” his mother said. “What are you talking about?”
“I called in to her radio show, Mom. I threatened to ruin her life.”
“WHAT?”
“That’s not all he did,” I said.
“No, that’s not all,” Lucas said. He looked down at his feet. “I emailed Ms. Gideon, too. And I texted her. And I broke her headlights. And left dead roses in her kitchen.”
“Oh my God,” Evie breathed. She sank down into a chair in a corner of the room. “I cannot believe this. What are you saying? How could you do this to a woman who has been my . . . my rock for so many years?” She looked up at me. “G.G. Ms. Gideon. I—I don’t even know what to say. I had no idea. I can’t believe that I had no idea this was happening.”
“He was so angry,” Nic said from the bed. She’d reached out her hand to hold Lucas’s. “He was going to go to a special art program in New York and then all of a sudden he had to leave his home and . . . his life wasn’t his anymore. Anger can make you do things you wouldn’t expect of yourself in a million years,” she said, sounding so much older suddenly than her fourteen years. The pleading look in her eyes was so fierce that I had to look away.
“I am so sorry, Ms. Gideon,” Lucas said. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I know what I did was wrong. Words can’t really express how I’m feeling right now.” He looked right at me. “But I’m going to find a way to show you how sorry I am.”
Oh, boy, I thought, watching his dark eyelashes tremble over his reddening eyes. I glanced at my daughter, and then back at Lucas. In my mind, I kept running through the things that he had done, the calls and email and headlights and roses, trying to reframe them as the acts of a troubled kid. Did I actually have it in me to forgive him? I pictured myself at his age. Had I ever felt so angry that I could have smashed someone’s headlights? I realized that I had. I felt so grateful to have shed the worst of my childhood rage and sadness, to have created a life for myself that allowed me to grow and heal.
But weren’t girls supposed to be attracted to boys that reminded them of their fathers, not their mothers? A young Tyler 2.0 would have been so much easier to handle.
The door to the room opened and a nurse walked in, smiling and whistling as though she were strolling onto the set of Singing in the Rain. The smile slid right off her face as she glanced around the room. “Hi, everyone. We just need to run a few quick cognitive tests on Nicola.” She shot me an apologetic smile. “Mom can wait here and work her way through a boatload of paperwork.”
Nic swung her legs off the bed and stood. Her legs were so long and thin that whenever she stood I half-expected her to stagger off to the side like a newborn giraffe, but there she was, strong and solid and full of grace. She hugged Lucas and then me. Lucas received the longer hug, and yes I was counting.
“I love you,” she whispered in my ear. And then, the dynamite: “And I think maybe him, too.”
At the door she turned and gave a cheerful wave, and then was gone.
Unlike Nic, Evie rose unsteadily to her feet. “Let’s go, Lucas,” she said. “You have a lot of explaining to do and I, for one, am not getting any younger.” As she steered Lucas from the room, Evie paused and turned to me. “He’s a good kid. Beneath all of this mess, believe it or not, there’s a really good kid.”
“Nic certainly agrees with you, Evie.”
She released a grateful smile, then gave her son a much-deserved shove into the hall.
When I turned to him, Denny was waiting with open arms. I pressed my face against his chest and breathed in his deeply soothing scent. “Holy hell,” he said in a low voice. Inexplicably, we both began to laugh. Once we started, we couldn’t seem to stop. We were still shaking and wiping at our eyes when Tyler rushed into the room. He skidded to a stop at the sight of us. Denny and I stepped away, but not that far away, from each other.
“Hey—hello—I—” Tyler stammered, looking back and forth between us. “Where’s Nic?” He took in the empty hospital bed. “Is she okay?”
“Oh, Tyler, I should have called you right away. She’s fine. She was here a minute ago. She’s just gone for a few last tests.”
His shoulders slumped with relief. “Thank God.” He looked at Denny, blinking.
“Do you remember Denny Corcoran?” I asked. “He owns the barn where Nic rides.”
“Also,” Denny added, taking my hand and a little piece of my heart at the same time, “he’s dating your ex-wife.”
Chapter 24
Later that night, when Nic was discharged with a clean bill of health from the hospital, she asked her parents if she could go home with her mother instead of returning to her father’s house.
“You don’t mind, do you, Dad? I’d just really love to sleep in my own bed tonight.” She also had a feeling that her mother would be sleeping on her bedroom floor that night, and after the crazy night that she’d had she didn’t mind the thought of this one bit.
Her father hugged her tight and let her go.
THE NEXT MORNING, Lila came to visit. She sat on the edge of Nic’s bed and seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
“It’s been a while since TheKirkeLurk7 posted,” Nic ventured finally.
Lila immediately burst into tears. “Oh, Nic! It was me! I’ve been the Lurk this year!”
“I had a feeling.” Nic leaned back and crossed her arms.
Lila blinked. “You did? But you wrote such nice things about me on KirkeKudos. That’s you, isn’t it? It has to be you.”
Nic nodded. “It was easy to write nice things about you—you are nice, Lila. You’re such a good person. Why would you write things that made people feel so bad about themselves?” She gave a little shudder. “I spent weeks feeling scared that I would be humiliated by the Lurk.”
“I would never have written about you, Nic.”
“But I saw you take a picture of me when I was finished with my Shakespeare presentation!”
Lila’s brow furrowed and then cleared as she wiped at her tears. “Oh, I was taking a picture of Malin Jones! She was going up to the stage as you were coming down.”
“You were
going to post about Malin? She’s so nice!” Nic had always liked Malin, a dreamy girl with a soft voice and a penchant for long, flowing skirts.
“It wasn’t going to be that harsh. Just something about those new purple glasses she’s been wearing.”
Nic shook her head angrily. Even though she’d suspected Lila was the Lurk, it was painful to hear her friend actually admit these things. “Why do you care what color glasses she has?”
“You’re missing the point, Nic. As long as I’m the Lurk, neither of us will ever appear in a post. I control who shows up on there. I can make sure it’s never you . . . or me.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t think I ever told you, but I wasn’t always the most popular kid in middle school. People said things that . . .” She trailed off, shaking away fresh tears. “I didn’t want that to happen again. So when I started at Kirke and heard rumors about the Lurk, I just decided to do it myself before anyone else could. No one passed it down to me, I just signed into Instagram and created a new account. TheKirkeLurk7.”
“So you made fun of a bunch of other people to save yourself?”
Lila waved away this thought. “I mostly threw softballs. And I picked targets that could handle them.”
“Like that swimmer, Bridget? She was devastated, Lila. I saw her crying in the bathroom.”
“Bridget is a swimming goddess and cute as a freaking button. Bridget is beloved. No stupid comment from the Lurk could make an impact on how people feel about that girl.”
Nic could see that Lila really believed this. Lila, too, in her own way, had thought of herself as a version of Robin Hood, stealing bits here and there from the rich to spare the poor. Nic thought of Hunter Nolan’s crumpled Spanish essay in the back of his car, the one with the trail of bright red circles so thick you could barely see what he had written. She thought of Lucas, all confident intensity on the outside, the sensitive core easily hidden below.
“Bridget isn’t as strong as she seems,” she said. “No one is.”
Lila thought about this and slowly nodded. “I guess you’re right.” She straightened. “I won’t do it anymore, Nic. I promise. Just say we’re okay. I don’t know if I can handle Kirke without you by my side.”
“We’re okay, Lila. We’re always going to be okay. Maybe now that you have a little more time on your hands, you could help me run the KirkeKudos account.”
Lila brightened. “That sounds like excellent college-essay material.”
Nic shook her head, laughing.
The girls pressed their hands together, bowed their heads, and with one final, giggling “om shalom,” the Lurk was gone.
SUNDAY NIGHT WAS always Nic’s night with her mother. She could not imagine that there would ever be a time in her life when this would not be the case. On Sundays, they ate dinner together. They listened to music. Sometimes they talked until they were yawning more than talking. Other times, they didn’t speak much at all—they curled into the couch and watched a movie, or read books.
That night, though, they reclined at either end of the couch and they talked. Patti Smith’s Horses album played in the background. Her mom told her that she had gone to the Patti Smith concert with Denny.
“Would it be weird for you if I saw him more?” her mom asked. “If we were dating?”
“Yes,” Nic said. “But good weird . . . unless you two broke up. Then it would be bad weird.”
“We’ll take things slow,” her mom promised.
“Would it be weird for you if I dated Lucas?”
“Yes. Bad weird.”
Nic poked her mother with her foot.
“The boy threatened to ruin my life,” her mother reminded her. “He broke Roy’s headlights and entered our house illegally. It’s a little hard to bounce back from all of that. Not to mention that he’s seventeen and way too old for you.”
Something—her mother’s expression, or the way her toe kept moving to the beat of the music; or something else, maybe, something perceptible only to Nic—told her that her mother did not feel as strongly as she claimed. Nic and Lucas had spoken on the phone earlier in the day. He’d wanted to visit her, but his mother would not let him out of her sight. Nic had said that she thought her own mother needed some time to process everything, anyway, but that she suspected in the end her mother would forgive Lucas. “What about you?” he’d asked. “Can you forgive me, Nic?” Despair and hope had fought in his voice.
“Yes,” she’d answered quickly, relieved that the car that had hit them the previous night had not stolen her chance to assure him of this.
“Lucas painted the most beautiful mural in Golden Gate Park,” Nic told her mother. “It’s in fluorescent paint so you can only see it with a black light. It’s . . . it’s of me. And a storm. Or maybe I am the storm.” She felt bashful telling her mother this, but seeing that painting had been one of the most special moments of Nic’s life, and she could not fully come to grips with the experience until she had shared it with her mother.
“I’d like to see it sometime,” her mother said.
Nic could feel her mother studying her, as she so often did. If anyone knew what to make of everything that had happened to Nic over the past few weeks, it was her mother.
“Do I seem different?” Nic asked.
“Yes, in some ways. But people change all the time. It’s one of the things that make life interesting. No one should sing the same tune forever.” Her mother’s right toe was moving to the beat of the music the whole time that she spoke. “Do you feel different?”
Nic thought about this. “The little things that used to frighten me don’t anymore.”
“But you’ve always had that strength inside of you. Your father and I saw it. Denny saw it.”
“Maybe it was trapped inside of me and the fall broke the container that held it.” Nic frowned. “It’s kind of sad that it took a brain injury to make me stop feeling so scared all the time.”
Her mother shot upright. “The fall didn’t break the container, Nic! You did. You told me yourself that you were embarrassed in front of Lucas that day and you were fed up with feeling like the person that you were on the outside didn’t reflect the person you were on the inside . . . and then you challenged yourself to do something terrifying, something that only the person deep inside of you thought you could do. You pushed yourself to jump that tree. You did it! You broke the container, Nic . . . you broke it before you fell. Who knows if the brain injury has lowered some of your inhibitions . . . you set this all in motion.” Her mother sat back again, thinking. “Maybe there are two kinds of change. One is the kind that involves transitioning toward something new. And the other is more like peeling away your own layers to find what has always been at your core.”
Nic leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek. “You know, you should really have a radio show. You’re very wise.”
Her mother hugged her and whispered, “Some of us find wisdom earlier than others. You’re one of the lucky ones.”
Chapter 25
One morning the following week, Denny took me riding. I hadn’t been on a horse in more than twenty-five years, but settling into the saddle felt like finding a favorite old coat that I’d thought I’d lost long ago, slipping it on, and discovering that it still fit.
I rode Tru. His steady gait brought to mind an older gentleman gliding with ease across a dance floor. We followed Denny and his huge black horse, Zed, along the sandy trail that cut down through the cliffs to the ocean. Ahead of us, the vast Pacific Ocean sparkled below the morning sun. I breathed in deeply, overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude that my daughter was able to ride this gorgeous piece of land each and every day. Denny turned back and caught my eye.
“You look good on that horse, Gail Gideon,” he said. “Who knows, maybe you’ll decide to keep him for yourself.”
“Who knows,” I murmured. All week, I’d been allowing Nic to ride Peach under Denny’s supervision. They both reported back to me that everything was going well—so well, in fa
ct, that Nic was desperate to start jumping Peach. The thought of this gave me mild to severe heart palpitations, depending on how much coffee I’d had.
The trail met the beach and then we walked our horses side by side across the sand. They seemed to like the salt air and open expanse; I could feel Tru itching to move on under my leg.
“So what did you really think of the concert?” I asked.
“Patti Smith? She was great.” Denny pulled a bit of straw from Zed’s mane and let the wind carry it away.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
He looked over at me, lines spreading around his blue eyes as he smiled. “To tell you the truth, I’m more of a bluegrass guy.”
I laughed. “I like bluegrass, too.”
When he reached out and touched my hip, I felt a jolt of desire. He felt it, too, I knew. We looked at each other for another long moment before smiling and looking away.
“Today is the big day, isn’t it?” he asked.
I nodded. During a meeting that afternoon with Martin Jansen, Simone and I planned to let him know that we would not be signing our renewal contracts. Instead we were going to produce our own show out of a studio space we’d not yet rented, under the auspices of a production company that we’d not yet founded. For three hours every night I would take calls from listeners, chatting with them about their lives and their relationships, their hopes and their fears, in much the same way that I did on The Gail Gideon Show. And then, based on whatever had inspired them to call and ask my advice, I’d select a song that I thought fit the circumstances and dedicate it to them. The show would be a uniquely mixed talk and music format, a strange little hybrid that felt true both to what my fans loved and to what I loved. Shayne was already preparing to present our idea for the show to a wide range of media and radio networks with an eye to national syndication. I felt a sense of excitement that I had not felt in years. There were no guarantees that my fans would follow me in this new direction, but I had faith in them, just as they had had faith in me for so long.