Coast Road

by Barbara Delinsky

  Why was he heading south?

  He was heading south because her friend had called him. And because it was his job as a father to help out with the girls. And because he was terrified that Rachel might die. His life with her had been better than anything before or since. He was heading south because he felt that he still owed her for that.

  THE VERY FIRST time Jack had laid eyes on Rachel, he decided that she wasn’t his type. Oh, he liked blond hair, and she had endless waves of that, but he usually went for model types. Rachel Keats didn’t fit that bill. She looked too pure. No long eyelashes, no glossy mouth, no flagrant sexuality, just dozens of freckles scattered over a nose and cheeks that were vaguely sunburned, and eyes that were focused intently on the most boring professor Jack had ever heard.

  The subject was rococo and neoclassic art. The professor, renowned in his field, was the man whose grant was paying for Jack’s architectural degree. In exchange for that, Jack graded exams and papers and helped with research and correspondence to do with the textbook for which the grant had been given.

  Jack was only marginally interested in rococo and neoclassic art and even less interested in moving from Manhattan to Tucson, but the slot had been the only one open that offered a full ride plus a stipend. Being penniless, Jack needed both.

  The job wasn’t taxing. The professor in question had been delivering the same lectures, from the same printed lesson plan, for twenty-plus years. Since Jack read the lectures beforehand, his presence in the lecture hall was more for the sake of fetching water or a forgotten book or paper for the professor than anything educational for himself. He sat far off to the professor’s side, where he could be easily accessed. It was a perfect spot from which to view the fifty-some-odd students who attended a given class, out of three times that many enrolled in the course.

  Rachel Keats attended every class, listened raptly, took notes. Jack told himself that his eye sought her out for the simple constancy of her presence. It didn’t explain, though, why he noted that she went from class to lunch at the smallest campus café, where she sat alone, or that she drove an old red VW bug and put a sunshade on the dash that was surely hand-painted, since he had never in his life seen as large or vividly colored a bug sitting behind the wheel of a car as her sunscreen hilariously depicted.

  She was an art major. She lived in an apartment complex not far from his. She was a loner by all accounts and, if the easygoing expression she wore meant anything, was content.

  Not only wasn’t she his type, but he was dating someone who was. Celeste was tall and leggy, loaded up top and sweet down below, asked precious few questions and made precious few demands, liked the sex enough that he could do what he wanted when he wanted in between. She cooked and cleaned his bathroom, but he hadn’t been able to con her into doing his laundry. That was why he found himself in the laundromat on a Tuesday night when Rachel came through the door.

  Those waves of blond hair were gathered up in a turquoise ribbon that clashed with her purple tank top, but her shorts and sandals were white and as fresh as the blush that stained those sun-stained cheeks when she saw him there.

  In the extra-long heartbeat that she spent at the door, he could have sworn she was debating turning and leaving. Not wanting her to do that, he said, “Hey! How’re you doing?”

  She smiled. “Great.” The blush remained. She sucked in her lips, raised her brows, and seeming self-conscious, hugged an overstuffed laundry bag as she looked down the row of washers for raised lids. “Ah,” she said, spotting two side by side. She smiled at him again and headed toward them.

  Jack’s heart was pounding. He didn’t know why. All she’d done was smile. There hadn’t been anything remotely sexual in it. She wasn’t his type at all. But he slid off the dryer he’d been sitting on, and following her, he leaned up against the machine that backed on one of those she had chosen.

  “Rococo and neoclassic art?” he prompted. He didn’t want her to think this was a blind pickup, because it wasn’t a pickup at all. She wasn’t his type. He assumed that was why she intrigued him. It was safe. No risk. Just an innocuous hello.

  She acknowledged the connection with a simple “Uh-huh.” She was blushing still, pushing dirty laundry from the mouth of her laundry bag into the mouth of the washer.

  He watched her for a minute, then said, “Mine’s in the dryer.”

  It was probably the dumbest line he’d ever handed a woman. But he couldn’t tell her that she was pushing reds and whites together into her machine. He couldn’t ask if the reds were shirts, bras, or briefs. He couldn’t even look directly at those things, because she would have been mortified. Besides, he couldn’t take his eyes from hers. They were hazel with gold flecks, and more gentle than any he had seen.

  “You’re Obermeyer’s TA,” she said as she filled the second machine with things that went way beyond red. Her current outfit was conservative by comparison. “Are you training to teach?”

  “No. I’m in architecture.”

  She smiled. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said, smiling back. She really was a sweet thing, smiling like that. The sweetness remained even when she suddenly opened her mouth and looked around—left, right, down, back.

  Jack returned to his own possessions and offered her his box of soap powder.

  He was rewarded with another blush and a soft-murmured “Thanks.” When she had both machines filled with soap, fed with quarters, and started, she asked, “What kind of things do you want to build?”

  The question usually came from his parents and was filled with scorn. But Rachel Keats seemed genuinely interested.

  “Homes, for starters,” he said. “I come from a two-bit town, one little box after another. I used to pass those little boxes on the way to school and spend my class time doodling them into something finer. Those doodles didn’t help my math grade much.”

  “No. I wouldn’t think it.” She shot a glance at the text that lay open on his dryer. “Is the book on home designs?”

  “Not yet. Right now we’re into arches. Do you know how many different kinds of arches there are? There are flat arches, round arches, triangular arches, pointed arches. There are hand arches, back arches, groin arches. There are depressed arches. There are diminished arches. There are horseshoe arches.”

  She was laughing, the sound as gentle as her eyes. “I don’t think I want to know what some of those are.” She paused for the briefest time, said almost shyly, “I was a doodler, too.”

  He liked the shyness. It made him feel safe. “Where?”

  “Chicago, then Atlanta, then New York. My childhood was mobile. My dad takes old businesses and turns them around. We move when he sells. How about you?”

  “Oregon. You won’t have heard of the town. It doesn’t make it onto maps. What did you doodle?”

  “Oh, people, birds, animals, fish, anything that moves. I like doing what a camera does, capturing an instant.”

  “Are you still doodling?” he asked in response to her use of the present tense.

  She lifted a shoulder, shy, maybe modest. “I like to think it’s more. I’m hoping to paint for a living.”

  “With or without a day job?” Jack asked. The average artist barely earned enough to eat. Unless Rachel was significantly better than average, she would have a tough time paying the bills.

  She wrapped her arms around her middle. Quietly, almost sadly, she said, “I’m lucky. Those businesses keep selling. My mom heads one of them now. They think I’m crazy to be here doing this. Art isn’t business. They want me back in the city wearing designer dresses with a designer handbag and imported boots.” She took a fresh breath. “Do you have siblings?”

  “Five brothers and a sister,” he said, though it had nothing to do with anything. He rarely talked about family. The people he was with rarely asked.

  Not only had Rachel asked, but those wonderful eyes of hers lit up with his answer. “Six? That’s great. I don’t have any.”

  “Th
at’s why you think it’s great. There were seven of us born in ten years, living with two parents in a three-bedroom house. I was the lucky one. Summers, I got the porch.”

  “What are the others doing now? Are they all over the country? Are any of them out here?”

  “They’re back home. I’m the only one who made it out.”

  Her eyes grew. “Really? Why you? How?”

  “Scholarship. Work-study. Desperation. I had to leave. I don’t get along with my family.”

  “Why not?” she asked in such an innocent way that he actually answered.

  “They’re negative. Always criticizing to cover up for what they lack, but the only thing they really lack is ambition. My dad coulda done anything he wanted—he’s a bright guy—only, he got stuck in a potato processing plant and never got out. My brothers are going to be just like him, different jobs, same wasted potential. I went to college, which makes what they’re doing seem smaller. They’ll never forgive me for that.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled. “Not your fault.”

  “Then you don’t go home much?”

  “No. And you? Back to New York?”

  She crinkled her nose. “I’m not a city person. When I’m there, I’m stuck doing all the things I hate.”

  “Don’t you have friends there?”

  “A few. We talk. I’ve never had to go around with a crowd. How about you? Got a roommate?”

  “Not on your life. I had enough of those growing up to never want another one, at least not of the same sex. What’s your favorite thing in Tucson?”

  “The desert. What’s yours?”

  “The Santa Catalinas.”

  Again those eyes lit, gold more than hazel. “Do you hike?” When he nodded, she said, “Me, too. When do you have time? Are you taking a full course load? How many hours a week do you have to give to Obermeyer?”

  Jack answered her questions and asked more of his own. When she answered those without seeming to mind, he asked more again, and she asked her share right back. She wasn’t judgmental, just curious. She seemed as interested in where he’d been, what he’d done, what he liked and didn’t like as he was in her answers. They talked nonstop until Rachel’s clothes were clean, dry, and folded. When, arms loaded, they finally left the laundromat, he knew three times as much about her as he knew about Celeste.

  Taking that as a message of some sort, he broke up with Celeste the next day, called Rachel, and met her for pizza. They picked right up where they had left off at the laundromat.

  Jack was fascinated. He had never been a talker. He didn’t like baring his thoughts and ideas, held them close to the vest, but there was something about Rachel that felt … safe, there it was again. She was gentle. She was interested. She was smart. Being as much of a loner as he was, she seemed just as startled as he to be opening up to a virtual stranger, but they gave each other permission. He trusted her instinctively. She seemed to trust him the same way right back.

  As simply as that, they became inseparable. They ate together, studied together, sketched together. They went to movies. They hiked. They huddled before class and staked out their favorite campus benches, but it was a full week before they made love.

  In theory, a week was no time at all. In practice, in an age of free sex with two people deeply attracted to each other, it was an eternity, and they were definitely attracted to each other. No doubt about that. Jack was hit pretty fast by the lure of an artist’s slender fingers and graceful arms. He didn’t miss the way her shorts curved around her butt or the enticing flash of midriff when she leaned a certain way. The breasts under her tank tops were small but exquisitely formed. At least, that was the picture he pieced together from the shadow of shapes and the occasional nob of a nipple. The fact that he didn’t know for sure kept him looking.

  Was she attracted to him? Well, there was that nipple, tightest when he was closest. There was the way she leaned into him, so subtle, when they went to a campus concert, and the way her breath caught when he came close to whisper something in her ear. All that, even without her eyes, which turned warm to hot at all the appropriate times. Oh, yes, she wanted him. He could have taken her two days after the laundromat.

  He didn’t because he was afraid. He had never had a relationship like this with a woman before. Physical, yes. But not emotional, not psychological, not heart-to-heart. Rachel made him feel comfortable enough to say what he thought and felt. Not knowing how sex would mix with that, he avoided taking her to his apartment or going to her apartment, avoided even kissing her.

  A week of that was more than an eternity. He’d had it with avoidance by the time she invited him over for dinner, and apparently she had, too. He was barely inside the door when that first kiss came. It was a scorcher, purity in flames, hotter and hotter as they slid along the wall to her room and fell on the bed. There was a mad scramble to get clothes off and be close and inside—and it was heaven for Jack, the deepest, most overwhelming lovemaking he had ever in his life dreamed could take place.

  When it was done, she sat on the bed with pencil and paper and drew him, and what emerged said it all. With her hands, her mind, her heart she made him into something finer than he had ever been before. She was his angel, and he was in love.

  chapter two

  THE SURGICAL WAITING ROOM was on the second floor at the end of a very long hall. Dropping into a seat there, Jack folded his arms on his chest and focused on the door. His eyes were tired. Fear alone kept them open.

  It was a full five minutes before he realized that he wasn’t alone. A woman was watching him from the end of a nearby sofa. She looked wary, but she didn’t blink when he stared.

  “Are you Katherine?” he finally asked, and saw the ghost of a crooked smile.

  “Why the surprise?”

  He would have liked to be diplomatic, but he was too tired, too tense. “Because you don’t look like my wife’s type,” he said, staring still. Rachel was all natural—hair, face, nails. This woman was groomed, from dark lashes to painted nails to hair that was a dozen different shades of beige and moussed into fashionably long curls.

  “It’s ex-wife,” Katherine said, “and looks can deceive. So, you’re Jack?”

  He barely had time to nod when the door opened and a doctor emerged. His scrubs were wrinkled. Short, brownish gray hair stuck up in damp spikes.

  Jack was on his feet and approaching before the door had swung shut. “Jack McGill,” he said, extending a hand. “How is she?”

  The doctor met his grip. “Steve Bauer, and she’s in the Recovery Room. The surgery went well. Her vital signs are good. She’s breathing on her own. But she still hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  “Coma,” Jack said. The word had been hovering in the periphery of the night, riding shotgun with him down from San Francisco. He needed the doctor to deny it.

  To his dismay, Steve Bauer nodded. “She doesn’t respond to stimuli—light, pain, noise.” He touched the left side of his face, temple to jaw. “She was badly bruised here. There’s external swelling. Her lack of response suggests that there’s internal swelling, too. We’re monitoring for intracranial pressure. A mild increase can be treated medically. There’s nothing at this point to suggest that we’ll need to relieve it surgically.”

  Jack pushed his hands through his hair. His head was buzzing. He tried to clear out the noise by clearing his throat. “Coma. Okay. How bad is that?”

  “Well, I’d rather she be awake.”

  That wasn’t what Jack meant. “Will she die?”

  “I hope not.”

  “How do we prevent it?”

  “We don’t. She does. When tissues are injured, they swell. The more they swell, the more oxygen they need to heal. Unfortunately, the brain is different from other organs, because it’s encased in the skull. When brain tissues swell, the skull prevents the expansion they need, and pressure builds. That causes a slowing of the blood flow, and since blood carries oxygen, a slowing of the b
lood flow means less oxygen to the brain. Less oxygen means slower healing. Her body determines how slow.”

  Jack understood. But he needed to know more. “Worst-case scenario?”

  “Pressure builds high enough to completely cut the flow of blood, and hence oxygen to the brain, and the person dies. That’s why we’ll be monitoring your wife. If we see the pressure when it first starts to build, we stand a better chance of relieving it.”

  “When? What’s the time frame here?”

  “We’ve done a head scan, but nothing shows positive. We’ll watch her closely. The next forty-eight hours will be telling. The good news is that what swelling there is now is minimal.”

  “But you said she doesn’t respond. Assuming the swelling doesn’t get worse, when will she?”

  The doctor caught the dampness on his brow with a forearm. “That’s what I can’t tell you. I wish I could, but it’s different with every case.”

  “Will there be permanent damage?” Jack asked. He needed it all on the table.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does the chance of permanent damage increase the longer she’s comatose?”

  “Not if the swelling doesn’t worsen.”

  “Is there anything you can do to get the swelling down?”

  “She’s on a drip to reduce it. But overmedicating has its problems, too.”

  “Then we just let her lie there?”

  “No,” the doctor replied patiently. “We let her lie there and heal. The body is a miraculous thing, Mr. McGill. It works on its own while we wait.”

  “What can we do to help?” Katherine asked from close behind Jack. Startled by her voice, Jack turned, but her eyes didn’t leave the doctor’s.

  “Not a whole lot,” Bauer replied, but he looked torn. “Ask nurses specializing in coma, and they’ll say you should talk to her. They say comatose patients hear things and can sometimes repeat those things with frightening accuracy when they wake up.”