Coast Road

by Barbara Delinsky

  “What do you love about it?” Jack asked Ben. So maybe he, too, needed stroking.

  Ben, in his innocence, didn’t hesitate to tell him. “The background is complimentary to the rest, but different, very subtly different. It makes the bobcats more striking.”

  “Have you told Rachel that?”

  “Many times.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Just that it was done a long time ago. So where do we stand? How many more paintings are in her studio?”

  Eleven, Jack thought, but he was still looking at the picture he and Rachel had done together. She hadn’t told Ben about his participation. Dishonest, perhaps, but interesting. The piece wasn’t for sale. That was good.

  “Do we have a shot at the show?” Ben asked.

  “I, uh, I think … yeah, actually, I think we do,” Jack said, because they definitely had a shot at it. That wasn’t the real question. The real question was how Rachel would feel if Jack picked up a brush and collaborated with her again.

  chapter nine

  JACK WAS FEELING stronger. He didn’t know why, since Rachel’s condition hadn’t changed. He figured it had to do with being more rested. Life in Big Sur didn’t make evening demands. He had slept more in the last few days than he had in months.

  It surprised him. By rights, he should have been lying awake worrying about Rachel and the girls and what might be if Rachel didn’t recover. He should have been losing sleep over work and the firm, should have been staring at the ceiling wondering what to do about Jill. And he did think about all those things—but during the day. Rachel’s bed was firm, and even if the scent of her on the sheets roused the devil of his id, he had always slept well when he was with her.

  He thought about that now, driving south along the coast with the girls in the car. Rachel was a cuddler. For him, that had meant having a breath of warmth against back, front, arm, or hip, depending on how she was burrowed. She snuggled in as though his body were a magnet. During the night, at least, he had always felt competent and strong.

  So sleeping better was one possible reason for his current mood.

  Another might be the drive itself. He used to find driving relaxing, way back, before they moved to the city. What he felt now reminded him of that. Traffic always thinned after Carmel, allowing him to catch more of the passing scenery—the beach, artichoke fields, the touch of purple where wildflowers were starting to bloom on the low hills swelling beyond. He could feel himself mellowing once he reached this stretch, could feel himself breathing more deeply. Not even the spot where the accident had occurred changed that.

  Or maybe it was Rachel’s work. He kept thinking about the gallery, about Ben’s favorite painting, about the ones in her studio waiting to be finished. He kept thinking that it would be fun to paint again.

  It was like there was something new and different in his life. Something exciting. Challenging. Meaningful was the word that came to mind, which was odd, since his life was plenty meaningful. But there it was.

  THE PHONE was ringing when they walked in the door. Samantha ran for it. Jack followed her into the kitchen and waited nervously. If something had happened at the hospital—good or bad—he would turn right around and return to Monterey.

  Samantha passed him the phone with a look of frustration. “It’s David.”

  Jack felt his own frustration as he took the phone. David had been sending messages all week. He wanted work done, but Jack’s mind was elsewhere. “How’re you doing, David?”

  “Jack? Jack? Is it really you?”

  Jack looked out the window. The early evening sun snagging the tops of the redwoods spilled a glow through airy needles and on down densely scaled bark. There was something settling about it. His voice was more forgiving than it might otherwise have been. “It’s been a long day, pal.”

  “No change, then?”

  “No change. What’s up?”

  “I just got a call. Flynn’s gone.”

  “To Buffalo? It’s about time.”

  “To Walker, Jansen, and McCree.”

  Walker, Jansen, and McCree. The competition. Michael Flynn had defected. He was the third one in six weeks. At least he wouldn’t have taken any accounts with him. Clients weren’t drawn to Michael. He was a follower, not a leader.

  “Will you be long?” an aggrieved Samantha asked.

  Jack held up a hand to silence her and said to David, “Okay. We can live with this. It makes sense. WJM’s work is more local than ours. Michael has young kids and doesn’t want to travel.”

  “I agree with you there, but what about you? You’re the one who’ll have to fly to Buffalo in his place.”

  Habit kicked in. For a split-second, Jack looked ahead to the workweek and debated what he could shift around or cancel to allow for several days in New York. Then he realized that he had already canceled and shifted to the limit to clear the next patch for Rachel.

  She had to wake up. It would be a week tomorrow. It was time.

  In the meanwhile, there was a solution. There was always a solution. He made a quick mental assessment of the office situation vis-à-vis the Buffalo project. “Brynna Johnson can do it.”

  David made a disapproving sound. “Brynna’s only a draftsperson.”

  “She’s more experienced than the others, and she knows Buffalo. Besides, I think she’s great.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Jack hadn’t known that. “No kidding? But that’s okay. We can still move her up.”

  “What’s the point of doing that if she’ll be leaving?”

  “Will she?”

  “You know how women are these days. What’ll happen—trust me, this happens all the time—is that she’ll say she’s taking a standard maternity leave, then at the end of it she’ll tell us she’s not coming back. Why should we make a woman like that a project manager?”

  “Because she’s talented,” Jack said, thinking of his daughters being in the same boat one day, “and because maybe if we put out for her, she’ll put out for us. It’s a matter of instilling loyalty.”

  David snorted. “Loyalty? Good God, I haven’t heard that word in a while. Has anyone else?”

  Fine. So loyalty wasn’t something they had talked much about. But it was time. Instability in the lower echelons of the firm made things harder for the people on top. Jack had to be able to rely on his associates. He hadn’t realized how much, until now.

  “Maybe if she feels she’s moving up with us,” he said, “she’ll come back after the baby. How far along is she?”

  “I don’t know. Three months? Four months?”

  Jack remembered Rachel at four months. She had barely looked pregnant with Samantha, had looked it a little more with Hope. The early change had been in her breasts and her belly, both gently swollen, creamy, soft.

  That was what Jack had seen. The rest of the world had seen that by the fourth month, Rachel had outgrown morning sickness and was feeling good. She hadn’t wanted coddling, hadn’t wanted extra attention, hadn’t wanted anyone telling her not to do what she normally did. All she asked for was the occasional hot fudge sundae with mocha almond ice cream. That was her favorite, her very favorite. The ecstatic look on her face—the way she sucked off each spoonful, scraping the very last of the fudge from the rim of the dish—was a sight to behold.

  Rachel in her fourth month of pregnancy had been confident and strong. Brynna Johnson struck Jack as the same type.

  “Brynna can go to Buffalo,” he decided. “Unless she doesn’t want to. In which case we’ll send Alex Tobin. But Brynna’s my first choice.”

  “Dad, I need the phone,” Samantha whined.

  David said, “Why not go yourself? If Rachel is stable—”

  “She’s in a coma. I can’t leave now.”

  “Okay. Forget traveling. I’ll settle for getting you back in the office. Hell, I’ll settle for four hours a day. Do it while the girls are in school. If Rachel is unconscious, she won’t know you’re gone, and i
f she wakes up, hell, if she wakes up she won’t want you there. We have work to do, Jack. It’ll only wait so long.”

  Jack and David went back a long way. They had met as draftsmen sharing the bottom rung of the ladder and, commiserating, had started the climb together. Jack was the stronger designer, David the better businessman, but they shared identical dreams of success, recognition, and monetary reward. Early on in those bottom-rung days, when such dreams were a mainstay of survival, they decided to form a firm together someday. It made good business sense. Between their different strengths, their shared goals, and the diversity of their cultural backgrounds, they covered a good many bases.

  For two years, the dream remained a dream. They slowly climbed the ladder, becoming junior architects, then project architects. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed. On the day when David charmed a large company into hiring them independently of the firm where they worked, they resigned and formed Sung and McGill. In the thirteen years since, they had been of one mind as to what was needed to make the firm a success—and they might still be. Jack just wished his partner was more sensitive.

  “I need understanding here, Dave. I need help.”

  “I gotcha. But for how long? She’s your past; we’re your present and future.”

  “Da-ad?” Samantha made two impatient syllables of his name.

  He put a finger in his ear and turned his back. “Do you want to call Brynna, or should I? No. Forget that question.” David could be abrasive. He feared what the man might say to Brynna. “I’ll call her. I’m driving up tomorrow morning. I’ll meet with her and make sure she understands what has to be done.”

  “Have you talked with Boca?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve talked with Boca. The problem is with the footprint, which means altering the whole fuckin’ design.” Why did he fear it wouldn’t be for the last time? His stomach churned just thinking about it. “Listen, David, I have to get off the phone—”

  “To do what? Jack, I’m the front guy here. I’m the one running around drumming up work. I need to know you’re making progress on something. You are working down there, aren’t you? The girls are in school all fuckin’ day, and there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do for Rachel.”

  For a minute, Jack was angry enough to hold his tongue. When he was in control again, he said, “Actually, there is. I can paint. Hey, my daughter needs the phone. I have to go, Dave. Later.” He hung up the phone.

  “Paint what?” Samantha asked, tossing her hair back in a gesture that was at the same time negligent and powerful.

  “Your mom’s stuff,” he answered.

  She screwed up her face in horror. “You can’t do that. Mom’s stuff is hers. You can’t mess with it.”

  The phone rang again. He beat her to it. “Yes?”

  “It’s Victoria. How’s my daughter?”

  “You can’t,” Samantha insisted.

  “She’s the same,” he told his mother-in-law, returning the finger to his ear. “The doctors think that’s good news.”

  “I don’t. There must be something they can do. I’ve been asking people here, and they all agree. You don’t just sit around and wait. I can’t tell you the number of horror stories, horror stories, I’ve heard about times when action wasn’t taken that should have been taken. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to find myself six months from now looking back and regretting that I didn’t push. Didn’t my man have any suggestions?”

  “None that were different from the doctors here.”

  “The doctors there. Huh. The one I talked with the other day sounded too young to know much. I’d like to consult with someone in New York. I’ll be back there later tomorrow. My board was sending flowers. Did they arrive?”

  “A few minutes ago, but she’s in the ICU, Victoria. It’d be best if you asked people not to send things. We’ll only have to give them away.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but he envisioned Victoria spreading the word and an entire flower shop materializing in Rachel’s room.

  “You told me not to come, Jack. Has that changed? Is there anything I can do there?”

  Samantha tugged at his arm. Wait, he mouthed, then said to Victoria, “We’re marking time.”

  “Has your mother been down?”

  “I haven’t talked with her.”

  “She doesn’t know? That’s terrible, Jack. Give her a call. She should be told. I’ll call you again tomorrow. In the meantime, you know how to reach me.”

  “It isn’t right,” Samantha said as he hung up the phone.

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered, thinking about motherly devotion. If Victoria came to see Rachel, she would drive them all up a tree. And his own mother? A phone call would be bad enough. Somehow, some way she would blame him for the accident.

  “So you won’t?” Samantha asked.

  “Won’t what?”

  “Mess with mom’s work?”

  He shifted gears. “I wasn’t planning to ‘mess’ with it. I was planning—I was toying with the idea of finishing a few of those pieces so that Ben can go ahead with the show.”

  “She wouldn’t want you doing that.”

  “Oh? Did you ask?”

  Samantha made a face. “That was a mean thing to say.”

  “Well, did you? No, because your mother is in a coma, which means that none of us can ask, so we don’t know what she wants. She did want this show. Do you doubt that?”

  Samantha grunted what he took to be a no.

  “And Ben says the show can’t be postponed, so what are we supposed to do?”

  “Some of her pictures are finished. They can be in the show.”

  And if your mother doesn’t ever wake up or, worse, dies? It may be now or never, toots, he wanted to say, but he held his temper in check. “Know the picture at the gallery of the bobcat pups in the meadow?”

  “Of course I know it,” she said in disgust. “Anyone who’s been in this house knows it. It was in the living room for years. It’s Mom’s favorite.”

  “Right,” he said, gaining strength. “Do you know that I helped paint it?” Her withering look said that not only didn’t she know it, but that she didn’t believe it for a minute. “You were six years old. Your mother and I went hiking in the mountains not far from here. When we came back, that was one of the pictures we painted.”

  “Like, what part did you do?” Samantha mocked. “A tree?”

  There hadn’t been many times when one of his children had angered him to the point of losing control, and this wasn’t one, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Very deliberately, he tucked his hands in his pockets. Had he been his father, he would have used one of them to take the scornful look off Samantha’s face. There had to be a better way.

  “Have you ever drawn a tree?” he asked.

  “Everyone’s drawn trees.”

  “Yeah?” Catching her wrist in a way that was loose but locked, he strode toward the front door.

  “Where are you taking me?” she cried. “I have things to do!”

  He didn’t talk, didn’t look back, didn’t stop until they were in the woods and standing face-to-face with the trunk of one of the largest of the redwoods. It wasn’t one of the giant sequoias that grew farther north and inland, just a coast redwood, but it would do fine.

  Drawing Samantha in front of him, he held her rigid shoulders and said over the crown of that straight blond hair, “What do you see?”

  “Bark,” she snapped.

  “What else?”

  “Bark.”

  “Okay, what color is it?”

  “Red,” she said, then slowly, pedantically, “This is a redwood.”

  “Bright red? Brick red? Mahogany? Maroon?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever.”

  “If you were to paint it, what color would you make it? Bright red? Brick?”

  When she didn’t answer, he squeezed a shoulder.

  “Darker than that,” she muttered.

  “Mahogany?”

  “Maybe.”r />
  “All of it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you paint all of it mahogany?”

  “Yes,” she bit out.

  He released one shoulder, reached over it, and touched a piece of the bark. “But what about this part? The way the light hits, it’s darker by a shade or two.” He moved his finger. “This part’s a shade or two darker than that.” And again. “This part’s almost black. Can you see that?”

  “Yes, I can see it.”

  “If you paint the whole thing mahogany, you’ll lose the texture.” He swept the pads of his fingers over the bark. “Look at the shape of this piece, wider on top, tapering down. And the way this one waves back and forth. And this sickle-shaped piece? You’d lose these shapes if you did the whole thing one color.” He looked higher. “And up there? Where the sunset slants in? It makes the bark more orange than red. So you’d miss that, too, if you did the whole thing mahogany.” He looked way up. “Now look at the needles.”

  “You’ve made your point.”

  “Look at them anyway,” he said, framing her head with his hands and using only enough pressure as was necessary to tip it up. “The needles are feathery. Rich green. No—more blue-green in this light, I think. Warmer, almost lime, where the sun hits.” He paused. “Is it the needles that smell so good, or the bark?”

  “I don’t know. Is it my fault that I’m the only one in this family who can’t draw?”

  Jack was so surprised by the question that he let her go when she twisted away.

  “And just because you know about colors,” she blurted out, turning from ten feet away, “doesn’t mean you painted part of Mom’s picture. If you did, why would she have it hanging in the living room? She divorced you. She wanted you out of her life!”

  She stomped off, leaving Jack feeling empty again.

  “MY FATHER is a jerk,” Samantha told Lydia. She was breathing hard. “Who does he think he is, barging in here and taking over? He doesn’t know what my mother wants. He hasn’t lived with her in six years. No, longer. He wasn’t there for at least another six years. Probably even more.”