“Why you?”
“Bad experiences.” With a regretful smile, she started walking backward toward the shop. “Maybe someday we’ll have dinner. Not yet.”
His eyes dropped to her mouth, and for a split second, she felt caressed. “I’d settle for lunch,” he said with such endearing directness that her smile grew coy.
“Tell you what. Get my friend out of her coma and I might go for that.”
“I’m not God.”
She shrugged. Turning, she walked with deliberate reserve the rest of the way back to her shop.
JACK reached the hospital before nine. Cindy was bathing Rachel. The only change that had occurred was the arrival of a new, larger-than-ever flower arrangement from Victoria.
“Hi, Rachel,” he said, but she showed no sign of hearing. “No more movement?” he asked Cindy.
She shook her head.
From his briefcase, he took a handful of CDs that the girls had pulled from Rachel’s collection. Flipping through them, he said, “We have another Garth, we have Clint Black, we have Collin Raye, Shania Twain, and Wynonna. Okay, angel, what’ll it be?” When Rachel didn’t answer, he said, “Hope said I’d like Collin, so let’s do it.” He put the CD on low.
While Cindy finished up with Rachel, he disposed of the flower arrangements that were dead and went to the shop downstairs for replacements. In response to his request for something vivid, the florist pulled out an orange hibiscus and a deep pink kalanchoe. “They’ll bloom for months,” the man said, and just that quickly, Jack decided on roses and tulips. The roses were yellow, the tulips pink. They would last a week, no more. He wanted Rachel to be home by then.
Cindy had dressed Rachel in a nightshirt that was bright pink with orange and blue splashes—sent by the owner of a Big Sur crafts shop, along with a card that was tacked on the bulletin board beside Hope’s drawings and other cards—and was trying to tuck stray strands of Rachel’s hair into the loose topknot that Samantha had created with Hope’s scrunchy the afternoon before.
“Leave it,” he said to the nurse. “It’s pretty, curling against her cheek.”
Moments later, alone with Rachel, he touched that curl. It was soft, silky. There was life there yet.
Taking one of the roses, he moved it under her nose. “Bright yellow,” he said and, studying the rose, pushed himself to see it as Rachel would. “Sunshine. Barely open but wanting to, just the tips starting to curl outward, like delicate paper.” He tipped the rose to his own nose. “And fragrant. Smells like sunshine, too. Makes me think beach roses in Nantucket. Remember those? Good vacation.” He returned the rose to Rachel’s nose, then exchanged it for a tulip. “This one is soft pink. Baby pink. Smooth. Tall and graceful. A dancer. An elegant spring dancer.”
He teased the tip of her nose with the tulip. Then he told her about going out to the car that morning and seeing deer in the woods. A doe and two fawns—blacktails, he could have sworn he heard her say, though his own memory may have dredged it up. And he told her about Boca.
“See, it isn’t just the money,” he said, because if it was he would never have blown off a job. Then he leaned closer, so that no one else would hear, and confessed, “Maybe it was, for a while. But it wasn’t conscious materialism. It was wanting to be a success. If I got lost in it, I’m sorry. But success has always been a thing for me, more than for you. Back home, I was shit growing up. I still feel that way sometimes. You, you’ve always been a success. Hell, just growing the girls for nine months and giving birth was a coup.”
Oh, he had been proud, and not only of his daughters. Rachel had been the most beautiful, most serene mom during her brief-as-brief-could-be stays in the maternity ward. He remembered lying just this close when she was back home and nursing, watching her doze off with a baby at her breast. She hadn’t changed—same gracefully arched brows, same short nose, same freckles. He felt the same familiarity, the same closeness, that had made their best years so good. Even at the end, some things had worked. Like the girls tumbling with him in the yard, while Rachel captured it all on film. Even at the end there were smiles.
But okay, he hadn’t been there emotionally for her. She hadn’t pointed it out. He had felt her increasing silence. She had felt his increasing distance.
“It’s like you get started in one direction and pick up speed, and you may forget where you’re going and why, but the momentum takes you there anyway. Only, you find out when you arrive that it isn’t where you want to be.” He wasn’t sure if he was talking about work or about the divorce. Since the divorce was a done deed, he focused on work.
“The problem,” he said, pulling shop drawings from his briefcase, “is that I can cancel on a project like Boca because nothing’s been signed yet, but there are too many others where the commitment’s been made.” He unfolded the drawings. They were the designs for Napa—heat and air ductwork, lighting, kitchen fixtures—submitted by the various subcontractors and overnighted to him in Big Sur. They needed study and approval. It was the least he could do after postponing another set of meetings.
He told Rachel about the project, then talked his way through the shop drawings, wondering if what he said meant anything to her. She used to look over his shoulder sometimes when he was working with drawings like these. He had talked her through the plans then.
At least, he thought he had. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she had been running in and out, busy with the girls. She would have been bored with these. Hell, he was bored with these. They had more to do with supervision than design, and design was his love.
He had barely refolded the drawings and put them away when Ben Wolfe arrived. He carried an arrangement of yellow roses, saw the ones Jack had bought, and said a surprisingly gracious, “Great minds think alike.” He set his vase on the nightstand. “Today’s my birthday. We were going to celebrate.”
“Happy birthday,” Jack said, but he didn’t leave this time. He stood right there with Rachel while Ben made awkward conversation with her. He seemed like a very nice, very decent, very attentive and accommodating man. Jack had the wildest impulse to introduce him to Jill.
When Ben broached the subject of Rachel’s show, Jack said that he would be framing her pictures himself. After all, she had all the materials at the house, and he had framed pictures before, or so he reasoned. But he wasn’t thinking about framing when Ben left. He was thinking about painting. He had put it off, put it off, thinking that Rachel would wake up and tell him not to do it, but the show was ten days off and she was still asleep, and he didn’t know whether this six-years-older Rachel would resent his touching her work. Samantha thought she would. Katherine might have an opinion.
Katherine would definitely have an opinion. But he had told her to butt out.
He could apologize. That felt like the right thing to do. He wanted to think that she was his friend now, too. He would do it.
UNFORTUNATELY when Katherine came to visit, she wasn’t alone. Dinah and Jan were with her. Dinah looked as successful as ever with her smart red suit, gold brooch, and beeper. Jan was no-nonsense and functional, a woman with muscled calves, sun-dried skin, and sheer polish on her nails. Katherine’s own nails were burgundy today.
The three looked worried approaching the bed. With forced lightness, they talked to Rachel in turns. One held her hand, another brushed her hair, the third asked Jack what the doctors were saying.
Thinking to learn more about Rachel from them, as he had from Charlie and Faye, he asked about book group. It was a mistake. Suddenly, though he was standing right there, he faded. Their voices grew quiet, more intimate. They became four close friends—Dinah, Katherine, Jan, and Rachel—four close female friends, reminiscing about things they had shared.
“Why did I join?” Dinah asked in response to Jack’s question, but oblivious to him now. “Because I love to read. I always have.”
“You were the most avid of us,” Katherine said. “We rarely chose a book where you hadn’t read another by the same author.”
“I was so intimidated,” Jan confessed. “I felt like the dummy because my life was either hitting golf balls or changing diapers. I came so close to calling and canceling out of that first meeting. Changed clothes three times beforehand.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. But I needed to talk about that book. Remember it?”
“Beloved.”
“I was sure I’d missed most of the meaning.”
“Haunting book.”
“Strong.”
“Scary.” It was Jan, again, speaking softly. “But not as scary as The Fifth Child.”
“You were pregnant again.”
“Waiting for amnio results.”
“I read the book and began imagining that this new child would arrive and mess up the family I already had.”
“That was your confession book.” This from Katherine with a nod.
Dinah chuckled. “Boy, did you let go.”
“I was embarrassed.”
“But it gave the rest of us permission to do the same,” Katherine said. “I did it with A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I adored, but which had nothing to do with me directly.” She frowned. “So why that book?”
“It was the timing,” Dinah suggested. “Byron had just let you down. You needed to vent.”
“I vented all right.” She touched Rachel’s hair. “What did it for Rachel?”
“Moon Tiger.”
“Woman on the Edge of Time.”
But Katherine was shaking her head. “Exit the Rainmaker.”
“Oh my God.” Jan laughed. “About the college president who just disappeared one day. I haven’t thought of that one in ages.”
“What a great discussion.”
Katherine nodded. “We asked each other where we would go if we were to walk out of our lives and disappear like he did. Remember what Rachel said?” Jack listened as Katherine’s voice grew softer, lyrical. “She described a little town in Maine, not much more than a handful of stores backed up to the shore of a lake. There were huge pine forests, long dirt roads leading to cabins in the woods, and skies so clear you could see the northern lights. She said she would live in one of those cabins and know everyone in town. She thought it would be the simplest, most beautiful life.”
Dinah snorted. “Not my cup of tea. Remember what I said? I’d get lost in Gstaad.”
She may have said more, but Jack didn’t hear. He had gone to the window and was looking blindly out over a cluster of Monterey cypress, realizing that the birds he had found on one of those canvases waiting to be finished in Rachel’s studio were loons. He hadn’t identified them immediately because his mind was on the West Coast, not the East. Mention of the northern lights had shifted his sights, because he had seen those lights, that sky. The loons were from Maine. They had been floating on the glassy surface of the lake at dusk on every one of the seven nights he and Rachel had spent in the small cabin in the pines that had been their honeymoon suite.
HE BEGAN painting at eight. He worked until three in the morning, layering Rachel’s canvas with that lake and its small center island, its border of trees, and an early evening sky shot with a whisper of green and pink. Where the mirror of the lake called for reflections, he made them lighter than real life would have them, and it worked. When he finally set down his palette and brushes, straightened cramped legs one at a time, and stepped back from the easel, his eye was drawn more strongly than ever to Rachel’s loons.
It was another hour before he capped the oils and half again as much before he crawled into Rachel’s bed. He woke up after three hours of sleep, opened the window, and inhaled the lifting fog. He was tired, but pleasantly so. He had worked hard and done well. He hadn’t felt as satisfied in a long, long while.
He showered, shaved, and dressed. When he arrived in the kitchen, Samantha was standing at the counter drinking coffee. She looked like something from a magazine, all tight top and jeans, silky straight hair, and eyes lined in blue.
“You look so grown-up it scares me,” he said, meaning every word. The defiance he saw kept him from telling her to get rid of the eyeliner. “Is that all you’re having for breakfast?” he asked instead.
“Breakfast is my least favorite meal.”
“Since when?”
A look of annoyance came and went. Even her defiance was down. “Daddy? Can we talk about the prom?”
“Is your sister up?”
“Up and gone.”
“Gone where?” he asked, fearing.
Samantha didn’t have to do more than look in the direction of Duncan’s, and suddenly Jack made for the door. He knew that Hope would show up in time to leave, but she had gone to Duncan’s one time too many. A niggling in the back of his mind said that he wanted to see more of where she went.
He had lost one child, perhaps because of his own inertia. He couldn’t let it happen again. If he didn’t go after Hope, and she was ever hurt in any way, Rachel would never forgive him. More, he would never forgive himself.
chapter fourteen
JACK WAS A MAN with a mission as he strode up the hill. He felt little of the early morning chill, saw little of the sun that was just rising high enough to crest the hills in the east, and if the fragrance of the air had any power at all, it served only to keep him from outright panic. During the precious minutes it took him to reach Duncan Bligh’s cabin, his imagination worked double-time. He conjured all kinds of ugly images, all kinds of perverse abuse. Quickening his step, he swore at himself repeatedly for not acting sooner.
The cabin was a log box that might have fit neatly into a corner of the adjacent pen. The barn behind it was larger and newer. Sheep clustered between pen and barn, staring at him as he neared.
He crossed the porch and pounded on the door. Hands on his hips, he clenched his jaw and waited. When Duncan opened up, he said angrily, “I don’t know what in hell’s been going on here, but I want my daughter, and I want her now.”
Looking unperturbed—which bothered Jack all the more—Duncan ssh-shed him with a finger and glanced into the interior of the cabin. Wondering what all he hadn’t imagined, Jack barged past him. He hadn’t taken more than a handful of steps when he stopped short.
The first thing he saw was a large hearth with a healthy fire radiating warmth. The second was Hope’s blond hair, but it was down low, resting against something. That something was the third thing he saw. It was a minute before he identified a small figure in a wheelchair.
“About time you met Faith,” Duncan muttered, walking past Jack. He bent low over the figure in the chair and murmured something Jack couldn’t hear. Impatiently, he waved Jack forward. “Say hello to my wife.”
The woman in the wheelchair looked back at Jack. Her hair was white, her face creased, her spectacles round and small. Her smile was as warm as the fire.
“Hello,” she said, more mouthing than sound. Her hand lay on Hope’s head, which lay against the crocheted afghan covering her legs. “She’s sleeping,” she whispered, but she needn’t have reassured Jack. One look at the woman and her sweet smile, and his fears were gone. Duncan’s faith. He couldn’t count the number of times he had heard that phrase uttered in the same breath as solace and peace. The woman and her smile said it all. Duncan’s Faith.
Jack took a deep, wry breath. Duncan’s Faith. He was right for swearing at himself. He should have acted sooner. What an imbecile he was.
Releasing the breath with a self-deprecating shake of the head, he extended a hand. “Jack McGill,” he said. Her hand was frail in his, but there was a dignity to it. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
Faith nodded. “Hope didn’t tell you she was coming?”
“No.” He glanced at Duncan, who was regarding his wife with such tenderness that Jack was all the more humbled. Duncan’s Faith. Why hadn’t he known?
He hadn’t known because he was thickheaded, because he was driven by jealousy where his family was concerned, because he jumped to conclusions at the drop of a hat. An
d maybe because the girls had hoodwinked him. So there was that.
Duncan walked off. Jack hunkered down in front of the fire so that Faith wouldn’t have to look up.
“It’s been hard on her,” she said, her voice so soft and lyrical that it wouldn’t waken Hope. “I don’t think she’s sleeping nights very well. How is Rachel?”
Jack hadn’t called the hospital that morning. He knew that he would have been notified if anything had changed during the night. “She’s the same. Do you know, I had no idea you existed? The girls talked about ‘Faith’ like it was a religion. I’m afraid I’ve been rude not coming to thank you before this.”
“Thank me for what?”
The words came easily. Faith Bligh radiated goodness. Jack felt no threat here, no risk in baring his feelings. “For being kind to the girls. For taking care of Guinevere.” He sputtered out a laugh in self-reproach. “I couldn’t quite understand why the cat would be better off up here if Duncan was out in the fields all day.” At that moment, Duncan was washing dishes in the kitchen that lined the far living room wall. “Now it makes sense.”
“He comes back to check on me every few hours.” She smiled again. “Not that I’m going anywhere.”
“Do you go outside?”
“Oh, yes. I can wheel myself out to the porch. There’s a beautiful view of the valley. But I need Duncan for much beyond that.”
Jack was remembering something—something Hope had said on the very first morning after Rachel’s accident. He had been trying to assure her that broken legs healed. She had been convinced that it wasn’t always the case.
He was frowning, trying to decide whether he could ask and, if so, how to do it, when Faith said, “Some people think I’m crazy living up here, but I’ve always loved these hills. If I have to be confined, this is a beautiful place to be. Duncan and I used to vacation here before the accident.”
“How long ago was that?”
“The accident? Twelve years. A ski lift collapsed. My legs were broken in so many places that walking would have been an ordeal even if my spine hadn’t been injured, which it was.”
Coast Road Page 22
