by Jane Peden
“No wonder you’re so skinny. You don’t eat any meat.”
“I eat fish sometimes.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of vegetarians at my school. We have an organic garden and everything.”
“Sounds like an interesting place,” he said, noncommittally. He was still puzzled that Camilla had sent her sister away to live at a boarding school. They appeared to be very close, from what he had observed.
“I love it there.”
“You wouldn’t have rather lived with Camilla year-round and gone to school locally?” he asked mildly.
A cloud seemed to come over her eyes. “It was really hard after I got out of rehab. I couldn’t remember things, and they didn’t want to put me back with my regular class because I couldn’t catch up.”
Sam saw her start to tear up and part of him regretted opening the door to this conversation. But he wanted to understand.
Olivia looked down at her plate. “Plus, people said mean things.”
“What do you mean? About you?”
She gave her characteristic shrug and didn’t answer. Sam tried another tack.
“Olivia, how long were you in the hospital after the accident?”
“About five months,” she said softly, still not looking at him. “Then more than six months after that in rehab. There were a lot of surgeries.”
Sam took a drink of his soda and waited until she was ready to continue.
“I guess it shouldn’t bother me to talk about it to you. After all, we’re family now,” she said finally, and Sam felt a stab of guilt. We’re family, he thought, until I divorce your sister.
“I got hurt pretty bad in the accident,” Olivia said, which Sam was starting to think must be the understatement of the year. “I broke a lot of bones. Part of my hip was shattered, and my left leg was pretty much crushed. My arm was almost severed,” she said, and shivered. “But the worst part was the head injury.”
Sam stared at her, shocked. “I had no idea.” Apparently her injuries were even more severe than he’d imagined. It was a miracle she was alive, much less giving every appearance of being a completely normal teenager.
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
Yeah, he thought, he could see why she’d want to put all that behind her. The pain the kid had gone through must have been intense.
“They put me in a coma for months,” she said, her voice seeming carefully devoid of emotion. “And they told Cam I was probably going to be a vegetable for the rest of my life, if I even survived at all.”
She stopped talking for so long that Sam thought she had finished. He watched her pick up her sandwich and take a small bite, then a sip of her drink. He was about to change the topic just to get that sad look out of her eyes when she started speaking again.
“There were some new procedures a doctor in Texas was doing. Danny flew me out there. And then he put me in the best rehab center in the country. I had to learn to speak again—that was from the head injury. And walk again. It was so weird. Like, what I was trying to do was inside my head, but I couldn’t get my body to understand. And when I tried to talk, the words just didn’t come out right.”
She looked at him. “Rehab was hard. It hurt. Bad. I thought I knew what pain was, but this was worse than the accident. Worse than all the surgeries. I thought I would die, and most days I wished I could. One day I just stopped. I was just over it. I wasn’t going to do it anymore, and nobody could make me. Camilla tried everything to motivate me, to get me to care. Then mostly she just cried.” Sam felt an ache in his heart imagining how helpless Camilla must have felt, faced with Olivia’s surrender to the unimaginable pain she’d endured. This was what had lain ahead of the Camilla he’d met in Vegas, the woman he’d thought of then as a casual partner for few weeks of fun. He wanted to go back in time and hold her in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay.
Olivia twirled the straw around in her glass of iced tea, took a long drink, then shifted back in her chair.
“That’s when Danny came to see me. It’s the first time I met him. Everybody felt sorry for me all the time, and I thought he would too, because he of all people knew what it was like to be in an accident like that.”
“So did he?” Sam prompted.
“No way. He said I was a whiny little coward, and the most selfish person he’d ever met aside from himself.” Her eyes sparkled a little at that, and she almost smiled. Then her face got serious again.
“He told me about his spinal cord injury, and how he was never going to be able to walk again no matter how much rehab and therapy he did, and if he did have even a possibility of walking he would have fought like hell for it, no matter how tough it got. He said it made him sick just to look at me, like a spoiled little princess, when I actually had a chance to get my life back. And that he despised me for not even trying.
“I got mad then, and tried to tell him that wasn’t fair, I’d tried really hard for months and months, but he wouldn’t listen, and he told me to shut up because he wasn’t done talking. Nobody had ever talked to me like that before I got hurt, much less after. I was so startled I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.
“Then he said I should be ashamed of myself to lie around wallowing in self-pity when my sister had been forced to marry a jerk like him. He said he was making Camilla’s life miserable because he knew she didn’t like him, but she had to stay with him or he’d cut off the money for my rehab. And he said, ‘The biggest joke of all, Olivia, is that she married me to save you, and you aren’t worth saving.’”
It took all the skill Sam had as a trial lawyer to keep a poker face, to betray no sign to Olivia of how her words had ripped through him. He sat there, listening in stunned silence, as Olivia continued.
“So I said maybe she would like you better if you weren’t so mean, and he laughed—not a happy laugh, though—and said maybe she would, but that I didn’t know what mean was and I was about to find out. He’d be back every day, he said, until I was released, and if he heard again that I wasn’t trying he was going to ream me out in front of everybody, and then he was going to go home and make my sister’s life more miserable than it already was.”
“So you got back with the program?” Sam asked.
“You bet. As hard as it was, I was more scared of Danny. I mean, I was just a kid then, and man, he was fierce.”
Sam thought he was beginning to understand.
“You must have hated living with Danny and Camilla. So that’s why you went to the boarding school.”
She looked at him as if he was dense. “No, Sam. I have never in my life loved another person as much as I loved Danny.”
“Okay, now I totally don’t get it,” Sam said.
“Well, he was right. I was being selfish. Once I thought about it—how with all the money he had he couldn’t buy the one thing he really wanted. To walk again. It made me feel small and cowardly and completely deserving of all the bad things he thought I was. And I decided to show him that I was better than that, that I was worth all Camilla’s sacrifices. I decided I wasn’t going to just get back to eighty percent like the doctors had said might be possible. I was going to get back to one hundred percent. And I did.”
“So just like that it turned you around?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say just like that. I still had my moments. And more than once he made the nurse push me into the common room and then he yelled at me until I cried so hard I almost fell out of my chair.”
“So what is that, tough love?”
Olivia shrugged. “Call it what you want, it worked.”
“So why the boarding school?”
“I guess when you have a head injury and stupid things you didn’t mean to say come out of your mouth, and when your dad loses all his clients’ money and everybody says he’s a crook, you find out who your real friends are. Turns out I didn’t have many.”
Sam was aghast. “That’s awful.”
She shrugged again. “A lot of my old friend
s’ parents had invested money with my dad, and they lost it. Plus, everybody was saying he ran the car off the road on purpose, and it wasn’t true.”
Her eyes had started to fill up again—those brilliantly blue eyes that were so like her sister’s, shining with tears that threatened to spill over.
“They were arguing,” Olivia explained. “We’d just picked Mom up. She’d had like a nervous breakdown and was at this fancy treatment place, but my dad didn’t have the money to pay for it anymore so she had to leave. And they were arguing about it and she was getting louder and louder, and I got upset and scared and I was yelling at them to stop, and then we went around this curve and Mom grabbed Dad’s arm, and there was a car coming toward us. We were in the wrong lane, and I remember my dad yanking the wheel back but we went too far on the other side and started spinning on the gravel, and my dad yelled, ‘Hang on!’ and the next thing I remember is just this horrible pain and I heard a voice from like really far away saying ‘I think the little girl’s still alive,’ and then nothing until months later. I missed the funeral,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t like to think about it.” She met his eyes. “Or talk about it much.”
“I shouldn’t have brought the whole thing up,” Sam said, but his head was spinning with all the information she’d just provided.
“But anyway,” she said, “that’s why I went to the school. It’s a Friends school and they’re really big on nonviolence and accepting everybody, and the people there were just so nice.” She grinned. “A little out there sometimes, but really good people. People who make a difference in the world. Plus, they worked with me to get caught up so I’m not a grade behind in school anymore which is great, ’cause that really bothered me a lot.”
Last summer, she told him, she’d gone to Nicaragua to help with a project to bring medical care and other help to people who were so poor they lived on the outskirts of a huge garbage dump and scavenged to get by. It had made her think, she told him, about how truly lucky she was. And how even though she’d lost her parents and been hurt so badly, she had a future and people who cared about her.
Sam was only half listening as Olivia, her spirits revived, dug into her lunch and a series of stories about her experiences at the clinic in Nicaragua. The other half of his brain was trying to process what he’d learned about Camilla and her marriage to Danny.
If he’d been wrong about Camilla’s motivations for marrying her first husband, what else might he have been wrong about? The danger in building a case on circumstantial evidence, he reminded himself ruefully, was that sometimes even though all the pieces added up, the answer you got was still wrong. Could there be some explanation he could understand, and even forgive, for why Camilla had never told him he had a son?
He thought back to all the harsh things he’d said to his wife. If Sam had misjudged Camilla, he owed her a lot more than an apology.
That evening, stretched out on one of the chairs on the terrace with a cold beer while Camilla, Olivia, and JD splashed around the pool in a complicated game of beach ball tag that JD had invented, Sam made a decision. Instead of looking at everything as evidence that his wife couldn’t be trusted, he was going to have an open mind. He’d been wrong about why she married Danny. And he’d been wrong about why she “sent” Olivia off to boarding school. As a trial lawyer, he knew there were times when you just went with your gut. His instincts had been telling him that ignoring the feelings he had for Camilla was a mistake. Sometimes you had to take a risk.
There were still things about her past that troubled him—why she had never contacted him when she realized she was pregnant, and whether her husband had been complicit in her decision to pass the child off as his, or had been deceived into believing JD was his son.
But if she’d really been marrying a man who, according to Olivia, had set out from the beginning to make her life miserable, then her pre-wedding fling seemed sad and desperate rather than wanton and heartless. He wondered for a moment what might have happened if they had met under different circumstances, then realized that he now had the opportunity to find out.
He’d been telling himself all along that the only attachment he’d made to Camilla was the sex. But it wasn’t true. Somehow she’d taken hold of his heart.
“Sam! Sam!” JD shouted, splashing to the other side of the pool as Camilla and Olivia advanced on him. “No fair! Come on, Sam, they’re getting me!”
Why not? Sam thought, as he set his beer down, peeled off his T-shirt and got into the pool, lifting JD onto his shoulders. He easily wrestled the ball away from Olivia and passed it up to JD.
“Okay, buddy, let’s go catch Mommy. Get ready to throw the ball.”
JD laughed so hard he almost fell off Sam’s shoulders as the beach ball bounced off Camilla’s head and she made an exaggerated tumble backward. Then Camilla sneaked around to tickle JD in the ribs and distract Sam, while Olivia bumped him off-balance underwater and toppled JD from his perch. Since the rules of the game seemed pretty flexible, Sam decided that diving under the water and grabbing either Camilla or Olivia by an ankle and dunking them was fair play, to JD’s delighted shrieks. Camilla darted just out of reach, splashing Sam in the face and laughing when he lunged for her and missed.
Then Camilla was right there in front of him, pressing her body up close, staring at him with those sea goddess eyes. Suddenly everything got quiet as she put her hands on his shoulders. Her hair was slicked back by the water, her face tilted up toward his, her eyes bewitching him. He looked into the depths of those intensely blue eyes as she leaned in to kiss him—then shoved him backward and under the water. He gasped, choked, and came up sputtering and laughing. She was already halfway across the pool, a mischievous grin on her face. “I’ll get you for that,” he threatened.
She laughed and said, “Not if I get you first,” grabbing the beach ball from JD and tossing it to Olivia for the score.
The next hour was spent scoring points in a system that made absolutely no sense to anyone but JD, who finally declared himself “the absolutely winner.”
Camilla took “the absolutely winner” upstairs for a quick bath, amid loud protests and sudden tears that left Sam wondering how little kids’ brains worked. He heard Camilla’s good-natured but firm responses to JD’s objections. Parenting really did take patience, and Camilla seemed to have an amazing supply of it.
When JD reappeared he was all smiles, in little bare feet and superhero pajamas. Camilla dropped him unceremoniously onto Sam’s lap and announced that there was just enough time to watch a DVD before bedtime. She headed off to the kitchen for popcorn and drinks, leaving JD leaning contentedly against Sam’s chest. Sam lowered his head close to JD’s damp hair and breathed in the fresh scent of baby shampoo and little boy.
JD looked up at him. “Are you smelling my hair?”
Sam laughed. “I guess I was. Is that okay?”
JD just smiled and snuggled back in. “Mommy does that, too.”
Sam watched Camilla walk back into the room with a beer for Sam, a glass of wine for herself, and some kind of a juice drink that had a little straw sticking out of it for JD. Olivia had retreated to her room to work on a song she was writing on her guitar, but reappeared when she smelled the popcorn.
It all just felt right. While the others watched the animated movie, Sam kept looking at Camilla. Everything about her just seemed so natural this evening. The way she laughed. The tenderness in her face when she looked at JD. How contented she seemed, relaxing on the couch in simple cotton pajama shorts and a tank top. Which was the real Camilla? The glittering socialite on his arm, or the young mother who seemed so comfortable in her own skin? Twice she glanced over and caught him watching her. The second time, after Olivia had again retreated to her room and JD was fast asleep on his lap, she looked puzzled, like she was half expecting him to say something. He felt like there was something he should say, but for once in his life the words just weren’t th
ere.
So he lifted the sleeping JD and carried him up to his bed, while Camilla shut off the TV and gathered up popcorn bowls and drinks. Better to just relax and see how things played out. And try to show her, when they got into bed, the feelings he just didn’t feel ready yet to put into words.
Chapter Seventeen
It just wasn’t possible. Camilla stared at the thin line on the pregnancy test. Positive. It was the third test, and it was unanimous. And that little bout of the flu she’d thought she was coming down with last week obviously wasn’t. How could this have happened to her again?
She put her head down in her hands. The really light period she’d had last month hadn’t been a period at all. And now this month she was late and she was never late, not since she started taking the low-dose birth control pills her doctor had prescribed for that very reason. Low dose. Yes, her doctor had warned her that pregnancy was possible although extremely unlikely.
She groaned as she remembered the morning after their wedding, when he’d pulled her in off the terrace by the belt of her robe, and taken her right there against the French doors overlooking the waters off the Florida Keys.
She had just started to think that things were getting better between her and Sam. It had started with the night they made love in the limo. He’d made love to her in their bed almost every night since then, and twice in the kitchen last weekend when Olivia was at the park with JD.
And she’d sensed him softening toward her, not just in the bedroom, but in little day-to-day things. A half dozen times she’d caught him looking at her as if he wanted to say something, but then he’d looked away or they’d been interrupted, and somehow the moment was lost.
All of that was going to be ruined now. He’d think she got pregnant on purpose to trap him.
If she delayed telling him, he’d be furious when he found out. He’d accuse her of repeating exactly what happened with JD.
Why now? Why now when she was so close to the happy ending she’d allowed herself to start to believe in? She was in love with her husband. And he had feelings for her, she was certain of it. But when he found out her news, he would go right back to despising her and she couldn’t bear it.
