“Cole, I’ll kill myself. I swear to God I will.”
He leaned forward, his face inches from hers. “You need help, Estelle. But I can’t be the one to give it to you anymore.”
59.
“How could you have believed her?” He sat on the window seat watching Kit pace the floor, her face still puffy from crying.
“She was very convincing. And I think I’d prepared myself to hear it.”
“Is that how little you think of me?” He spoke gently. She’d been through a lot that afternoon, and he didn’t need to make it worse.
“It’s how little I think of myself.”
“There must be something radically wrong with our relationship if you think I could pick up with Estelle again.”
“There’s something radically wrong with me. Don’t you see? I’ve let it happen. I can’t live without you, damn it!” She kicked the basket she used for wastepaper across the room, and he had to smile.
“Come here, baby.” He reached out to her.
“No. I don’t want you to comfort me.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know that I could live without you.”
“You could.”
“But not happily.” She stopped her pacing to look at him, and he stood up and put his arms around her.
“What’s the crime?” he asked. “You need me, I need you. I like it, frankly.” He wished he knew the magic words that would end this conversation. He wanted to make love, not talk. He stroked her hair. “Why didn’t you call me after she spoke to you? I could have cleared the whole thing up and we’d be laughing about it right now.”
“I was afraid to talk to you. I felt as though I didn’t know you.”
“You don’t know me if you think I can be seduced so easily.”
It was a few seconds before she spoke again. “Cole, I saw the card she sent you while you were in the hospital.”
“You did? How?” He couldn’t remember what he’d done with that card.
“It was in the wastepaper basket when I emptied it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you found it?”
“Why didn’t you tell me you received it?”
“Touché,” he said. “I didn’t think it was worth worrying you about.”
“I really did put it out of my mind. Things seemed so good between us. But when this happened, I thought of the card and how you hadn’t told me about it. I figured you must have other secrets, too.”
He shook his head, thinking that he would have drawn the same conclusions—or worse—had he been in her place. “No other secrets,” he said.
She leaned her head against his shoulder and sighed. “Just hold me for a couple of minutes.”
He held her against him, feeling the tension leave her body bit by bit. She felt so good, her hair soft against his cheek. He felt his erection growing between them and heard her muffled laugh against his neck.
“How can you think of sex at a time like this?” she asked.
He felt appropriately guilty. “All afternoon I was thinking about us going to Miami tomorrow, and how tense you’re going to be, and how you’re probably not going to be in the mood while we’re there . . . so I thought tonight might be my—excuse me, I mean our—last chance for a few days.”
“You dog.” She kissed him, a long, satiny kiss that cleared his mind of the afternoon. She began to unbutton his shirt.
He led her to the bed and lay down next to her, slipping his hands under her sweater to unfasten her bra. Her breasts were warm.
“I can’t wait, Cole,” she said. “I’m in better condition now than I was before Somerville. When we’re finished do you think we could pack?”
“Shh.” He kissed her. She seemed to have forgotten they were making love.
“Sorry. I’m just excited about tomorrow.”
“Forget about tomorrow, at least for the next hour or so.” He unzipped her jeans and she helped him slide them off. “I’d better make sure these legs are ready to run twenty-six miles,” he said. He leaned down to kiss the top of her thigh and heard her moan softly. She’d already forgotten tomorrow. He would make her forget today as well.
60.
Kit had their new matching suitcases packed and waiting by the sliding glass doors of the kitchen.
She couldn’t relax. What a day of torture. She’d been keyed up from the second she opened her eyes that morning, and then to have to make two presentations and sit through a bunch of meetings . . . She could have screamed. The entire day she’d thought about one thing: running. What if she were kidding herself about her condition? What if she didn’t make the time she needed for Boston and had to miss it again?
“Here he is.” Maris looked through the sliding glass doors. Cole’s old white Mustang was pulling into the driveway. “I’ll be glad when he gets you out of here. You’re too antsy.”
The phone rang as he walked in the door and Kit looked at him in alarm. He held up a hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Kevin’s covering. I’m free until Monday.”
Maris answered the phone, then held it out to Cole. “Blair for Cole Perelle,” she said apologetically. “Sorry.”
Damn Blair, she thought. Why couldn’t they leave him alone for once?
“This is Cole Perelle,” he said. He frowned at the floor, then ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, no.” He looked at Kit, but she had no idea what was behind the worry in his eyes. “What are her vital signs?” He listened a moment. “No, I’d rather not,” he said. “She has family. I’ll try to get in touch with them.” He hung up the phone and turned to her. “Estelle swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She’s in a coma.”
Kit sat down at the kitchen table. She could see outside to the terrace where Cole had stacked the lumber he’d bought the day before. He was going to build beach chairs like John Chapel’s to set in their new backyard on the bay. He was anxious to get them built, he’d told her. Anxious to see a part of himself in that house.
Why a coma, damn it? Why couldn’t she have done the job right?
“Do they expect her to make it?” Maris asked.
Cole leafed through the phone book. “They’re not saying.” He picked up the receiver and dialed. Kit listened as he spoke with Marc, Estelle’s younger brother. It was obvious from Cole’s end of the conversation that Marc had no idea Estelle was even in town. He hadn’t seen her since before she’d left New Jersey. Then Cole began arguing with him. Wouldn’t Marc go to Blair to be with her, and what did he mean, he really didn’t care if she lived or died? Cole hung up the phone and began dialing again, this time Estelle’s mother. The conversation was even shorter than the one with Marc.
“Unreal,” he said, hanging up the phone. “What a cold bunch of people.”
She comes by it naturally, Kit thought.
“Her mother said, ‘Well, if she wakes up, then I’ll come down, but I don’t see the point in coming all the way to New Jersey if she’s unconscious.’ Her mother. Can you believe it?”
“She didn’t even endear herself to her own family,” said Maris.
Every muscle in her body was tight, waiting for what was coming next. She knew him too well. The way he was looking at her, the apology in his eyes before he spoke. She felt her own eyes fill with tears before he’d uttered the first word.
Please don’t do this to me, Cole.
“I have to stay here,” he said.
“No you don’t.”
“What if she comes out of it and there’s no one there? Not a soul who cares about her?”
“You can’t stay out of guilt.”
“It’s not guilt. She tried to kill herself. If she wakes up alone, she’ll . . . I don’t want her to regret that she didn’t succeed.”
“But this is my marathon. I want you with me.”
“If it were one of my nieces or Maris or Jay or anyone, I’d do the same thing.”
She knew that was true. She stood up. “You’re not going with me then?” She forced th
e words past the knot in her throat.
“I’ll take you to the airport.”
She shook her head. “I’ll drive myself.” She stood up and squeezed his shoulder. It was the most she could manage just then to let him know she understood. Or at least a part of her did. She walked toward the stairs. “Your suitcase is the one on the left,” she said without turning around.
61.
Saturday was the longest day of his life. Strange, spending the entire day at Blair without working. He sat next to Estelle’s bed in the Intensive Care Unit, reading. First the newspaper. Then the stack of professional articles that had been mounting on his desk for the past few months. It was hard to concentrate, though, with her lying in front of him.
He wouldn’t have recognized her. If he’d been walking through the ICU and noticed her, he might have thought she looked a trifle like Estelle, enough to make him think of her, but no more. It was the pallor and the tubes. The bruises around her mouth where they’d intubated her. She was tied to the respirator and the sound of it nauseated him.
He watched the clock the entire day. If she came out of it before noon, he would spend a few hours with her and then fly to Miami. When noon came and went he changed his plans to catching a night plane—that was if she woke up before six or so. He even called the airport. The last plane was at ten-thirty.
By five he knew there was no chance of making it to Miami that night. He went to his office and sat in the welcome darkness, away from the bright lights and machinery, and wondered if Kit was as lonely for him as he was for her. He hadn’t thought this through too well. It wasn’t fair to her, yet no matter how long and hard he’d considered the options, he would have made this choice. It would have been harder for Kit if he’d been with her, worrying about Estelle the whole time.
He’d call her later, when he was feeling better. The last thing he wanted to do was fall apart on the phone.
After dinner he went back to Estelle’s cubicle in the ICU. Nothing had changed. It could go on forever this way, he thought, the only change being that her body would gradually wither. She’d be a haunting presence in the hospital. He’d always know she was up here. If it went on too long, he’d pull the plug on her respirator.
He was thinking nonsense. It did something to your mind, sitting in one spot all day watching a person trying to die. A person he’d loved. Or had he? Suddenly he wasn’t sure if it had ever been love that tied him to her. He couldn’t remember. How had he felt in those first few years? Had it been love or just the excitement of having a woman like Estelle? He didn’t know anymore. Whatever it was he felt for Kit made every other emotion seem hollow.
She didn’t sound pleased to hear from him, and he struggled to keep conversation rolling, his voice even. “Have you met other runners there?” he asked, after he’d asked her about the flight, the hotel room and what she’d eaten for dinner—cereal and water.
“The hotel’s crawling with them,” she said.
“I wish I was there with you.” He said it quickly.
“You could have been.”
He was silent.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish you were here, too.”
He still couldn’t speak. He held the phone away to take in a deep breath.
“Cole?”
“I love you.”
“Are you crying?” she asked.
“It’s been a long day.”
“How’s Estelle?”
“No change. All day I’ve been hoping she’d come out of it and then I could fly down there and . . .”
“But it didn’t work out,” she said softly.
“No.”
“It’s all right, babe. I’m really fine. I can concentrate better by myself.”
“You’re very sweet,” he said.
“I know.”
He hung up with a smile. His first all day.
62.
She had no intention of enjoying Miami. If Cole had been with her, it would have been different. But aside from a couple of easy runs, she stayed in her room. The woman from room service probably thought she was a recluse. She felt a twinge of loneliness just once, when she went down to the lobby to buy the evening paper and saw the gathering of people. Obviously runners. They looked scrubbed and fresh and fired up for tomorrow. For a moment she was tempted to join them. It was where she belonged. But she turned back to the elevator and rode to the ninth floor of the hotel alone.
She would have felt worse if he hadn’t called, but now he was planted firmly in her mind, and that she didn’t need. She’d have to get the cobwebs out by tomorrow at eleven.
She fell asleep so easily that she was surprised to find the sun streaming in her room when she opened her eyes. The night had been far less painful than she’d expected.
She ate half a piece of toast and drank a few glasses of water in the hotel restaurant. She tipped the waitress well for all the trips with the water pitcher. Then she put on her running clothes and went out front to wait for a taxi. She had to share one with two other runners.
She would have thought they were in town for a party instead of a race.
“Where you from?” the man asked her. He was incredibly skinny, and she wondered what the muscles of his legs looked like under his warm-up pants.
“New Jersey.”
“Whew!” said the woman. “How d’ya ever train in that kind of weather? I visited some friends of mine there once at Christmas time and just about froze my tail off.”
“What a loss that woulda been,” said the man, giving the woman’s tail a little squeeze.
Kit didn’t bother to ask them where they were from, and after a while they gave up trying to make conversation with her and babbled to each other.
She felt flat and it worried her. She pinned her number on the front of her T-shirt and planted herself in the middle of the throng. If I don’t make it, Perelle, it’s your fault. She shook her head at how stupid that sounded.
It wasn’t until the tenth mile that she realized that running emotionlessly might not be so bad. She passed marker ten in seventy smooth minutes. She hadn’t even concentrated that hard on her pace. She worried that she was running too fast, that she’d tire too early to keep it up. But she felt fine. Maybe she actually could break three hours.
At mile eighteen, though, she started to falter. Everything hurt. Everything was wrong. She couldn’t filter anything out. The sunlight was blinding and splinters of pain stabbed her eyes. But hadn’t she been running into the sun for the last hour? This was ridiculous. Her shorts felt like they belonged to someone else. The waistband was too loose, and she spent precious minutes trying to decide whether or not to hitch them up. She chose not to, and then imagined they were slipping bit by bit as she ran.
And the bystanders. The cheering mob was thickening by the minute and she couldn’t keep her eyes off them. Five men in the length of one city block reminded her of Cole. She even looked back at one of them, thinking that maybe he’d made it after all. But then he would be at the finish line, not along the course.
Unless he’d flown in just seconds earlier and this was as close as he could . . .
Poor Cole. She was certain he was not here at all. He was back in New Jersey, doing what he thought was the right thing. It was simply the way he was. He’d always do what he thought was right no matter what it cost him. As long as she was with him, there would always be someone else. If not Estelle, then his mother or Rennie or a patient. Always someone he thought needed him a little more than she did at that moment.
And he’d probably be right.
The woman she’d been keeping pace with suddenly sprang ahead, and Kit’s attention snapped back to the race. She had no idea what mile she was running or how she was doing with the time. She was only running now because it was a habit developed over the last couple of hours.
A good habit, though. She finished in two hours and fifty-eight minutes and sprawled on the grass at the side of the road, alone and smiling.
&
nbsp; 63.
The cottage was one of dozens that dotted the sand between the ocean and the street. But it was the only one inhabited in the middle of December.
“This is like a honeymoon,” she said, moving closer to the fire Cole had built in the stone fireplace. The tiny living room glowed warmly from the blaze.
“A premarital honeymoon.” He sat on the dumpy sofa, sipping his cocoa and watching her.
“I’ve almost adjusted to the quiet,” she said. It was odd to be without the others. Only Rennie had trouble understanding that they needed some time away alone now. That it couldn’t wait until after the wedding.
“I like having you all to myself.” He put his feet on the hassock. “This has been a wonderful uncomplicated day.” She leaned forward to stir the fire and made a face at the pain in her legs.
“Stiff?”
“I hurt even more than I did last time.”
“You ran harder.”
“Wait till you see me in Boston.”
“I hope to.” He stood up and walked into the little kitchen for more cocoa. “Oh wow,” she heard him say. “The sky is full of stars. You want to bundle up and go out to the beach?”
She smiled to herself and stood up. He was already holding her jacket and mittens out to her. He pulled her ski cap down over her ears and picked up a couple of blankets from the table.
The beach was right outside their front door. Janni had made an excellent choice. She’d handed Kit the keys to the cottage when she met her plane from Miami. “This is your early Christmas present,” she’d said. “Three days for you and Cole, away from the house. I figure you both need it after this weekend.”
The air was cool but not cold, and it smelled of the smoke from their fire. They spread one of the blankets on the hard sand and pulled the second over them as they stretched out under the glittering sky.
“I see Orion,” she said, pointing to the three stars of Orion’s sash.
“Very good!” He sounded impressed. “Now find the scorpion.”
She smiled in the darkness. “You can’t fool me. They’re never in the sky at the same time.” How long ago had they had that conversation? It was so fresh in her mind. “Orion’s the victor this time around.”
Secrets at the Beach House Page 34
