by Susan Wiggs
“Yeah, well, maybe you are wrong about me.”
Sam got out a bottle of disinfectant. “This’ll sting.”
“Ouch. Hey, man.” Cody tensed the muscles in his arm.
“Maybe you’d better choose your friends more carefully. You could use a few more responsibilities—”
“Hey—”
“—don’t interrupt. You screwed up, and there are consequences. If you thought the work around here was hard before, you—”
Cody snatched his hand away before Sam was finished. “You’re not my frigging jailer.” He stood up fast, his chair legs scraping the floor. “What do you want with me?” he demanded.
Sam didn’t have an answer for that. Did he want a kid, or was it a concept he liked better in the abstract? No matter, he told himself. The reality was, he had a kid—and a difficult one at that. He had no idea if he knew how to be a good father. He picked up a length of gauze. “Let me wrap that wound.”
Cody grabbed it from him. “I’ll take care of it myself.” He backed away, pausing in the kitchen doorway. “I know what you want with my mom, and I can’t do anything about that, but stay the hell away from me.”
Saturday
Chapter 41
It seemed like half the population of Missoula found some reason to stop by Gavin’s room. They were timid at first, asking if he needed anything, making small talk. As the week wore on and he was moved from the SICU to a private room, their numbers increased. Nurses, aides, orderlies, residents, volunteers. The timidity fell away and then finally, on a rush of hard-won courage, they started asking for his autograph.
The mistake had been in giving out that first one, to a brown-eyed aide who looked a little like Carolyn.
“You remind me of the last woman who dumped me,” he said, scrawling his signature on the back of a work-order pad. “No, on second thought, you’re prettier.”
She must have alerted the whole ward, maybe the whole floor, because all through the week he had to deal with furtive fans. He’d given the hospital strict instructions that the transplant was to be kept private, but strict instructions only went so far.
“They’re wearing me out, Doc,” he said to Maggie Kehr when she stopped in. She wore a shamrock in her lapel and a little leprechaun clinging to her scope. “You’ve got to let me go home and get some rest.”
She smiled down at the chart she’d been writing on. “I want to keep you at least a week.”
“It’s St. Paddy’s Day, fer chrissake,” he said in an exaggerated brogue. “I’ve been lying around on my poor arse long enough.”
“A week, Gavin.”
“Aren’t you the one who said it’s the best kidney transplant you’ve ever seen?”
“Yes, but—”
“Didn’t you say we set some sort of record, getting the kidney to work? Didn’t you remove the catheter forty-eight hours sooner than you thought you could?”
“I did, Gavin—”
“Didn’t I just take the healthiest piss you ever saw a man take?”
“Now that,” she said, “is debatable.”
“Only because guys piss for you all the time.”
“One of the great perks of my specialty.”
“I’m going home, Doc. With or without your blessing, I’m checking out when Michelle leaves here.” She was being discharged today, and he was bound and determined to go with her. There was something vaguely horrifying about being left behind while his daughter went back to Crystal City. If he stayed, he’d feel like the loser in some battle or race.
“Never say whining doesn’t work,” Dr. Kehr said, signing a sheaf of forms.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a free man, Gavin. You’ve got the luck of the Irish on your side.”
“I love you, Maggie, I really do.”
“You’re an old coot. Take care of that kidney now. They’re a little hard to come by.”
“My body is now Fort Knox.”
“Just make sure that body doesn’t miss a single follow-up appointment or a single pill. A pharmaceutical therapist will stop in to go over your meds and your daily log with you.”
“Again, huh?” He didn’t argue. From the very start, they’d impressed on him the importance of taking the antirejection medications. With a decided lack of sympathy, Maggie had warned him that the drugs would make him itch and sweat and suffer from impotence. He’d probably gain weight, and it would show in the cheeks and gut.
Not a pretty picture. Still, given the alternative, he’d settle for night sweats and chipmunk cheeks. But if this didn’t work and he died, what the hell. It had brought him and Michelle together. It was up to them to find the things that mattered. Maybe they hadn’t quite found that just yet, but they would. He knew they would.
The discharge was nicely choreographed so that he and Michelle were both wheeled into the main lobby at the same time from opposite wings. Smiling volunteers gave them green carnations for St. Patrick’s Day. Gavin looked around suspiciously, thinking maybe the media had managed to barge in. He’d hate having this moment captured by some shutterbug who’d get five grand for the photo.
But what a moment it was.
Michelle. His daughter. She had always been incredibly beautiful, blond and luminous, with a way of looking at the world that was completely original, completely unique. It was something he had seen even in the crayoned Father’s Day cards she’d dutifully sent him as a small child. Seated in the wheelchair, smiling at him, she touched his heart.
He felt his throat fill with thick emotion, and the acting skill that usually came so naturally deserted him. He held out his hand. “Thank you, honey,” he said, suddenly reaching forward to touch her cheek. “You know, you’re the best thing I ever did.”
For a moment she just blinked at him, almost comically speechless. They’d seen each other now and then through the week, visiting, talking quietly, but this was different. They had done what they’d set out to do. They were going home now.
She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “All set, Daddy?”
“Yes. I want to tell you, I haven’t felt this good in two years. I’m not sick anymore. No matter what I’m doing or thinking, I just stop in the middle of it and say to myself, ‘I’m not sick anymore.’ ”
“That’s the point.” Her smiled widened. “Ready?”
“Past ready.” He signaled to the orderly pushing the chair and put on an English accent. “Driver, to the elevators.”
“Feels good to be going home.”
Gavin wondered what she meant. “Home” as in Blue Rock, or “home” as in Seattle? He didn’t know much about her life there, had only met two of her friends. Natalie was great. Brad Lovell was… adequate. The sort of solid guy you’d want for your daughter. Except that you wanted a guy to look at your daughter with worship, pure and simple. Not pride of ownership, which was what Gavin had detected in Brad’s manner.
Gavin’s burgundy Cadillac pulled up beneath the awning. He expected his foreman, Jake, to get out, but instead, it was Cody. He sent Michelle a questioning look, narrowing his gaze suspiciously. “Did you know about this?”
She laughed. “Uh-huh.”
He gave a low whistle. “I think I’d rather wheel this chair home.”
“Be nice, Dad. The drive’s nothing. A straight shot up the highway. It hasn’t snowed, so the roads are clear. And he’s worked really hard. Sam said he was practicing all week.”
Gavin saw her knuckles tighten on the arms of her chair. “So how did the week go, him staying with Sam?”
She watched the suitcases being loaded into the trunk. “I don’t know. He hasn’t said much.” Finally, she turned to him. “Daddy, what if he does better with Sam than he did with me?”
Gavin wished he was close enough to touch her. “It’s not a competition.” It was all he had time to say, when she needed so much more from him. She needed the years he couldn’t give back to her, when pride and anger had kept them apart. “We’
ll be all right,” he said, and vowed to make it so even if it killed him. “We’re going to be fine.”
The doors swished open, and out they went. Cody looked a little out of place, but very determined behind the wheel. Probably gave the kid a charge, driving Gavin’s Caddy. Something about driving two people who were full of stitches and drugs probably made him feel particularly important.
“Here goes nothing.” Gavin pushed himself up out of the chair.
The electric doors opened, and he stepped out into the bracing cold air. He wore a shirt and slacks that hadn’t been cut to fit over a dialysis bag, and his blood sang. He wasn’t nervous about the kid’s driving. How could he be? Something magical had happened to him in the hospital, and now he was going home.
“I do love the occasional miracle,” he said.
Sunday
Chapter 42
Cody was pretending he wasn’t nervous about school in the morning, Michelle observed that evening. It made her nuts that she’d been so out of it the past week, unable to be there for him every second, helping him through the ordeal of starting a new school. She had been there for every moment of his life, big and small, but last week, he’d been on his own.
And—wonder of wonders—the world had not come to an end. She was thankful he’d survived that first week, but she could tell he was anxious about the days to come. She knew that look, the shifting of his eyes, the jiggling of his foot against the chair as he ate dinner—a feast prepared by a beaming Tadao. They had eaten in the huge den of the main house, with Gavin and Michelle reclining like Romans on sofas. She had asked Cody if he liked his classes, if he’d made any friends, how he’d liked staying with Sam, but he’d only given her one-syllable answers. That was all she’d heard all week. She’d questioned him about the bandage on his hand, but all he’d said was he’d cut himself working at Sam’s.
Gavin drank a glass of wine, his first since he was diagnosed, and he got almost teary-eyed as he tasted the Jordan Cabernet. With both Tadao and Michelle supervising, he took his evening meds and noted them in his daily log. Though he didn’t whisper a word of fatigue, Gavin excused himself to go to bed early.
After an extralong shower, Cody went to his room, leaving Michelle lying on the sofa, fiddling with the TV remote. She was oddly manic and restless on her first night away from the hospital. She felt fragile and vulnerable from the lingering pain of an invasive procedure. She worried about bumping into things, worried about sleeping, worried about her father, worried about how she’d feel seeing Sam again.
But when she looked out and saw the snow begin to fall, her worries seemed to have no more substance than the weightless snowflakes settling over the yard. That was the gift that had been given back to her the morning of the surgery. She hadn’t recognized her old friend at first, but it was just as Joseph Rain had said, so many years ago. The gift comes to you in secret. If your heart and your mind are not open to inspiration, then it passes you by.
Now, finally, in the midwinter of her life, she understood. It was the space she had glimpsed between the two parting curtains. That was the offer. What she did with it was up to her.
She didn’t allow herself to think. Ignoring her doctor’s orders, she bundled up and walked through the blowing snow to the small dwelling at the end of the compound, the studio she had abandoned seventeen years before. There, she turned on the heat, rubbed her hands together, and took a deep, steadying breath. Physically, she felt dead tired. But she couldn’t quell the restless need inside her. Time enough later for sleep, she decided.
Natalie—bless her—had set up stretched and gessoed Belgian linen canvases and laid out new paints and brushes. But even if these had been the crudest of supplies, it wouldn’t have mattered, because at last she was ready. She lowered the legs of the easel and positioned it in front of the old red couch so she didn’t have to stand up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and began.
She worked at a fever pitch from a vision that had been hidden inside her for years. It was a painful emergence, a birthing of sorts. For someone so conditioned to look outside herself, to emulate the hard lines and precise angles of that which could be seen and quickly grasped by someone paging through a magazine, it was a difficult transition. But for once that didn’t stop her. After enduring what she had endured this past week, nothing could seem hard.
The transplant, confronting mortality, and coming face-to-face with her past had forced her hand. From her slumbering subconscious emerged the inspiration, the sense of awe and wonder, that had once meant everything to her.
The shapes and colors of her soul exploded onto the canvas. She didn’t think, didn’t evaluate. She just worked. And inside her, something happened. Something magical and true and luminous. She felt free, racing above the earth, elation pouring over her, out through her hands and her heart, becoming something wholly original, wholly her own.
She had no sense of time passing. She simply sank into a strange beta state where nothing mattered except the painting, where the colors and emotions came from, and what the images were. The urge was sensual, predatory, dangerous, seductive, and in a leap of faith, she gave herself to it utterly.
When Sam McPhee walked into the studio, she should have been surprised, but she was not. It made a terrible, wonderful sense that he would come here alone, searching for her.
He stood in the dim foyer, his shoulders dusted with new snow, his face unsmiling, his eyes filled with a look she recognized from long, long ago.
“I saw the light on,” he said.
Suddenly nervous, she grabbed a linseed rag and wiped her hands. “I… couldn’t sleep.”
“You sure as hell ought to be. You’re recovering from surgery—”
“I’m all right, Sam. Don’t doctor me. I’ve had enough doctors hovering over me, okay? I’m on the couch, see?”
“You’re supposed to be flat on your back.”
“That would make it hard to paint.”
“Worked for Michelangelo.” He studied her, and she braced herself for further argument, but he didn’t pursue it. Taking off his coat, he hung it on a hook behind the door. He wore jeans and a thick flannel shirt.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“Am I?” One Christmas, she had bought Brad a shirt exactly like that. It was still in his closet, still folded with the pins in it.
“Michelle. Are you feeling okay?”
It was a question from Sam the doctor. Not Sam the ex-boyfriend. Not Sam the father of her child.
“Yes.” She settled back on the old sofa. “I’m fine, really. My father and I are fine. We had a nice dinner to celebrate coming home. And I’m glad you came over. I want to thank you for keeping Cody last week.”
He lifted the corner of his mouth in a half grin. “He’s a barrel of laughs. We’re going to have to do something about him being so accident-prone.”
We. Did he really mean that? “He never did explain how he hurt his hand.”
He tucked his thumbs in his back pockets. “Barn chores,” he said dismissively.
“It was sweet of you to take care of him, Sam.”
“I didn’t do it to be sweet.” He crossed the room and sat down beside her, very close, and the unique smell of him was achingly familiar. He touched her chin. “So you’re fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Been painting.”
“Yes.” She held her breath while he regarded the tall, spattered easel with the halogen lights shining down. “It’s not finished.”
She watched him, still not daring to breathe. She saw the impact of the painting go through him as if he’d touched an electrified fence. His arms, legs, shoulders, neck stiffened; then he turned to her quickly.
“Wow,” he said.
“Is that good wow or bad wow?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Sam, the paint’s still wet. I barely know my own name.”
He held out his hand. She hesitated, then took it, studying the broad canvas. S
he saw an abstraction of pure emotion. It was no use. She had no objectivity.
“It’s the first time in years I’ve done a painting that wasn’t for work,” she admitted.
“It’s about damned time, Michelle.”
“But what do you think, Sam?”
“Hell, I’m no art expert. To me, it’s amazing. I look at this, and it makes me think differently. Makes me want to stare, fall into it, I don’t know. I don’t have the vocabulary or the expertise.”
She tried to see the picture as he saw it. The composition was classical, straight out of Art 101. But so were van Gogh’s compositions. The principal motif in the middle came from her vision—the mysterious space between the parted curtains. Within that space dwelled an abstract study of color, light and shadow. She saw pain and passion and depth, and realized she was looking at a painting that expressed precisely what she wanted it to express. Whether or not that had any particular value didn’t matter.
“You know what?” she said suddenly. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s good or not. It’s the painting that came out of me.”
“I think it’s incredible.”
“Do you think it could be the drugs? I’m on Percocet.”
“It’s not the drugs, Michelle.”
They sat together for long, silent moments, staring at the painting. She felt drained in a good way—the tension had flowed through her. She was the crucible. All the feelings, emotions, good and bad, had melted down inside her and then emerged in a new form, a thing of power and beauty, this painting.
She looked out the window, weighing her thoughts. What if she asked him about Cody’s week? Then Sam would know Cody had barely spoken to her. But then she remembered her father’s words: It’s not a competition.
“What?” Sam asked, regarding her reflection in the blackened window. “Are you all right?”
“Just… thinking. I’d like to hear how last week went from your perspective. With you and Cody.”
