by Loree Lough
He’d probably pay for it tomorrow, but at least he’d have a good night’s sleep first.
Yet again he hoped his Lillie-stuffed brain wouldn’t conjure dreams of her...
CHAPTER FIVE
TODAY MARKED LILLIE’S sixth visit to Children’s Oncology, and she’d settled into an efficient routine that made the most of her allotted hours. Adjusting to the sight of gaunt, hollow-eyed kids attached to tubes and monitors hadn’t been nearly as easy. The children faced fear and sadness all day, every day—from their parents, friends and relatives, when looking at one another—so she worked hard to stay bubbly and upbeat. She’d become a volunteer to atone for her sins, and it wouldn’t count if her demeanor added to their suffering.
“Daisies are my favorite flowers,” Sally said.
“Mine, too.” Lillie dipped her brush into a dab of yellow tempera and painted tiny random circles on the girl’s forearm. Switching brushes, she surrounded each with bright white petals.
The child-sized plastic playroom chair squeaked when the girl giggled.
“It’s tough to sit still when someone is tickling you with a paintbrush, isn’t it?”
Sally squinted in her attempt to exercise self-control. “Just a little.” Then, “But you know what? I think you’re so smart, painting on kids’ arms instead of their faces. We don’t need a mirror to see the artwork!”
“Yeah, every now and then I have a pretty good idea!”
“You’re better than most of the face painters who come in here.”
Lillie smiled. “Well,” she began, “it’s still nice when people come to visit and try to make you happy, right? Besides, we can’t all be van Gogh, y’know.”
Sally gave it a moment’s thought as, from across the room, Jason said, “Who’s that?”
Lillie faked shock. “Who’s van Gogh! Why, he’s only my most favorite painter, ever!” Lillie wiped her brush and dipped it in a blob of green. “Tell you what, when it’s your turn, I’ll find a couple of his paintings on the internet so you can see how beautiful they are.”
“Does this Go guy live in Baltimore?” he wanted to know.
“It’s van Gogh, you big silly!” Sally groaned and slapped a hand over her eyes. “No, he doesn’t live in Baltimore. He was born in Holland. In 1853. I know, because I wrote a report on him, and got an A+.”
“Pa-ar-don me.” Jason sniffed. “So Lillie, can you paint Spider-Man?”
“You bet your Legos I can!”
What kind of crazy luck was it that there were two boys on the ward named Jason? More curious still, one that had asked her to call him Jase. Would she ever escape the memory of what she and her Jase had shared?
“I love my daisy chain! I can’t wait until my dad gets here so I can show him.” Sally held up her arm—the one without the IV board attached to it—and admired the flowers connected by curlicues Lillie had painted from Sally’s wrist to the bend in her elbow. “Isn’t Lillie a great artist, Jason?”
The boy smirked again. “We’ll see after she finishes my Spider-Man.”
Lillie carried her supplies to the table where he’d built a tiny fort out of Lego bricks, then unpocketed her phone. “Want me to look up some of van Gogh’s works?”
“That’s okay. It’ll give me something to do tonight when I can’t sleep.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that the casual observer would have overlooked its true meaning. Lillie’s heart ached for these kids, here because of cancer, heart or lung disease, accidents, burns, even parental abuse. Earlier, she’d painted a Pokémon character on a three-year-old who’d swallowed drain cleaner. Her limited knowledge of the game made it tough to figure out which character he wanted, but the way his eyes lit up when he saw Pikachu in her notebook of illustrations made it worth every painstaking hour it had taken to create the samples.
Young Jason rolled up his sleeve as Sally scooted her IV pole up to the table. “Can I watch?”
“You have eyes, don’t ya?” he said.
She looked at Lillie and sighed. “Boys. Why must they always be so difficult?”
“I have a brother, so I know what you mean,” Lillie agreed.
“Yeah, well, I have two sisters, so I know that boys are nowhere near as difficult as girls.” Jason leaned forward as Lillie opened her paint kit. “Why do you keep your stuff in a tackle box?”
“I had a regular paint kit once, but it was too small. This one holds everything I need. Brushes in this cubby,” she explained, pointing, “nice deep bottom for tubes and bottles of paint, a place for cotton swabs and paper towels and even plastic cups to hold the rinse water. There’s even a space for my palette.” She lifted a tray and showed them.
“Pretty cool,” he said with a nod of approval.
Her mouth went dry, remembering that it was a gift from her Jase, who’d told her that if she intended to keep walking to the end of the dock to paint seascapes and sunsets, she needed something more sensible than a backpack to transport her supplies.
“Thanks, a friend gave it to me.” She felt a bit dishonest saying it. Yes, Jase had been a friend. The best she’d ever had. But he’d been so far more than that. Though she hoped she could revive all they’d shared, Lillie suspected she’d have to teach herself to settle for his friendship—if he even wanted that much contact with her.
She squirted dollops of red, blue, black and white on her palette, and using a thin line brush, proceeded to draw the superhero’s outline on little Jason’s forearm.
Sally, elbows on the table and chin resting on her fists, said, “How many kids do you have, Lillie?”
“None.” It hurt to admit it. Back in college, while her friends were spouting the “I don’t need a man to complete me” mantra, she’d dreamed of a Victorian-style farmhouse filled with the sounds of exuberant children. She’d wondered then why couldn’t a modern woman have both. These days, as she watched those same friends struggle to find a happy medium between motherhood and their careers, Lillie still clung to the belief that, with the right man, she could balance the white-picket-fence life with a fulfilling job.
“Aw, don’t look so sad,” Sally said. “My mother was thirty when I was born. You still have time to be a mom.”
Jason said, “How ’bout a husband? Got one of those?”
She could have, if she hadn’t allowed pills to rule her life. “No, I’m afraid not.”
His pale face crinkled in a frown. “I don’t get it. You’re pretty and smart and funny, and you can sing and paint. Are you crazy or something? Is that what scares men off?”
“Jason!” Sally scolded. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say.” She sighed heavily. “Not everybody wants to be married, you know.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “My mom is always saying that my aunt Charlie is crazy, and that’s why she isn’t married. I love my aunt Charlie! She’s fun and pretty, too!”
One of the hardest lessons she’d learned, working with these children, was how mature and intuitive they were. Not surprising, she supposed, considering everything they coped with on a daily basis, from surgeries to treatments to trips to the imaging center.
Jason looked at Sally and blushed. “You know how much I want to get married.” Facing Lillie, he added, “My mom wants grandchildren. It’s practically all she talks about these days. It’s like she forgets that I’m not her only kid.”
Sally gave that a moment’s thought. “Maybe she thinks if she finds a good enough reason, you’ll keep fighting until you’re cured.”
“Maybe.” He blew a stream of air through his teeth. “But what if Doctor Kay told her something he didn’t tell me?”
Sally got up, rolled her IV poll to the other side of the table and, placing a hand on his shoulder said, “You’ll be fine. It’s hard for parents to watch all the stuff they do to us in here. They want it to be over for us
, fast.”
“Then I think we should tell them we want it even more than they do.”
Sally returned to her seat, the wheels of the tall aluminum pole squealing in protest. “Oh, I think they know.”
The children sat in pensive silence, watching Lillie put the finishing touches on Jason’s Spider-Man. She started humming quietly, more to keep from bursting into tears than to comfort or entertain them. It never ceased to amaze her how caring and intelligent these kids were. With maturity came empathy that allowed them to better understand others’ reactions to their illnesses. And it shamed her, because if she’d possessed a fraction of their courage, she never would have grown dependent on—
“You paint so fast,” Jason said, displaying his forearm. “This other volunteer paints ugly roses and he’s so slow.”
Lillie repeated what she’d said to Sally, earlier. “But still, it was nice of him to come here, right? I mean, he could have stayed home and played cards with his wife or something, you know?”
“Oh, yeah? Well, if he’s so nice, why didn’t he come back?”
In the short while she’d been volunteering, three of the kids she’d done painting for had died. Despite the best efforts of the staff, their futures had been unpredictable, at best. Not an easy thing to accept, even for seasoned doctors and nurses.
“People like him,” Jason went on, frowning, “are here to get high fives from their friends. They might fool those people, but they can’t fool me. It’s mean, using sick kids to make other people think they’re good.”
The longer he talked, the more agitated the boy became. Lillie searched her mind for the words that would ease his distress.
“Sometimes, grown-ups let others down. It isn’t easy admitting that, but it’s true.”
He fell silent for several minutes, and she used the time to add a few embellishments to his painting.
“Can you do Batman?” he said, pulling up his other sleeve.
“Sure.”
Lillie wasted no time starting the superhero’s outline. Jason’s ire opened Lillie’s eyes to something she hadn’t considered before: Did her siblings, the guys in the band, even her parents, think that her coming here was a show of some sort, acted out so that she’d look better in their eyes? Was that what Jase thought?
Sally’s voice broke into her thoughts.
“Don’t mind him, Lillie. Even his mom says he’s too intense.”
“Only about fake people,” he defended. “I don’t like ’em. That guy was the biggest faker ever.”
“But we like you a lot, Lillie,” Sally said.
“’Cause you’re not fake.”
Or was she? Lillie’s heart hammered as she said, “I like you guys a lot, too.”
There were plenty of reasons to admire them. While fighting tirelessly to get healthy, they rarely cried or complained, even when the nurses administered shots, changed bandages and inserted fresh IV lines into exhausted veins.
“You forgot Batman’s emblem,” Jason pointed out.
“Oh, my gosh! What was I thinking?” Lillie added the gold oval to the superhero’s chest, then painted a bat silhouette inside it. “There. How’s that?”
“It’s perfect.” Beaming, he studied the painting. “Just like you.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. In Lillie’s mind, she was about as far from perfect as a human could get.
* * *
JASE HELD UP a bright red, shoebox-sized birdhouse. When he saw the spotlight’s glare reflected in the lacquered coating, he tilted it slightly.
Trina, the show host, ran a fingertip across the top of it, designed to look like the thatched roof of an Irish cottage. “Aren’t these just lovely! I have the green and yellow in my backyard.”
The camera panned the row of birdhouses on the shelf below the display counter as she added, “Today only, we’ll send you one for the special low price of $29.99.”
Now, as the camera zeroed in on Jase’s smiling face, he said, “Order two and the shipping and handling is free.”
Half an hour later, alone in his dressing room, he pulled up the latest stats on his laptop. It had been a good morning, real good, as evidenced by the show’s sales chart. He clicked another link and displayed the numbers from Burton’s Manufacturing.
“Oh, great. Just great,” he grumbled, pacing as he pecked the manager’s number into his cell phone.
“Dan. It’s Jase. What’s up with the stock on the birdhouses? I’m stuck here in Florida another two days, and the computer says you only have 200 left on the shelves.”
“Let me check.”
He listened as Dan’s keyboard clicked. “We have 250, actually. And we’ve got a line set up to crank out another thousand first thing tomorrow.”
Jase noticed that the producer had placed a basket of fruit beside a reproduction of Andrews’s Field of Daisies. Great. Just what he needed. Another reminder of Lillie. He plucked a grape from the bunch.
“How soon will they be ready?” he said around it.
“Day after tomorrow, if we’re lucky.”
He turned his back to the painting. “If you’re lucky? Look, Dan, we sold a couple thousand during the morning show alone. I go on again in two hours to hawk serving platters, but the birdhouses are on again at eight. How soon can you deliver...once you get the numbers, that is?”
“We’ll double the numbers, run some overtime if we have to. But you know what Rich is gonna say...”
That Colette’s Crafts wasn’t the only company on the Burton books, for starters. Jase saw no reason to point out that their work orders had come along just in time to save Rich from Chapter 11 proceedings. Yet.
He didn’t mind the corporate stuff. Contracts, negotiations, new contacts. The on-air stuff? It was a necessary evil. The best he could say about it was that it reminded him a little of being onstage, doing what he loved best, singing with Lillie.
With Lillie? Where had that come from? He slapped a palm to the back of his neck.
“Tell Rich not to sweat it,” he all but barked. “He’ll get paid, same as always.” He hit another tab on the computer screen. “Tell me about the casserole dishes. We’re showcasing those day after tomorrow, and you only have 500 in stock.”
“I’ll fire up a second line.”
“Okay. Good. Let’s set up a day next week to talk. I can’t come back down here unless I’m sure we have plenty of inventory.”
“Right. I’ll have Daisy fiddle with the calendar and shoot you an email with a couple of choices.”
His head was pounding by the time the call ended. No surprise there. He’d skipped breakfast, and nothing on the food cart had looked particularly appetizing. Jase snapped a banana from the bunch in the basket, taking care not to look at the picture.
“You’re ridiculous,” he muttered, peeling the fruit as he made his way to the parking lot. All the way to the hotel, he thought about the print. It was a copy of a masterpiece, of water lilies of all things. Why had it reminded him of her!
He didn’t want to think about Lillie anymore. What he wanted was a burger. Fries, smothered in catsup. A hot shower and eight hours of sleep.
Once at the hotel, he pushed the key card into its slot. Jase could almost taste the cold beer he’d ask room service to send up with the food.
He opened the door, and there in the middle of the room stood Whitney, looking like she’d stepped out of a fashion magazine in her form-fitting black dress, strappy heels and earrings that nearly touched her shoulders.
“Surprise,” she said, gesturing toward the candlelit table beside her. “I know how you are when you’re working, skipping meals and whatnot, so I ordered you a steak and a baked potato.” She lifted a silvery lid from one of the plates. “And a Caesar salad, your favorite.”
His favorite beer, too, he noticed as the candle flame flickered
behind the golden liquid.
“Happy to see me?”
She hadn’t moved, unless he counted the broadening of her smile.
“Sure.” He closed the door, tossed the key card onto the dresser. “You look real nice.”
Whitney took several steps closer, stopping just out of arm’s reach. And then she frowned.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure,” he said again, and loosened his tie. “Just tired. And hungry.” He draped the tie over the doorknob, crossed the room and gave her a hug. “You didn’t get anything for yourself?”
“I ate earlier.” She pulled out his chair. “You should eat before everything is ice cold.”
Jase sat, and she did, too.
“So how’d things go today?”
While he devoured the meal, Jase told her how many birdhouse units he’d sold. Added that he’d had to call the warehouse, put the screws to them about getting more stock on the shelves. And that he’d come this close to reminding the manager who’d saved the company’s bacon.
“What stopped you?”
“If I’m going to bite somebody’s head off, it oughta be Rich’s.”
Elbows on the table, she stared at her hands. And rubbed her ring finger.
“I get it. One of those ‘choose your battles well’ kind of things.”
Jase had a pretty good idea what had prompted her subconscious gesture. Why did it seem that the more he tried to focus on Whitney, the more he thought of Lillie?
“Something like that.” He pushed back from the table and patted his stomach. “That was good. Just what the doctor ordered. Thanks, Whit.”
“I enjoy doing things for you.”
And it showed. He appreciated every thoughtful thing she’d ever done for him...helping him choose shirts and ties to wear on the show, making sure he had a meal, worrying that he was spending too much time alone...
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything.”
“Why are you here?”
The wide-eyed look of surprise made it clear she hadn’t been expecting him to say that.
