Ten minutes later, she was watching Sarah try on clothes and mentally giving her an extreme makeover.
“You should let me cut your hair,” she said, after Sarah had disappeared into the walk-in closet. Elizabeth dug into her dresser drawer for the shears she used to trim her bangs when she didn’t feel like looking at herself in a beauty-shop mirror. “I almost got a cosmetologists’ license, you know.”
She found the shears and looked at Sarah, who had reappeared wearing her off-white dress with the long sleeves and a low neckline. It would’ve looked a better with a push-up bra. Sarah wasn’t exactly overloaded in the boobs department.
“I used to love that dress,” she told Sarah. “About fifty pounds ago. It looks good on you. You need a different bra though.”
Sarah frowned at her reflection. “I do?”
Elizabeth grinned. Sometimes it amazed her how clueless Sarah was about things that most women didn’t have to think about. Even Lucy at fourteen was lot more savvy than Sarah. It made her feel protective toward Sarah. She needed someone to look out for her. “Seriously, you should let me cut your hair.” She moved over to tug the rubber band from Sarah’s ponytail. “Lucy does mine, it’s no big deal.”
“Yuck.” Sarah frowned as the hair fell around her shoulders. “All I need is a wart on my nose and a broomstick.”
“Stop it.” Elizabeth caught the hair and arranged it around Sarah’s face. “See?” She met Sarah’s eyes in the mirror. “If I cut off about…four or five inches, it would frame your face and look really cute.”
Sarah, still frowning at her reflection, looked doubtful.
“Come on.” Elizabeth’s fingers were itching to start. “It would make you look at least ten years younger.”
For a minute Sarah seemed to be wavering, then she shook her head and moved away from the mirror. “You’ll get it looking cute, but once I wash it, I won’t be able to do anything with it.” She grabbed the rubber band, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and grinned. “I need to control my hair,” she said, “not have it controlling me.” Then she disappeared into the closet again and came out with a black dress with spaghetti straps. “This is the other one,” she held it against herself. “But it seems…out there.”
Elizabeth, watching her, laughed. When Sarah bent over to shake off the dress, the tops of her breasts showed, and Elizabeth tried to imagine Sarah and Matt in bed together. Then she made herself look away. It was easier to imagine them the way she’d always seen them. Looking at each other in that conspiratorial way they had. We have a secret. She grabbed a hideous green shirt she’d meant to take to the Goodwill out of Sarah’s hands.
“No.”
“Why? I like it.”
“Because it does nothing for you.” She shook her head. “You are so strange sometimes, Sarah. It’s like you ace everything you do, but—”
“Girly stuff. I know.” Sarah sat on the bed. “What can I say? I’m no good at it.”
“But you don’t even try. It’s like you’re scared you’ll fail.”
“Maybe I am.” Sarah looked thoughtful. “That never really occurred to me before.”
Elizabeth picked up the black dress from the bed and held it up to herself, although she’d never fit into it in a million years. “What about Matthew?” she asked, not looking at Sarah because they’d never got onto this topic before. “I mean, I know you’re good friends and you have a lot in common, but do you…have—”
“Have I slept with him?” Sarah was still sitting on the bed. “No.”
“But you want to?”
Sarah laughed. “Yes.” And then she lay back on the bed and started laughing more. “God, this is so weird to be having this conversation.”
“No, it’s not,” Elizabeth said. “Women talk about this stuff all the time. It’s not as if I still have something with him.” She turned to look at Sarah. “You never talk to girlfriends about…dating, that kind of thing?”
“Nope.” Sarah sat up. “But you know what? After Ted died, I mean, a couple of years later, just before I came back here, I met this guy who seemed interested in me. He was a reporter and he’d come to do an article on the clinic. We got along really well and then one night, we were drinking wine and solving the world’s problems—”
“Like you and Matt,” Elizabeth said.
“Well, yes, but I wasn’t that attracted to him. It just made me feel better about myself that he seemed attracted to me.” She chewed her lip. “I would have slept with him, I’d already decided, but he had an early appointment and left. And then he went back to the States and I never heard from him again. I sent him a couple of e-mails, he knew my phone number. Nothing.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Men.”
“Has anything like that happened to you?”
“Oh, God. Let me count the times. Show me a woman it hasn’t happened to, and I’ll call her a liar. It’s just the way guys are.”
“But I didn’t know that,” Sarah said. “I mean, it hadn’t happened to me before and…what you were just saying about talking to other women? I don’t do that. So I just carried on, feeling badly about myself.”
“Aw.” Elizabeth put her arm around Sarah’s shoulder. “See, that’s why it’s good to share.”
“Thank you,” Sarah said. “Really.”
“THIS IS A GREAT HOUSE,” Sarah said after she’d finally selected a dress—the black spaghetti-strap number. Elizabeth had talked her into it, but she was also taking the off-white one, just in case.
She looked around the room—her entire apartment would have fit into one corner. One wall was an arrangement of floor-to-ceiling windows, of varying heights ranging from about ten feet to a soaring panel that reached the highest point of the cathedral ceilings. The design was clearly intended to maximize the panoramic views of water and sky and distant coastline. A massive floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace dominated another wall.
Elizabeth had gone to make cappuccino and Sarah sank into a sand-colored suede sectional which, like everything else about the house, was tasteful and obviously very expensive. Recalling Matthew’s seeming indifference to his physical space—as reflected in the anonymous jumble of his boyhood bedroom—she wondered how involved he had been in the decorating.
“We used to have so many fights over the money when we were building this place,” Elizabeth said, coming back in and setting two oversized black cappuccino cups on the glass coffee table. “When he found out what those windows cost, we didn’t speak for a week.”
Sarah sipped at the coffee beneath the froth. “Did you live here the whole time you were married?”
“No. We had it built after Lucy was born. We’d been living in a house on Peabody. I was always complaining that we needed something bigger, but Matthew was busy at the hospital and it was as if he didn’t really hear me until Lucy arrived.” She grinned. “I could pretty much buy anything as long as I could somehow make it seem it was what Lucy needed.”
Sarah thought of Matthew’s defense of Lucy on the fossil trip. I wanted my daughter to have the things I never had. Most parents felt that way, she guessed, but it saddened her to think that Matthew could be so easily manipulated and that he apparently couldn’t see that he was doing his daughter no favors. But then I don’t have kids. “He moved out after the divorce?”
“Yeah. I suggested we sell this and look for a smaller place. Lucy and I didn’t need all this room, but it was the same old story. Sometimes, even now, I walk through the rooms and instead of seeing how beautiful everything is, I can almost hear all the arguments we used to have about money.”
Sarah looked at her. “So you’d spend the money, Matthew would worry about it, but then justify it because of Lucy?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Go figure.” She got up from the couch and returned with a slip of paper. “Before I forget, I was talking to this girl who came into the restaurant. I was telling her that I have this friend who’s an incredible doctor and she’s going to start making house calls.
”
Sarah smiled. “You don’t know how much I appreciate hearing that. Actually, you’re the only one I’ve told who doesn’t think I’m out of my mind.”
“Don’t feel bad about Matthew’s attitude,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe if it was just him, but it’s Lucy and—” she waved at the living room “—all this. I mean, Lucy could live in a house half this size and be happy, but—”
“It’s the way he grew up,” Sarah said. “His dad never had anything.”
“Tell me. I remember when we first started dating, his clothes were so horrible. Polyester shirts that had been washed so many times they had these little bumpy things all over them. Wal-Mart sneakers.”
Sarah laughed. “I never even noticed.”
“It’s with Compassionate Medical Systems,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been dragging his feet about joining because he doesn’t really believe in it, but if I say it would give him more time to spend with Lucy, or if Lucy wants something he can’t afford now, that’s when he starts thinking it might not be a bad idea.”
Below them, on the street level, she heard a door slam, then the sound of feet on the wooden staircase leading up to the living room.
Elizabeth smiled. “Lucy’s home.”
Sarah arranged her features into a smile.
“Mom…” Lucy stood in the doorway, her face, as she spotted Sarah, darkening dramatically.
“Hi, sweetie,” Elizabeth said.
“Hi, Lucy,” Sarah added.
Lucy ignored them both, then left the room. “Mom, can I talk to you for a minute?” she called from the kitchen.
“Sure, go ahead,” Elizabeth replied.
“Can you come here, please?”
Elizabeth glanced at Sarah. “Be right back.”
Sarah tipped her head back against the sofa’s plush upholstery. From the kitchen, she heard Elizabeth’s low voice and then, loud and shrill enough that it might have been intended for her to hear, “Daddy’s going to Victoria with…her. And I have to stay with Grandma. It’s not fair, I hate everything.”
ON THE AFTERNOON of his overnight trip with Sarah, Matthew left the hospital two hours earlier than usual with the intent of helping Lucy understand that Sarah in no way posed a threat to the love he felt for her. He’d rehearsed the words so many times he worried that by the time he actually said them, they’d sound rehearsed and insincere. It was ridiculous, of course, that Lucy could doubt him in any way.
On the way over to Pearl’s, she refused to speak to him.
When Pearl opened the front door, Lucy burst into tears and retreated to the room she’d be using. Pearl took his face between both her hands. “Go.”
“I hate leaving her like this,” he said as they stood in hallway of Pearl’s little cottage. From the bedroom, the sounds of Lucy sobbing as though her heart would break. “Maybe—”
“You do that, Matthew Cameron, and I’ll throttle you with my bare hands.”
Despite himself, Matthew grinned. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Pearl took him by the arm and steered him toward the front door. “You just go and have a good time. She’ll be fine.”
Matthew nodded. That she was right didn’t make him feel any better. Didn’t change the fact that he alone had the power to make his daughter happy again.
“I want you to promise me you won’t think about her for the next two days,” Pearl said.
Matthew grinned. “I’ll do my best.”
“Sarah’s a good girl.”
“Pearl, I don’t want a good girl.”
She smacked his arm. “Buy her some flowers. Women like that.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“ROSES?” SARAH SAID when she opened the front door to find Matthew standing there with a pale pink bouquet. “So this really is a date?”
“As opposed to?”
“I don’t know.” It was the first time she’d seen him since they’d kissed and now everything was different. Different and difficult acting in the same jokey, good-pals way they always had when all she really wanted was to tear off his clothes. “A fig?”
He considered. “So as opposed to dating you, that would mean I’m figging you?”
“That sounds rather obscene.” She led him inside. “But not altogether unpleasant. Anyway, I think the term dating has become…well, dated.”
“Only old farts like us use it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Watch who you’re calling an old fart.” She filled a drinking glass—the only thing in the apartment that vaguely resembled a vase—with water and attempted to arrange the roses. “I’m two years younger than you.”
“A veritable child.” He came up behind her, nuzzled her neck.
She caught a whiff of the perfume she’d dabbed on, felt the beat of her heart. Then she relaxed in the warmth of Matthew’s body for a moment before turning to look at him. “You look very nice, by the way.”
“So do you. I didn’t realize you had legs.”
“Oh, the dress.” She glanced down at herself. At the last moment, she’d decided against Elizabeth’s castoffs and splurged at Port Hamilton’s only boutique, a pricey little place frequented mostly by tourists. “Wait.” Hips swaying, her version of a model parading down the catwalk, she strutted across the room. When she turned, Matthew was leaning against the counter, smiling.
“Zees?” She gestured at her dress. “A little number I picked up in Paris, dahling. Terribly chic, non?”
“Yeah.” He pulled her hard against him. “Terribly.”
“Just trying to do my girly girl best,” she said.
And then they looked at each other and started laughing.
“I’d rather stick a lizard down your top,” Matthew said.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Or we could go kayaking,” he suggested.
“So this thing. Us. This date—”
“It takes some adjustment. I think I missed most of Lucy’s play. I mean, I was there, sitting in the auditorium, but my head was somewhere else.”
She reached up to kiss him and he put his arms around her and they kissed until it seemed she would melt into him and nothing else mattered, and the rest of the world and everyone in it could just fall away and—
His cell phone rang.
He broke away to look at it. “Lucy.” Indecision played across his face, then he put the phone away. “Let’s go.”
HALF AN HOUR LATER, as they stood in the chill night air waiting for the ferry, Matthew felt his cell phone, which he’d slipped into his overcoat pocket, vibrate. One arm around Sarah’s shoulder, he debated what to do. He’d considered leaving it in the car but compromised by turning off the ring. Out on the water, a splash of light appeared as the ferry made the turn into the harbor.
“Six minutes,” Sarah said.
“Six minutes and thirty-five seconds,” he countered. They’d both seen it cross the straits so often that timing was predictable. The crowd started milling around them. His phone continued to vibrate.
“Just to show how accommodating I’ve become,” Sarah said, leaning into him, “I’m going to give you the last word. Even though I know it’s actually thirty-four seconds. And by the way, you look incredibly sexy.”
He laughed. “Come on.”
“I’ve always thought you looked sexy,” she said. “I never had the guts to admit it.”
Matthew decided to ignore the phone.
Sarah kissed his neck.
“Keep that up,” he said, “and…I will stick a lizard down your back.”
The phone, which has stopped vibrating, started up again. “Hold on.” He removed his arm from around Sarah’s neck, fished the phone from his pocket. Lucy’s cell-phone number. He felt Sarah watching him. “You know what?” He turned the phone off, took Sarah’s arm and they joined the foot passengers filing down the narrow walkway to get on the ferry. And tried not to think of what Lucy was doing at that very moment. Probably
crying as she waited for him to call back to say he’d be there for her.
MATTHEW HAD MADE reservations at Dickens, a restaurant on the Victoria waterfront. All timbered ceilings, cozy nooks and waiters in period costumes. They’d walked there from the ferry, the night cool and sparkling with light, the wind in their faces. The tables were set with pewter dishes and flowers and over Matthew’s shoulder Sarah could see the lights along the waterfront and the illuminated spires of the Empress Hotel. He looked great, broad-shouldered and handsome. She felt terrific in her stylish little black dress. Life was good
After a waiter brought the wine, Matthew raised his glass and smiled across the table. “To…what?” He thought for a moment. “New beginnings.”
“New beginnings.” She raised her glass and clinked his. “Not to ruin your toast or anything, but aren’t beginnings new by definition? Could you have an old beginning?”
“Probably not.” He set his glass down. “I don’t know why I said that. It just came to me.”
“Although I guess you could begin something,” she amended, “a discussion, say, but it’s not really new, just a continuation of the one you had the day before.”
“Or a relationship,” Matthew said. “It’s a new beginning to…” He shook his head, reached across the table and took her face in both hands. “Damn it. Why can’t you just smile prettily and clink your glass and not tax my brain?”
She smiled prettily. “Because that wouldn’t be me.”
“Okay, you make a toast.”
She raised a glass. “To us. All grown up.”
“To us,” he said. “All grown up.”
“It’s funny,” she said after a moment. “I’m looking at the Empress and trying to remember the last time I was there and I’m pretty sure it was when my mother took me for my fourteenth birthday. We had afternoon tea. The china cups were so thin you could see the tea through them and there was a silver tray of cucumber sandwiches, which I actually hated. Plus, I was upset because you were hanging around Elizabeth constantly and that’s all I could think about. Finally I told Rose I had a stomachache and we took the next ferry back.”
Baby Doctors Page 11
