by Ella James
I tell him more, sharing everything with him except for Hunter. Not that there’s anything to share. I haven’t seen him since that night at his vineyard, and my thoughts about him pull me in two directions. The main one, though, is interest. I still want him, still think of him, and I’ve decided his allure is that he’s not available. Hunter is a fantasy. And fantasies are safe. And yes, I need more therapy.
Putting Hunter out of my mind, I play some Grateful Dead on my iPhone, and then I use a straw to dip a little Sunkist into his mouth. He loves Sunkist, and I firmly believe that he can taste it. I put some strawberry lip balm on his lips and tuck the covers around his broad shoulders. The sheets and blankets are all from my room, where he was staying at my mom’s place. I want him to have things that smell familiar.
When I get up to leave, fifteen minutes after the arbitrary deadline assigned by Nurse Bitchface, I kiss him on the cheek. It’s selfish to play on the feelings he might have had for me, but I need him to wake up.
“I’ve got to go and read some Victor Hugo, but I’ll try to come back tomorrow. I want to hear about your next N-therapy session.” N-therapy is where they use some big, swanky machine this clinic patented to stimulate Cross’s brain. They talk to him while they wave a wand around his head, and supposedly that helps. It must, because people with brain injures come from all over the place to get treated here. In my mind, this is the very least his awful parents can do.
I stuff my hands into the pockets of my coat, feeling sad again. “I don’t want to pressure you, Cross, but I really do need you back. I miss you.” Tears fill my eyes, and on impulse, I lean down and kiss his cheek again.
When his eyes flutter, I think I’m seeing things. As soon as I realize those are really his blue eyes, I feel my throat constrict, like I’m going to get sick or cry.
“Cross?” My stinging eyes cling to his.
I almost faint as Cross blinks. His eyes tear, and he makes a face like he’s tasting something really sour. I feel something tickle my abs, and I realize he’s grabbing my shirt. I back up, gaping at him. Laughing. “Oh my God, Cross! Hi!”
His lips part, and I can see he’s trying to speak. I look down at myself and start to cry as I see his loose grasp on my shirt. My heart is beating so fast as I clasp his hand.
“Are you okay?” I would do anything on Earth to take that lost look off of his pale face. “Do you want me to call someone?”
His eyes squeeze shut, and his chest makes a rumbling noise.
“What’s that?” I whisper through my tears.
He shakes his head just a little and mumbles something. His lids drift lower, and I grab his cheek, worried that he’s slipping away. Instead, his eyes peek up at me again, and he mouths what I think is, “headache.”
He swallows, and I squeeze his hand. “What was that?”
His eyes shut, and I bite my lip—but again, they flutter open. “Sorry.” It’s barely a rasp.
“For what?” My voice cracks. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
His eyes roll back slightly, but his arm is tugging me closer. Still sweating and hardly able to breathe from shock, I lean down and wrap my arms around his shoulders.
“It’s okay,” I whisper against his neck. I’m stroking his hair, wanting to be sure that he knows he’s loved. “I’m sorry, too. We’re friends again. You’re my best friend. Stay here with me, please.”
I feel him draw a raspy breath. Then his eyelids are sagging again, his lashes tickling against my face. His eyes are shut as he says, “Stay…”
That soft word is the last thing that I hear before a nurse bursts into the room, and Cross is gone again.
THE REST OF the week crawls by. I’m spending a lot of my time in mandatory group study sessions, which I definitely don’t need in order to understand and apply our class material. If I wanted to spend all my time with other people, I’d have joined a think tank, not endeavored to become an ethics professor.
I’m grouchy and tired when I come home from campus Friday afternoon, toting a little brass scale for a presentation my Plato & Aristotle group is making to a high school honors class next Wednesday.
The driveway at Crestwood Place is almost half a mile long, taking me through a beautiful apple orchard and then around several fields where horses graze. The horses belong to Suri’s parents, who are so seriously amazing that at times I pretend they’re my own.
Trent Dalton is the most modest Silicon Valley tycoon you could ever meet, and Gretchen is an elementary school counselor, working entirely pro bono. Suri has two younger sisters, Rachel and Edith. I spot Edith’s white horse, Samson, as I pull into the circle drive directly in front of the house.
I toss my leather pack over my arm and scoop the scale up. The columned brick home has a wide, stone staircase, and it takes me forever to drag my tired self up it. I press my thumb against the keyless entry and the door pops open immediately—so quickly, in fact, I worry that it wasn’t locked. Which is strange since Suri always uses the kitchen door.
I wiggle my cell phone out of the pocket of my sagging jeans and quickly pull up the emergency services phone number, conveniently stored as No. 2, in honor of the bullshit usually going down with Mom when I have to use it. I’m not sure what worries me most as I slowly step inside—the idea of Crestwood being burglarized like the Dalton’s city home has been a time or two, or the images that resurrect themselves inside my mind: visions of my mom lying in a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs or passed out in a pile of Oxy.
Thinking of Oxy—or any drug, for that matter—makes me think of Cross, which makes my heart ache.
After the miracle of Wednesday, I skipped my classes Thursday to be at the hospital with him, convinced he would wake up for good. He squeezed my hand when I asked if he was glad to see me, but that was all. This morning when I called, Nanette sounded weird.
I’m wondering if I can slip in during her shift tonight when the scent of cinnamon rolls hits my nose.
I race through the foyer, past the spiral staircase, through the formal dining room, and into the massive kitchen like a kid hot off the school bus.
I come to a stop on the rug that spans most of the kitchen and grin at the sight before me. Suri, turned toward the counter, is wearing a pink and green paisley apron. Her curly brown hair is locked away in pigtails. She looks like she just stepped out of Martha Stewart Living.
My smile disappears when she turns to me and I see her face.
I hold up my hands, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. “Remember what we said last time with Mom. Just spit it out, Sur.”
I bite down on my lip when Suri’s eyes tear and she steps over, closer to me, fiddling with her oven mitt and meeting my eyes with a deep frown. “You’re going to be so upset, Lizzy.”
“Dude!”
She wrings her hands and starts speaking on fast-forward. “My mother told me today. She heard from their new housekeeper—she cleans the Carlson’s home, too.” My stomach takes a nose-dive. “They’ve dropped him off their insurance. They’re not going to pay for his healthcare anymore. They’ve moved him, Lizzy. This morning, to a really crappy place in L.A.”
“What?”
“They got shut down last year, temporarily. They had a lot of different violations. Bed sores, people getting resistant bacterial infections…” Tears glimmer in her eyes. “It’s not good. It’s a hell hole.”
5
Elizabeth
SURI WRAPS HER arms around my shoulders, and I smell the cinnamon rolls burning.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this to him.” My voice is raspy.
I’ve got my head sort of pushed against her shoulder. I never cry, but right now I’m about to. When I finally compose myself, there’s a definite smoky smell in the kitchen. Suri squeezes my arm before dashing to the oven and yanking the cinnamon rolls out. They look like they’ve survived a volcanic eruption at close range.
“I’m so sorry!” She looks anguishe
d as she stares down at the cinnamon rolls.
I can’t help laughing, because this is classic Suri—coping with a crisis via yummy foods, concert tickets, fruity daiquiris, and spa trips. I’ve been the beneficiary of her trauma response since we were kids.
“I don’t care about the rolls,” I say, unable to swallow a laugh at their horrible appearance. “It’s the thought that counts.” I smile, although my eyes have started to sting again. “Do you want to go out or something? Maybe we can break Cross free and move him here.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” she says, her voice going all high-pitched like it does when she’s really distressed. “Adam is making me fly to New York tonight. Some special occasion he won’t tell me anything about.”
My brain shifts gears immediately. “Do you think that he’s proposing?”
“I don’t know, but he better not. He knows how I feel about New York, and he can be a literary agent on the West Coast much more easily than I can run Northern California Interiors from New York! His clients are almost entirely virtual. Mine have homes.”
She bares her teeth and mimes a cat scratch, and I know things must have gotten really rough with Adam. It’s safe to say he’s not proposing.
“So the two of you are still at an impasse about where to live?”
She nods miserably, but quickly finds a smile. “Maybe he’s finally going to give in. I would so accept a Cali-shaped cupcake or...I dunno, Alcatraz earrings.”
“Alcatraz earrings.” I shake my head.
Suri grins. “A girl can hope.”
She pulls a napkin from the pocket of her apron and dabs at her eyes, and I put my arm around her. She wraps hers around me, and together we walk over to one of the windows. I’m not sure who steered us here: her or me. It’s like a game of Ouija Board; maybe we both needed a look outside.
It’s quiet inside the house, so the low whoosh of the heat through the vents down by our feet seems loud. When Suri speaks, her voice is high and shaky. “Remember when we were in seventh grade and Cross invited you to Fall Ball?”
I nod, smiling at the memory. He came to my house to ask, wearing a black leather jacket and jeans with holes. I frown next, because I remember how his parents never drove him anywhere. It was always Renault, the Carlsons’ butler.
Suri inhales, and I watch her face as she sucks her lips in and makes a thinking face. Then she drops a bomb. “Ever since then…I kind of had a secret thing for him.”
My jaw drops, and I do a quick turn of my head—like a dramatic owl—giving her my most dramatic googly eyes.
She shakes her head, blushing three shades of pink.
“How could you keep this from me?”
“I don’t know.” She smiles and shakes her head, and I know the answer before she says it.
“I guess I just met Adam and...that was that.” Her eyes tear again. “I still love my Cross.”
“Me, too.”
“I want to do something for him,” Suri says.
I do, too. In fact, I have to.
MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE of Mom that I freak out. I don’t have that many childhood memories of her being whisked away to rehab, and I think that’s mostly because she never went. Not until I was a teenager. But she was locked away from me in other ways. Always in and out of altered states, sleeping just like Cross is now.
I have too many memories of watching from the foot of her bed as one of many private nurses dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth or hooked up saline to the IV stand she stashed in her make-up room. Sometimes, when I was really little, I would cry and my dad would tell me she was just tired.
“She loves you, honey, but she’s so sleepy today.”
There were a few years there where I thought she had narcolepsy.
After Suri leaves, I grab my car keys and race to my old, powder blue Camry. I’m out of breath by the time I crank it, but that doesn’t stop me from speeding to Mom’s house—a massive, white Southern-style home with a huge wrap-around porch, situated in the rolling hills fifteen miles northwest of downtown Napa.
The gate password is the same. It’s been about a month since I’ve been here—several weeks after Cross’s accident—but I don’t see any spider webs stretched between oak trees as I fly down the arrow-straight driveway. I remind myself that a maid service is still coming; I hired them myself after Cross got hurt, mainly to check on the house so I don’t have to drop by regularly.
As I see the house for the first time in weeks, my heart squeezes, because no matter how much time passes and how much changes, this place will always feel like home. In the circle drive, I throw the car in park and fly up the square staircase, unlocking the door and stepping inside quickly, so I can disable the alarm.
The code is my birthday backwards. I picture Cross pressing the keys, probably standing in this very spot wearing old jeans and one of his bomber jackets, and my throat aches.
I’m here for one thing and one thing only, and that’s Dad’s new phone number. I don’t keep it in my cell, because it’s too enticing. I don’t allow myself to call on a whim. When Dad wants to talk to me, he calls, and as soon as we’re finished talking, I delete the number from my call log. It’s a Salt Lake City number, so it’s not one I could accidentally memorize.
When I call from the rotary phone in our vast, dark kitchen, I’m grateful that it’s new wife Lyndsey who answers and not one of her daughters, Fern, thirteen, or Hollow, nine. Her hello is flat and Midwestern; I can almost see her on the other end of the line, clutching a cordless phone and standing in a slightly dated kitchen. The picture of normal: that’s Dad’s new family.
“Um, hi Lyndsey, it’s Elizabeth.”
She pauses for a second then responds in a crisp, telemarketer-sounding voice. “Elizabeth. Can I help you?” Whoa, her tone is brisk. I swallow back my irritation.
“Yeah. I want to talk to my dad.” Biotch. I want to stick my tongue out and tell her he was my dad first, but instead I calmly say, “Is he around?”
“He is.” I think she’s gone to get him when I hear a breathing sound and Lyndsey says my name again. “Elizabeth?”
“I’m here.”
“I know you are. Uh—” There’s a fuzzy sound, like she’s covering up the phone’s mouthpiece. When she speaks again, her voice is tight. “Elizabeth, is this about your mother?”
Now it’s my turn to be surprised. And peeved. “Why do you ask?”
Lyndsey sighs. “I know that she’s in rehab again, Elizabeth.”
“Yeah. That’s not news.” I squeeze my eyes shut, wanting to bang my head against the kitchen wall. What the hell does Lyndsey care what my mom’s up to?
“I know it’s how things are there, but it’s not normal here for us.” She pauses, like she’s rallying herself, and I try to put my armor on, because I can tell this is going to get me right between the ribs. “Your father is damaged from what he went through with…your mother. You know how she treated him. But when things happen with her, he still feels responsible. That’s not healthy.”
I inhale deeply and slowly, trying not to lose my shit. “Um, well, of course he does. He was married to her for more than twenty years.” I inhale again, fighting to control my temper. “Anyway, I’m not calling about my mom, so can I talk to my dad now please?”
I hear silence, and for a long moment, I think she’s hung up. Then my dad is on the phone.
“Elizabeth.”
“Hi, Dad.” In the background, I can hear a girl’s voice, and I know it’s one of them. Fern or Hollow. “One of my new girls.” I lean my head against the wall. “Look Dad, I just had a quick question for you.”
“Okay. What’s your question?”
I wrap the curly cord of the olive green phone around my finger, biting my lip, because I hate to ask this—but I have no choice. “I was wondering if I could get a loan. From the DeVille Trust, or from you.”
My words are followed by a long pause, during which I honestly have no idea what he will say. Then I hear
a sort-of snort.
“Elizabeth, we’ve talked about this. You can’t spend money like your mother used to. I know it’s hard for you, growing up the way you did, but this is life now and you’re twenty-three—”
“Dad, I’m not. I’m not spending any money.” I clench my jaw, breathing deeply as my pulse races. “I never buy anything. It’s not for me.”
Pause. “So you are calling for your mother?”
“No.” I grit my teeth as rage builds in me, aching underneath my breastbone and radiating out over my shoulders like venom from a snake bite. I huff my breath out, so pissed that I’m seeing stars. “Dad, did you tell Lyndsey to screen my phone calls?”
“Screen your calls? Of course not. Lyndsey would never do something like that. She cares a lot about our relationship—yours and mine, that is.”
I can feel my lower lip tremble. “Why don’t I believe you?”
He sighs, and it’s the sigh he used to save for Mom. I get the eerie feeling Lyndsey is standing right beside him, encouraging him, with her deep brown eyes, to stick it to me.
“Elizabeth. You have issues with trust.”
“What?”
“There’s money available for counseling—”
His comment takes me off guard and makes me furious. “You think so?” I demand, cutting him off. “Maybe Lyndsey could see me. Do herbalists take insurance? I know they’re great advice givers, so maybe I could fly out—”
I’m still going—verbal vomit, that’s what Cross would call it—when the dial tone sounds.
My mouth hangs open and my eyes fill up with tears. “I need counseling?” I slam the phone down with all my might, feeling the impact in my fingertips as I whirl around to face the empty kitchen.
