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“I will,” she said. “I promise.”
Jessica sighed. “I was so lucky, Lace,” she said. “This morning they told me how close I’d come to dying. I am going to really embrace every minute of my life from now on. You do the same, okay?”
“You sound so strong,” Lacey marveled. “How did you get that way?”
Jessica laughed, though the sound was weak. “Motherhood,” she said. “It either makes you strong or it kills you.”
“I love you,” Lacey said.
“Love you, too, Lace. Don’t worry about me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Lacey hung up the phone, relieved by the conversation and wondering what she could do to help from two thousand miles away. Sending flowers was one option, but Jessica would probably get plenty of those. She’d buy her books and magazines, things to help her pass the time as she healed. Yet even that idea didn’t ease her powerless feeling, and she wished she could do more.
She had no idea just how much she would be asked to do.
9
LEDA AND JUDY HAD BEEN WRONG ABOUT THE rules. It wasn’t until Faye’s sixth date with Jim that they finally made love. And by then she felt so comfortable with him, so trusting and at home, that she was no longer anxious about her body or her performance. He had shared so much with her about himself and his life. He’d told her about his own performance anxiety—he’d had some prostate problems a few years ago—and she’d been able to share her own insecurities about her weight, her crepey skin, her wrinkles. He had only laughed, as though her concerns had been the furthest thing from his mind.
Of course, once the line had been crossed, they spent a lot more time in bed than they did going to dinner or the movies. The third time they made love, they had not even bothered with the pretense of going out. She drove directly from work to his house. She was exhausted, having taught an all-day seminar for chronic pain clinicians, and although she’d loved every minute of the training, it had taken a lot out of her. She found new energy in the car, though, as she thought about spending the evening with Jim.
It was the first time she’d been in his home, and he gave her a short tour before leading her up to the master suite. She’d known he had money, but she hadn’t expected the absolute luxury that surrounded her when she walked into the grand foyer. It was obvious that every inch of the house had been professionally decorated, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she was seeing Jim’s taste in the elaborate window treatments and floral print upholstery or his late wife’s.
The view from the bedroom—from nearly every room of the house, actually—was spectacular. The house stood on a hillside, and in the evening light La Jolla stretched out beneath it like a quilt. The sun was a vivid coral as it drifted toward the sea. Faye studied the scene before her with great attention, doing her best to ignore the fact that she would soon climb into Alice Price’s antique bed. Was Jim thinking about that, too? Did it feel strange to him to have another woman in this room?
The thought slipped from her mind, though, as he began undressing her. Lovemaking with Jim was slow and sweet, and Judy had been right about him leaving her satisfied. Judy would have to speculate about that, though, since Faye had stopped sharing private information with her and Leda, much to their frustration.
After they made love and darkness had fallen in the room, Jim hugged her close and let out a long sigh. It sounded like contentment to her, and she nestled her head against his shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking about you a lot the past couple of days,” he said, rubbing her bare shoulder.
“You have?”
“I want you to know how much I’ve appreciated all the listening you’ve done,” he said. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone the way I’ve talked to you in a very long time. Maybe never.”
She was touched. “I’m glad you’ve felt able to,” she said, resting her palm flat against his chest.
“I realized, though, that you haven’t really told me much about yourself,” he continued. “You tell me how you feel about things, and I really like that. You’re such a straight shooter. I don’t have to guess with you. But …” His voice trailed off.
“But?”
“I don’t know anything about your past.”
“Ah,” she said. She’d hoped to avoid talking to him about her past, but clearly that was going to be impossible.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “You grew up in North Carolina, like I did. You were an only child. Your parents are dead. You have no children. You were married, but your husband died long ago and you haven’t dated since. But I don’t know what it was like for you growing up, or what your parents did for a living, and that’s my fault for not asking questions. I know that. And I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
“The biggest blank of all is your marriage.” His hand toyed with her hair where it fell in wisps at the back of her neck. “Your husband,” he said. “You never talk about him. You know all about Alice. I talk about her too much, I suppose.” He laughed self-consciously and she felt a little sorry for him.
“No, you don’t,” she reassured him.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry I haven’t asked you about these things before now,” he said. “That I haven’t given you the chance to tell me about yourself. I hope you haven’t misconstrued that as disinterest. It’s really been …” He laughed. “It’s been selfishness, pure and simple. I needed to dump my problems onto you. But I’m ready now.”
She was quiet, and he nudged her.
“So go ahead,” he said. “Tell me.”
She let out her breath. “Oh,” she said, “this is hard.”
“Why is it hard?”
She could feel the blank slate he’d placed in front of her, waiting for her to fill it. “Some things are difficult to talk about,” she said. “But I do want to tell you. I want a good relationship with you and I know I can’t build one on lies.”
“Have you been lying to me?” It sounded as though this was not a complete surprise to him.
“Yes,” she said, “though mostly through omission.”
“You can tell me anything,” he said, and she wondered if he knew what he was getting himself into.
“I have to ask you to keep what I say just between us, okay?” she asked. “I mean, I’m ready to tell you … some things … but not the world.”
“All right.”
She was quiet a moment, forming her thoughts, and he spoke before she could get the first word out.
“You have had a child,” he said.
The question surprised her. Of the things she was preparing to say, that was low on her list. “Yes, I have,” she said. “But how did you know?”
“Your body gave it away.”
“My stretch marks?”
He laughed. “You are so self-conscious about your body,” he said. “I didn’t notice any stretch marks. But the color of your nipples. The areolae are dark.”
“That’s what I get for dating a doctor,” she said.
“Did you lose the child?”
She pressed her palm against his chest again, trying to formulate her response. “Yes,” she said. “But not the way you mean.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “My husband didn’t die,” she said. “I’m not really a widow.” She hurried on as she felt the muscles in his chest tighten up beneath her hand. “And I’m very, very sorry for having led you to believe that I am, because I know that’s part of what drew you to me. Thinking we had that in common. I’m sorry.”
“You’re still married?” he asked.
“No. I’m divorced. But when I moved here—to California—eight years ago, I couldn’t bring myself to tell complete strangers the truth. It was easier to just say he’d died. I didn’t want to have to answer questions about my ex. He was dead to me, as far as I was concerned, so it wasn’t a lie that was hard for me to stick with. Until now. until you.”
“It was a nasty divorce, then.” He was upset over her pretense of being a widow. She could hear it in his voice, and she didn’t blame him.
“I want you to know that I’m an honest person,” she said. “I mean, basically, I’m very honest. I do have this one big lie I’ve been living, but please don’t think that it defines who I am. Because it doesn’t.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“My ex-husband is in prison for murder.” She had said those words to herself many times, but never, not once, had she said them out loud. They echoed in the huge room.
“God,” he said. “What happened?”
She rolled away from him to turn on the Tiffany lamp on the night table. The old, nauseating images were filling her head and whenever that happened, she couldn’t tolerate being in the dark.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She rested her head on his shoulder, swallowing hard against the nausea.
“Could that be enough for now?” she asked. “Enough of the truth? I still get nightmares about it sometimes and don’t really want to have any tonight.” How could she tell him she had lived in a cramped little North Carolina trailer—and spent time in a battered women’s shelter—when here she was, lying in a $3000 carved cherry bed in La Jolla, trying to fit in with the sort of people she hadn’t even known existed back then?
“Just tell me one thing,” Jim said. “He didn’t kill your child, did he?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.” A man by now. “His name is Freddy. Fred. We’re estranged. He blamed me for what happened with his father. He thought I somehow drove him to kill someone. After it happened, Freddy and I left North Carolina and moved to L.A., where I had an old girlfriend from nursing school. We moved in with her and I got my master’s degree there. My son was very hard to manage, though. He wasn’t a bad kid. Just … so terribly angry with me. The day he turned eighteen, he moved out. I went to a counselor who said I should practice tough love. You know, let him go, let him make it on his own. So that’s what I did.” She recited the situation with little emotion. She couldn’t let herself feel the pain behind the words or she might fall apart, and she wasn’t ready to do that with Jim. With anyone.
“And you haven’t been in touch with him since?”
“I don’t know where he is, and he’s never tried to find me.”
Jim sighed, rubbing her shoulder again. “I actually had a similar problem with my daughters,” he said.
“You did?” She had not yet met his adult twin daughters, but she’d seen pictures of them just that night during the house tour. Photographs of the blue-eyed blondes at various ages were on the bookshelf in the den. There were a few photographs of Alice on that bookshelf, too, and she looked just as Faye had expected: well-coifed, well-dressed and glittering with gold. The woman was her opposite, at least on the surface.
“They didn’t talk to me for a year after Alice died,” he said.
“Why?”
It was his turn to hesitate. “They blamed me for their mother’s death,” he said. “I talked Alice into enrolling in an experimental treatment program. I didn’t see that she had much of a chance otherwise, and I think—I hope—she understood that. The girls were furious with me, though. They said I turned Alice into a guinea pig, et cetera, et cetera.” He sighed, and she knew he’d been through quite a battle with his girls. She could only imagine what it had been like for him to endure the loss of his wife and his daughters’ antipathy at the same time.
“I think they were cruel to turn their backs on you,” she said.
“They were in a lot of pain,” he said, “but eventually, they realized that I’d truly had Alice’s best interest in mind. So maybe, someday Fred will come around, too.”
“God, I wish,” she said, struggling not to feel the sorrow welling up inside her. “Every time I see a young man come into the pain clinic, I think of him. Even when they don’t look a thing like him.” Gunshot victims, especially, tugged at her emotions. If it hadn’t been for Annie O’Neill, Freddy might have been one of them himself. She waved her hand in front of her face as if trying to bat away the thought. “I can’t talk about it anymore,” she said.
She lifted her head to study his face. In the light from the Tiffany lamp, she could see the arc of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the deep crevices that ran from his nose to his chin, and she knew he must be seeing similar flaws on her own face. She should turn off the light. But before she could roll over, he touched her cheek with his fingertip, tracing whatever lines he might be finding there, and smiled. “When you’re ready to tell me more,” he said, “I’ll be here for you.”
10
THE KEEPER’S HOUSE WAS QUIET AND CALM AS Lacey and Rick sat at the kitchen table, sipping iced tea and wrapping gifts for Jessica. Sasha slept by the screen door, occasionally opening his eyes to see if Clay or Gina or Rani might be walking through the sand toward the house. It was Clay’s long day at work, and Gina had taken Rani to her toddler swim lessons.
“Isn’t she a little young for swimming lessons?” Rick had asked when Lacey told him where they were.
“It’s mostly to get her used to the water,” Lacey said. “She was afraid of it when she first got here. She couldn’t even look at a full bathtub or the toilet without crying.” For reasons they were never to understand, Rani would scream even when approached with a damp washcloth. Gina’s best guess was that her little daughter had been subjected to rough shampooing with harsh soaps, necessary to kill the lice and nits that every child in the orphanage seemed to have. But Rani’s phobia was improving. She let Gina or Clay bathe her now in a large basin, and the previous week, Gina had finally coaxed her into the pool.
It was at moments like these, when the only sounds in the house were from the ocean and the cicadas, that Lacey realized how much chatter and energy Rani produced. Just a few months ago, Gina had worried there was a problem with her development, because Rani never spoke. One morning, though, the child simply woke up a chatterbox. Not only did she seem to know the right words for nearly every object she encountered, but she also strung those words together in sentences. She may not have been speaking, but she’d certainly been listening. She ran into the kitchen that morning, looked up at Clay, and said, “Daddy, I want you play with me, now!” Gina and Lacey had looked at each other and laughed, but Clay had cried. He had changed so much since Rani came into his life. There was a softness to him Lacey had never expected to see.
“Should I wrap each of these separately?” Rick held up the three gel pens they had bought for Jessica.
“Sure,” Lacey said. “It will be more fun for her to have a bunch of things to open, don’t you think?”
She and Rick had shopped most of the afternoon, picking up small gifts to send to Jessica. Little things like pens and magazines, tiny jigsaw puzzles and one of Lacey’s kaleidoscopes, gifts that could help her while away her time in the hospital. Lacey planned to put all the wrapped gifts into one big box and ship it to her. It had been kind of Rick to go shopping with her, and he’d seemed to get into it, picking up things on his own that he thought someone like Jessica might enjoy. Adding the kaleidoscope had been his idea.
A car door slammed shut in the parking lot, and Sasha was immediately on his feet, nose pressed against the screen and tail wagging. It was too soon for either Clay or Gina to be home, and Lacey got up to walk over to the door.
Her father was walking—strolling, really—toward the house. His head was down, his hands in his pockets. He was not a stroller. He always moved quickly, like Clay, and the sight of him like this scared her.
She pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch.
“Dad?” she called.
He looked up from his pensive staring at the sand and waved to her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, as he neared the house.
“Let’s go inside.” He reached past her for the handle of the screened door. “Go on in,” he said.
He followed her into the kitchen, and Rick was quick to stand up.
“Dad, this is Rick Tenley,” she said. “Rick, this is my father, Alec O’Neill.”
“Hello, Dr. O’Neill.” Rick held out his hand, and Alec shook it, frank curiosity on his face, but the expression disappeared quickly as his somber look returned.
“What’s wrong?” she asked again. Her heart was beating hard, and she thought of Rani’s little heart, so newly repaired and delicate. “Please tell me Rani’s okay.”
“Rani’s fine.” Her father touched her shoulder. “Sit down,” he said, and she dropped into the chair Rick pulled out for her.
“Nola just called me,” her father said. “She was trying to reach you, but didn’t have your number out here.”
All of a sudden, she knew. “It’s Jessica,” she said.
Her father leaned against the kitchen counter and nodded. “She died this morning, honey. I’m sorry.”
Lacey leaped to her feet so quickly that Sasha started barking at her. “Oh, Dad, no!” she said. “How could that happen? She sounded so good when I talked to her yesterday.”
“They think it was a blood clot from the surgery,” her father said. “It was fast. She probably didn’t even know what hit her.”
That’s what they had said about her mother, but her mother had known. Lacey would never forget the look of surprise on her face.
