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“They were.” The bartender picked up another glass. “One of them called a while ago to say the girl singer was sick. Strung out on drugs, or something, would be my guess. Anyway, tonight’s going to be karaoke.”
Hannah bit her lip. Okay, this was a sign. A warning that maybe her mother was right. Maybe nothing good could come from seeing him again. Margaret had been crying when Hannah left the house. “Think of what’s best for Faith,” Margaret had begged her. “That’s exactly what I intend to do,” she’d replied.
Now she wasn’t so sure. What was the point of having Liam breeze in and out of Faith’s life? And why risk all the rebuilding she’d done of her own life? Why upset everyone and everything? Because she owed it to him. Simple as that. He’d been lied to and the least she could do was try to make some kind of amends.
“Do you have any idea where I can find him?” she asked the bartender.
“Him?” The bartender grinned. “The singer? Liam something or other?”
She nodded and felt her face heat up. God, this was embarrassing. “Look, it’s not what you’re thinking…”
“Hey.” He flicked the towel across the top of the bar. “I’m not paid to think. All I can tell you is what I told the other girls who came in asking about him. I think the band’s staying at some place in Huntington Harbor.
Hannah checked the urge to ask, What other girls? How many other girls? Liam had always drawn girls. Well, so what? He could bed a different girl every night, and she wouldn’t care.
“Do you have the address?” she asked.
“Yeah…” The bartender grabbed a napkin and drew a map of Huntington Harbor. “There’s a party there tomorrow, that’s how I know where they are. Huge house on the water with a yacht the size of the Queen Mary on the dock outside. Some big cheese from L.A. owns the place. A record promoter, or something.” He winked. “Told me to invite hot-looking chicks.”
Go home, Hannah thought. You don’t need this.
“Hell…” With a sigh, he threw down the pen he’d been using and reached for another one. “I should probably photocopy these damn directions.” He handed her the napkin. “You’ll probably have to take a number.”
“BRID WILL BE FINE, Liam.” Miranda Payton, the record producer’s wife, sat next to him, feet dangling in a pool that had been built to look like a tropical lagoon. “I sent my own daughter to Casa Pacifica when I realized she was spending half her life in the bathroom with her finger stuck down her throat. They straightened her out in no time. Quit worrying about her and enjoy yourself.” She brought a frosted glass to her lips, eyed him over the rim and smiled. “You could be in a lot worse places.”
Liam laughed. An understatement if he’d ever heard one. Beyond the purple bougainvillea-covered wall that separated the property from the private beach, he could see the Pacific Ocean. The sun was hot on his back, and Miranda had brought out a jug of something icy that tasted like rum and bananas. The exotic scent of it mingled with the suntan lotion she was massaging into her legs. If he had to take a week off in the middle of a tour, this definitely wasn’t a bad place to while away the time. Certainly none of the band had complained. A couple of them were off taking surfing lessons, the others had gone to see the sights.
He’d thought about calling Hannah again. Thought constantly about his daughter, whose name he still didn’t know. Off on a trip, Hannah’s mother had said. Another lie?
“You’re soooo serious.” Miranda trailed one perfectly manicured fingernail down his arm. “Are you always this way?”
“Always,” Liam said. “A right wet blanket, that’s me. I cast a pall on any party I go to.”
Miranda laughed with disproportionate enthusiasm. “I don’t believe you. I think you’re just deep.”
“Wrong,” Liam said. “Shallow as a puddle. Ask anyone who knows me.” He reached for his shirt. Miranda was making him uneasy. She was about forty, thin, tan and attractive in what Brid would call a high-maintenance way. Lots of curly hair streaked in different shades of blond, plum-colored lips and nails. She was Bert Payton’s third wife, considerably younger and obviously bored. Which definitely wasn’t his problem. He got up and started for the house.
Miranda followed him. Her hand at the small of his back, they made their way through the open French doors into the blue-and-white living room just as a housekeeper was leading Hannah into the room through a door off the hallway.
Startled, they all eyed each other. Hannah’s focus went from Miranda, who was clutching her bikini top as though she’d been caught in risqué underwear, to Liam’s opened shirt and bathing trunks.
Hannah had on a short, sleeveless cotton dress patterned with small pink and orange flowers. Her hair was pulled back in a band and she looked young and a little uncertain. He wanted to tell her the thing with Miranda wasn’t what she thought it was, which was a bit stupid because he had no idea what she thought and what difference did it make anyway?
He started to speak just as Hannah did, and then Miranda chimed in and there was a flurry of introductions. Hannah, he noticed, was avoiding eye contact with him.
“I wanted to talk to you.” She addressed his left shoulder. “If this isn’t a good time…”
“It’s fine.” He looked at Miranda, who fluttered her fingers at him and disappeared. “So…” He waved at the cluster of wicker armchairs upholstered in blue canvas. “Pick a seat.” She did and he sat down opposite her. Music drifted in from somewhere in the house. Hannah sat with her knees close together, her hands in her lap. A silence hung in the air between them, thick with ghosts and recriminations. Hannah. Hannie. Hannah. Formal as a stranger now.
She cleared her throat. “Look, I just want to explain—”
“What’s her name?” he asked. “What’s my daughter’s name?”
“Faith.”
Faith. He said it again to himself. Then he looked at Hannah. “Why? Where did that come from?”
“When I was in the hospital having her…everything seemed so hopeless. You’d walked out—well, I thought you had—and my world was falling apart. And then I saw her and…” Her face colored. “I know it sounds kind of hokey, but she gave me the faith to believe in myself again.”
He leaned his head against the high back of the wicker chair and stared up at the white-painted ceiling beams. So many questions were rattling around in his brain. Where to start? Finally he looked back at Hannah.
“Do you have any pictures with you?”
She pulled an envelope from her bag and handed it to him.
“She looks like me,” he said after he’d studied the first one. “A right little terror, I bet.” He looked to Hannah for confirmation.
She smiled. “She can be pretty strong willed.”
Slowly he leafed through the stack. Pictures of a baby Faith in a cradle, on a rug gazing wide-eyed at a Christmas tree. School pictures of a little girl, smiling obediently for the camera. A snapshot—recent, he guessed—of Faith riding a red bike. Laughing, the wind in her hair. Unable not to, he smiled at the image. God, how incredible to look at this child and see his own face reflected in hers. And yet, beneath the wonder, an old anger, smoldering now with new intensity. She’d been stolen from him.
He should have been there. He should have been the one teaching her to ride the bloody bike, not sitting here now looking at pictures. They’d stolen her from him, robbed him of her childhood. And then a voice in his head spoke up. Ah, catch yourself, it scoffed. Can you really see yourself playing the suburban daddy? Bikes and kiddies and lawn mowers. Telly and slippers and “keep the music down, love, you’re waking the baby.” That’s not you and it never will be. Without a word, he returned the pictures to the envelope and held it out to Hannah.
“They’re yours,” she said. “I brought them for you.”
He stuffed the envelope into the pocket of his shirt and felt her watching him as he did. In the first few weeks of their marriage, he’d come home one day and found her ironing his shirts. He’d started laughing. Never in his life had he worn an ironed shirt, and the sight of her carefully pressing the creases in the sleeves struck him as so touchingly funny, he couldn’t help himself. Now he had an urge to apologize for hurting her feelings.
“What does she know about me?” he asked. “What have you told her?”
Hannah looked at him for such a long time that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. “She thinks you’re in heaven,” she finally said.
“In heaven?”
“See, we didn’t think she’d ever see you and—”
“No…” He shook his head, no explanation needed. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the scenario. Given the lie he’d been told, he could well imagine that her family had believed they’d seen the last of him. Certainly his parting shot to Hannah’s father would guarantee he’d never be welcome in their home again. And truth was, it was probably kinder than letting Faith think she had a father who had no interest in her. But heaven. Of all the places to pack him off to. He felt a grin spread across his face. “My God, Hannah. Wouldn’t it have been more like them to tell her I was in hell?”
“Yeah, well…” She smiled back at him, clearly relieved by his reaction.
“That’s no doubt where your da would consign me.”
“My father died,” she said. “A few months after you left. A heart attack. Needless to say, my mom was pretty devastated. The family were all there for her, of course, but she still gets lonely.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.” He recalled meeting her father for the first time, the look of clear disapproval on the man’s face. A tall, imposing man, obviously accustomed to having control over most things, including his family. Which must have made it pretty tough when his daughter ran off and married a ne’er-do-well Irish musician.
“You never tried to contact me,” she said.
“I was too furious with you. I thought you’d had an abortion. Why didn’t you ever try to reach me?”
“Because…” She shrugged. “I just figured it was over. I didn’t especially want to hear you confirm it. I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “For everything.”
So am I, he thought. For everything. They sat in silence for a while. The memories were all coming back to her, he guessed, just as they were for him. The cheap apartment, the car that spent more time up on blocks than on the road, tins of beans and fried-egg sandwiches for supper. Happy enough until those last few weeks, or so he’d thought. One night he’d woken from a dream about Ireland, starving for the sort of lamb stew he remembered his gran making. He’d roused Hannah out of sleep, and at two in the morning they’d found an all-night market and spent all the money they had on the stuff to make it. By the time they’d got everything home, he was no longer in the mood for stew, and they’d made love on the kitchen floor instead.
“What happened?” he asked her now.
Hannah traced a bit of the wicker weave on the arm of the chair. “Short version?”
“Let’s begin with that.”
“I fell apart, and my family had me hospitalized. That’s where I was when you came to look for me.”
“Let’s hear the longer version,” he said.
She covered her face with her hands, took a deep breath then took her hands away. “Oh God, Liam, I don’t know. I was such a mess. I hated your being gone all the time. I hated the clubs and the girls always hanging around. I was miserable, lonely. I missed having my family around me. Mostly I was terrified of going back to Ireland where I didn’t know anyone. My life would have been tagging around after you, or staying home by myself.”
He looked at her, wanting to argue but resisting. He knew his version of what went wrong; he wanted to hear hers.
“Not that we didn’t have some good times,” she said. “I don’t mean that. It was just…I felt like I was disappearing. That last tour you had in San Francisco, I stayed home, remember? In our apartment, I mean. Anyway, I started going through the drawers in your dresser, and I found these letters from some girl…”
“God, Hannah—”
“No, let me finish. It’s a chapter in my life that I’d just as soon never think about again, but I want you to know so you understand…about Faith and everything. I just went to pieces. Everything is a kind of blur. I guess I called my mom and she was on her way over to pick me up, but I’d already left. I don’t even know what I was thinking. She found me walking along the freeway. At that point, she decided to take matters into her own hands.”
He thought of those last couple of months with her. He’d come home late from a gig to find her sleeping. She’d be sleeping still when he went off again the next day. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was crying. For days on end it seemed she’d do nothing but sleep or cry. He’d alternate between racking his brain to figure out why she was unhappy and losing patience with her for doing nothing to help herself. “For God’s sake, snap out of it,” he’d say. “Stop feeling so bloody sorry for yourself.” And then he’d blow money they didn’t have on hothouse roses.
Her expression clouded, and she picked at the fabric on her dress. “The thing is, my family still worries about me and Faith. My mom especially. Although lately, the tables have kind of turned and it seems I’m always worrying about her…” She smiled slightly. “Another story. Anyway, they all know how bad things were after we split. I mean if it hadn’t been for them…”
If it hadn’t been for them, he’d know his daughter today. On the other hand, he hadn’t recognized the severity of her depression and they had, so maybe he didn’t deserve to know his daughter. He stood, restless, fighting a barrage of competing emotions.
“I was a real mess,” she said again. “I couldn’t even take care of Faith. So now, every time I feel smothered by my family, I remind myself of that.” She laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Or they do.”
“But you’re all right now?” He turned to face her again, studied her for a moment. There was a confidence and strength about her that she hadn’t had before. “You look great,” he said. She smiled and he was reminded again of all the good times they’d shared. “No, I mean it. Back then, a good wind would have blown you away. You’ve…filled out.”
Her grin widened. “Are you saying I’m fat?”
“No, not at all. And I like your hair the way you have it now. It suits you.”
“You used to like waist-length, white-blond hair.”
“Ah, well, we all change.”
“Listen, Liam…” She leaned forward in her chair. “About Faith. It’s her birthday next Saturday, a week from today. We’re having a party for her. If there’s some way you can make it…”
He looked at her for a moment, tried to imagine himself in a room full of six-year-olds, one of them his daughter. Tried to imagine what he would say to her. Happy birthday! You don’t know me, but I’m your daddy. Thought I was in heaven, didn’t you? Well, surprise! Sorry I can’t stick around to see you grow up. Nice meeting you though. Drop by if ever you’re in Ireland.
Hannah was watching him. He felt the tension, hers and his own, as she waited for his response. “Listen, I um…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe it’s better we leave things as they are.”
“You don’t want to see her?” A moment passed. “That’s what you’re saying?”
“Right.” He hardened himself against the look in her eyes. “Thanks for inviting me, though.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LIAM HAD REJECTED HIS DAUGHTER. The thought lodged in Hannah’s brain for the rest of the weekend and was still there Monday even as she sat through another session with Taylor Becker’s mother, who absolutely could not understand why she wouldn’t be allowed to sit in on her son’s prekindergarten readiness test.
Hannah tried to keep her voice free of irritation. Her personal problems didn’t belong in the classroom, but it just seemed so damned ironic that she was dealing with parents who made themselves crazy trying to be perfect while her own daughter had a father who didn’t give a damn.
That night, she took Faith to see Harry Potter, a movie Faith had been clamoring to see since the day it came out. Afterward they went for Faith’s favorite cheese-and-sausage pizza with extra mozzarella. Dairy Queen brownie sundaes, another of Faith’s favorites, were planned for dessert. A splurge, but tonight Hannah wasn’t dwelling on economics. Liam had rejected his daughter.
Hannah sprinkled hot pepper flakes onto her slice of pizza. Not that Faith knew anything was wrong, but it seemed important to compensate for Liam’s lack of paternal interest. She smiled across the table at her daughter. You don’t need him anyway, sweetheart. I can love you enough for both of us.
Faith, in a pair of sixty-dollar denim overalls purchased by Helen “Just because she’s our own little princess,” grinned at Hannah across the table, a study in perpetual motion. Up on her knees to carefully pick up a piece of pizza, then down to a sitting position, her head swiveling to watch a man with two small children in the booth on the other side of the aisle.
And then her smile dimmed and the slice of pizza in her hand dripped a sticky stalactite of mozzarella. She lifted the pizza high above her head and opened her mouth wide to catch the cheese. Her expression contemplative, she chewed in silence for a while. Then she put the pizza down. “Mommy, Grandma was sad today.”
Hannah sipped at a glass of Diet Coke, thought guiltily of Margaret’s tearful entreaties not to be mad at her. “My only thought was what was best for you,” she’d said last night and again this morning. And then Rose had taken up her sister’s cause. “Give your mom a hug and tell her you love her,” Rose had urged. “Between Debra’s pregnancy and your no-good ex-husband, the poor thing’s going out of her mind.”
“People get sad sometimes, sweetie, for all kinds of reasons,” Hannah told Faith.
“I was sad two days ago,” Faith said.
“You were?” Hannah thought back over the last couple of days to what might have made her daughter sad. Nothing came to mind. “How come?”
“Because Beth wouldn’t play with me. It made me feel sad.”
I hate Beth, Hannah thought. She reached for another slice of pizza, then decided she wasn’t hungry. I hate Liam, too. She watched the man who had caught Faith’s attention a moment ago bundle a small child into a sweater, watched Faith staring at him buttoning up the sweater. The child said something and the man bent down and kissed the end of her nose. Something squeezed at Hannah’s heart, and she looked away.
“Maybe Beth just felt like playing with someone else that day, honey,” she said.
“But I’m her best friend.” Faith stabbed at her chest. “She’s supposed to play with me. She hurt my feelings.”
“Ah…” Not trusting her voice, Hannah reached across the table, and caught her daughter’s face in her hands. “People do that sometimes, sweetie,” she said as Faith wriggled out of her grasp. “They behave in ways that hurt and make us feel sad. We don’t always know why they do it, but it’s kind of how life is.”
“I have another best friend now.” Faith’s expression cleared. “Her name is Tiffany.”
“Tiffany’s a pretty name,” Hannah said. God, it was uncanny how exactly like Liam Faith looked right then. Serious one moment and then a smile like a sudden burst of sunshine dissipating the clouds. She banished his image.
“Don’t be sad, Mommy.” Faith leaned across the table, bringing her face up close to Hannah’s. “Tiffany’s only my friend. I still love you best.”
“And I love you best.” Hannah felt her voice crack and she covered with a wide smile. “You’re my very best sunshine girl, and I love you better than anything else in the world.”
“Better than three million chocolate bars?”
“Three million chocolate bars with almonds,” Hannah said.
Faith grinned. This was her favorite game. “Three million and one hundred million chocolate bars and two million Little Debbies?” she asked.
“Well, now you’re making it difficult.” Hannah pretended to consider. “What kind of Little Debbies?”
