Her Mother's Shadow (33 page)

T
he drugs had her floating in and out of consciousness, and the in-between stage was filled with nightmare images of Wolf and a variety of nonsensical hallucinations. Late that night, when the lights were low in her hospital room and the pain had shifted from viselike to a grueling, fiery ache, she thought she saw a nun sitting in the chair next to her bed. Through her half-opened eyes, she could see white and black cloth, wavy and out of focus.

“Hello, beautiful.”

She knew the voice, and it did not belong to a nun.

“Bobby?”

“You recognized me even in these duds?” he asked with a laugh.

Opening her eyes wider and struggling to clear her head, she saw that he was wearing a tuxedo. Black tie, red cummerbund.

“What are you—” She tried to raise her head, but winced at the pain. “Where are you going? Why are you dressed up?”

“I rented it,” he said. “Do you know how hard it is to rent a tux in the Outer Banks in August?”

She wondered if she was hallucinating the entire conversation. “I don't get it,” she said.

“I wanted to see if you'd like me any better if I looked straight-arrow. You know, if I lose the bad boy image.” He turned his head to the side and pointed to his earlobe. “See?” he said. “I even took my earring out.”

She laughed, her first laugh all day, and it hurt all the way to her toes. “Can you…you know…” She made a circling motion with her hand, but could not think of the word. “Could you wind up my bed so I can see you better?”

He moved to the end of her bed and turned the crank until she was nearly in a sitting position. He looked at her. “You okay?”

“Now turn on the light,” she said, shifting a bit on the bed. Sitting up made her very aware that Wolf had made mincemeat of her buttocks. “It's too dark in here,” she added. “I thought you were a nun.”

He laughed as he turned on the light, then he stood next to the bed so she could get a good look at him. His hands were on his hips, the cockeyed grin on his face. He was gorgeous in his jeans and tattoo and earring, and he was just as gorgeous now. She smiled. “You could wear a wedding gown and you'd still look like a bad boy,” she said.

“Well,
that's
a repellent image,” he said. “Are you saying I went to all this trouble for nothing?”

“It was sweet of you,” she said.

His expression sobered. “How're you feeling, Lace?” he asked.

She hesitated, trying to find both a comfortable position on the bed as well as the words she needed to say what she was thinking.

“Something's bothering me,” she said.

“Want me to get the nurse?”

“No, that's not what I mean.” She looked him squarely in the eye. “I saw you with that woman a few times,” she said, “and I…I just need to know…you gave her…” She winced as a fresh wave of pain coursed through her head.

He sat down in the chair next to her bed. “I think your pain meds might be doing something to your brain,” he said.

“Please don't do that,” she pleaded. “Don't pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about.”

“Lacey…help me out, okay? What did you see me give her?”

“Shh!” she whispered. He was talking too loud, his voice a jackhammer in her head.

“Babe.” He rested his palm against her forehead. “I told you. That woman is just a friend.”

“What's her name?”

She saw the hesitancy in his face as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He had a five-o'clock shadow, and she could see the red veins in his eyes and knew that he had had a rough couple of days himself.

“I…” he began, then stopped. “I'll tell you, Lace. It's only fair that I do, but you have to keep this between us, all right?”

She said nothing, hoping he was not going to hand her another cock-and-bull story.

“Her name is Elise,” he said. “She's my cousin.”

“Your
cousin?
”

He nodded. “Years ago, I got her hooked on crack and booze,” he continued. “She discovered heroin all on her own. She started turning tricks to feed her habit. She got in with some bad people—some
really
bad people. I was helping her get clean, but her pimp and her dealers were after her and
they were not small-time players. She was in serious danger. So I hid her with some friends, because I knew my house would be one of the first places they looked for her. When you called and I decided to come here, it seemed perfect. She had old friends here, in Kitty Hawk. So she's been staying with them, but I have to keep in close touch with her because she's still…fragile. She could slip any minute. Worse, those guys could find her. I don't know what they'd do to her if they did.”

She wasn't sure if the relief she felt was from his explanation or from the drugs, but for the second time that day, that odd sense of euphoria came over her.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, and she meant it.

He lowered the metal railing on the side of her bed and took her hand, holding it in both of his. “I don't think I've ever been as scared or as furious as I was when I saw that dog tearing into you,” he said. “You weren't moving. I thought you were dead, Lace.”

“Dad told me you killed the dog,” she said.

“I did, and I have no regrets about it,” he said. “Does that bother you?”

Under other circumstances, it would have bothered her a great deal. But not this dog. Not now. “No,” she said.

“Mackenzie needs to see you,” he said. “She's pretty sore, still, and I persuaded her to wait until tomorrow, but she's terrified you might die, and no matter how many times I tell her you're going to be all right, she doesn't believe it.”

“Oh.” Lacey frowned, knowing how empty those words must sound to Mackenzie. “People told her that her mother was going to be all right, too,” she said.

Bobby pressed her hand between his. “Do you remember,” he said, “when I first got here, you and I had a talk
about relationships, and you said that you had a romantic notion that you could find someone you'd love so much you'd lay down your life for that person?”

She nodded.

“I was thinking about that the past few days.” He smiled. “I'm willing to bet you never expected that someone to come in the form of a child.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “No,” she said. “I didn't.”

He stood up and leaned over to kiss her forehead. “Get some sleep, babe,” he said. He moved to the end of the bed to crank the mattress flat again. “I'll be back in the morning.”

He walked toward the door, in his tuxedo and his shiny black shoes, and the whole getup touched someplace deep in her heart.

“Bobby?” she said softly.

He turned around to look at her.

“I would have done the same for you,” she said.

 

Sometime the next day, the tall, slender blond woman herself appeared in Lacey's hospital room. She sat down in the chair next to the bed, and for a groggy moment, Lacey thought she was a vision.

“I'm Elise,” the woman said. “I'm sorry you got so chewed up by that dog.”

This close, Lacey could see the woman's hollow-eyed look. Her hair was bleached and frayed, like the bristles of a broom. Her tank top fell too low, and her ribs were clearly visible beneath the skin of her chest.

“Thank you.” Lacey was not certain what else to say. The pain was even worse than it had been the day before.

“Bobby asked me to come see you,” Elise said. Her voice was husky from too many cigarettes. “You know. Explain who I am and all.”

“His cousin,” Lacey said.

Elise nodded.

“He said he got you hooked,” Lacey said.

Elise smiled and Lacey saw the prettiness hiding inside the haggard face. “He blames himself, but I would've gotten hooked all on my own. I didn't really need his help.”

“He said you've gotten straightened out, though,” Lacey said. Her mouth was dry and it hurt to swallow. “That's good.”

Elise let out a sound, half laugh, half snort. “I'm straight now,” she said, “but sometimes I think it would be easier just to go back. I'd get beat up for sure, but then I could get high again.” She looked dreamy, her expression one of longing, and only then did Lacey notice the tracks on her skinny arms. “Bobby thinks my life was shit,” Elise continued, “but it wasn't all that bad.”

Lacey wanted to tell the woman she was doing the right thing by getting away from a life on the streets, but the words would require more strength than she had. Instead, she put her energy into shifting in the bed, struggling to find a position that might relieve some of the pain in her legs.

“He's in love with you, in case you don't know it,” Elise said. “I mean, every time I talk to him, it's like, ‘You doing okay, Elise? You clean? Do you need anything?' and then he goes off on you.”

Lacey tried to smile. “Thank you for telling me that,” she said. “And for coming here.”

Elise stood up, then looked down at Lacey, studying her hard for a moment. “You're in a shitload of pain, aren't you,” she said.

Lacey was barely able to nod.

“They'll give you more if you ask for it.” Elise nodded toward the I.V. pole from which bags of liquid were slowly
emptying into Lacey's veins. “Enjoy them while you can get them,” Elise said. “I'd trade places with you right now in a heartbeat.”

R
ick sent an enormous arrangement of flowers to the hospital. He was good with flowers. Ordinarily, they could mend any problem. In this case, though, he knew they would not be enough. Still, he sent them. Even if Lacey had not been hurt by that dog, he would have sent them to her, maybe every day for the rest of her life. He owed that to her, and more.

It was Clay who told him what had happened. Rick had called the keeper's house for the fourth or fifth time, hoping Lacey would finally pick up the phone and let him apologize, but it was Clay who answered and who chewed him out. Clay told him about Lacey being attacked by the dog, and even though Rick could not possibly be responsible for that horrific event, he felt guilty about it.

“She's really a fine person,” he told Clay. “She didn't deserve that. And she didn't deserve what I did to her, either.”

“I hope your father stays in prison for the rest of his life,” Clay said, and hung up on him.

Rick didn't give up. He called again two days later, wish
ing that Gina would be the one to answer the phone, but once again, he got Clay on the line. He asked if he could visit Lacey in the hospital and Clay told him that he was the last person Lacey wanted to see. Again, Clay hung up on him, slamming the phone down so hard, Rick's ear hurt for minutes afterward.

“She won't see me,” he'd told his mother after getting off the phone. It was the fourth day of her visit with him.

“You can't possibly blame her,” his mother had said. “You hurt that entire family by trying to save your own.”

He shook his head. “I feel terrible for Lacey,” he said. “At first she really had no romantic interest in me, and that made it so easy. I didn't want to…you know, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do if she wanted more from me. But that last night, she was starting to talk serious and…I guess it's best the truth came out. Just not best for Dad.”

There were so many other ways, better ways, he could have handled his desire to get his father released. Sometimes, he realized, when you were caught up in your emotions, you could do really insane things, and that's what he'd done with Lacey. When he'd learned that his father was up for parole, he knew Annie O'Neill's family would be asked to write victim's statements, and that Lacey's would be most important. He remembered her from that horrible Christmas Eve in the battered women's shelter. He knew she had been close to him in age and he thought that he could meet her, befriend her without revealing his identity and influence her through seduction. Women had always been attracted to him, despite his disinterest in them. He was ordinarily an honest man, but the deceit seemed worth it in this case. Lacey, though, had turned out to be a different sort of person than he'd anticipated. He could have appealed to her sense of justice, but he didn't know that going in, and
by the time he realized how good she was, how fair-minded, it was too late. He was already well into the game.

Now, though, he feared his plan had backfired. Her statement would be fueled by her anger at him. He'd hurt his father more than he'd helped him.

The only good thing about the week was having his mother with him. What a way to start things off, though, with her learning that her son was a conniving, manipulative scam artist. They'd talked all night long after Lacey left, never mentioning his father, both of them carefully avoiding the topic. Instead, they caught up on each other's lives. He was impressed by her: she'd made a name for herself, writing an acclaimed book on pain control. She'd gotten a good education, and she was beautiful. His father had held her back, he thought. Not intentionally. Not in any mean-spirited way. But his father had wanted to live in Manteo, and there had been little opportunity for her to blossom there. He didn't like thinking about the fact that she had done better without her husband than she had with him, but it was probably the truth.

His father had been a simple man, content to sell boogie boards in a shop that catered to tourists, to live in a little village where he knew most of the natives by name and where the simplicity of his life had enabled him to keep his mental illness in check. Rick had always felt that his and his mother's escape to the shelter had thrown his father's carefully maintained stability out of balance, and he'd suffered a meltdown.

He'd been a loving father. He'd never said those words, “I love you,” to Rick, although he said them all the time now. But it didn't matter. His father had taken him on fishing expeditions and never missed a Little League game, and Rick had known how much he was treasured.

He told his mother about getting his law degree and how much he enjoyed teaching. He told her he'd known he was gay from the time he was in elementary school. And he told her about Christian.

“Did he know what you were truly doing here?” she asked.

“No,” he said, once again tapping into his overabundant supply of guilt. “He would have talked me out of it. He'd tell me I was acting irrationally, and I already knew that. I didn't want to hear him reinforce it.”

Whatever his mother's feelings about his behavior toward Lacey, that first night she'd been careful to keep them to herself, as if she knew they needed to avoid potentially combustible topics as they got to know each other again.

It wasn't until their second evening together, when they were preparing dinner in the tiny kitchen of his cottage, that they began to work their way into the difficult topic of his father.

“What is he like?” she asked without even identifying who she was talking about, but he didn't need to ask her for clarification.

He was washing lettuce in the sink, and he kept his eyes on the task. “He's contrite,” he said. “He's been contrite for many years. He was sick, Mom.” He looked over to where she was chopping onions for the chili. “If he could have changed what happened, he would have. He'd give up his own life to change it.”

She said nothing, the chopping and the running water the only sounds in the kitchen.

“I think he needed to live in Manteo,” he said. “He knew he wasn't well. He told me once that when he had any change of routine, or when he traveled anywhere, even to Elizabeth City, he started feeling scared and out of control.”

“I didn't know that,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was hard to get him out of Manteo, but I just thought he was being stubborn.”

He waited a moment before he spoke again. “Would you like to see him?” he asked.

“No,” she said quickly. “Whether he's really changed for the better or not is no longer my business. He's a part of my past, Fred.” Her hands stopped chopping the onions and she looked at him. “I know he's your present, though. And your future. I understand that, but I don't want or need any part of him.”

He nodded, disappointed but not surprised. If she saw his father, she would know how dramatically he had changed. But it was too much to ask of her, just as it had been too much to ask of Lacey to try to forgive the man who had wreaked such havoc on her life.

“Are you still angry with me for going to the shelter that night?” his mother asked.

Rick shook the lettuce leaves dry and began tearing them into pieces over the salad bowl. “I know you thought you had to,” he said. “I know you had information from the neighbors that led you to believe we were in real danger. I just don't think he would have flipped out the way he did if we hadn't left.”

His mother scraped the chopped onions from the cutting board into the pot on the stove. “I guess that's something we'll never know,” she said.

By the time he drove his mother to the airport in Norfolk, he felt nearly at peace. He may have harmed his father's chances at parole, and he was certain he would never be given the opportunity to truly apologize to Lacey, but there was one thing of which he was certain: he was never going to lose his mother again. Nothing he did would ever drive her away.