Distant Shores (14 page)

“You told me all the time, Daddy.”

He tried to come forward off the pillows, to sit up. It was heartbreaking to see his failure. With a sigh, he sank back down. “I need you to do somethin' for me, Birdie. It won't be easy for you.”

“Anything, Daddy. You know that.”

“You take care of Anita. You hear me?”

“Don't say that,” she said, hearing the sudden desperation in her voice. “You'll be around to take care of her.”

“Don't sass me. This is important.” His breathing became shallow, labored. “Promise me you'll take care of her.”

“Okay.” Elizabeth leaned down and kissed his forehead. “I love you, Daddy.”

He looked at her, but his eyes were glassy now, unfocused. As if he'd spent all his energy and had nothing left. “That love'll carry me through the Pearly Gates, sugar beet, it surely will. Now, ask Anita to come in here.”

“No … please.”

“It's time, Birdie. Now go get your mama.”

Elizabeth stood there a minute, unable to leave him.

“Go on,” he said gently.

She forced herself to move. At the door, she gave him a last smile, then left the room. “He wants you,” she said to Anita.

Her stepmother made a sound that was half sigh, half sob, and hurried into the room, closing the door behind her.

At the window, Elizabeth stood close to the glass, on the outside of their love, looking in. She prayed hard.
Be strong, Daddy. Be strong.

An alarm on one of the machines went off.

Anita stumbled back from the bed, screaming, “Help us, help us!”

Elizabeth jerked to open the door, but nurses and doctors rushed past her, filled the tiny room, pushed Anita out of the way. People clustered around her father. The noise turned into a dull roar in Elizabeth's ears. She pressed the glass, hard. “Don't you die, Daddy. Don't you dare …”

Phillip raced into the room, elbowed his way to her father's side. He reached for the heart paddles.

Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't breathe. Her own heart kept skipping beats, unreliable now that her father's had stopped.
Please, God, please don't take him. Not yet …

When she opened her eyes, the doctors and nurses were standing still; the machines were cold and black. Anita was sitting by Daddy, her cries had dwindled down to soundless gasps and occasional shudders. The makeup on her face had been washed away in streaks.

Anita looked through the glass at Elizabeth. “He's gone,” she mouthed helplessly. The words made her start to cry again. This time, her sobbing was a shrunken, heart-wrenching sound.

Slowly, Elizabeth walked into the room, went up to his bed. She pressed a hand to Anita's frail shoulder, clutching hard, though she'd only meant to squeeze reassuringly.

Daddy lay there, his eyes closed, his great barrel chest sunken and still. “Hey, Daddy,” she whispered. It was a split second before she realized that she'd expected an answer. But, of course, there wasn't one.

His heart—the one that had loved her so well—had finally given up.

THIRTEEN

Elizabeth pointed to an empty stall in the airport's underground parking lot. Jack turned the car into it and parked.

She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She'd been careful all the way here. No radio (the last thing she needed was to hear a sad song), no runaway thoughts, no memories. She kept her eyes on the road and her mind on the funeral. Arrangements, she could deal with. Emotions, she couldn't.

She got out of the car—

(Daddy's car, but don't think about that.)

—and walked briskly toward the terminal.

Jack sauntered along behind her. She'd snapped at him often enough in the last few hours that he was giving her a wide berth. He'd obviously figured out that it was better to say nothing at all.

She saw the girls first. Stephanie was standing at the gate, with her boyfriend, Tim, beside her. As always, Stephanie looked impeccable. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was drawn back from her face and held in place by two silver clips. She wore a pair of black wool pants and a pretty yellow sweater. Tim, in Dockers and a striped Brooks Brothers' shirt, was holding her hand. Jamie was close to them, yet separate, and dressed in baggy denim overalls. A baseball cap was pulled down low on her forehead.

Elizabeth quickened her step. “Hey, girls … Tim,” she said softly, pulling her daughters into her arms.

For the first time in hours, Elizabeth drew in a full breath.

When they separated, Jack came up beside them. He slipped an arm around her waist. She wondered if he'd known that she was losing her control, or if it was sheer dumb luck on his part. Either way, his touch steadied her.

Jamie looked up at her dad. She managed a tired smile. “Holy shit. You're gorgeous. Did you have a face-lift or something?”

Elizabeth was startled by that. With all that had happened in the past day, she hadn't bothered to really look at her husband. Now she did, and she saw what Jamie meant.

He shrugged. “They made me color my hair. Just when I'd gotten used to the start of gray, they took it out. I haven't been this blond since eighth grade.”

Jamie frowned. “You look like a movie star, no kidding.”

Elizabeth took a step backward. She felt old suddenly, flabby and wrinkled. She hadn't had time to color her own hair, and more than a little gray threaded her darker roots. And she'd slept so poorly last night that her skin was the color and consistency of tapioca. And here was her husband of twenty-four years looking like Jeff Bridges in
The Contender
.

Jack looped an arm around Jamie. “They did this treatment that peeled the skin off my face. It hurt like hell and for almost a week I looked like a burn victim. That's why rich people look so good. They spend money on stuff you can't imagine and pain is no reason to say no.”

Stephanie put an arm around Elizabeth's sadly thick waist. “You're as pretty as ever, too, Mom,” she said.

“Thanks.” It was all she could say.

The mechanics of death in a small town ticked forward like a well-oiled clock. Everyone pitched in. An intricate ballet played out first in the funeral parlor, then at the graveside, and now at the house.

There were pictures of Daddy everywhere, on tables and counters and windowsills. Some were ornately framed; others sat in plastic-wood frames from the nearest Piggly Wiggly. Everyone who'd come to Sweetwater after the funeral had brought a casserole and a photo. Wherever Elizabeth walked in the house, she was sure to hear soft laughter, a few sighs, and her father's name spoken in a whispered voice.

In a town like this, people came together in triumph and in tragedy. Every emotion was shared, but none were openly discussed. No one asked Elizabeth how she felt or offered an expensive grief-therapist's name. That's how it was done in The Big City. Here, they squeezed your shoulder and remarked that you were “holding up well.”

Southern women had been hiding emotions behind competence since crinolines were in fashion. It was bred into them, like the ability to make a flawless mint julep or bake a perfect ham. Elizabeth did as was expected of her.

But as hard as she tried to keep the grief away, it stalked her.

When she couldn't take it anymore, she escaped to the back porch.

It was the last place she should have chosen. She'd sat here so often with Daddy, listening to the cicadas and his tall tales. Memories pressed in on her from all directions. She recalled standing down at the pond trying to land one of the trout they'd thrown into the water as fry … or walking the fields at harvest time, when the air smelled of sweet white corn and tobacco smoke.…

This was where they'd come on the day after Mama's funeral, too. It had been spring then, not nearly so cold as today. Like today, the house had been full of guests speaking quietly and pictures.
You want to sleep in my room tonight, sugar beet?

“Hold on, Birdie,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut, fisting her hands. Fingernails bit into the soft flesh of her palms.

It didn't work. She had to get out of here. In about ten seconds, she was going to lose it. She went back into the house and disappeared in the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her.

She closed the toilet lid and sat down.

There, on the floor by the toilet was a magazine.
Travel and Leisure.

When she picked it up, it fell open to a two-page, dog-eared spread on Costa Rica. There was an advertisement for an adventure camp on the Caribbean coast. Someone—Daddy—had drawn a star in red ink on the page.

There's a place in Costa Rica, sugar beet, called Cloud Mountain—or some damned thing—that speaks right to m' heart.

The magazine fell to the floor and hit with a thump. She cried at last, for all the times she'd had been with her father and all the times she hadn't, and for all the times she never would be.

When the tears had worn themselves out and left her dry, she got unsteadily to her feet.

She splashed cool water on her face, then smoothed her hair back and returned to the fray. As she moved through the crowd, she felt stiff and fragile. If anyone noticed how awful she looked, no one commented.

She checked on the food and opened bottles of wine, then headed for the library, where her family was hiding out.

Stephanie and Tim sat together on the sofa. As usual, Stephanie was the picture of decorum. A plain, scoop-necked, long-sleeved black dress clung to her lithe body. There were red streaks on her porcelain cheeks, and her gray eyes showed the residue of tears. Tim was holding her hand. They looked like a couple from central casting—
young love handles grief well.

Jamie, on the other hand, had taken no great care in dressing. She sat slouched on an ottoman, her white-blond hair a tangled mass that covered half of her face. Her navy blue dress was already wrinkled. Her pale blue eyes were swollen and red.

“I can't listen to any more stories about him,” Jamie said softly, her eyes welling up.

Elizabeth understood. It was difficult out there. Everyone had loved him so much and they wanted to share their favorite story, but every word lodged in your heart like a shard of glass.

Jack rose from the leather wing chair and walked toward Elizabeth, never taking his gaze from her face.

He pulled her into his arms. She held herself back, afraid that if she relaxed, she'd break.

“He loved you,” Jack whispered against her ear, too softly for the children to hear. “The first time I met him, he told me he'd kill me if I ever hurt you. He reminded me of that promise when I asked for your hand in marriage. His exact words were:
‘You hurt my sugar beet, Jackson Shore, and I'll whoop you s' hard you'll see the Milky Way.'
”

Elizabeth looked up at Jack. She'd never heard that story before. It brought her daddy back to her for a perfect, heartbreaking moment; she heard his booming, laughing voice, calling her his sugar beet. She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn't sure what—but nothing came out.

Jack touched her face gently. “You don't have to do everything alone, Birdie,” he said, “go ahead and cry.”

He was trying to help, but somehow that only made her feel more alone. She knew sorrow would hit her later, hit her hard, the sudden, aching realization that her father was Gone, that she'd never pick up the phone and hear his voice again, or go to her mailbox and get a letter written in his bold, sweeping hand. “Oh, Jack …”

“Let me help you, Birdie,” he said, stroking her hair.

She loved him for trying, but there was no way to help a person through something like this. Grief was the loneliest road in the world.

“It helps just to have you here,” she said, and it was true.

She clung to him then, taking strength from the feel of his arms around her, and for a single, magic moment, it felt as if they loved each other again.

FOURTEEN

Jack was back in New York. Thank God.

He knew it was a weakness in him, a moral failing, but he hated death's accessories. The sobbing, the gathering, that god-awful, primitive ritual called a viewing.

As expected, he had looked down the church aisle and seen that flower-draped casket, and all he'd been able to think about was his mother's funeral.

There had been no flowers then, no expensive mahogany casket, and saddest of all, no mourners. Just one skinny boy in a borrowed coat, and a slouched-over, broken stalk of a man, only a few years away from his own death.

Jack loved his wife and he adored his children, but two days in that grieving, too-quiet house had been more than he could stand.

Thankfully, Birdie was good in a crisis. Jack hadn't even had to beg to leave—or to make up a feeble excuse—she'd released him, said,
Go on back to New York; there's nothing for you and the girls to do down here.

He'd made a lackluster effort at argument.
If you need me …
 But she hadn't. Birdie was pure steel when it came to hard times.

Now he was free again.

He stepped out of the cab, overtipped the driver (he was becoming a celebrity again), and hurried into the studio. He went straight to his office, stowed his carry-on bag in the closet, and sat down at his desk.

The stack of paper was huge, as was the pile of pink phone messages. He'd forgotten how much the phone rang when you were
somebody
. They'd promised him a secretary to handle all this office grunt work—that was a given. He couldn't go around answering his own phone anymore, and when the fan mail started coming in, he'd need someone to do that for him, too.

He didn't look forward to training another secretary. It took weeks, sometimes months, to teach someone your likes and dislikes, your quirks and demands. Interviewing, reading résumés, choosing the right candidate.

What he really needed was an assistant. Someone to train his secretary as well as to help him formulate questions for the athlete interviews. There was a lot of research involved in looking smart off-the-cuff.

The writers and producers were doing that, of course, but Warren had his own assistant producer, and Jack had noticed that Warren got the lion's share of the good questions.

Jack picked up a pen and began making a list. His assistant would have to be bright, ambitious, dedicated, intelligent. Someone like … Sally.

Why hadn't he thought of it before? She had the experience. They had worked well together in Portland, and she was a tiger behind the scenes. She tracked down every nuance of a story. She'd be a real addition to the show. As it was, all the producers and writers were male. A young woman who loved sports would shake up the perspective a bit. And she'd make sure Jack looked good.

She'd do it, too. He had no doubt about that. Sally was a woman with big dreams and tall ambitions. A chance to be a production assistant for a network show in the Big Apple would really charge her batteries.

This was business, pure and simple. That he'd been attracted to her didn't matter. He'd always be tempted by some young woman; that was hardwired in his DNA, as much a part of him as blue eyes and blond hair. He'd been tempted plenty of times in the past fifteen years—and even more recently—but he hadn't fallen out of the old marriage bed even once. Those days were behind him.

This was strictly business.

Unable to sleep, Elizabeth put on one of the thick terry-cloth robes that Anita had placed in the guest room closet and went quietly downstairs. The old house creaked and moaned at her progress. The wind against the windowpanes sounded like a cat scratching to be let in.

She didn't doubt that the house knew its master had gone on, but this place had weathered the storms of death for a long, long time. The first Rhodes had come to this land long before the Civil War, one of the working-class poor of England who dared to dream of a better life. He'd crossed the sea as an indentured servant and been sold at auction to a farmer in nearby Russellville. He'd worked hard, married well, and planted the seeds of a dynasty.

In the darkened kitchen, she made herself a cup of tea and stood at the sink, staring out at the backyard. Moonlight tipped the dead black branches with pearlescent color. Thin clouds scudded across the breezy sky; they created a shifting pattern of light on the garden.

She tightened the belt on her robe and went outside. The screen door banged shut behind her. The wind suddenly died down. An almost preternatural silence fell.

She shivered, though not only from the cold. It felt as if she'd been summoned out here, perhaps by the memory of their night out here at Christmas.

“Daddy?” she whispered, feeling both silly and hopeful.

There was no answer, no Hollywood moaning or ghostly apparition. No tall man dressed in a flannel shirt and twill pants standing beside her.

She stepped down onto the brick path that bisected and outlined the garden. The thin slippers she wore protected her feet from the cold as she walked past the perfectly shaped boxwood hedges. Here and there, shaped camellia bushes stood above the squared hedge, their glossy green leaves a stark contrast to all the brownness.

This had once been her special place, and now she was a stranger to it. So many times in her youth, especially on long summer nights when the heat made sleep impossible, she'd come out here. Alone and searching. In the winter, she'd scoured the leaf-blackened beds for signs of spring. A patch of lime green moss, a seed pod that had sprouted.

What she'd really been looking for, of course, was her mother, and here, amid the flowers she'd tended so carefully, Elizabeth had thought she felt her mama's spirit.

She'd always tried to picture her mama in the garden, maybe thinning the daffodils or trimming the roses, but all she'd ever seen of her mother were black-and-white photographs, and even those had been scarce. Most of the pictures had been portrait shots—wedding, graduations, that sort of thing. They left Elizabeth with a vague, colorless image of a pretty young woman who always looked perfect but never laughed or spoke.

Elizabeth knelt at the edge of the rose bed. Damp black earth ground itself into the plush fabric beneath her knees.

The bare, grayish brown rosebushes cast shadows on the darkened earth. Moonlight gave them an eerie look, like twisted hands from an ancient reptile, each finger thickened by age and studded with huge thorns.

Behind her, she heard the sound of a door creaking open and clicking closed, then the rhythm of footsteps on the brick path.

“Hey, Anita,” she said without turning around.

“It's amazin' to think that those roses'll be bloomin' in just a few months.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

When she was little, Elizabeth had often cried when her mama's favorite flowers wilted and died. Now, though, as a woman full grown, she understood the importance of rest. It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible. She wished such a thing could be true for housewives who'd lost their way, that instead of wasting a life, you could be hibernating, gathering strength for the coming spring.

A breeze kicked up, sent a few dry, brittle leaves skittering across the path. “I tended those roses by hand all these years. I never let a gardener near 'em.”

Elizabeth sat back on her heels and looked up at Anita. “Why?”

Anita smiled sadly. Her platinum hair was a mass of curlers; thick night moisturizer glistened on her cheeks and forehead. A heavy blue-plaid-flannel nightdress covered her from throat to foot. She looked ten years older than her actual sixty-two. “I smelled her perfume once.”

Elizabeth felt a shiver. She remembered the pretty little bottle that had sat on her mama's vanity table. “Mama's?” she whispered.

“It was one of those days—when you were in a mood, as your daddy used to say—you disagreed with everything I said. So I stopped talkin' at all. I came out here, ready to attack your mama's garden. I wanted to fight somethin' I could
see
. But when I sat out here, all alone, feelin' sorry for myself, I smelled your mama's perfume. Shalimar. It wasn't like she spoke to me or anything weird like that. I just … realized I was fightin' with her baby girl, who was broken up inside. After that, whenever you made me crazy, I came out here to the garden.”

Elizabeth heard the pain in Anita's voice, and for once, she understood. “No wonder you were out here so often.”

“I should have done things differently, I guess. I knew you missed her somethin' awful.”

“I started forgetting her. That was the worst part. That's why I always asked Daddy about her. But he wouldn't say a thing, ever. He always said, ‘Keep your memories close, Birdie.' He never seemed to understand that my memories of her were like smoke. I couldn't hold on to them.”

“I imagine your mama is giving him a piece of her mind about that right now.”

“I don't think anyone held as much of Daddy's heart as you did, Anita.” Try as she might, a slight bitterness tainted her final words.

“Thank you for that.” Anita gazed out over the fallow fields. “Why didn't you fly home with Jack and the girls?”

Elizabeth felt the cold suddenly. She shivered and stood up, crossing her arms. “He had to be at work first thing in the morning. I thought I'd stay and help you clean the house.”

“Heloise cleans the house. She has since you were in pigtails.” Anita looked down at her. “You
can
tell me to mind my own business, y' know.”

“The truth is I don't know why. I just wasn't ready to go back to New York.”

Anita took a step forward. Her silly pink slippers sank into the black earth. “Your daddy used to say to me, ‘Mother, if that girl don't spread her wings, one day she's plumb gonna forget how to fly.' He was worried that you were missing out on your own life.”

“I know.” Elizabeth didn't want to be talking about this. It hurt too much, and right now, in her mama's garden, she was fragile. She wiped her eyes—when had she started crying, anyway?—and looked at Anita. “What about you? Will you be okay?”

“I'll get by.”

It wasn't really an answer, but it was all there was. They had both known it would come, the day when Anita would be left alone in this white elephant of a house. For a while, the phone would ring almost hourly and friends would show up on the porch with a casserole, but sooner or later, the stream would run dry, and Anita would have to look widowhood in the eye. “I'll call you when I get to New York, just to make sure everything is okay.”

“That would be nice.”

Silence fell between them again. Wind whispered through the shrubs and played the chimes that hung from the porch roof. A melancholy sound.

Elizabeth wished suddenly that things were different between her and Anita, that they could hold hands and comfort one another. But it was too late now to recraft a relationship whose time had come and gone.

“We've missed our chance, haven't we?” Anita asked softly.

Elizabeth nodded. She didn't know how else to respond.

“It's too bad,” Anita said. “But don't you worry about me, honey. I'll be fine. You don't marry a man who is fourteen years older and expect to outlive him. I always knew I'd be alone one day.”

Elizabeth had never considered that. To her, the age difference had always fallen on her daddy's side of the equation. She'd seen it from a man's point of view. A younger wife made a man happy. Everyone knew that. Men—shallow as plate glass—had been proving it for years.

Now she saw the other side of that coin. Sure, Anita had gotten a good life and a lot of money. She'd been accepted into the local social scene and married a man who treated her like a piece of the finest French porcelain.

In return, Anita had no children now to comfort her, and no partner with whom to spend the hearing-aid years. She was sixty-two years old and a widow. Alone perhaps for the remainder of her life.

“Why didn't you and Daddy have children?” Elizabeth asked—finally—the question she'd pondered for years.

Anita sighed. “Oh, honey, that's a question for another time, maybe between different women.”

“In other words, mind my own business.”

“Yes.” She smiled, maybe to take the sting out of her answer. “That question cuts to the heart of me, is all. I'm not goin' to answer it as idle chitchat at midnight two days after my husband's death.”

Elizabeth understood. They'd missed their chance for intimacy. Now they were simply two grown women, connected by the barest strand of relation, who would go their separate ways. “I'm sorry,” she said at last, choosing the sentence she herself had heard a hundred times in the past few days. “You call me if you're feeling too alone.”

“There are worse things in life than being alone.”

Elizabeth sensed that Anita had chosen those words carefully. She felt transparent suddenly, as if unhappiness ran through her veins, showed in the tiny blue lines that came from her heart.

Anita took a step closer.

Elizabeth stepped backward, needing space between them. “I better get to bed now. Six will come awfully early.” She walked away, forcing herself to keep a steady pace. It was difficult.

She went inside the house and slammed the door, then peered cautiously out the window.

Anita was still standing there, shivering, her white hair twined around a dozen pink curlers. Even in the fading moonlight, Elizabeth could make out the glittering tear tracks on her face. Anita was standing alone, crying.

She was looking at the roses.

Elizabeth paid the cabdriver and stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the Nashville airport.

It was cold out today. The air smelled of incipient snow; the skies were gray and bloated.

She wheeled her carry-on bag behind her. It bumped over the threshold as the electronic doors whooshed open. The United Airlines ticket counter was crowded with travelers, so she went instead to the bank of computers along the wall. It took a few minutes to find the departures terminal. She scanned through the flight numbers.