One Mountain Away (44 page)

“What do I think?” She seemed to ponder that. “I guess my own waters are muddied, because I like her. I never used to, so I know how infuriating she can be. But I’ve watched her struggle with her illness, and I have so much admiration for the honesty with which she regards her life and how hard she’s trying to end it well.”

“End it?”

“Despite the clerical collar I don’t have a pipeline to the Almighty, but I’ve done a little research. Charlotte has an acute form of leukemia, and I doubt she’ll die from something else in the far-flung future. She doubts it, too. Right now I think her final goal is to die well and leave behind a world that’s a little better because she was in it.”

Ethan thought Analiese’s spin on this was, not surprisingly, too positive. But wasn’t hope what she was paid for? Right along with faith in God and her fellow man?

He struggled to sound rational. “Maybe she’s just trying to rack up points with that Almighty you mentioned.”

“Really? You think so? Charlotte strikes you that way, as a woman so scared of what comes next that she’s trying to hedge her bets?”

She said it lightly, but he heard the rebuke and knew he deserved it.

“She manipulated me,” he said.

“Not for the first time, I imagine. I understand right now it feels like one time too many, particularly when you were beginning to let your guard down with her.”

“How would you know
what
I was doing?”

“I was at the pool party, too. I saw you with her. I recognized what I saw.”

His throat threatened to close. He rested his head in his hands and wished he had stayed home.

“It’s very hard to take,” she said softly. “It’s very hard to take when somebody you love is dying.”

He knew better than to let that hang between them without refuting it, but the words wouldn’t come, and he was afraid if he tried to speak, tears might come instead.

He felt her fingertips rest briefly on his arm. “Any time you want to talk,” she offered, “I can listen.”

He didn’t lift his head after he heard her drive away. He sat there, face still buried in his hands, and listened to the deep silence that surrounded him.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON the telephone was ringing when Ethan let himself into his house. Since early morning he had been busy consulting with the bottle factory contractor who would begin work on Ethan’s unit on Monday, along with finishing another that had just sold.

The sale had been the high point of a week that had begun badly, but even that hadn’t lifted his spirits. Now, as he hurried to catch the phone, he wondered wearily what this call might bring. More bad news about the struggle Taylor and Jeremy were engaged in? News of another injury for Maddie?

News that Charlotte had taken a turn for the worse?

Of course, he didn’t really know what that last possibility might mean, since he knew so little about her disease or its treatment. She’d made sure of that by not telling him she was sick.

He picked up the phone and barked out a hello.

“Ethan, is that you?”

He relaxed a little. Judy hadn’t called since early spring, nor had he called her, but the voice of an ex-wife was not a voice a man forgot.

“How are you?” he asked. “It’s been a while.”

“Apparently I’m as busy as you are. We really haven’t made time to chat, have we?”

He asked how she was, and she asked the same. He told her about the bottle factory, and she told him about the pro bono work she was doing for legal services, in addition to her cases at her law firm. There was an uncomfortable silence, then she went on.

“I’m not just calling to catch up. I’m getting married again. I wanted you to hear the news from me.”

How did a man know when a relationship was truly over? When he didn’t feel a pang of regret. At that moment the only thing that came to mind was how nice it was that one of his exes knew how to be honest.

“Hey, that’s great,” he said. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

“Somebody I met on a ski trip last winter.”

“I hope he lives in Chicago.” Ethan uttered the words without considering them first. Too late he realized they sounded like an indictment.

“Luckily, he does. Flying back and forth cross-country would be tough.”

He seemed to remember Judy ending their marriage because flying back and forth would be
impossible,
but he knew better than to say it. “I hope this is one doozy of a love affair.”

She kept her voice light. “It had better be. They say three’s a charm. Luckily I think I’ve learned a thing or two. We’ll be happy.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Want to tell me what you learned?”

“And bore you silly?”

He found himself shaking his head and translated that into speech. “Maybe it’ll help if I get a next time.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“You don’t think there’s a single woman anywhere who might be interested?”

“Of course that’s not what I meant.”

“Enlighten me, then.”

She was silent for half a dozen heartbeats before she spoke. “You’re sure you’re ready to hear my revelations, Ethan?”

He frowned, because he wasn’t sure he liked where this was going. “Why not give me a try?”

“Then here’s what I’ve realized. Never marry a man who’s still in love with another woman. Jay’s not. He actually dislikes his ex-wife as much as he says he does.”

Ethan lowered himself into the closest chair. “Would you like to be even clearer?”

“Didn’t you ever realize there was somebody sleeping in the bed right between us? I know you were furious at Charlotte. I know you didn’t want to be anywhere near her. But after I left, didn’t you finally get that you were still in love with her?”

“I have no idea where this is coming from.”

“Some people fall in love once and they never fall out of it, even if the relationship falls apart. At the worst they become stalkers. At the best they remarry and honestly try to fall in love with their new partner, but it never quite takes. Deep down, they’re still yearning for the person they lost.”

“I can’t believe you think that was true for me.”

“I
know
it’s true. It wasn’t the same for me. When my first marriage broke up, I was relieved, pure and simple. Then I married you, and when
our
marriage broke up—”

“I can’t wait to hear this.”

“When our marriage broke up,” she repeated patiently, “I was relieved again, because by then I’d figured out there was nothing I could do to make you love me. Not that you didn’t a little. I do know that. We had some great times. But you were never really invested in me, not in the way I wanted to be invested in you.”

“Judy, come on. I’d learned the hard way
not
to be that invested in anybody again. I thought you had, too.”

“You’re using that to refute what I’ve said? Because you’re as much as admitting I’m right.”

She sounded like the attorney she was, and he could feel himself beginning to seethe. “That doesn’t mean I was yearning for Charlotte while I was married to you.”

“You never stopped yearning for what you had with Charlotte. You never fell out of love with her, or at least not out of love with the way things were when they were good.”

In the space of a sentence his annoyance turned into something darker, something that until this week he hadn’t even realized he had inside him.

“Well, you’ll like this,” he said. “Charlotte’s dying. Maybe that will get her out of my system once and for all. Do you think that’s what it’ll take?”

As he fought back more angry words she was silent, then she said, “I’m so sorry, Ethan. If I’d known…”

“What? If you’d known, you wouldn’t have told me things you didn’t have the courage to say when they actually
mattered?
When we still had a chance of straightening out misunderstandings and making our own marriage work?”

Now
she
was angry, too. “My God, listen to yourself. You think we actually had a prayer of being happy? Just ask yourself this. Would you be this torn up if I told you
I
was dying?”

He gathered every ounce of self-control so he could end the phone call politely. “I wish you the best, Judy, I really do. If you’ve figured out what you need to make your next marriage work, I’m happy. But take some advice from
me.
This time, if you think something or someone is interfering with your happiness, be sure you tell your husband while you’re still married to him. Don’t wait until another divorce is final.”

He hung up carefully; then he kicked the cabinet underneath the telephone so hard that the phone tipped and clattered to the floor.

* * *

Five chemo treatments, with two more to go. Since returning from the hospital that morning, Charlotte had spent the rest of the day and evening telling herself she
would
get through this. Two days were nothing. Phil had increased the antinausea medication, and so far the only other side effects had been swelling and soreness around the injection sites, and a bone-deep fatigue. They were carefully monitoring her progress, and additional tests were a fact of life. If any of them had been particularly worrisome, Phil would have called.

She was alone in the house. Harmony hadn’t wanted to leave for work this evening, worried Charlotte might need someone nearby, but Charlotte had made her go. The house was silent except for yips and squeals from the family room.

Today the fatigue was the hardest to bear. She could use warm compresses where the injections had been given, and if she took the meds on time, and ate and drank small quantities, she could control the nausea. The fatigue, though, was insidious. She was like a balloon with a small pinprick. The air that had lifted her above the earth to soar with the birds was slowly escaping, and unless someone found the hole and mended it quickly, she would be a puddle on the ground. Hopefully a colorful, gracefully arranged puddle, but a puddle still.

She had dozed continually. Every time she’d tried to write in her journal, her eyelids had drifted closed, proving, she supposed, that she had nothing of interest left to say. Next she had wandered into the media room, hoping television would distract her. Over the years she had spent so little time in front of it that she didn’t know what to watch, and now she felt like a voyeur peeking in the windows of people she’d never met. Even the game shows were foreign to her. She hadn’t solved a puzzle on
Wheel of Fortune,
and most of the categories on
Jeopardy!
made her even sorrier she hadn’t spent time just reading for the fun of it.

When the doorbell rang, she wasn’t sure she’d actually heard it. The telephone had rung several times during the day, and without answering she had listened to well-wishers leaving messages on her machine. The word had obviously gotten out that she was ill, most likely through someone at Falconview, and as callers filled their allotted thirty seconds, she’d asked herself not only if they really cared but why they should.

Those questions had helped fill the time, but they had left her even more exhausted.

The doorbell rang again, and this time she imagined the UPS man with a package she didn’t want. Or maybe a neighbor who wondered why Charlotte’s yard service had trimmed too much off the hedge that separated them, or not enough. Staring at the ceiling, as she had for most of the day, she had come to regret all the petty interactions that filled her life. She thought doorbells were something she wouldn’t miss if the new chemo was unsuccessful.

It seemed to her that somebody had designed the world backward. Facing death should come first, then slowly, after coming to terms with dying and learning what was really important, each person could begin living. Slowly, of course, picking up energy as the body grew younger and healthier. Until…

She didn’t have that part worked out, but it had given her something to think about.

When the doorbell rang one more time, she pushed herself off the sofa and made her way through the house to the front door. She didn’t even check the peephole. If masked men with assault rifles were standing on her porch, she thought she would invite them inside to end it all now.

She opened the door.

Ethan stood on the porch, jeans, dark polo shirt, hands in pockets. She thought the masked men would have been easier.

“Is Taylor all right?” she asked.

“Yes, she’s—”

“And Maddie?”

He nodded.

“Then we’re done here.” She started to close the door, but he put his foot in the crack.

“I hope that’s not true,” he said, his voice a hoarse rumble over the sound of crickets and, from farther away, the clipped screech of a nighthawk.

The outside air smelled like summer, wild roses in the woods, honeysuckle beginning its perfumed reign. For a moment she just breathed it in, looking for the right words.

“I don’t think I have the energy for more indictments of my character. Tell you what…” She took another deep breath and let it out slowly. “Put everything you despise about me in writing. I may even get to it before Taylor gets to
my
letter.” She looked at his shoe, still blocking the door, then back up at him. “And as lovely as it is out here tonight, I think we’re finished.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Angry.”

“May I come in?”

“It’s not a good time.” She considered that. “And I don’t think there will be a good time.”

“I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”

She had very little fight left in her. Fight was one thing the chemo had rooted out and disposed of. If it rooted out the leukemic blasts cluttering her bloodstream half as well, she might live another decade.

“I appreciate that.” She glanced at his foot again. “Ethan, if that’s what you came to say, I think you’re finished now.”

“I don’t want you to die.”

She felt a flash of anger. She didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want a guilt-driven apology. “Here’s a thought to comfort you. Ten years went by after our divorce, and I think we spoke once. So it won’t be that different, okay?”