Second Chances (19 page)

She slipped the notepad into her purse and put the journals back into the laptop bag. She yawned. She felt completely drained. She reached up and turned off the overhead lights, closed her eyes and, without thinking about it, reached out and placed her left hand in his right. Nathan's hand closed over hers with a reassuring squeeze. A slip of a smile spread over her lips. They both wanted answers to the same questions and she hoped that together they might be able to find them.

The layover in Chicago was brutal. The flight attendant woke them shortly before landing as they had not been woken by the pilot's announcement of their impending arrival. Paige had blushed when she saw they were still holding hands. She felt completely foolish. The term school girl sprang to her mind. For his part, Paige wasn't sure if Nathan even noticed. He was still wiped out from the previous days and moments after bringing his seat into the appropriate landing position, he was once again asleep.

The landing went smooth and they taxied to their gate quickly. Paige woke Nathan again once they had opened the door to the terminal. He said nothing, but nodded at the appropriate times and followed her instructions. They were the last to deplane. The terminal was eerily quiet. It was the middle of the night and as such the foot traffic was slim and none of the shops appeared open.

Paige took the tickets from Nathan and looked to see where their connecting flight would board. It turned out they were only a single gate over from where they needed to be. The boarding desk was currently closed. While there were still people moving about the terminal, she noted that there appeared to only be one other passenger waiting for the same flight. A middle-aged woman was curled in a tight ball in the waiting area, fast asleep with her carry-on serving as her pillow.

Nathan nodded toward the woman, indicating that he thought she definitely had the right idea. He picked a row near the boarding area, sat down and quickly joined the other woman in slumber.
 

Paige wanted to join in on the party, but found she couldn't sit still. She wished the flight had been nonstop. She couldn't say why, but she didn't feel comfortable. She knew it was fear racing through her, but she wasn't sure what she was afraid of. No that wasn't entirely true, she knew plenty of things she was afraid of. She was afraid of finding out the truth. She was afraid of not finding out the truth. She felt afraid of getting back on a plane, which was silly since she used to love to fly. Part of her mind was screaming at her to stay away from Rhode Island. An unnatural desire gripped her and it took everything she had to resist the urge to run screaming down the concourse.
 

She wiped her sweaty palms on her pants and paced around the boarding area, circling the clusters of chairs again and again.

Did they need to go to Rhode Island? Should they? Maybe they could just go somewhere else. They?

"Are we a they?" she asked herself aloud.
 

When had she begun to think that way? She still did not believe that she was Nathan's Paige, in fact she was quite sure she wasn't. And yet looking at him asleep in the chair, she couldn't deny that she was starting to feel something for him. But why? The passion with which he had written in the journals was undeniable. She knew that part of her was responding to the raw emotion he had poured out in those words. She found his dedication to the woman he wrote about to be extremely attractive, almost sexy. And speaking of sexy, she had to admit she was more than a little attracted to him physically. But was that it? Was it just that she was attracted to the dedication he showed for his past wife and his cute smile? She didn't think that was it.
 

She had liked him instantly. She felt she could trust him, as was obvious from all the craziness she had followed him into. She had felt comfortable with him, even when he had scared the hell out of her back...here? She shook her head.

"This is where it all started." She looked around the terminal, what a difference a few days could make. For the life of her she could not remember what gate they had been at for that last flight, but part of her wondered if it hadn't been this very gate. What were the odds?

"Full circle. It started here, so why shouldn't it end here?"

She slapped a hand over her mouth. What had she just said? Why had she said that? Why should it end here? Why did she think it might or that it even should end?
 

She wiped her trembling hands on her pants again. It felt so hot in here. She felt a rush of warm saliva filling her mouth and darted for the rest room.

The muscles in stomach clenched into hard knots. She kept her eyes closed as she leaned over the sink, her hands gripping the sides tight enough to turn her knuckles white. She spit out mouthful after mouthful of saliva between the dry heaves. The pain in her stomach was enough to bring tears to her eyes.
 

When it seemed the heaves were subsiding she reached to turn on the water, cursed when she noticed it was a hands free faucet and waved a hand back and forth over the sensor. The water started to flow and she scooped up a handful and splashed it on her face, reached for a second and cursed once more when the water stopped running. She waved the faucet on once more and got another handful of water. She wished it were cold instead of luke warm. She took a third handful and splashed her face once more, before she risked standing up. Her stomach ached.

She took a few slow breaths before she looked at herself in the mirror. Paige was horrified by her reflection. Her color was way off, her face red from the straining of the dry heaves. Her nose was running and she still had tears running down her face.

"What the hell is wrong with me? You need to get a hold of yourself," she said to the reflection in the mirror. She reached over and waved her hand repeatedly in front of the paper towel dispenser. It made a noise, its motor running, but no paper towels came out.

"Perfect, just perfect."

She opened the closest stall and pulled a large wad of toilet paper free. She did her best to clean up her face, wiping away the stray flecks of white as the toilet paper came apart.

"This is pathetic," she said to her reflection. "It's a good thing Nathan can't see..."

She shivered. She was no longer hot. In fact, she felt down right frigid. She was gripped by a sudden certainty that Nathan was gone. She saw it in her mind. She would exit the restroom and he would be gone. Only empty chairs and the middle-aged woman in the row across the way would be there to greet her.

She clenched her hands into fists and held them tightly at her side, trying to will away the fear. She blinked away her tears.
 

"Stop it," she hissed to herself and was pleasantly surprised when her body responded.

Her heart thundered in her chest as she walked to the exit. She hesitated for only a moment before exiting the restroom. A sob of relief escaped her lips when she saw Nathan's sleeping form exactly where she had left him.

She moved quickly over to join him, sitting in the chair next to him. He had his hands buried in his jacket pockets. She pulled gently on his left arm as he shifted. His hand came out of his pocket and something else came out with it. She saw a flash of silver and then it fell from her sight under his chair. She bent forward and reached for it.

Her breath caught in her chest when she pulled the silver cross and chain out from under the chair. It was the one she had looked at the other day. She didn't have to look at it too closely to tell, she just knew it. It was the one she'd seen that had reminded her of her mother's.

How?

She shook her head and looked from it to Nathan and back, a sad smile on her lips. He had gotten it for her. How had he known? How could he have known? She held it tightly in her hand, trying to decide what to do. A minute later she undid the clasp and put the necklace on. The weight of it against her chest felt reassuring, like a hug from her mother. She smiled at him, then without thinking about it, leaned over and gently kissed him.

For the next several hours she stayed glued to her spot beside him. More passengers arrived and she eyed them warily. Fear still filled her. The desire to run screaming down the concourse did not entirely leave and she didn't dare allow herself to fall asleep for fear that she would awaken and find him gone. But the comforting weight of the cross helped sustain her.

When the time came to board, she gently woke him. She couldn't tell if he noticed she was wearing the necklace or not and was unsure of just how to bring it up. He was still half-asleep and then after they had taken their seats in the cabin, he was all the way asleep once more. This time she didn't leave an empty seat between them. She sat in the middle, leaving the aisle seat clear.

She fidgeted in her seat until the plane had pulled away from the gate. She was certain something would happen. The plane would get called back to the gate and she would be escorted off and away from Nathan.
 

She began to relax only when the reassuring pressure of the takeoff pushed her back in her seat. As the jet lifted off into the air, she raised the armrest between them and before the aircraft reached cruising altitude she was asleep, nestled up against him with a sliver of a smile on her lips and a hand holding the cross against her chest.

Julie rolled up to the closed wooden crossbar of the guardhouse in her battered Volvo. She recognized the man on duty. He was dressed in his blue uniform, crisply pressed. He stepped out of the guardhouse and smiled at her.

"Good morning," he said as he looked at his watch. "You are a little early."

Julie knew it was true. She had tossed and turned most of the night until finally giving up on sleep and had gotten out of bed and prepared for the day.

"Oh really?" She tried her best to sound innocent and gave him a big smile. She thought about batting her eyelashes at him, but figured she was too old to get away with such an obvious gesture.

"Yeah, ten minutes until visiting hours start."

"Guess traffic wasn't as bad as I feared. Can I still go in, Dave?"

"Sure," he said, smiling because she'd remembered his name. He returned to the guardhouse and a moment later the crossbar at the entrance to the grounds began to rise.
 

She waved to him and then put her car in gear. She drove slowly up the long driveway. The vast, immaculately kept grounds of the Ocean View Estates spread out on either side of the gravel drive. She pulled up to the parking area in front of the massive home and got out. She turned and looked back, as she always did, past the gate to the ocean beyond.
 

The name was no lie. The view from the top of the hill she'd just driven up was spectacular. Just beyond on the other side of the road was an almost unrestricted view of Gooseberry Beach. While much of the beach itself was open to the public, the Bastion Beach Club, which she could just see from her vantage point, was anything but. Like much of Newport, the rich and privileged lived side by side with the commoners, but never together. Together but separate was how she always thought of it.

She shook her head. What was she thinking? She wasn't here to sightsee. It was just so hard not to appreciate the majestic beauty of the surroundings. She was certain a part of her would actually miss it. She turned back to the house. An understatement. She was always in awe of the fact that at one time the building before her had been home to a single family. She had called it a mansion the first time she had seen it, but had been quickly corrected on that. There were certainly plenty of mansions in the area, but this wasn't one of them. At originally only seven thousand square feet, it had been a thousand square feet shy of earning that distinction. While that meant little to Julie, to those in the know it was quite unseemly to make such an error. She often wondered what it had been like before its conversion. The inside had been gutted and remodeled long ago, with massive expansions added to make it bloom well beyond its original size. It was now home to twenty full time residents when operating at full capacity, which it almost always was. Despite the exorbitant cost of being a resident at the facility, there was always a waiting list and it was often a matter of who you knew not when you applied to the facility that garnered a person one of the coveted spots on the rare occasion one became available.

Part of Julie almost wanted to be grateful to Cameron for arranging his placement here, until she reminded herself that if it weren't for Cameron then he wouldn't have a need to be placed anywhere. Damn catch twenty-two situation if she ever saw one.

"Well hopefully we can bring an end to this soon," she said to herself as she reached into her car and grabbed her purse before heading up the ramp to the front door.

She grasped the doorknob and took a slow deep breath before turning it and opening the door. She always felt as if she were entering the lion's den when she came. She knew all the people who worked here, but was unsure just who they actually worked for, and that made her paranoid. But she believed that was a good thing, a survival instinct perhaps.

The door opened into a large open room which had likely been a grand hall before the remodel. There were couches and love-seats arranged around the room by the front windows, all but one was vacant. Seated upon the farthest couch to the left was an elderly gentlemen dressed in a full three-piece suit, his hands resting atop a hand carved wooden cane. He stared off into the distance. Julie knew his name was J.P. Sanders and he had at one point been a financial wizard. These days he couldn't even remember his children's names, but he never failed to dress as if he were still heading for the office. Standing a foot or two behind him, Julie saw Peggy Jennings. She was dressed in a plaid skirt and dark blue top, the unofficial uniform of the resident caregivers. Each resident had their own personal caregiver. Ocean View insisted that they work six days a week, keeping continuity with each resident was important. Not long ago Julie had a chance to talk with Peg, as she liked to be called, and learned she'd been J.P.'s caregiver for almost eight years. Julie could tell that she cared deeply for the man and it was no doubt thanks to her dedication to his care that he continued to thrive. Julie guessed it was like that for most of the residents and their caregivers. They spent so much time together, how could they not get close? She gave Peggy a wave and then headed to the front desk, straight ahead on the right just beyond the entrance area. Peggy flashed her a smile and returned her greeting.