The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (145 page)

“Mine?” he finished for her. “Sure, I always thought I’d have kids of my own, but it worked out the way it was supposed to.” He looked at her, his dark eyes alight with equal measures of humor and affection. “It’s all your fault, you know. If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known what we were missing.”

“Just do me a favor and don’t adopt twelve more,” she said with an embarrassed laugh. But she was secretly pleased to hear how he felt, this accidental father who’d turned out to be better than one she might have picked.

After a moment of companionable silence, he nodded toward the car, saying, “Want to give me a hand with those suitcases?”

Finch fell in behind him as he started down the steps. Inside the house she could hear the baby crying in a sleepy, halfhearted way while Laura warbled a lullaby in her off-key voice. She looked up to see a hawk wheeling lazily in a sky so blue it seemed to crackle, and for an instant imagined herself soaring alongside it. She was brought back to earth by the smell of lasagna in the oven and the sight of Hector holding up an oversize sombrero nearly as wide as his grin.

E
ACH DAY ON THE
job brought new challenges. The first two pieces Anna did on spec were summarily tossed out, Bob Heidiger gruffly pronouncing them sophomoric, but one on a local battered wives’ shelter caught his interest. He called her into his office and shut the door—not a good sign usually, though this time the news wasn’t all bad. He got right to the point. “You’re still a long way from being a reporter, but you do have a knack for getting to the meat of the matter. I guess you’ve heard Suzette’s hanging it up the end of the month—” Suzette Piggot of “Suzie Says,” the
Clarion’s
sixty-eight-year-old advice columnist. “I was thinking of going with one of the syndicateds, but why don’t you take a crack at it?”

Anna had stammered a reply before floating back to her cubicle. An hour later she was sifting through a pile of letters she’d collected from Suzette. The first to catch her eye was from a woman named Tanya, who was torn over whether or not to put her elderly father in a nursing home. Anna wrote in response that it was natural to feel guilty but that guilt would only muddy the waters and possibly result in her making the wrong decision. She suggested Tanya see a counselor, and listed several organizations she’d come across when she’d been in the same situation herself.

She found that it wasn’t much different from when Monica’s fans had written for advice. Bob even insisted that she remain anonymous when he finally gave it the green light, saying her notoriety might put people off. Some letters required careful thought and research; others, merely a dose of common sense, like the one from a woman who complained that her next-door neighbor was in the habit of dropping by unannounced, often hanging around for an hour or more. When “Penny for Your Thoughts” debuted, it featured Anna’s response to Fed Up:

Dear Fed Up,

A tap on the brakes is certainly in order. Next time your neighbor drops by uninvited, I suggest you greet her with, “Perfect timing! I’m just taking a five-minute coffee break.” That way, you’ll be letting her know there’s a time limit without offending her. And if she doesn’t get the hint, give her the boot. If her hide’s that thick, she won’t even feel it.

Penny

But as much as she loved her job, she still had to go home to an empty house at the end of each day. The difference was that nowadays she wasn’t allowing herself to sink into the mire. She’d found another therapist, one she liked, a no-nonsense older woman named Corinne, who reminded her of Rhonda. It was Corinne who’d steered her toward ACA—Adult Children of Alcoholics. Anna attended meetings once a week and had come to a deeper understanding of what had caused Monica to act as she had. More and more, too, she was seeing the part
she’d
unwittingly played in it all. Hoping it would benefit Liz as well, she’d urged her sister to join her, but Liz had declined, saying she’d used up all her frequent flier miles on
that
particular trip to hell.

Anna didn’t blame her. There was a fine line between delving into the past and dwelling in it. Hadn’t she obsessed enough about Marc? The only remedy, she’d found, was staying one step ahead of it. She’d joined the music festival committee at Sam’s invitation, and as a volunteer for the historical society would be conducting tours of historic homes during Christmas open house week. The weekend before, she’d attended the garden club’s annual orchid show and the one before that she’d taken a trip to Big Sur with Liz, where they dined on Dungeness crab and had too much to drink before falling into their respective beds, giggling themselves into hiccups.

Her greatest pleasure was baby-sitting for Esperanza, nicknamed Essie, on the odd occasion when everyone at the ranch was tied up. Essie laughed more than she cried, and nothing short of an earthquake could wake her. Anna didn’t doubt that at the party in her honor, set for the week after school let out, she’d be the belle of the ball. The only downside was the deep hunger she stirred in Anna, who wondered about the children she might have had with Marc. She knew she ought to count her blessings, yet couldn’t help feeling as though she’d been robbed.

But wasn’t that just what had been drummed into her growing up, that no woman was complete without a husband and kids? (Though God knows her parents had been anything but models of domestic bliss.) Why couldn’t it be enough that she was finally discovering what she wanted out of life? The trouble was that her solitude had a face: Marc’s. At night she couldn’t close her eyes without seeing him. A breeze blowing her hair across her cheek brought memories of his caress. Even the coffee mug he’d favored brought a pang each time she opened the cupboard and saw it sitting there.

He called every so often, but their conversations seemed forced and always left her more depressed than ever. It was getting harder and harder to settle for so little when she wanted so much. The irony was that men looked at her twice in the street now, and not just because she was the local Madame X. A few had even asked her out, like Howard Newman at the
Clarion,
an attractive divorced father of three. Over lunch at the Tree House, they’d talked about their work and his kids, and what they enjoyed doing in their time off—Howard was an avid hiker—but though she enjoyed his company, she didn’t see it going anywhere. The only man she wanted was taken.

On a Tuesday morning in mid-June, when the riotous spring blossoms that’d blanketed the valley had given way to the deep green of summer, she got the call she’d been dreading. “It’s your mother,” Felicia Campbell said. “She’s taken a turn for the worse …”

Anna’s initial reaction was to smile at the quaint expression, as if Betty had taken a wrong turn on an unfamiliar road and lost her way. Then it hit her: Her mother was ill, possibly dying. She’d known it could happen at any time—old age and the years of abuse at their father’s hands had taken their toll—but it came as a shock even so. As soon as she hung up, she phoned Liz and arranged to meet her at the hospital.

By the time they arrived it was too late. A soft-spoken Pakistani resident took them aside, explaining gently that Betty’s heart had given out. Anna stood speechless while Liz demanded answers. Had they done everything they could to resuscitate her? Why not? What the hell kind of hospital was this anyway?

It was left to Anna to inform her that their mother, whose biggest fear had been a slow death hooked up to machines, had left a living will. “It’s what Mom wanted. It’s better this way, really.”

Liz stared at her in disbelief, then after a moment bowed her head and began to weep. Anna had known it would be like this: that her sister’s heart, hardened against their mother, would be the first to crack. Her tears weren’t just for Betty, but for all that would forever remain unresolved.

That she’d missed that boat long ago—their mother had been beyond reach for years—didn’t seem to matter. She was gone; that was all Liz knew.

“The arrangements have all been made.” Anna spoke quietly. They might have been stranded on a rock amid the ER staff swirling around them like surf: harried-looking nurses and residents tending to the patients, some holding bloody towels to wounds or cradling injured parts of their bodies.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” Liz lifted her head, her bloodshot eyes filled with accusation.

“You never asked.”

“When did she … ?”

“When dad died.”

“I suppose she wanted to be buried next to him.” A bitter note crept into Liz’s voice.

“No. She was very definite about that.” Betty had wept at their father’s funeral—tears not unlike the ones Liz was now shedding—but the one thing she’d been firm about was where she was to be buried when her time came. “She’ll be next to Grandma.” On the other side of the cemetery, as far from Joe Vincenzi as possible.

“Thank God for that, at least.”

“I should call the funeral home.”

“Do you need me to do anything?”

Liz looked incapable of anything more than wiping her own nose at that moment. “It can wait until tomorrow,” Anna said gently, making a mental list of the friends and relatives they’d have to call. “Do you want me to have someone drive you home?”

“Why don’t we ask David? He’s probably upstairs with his son. And Saint Carol, of course. She’d insist he take me home.” Her voice cracked as she leaned against the wall, eyes squeezed shut. Betty’s death and the breakup with David had somehow become tangled together in her mind.

“I’ll take you,” Anna told her. “We’ll come back in the morning for your car.”

Liz looked as though she were going to protest, but instead surrendered with a sigh, saying, “You’re probably right. With my luck, it’d be a double funeral. In fact, the way I feel right now, it might end up being one anyway.”

“You’ll live.” Anna spoke briskly. She knew that what Liz wanted was sympathy, but she was no longer in the business of providing full-time care and comfort.

Her sister’s mouth stretched in a bleak smile. “Oh, sure. I’ll live. Chin up, isn’t that what Mom used to say?”

“You still have Dylan.”

“Believe me, he’s the only thing keeping me sane.”

“You have me, too.”

“I don’t know why you don’t hate me.” Slumped against the wall, her arms folded tightly over her stomach, Liz might have been one of the patients. “I wasn’t much help, was I? With Mom or Monica.”

No, you weren’t.
“I forgive you,” Anna said.

Liz looked at her in surprise. Clearly, she hadn’t expected Anna to agree so readily that she was at fault. But her expression quickly turned sheepish. “I’m sorry. Really. I’ll try to make it up to you.”

Isn’t it a little late for that?
said the cold voice in Anna’s head. But there was no point in beating a dead horse. “I’ll make a list of people for us to call. We’ll each take half.”

“Just be sure to put David and Carol in
your
column,” Liz said bitterly. They were on their way out when she asked, “What about Marc—are you going to let him know?”

Anna thought for a moment, then shook her head. He’d insist on coming, and she couldn’t cope with
that
on top of everything else. On the other hand, if she told him not to, it would become even more glaringly obvious that theirs wasn’t a real friendship, but some strange hybrid. Friends looked after one another at times like these; they held your hand and kneeled with you in prayer. If Marc couldn’t be there for her as he’d once been, what was the point in pretending?

Marc sat in a circle of patients and family members in Room C-4, which looked over the lawn, where at that moment one of his colleagues, Dennis Hodstetter, was consoling a distraught young woman seated cross-legged on the grass. He thought of Anna. He’d read somewhere that there were fifty words in the Eskimo language to describe snow. Shouldn’t there be at least that many to define all the ways to miss someone?

It had been a particularly intense session so far: One of his patients, a bearded young artist named Gordon, had divulged earlier on that he’d been sexually molested as a child—by the very man seated across from him now, his older brother. Gordon was crying and so was his brother while their parents looked on in anguish.

They went around the circle. A number of people expressed anger and disgust, while Mohammed B.—a recovering coke addict whose traditional Muslim parents sat mute with shock—commended both Gordon and his brother for having the courage to confront this. Melanie S., an incest survivor herself, broke down in tears. Jim T. said in a strangled whisper that he didn’t trust himself to speak; he might say something he’d regret.

Marc reminded them all of their confidentiality pledge before inviting Gordon and his brother to pull their chairs into the center of the room. Gordon went first, speaking in a choked near whisper of the damage that had been done and the many ways he’d suffered through the years. His brother Tom, as clean-cut as Gordon was shaggy-haired, listened with tears streaming down his cheeks, nodding every so often as if to acknowledge what he’d done and the pain it had caused.

This was the hardest part of Marc’s job: checking judgment at the door. However disgusted or angered by what he heard, he had to find a way to get past it. Healing didn’t come from shaming, he knew; it was a function of open and honest discussion, allowing each person to have their say. The end result wasn’t always forgiveness; some things were too deep or painful to forgive. But in this case, Gordon might learn to forgive himself, if not his brother, and be able to move on with his life.

Marc’s thoughts turned once more to Anna. He’d known it would be hard, but the ache hadn’t lessened with time. He thought about her constantly. He wrote letters that ended up crumpled in the wastebasket, e-mails that were deleted unsent, and for every time he phoned, at least a dozen times he’d hang up before punching in her number.

And where was Faith in all this? Was he clinging to lost hope, a dead love? The husband in him had begun to think it was merely wishful thinking that she would ever be well, but the doctor knew that advances were being made, if not every day, then at a rate that was meteoric in the once-hidebound field of mental health—a field that not so long ago had relied on electroshock and insulin therapies, with lobotomy as a last resort. He’d seen miracles like the woman in group just last week, a self-described recovering schizophrenic who’d spoken frankly and intelligently about her struggle with her disease. And she hadn’t even been a patient; she’d been here for her son. So, yes, it was possible that one day in the not-too-distant future he’d look across the dinner table and see the woman he’d married smiling back at him. If he didn’t believe that, there’d have been nothing to hold him back. He’d have gone straight to Anna.