Year of the Monsoon (4 page)

If Nan thought meeting Leisa’s family was cause for panic, it was nothing to the panic she felt now. “But this is… this is legal! I mean, this is serious,” she said, practically gasping for air.

Lyn laughed. “If you mean, you can’t just walk away, you’re right. You’ve got to be ready for a real commitment and break all your old patterns, the things you did before. This is what normal couples do.”

“But if you’ve never had normal, how do you know how to live it?” Nan asked more than once.

“We’ll work it out as we go,” Leisa said confidently.

“How do you do that?” Nan asked, bewildered. “How do you know?”

Leisa laughed, and said, “I don’t know. No one does. But I believe.” She placed her hands on either side of Nan’s face and looked into her eyes. “I believe in you. I believe in us.”

Within a year, Nan and Leisa bought a house together, and life settled into a blissful routine. “What’s a home without a dog?” Leisa murmured one evening as she nibbled on Nan’s ear. And so Bronwyn came into their lives, a tiny bundle of fur, stubborn and fiercely independent, even if her legs were only an inch long. Before long, vacations gave way to a new furnace and then a new roof.

One day after they’d been together almost three years, Leisa told Nan she was thinking of going back to school to get her master’s in social work. “I could do so much more with that degree,” she said.

Nan couldn’t argue. She remembered how much her own master’s and doctorate had meant, and she knew Maddie valued Leisa at St. Joseph’s. So she began scheduling evening clients again to make extra money while Leisa attended classes, studied and worked nights and weekends. The nights Leisa was home, she was so tired she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. But even after Leisa had finished school and gotten her license, “we never got back to the way we used to be,” Leisa mused as she and Bronwyn walked the dark sidewalks of their neighborhood.

They got home from their walk and tried to wait up, but Nan found them asleep together on the couch.

“Hey,” Nan whispered, kissing Leisa on the cheek and giving Bron’s tummy a rub.

“Hi,” Leisa smiled, stretching. “Are you hungry?” she asked as she sat up.

“No. I grabbed a sandwich in between sessions,” Nan replied as she took off her coat and scarf. “Why don’t you go on up to bed? I’ve got to finish documenting my last couple of sessions, and then I need to watch a little TV and clear my head before I come up.” She picked up her briefcase and gave Leisa a quick kiss before heading down the hall toward the den. “I’ll be up soon. Love you.”

Leisa stared down the hall at Nan’s retreating back. She heard the study door click shut. Bronwyn pushed her wet nose under Leisa’s elbow, squirming onto her lap. Leisa sighed and hugged her. “Not sure why we bothered to wait.” She clicked the television off. “Come on. One more time outside, and then off to bed.”

In the study, Nan opened her e-mail. There it was. She hadn’t really had time to read this message carefully when she first saw it. Vaguely, as if she were observing someone else’s behavior, she noticed that her fingers poised over the buttons on the mouse were trembling. She read the message through a couple of times before deciding to delete it. She made sure she deleted it again from the “Deleted Items” folder.

Chapter 3

NAN GAVE HERSELF A
mental shake, hoping she hadn’t betrayed her momentary inattention to her client. She tried to focus. Damn, it felt like this week was never going to end. And the tension between her and Leisa wasn’t making time go by any faster.

Leisa had been a little cool this morning after Nan was so late getting home, and even through her own pre-occupation, Nan had picked up on it.

“I’m sorry I was so late last night,” she apologized, coming over to where Leisa was waiting for the toaster to pop and giving her a hug from behind.

A smile tugged at the corner of Leisa’s mouth. She never could stay angry.

“Tell you what,” Nan continued. “Let’s go down to Fell’s Point this weekend. We can bring Bron and spend the day together, just us.”

Leisa turned to hold Nan. “That sounds good,” she said, her voice muffled as she nuzzled into Nan’s neck.

“How has your week been?” Nan asked as they each finished getting breakfast ready.

“It’s been kind of a weird week,” Leisa replied. “You remember the little girl I had to go to the police station for? Well, yesterday –”

They were interrupted by the ringing of Nan’s cell phone. “This is Dr. Mathison,” she said. It was the ER of one of the downtown hospitals informing Nan that one of her clients had been admitted. Nan looked at her watch as she hung up.

“I’m sorry, hon, I’m going to have to stop by there on my way to the office,” she said as she abandoned her cereal and filled a travel cup with coffee.

“But you haven’t even had breakfast,” Leisa protested.

“I’ll grab something later,” Nan assured her. “See you tonight. Love you,” she said as she gave Leisa a quick kiss.

“Love you, too,” Leisa said as she sat with her toast.

As Nan reflected back on that conversation, she realized Leisa never got to finish whatever she had started to say. “I’ve got to remember to ask her,” she said to herself when, at last, she finished her last session of the day. She gathered up her things and hurried out to her car.

Why is Friday traffic always so much worse than other days of the week?
Nan wondered as she drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, oblivious to the fact that the soothing Native American flute music playing on the stereo wasn’t calming her in the least. When she finally got home, she parked quickly behind Leisa’s Sentra and ran up the steps to the front porch. Inside, she could hear Leisa’s voice coming from the family room. Something was wrong.

“I don’t understand,” Leisa was saying in a choked voice. When Nan entered the room, she could see that Leisa’s eyes were filled with tears. Leisa handed the telephone wordlessly to Nan and collapsed on the ottoman.

“Hello?” Nan said cautiously.

“Oh, Nan,” came Jo Ann’s voice, “I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Jo, what’s wrong?” Nan asked in alarm.

“It’s Rose.” Now, Nan could tell that Jo Ann was also crying. “She collapsed this afternoon. They rushed her to the hospital. They said it was a heart attack. She’s dead.”

“Are you sure you’ll be all right for awhile?” Nan asked the next morning, holding Leisa closely. Neither of them had slept for more than short bits and the little they got wasn’t restful.

“Yes,” Leisa sniffed.

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Nan promised, holding Leisa’s face and kissing her tenderly.

A few minutes later, Nan jumped as the driver behind her honked his horn irritably at her failure to notice that the light had changed. She was on her way to the office to re-arrange her schedule for the coming week. Bruce had left immediately after Jo Ann called yesterday afternoon, insisting on driving to New York to pick her up and bring her home. “I don’t want her coming back on the train –” He cut himself off before he could add “alone”. They had gotten home sometime around four a.m. Leisa and Nan were going over to their house later to eat lunch and then go on to the funeral home. As Nan wove her way through traffic, she tried to figure out how to prioritize her caseload. Everyone seemed to be in crisis mode lately.

Going through her schedule at the office, she picked out the clients who most needed to be seen. When she looked at the list, she realized she could still put in half a week seeing them.

Nan shifted uneasily, recalling a conversation she’d had with Maddie before Christmas.

“Remember to take care of what’s important,” Maddie had said, refilling Nan’s wine glass.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nan asked sharply.

When Maddie didn’t answer right away, Nan said, “You say something like that and now you’re going to get all cryptic on me?”

Maddie swirled the wine in her glass, watching the ruby reflections on the granite of the kitchen island. “You’re working a lot lately.”

“So?”

“So it’s work.” Maddie looked at Nan. “You’re a good therapist, but if you died in an accident tomorrow, your clients would find someone else to go to. Your work is not your life.” She took a sip of her wine, and asked, “Is there a reason you’re working so many hours?”

“No,” Nan replied emphatically. “No, it’s…” But she didn’t know exactly what it was.

“Don’t you want to be home more?” Maddie watched her closely.

Nan lowered her eyes. “Nothing is wrong, exactly, we’re just in one of those phases where we don’t seem to talk anymore. I feel like I might as well be at work,” Nan admitted.

Maddie reached out and squeezed Nan’s hand. “Remember to take care of what’s important,” she repeated.

Sighing, Nan looked back down at her list of clients and decided to cancel the entire week. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a whole week off. “Leisa is the most important thing right now,” she reminded herself as she reached for the phone.

A couple of hours later, she and Leisa were seated at the kitchen table at Jo Ann and Bruce’s home a couple of blocks from their own house and from Rose’s, all within easy walking distance of each other.

“Tell us what happened,” Leisa said as Bruce laid out a platter of ham and turkey for sandwiches.

Jo Ann removed her wire-rimmed glasses and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “She was complaining of indigestion,” she explained in a tremulous voice. “We thought it was all the rich food we’d been eating. We went back to the hotel to rest.” She began to cry again. “I heard her fall in the bathroom. I did CPR, but the paramedics said she died immediately.” She couldn’t continue.

Leisa looked up, her eyes red and puffy. She studied her aunt’s face, so much like Rose’s that people often mistook them as twins. Their dark hair had gone silver over the last few years and they had defiantly refused to color it, declaring that they had earned every one of those gray hairs.

Leisa looked nothing like them, having been adopted, the only child of Rose and Daniel Yeats. Daniel used to tell her when she was little that they went to the baby store and picked her out, like picking a puppy at a pet store.

“Your mother and I walked around and around, looking at all the babies there, and we picked out the prettiest and smartest baby girl they had,” he used to say, holding Leisa and rocking her with her blond head resting on his chest so that his voice rumbled in her ear.

“I think I was ten before I started questioning that story,” Leisa would laugh.

Now, they all picked at their food as no one had much of an appetite. At last, Bruce looked at his watch. “We’d better be going.”

At the funeral home, they met with Horace Spink, a pale man with large bags under his eyes that gave him the appropriately mournful expression of a basset hound. “We’ve been in contact with the New York City medical examiner’s office, and they assured me that the deceased’s remains would be available by Wednesday.”

“What do you mean ‘available’?” Leisa demanded.

“After they have completed the autopsy, of course,” Mr. Spink answered with what he obviously thought was a reassuring smile.

“Oh.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a leather binder. “Perhaps we should start,” he said, flipping the binder open, “with our casket selection.”

It seemed there was an endless list of decisions to be made: arranging for the transport of the body, scheduling viewing hours, what to include in the obituary, choosing the floral arrangements, how many death certificates to order. Leisa had helped her mother with all of these things when her father died, but Nan had never been through this process. She felt helpless as she sat back offering nothing but her support.

Nan had often watched, a bit enviously, as Leisa interacted with her parents and with Jo and Bruce. It was abundantly clear watching them that Leisa was not just loved, but adored, something Nan could not relate to.

“We just don’t have anything in common,” she had said flatly when Leisa first asked why she didn’t want to see her family more often. “Having them in Oregon and me here works out just fine.”

Nan was the middle child of three, “the unspectacular one,” she often said. Leisa had met Mr. and Mrs. Mathison once when they stopped in Baltimore on their way to Europe. “Let’s be discreet,” Nan had said.

Leisa cocked her head to the side and asked, “Are you ashamed of me?”

Nan flushed and replied, “Of course not. I just don’t discuss my personal life with them.”

Leisa laughed. “They’re your family! How can they not be involved in your personal life?”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is.”

“But,” Leisa sputtered, “but you have a brother and sister!”

“Believe me, siblings are over-rated,” Nan said sardonically.

“You wouldn’t think that if you didn’t have any,” Leisa sighed.