Always and Forever (44 page)

your head by sharing it with you”.’

‘True,’ Cleo agreed. ‘Did Tyler say he was coming to Carrickwel to see me?’ She hoped he had.

‘No. But Ron and Tyler are going to the Aussie Rules match next time Tyler’s here.’

‘Great. Just great. Male bonding at its most primal.’ Cleo was stil mul ing this over when two women walked in through the door and came over to her desk. This was her first morning working on reception and she was enjoying it al so far. People were so pleased to be here, anticipating a day of pure relaxation. Nobody had marched in, irate from late plane connections and traffic snarl-ups that had made them late for meetings.

‘Hel o,’ she beamed. ‘Welcome to Cloud’s Hil . Can I help you?’

‘Mel Redmond and Caroline Casey checking in,’ said the smal er woman with the heart-shaped face and the huge blue eyes. She was very pretty and animated-looking, and her hair was the sort of funky blonde messy style that Cleo would have loved to try but knew her hair would rebel against. The blonde woman’s friend, who looked as if she’d just heard some dreadful news, leaned against the desk as if she might fal over without support. Cleo quickly found their reservations. ‘If you’d sign in here …’ she said to the blonde, who signed ‘Mel Redmond’. ‘You’ve twenty minutes before your first treatment. Would you like to go into the den and relax, and I’l get some coffee and pastries brought in for you?’ she said kindly. ‘Thanks,’ said Mel grateful y.

‘You’re booked in for an aromatherapy facial first with Li Chan, and Ms Casey is having the holistic body therapy with mineral clays.’

‘Sounds wonderful,’ said Mel.

‘It is,’ Cleo replied. ‘And wait til you have the reflexology treatment. I had it yesterday and it’s incredible. You’l float out of the room. And you’ve got a massage and a paraffin manicure then.’

Mel grinned. ‘I have been so looking forward to this,’ she sighed.

By five that evening, Leah was tired. She didn’t have the energy she used to have, in the days when Jesse was a child. She’d been thinking a lot about Jesse since she’d told Daisy about him. Not that he wasn’t with her every day, in her thoughts and her heart. But that was the grown-up Jesse who’d died. Hearing Daisy talk of her longing for a baby reminded Leah of Jesse as a smal child, and then as a gangly adolescent. She remembered those happy years when she, Sol and Jesse used to go skiing at Lake Tahoe.

They’d be up early, out skiing al day, and come home at night exhausted and happy. They’d sit in the hot tub looking out at the lake, and talk.

Jesse had loved skiing. He’d had no fear.

‘Momma, watch me!’ he’d yel when he was six and already an expert skiier, brown eyes shining merrily as he turned on his skis and pushed himself off in the snow to perform manoeuvres that Leah wouldn’t dare to try.

They used to stay in Leah’s mother’s cabin in Tahoe: a big, comfortable place that Vanna, her mother, hadn’t been in for years because Vanna preferred the heat of LA, though she never let the sun get on her face.

Sun was so ageing. Vanna, a one-time B-movie star who’d become a daytime soap queen, had taught her daughter about how to protect her face from the sun. ‘Your face is your fortune,’ Vanna said, and she believed this with a religious fervour. ‘Do whatever it takes to stay young because once this is gone,’ she’d touch her face with its high cheekbones and now-fading beauty, ‘it’s al over.’

Leah might have become like her mother - obsessed with appearances and material things - if it hadn’t been for Sol and Jesse.

Sol Meyer owned furniture stores and she’d met him when she was twenty-five.

‘He’s not in the business, you mean?’ her mother had said horrified, when she’d heard Leah was seeing this man.

‘The business’ was the movie industry. Anyone outside it was a non person.

‘I’m not in the business, Vanna,’ Leah had pointed out. ‘And I love him.’

Her mother had waved one perfectly cared-for hand theatrical y. ‘See if I care. You’l be back.’

Leah hadn’t been back. She and Sol got married, and a couple of years later Jesse had been born. They lived on the outskirts of Carmel. Jesse went to the local school, and Sol’s business went from strength to strength.

They became rich but their life together was stil pretty much the same: comfortable, companionable, good.

Jesse went to col ege to study aeronautical engineering.

He was interested in the space programme and had been on the Mission Control tour in NASA Houston many times.

‘Look up, Mom,’ he’d say to her on clear nights as they stood on the deck outside the house. ‘Look up at the stars.

That’s the world we’ve got to explore. Mankind has only touched a fraction of the universe. There’s so much out there.’ Leah, who got weak on the highest escalator in department stores, thought of her beloved son going up into space and shuddered. But you had to let people live their own lives.

The phone cal had come early in the morning, from Jesse friend, Carl, in the hospital. Some kids in a stolen car had swerved in front of Jesse motorcycle and he’d crashed into a wal .

The medical staff were wonderful to her and Sol.

Jesse was stil technical y alive. That was the crux of the matter. He was brain dead; he would never recover; he’d never be Jesse again, ever. The question was, would his parents let the doctors harvest his organs? It was a bewildering choice to be faced with. Your son is dead, now he can help other people. Corneal transplant, liver transplant, lungs, skin grafts - the list was endless. She later learned that hospital staff described motorcycles as ‘donor cycles’, because so many people became organ donors as a result of bike accidents.

Distraught with grief, she and Sol tried to think about what Jesse would want them to do. It was not something that families usual y discussed.

It was Carl who had made sense of it al . Traumatised but refusing to go home, because Mrs and Mr Meyer had to have support, he mentioned the run Jesse had recently done for charity.

‘It was a ten K for kids with cancer; he was real y into it. My guess is he’d have liked to donate anything he could. Keep living on, you know, his spirit being alive in someone else

…’ Carl talked a bit like a born-again hippie, Jesse used to say fondly.

Leah and Sol agreed to donate as many of Jesse organs as were viable. Carl hugged Leah, a bit like Jesse might have hugged her, and said, ‘Way to go,’ with tears in his voice. Twelve people benefited from Jesse Meyer’s death -

which was a beginning for al of them, and it was a beginning for Leah too. Once Jesse was dead, she had to learn to live again herself, and she didn’t know how. She didn’t know who she was, what she was or where she was.

She and Sol inhabited different pain-fil ed worlds. Within a year, they’d split up, after twenty-six years of marriage.

They couldn’t cope with each other’s pain, and every time Leah sat down to dinner with Sol, she thought of how Jesse should be there too, and she’d have to get up to cry.

She never thought she’d learn to live again. She tried al sorts of therapy, healing diets, retreats run by television evangelists, you name it. But final y a friend took her to a spa in Arizona, a remote, sun-baked place that looked like one of the last places God made: untouched by civilisation and exquisitely beautiful in its wildness. There, in the heat and the dust, in a place away from the trappings of her old life, Leah felt at peace.

Many different people came to Cloud’s Hil , the old Indian name for the smal , rocky patch of land, to recuperate after il nesses or emotional stress. The owner, an ageless American Indian woman named Sequoia, had many different types of clients: from the very rich who arrived on the private runway in Lear jets, to people who couldn’t have afforded Cloud’s Hil at al if Sequoia didn’t run the place so that the rich essential y subsidised the non-paying guests.

The first week Leah was there, she spent time with two East LA teenage girls battling their way back to health after coming off drugs, as wel as going on walks with a New York comedian who’d turned to food addiction when his beloved mother had died. Cloud’s Hil couldn’t magic al their problems away, Sequoia told Leah, but it seemed to help.

‘You’re good with people,’ Sequoia added. ‘You’re gentle, kind, and you know what pain is. You can’t pul people out of the pit if you haven’t been in there yourself. Would you consider staying on, to work?’

In the end, Leah remained in Cloud’s Hil for two years. She learned that helping other people helped her and she learned that she had a gift for helping others. Her pain would never go away and, if she’d had an addictive personality, like Daisy and so many of the people she’d met at Cloud’s Hil over those two years, she’d have turned to pil s or booze or food. She could understand the need to block out pain, but it was stil there when you woke up again in the morning. You needed to find another way to deal with it.

One day, she told Sequoia that she’d love to set up her own spa in another healing place.

It had taken her a long time to find the spot with the right sense of healing and tranquil ity. The old Delaney house on Mount Carraig had been perfect. And in the end, the name had been obvious: Cloud’s Hil .

‘Cloud’s Hil in Arizona and Cloud’s Hil in Ireland,’ she’d said to Sequoia. ‘Can I use the name?’

‘Of course. The two places can be like twin stars in the sky, lighting the way,’ Sequoia answered.

Leah remembered Jesse love of the stars and what lay beyond them, and thought Sequoia had got it exactly right.

There was a knock on her office door.

‘Leah,’ said Cleo, ‘are you going down to the hot tub?’ ‘Yes.

I asked Daisy if she wanted to come with us.’ ‘Good,’ said Cleo, who’d met Daisy for the first time the night before at dinner. ‘There are a couple more guests who aren’t finished yet, Mel Redmond and Caroline Casey. They’re going to the tub as wel . I just met Mel in the changing room.’ ‘See you there in five,’ Leah replied.

The hot tub room in Cloud’s Hil faced southwest, so that when the evening sun was sinking gently down towards the horizon, it shone in through the huge sliding doors. The doors were open, letting the drowsy heat of the evening mingle with the warm damp air from the hot tub.

Mel slipped into the water feeling wonderful. She wasn’t so sure about Caroline, though. They’d both had a wonderful day with lots of treatments, but Caroline’s spirits were stil low.

At lunch, Mel had felt wearied by this and felt like chal enging her to cheer up. But then she saw Caroline was spinning her wedding ring round and round her ring finger absently, and she’d felt a bitch for being impatient. Caroline wanted to save her marriage and didn’t want to leap to conclusions: that was the brave thing to do, Mel knew.

Now Caroline sat opposite her in the hot tub, lying back with her head resting on the edge of the tub, her eyes closed. There was one other woman in there with them.

She was younger than Mel, voluptuous and sexy, with the creamy pale skin of a natural redhead, and strawberry-blonde curls piled out of the way on top of her head.

She’d given Mel and Caroline a shy smile when they’d come in, and had leaned back and closed her eyes too.

Closing your eyes was a handy way of not talking to anybody at such close quarters.

‘Juice, anybody?’ It was the tal girl who’d been on reception that morning, carrying a tray of jugs and glasses.

Mel thought her name was Cleo.

‘I’ve got orange, mango and,’ Cleo grinned, ‘for those of us in need of some excitement in our lives, passionfruit juice!’

The other three laughed.

‘It’s the only passion I’m likely to get these days,’ Cleo went on, setting the tray down.

‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ said Mel wryly. ‘I bet I’m the oldest one here. You young ones should be having loads of passion.’ She included the redhead in this sweeping statement. ‘You couldn’t be the oldest,’ Cleo said in amazement. Mel looked as if she was in her mid-thirties at the latest. Everything about her suggested someone who didn’t intend to get old before her time.

‘I am,’ said Mel. ‘Forty and counting. You’re what … twenty-four?’

‘Is it that obvious?’ laughed Cleo. ‘I’m trying to look more mature for work. I’ve a hotel management degree and looking a bit older helps.’

‘It’s the only job where it does, then,’ said Caroline. ‘Can I have some passion juice, please?’

‘Me too,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re wrong about the passion,’ she said to Mel. ‘This is the only passion I’m likely to get, so give me a big glass, Cleo.’

The juice poured, Cleo got into the tub and the four of them lay back in comfortable silence.

‘I had no idea a hot tub could be so relaxing,’ Caroline said final y. ‘I could never see the attraction before but it’s soothing, isn’t it?’

‘I know just what you mean,’ Daisy said. ‘The first time I was here, Leah said this tub was special and was the Hot Tub of Truth. Or was it Honesty?’

‘No, Truth, I think she told me,’ said Cleo.

‘The water makes you tel the truth?’ Caroline laughed. ‘This tub must have heard some secrets then. I don’t think it would be interested in mine.’

‘You have to say what you’d like most in the world,’ Daisy explained. ‘You’re supposed to be truthful.’ She thought then of the white lie she’d told when she was here with Mary and Paula. She’d said she’d like to be able to eat as much chocolate as she wanted.

‘Remember Truth or Dare when you were a teenager?’

Cleo asked.

‘I hated that,’ Mel shuddered. ‘People tried to trick you into revealing things about yourself. You had no control over it.’ ‘I never played it,’ Daisy said. Fat girls weren’t asked to play anything sexual y charged like that. She touched the rol of her stomach under the water. She was getting bigger al the time. She’d put on pounds and pounds. She needed a whole new wardrobe.

‘Oh, Daisy, you must have,’ said Cleo.

Daisy shook her head.

‘We used to play a version of Truth or Dare years ago, Mel,’

Caroline said. ‘Mel and I worked together in an office,’ she told the other two, ‘and we had some wild times. We’re boring and settled down now. I’ve got three kids and I’m a ful -time mother.’ She looked defiantly at Cleo and Daisy, as if daring them to say anything negative about staying home with the kids. ‘I recently gave up work to stay home too,’ Mel said hastily, noticing that Caroline hadn’t mentioned that she was married. ‘I’m married with two little girls, Sarah and Carrie.’ She didn’t al ow herself to say, ‘I used to work for Lorimar.’ That sort of validation was in the past. Who she had been wasn’t important. What mattered was who she was now. She I; didn’t need a job to define her.