Homeplace (19 page)

He plucked some spring green grass from beside the rock. It was not the first time he’d come up here to talk with his wife. In the beginning he’d cried, sobbing like a baby, releasing tears that he hadn’t dared shed in front of his friends, his parents, his daughter. Especially his daughter. Later, after he couldn’t cry anymore, the anger had come out and he’d stomped over the alpine meadow, screaming at the top of his lungs. The only witnesses to his anguish were the marmots and a red-tailed hawk that lived in a nearby tree.

Finally, he’d moved past the pain and the anger to a point where he could come here to find comfort—even a strange sort of companionship—when he got too lonely. Jack knew that some people might think him nuts for talking this way to his dead wife. He didn’t care.

“Then Ida’s damn granddaughter came roaring into town with all guns blazing,” he said.

He couldn’t help smiling at the memory of her, marching through the rain and mire on that long-legged stride. Even soaked to the skin, she’d reminded him of some amazing female warrior princess. Like the one Amy liked to watch on TV. Xena, he recalled after a moment’s thought.

“She can be a real pain in the ass. But there’s another side to her. A gentler, caring side that I think she’s tried real hard to bury over the years. Which, if you’d ever met her mother, you’d probably understand.”

Peg had always been much more forgiving of human failings than he was. Then again, until she’d gotten sick, she’d taught kindergarten, which had sheltered her from the daily examples of man’s inhumanity to man that he’d witnessed on Seattle’s mean streets.

“Of course there’s no future in it. She’s only going to be here for a couple more weeks, then she’ll go back to her fancy, high-rise office in New York.”

If what Dan had told him about Raine’s win for Odessa Oil was even half-true, she was a power player in a city that defined high stakes. He had no trouble picturing her in a corner-window office that looked out over the city and made the cars on the street below look like Hot Wheels toys.

“Get this—she’s a lawyer.” He shook his head. Despite his affection for his cousin, Jack was having trouble getting past this one. “At first I thought it was just hormones. Which wasn’t any big deal…. But I’m beginning to think it’s more than that. And that scares the hell out of me.”

Peg didn’t answer, of course. But when he felt a soft breeze against his cheek, Jack was reminded of yet another tape she’d left behind. One she’d given to his mother for safekeeping until after she’d gone.

He’d first viewed what turned out to be her final goodbye in the early hours of the morning the day after her memorial service. Or at least he’d tried to watch it. It had taken three attempts before he was able to get all the way through it.

“Darling Jack,” she’d soothed, her soft voice and her liquid blue eyes filled with warm comfort. “I know how horrible you must be feeling now. But I don’t want you mourning me. Because I’m not gone. Not really.”

That was when he’d turned off the VCR the first time. If she wasn’t really gone, then why the hell wasn’t she upstairs in their bed where she belonged?

“I’ll always be in your heart, Jack,” the farewell had continued when he’d tried again a week or so later. “In our daughter’s heart. I’ll be with the both of you always, for all eternity. I’ll watch over you while you honor your oath to keep our friends and neighbors safe. I’ll be with you on the sunniest summer days and the darkest winter nights.

“When you hear the breeze in the treetops, it will be my breath whispering your name, and whenever you feel a soft rain cooling your skin, it’ll be my spirit passing by.”

This was where he’d stopped on that second attempt. Then proceeded to drink himself into temporary oblivion.

Finally, nearly six months after he’d kissed his wife for the last time, he’d worked up the courage to watch the tape to the end.

“I know you love me, Jack. As I love you. Truly, madly, deeply. Forever. But sometimes forever on earth isn’t as long as we’d hoped and it would break my heart to think of you alone, mourning my death instead of celebrating the wonderful life we had together and the blessings that brought us our darling daughter.”

Jack heard a moan and realized it had been torn from his own throat. He felt the moisture on his cheeks, looked up, and while the gunmetal gray sky was getting increasingly lower, it hadn’t yet begun to rain.

“Now I know this will make you angry, Jack,” Peg said, in that sweet, cajoling way that he’d always found impossible to resist. “But I want you to marry again. Partly for Amy’s sake, so she’ll have more of a mother than this mountain of video tapes I’ve created can provide. She needs a real Mommy, Jack. A living, breathing one who can make Jell-O when she has a tummy ache and help soothe teenage broken hearts.

“A mother who’ll someday watch you walk her down the aisle to begin a new life with a young man, who if she’s very, very lucky, will love her the way you always loved me.”

Her voice choked up at this point. Her blue eyes shimmered with tears. She bit her lip, drew in a ragged breath and combed her graceful fingers through her short blond cap of curls.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I just need a minute.” She drew in another breath. This one more shallow than the first. Then, demonstrating the same strength of will he’d witnessed during the two years she’d valiantly fought off death, she forged on to the end.

“But I also want you to get married again for yourself. Because you have such an amazing capacity for caring, Jack, it would be a sin not to open your heart to someone else. Someone who needs you as much as you need her. Someone who loves you the way you will her.

“Now, I know how your mind works.” She’d sniffled away the tears that had threatened earlier, now sounding more like the Peg who could keep a class of two dozen rambunctious five-year-olds in line. “I know how you feel about honor and loyalty, but you mustn’t ever feel guilty about loving again, or even think you’re abandoning me or my memory.”

Her voice and her eyes gentled again. Offering reassurance. “Because I believe, with every fiber of my being, that someday, darling Jack, we’ll meet again in a beautiful place where love is infinite and there will be plenty for all of us to share.”

Alone on the mountain, in the meadow they’d laughingly once claimed as their own, Jack closed his eyes and pictured the way her wedding band had gleamed in the sun slanting through the hospice window as she’d touched her fingertips first to her lips and then to the camera lens.

Fade to black.

The sky overhead opened up and the rain that had been threatening began to fall. But as he sat there, remembering, Jack didn’t notice.

R
aine had come to expect the unexpected from Lilith. But it appeared her mother had found a new way to drive her crazy.

For as long as she could remember, her mother had glowed with an internal light. But after Ida’s guardianship hearing—and their argument—it was if that inner light had been snuffed out by an icy wind. Lilith became uncharacteristically subdued. She seldom spoke, and when she did it was in a listless voice lacking its customary music. She’d twisted her flowing silver hair into a decidedly unglamourous knot at the nape of her neck and exchanged her rainbow of colorful silks for clothing that could have come from Raine’s own closet. Everything was now charcoal gray, bark brown, or black.

When Raine entered the kitchen a week after the hearing and found her mother clad in black slacks and a matching cotton shirt, it crossed her mind that in this new camouflage clothing Lilith could blend in quite well on the streets of Manhattan. Even more surprising was the sight of her dropping cookie dough onto a greased aluminum sheet.

“Hello, darling.” Lilith smiled a bit uncertainly. “I hope you like chocolate chip cookies.”

“Of course I do.” Raine tried to remember a previous time she’d seen her mother engaged in any domestic activity and came up blank. Obviously Lilith had been working for some time; there were spatters on the cupboard doors, the counter was covered with flour, and there were enough mixing bowls, measuring cups, and assorted utensils piled up in the sink to create an eight-course dinner.

“I decided baking cookies to welcome Savannah home this evening would be a nice, maternal thing to do.” Atypical worry lines bracketed her mouth. “I do hope she likes chocolate chip. Perhaps I should have made oatmeal instead. I forgot to buy raisins when I was at the store, but I could always go back, and—”

“Don’t worry. Everyone loves chocolate chip,” Raine assured her, feeling strangely as if she’d walked through some unseen psychic curtain and landed in
The Twilight Zone
. That was the only excuse she could think of for Lilith Lindstrom Cantrell Townsend wearing an apron. “Savannah’s going to be pleased you went to the trouble.”
And surprised as hell
.

“I also bought some pancake mix while I was at the market. I thought they might be a nice change from cold cereal tomorrow morning.”

“Sounds great.” If it wasn’t
The Twilight Zone
, she must have somehow entered a parallel universe, Raine decided.

“I couldn’t make up my mind whether to buy the buttermilk or the blueberry.” Lilith wiped her hands distractedly on the front of the apron. “So I bought both.”

“Good idea.” Or perhaps, Raine considered, some aliens had landed in Coldwater Cove, snatched her mother up to the Mother Ship for some sort of strange medical experiments and left a Stepford Wife in her place.

“Of course, I realize that Savannah would never, in a million years, use a mix,” Lilith continued as she returned to filling the cookie sheet with mounds of dough. They were eerily the same size, precisely the way a programed Stepford Wife might form them. “But I hoped that…Oh, no!”

Smoke was billowing from around the edges of the oven door. While Lilith twisted her hands together and made little wailing sounds, Raine grabbed the quilted oven mitt from the counter, opened the oven, pulled out the cookie sheet, and dropped it into the sink.

“Oh no.” Lilith repeated bleakly, staring in abject dismay at the rounded black mounds. “They’re burned.”

More like cremated, Raine thought but did not say. “They are a bit crisp,” she agreed carefully.

“They’re ruined!” Her mother’s pansy blue eyes were swimming with moisture.

“It’s no big deal. You can just bake more.”

“I’ll ruin them, too.” The tears that had been threatening began to fall, streaming down Lilith’s face in wet, mascara-darkened trails. “I’m such a mess. I can’t do anything right!”

“We’re only talking cookies.” The smoke alarm began to blare; Raine opened a window.

“I was thinking about what you said the other night, about how selfish I’d been, and decided that you were right. I truly didn’t mean to cause you pain, Raine, but obviously I did. So I decided that I was going to turn over a new leaf and try to make things up to you and Savannah.” The tears began to flow faster. “But those damn burned cookies are a metaphor for my entire life.”

This display of dramatics was the most emotion her mother had shown in days. It was also surprisingly welcome. “If that’s the truth, then we’re in trouble,” Raine said soothingly. “Because, with the exception of Savannah, none of the Lindstrom women have ever been able to cook.”

“We’ve always had better things to do,” Ida, drawn by the smoke and the alarm to the kitchen, pronounced from the doorway. “More important things than spending our lives in an apron and standing in front of a hot stove.”

“That’s just the point,” Lilith wailed. “I’ve never done anything even the slightest bit important with my life.” She sank onto one of the ladderback chairs, buried her face in her hands, and wept copiously.

Raine exchanged a distressed look with Ida, who shrugged. “Nonsense,” the elderly woman said. “Don’t go talking such foolishness, Lilith. Your singing has obviously given a lot of people pleasure.”

“They only put up with me because I still look good in short skirts and leather and they’re waiting for the star performer.”

“Now, you know that’s not true. You’ve always had a lovely voice.

“And you were a good actress,” Raine said encouragingly.

“I was a terrible actress.”

“Well, you weren’t exactly Bette Davis or Kate Hepburn,” Ida allowed. “But I’ll bet there wasn’t anybody in the horror movie business who could scream louder than you. Or who looked better in a wet nightgown.”

Raine knew things were serious when her mother didn’t agree with the nightgown assessment.

“And you’ve given birth to two exceptional young women,” Ida continued. “That in itself is an accomplishment.”

Lilith lifted her head. “Even an alley cat can give birth,” she said, reminding Raine uncomfortably of the words she’d flung at her mother in anger. “That doesn’t mean that she’s capable of taking care of her kittens.”

“You did the best you could at the time,” Ida said briskly. “That’s all any of us can do.”

The words seemed to have a settling effect. Lilith’s weeping trailed off to ragged, gulping sobs, and the flood of tears began to subside.

“What a mess.” Her bleak eyes looked around the kitchen. Her shoulders slumped. No longer a Stepford Wife, she looked like a dejected fifty-year-old woman who’d just discovered that real life wasn’t always fun. “I’d better start cleaning up before Savannah arrives.” She pushed herself out of the chair, tipped the blackened mounds into the wastebasket and returned the cookie sheet to the sink. When she turned on the tap, water sizzled on the still-hot aluminum.

The sight of her mother with her rubber-gloved hands in soapsuds was even stranger than Lilith baking. Raine was about to suggest she take over when Gwen and Renee came into the room.

“Wow,” Renee said.

“I know.” Lilith’s voice threatened renewed tears. “It’s a mess.” Soapy water sloshed over the rim of the sink onto the pine floor, which, like the counter, was dusted with flour. The resulting mixture resembled library paste.

“Why don’t you let us help?” Gwen grabbed a dishrag. “I’ll clean up while Renee finishes baking the cookies.”

“It’s my mess.” More water sloshed onto the floor as Lilith energetically scrubbed at a Pyrex mixing bowl. “I’m going to clean it up.”

Realizing that her mother’s efforts were only making things worse, Raine decided to attempt to distract her.

“You know,” she suggested, “as much as Savannah’s going to enjoy those cookies, I’ll bet she’d love some fresh flowers in the bedroom. None of us have the marvelous eye for color and design you do, Mother.”

Lilith spun toward her, billowy soapsuds dripping unnoticed from the yellow rubber gloves. “What did you call me?”

Raine was as surprised to have said the word out loud as Lilith was to have heard it. “Mother.” Strangely, it sounded almost right. “Does that bother you?”

“Oh, no, darling! Of course not!” There was a renewed flood of tears as Lilith threw her arms around Raine. “It sounds wonderful. Does this mean you’ve forgiven me?”

Her T-shirt was getting soaked by dishwater and tears. “There’s nothing to forgive,” Raine said, not quite truthfully. Grateful to have the old Lilith back, she was nevertheless discomfited by the emotional display. “Now, why don’t you let the girls finish up and go take care of those flowers?”

“That’s a grand idea.” Lilith released Raine from the tight embrace. “I think hyacinths might be nice. Or sweetpeas.” She nodded. “Definitely sweetpeas.” She peeled off the gloves, untied the apron, and threw it uncaringly onto one of the kitchen chairs, seeming not to notice when it slid onto the gummy floor. “They’re perfect for spring.”

“Well,” Ida said, after Lilith left the room with renewed purpose in both her step and her eyes, “I never thought I’d say it, but it’s a relief to have the old Lilith back with us.”

The others murmured heartfelt agreement.

“You know,” Ida mused, “she did have a good idea, making those cookies for Savannah. Family coming home is cause for a celebration. I believe, since we’re being so domestic, I’ll make my meatloaf.”

As Raine exchanged a fatalistic look with the girls, she hoped Savannah stopped for dinner before she arrived in Coldwater Cove.

Savannah Townsend’s late-night arrival in Coldwater Cove might just as well have been accompanied by a flourish of trumpets. Looking at her younger sister, if she hadn’t known better, Raine would have thought nothing had gone wrong in her life. Indeed, she resembled Alexander the Great entering Babylon for the first time—strong, bold, invincible.

“It’s about time you came back home where you belonged,” Ida said with her usual bluntness.

“It’s good to be here,” Savannah agreed as she hugged her grandmother.

“Of course it is. Everyone knows that home is where the hearth is.”

Savannah laughed. “Now I know I’m home.” She bestowed a smile on her mother. “Lilith, I swear you look younger every day.”

“It’s the clean life your grandmother makes me lead whenever I come back to Coldwater Cove.” More laughter, hugs were exchanged.

After embracing Raine, Savannah leaned back and observed her sister more closely. “You’ve lost weight.”

“Not that much.”

“You’ve also got circles beneath your eyes and you’re too pale. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you were the one getting a divorce.”

“I’ve been busy.” Raine was getting tired of people’s negative comments on her looks. She also couldn’t help marveling at the way her sister could have her marriage collapse, give up a job she’d worked like hell to achieve, move out of her home, drive for three long days, and still arrive looking like some supermodel in a white jumpsuit trimmed in gold braid that didn’t have a single wrinkle or stain. There were times, and this was definitely one of them, that Raine was forced to wonder if Savannah sprayed herself with Teflon before leaving the house each morning. “I just finished a big case.”

“I know. I saw you on television. That took a lot of guts.”

“Making myself a target for egg throwers?”

“No. Taking Odessa Oil’s side in the first place.

“They’re a client.”

“They’re also an oil company.”

Raine glanced at the sporty red BMW illuminated by the spreading glow of the porch light. “Try running those snazzy wheels on tap water and you may just develop a different view of oil companies.”

“Touché,” Savannah said with a dazzling smile that was a twin to Lilith’s. “I also realize that you don’t always have a choice which of your firm’s clients you represent, so—”

“Actually, I’m the one who brought Odessa to Choate, Plimpton, Wells & Sullivan in the first place. The revenues it’s already generated have about guaranteed my partnership.”

“Well, isn’t that wonderful. You must be on cloud nine.”

Ever loyal, Savannah gave Raine another big hug and the subject was dropped. But as they went into the house, Raine couldn’t help thinking how her sister’s take on the case echoed that of seemingly everyone around her.

As they gathered around the table while the girls slept upstairs, it occurred to Raine that this was almost like old times. Except in the past, Lilith had seldom been part of the family group.

“I knew that Kevin was trouble the first time I met him,” Lilith said heatedly. “He was too slick and too smooth for my taste.”

“Heaven knows, your track record with men is terrific,” Ida said beneath her breath.

“I heard that.” Lilith tossed her head. Raine had been relieved this afternoon when her mother had finally pulled her hair loose of that ugly bun she’d been wearing it in these past days. “That’s exactly how I recognized that he was wrong for our Savannah. Because he reminded me of exactly the type of man I’ve always tended to get involved with. Smooth and charming and handsome as sin.”

“Ha!” Ida scoffed. “That kind of charm is the oily kind that you can wash off in the shower with a bar of Lava soap. As for him being handsome, I suppose he wasn’t all that hard on the eyes,” she admitted grudgingly. “But to be perfectly honest, Savannah, dear, I always felt that
his
eyes were a bit too close together. And did any of the rest of your ever notice that he squinted?”