Kiss (6 page)

“Like I said, we’ll figure it out as we go. You haven’t kicked me out yet.” He grinned at her. “That’s a good start.”

She laughed. “How did we meet?”

“Our paths crossed a few times—before you resigned—at Harper & Stone.”

“I resigned?”

“In July. You told me you needed some time off to plan your next move. Said the CPA life was not working out for you.”

Well, that sounded like a brilliant way to advance a career. But more and more it seemed she had fallen into the habit of making foolish choices.

“How far back do you remember?” he asked. “Have you pinpointed that?”

“I remember vacationing in Guatemala in March. After that . . .” She men-tally calculated that her memory was blank for the prior five or six months. “If I’m lucky, I haven’t forgotten anything of value.”

A streetlight flashed over Wayne’s face through the wet windshield. He looked away from her.

“Except you, naturally.”

He frowned. “Naturally.”

Maybe the reason she didn’t have many close friends had nothing to do with her avoiding relationships; perhaps everyone saw her for the insensitive clod that she was and went out of their way to avoid her.

“So you’re a CPA too?” she asked.

“No. I’m the CFO of McAllister MediVista.”

This news startled her. “You work for my father?”

“You always preferred me to say I work for your uncle.”

“You must think I’m a silly girl.”

Wayne shook his head. “Not at all. You remember that Harper & Stone handles our books.”

She nodded. “But Mr. Stone felt I presented a conflict of interest. He kept me off those accounts.”

“He did. But you helped me with some fact-finding during the last audit. That would have been May.”

She tried to call up the event. Futile. But it was true that when it came to audits and overtime, everyone pitched in.

“So are we . . . what are we, exactly?”

He kept his eyes on the road. “We hadn’t landed on an answer to that question. We saw each other socially, went out several times. We liked—I liked your company.”

“In a way, that might make things easier,” she said. She kept her voice light and hopeful. “To start over, I mean.”

Wayne turned his truck in to the McAllisters’ private drive. “Yeah. Maybe it will.”

The McAllister estate was a gated residence bordered by the Colorado River, a sprawling stucco-and-terra-cotta rancher on ten acres that included a guesthouse, tennis courts, a fitness center, and a small dock, where Landon occasionally anchored his cabin cruiser. Shauna often thought it could easily have been the villa of some Colombian drug lord.

Shauna laid a hand across her roiling stomach. She hated this place and all the memories it housed.

The security detail around her father was higher than usual, with the general elections less than a month away. And yet Wayne passed through without question.

They entered the mansion through a side entrance that led to the McAllisters’ casual dining area, located off a sparkling stainless-steel kitchen. Shauna smelled barbeque mesquite and buttered potatoes, which only made her nauseated.

She nodded at a cook she didn’t recognize and hurried her pace so as not to fall behind Wayne. He took her hand and paused before the door.

“You okay?”

She nodded, but she didn’t feel anything similar to okay.

Shauna pushed the door open and stepped into the dining room.

Landon, Patrice, and another woman sat at an oak pedestal table eating the last bites of their supper. Rudy sat by the window.

The clinking of forks on plates came to an abrupt halt, and the room stilled to complete silence. As one they stared at her.

Landon said something, but Shauna didn’t hear his words. She was only aware of Rudy.

Her unstoppable brother, a fit and strong track-and-field champion, had been reduced to a twisted twig, contorted in a wheelchair contraption that looked expensive and custom-fitted to his shriveled body. The tilted chair put him in a reclining position and was jacked up on a frame like a monster truck on small wheels. A bag hung from a pole attached to the side of the chair, and a narrow plastic tube ran from it into Rudy’s abdomen.

He must have weighed thirty pounds less than her last memory of him. His wild curls, light brown and thick, had been shaved, and large foam pads braced his fuzzy skull. A scar cut laterally through the new hair growth across the top of his head. “Rudy.” His name came out of her lips like a dying breath.

Shauna felt too weak to stand. She groped for a side chair and gripped the back for support. Wayne took her elbow.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t know.”

Mind numb, she pulled her arm free.

She couldn’t tear her eyes from Rudy’s shriveled form. Shauna knew then that she should have died in the river that night. She’d done this . . .

Below his hairline, a dark bruise that had long since gone through its rain-bow stages nearly covered his forehead and right eye. His gray eyes—she caught her breath—his gray eyes were watching her.

“Rudy?” And this time his name rode out of her mouth on hope.

“He can see you, but I can’t say whether he recognizes you,” the woman next to Patrice said. Shauna glanced at the middle-aged woman with over-rouged cheeks and a nose too small for her wide face. She rested an equally small chin on her folded hands. “He is in what we call a minimally conscious state.”

Shauna turned back to Rudy. Tears filled her eyes at this unbelievable sight.

“What does
minimally conscious
mean?” Shauna asked.

“That he’s got a couple more functioning brain cells than a vegetable,” Landon said.

“Mr. McAllister,” the woman said gently. “He is aware.”

Shauna looked at her father for the first time since coming into the house. Landon McAllister’s voice was as she always remembered it: deep and rich and clear and charismatic, a pied piper voice that anyone would follow. But his normally flashing eyes were flat today. The lines of his wide mouth turned down. A surface vein pulsated at his left temple the way it so often had in the weeks after her mother died.

This man was broken, and Shauna’s heart overflowed with a new kind of grief.

He did not hold her eyes for long. Again, he was the first to turn away.

“How aware is he?” Shauna asked. She returned her attention to her brother’s eyes.

“We really don’t know,” the guest said.

“Amazing how little you people do know,” Landon muttered.

Patrice spoke to Shauna for the first time, cool and formal: “Shauna, this is Pam Riley, Rudy’s live-in nurse. Pam, my husband’s daughter and her boy-friend, Wayne. We weren’t expecting her tonight, as she is under house arrest at the hospital.”

Pam’s bright cheeks turned brighter, and Shauna pretended not to hear. Wayne rested his hand on her shoulder.

“So, minimally conscious is good?” Shauna asked Pam. “I mean, there’s hope?”

“Hope is a fairy tale for the guilty,” Landon said, then threw back the last of his coffee. “So you can get any inspirational sap out of your head right now.”

His words stabbed her. She moved her chair closer to Rudy and turned her back toward the table.

“All brain injuries are really uncharted territories,” Pam said. “We don’t like to make predictions or promises. But we are hardly resigned to Rudy’s present condition. There’s plenty to do.”

Landon rose from the table with his empty plate as if he’d heard this speech a thousand times. His long stride carried him into the kitchen.

“The senator has taken every possible measure to increase the chances of Rudy’s recovery. Maybe later I can show you the—”

“Shauna has an appointment with local authorities,” Patrice said. “I’m afraid it will have to wait.”

Shauna clenched her teeth to prevent herself from snapping back. Not here. Not now.

Pam adjusted. “To answer your question, Shauna, yes, there are documented cases of minimally conscious patients regaining their functions—”

“After more than twenty years,” Landon said, returning. “And they call that a miracle. Sure there’s hope. I just won’t live to see it.”

“Rudy’s case leaves a lot of possibilities open,” Pam continued, unfazed. “His injury was caused by trauma rather than by hypoxia—”

“Which is?”

“Lack of oxygen.”

“He didn’t drown, then?”

“No. He just got really banged up. Thrown from the car before it hit the water. But he was breathing on his own the whole time.”

Rudy had not stopped looking at her. She shivered. “And why is that better than drowning?”

“Hypoxia shuts down the entire brain,” Pam said. “Remember Terry Schaivo? That’s what happened to her. For Rudy, though, the damage was partial. Devastating, but partial. Some parts of his brain are still functioning fine. It’s possible, in time, that these areas will be able to rebuild his lost connections.”

Landon moved to stand behind Rudy and placed a gentle hand on his son’s head. Rudy kept his eyes on Shauna. Those eyes might have been conveying recognition or fascination. Mercy or accusation. They might have been requesting a key to unlock their prison, or screaming at her to leave. They might be seeing nothing at all.

“In time, Rudy might be able to compensate for his other losses,” Pam said.

“There is no compensation for this,” her father said.

Paired with her father’s words, Shauna believed Rudy’s eyes turned hostile. They burned through her, judging her forgetfulness.

“Dad, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Rudy. Please forgive me.”

She released the chair, crossed to Rudy, and eased herself into a seat close to him. Leaned forward and touched his hand. If she could make all this right she would do it without a second thought. She would sit in that chair and lock her-self up in that broken mind so Rudy could come back and be the calm force in the center of this stormy family. What would it take? She would do anything.

“Please. I’m so sorry.” His skin felt rubbery and unnatural to her. He did not respond. She squeezed his fingers.

“Stop it, Shauna,” Landon said, sending the command like a kick to her heart. She let go of Rudy’s hand, a defensive move. Stop what? Touching him? She looked at her father and instantly recognized his anger, which was so familiar to her: taut forehead, flat lips.

Why couldn’t she be as familiar with his affection? Just a minute of the hours of love he had poured into Rudy. She didn’t need so much from Landon, only a moment, a glance, a smile.

Certainty that he believed her. Trusted her. Protected her.

“Your groveling doesn’t help anyone.”

“I wish I—”

“This isn’t about you, Shauna. This is about Rudy. This is about what you took from us. Rudy won’t get to campaign with me. He won’t get to attempt a single one of his dreams. For heaven’s sake, Shauna, he wasn’t even old enough to be disillusioned yet! He wanted to be a
politician
!”

Rudy uttered a moan that sent a chill through Shauna’s nerves. She stood, unsure what to do.

“Now I think we’d better all take a deep breath,” Pam said, coming around the table. “Let’s lower the volume a notch, shall we?”

“Is he okay?” Shauna asked.

“Is he okay?” Patrice mimicked, barely audible. “You are unbelievable.”

Shauna eased back into her chair and picked up Rudy’s hand again. His head began to hit the pad.

“Sh, Rudy.” Shauna stroked his palm. She could not bear the sight of his pain. “Sh.” He beat his head more violently, and for the first time, his eyes let go of hers. They slipped upward, back into his head. “Rudy?”

“You let me take care of this,” Pam said, preparing to wheel him out of the room. But Shauna could not let her brother go.

Landon leaned over and gripped Shauna’s wrist. He drilled his thumb between her small bones and she cried out, dropping Rudy’s hand. Her father’s eyes were gray like her brother’s, but much more clear in what they meant to say.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t fix this. You only upset him.”

Rudy’s moan rose to a shrill pitch as Pam pushed him away from the conflict and down the hall toward his bedroom. Landon released Shauna and turned his back on her to face the window.

“You ought to go now,” Patrice said to Shauna, stacking empty plates on the table, making more noise than was necessary. “You upset him.”

“I think he’s responding to conflict—he senses the stress between us, obviously.”

“So we remove the cause, and voilà.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

“I’m completely serious.”

Shauna folded her hands in front of her to prevent them from shaking. She sensed Wayne move to stand behind her. She looked to Landon for defense, but he had removed himself from the exchange.

“I take full responsibility for what happened to Rudy,” she said, staring at her thumbs. “And I know there’s no way to make up for it, but I’m sure I can help—”

“Shauna, you owe so many people so much that you will
never
be able to make it up to even one of them.”

Shauna’s first tears finally escaped, and she couldn’t say whether they were tears of injustice or anger or agony over the truth of her stepmother’s words. She felt all these emotions simultaneously, and she reached out blindly for Wayne’s hand. He caught her grip.